The Beauty of Convention : Essays in Literature and Culture [1 ed.] 9781443861120, 9781443854696

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The Beauty of Convention

The Beauty of Convention: Essays in Literature and Culture

Edited by

Marija Krivokapiü-Kneževiü and Aleksandra Nikþeviü-Batriüeviü

The Beauty of Convention: Essays in Literature and Culture, Edited by Marija Krivokapiü-Kneževiü and Aleksandra Nikþeviü-Batriüeviü This book first published 2014 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 © 2014 by Marija Krivokapiü-Kneževiü, 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): 1-4438-5469-7, ISBN (13): 978-1-4438-5469-6

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Introduction ............................................................................................... vii Marija Krivokapiü-Kneževiü and Aleksandra Nikþeviü-Batriüeviü Interpretation of Conventions or Convention of Interpretation? The Anthropological Puzzle ........................................................................ 1 Maja Muhiü Beauty and Pain, and the Escape from Convention in Tragedy: Oedipus Coloneus by Sophocles and King Lear by William Shakespeare .............. 17 Bavjola Shatro Objectivist Poetry and Its Conventions in the Context of Modernist and Postmodernist American Poetry ......................................................... 33 Dubravka Ĉuriü “In Dublin’s Fair City”: Joyce, Bloomsday, Dubliners and the Invention of Tradition ................................................................................................ 51 Benjamin Keatinge The Liberation of the Self through a Self-Imposed Exile .......................... 65 Nadežda Stojkoviü and Slaÿana Živkoviü [email protected] .................................................... 73 Armela Panajoti Self and Selfness in the Modern Scottish Novel........................................ 85 Božica Joviü Metaphysical Convention in Huxley’s Time Must Have a Stop ................ 93 Janko Andrijaševiü Conventions in the Presentation of Women in Victorian Literature ........ 103 Dijana Tica

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Emily Dickinson and the Challenge of Convention ................................ 123 Arben Bushgjokaj BREAthtaKING Beauty: Gender and Race Conventions in Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye ...................................................................... 137 Aleksandra Izgarjan Martha Graham’s Choreography: Convention, Transgression and Beauty ............................................................................................... 155 Jeanine Belgodere American Contemporary Art: A Look into the Rhetoric of Artistic Convention in Classical Sculpture ........................................................... 173 Claudine Armand Doubling of Convention: Julian Barnes’s Before She Met Me, Talking It Over and Love, etc. .................................................................................. 187 Aleksandra Žeželj Kociü The Concept of Beauty in Postmodernism and Digital Media as in Howard Gardner’s Truth, Beauty and Goodness Reframed ............ 201 Slaÿana Živkoviü and Nadežda Stojkoviü Ian McEwan’s Enduring Love: A Lover’s Discourse as the Conventional Form of Love ........................................................................................... 211 Olga Veliugo The Beauty of Operatic and Postmodern Convention(s) in Michael Berkeley and Ian McEwan‫ތ‬s For You ..................................................... 221 Jean-Philippe Heberlé Contributors ............................................................................................. 235 Index ........................................................................................................ 243

INTRODUCTION MARIJA KRIVOKAPIû-KNEŽEVIû AND ALEKSANDRA NIKýEVIû-BATRIûEVIû

This collection of papers is the result of the conference The Beauty of Convention organized by the Department of English Language and Literature (Faculty of Philosophy of the University of Montenegro) and held at the National Library in the Montenegrin cultural capital, Cetinje, on October 4-6, 2012. The scholars were considering the intriguing issue of the place and role of convention in the post-postmodern world. Addressing the beauty of convention, we have not assessed it with an attempt to recapitulate the established values (as, luckily, in literature and culture, there are not absolute beauties that serve everyone and always); we were not intent on the draw of the centre that the alternative, or avant-garde, or simply odd, has always experienced in its attempt to pose itself as a valid art (or other) material; least of all was it a standard, or an average, set of rules or absolute necessities, or lack of imagination, desire to conform or play it safe by sticking to what has always worked that we wanted to promote. Most of all, it was an attempt (in a format of the new millennium revisit) at an aesthetic appreciation of a form as a keeper of meaning and at an ethical post-cynical metadiscourse on human dependence on symbolic interaction and generic conventions. Therefore, we were inclined to look more into the artificial, invented, the optional side of the term’s ambiguity (as Nelson Goodman defines it, cf. 1989: 80). Some of the questions we addressed were: What is beauty (truth and good) by virtue of convention? How does convention generate beauty? How does it happen that a convention acquires a normative force? What is the nature or the “logic of situation” (literary, linguistic, social, historical, psychological) that leads to the arbitrary conventions? How are alternative conventions made? What is inertia and what real joy or belief ensures the stability of convention? Is there a natural correctness that enables the stability of convention? How does convention determine linguistic meanings—and can it do so? Can interpretation avoid convention (as intention, preference, and expectation)?

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Making the grounds for more particular issues that will follow, the book opens with a paper titled “Interpretation of Conventions or Convention of Interpretation? The Anthropological Puzzle,” a paper by Maja Muhiü from the South East European University in Tetovo, Macedonia. This paper looks at the complexity and the traps of applying conventions that appear in the process of anthropological interpretation. The main focus is placed on the interpretive/symbolic anthropology. It, therefore, offers an overview of this anthropological paradigm established in the second half of the 20th century and its attempt to offer a thick description of one’s culture, by deeply immersing in it. Its main representative was the American anthropologist Clifford Geertz. This anthropological paradigm highlights the importance of symbols and social conventions as the enabling factor for the interactions of people within a community. However, the very insistence on interpretation of cultures, and the web of symbols people are intertwined in, as the only true way of understanding the “natives’ point of view,” brings into light another paradox that was brought to the public with the rise of post-modern anthropology, namely can anthropology really reveal and interpret something beyond its own conventions. Therefore, Muhiü looks at the problems of interpretation and ethnography in general, especially focusing on the Balinese cockfight essay by Clifford Geertz as well as the post-modern crisis in anthropology, which came about in the 80s. This marked the period where ethnography and the role of the anthropologist as an interpreter were brought into question. The so-called crisis of representation has questioned ethnography in general, criticizing it as a practice, a mode of writing a culture, that is, a tool, which can impose conventions regarding how a culture is understood and interpreted, since it can itself be, under deep influence of the cultural conventions of the ethnographer/interpreter. It was also believed that it can impose itself as the epistemological dictator, that is, the source of interpretation of the Other. Taking into consideration these tectonic changes that happened to anthropology in the 80s, and looking at its contemporary engaged and dedicated work, this paper is an attempt to argue in favor of the pragmatically justified need for the continuation and existence of anthropology. After this, Albanian scholar Bavjola Shatro, from Aleksandër Moisiu University, Tirana, discusses and compares two classic world dramatists. Her paper “Beauty and Pain, and the Escape from Convention in Tragedy (Oedipus Coloneus by Sophocles and King Lear by William Shakespeare)” aims at analyzing the relationship between beauty and pain as the essence of tragedy in the work of Sophocles and Shakespeare. The ancient tragedian reinforces the conventions of classical Greek tragedy while the

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latter successfully escapes the conception that his own epoch had about this genre and returns to Sophocles’ model of tragedy. Shatro believes that through these two actions, that of simultaneously conveying and avoiding convention, these two tragedians create a clear concept of this genre that it is nowhere to be found with that clarity and vigor in any of their other tragedies—except in Oedipus Coloneus by Sophocles and King Lear by Shakespeare—and, to a considerable degree, in any other tragedy (written in Western literature). The paper asserts that in Sophocles’ Oedipus Coloneus—one of his tragedies that critics have traditionally avoided—lies the essence of ancient Greek tragedy as a relationship between pain, death and beauty. On the other hand, Shakespeare’s King Lear is the only Renaissance tragedy which bears a clear resemblance to the ancient Greek tragedy and brings back to us the complex reality of this genre and the way it shaped Western literature and philosophy. Further on, the paper focuses on how Oedipus and Lear are related and also shows that these are “human condition” tragedies rather than tragedies of characters. Oedipus and Lear share the same agonizing fate, which is not that of dying, but that of being born. Therefore the paper analyzes their decline not as connected to an idea(l) but, rather, as a consequence of the human condition. That is how Shakespeare and Sophocles provide us with a deep and keen insight into the beauty of the work of art itself. In her paper “Objectivist Poetry and Its Conventions in the Context of Modernist and Postmodernist American Poetry,” Dubravka Ĉuriü, from the Faculty of Media and Communications of the Singidunum University in Belgrade, positions the study of poetry with regards to literary studies in general. For that purpose, she uses Joseph Harrington’s essay “Poetry and the Public: The Social Form of Modern U.S. Poetry,” in which Harrington states that “‘poetry studies’—even studies of American poetry—remained distinct from ‘American literature’.” Harrington points to the fact that during the 1990s, modern poetry criticism, or at least some parts of it, despite its domination by a narrowly defined modernist canon, inched a little closer to “cultural studies.” It is indeed interesting to note, as Harrington does, that at a time when historical scholarship has become the norm in American literature criticism, “American literature” continues to neglect poetry, and the paper joins Harrington in asking: why? He further notes that the textualist poetics of high modernism maintained its influence in English departments throughout the 1990s, not only among poetry critics. In fact, as Alan Golding points out, the problem is that much New Americanist work implicitly perpetuates the historical essentializing of poetry as the least “social,” most “transcendent” of genres, treating it by

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default as a private space untouched by the material and historical determinants shaping literary production in other genres. “In Dublin’s Fair City”: Joyce, Bloomsday, Dubliners and the Invention of Tradition,” by Benjamin Keatinge from the South East European University, Macedonia, attempts to trace some inter-textual relationships between James Joyce’s volume of short stories Dubliners (1914), and some examples of more recent stories related to the city of Dublin which have an explicitly acknowledged debt to Joyce. In doing so, it identifies a “mini-tradition” in the post-Joycean Irish short story which echoes the urban realism of Joyce’s stories. The essay also shows how Joyce’s treatment of social customs and conventions in Dubliners has found contemporary resonance in a much-changed urban environment of the 1990s and 2000s. It also points to the importance of Joyce’s representation of Ireland’s capital city in later works, notably Ulysses (1922) and Finnegan’s Wake (1939) both of which have had a revolutionary impact on the novel. In the case of Ulysses, we have a work of fiction which has inaugurated a social tradition in Dublin, and internationally, known as Bloomsday (16 June 1904), the day on which Ulysses is set and on which it is annually celebrated. This essay therefore examines, on a number of levels, how Joyce’s work revolves thematically around customs and conventions while also stimulating the invention of social and literary traditions in his native country. Staying within the time frame of modernist literature, Nadežda Stojkoviü and Slaÿana Živkoviü, from the University of Niš, Serbia, present the first of their co-authored works in this book—“The Liberation of the Self through a Self Imposed Exile.” Drawing from Northrop Frye’s theory of archetypes, they maintain that the story of the loss and regaining of identity is the framework of all literature. This is the archetypal quest myth in which the goal of the hero’s endeavors is identical with the idea of a paradisal world. In modern literature, but not unknown in earlier periods, the emphasis shifts from describing the end of the quest towards more accurately presenting the world which urges the hero to set out on a journey, thus producing a severe critique of modern civilization. It all serves to describe the hero’s feeling of separation, disillusionment, opposition to the culture they belong to. Thus, many of the modern quest myths are often essentially concerned with internal, psychological quests. This paper uses the example of James Joyce’s novel A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man to emphasize that the socio-historical environment influences and to a large extent shapes the perception and behavior of individuals. Yet, there is argumentation on those liberation forces within an individual that help make an inner shift in the sensibility and allow for a

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different perception of one’s identity. Finally, the focus of the paper is to show that a modern individual, as illustrated by the character of Stephen Dedalus, an artist, is capable of seeking and realizing their identity within the full complexity of contemporary life, by relying on the knowledge and sensibility gained through the insights of art, and is so capable of discarding all the stifling and diminishing forms of identity that a society imposes. Unconventionally titled, “Lord [email protected],” by Armela Panajoti from the University “Ismail Qemali” in Vlora, Albania, focuses on the way this insightful Conrad novel searches for those aspects of self that can be corrected and uses the convention(s) of Freud’s oedipal model to read father-son relationships in Lord Jim, while the interrelationship between the three (Oedipus complex, convention, Lord Jim) is hinted at through the electronic metaphor in the title of the paper. The aim of the paper is to demonstrate that despite the controversy surrounding Freud’s work, his theories have still been the ground for many critics working either in psychoanalysis or elsewhere. In this way, Panajoti sees Freud’s Oedipus complex as informing certain conventions in literature and as such reaffirming itself every now and then. Janko Andrijaševiü, from the University of Montenegro, turns towards metaphysical convention in another great modernist, i.e. Aldous Huxley’s Time Must Have a Stop. Andrijaševiü claims that one of the major strands of this novel follows posthumous experiences of Eustace Barnack, a hedonist and art-connoisseur, who passes away at the very beginning of the novel. The out-of-body workings of Barnack’s mind are given in about a dozen hermetic interpolations, which took more than twenty years for the critics to figure out. In the late sixties, Peter Bowering connected Huxley’s text with the Tibetan Book of the Dead and discovered that the previously impenetrable chapters were essentially very precise renderings of the Buddhist-Lamaist spiritual convention about the mind’s journeying in the BardoThodol in between two incarnations. This paper attempts to explain the necessity of imposing order and norm on phenomena of metaphysical nature, as illustrated in this novel. “Self and Selfness in the Modern Scottish Novel,” by Božica Joviü from East Sarajevo, Bosnia and Herzegovina, demonstrates the value of different kinds of conventions, both inside and outside the texts of the novels the author has chosen for discussion. The outside “conventions” are shown to be the conventions of tradition, history and themes within contemporary Scottish novel, and especially through the vision of Cairns Craig on the matter. Whereas, the inside “conventions” are dealt with through discussion of the organisation of William McIlvanney’s The Kiln

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(1996); the struggle for a kind of convention in the world of Alasdair Gray’s fictitious young artist in Lanark (1982), and the horror of convention in Poor Things. The work of Dijana Tica, from the University of Banja Luka, Bosnia and Herzegovina, moves us to other particular issues of the period, inviting a chapter of the book related to gender politics. She explores conventions in the presentation of women in Victorian literature, since this historical period was famous for its strict adherence to rules as well as for its precise division between male and female spheres. The author argues, that even in the earliest literary works, in which female characters hardly appeared, their presentation was the reflection of the roles they were assigned and it served to teach women what their patriarchal society, represented by male authors, expected of them in terms of both their physical appearance and their manners and behaviour. Those heroines who performed their given roles in the best possible way and who perfectly fitted the currently predominating ideals of both external and internal beauty were considered conventional and were mostly rewarded with a happy ending, which usually meant a successful marriage and a prosperous family. Those who dared to be different and assume the roles generally associated with men were described as unconventional and punished either by the loss of reputation or untimely death. In his paper “Emily Dickinson and the Challenge of Convention,” Arben Bushgjokaj, University of Shkodra, Albania, shows how Emily Dickinson responded to the cultural and conventional pressures which shaped the lives and works of writers and poets in the nineteenth century, especially when it came to female writers and poets. When most female writers tried to engage in the ideologies that defined the writer or poet of the time and yet stayed within the conventions indicated, Dickinson ventured beyond the imposed conventions. This appears to increase rather than diminish the mystery of Dickinson as a poet and her greatness in later literary scholarship. Dickinson’s style deserves observations concerning the thin line between poetry and prose in her letters, and about the complex and integral relationships between the two genres throughout her writing. Readers and literary scholars seem to be invited to read letters as poems and to read poems as letters, exploring the ways in which Dickinson’s work challenges traditional notions of the boundaries of genre. Although, for the most part, Dickinson is perceived as challenging convention, there is a fine thin thread of convention in her poems, especially in her borrowings from the rich culture and heritage of hymns. In such instances, Dickinson enriches the conventional form of hymns and

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reinvigorates them with the fine new touch of the modernist avant-garde poet. “Breathtaking Beauty: Gender and Race Conventions in Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye” is a paper authored by Aleksandra Izgarjan from the University of Novi Sad, Serbia. Izgarjan shows how the novel The Bluest Eye explores the ways conventions of gender and race are created and perpetuated in African American and American society. Morrison uses the ideal of female beauty imposed by the media featuring blonde, blue-eyed seductresses to show how it is used by the dominant white community for manipulation and subjugation of ethnic minorities which are labeled as different and therefore unfit. When African Americans adopt these ideals, which are for them impossible to attain, they feel inadequate, which leads to their entrapment in the vicious cycle of domestic violence. Marginalized by the dominant society and consigned to invisibility and contempt, they find it impossible to rebel against the conventions they have internalized or those who have imposed them. Instead they react by turning their anger towards themselves for not being able to fulfill the ideals of white beauty. Morrison deconstructs conventions of gender and race through postmodern literary strategies such as polyvocality of the text, magic realism and historiographic metafiction in order to show instability of such categories and their dependence on mutual consent of people who make a nation and a culture. Jeanine Belgodere, from Le Havre University of France, discusses convention, transgression, and beauty in Martha Graham’s choreography. Belgodere first presents how Graham developed her unconventional dance expression and then illustrates how she transgressed the thematic and stylistic balletic norms through examples of major works that she created in the late twenties and thirties. At the time, Graham’s choreography was considered as outside the norm. However, Belgodere points out that transgression belongs to the realm of the normative. It is only a phenomenon that gives rise to a negative judgment. Gradually, Graham’s dance form came to be widely accepted and recognized by the dance world and audiences. Graham’s transgressions became a new normative language. Eventually, Martha Graham’s choreographic adventure reveals the complexity of conventional beauty and that, indeed, it is grounded in a history where yesterday’s transgressions are not alien to today’s norms. In her paper “American Contemporary Art: A Look into the Rhetoric of Artistic Convention in Classical Sculpture,” Claudine Armand examines Fred Wilson’s handling of artistic conventions in his appropriation of archetypal figures of classical art and in his assessment of the traditional criteria of beauty. Armand first deals with the historical perspective—

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bearing in mind the teachings of Antiquity, the development of aesthetics and the eras of classical revival—and then highlights the concept of artistic convention in relation to the quest for ideal beauty. She focuses on Wilson’s rereading of art history and on some of the strategies he uses to subvert those conventions. Finally she sheds light on a few other contemporary artists who have taken up the classical model. Aleksandra Žeželj Kociü, from the University of Belgrade, explores the issue of convention in the postmodern fictional world of Julian Barnes’s Before She Met Me (1982), Talking It Over (1991) and Love, etc. (2000). His palimpsest-like texts disclose interpretation that simultaneously avoids and perpetuates the conventions of not only a love-novel genre, but emotional relationships as well. Furthermore, this essay poses several questions: whether the above-mentioned novels turn against their postmodernist bases in order to reveal an aesthetic appreciation of a form as a keeper of meaning; if there is stability of convention or not; what are the situational specificities that lead to the arbitrary or alternative conventions; and finally, whether particular comprehension can avoid convention. Just as modernists break the Victorian tradition, postmodernism can be said to build on a few modernist characteristics, ensuring the stability of convention in its very appellation, choosing to be named merely in terms of its opposite, whereby modernism is the norm while postmodernism is a deviation. Žeželj Kociü’s essay also draws from John Barth who discusses the human tendency to place things into categories that are nothing but indispensable fictions. The labeling of literary achievements with prefixes high-, late-, proto-, and post- becomes a need, even though it is not always easy to differentiate between the tenets of any chosen opposing poles. The author gives the example of the modernist beliefs that are said to have undergone crisis in the age of postmodernism are “critical, magical and utopian impulses.” So, it is still possible for the ethos of modernism—i.e. dissolution of surface, routine and convention in the name of passionate quest for what is concealed, suppressed or prohibited—to prove every so often alive almost a century after its awakening. Taking into account that the debate on postmodernism has been an ongoing process, which in its very definition does not welcome closures, let alone proposes them, some of its basic principles will still be outlined hereafter, putting special emphasis on its ideas as embraced by Julian Barnes’s fiction. This time, in order to comprehend the phenomenon of beauty, in their paper “The Concept of Beauty in Postmodernism and the Digital Media as in Howard Gardner’s Truth, Beauty and Goodness Reframed,” Živkoviü and Stojkoviü assert that in today’s society, the concept of beauty has

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become mostly a technical matter and, therefore, ask if in the age of digital technology, in which computers and the Internet predominate in various aspects of our lives, anyone perceives and values beauty. They elaborate how globalization has changed our lives and our view of the world, and that, therefore, beauty has a completely different role and is defined in a more flexible way, something that is interesting, memorable, and worthy of revisiting. From here they pass onto analyzing Truth, Beauty and Goodness Reframed (2011) by Howard Gardner who explains how our conceptions of this virtue have shifted over time. Gardner argues that despite constantly changing world, beauty should remain a cornerstone of our society, the crucial bedrock of our existence, even in the light of technological advances. He sheds some light on how the concept of beauty may be reframed, reformulated in the next century, and thus, it will remain essential to the human experience and, of course, to human survival. Ukrainian scholar Olga Veliugo deals with “Ian McEwan’s Enduring Love: A Lover’s Discourse as the Conventional Form of Love.” Her paper discusses contemporary reconsideration of conventional love discourse, a universal verbal code lovers use to communicate their feelings, in Ian McEwan’s novel Enduring Love. The traditional discourse of romantic love, originating from medieval courtly love, still enjoys great popularity, although it represents a rather conservatively codified type of narration. Men and women, the sane and the insane, practice quite similar love discourses, eventually the binary opposition of good and evil, Eros and Thanatos becomes decentralized. Love discourse constructs its own linguistic reality of love and thus becomes a form love can take. Meanwhile love discourse may be in total discrepancy with the extralinguistic reality where lovers demonstrate a pitiful lack of empathy towards each other. Despite the possible reduction of love to the realm of discourse only, the latter cannot be denied inherent beauty of its own, which consists in the simple fact that it is through discourse that love asserts itself as a key human value, the best experience ever possible, the sense of human life. This idea is popular in contemporary fiction which demonstrates a shift from postmodern aesthetics to postpostmodernism, marked by a turn from postmodern cynicism to human feelings. The book closes with the paper “The Beauty of Operatic and Postmodern Convention(s) in Michael Berkeley and Ian McEwan‫ތ‬s For You (2008)” by the French scholar Jean-Philippe Heberlé from the Université de Lorraine. The paper aims at examining how the beauty of convention(s) is at work in For You, an opera by English composer Michael Berkeley and English novelist Ian McEwan, which premiered in October 2008 at the Music Theatre Wales in London. Beauty points at the formal aesthetic qualities of

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an artistic or literary work as well as at the pleasure and joy stemming from the work itself and from its fabric while convention underlines the “traditional” and “conventional” methods or styles used for the conception and elaboration of the work itself. In For You, the beauty of convention(s) lies in the aesthetic quality of the opera, most particularly in Berkeley and McEwan‫ތ‬s use of operatic and/or literary postmodern conventions as well as in the pleasure of playing with these conventional forms and genres. Heberlé studies the way Berkeley and McEwan play with the listeners‫ ތ‬or spectators‫ތ‬ expectations through operatic conventions and references to key works and genres of western literature and opera as well as through typical postmodern conventions (self-referential and meta-artistic comments, literary and operatic intertextuality, stylistic and generic hybridity, elements of high and low culture, etc.). Through the interaction/interplay between beauty and convention in For You, Heberlé ponders the following questions: How does convention generate beauty? Is this interplay a simple postmodern game or is it an apt means to express Man‫ތ‬s postmodern condition and conception of art? The papers gathered in this book are diverse and speak for themselves, yet, in their different ways they address a common core of questions arising from the nature and virtue of convention. Without an intention to impose a one meaning onto the reader, we have tried to understand the stability of convention and how convention generates beauty employing numerous contemporary reading strategies and diverse cultural, ethnic, gender, psychological, and textual perspectives. Our interest is focused on the literary texts ranging from the early classics to modernism and contemporary writing, but also on some other forms of human expressions, such as music, dance and sculpture. Therefore, we trust that we have met our primary aim and that this book will contribute to the on-going discussion about the ambiguities inherent in the concept of convention and, thus, give scholars and students of literature and culture alike the opportunity to share results of a very successful international cultural event, as well as stimulate intellectual confrontation and circulation of ideas within the field.

INTERPRETATION OF CONVENTIONS OR CONVENTION OF INTERPRETATION? THE ANTHROPOLOGICAL PUZZLE MAJA MUHIû

Introduction This paper analyses the complexity of the process of interpretation and the dangers of applying conventions along the process. The main focus for this analysis has been placed on interpretive/symbolic anthropology. The goal of this anthropological paradigm established in the 20th century is to offer a thick description of one’s culture, by deeply immersing in it. Its main representative was the American anthropologist Clifford Geertz. In general terms, interpretive anthropology studies the symbols, and processes (ritual, myths, etc), through which people give meaning to the events that surround them. Hence, it highlights the importance of symbols and social conventions as the enabling factor for the interactions of people within a community. Because of this, it insists on the exclusiveness and uniqueness of cultures, as well as on the absolute authenticity of one’s culture worldview, which can be understood only through a thick and thorough interpretation. On a number of occasions, throughout his fieldwork, Geertz has argued that culture is a historically transmitted pattern of meanings embodied in symbols, a system of inherited conceptions expressed in symbolic forms by means of which men communicate, perpetuate, and develop their knowledge about and their attitudes toward life.1

It was therefore his deepest conviction that the analysis of culture should not be “an experimental science in search of law, but an interpretative one

 1

Clifford Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures: Selected Essays (New York: Basic, 1973), 89.

2

Interpretation of Conventions or Convention of Interpretation?

in search of meaning.”2 Geertz, understands all phenomena that we call art, religion, etc. as expressions of culture, or as kinds of photographs that freeze, solidify, and express the modes of existence of a community that we need to analyze hermeneutically as text. This text will use several examples from anthropological fieldworks, and essays (Joseph Fabian, David Schneider, Clifford James), and pay special attention to Geertz’s interpretation of the Balinese cockfight described in his famous and most frequently cited essay Deep Play: Notes on the Balinese Cockfight. This essay is probably the most plastic representation of his thick description as way of immersing oneself into the culture one studies and trying to understand the natives’ point of view. It will also provide us with a solid foundation to discuss the problem of convention and interpretation. However, the very insistence on interpretation of cultures, and the web of symbols people are intertwined in, as the only true way of understanding the authentic, that is, the “natives’ point of view,” brings into light another paradox. The so-called crisis of representation has questioned anthropological interpretation as well, criticizing it as a practice, which can impose conventions regarding how interpretation is carried out, under the deep influence of the cultural conventions of the interpreter. It was also believed that it can passivize cultures and impose itself as the epistemological dictator, that is, the source of interpretation of the Other. Taking into consideration these tectonic changes that happened to anthropology, and looking at its contemporary engagements, this paper is an attempt to argue in favor of the pragmatically justified need for the continuation and existence of anthropology.

Some Notes on the Rise of Interpretive Anthropology The transformation of the discipline in the 20th century was actually located within the ethnographic process of study and was defined by two key elements. The first one refers to the locating of cultural differences existing predominantly among the non-industrial (non-western) societies, while the latter contained a cultural critique of the anthropologist’s culture.3 This transition and reorganization of anthropology from a study of people and humanity, towards ethnography as its constituent element, practically marked the end of generalizations and grand theories (existent

 2

Ibid., 5. James Clifford and George E. Marcus, Antropologija kao kritika kulture (Zagreb: Naklada Breza, 2003), 36-37. 3

Maja Muhiü

3

and vibrant in the previous anthropological paradigms). The holism in anthropology has shifted the ground and the anthropologists’ striving for universal claims, has been replaced with the endeavor for a more precise and more complete representation of the life of a certain community. This caused further problems in that it provoked a new ethnographic motivation. Ethnography now aimed at documenting the authenticity of those cultures amid the devastating force of the galloping westernization. This aspect of ethnography as being something that has a saving mission has now been abandoned, due to the fact that the very existence of an authentic culture that has not been in contact with modernity is now being contested. Modernity, on the other hand, is also something that is heavily scrutinized and considered far more complex than the term would have us think 4 . Hence, the big dose of realism that was existent in the ethnographies of the 60s, has been substituted with the attempt to explore the realm of mental culture, that is, to understand the natives’ viewpoint, the experience, and the attitude towards life. It is in this endeavor, that one can see the sprouts of interpretive anthropology. The premises, upon which interpretive anthropology rests, claim that culture is neither neutral nor univocal. On the contrary, cultures are always poly-vocal, unrepeatable, and unique. The epistemological relativism became the dominant mark of interpretive anthropology. The main representatives of interpretive anthropology were the American anthropologist Clifford Geertz, also considered as its founder, along with Victor Turner, Mery Douglas, Terence Turner, Nancy, Mun, David Schneider, and, later on, Sherry B. Ortner. Ortner brings into focus an interesting observation regarding the transformation of the discipline in the second half of the 20th century. She argues that it was the attempt of the newly trained anthropologists to strengthen the previous anthropological thoughts that were dominant until the 50s (the British structural-functionalism, the American psycho-cultural anthropology, and the American evolutionist anthropology), that led to the establishment of symbolic/interpretive anthropology, cultural ecology, and structuralism. All of these authors offered a fresh breeze in the interpretations and study of cultures. As Marcus and Fisher point out, the parameters of the western thought, according to which, politics, economy and the individual interests stood at the center of social life, demanded that every approach, which wanted to look into the symbolic of cultural and social organizations instead, had to first look at the materialist explanations about culture.5 It

 4

See more in the insightful study of modernity by Eisenstadt Shmuel Noah, “Multiple Modernities,” Deadalus 129 (2000). 5 Clifford and Marcus, op. cit., 164.

4

Interpretation of Conventions or Convention of Interpretation?

was because of this that the main aim of these thinkers was to questions the materialist and utilitarian principles of western thought in understanding and interpreting social life. One of the greatest changes, which marked this anthropological thought, was its distancing from materialist, positivist and functionalists interpretations, according to which, culture is merely a means for the adjustment of people to nature. In addition, instead of reifying culture and isolating it from the individual, as something objective and existent in and of itself, this anthropology started emphasizing the importance and role of the individual in shaping culture. 6 The most exclusive marker of this anthropological stream was, rather, the focus on symbols and the symbolic character of culture, and hence, the meaning of symbols. It was because of this that interpretation became the only reasonable approach to understanding the multilayered meanings of symbols that constitute cultures. The anthropologist is on a mission to immerse him/herself and try to read-as-text the web of meanings created by the members of the community.

The Crisis of Ethnographic Representation in Post-Modern Anthropology and Contemporary Anthropological Trends The postmodern discourse, which dominated in the 80s, led to a global crisis in the reception of anthropology and brought into question the relevance of this discipline. The anthropologist was also scrutinized and it was uncertain whether he/she informs about other cultures or, rather, writes a culture, that is, writes an autobiography. The crisis of ethnographic realism was diagnosed in 1982 with the Marcus and Cushman publication of Ethnographies as Texts in the Annual Reviews of Anthropology. These tectonic changes were certainly a result of the social processes, both in the discipline itself, but also in the societies/cultures that anthropologists addressed in their writings. These processes have mainly been marked by the terms post-modernization, globalization, commodification of culture. The postmodern authors were clearly epistemological anti-realists, leaning towards lingual, cultural, as well as cognitive relativism, unlike their critics, who were proponents of the more rationalist, methodological

 6

Jerry D. Moore, Uvod u antropologiju: teorija i teoretiþari kulture (Zagreb: Naklada Jasenski i Turk), 280.

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models.7 In America, this crisis was a consequence of the social circumstances, namely, the deconstruction of the paradigms after WWII. The general qualification for this period is that of a crisis of paradigms and previously solidified totalizing theories, which lost their legitimacy under the pressure of the newly-created fascination with local experiences and reactions, and with the unpredictability of life as a whole. These circumstances have also influenced the terminology of the social sciences and humanities. The term post-paradigm was put to use. It marked the overall distrust in all forms of meta-narration and grand theories, which were contrasted with contextuality and unpredictability of the human life, contrary to the previous focus on continuity, that is regularity in the phenomena observed. One of the key changes that happened to anthropology in this stage was the newly created crisis of representation, which resulted from the distrust in the validity of everything described with the key methods of this discipline, first and foremost, ethnography. The political-methodological crisis of trust in this primary method used in the anthropological production of knowledge was most fervently manifested in the 80s. It was predominantly, interpretive anthropology, which differed greatly from the other anthropological streams in that it started questioning the validity of ethnographic interpretation. 8 As was previously mentioned, interpretive anthropology aberates greatly from the positivist approach in the understanding of societies and cultures, as it focuses on the fact that the social life must be understood, and hence, analyzed as a network of meanings. Similarly, Geertz heavily criticized the practice of an allegedly neutral scientific perspective. He insisted on the fact that cultures are created from webs of meanings that the anthropologist must interpret and read as a text. Culture should not be seen as an objective, homogenized entity, but rather as a web of symbols, which give meaning to people and help them understand and deal with the world. It is in this sense, that this anthropological

 7

See more in Philip Carl Salzman, Understanding Culture: An Introduction to Anthropological Theory (Illinois: Waveland Press), 2001. Among other things, he points out that the postmodern epistemology, exemplified by the subfields of symbolic and feminist anthropology, brings into focus the importance of moral responsibility, the worth of positional relativity as well as the subsequent subjectivity it produces, hence challenged the stoic ideal of the unbiased view (Salzman 2001). 8 This is clearly brought to attention by Marcus and Fischer who claim that interpretive anthropology acts at two levels: it gathers information about the other worlds from the inside, but at the same time, it ponders upon the epistemological foundations of such information.

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Interpretation of Conventions or Convention of Interpretation?

thought has, in a manner of speaking, sabotaged itself. Built upon such fundaments, it seemed as if it generated the postmodern critique, which brought into question the survival of anthropology and the anthropological subject in general. It was the insistence to understand culture primarily as a complex system of meanings, that in due course resulted with the motive to question the process of interpretation of these meanings. This marked the birth of postmodern anthropology, within which, ethnography requestioned iself. The problems surrounding the authenticity/subjectivity of interpretation are also tightly related to a debate, which arose during the 1980s, predominantly with the publication of several works, among which is the edited volume Writing Culture by Clifford and Marcus and Clifford’s On Ethnographic Surrealism, published in 1981. This debate marked the beginings of a crisis of the reliance on, certainly, one of the crucial tools of anthropological study—ethnography. This debate, which brought into question the purposeness of ethnographic method is usually marked as post-modern anthropology. George Marcus, Michale Fischer, Renato Rosaldo, James Clifford, Vincent Crapanzano, etc, are among some of the key figures who are considered responsible for this anthropological shift in the second half of the 20 century. They are the founders of the theory of ethnography, which deals with the problem of writing culture. They brought into light several problems regarding ethnography as a method as well as the previous anthropological paradigms. They pointed out the ethically problematic position of ethnography and field work, emphasizing the fact that describing the world always presupposes a certain theory, a convention of some kind, as well as, the fact that writing about the other is always writing about the Other.

The Anthropologist’s Burden In his introductory text to the edited volume Writing Culture, titled “Introduction: Partial Truths,’’ Clifford points out that ethnography is always involved in the invention, rather than representation of cultures.9 According to him, ethnographic truths are inherenthly partial. In his essay, Notes on (Field)notes, Clifford decenters the process of description in ethnography, by analyzing the fieldwork of three anthropologists (Bronislav Malinowski, C. G. Seligman, and Joan Larcom). According to these

 9

James Clifford, “Introduction: Partial Truths,“ in Writing Culture: The Politics and Poetics of Ethnography, eds. Clifford James and Gerge E. Marcus (Berkeley, U of California P, 1986), 2.

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photos, he differentiates between three ethnographic moments—inscription, transcription, and description. The first denotes the moment of taking mental notes, when the ethnographer returns to some previous list of questions and hypotheses that he/she needs in order to create some kind of observation. The second is the moment when the ethnographer merely poses questions and writes down the answers of the local inhabitants, a practice opposed by Malinowski, who insisted on a more subtle amalgamation of the anthropologist with the natives. Hence the description photo, by which Clifford means a more or less coherent representation of the cultural reality. He will use this to criticize Geertz’s observation that the ethnographer is actually writing. If such is the case, Clifford believes, then the process of ethnography will merely be boiled down to inscription and interpretive description. He also realizes that the whole process of fieldwork is actually infinite. One can simply not draw the line, which would specify that someone has talked to the local inhabitants sufficiently, has learned their language or has gotten into the secret zones of indigenous people’s life. This is precisely where the problem of interpretation comes to the fore. As Clifford points out, descriptions about another culture are almost never interpretations only, but they are always written rhetorical constructions.10 In the Interpretation of Cultures, Geertz specifies that the ethnographer inscribes the social discourse, that is, he writes it down. Hence, that which the ethnographer pins down transforms from a transient event, which exists only during the time it is happening, to a note, which is inscribed, and to which, we can return times and time again. It is here that we can ponder the question of what actually the anthropologist is inscribing. Are these authentic stories of the natives or is the anthropologist inscribing his already made conventional discourses and beliefs? Clifford actually points out to this dilemma by stating that the ethnographic work is very often not even close to catching and putting down on paper some spontaneous, “transient moments,” but it is rather a process of transcribing an already formulated discourse. Moreover, describing something always presupposes a rhetorical, historical, and politically mediated relation with the culture one studies. The reduction of anthropology’s methodology to ethnography, which occurred in the 80s, meant that anthropology has to strictly deal with culture (something that goes back to Talcot Parsons), and that culture has to be treated as text. Geertz was considered the main culprit for this reduction. Many anthropologists have criticized this culture-as-text approach, including Mark Schneider. In his work Culture-as-text in the

 10

James Clifford, “Notes on field(notes),” in Fieldnotes: The Making of Anthropology, ed. Roger Sanjek (Ithaca & London: Cornell UP, 1990), 57, 67.

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Interpretation of Conventions or Convention of Interpretation?

Work of Clifford Geertz, Schneider wonders if reading Geertz one really sees the web of meanings existing in the culture studies, or whether, actually, in his attempt to textualize culture, he creates something that is to a great extent a result of his personal inclinations and literary imagination.11 Similarly, David Schneider brings into question the problematic cultural matrices and conventions that are likely to blur our interpretation of cultures. In American Kinship: A Cultural Account Schneider also awakens us to the fact that what is considered a natural category in EuroAmerican societies might in the end not be a natural category at all, but a cultural construct created from particular social circumstances. He tried to show that more often than not that which is considered to be a natural category in the European-American societies is perhaps not natural at all, but rather, it is a cultural construct that comes out of a specific society, in his case, western-European society. His study refers to the problematics of kinship and he is triggered to conclude that, at the very beginning, the ethnographer who comes from these (western) cultural milieus inevitably “contaminates” the study of kinship with American prejudices as to what kinship means, and especially so with the ideology for the absolute importance of biological/blood ties, which so strongly resonates among Americans, but might not be the case among the society that the anthropologist is studying. Perhaps, one of the most lucid critiques that brought to the surface the inevitable cultural conventions that anthropologists often project on the object of their study is Johannes Fabian.12 In his Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes Its Object, he criticizes the temporal dimension according to which anthropologists posit that they are “here and now,” while the object of their study is always “there and then.” This resulted in conclusions that promoted the idea that the “other” exists in a time which does not overlap with our, that is the anthropologist’s time. In this sense, as Bunzl points out, Time and the Other is a kind of meta-analysis or the anthropological project, but at the same time, a deconstruction of its temporal framework. The Other is, according to Fabian, never an immediate partner in the cultural exchange, but is always spatially as well as temporarily dislocated from the anthropologist. The repercussions of this critique are multilayered, but they culminate in the awareness that anthropology is a project, which is far from neutral. Anthropology is, for Fabian, an inherently political discipline, which has

 11

Mark A. Schneider, “Culture-as-Text in The Work of Clifford Geertz,” Theory and Society 16 (1987): 811. 12 Fabian Johannes, Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes its Object (New York: Columbia UP, 2002).

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defined and constituted its objects through a temporal lens. “Moreover, it also subordinated the temporal to the visual, i.e. spatial.” Hence, to show, for our particular case, that interpretations are often a result of previously structured matrices of thought, we can point to Fabian’s argument that the 19 century evolutionary paradigm, used the concepts such as “primitive culture,” wanting to describe it as something primary, before us, from a distant time. Representing the physical and cultural differences as temporal differences is the key to the distortion of cultures. Fabian terms this the denial of coevalness between the object and the researcher. Anthropology emerged out of the specific circumstances of the 19-century western societies, which imbued this discipline with the doctrines of evolutionism, scientism, enlightenment ideals for progress, and ethnocentrism. This clearly explains the developmental phases (savagery, barbarianism, civilization) that Taylor and Morgan talked about. Fabian criticizes the hegemony of positivist-pragmatic philosophy present in the social sciences and humanities. This line of thinking drew its ideas from the pre-Kantian metaphysics, which kept promising objective truth with the use of standardized methods. He notices this same distortion in the interpretive/symbolic anthropology as well, which albeit far more refined in its study of cultures, inevitably freezes the Other both spatially and temporally. At the same time, it imposes itself as the observer and interpreter. Hence, it lacks dialectic confrontation and, instead, wraps both the indigenous cultures and his/her own culture in protective shields. The obsession with the symbolic prefers to see the anthropologist as the observer who deciphers the cultural “texts.” The Other again remains just an Object, albeit at a much higher level that the one given by the previous paradigms.

Geertz and the (Un)conventional Interpretation of the Balinese Cockfight Deep Play: Notes on the Balinese Cockfight is Geertz’s essay published in 1973 as a part of his Interpretation of Cultures. It is considered one of the greatest achievements of anthropology, but has at the same time been a subject to severe criticism. It starts with Geertz’s confession that in 1958 he and his wife, suffering from malaria, arrived in a small Balinese village with around 500 inhabitants. He underlines that it was precisely his participation in the cockfight and a police raid, which followed it, that marked the transformation from being invisible to becoming visible to the local population. This has been a subject of critique by Crapanzano, who ridicules Geertz’s ethnographic position since now the hero, the

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Interpretation of Conventions or Convention of Interpretation?

anthropologist, is not certain of his own identity and is lost between two worlds. Crapanzano ridicules this looking back at Geertz’s statement, according to which they were invisible among the local Balinese population, but that invisibility was rather studious. Hence, Geertz says: The indifference, of course, was studied; the villagers were watching every move we made, and they had an enormous amount of quite accurate information about who we were and what we were going to be doing. But they acted as if we simply did not exist, which in fact, as this behavior was designed to inform us, we did not, or anyway, not yet.13

It is precisely in this description that Crapanzano finds some serious discrepancies. He argues that there is a difference between being a nonhuman, a specter, or invisible man, on one hand, and being treated with a “studied indifference.” Moreover, according to him Geertz and his wife were indeed there. Otherwise, they wouldn’t be able to be informed about their “nonexistence.”14 At the level of the general problem treated in his essays, namely the way too frequent and often unconscious implementation of the anthropologist’s subjectivity and/or cultural conventions, Crapanzano alarms us to see that Geertz blurs his own subjectivity, that is his personal experience of himself, with the subjectivity and intentionality of the locals. We could argue that perhaps, Crapanzano is being way too sharp in laying out such a critique, thus failing to aknowledge the advantages of such selfexamination and questioning of one’s personal role as an ethnographer in a foreign culture. In this sense it is worth mentioning that Geertz does not forget to point out that it is only in Bali that he faces this kind of indifference by the local population. His experience has led him to conclude that in all other places, including Morocco, the inquisitive dimension with which the local population examines the newcomer was far greater. The essay is clearly one of the greatest manifestations of Geertz’s obsession with treating culture as text and performativity. Inglis brings to our attention the fact that it is through this essay, that Geertz so lucidly brings closer to us the symphony and poetic dimension of the cockfight, which is imbued with passion and melodrama.15 This fight is threaded with

 13

Clifford Geertz, Interpretation of Culture, 412-13. Vincent Crapanzano, “Hermes’ Dilemma: The Masking of Subversion in Ethnographic Description,” in Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography, eds. Clifford James and Marcus George, E. (Berkeley: U of California P, 1986), 70. 15 Fred Inglis, Clifford Geertz: Culture, Custom and Ethics (Cambridge: Polity, 2000), 89. 14

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the masks of tragedy and comedy, and is open only to those men, who have a certain social status and money to become part of the deep play. This fight, then, is not so much about the money as it is a symbol of moral importance. What is really being gambled with are respect, status, and reputation of the Balinese man. The cockfight is merely a scenography, through which Bali and its people manifest itself. With such an interpretation of the fight, Geertz enters shaky grounds and renders himself vulnerable to the post-modern anthropology’s critique of ethnography. Geertz is certain that the cockfight really puts at stake the eternal themes of life, death, masculinity, anger, pride, loss, happiness. The fight is therefore, a social drama, full of metaphors. He believes it thus serves an interpretive purpose in Balinese society, whereby the locals interpret and understand the concepts of passion, anger, life, and death. It is here that Crapanzano once again intervenes by pondering if the cockfight is really a dramaturgical form through which people’s daily experience is being articulated or it is rather Geertz’s personal experience that is being ascribed to the locals. Moreover, Geertz’s comparison of the purpose of the fight as a means for the Balinese people to understand the complex stages and emotions that life brings, with the effects that reading of Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment has on us, causes further problems. From the perspective of post-modern critique, which brought about the crisis of representation, Crapanzano wonders if perhaps the ethnographer speaks more of his personal experiences and projects their cultural milieu than of the experiences of the locals whom he studies. Do the anthropologists in their quest to understand cultures do nothing else but merely incorporate their subjectivity as well as the norms and conventions of their culture, and can we speak of some kind of true understanding, and/or interpretation of cultures, that Geertz so fervently tried to achieve? Inglis makes an immensely important point when amidst all the postmodern critiques of ethnography, including the work of Geertz, he sees something illuminating. For Inglis, the way in which Geertz interprets the cockfight carries the weight of a methodological lesson about the mission of contemporary researchers in the area of humanities and social sciences. This essay, according to him, should make them realize that, beyond anything else, their role is that of being literary critics, art historians or jurisprudentialist, rather than plain mechanics who merely wonder how something functions, a surgeon or a cryptographer.16 In a similar fashion, while critical at many levels against this particular essay, Schneider brings into light another important point that can be applied as a general defense

 16

Ibid., 88.

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Interpretation of Conventions or Convention of Interpretation?

of interpretive anthropology in general and the work of the anthropologist in particular. Namely, what he notices is that Geertz restrains from analyzing the fight through the lens of plain functionalism. Nowhere are we led to think and look at the cockfight as a fight or a war. On the contrary, its “function,” as Geertz shows, is placed in a different, divinely filled arena in which the “Balinese sensibility is materialized for the sake of contemplation, edification and cultural instruction.”17 The problem of generalization, whereby the cockfight is spread among many cultures and is thus not exclusive for Balinese society, brings into question the validity of treating such a material as a serious foundation upon which one can build interpretations about the ethos and sensibility of a culture, as Geertz did. Perhaps, even Geertz himself did not have a solution to this problem. What matters, however, is that his self-reflexivity and awareness of the problems he faced as an anthropologist led him to the conclusion that, in a way, his interpretation cannot be by any means final. Moreover, he points out that in the process of reading cultures one can start and end with any part of the cultural repertoire of forms. Yet, the principle remains the same. Societies, same as lives, he believed, contain their own interpretations. We just have to learn how to approach them. The lucidity, nobility, and illuminating strength of Geertz’s thought and understanding of cultures cannot be but noticed here. It is here that he also defends the grace and dignity and importance of anthropology. In the words of Rosaldo18, Geertz was dedicated to the mission of approaching the study of any culture by first attempting to understand how people understand and see themselves. As such, his mission is tantamount to a serious, ethical project, which needs to open our eyes in front of the fact that none claims a monopoly over the truth.

Concluding Remarks This paper looked at the mechanisms of interpretive anthropology and the traps of applying conventions that appear in the process of ethnographic study so heatedly debated about within post-modern anthropology. One of the main points of departure was interpretive anthropology and her main representative, Clifford Geertz, with his essay on the Balinese cockfight. Giving both the positive as well as negative criticisms to his interpretation,

 17

Schneider, op. cit., 816. Renato Jr. I. Rosaldo “A Note on Geertz as a Cultural Essayist,” in The Fate of “Culture”: Geertz and Beyond, ed. Sherry B. Ortner (Berkeley: U of California P, 1999), 31. 18

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this paper looked at the problems of interpretation and ethnography in general through the lens of the post-modern crisis in anthropology, which came about in the 80s. The so-called crisis of representation has questioned ethnography, criticizing it as a practice that can be under deep influence of the subjectivity and cultural conventions of the ethnographer. Yet, more than any other anthropological school, interpretive anthropology realized that culture is, in the final instance, a result of a consensus among the participants of that culture and that the community preserves the cultural norms and matrices because these give meaning to life. 19 The importance and meaning of anthropology have been brought into question with the contemporary post-modern dilemmas about the validity of its study. Yet, the contemporary engagements of anthropologists are a clear proof that it is a discipline of utmost importance. To name but a few among the contemporary anthropological problems so skilfully vivisected by anthropologists today we can point to the complex themes such as: cultural borders, diasporas, migration, violence, fluctuation of capital, political fragmentation, the regimes of social and moral control, the neoliberal reforms, the new modes of pharmaceutical industry, information technology. All of these themes are approached systematically and competently by contemporary anthropologists such as Ong and Collier20. Anthropologists today do not approach the omnipresent process of globalisation in a similar fashion as other social scientists. Instead of looking at globalization through the lens of grand narration announcing the new world order, or through the analytical lens that studies more the versatility of “local” reactions and resistance to global forces, these anthropologists look at the specific phenomena through which these changes are being manifested. Among these phenomena there is technoscience, the systems of administration and/or control, as well as the ethical and value regimes. These phenomena are, according to Ong and Collier, global in the sense of being mobile and dynamic, moving and reconstructing society, culture, and economy. Yet, these global phenomena articulate themselves in specific situations and, hence, Ong and Collier refer to them as global assemblages. These approaches specific of the contemporary anthropological scene, as well as the problems they deal

 19

One can clearly argue that this assumption omits the power mechanisms so vividly discussed by Asad. See more on the power mechanisms that shape social life in Talal Asad “Anthropological conceptios of Religion: Reflections on Geertz,” Man, 18 (1983), 237-259. 20 See more in Aihwa Ong and Stephen J. Collier, eds. Global Assemblages: Technology, Politics, and Ethics as Anthropological Problems (Oxford: Blackwell, 2005).

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Interpretation of Conventions or Convention of Interpretation?

with, reveal a new, mature side of anthropology liberated from the traps of conventional interpretations of cultures and events that were problematized above.21 Agreeing greatly with Milenkoviü,22 it should be pointed out that it was precisely this assiduous scrutinization of anthropology by anthropologists themselves that has taught the anthropologists of today more about the role of science in culture and culture in science than the previous generations. It is because of this that today the anthropologists can speak up with a full public and critical authority in the scientific and cultural wars, debates, and other forms of critique. This, as Milenkoviü points out, is due to the fact that for decades now, anthropologists have been part of a discipline which has discussed “irrationality,” “objectivity,” and “neutrality” of itself. It has therefore carried out a long process of auto-therapy, a self-reflexive journey. It is because of this legacy, that anthropology has the full right to continue working and carrying out scientific interpretations of different phenomena, themes, processes, objects, and so forth. Taking into account the unremitting changes, redefinitions, reshaping of the conditions in which we live, as well as of our understanding of life in general, together with the evolved, matured face of anthropology today, one cannot but argue in favor of the pragmatically justified need for the continuation and existence of this discipline.

 21

Among their illustration for the global assemblages and the new anthropological approaches to studying cultures, free of the conventions and cultural matrices of the ethnographer’s culture, we can point out to Ong and Collier discussion on a text by Sara Franklin, who talks about stem cell research as a “global biological” activity. The whole apparatus of scientific and technological study of cells takes place in a transnational, global space, related to what can be referred to as the global capital. Yet, cell research can be organized in any kind of cultural, social, and economic context, while the repercussions would be global. Even the way in which we understand and intervene in life will change. The key infrastructural premises for the stem cell research are, according to Franklin the specific distribution of scientific expertise and global capital. At the same time, the ethnical regulations implemented through the political contexts of the individual countries are a key segment of the assemblage of elements through which, such a research can be articulated. Finally, the genetic research will have serious repercussions on the ways life is understood in general. Hence, such research can lead to a revision of the long-term established assumptions about the irreversibility of aging. In addition, the advancement of therapeutical methods can lead to problems in the sphere of political regulations and ethical applicability on both the individual and the collectively. 22 Miloš Milenkoviü, ,,Teorija etnografije u savremenoj antropologiji (1982-2002)” (PhD diss., University of Belgrade, 2006), 258.

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Works Cited Asad, Talal. “Anthropological Conceptios of Religion: Reflections on Geertz.” Man, 18 (1983): 237-259. Clifford, James and George E. Marcus. Antropologija kao kritika kulture. Zagreb: Naklada Breza, 2003. Clifford, James. “Notes on field(notes).” In Fieldnotes: The Making of Anthropology. Edited byRoger Sanjek, 47-71. Ithaca & London: Cornell UP, 1990. —. “Introduction: Partial Truths.“ In Writing Culture: The Politics and Poetics of Ethnography. Edited by James, Clifford and George E. Marcus, 1-27. Berkeley: U of California P, 1986. Crapanzano, Vincent. (1986). “Hermes’ Dilemma: The Masking of Subversion in Ethnographic Description.” In Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography, edited by Clifford James and Robert Marcus, 1-77. Berkeley: U of California P, 1986. Geertz, Clifford. The Interpretation of Cultures: Selected Essays. New York: Basic, 1973. Fabian, Johannes. Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes Its Object. New York: Columbia UP, 2002. Inglis, Fred. Clifford Geertz: Culture, Custom and Ethics. Cambridge: Polity, 2000. Milenkoviü, Miloš. „Teorija etnografije u savremenoj Antropologiji.’’ (19822002). PhD diss., University of Belgrade, 2006. Moore, Jerry D. Uvod u antropologiju: Teorija i teoretiþari kulture. Zagreb: Naklada Jasenski i Turk, 280. Ong, Aihwa and Collier, Stephen J. Eds. Global Assemblages: Technology, Politics, and Ethics as Anthropological Problems. Oxford: Blackwell, 2005. Rosaldo,Renato Jr. I., “A Note on Geertz as a Cultural Essayist,” in The Fate of “Culture”: Geertz and Beyond, edited by Sherry B. Ortner, 3034. Berkeley: U of California P, 1999. Salzman, P. Carl. Understanding Culture: An Introduction to Anthropological Theory. Illinois: Waveland, 2001. Schneider, David M. American Kinship: A Cultural Account. Englewood Cliffs, N.J: Prentice-Hall, (1980[1968]). Schneider, Mark A. “Culture-as-Text in The Work of Clifford Geertz.” Theory and Society 16 (1987): 809-839. Shmuel, N. Eisenstadt. “Multiple Modernities.” Deadalus 129 (2000): 1-29.

BEAUTY AND PAIN, AND THE ESCAPE FROM CONVENTION IN TRAGEDY1: OEDIPUS COLONEUS BY SOPHOCLES AND BY WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE BAVJOLA SHATRO

When Aristotle wrote in Poetics why people make art, besides stressing the fact that art is thrilling and educational, he maintained that making art is natural to human beings. We need to make art or else our existence would cease to display those traits which make that existence human; without it imagination can give no insight into our place in the world and into our understanding of life. To Aristotle tragic art was among the ultimate achievements of art and it might even mark the singular destination of art. Even though Plato and Aristotle spoke about art and tragedy, there is, however—and somehow paradoxically—no theory of the tragic in ancient Greece. It is, nevertheless, ancient Greece that provides us with the literary works that represent probably the most revealing examples of the tragic concept. This concept is to be found in the tragedy itself, more specifically in that of Sophocles and particularly in the plays of the Oedipus cycle. This cycle includes Oedipus Rex, Antigone, Oedipus Coloneus. The last play will be the focus of this article since that play represents a unique literary phenomenon that sheds light on the essence of the tragic the way the ancient Greeks thought of it. It is that perception of the tragic in the plays of the Oedipus cycle and particularly in Oedipus Rex that modern European art has lost by degrees, thus giving rise to a different perception of the tragic. This loss reshaped also part of our

 1

Research for this article was supported in part by the Junior Faculty Development Program, which is funded by the Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs (ECA) of the United States Department of State, under authority of the FulbrightHays Act of 1961 as amended and administered by American Councils for International Education. ACTR/ACCELS. The opinions expressed herein are the author’s own and do not necessarily express the views of either ECA or American Councils.

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Beauty and Pain, and the Escape from Convention in Tragedy

conscience on the place of man in the world and on the meaning of life, death and language. European civilization started to rediscover that sense of tragedy very slowly but inevitably and with great enchantment during German Romanticism and, later, in the beginning of the 20th century. Several times Oedipus Coloneus has been defined as a very unusual tragedy, one which does not develop according to the typical stages of this genre. Though considered a literary masterpiece, this tragedy has been marginalized and very often it has not been mentioned by most studies of ancient tragedy. There is something in this tragedy that eludes our concept about art, our expectations about it, particularly about ancient tragedy, and also about theorizing in literature in general. Similarly, though one of Shakespeare’s greatest works, King Lear, one of the great four tragedies of Shakespeare, is less dealt with than the other three—Macbeth, Hamlet, and Othello. Literary art, art in general, is uncanny. It is uncanny in the sense of being monstrous, which means something not quite human or no longer human. This uncanniness is what draws us to art and makes art indispensable for the human being and that uncanniness has been the concern of much of the World’s greatest literary works but which is found first and foremost in ancient Greek tragedy, culminating with the Oedipus cycle. The challenging uncanniness of art makes us think of a phenomenon which can be surely considered as a type of fear, a conception, a conviction, a memento, etc.—both conscious and unconscious—which displays during and most of all after the contact that we have with the literary work. That is how the literary work can have an enormous impact on the reader and makes them either experience the “obsession of Oedipus,” which I see as a tendency to focus on the monstrous and estranged face of the human being and of his fate, or marginalize it and almost avoid it in silence and discomfiture. It is as if we become part of a play that starts and goes on exactly after the moment of the shocking awareness that we are human and this very fact constitutes the essence of the experience of a work of art. When talking about the hermeneutical praxis of the work of art, H. G. Gadamer says: It is part of the reality of a play that it leaves an indefinite space around its real theme. [...] It would be a false reality if the action could all be calculated out like an equation. Rather it becomes a play of reality when it does not tell the spectator everything, but only a little more than he customarily understands in his daily round. The more that remains open, the more freely does the process of understanding succeed—i.e., the process of transposing what is shown in the play to one’s own world and,

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of course, also to the world of one’s own political experience. (WM 471/TM 498)2

When reading Oedipus and Lear much of the theme remains open and can be addressed to any time in history and in all stages of the development of the history of ideas. Gadamer also emphasizes that the crucial point is that “the play is not a sealed-off event that occurs in isolation, but is an act of playing that always requires a playing along with.”3 In the tragedies of Shakespeare and Sophocles the play always continues and offers us something to situate ourselves toward the play in our given historical context and ethical questions but also makes us able to see far beyond them. We experience the play even more after its performance is concluded. The paper, too, argues that these tragedies are crucial to a better understanding of ethics within the realm of philosophy, if we understand ethics to be far from simple everyday life perception of morality and regard it as a deeper insight on the human condition as such. *** Andrew Cecil Bradley, the classical reference of Shakespeare, writes that King Lear, when regarded strictly as a play, though in certain parts overwhelming, taken as a whole is decidedly inferior to Hamlet, Othello and Macbeth. Bradley maintains that: When I am feeling that it [King Lear—B.Sh.] is greater than any of these, and the fullest revelation of Shakespeare’s power, I find I am not regarding it simply as a drama, but am grouping it in my mind with works like the Prometheus Vinctus and the Divine Comedy, and even with the greatest symphonies of Beethoven and the statues in the Medici Chapel.”4

I believe that this is due to the fact that in King Lear there is a perception of pain and beauty that reminds us the sense of tragic in ancient Greece. This tragedy points to both the grandeur and the misfortune of being human: the fact that we both perceive and embody the infinite within our finite nature. As soon as we are faced with this reality, we experience the beauty of these works of art and the real sense of the tragic.

 2

Hans-Georg Gadamer, Who Am I and Who Are You (New York: U of New York P, 1993), 31. 3 Ibid. 4 A. C. Bradley, Shakespearean Tragedy (New Delhi: Atlantic, 2004), 244.

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Beauty and Pain, and the Escape from Convention in Tragedy

In King Lear, as in Oedipus, we find the coldest and most ironic form of disaster, of the catastrophe. This is due to the fact that both tragedies deal with the tragic effect of blindness, a condition which characterizes and delimits our existence in the world and the inevitable sense of the tragic that is entailed in that existence. Oedipus and Lear are both victims of their being human, or, rather, of their being born, and both of them are thoroughly overwhelmed by blindness—naivety and shortsightedness in Lear, and excessive thirst for knowledge in Oedipus. Though different from one another, both forms of blindness are the cause of their downfall. The chorus in Oedipus tragically declares the curse of being born and Lear seems to echo it when he says: “When we are born, we cry that we are come/to this great stage of fools.” This may explain why the most-cited and best-known passages from both plays are precisely curses—extremely harsh and shocking. The curse seems to be the only weapon left to the protagonists when faced with the tragic events and their disturbingly dramatic experiences. While analyzing King Lear, among other things, A. C. Bradley declares: that which makes the peculiar greatness of King Lear is connected to the mass and variety of intense experience which it contains; the interpenetration of sublime imagination, piercing pathos, […] the vastness of the convulsion both of nature and of human passion; […] the halfrealized suggestions of vast universal powers working in the world of individual fates and passions—all this interferes with dramatic clearness even when the play is read, and in the theatre not only refuses to reveal itself fully through the senses but seems to be almost in contradiction with their reports.

Bradley maintains that in this tragedy we find a poetic kind of imagination more than a dramatic type of perception, which is why this tragedy is less “preferred” by drama critics or by producers. From the stage perspective, the performance of King Lear has often turned out to be disappointing. I believe that King Lear represents a sense of the tragic—in terms of ancient Greek tragedy—that other Shakespearean tragedies do not have and that is what makes this particular tragedy so peculiar. It deals with the monstrous that the human being embodies and also with what happens when they come to terms with their finite and limited nature. It is precisely this monstrous element in the human being—the to deinon 5 referred to in Sophocles’ Antigone—that most touches the readers or the audiences, as

 5

See Martin Heidegger, Introduction to Metaphysics (Yale UP, 2000).

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that element transcends the bounds the standardized Western culture has of human beings and of nature. Bradley argues that despite the defectiveness on the dramatic side: to [King Lear—B.Sh.] is due the idea of monstrosity—of beings, actions, states of mind, which appear not only abnormal but absolutely contrary to nature; an idea, which, of course, is common enough in Shakespeare, but appears with unusual frequency in King Lear.”6

However this paper maintains that what we see in this tragedy is not contrary to nature but in accordance with our human nature, which is able to unleash hell willingly or not. I am referring to that part of human nature that we believe, or choose to believe, that has been subdued, or tamed. The confrontation with this side of our nature is extremely harsh and dreadful. It is for this reason that King Lear goes beyond what the spectator was used to seeing during Shakespeare’s lifetime and what the spectator is faced with in our times. We tend to refuse what happens to Lear. Although the simplified idea of what a tragedy is makes us more inclined to expect that the protagonists would undergo suffering and, ultimately, death, the audiences tend to reject, to decline that extreme suffering that the character perceives and even to search for something essentially “wrong” that is going on in the fate of Lear and in his figure in general. Shakespeare has given us an unexpected and surprising reminiscence of the tragic as perceived in ancient Greece. Both Oedipus and Lear share the helplessness of their age, mixed with the monstrous suffering, the extreme pain resulting from their ruin at a moment when they least expect it, which is accompanied by their transformation and alienation because of the choices they make. These choices do not seem to be really a choice but rather the happening, the actualization of the human fate, which is defined by human nature itself. Lear as an old man faltering with his walking-stick reminds us of Oedipus at Coloneus. Nevertheless, Lear is still far from the understanding that Oedipus has and the peace that this hero finds after the tremendous experiences of his life. The enormous amount of suffering both characters experience disturbs and distresses the audiences and readers but rather than focus on this shared aspect both tragedies have we should not forget the reason both heroes reach at this point and, more importantly, what comes after that point. When arguing about elements from ancient Greek tragedy in Shakespeare, the possible Aeschylean spirit of King Lear has been a fertile ground of discussion:

 6

Bradley, op. cit., 244.

22

Beauty and Pain, and the Escape from Convention in Tragedy And if we exclude the biographical part of this view,1 the rest may claim some support even from the greatest of Shakespearean critics since the days of Coleridge, Hazlitt and Lamb. Mr. Swinburne, after observing that King Lear is “by far the most Aeschylean” of Shakespeare’s works…”

However I, too, believe that King Lear differs radically from Aeschylus because this Shakespearean tragedy has a different weight of pain that reminds us of a feeling of suffocation and lack of escape, which are not found in Aeschylus. The fate of Lear is equivalent to darkness, to impasse, to total catastrophe. [O]n the horizon of Shakespeare’s tragic fatalism we see no such twilight of atonement, such pledge of reconciliation as this. Requital, redemption, amends, equity, explanation, pity and mercy, are words without a meaning here.7

In King Lear, as it is often the case in Shakespeare’s plays, man is not represented […] as the mere plaything of a blind or capricious power, suffering woes which have no relation to his character and actions; nor is the world represented as given over to darkness. And in these respects, King Lear, though the most terrible of these works, does not differ in essence from the rest.8

Yet this tragedy leads us to a concept of fate which is quite different from any kind of fatalistic perception but comes closer to the concept of fate we find in Oedipus Coloneus, even though Lear is far from understanding it and from reaching that level of insight that Oedipus reached in the Greek tragedy. Bradley adds: Its [King Lear’s—B.Sh] keynote is surely to be heard neither in the words wrung from Gloster in his anguish, nor in Edgar’s words “the gods are just.” Its final and total result is one in which pity and terror, carried perhaps to the extreme limits of art, are so blended with a sense of law and beauty that we feel at last, not depression and much less despair, but a consciousness of greatness in pain, and of solemnity in the mystery we cannot fathom.9

This reminds us of the greatest misfortune of mankind according to Sophocles: that of being born. Rather than detecting the source of the

 7

Ibid., p. 283. Ibid., p. 284. 9 Ibid. 8

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tragedy in people’s actions and choices, that greatest misfortune seems to be the cause of our suffering; the people’s actions and choices are often an unconscious pursuit of that curse. Bradley rightly maintains that: The position of the hero in this tragedy is in one important respect peculiar. The reader of Hamlet, Othello, or Macbeth, is in no danger of forgetting, when the catastrophe is reached, the part played by the hero in bringing it on. His fatal weakness, error, wrong-doing, continues almost to the end. It is otherwise with King Lear. When the conclusion arrives, the old King has for a long while been passive. We have long regarded him not only as ‘a man more sinned against than sinning,’ but almost wholly as a sufferer, hardly at all as an agent. His sufferings too have been so cruel, and our indignation against those who inflicted them has been so intense, that recollection of the wrong he did to Cordelia, to Kent, and to his realm, has been well-nigh effaced. Lastly, for nearly four Acts he has inspired in us, together with this pity, much admiration and affection. The force of his passion has made us feel that his nature was great; and his frankness and generosity, his heroic efforts to be patient, the depth of his shame and repentance, and the ecstasy of his reunion with Cordelia, have melted our very hearts. Naturally, therefore, at the close we are in some danger of forgetting that the storm which has overwhelmed him was liberated by his own deed.10

I think that this works for Oedipus Coloneus too because in this tragedy we probably have the first model of the way the main character “perishes” into the fatal suffering that he himself invites into his life. No matter the mistake the protagonists of these plays might have made, we feel pain for them; we reject the unfair punishment and their extreme suffering. In such plays we almost overlook the character and instead focus on the meaningfulness or fairness of the events. Unconsciously, perhaps, we simultaneously place ourselves in their position and also distance ourselves from the events we see on stage. This is, I believe, the twofold reaction of the spectator toward these characters. It was Oedipus Coloneus, the tragedy that gives rise to such a character, a character who invites calamity to his own life partly willingly and partly unknowingly, but who also reached the solution to the impossible equation of human existence and the meaningfulness of life when faced with extreme events. The latest phase is the one that Lear experiences. But still this mixture of guilt, unconscious quest for something beyond the natural, and the extreme pain inspires in us the sense of beauty in a solemn way. Oedipus is not active in

 10

Ibid.

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Beauty and Pain, and the Escape from Convention in Tragedy

Oedipus Coloneus the way it is in Oedipus Rex and we almost forget that his present stage is nothing but the result of his own eager and restless search to know things that he should not know and the outcome of his effort to reach things and realities that are not at hand for a human being. Yet, this tragedy and this horrible fate rouse the sense of beauty in the spectator. Bradley links suffering and pain to beauty because, to him, in a tragedy “there holds in it the law, not of proportionate requital, but of strict connection between act and consequence. It is, so far, the world of all Shakespeare’s tragedies.”11 But I consider King Lear to go beyond this definition and this shared feature which marks all of Shakespeare’s tragedies; this is one reason King Lear stands out from the rest of Shakespearean tragedies as the tragedy in which Shakespeare successfully escapes convention, as it was known by the theatre of the time and by all European literature from antiquity until German Romanticism brought back the concept of the tragic. Therefore, Shakespeare gave us a glimmer of the pure tragic, which is to be found in one of the most extraordinary literary works ever written, the Oedipus cycle. When speaking of Oedipus and also of Lear—especially of the Lear of Act III, Scene II—we are confronted with the issue of how to speak about the unspeakabilty of our perceptions of insights into the self and the world. This insight is a reality that we suffer but that we cannot apprehend. Knowledge and conviction which is achieved through a stubborn quest that goes beyond the human ability to understand and change things lead to extreme pain and death; this becomes the cause of artistic beauty. Strangeness and alterity, too, are linked to it, because the moment that an individual makes such a choice he/she exposes his/her own self to misfortune and suffering. In order to understand such a complex reality, one can proceed by focusing on the character or on the idea that the character embraces and represents. Sophocles does not enter into the labyrinths of human psychology but still he reveals the very cause of the tragedies that chase man. Human beings, whether willfully or unknowingly, bring calamity and suffering to themselves and to others and this defines our human condition. The fate of human beings is for them to be exposed to the pain that comes from such a revelation. An alternative to that pain is to avoid being exposed to it by ‘becoming blind’ to what people cannot know or prevent from happening, not because their fate has been already written for them (with the pejorative and fatalist implications that this statement has) but because our very nature defines much of our attitude

 11

Ibid.

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and actions. Therefore, being born is a great misfortune and the best thing one can do is go back as soon as a possible from where he came. The insight within the psychodynamics of the character is typical of Shakespeare but that is almost lacking in Sophocles, and their differences embody the difference between the modern and ancient sense of tragedy. People have to suffer beyond what is normal—considering the level of knowledge that they are equipped with—and this makes of them monsters, alienated creatures, since they carry within themselves the knowledge that can only be suffered by men but which cannot be grasped in any way. This is linked to the pain of what is unspeakable, which is intrinsic and essential to our existence. That is what constitutes the tragic in life, the tragedy of life that makes Sophocles say that the best thing for man is not to be born at all. In Shakespeare we see that no disappointment is greater than the pain one feels about realities that one cannot even express. Death is frightening in Sophocles but life and the consciousness of life is far more menacing. The same can be said of Shakespeare when it comes to man’s relation with nature, which is especially evident in King Lear. The relationship with nature signifies the relationship and conscience with/of death. We belong to death and we owe much to it. I believe that we owe to death our own language and soul, logos and psyche. Therefore we carry death with us; these two tragedies bear witness to this fact. In Oedipus the two basic elements that cause the emotional effect of the tragedy, the reversals (peripeteiai) and discoveries (anagnorisis), are missing. Therefore we know almost nothing of the turmoil of Oedipus except for what he personally reveals in the dialogues but we know a lot of Lear’s suffering. The sense of the tragic differs enormously in the two authors. Shakespeare’s Lear is a subjectivity clearly defined. As a result, there cannot be any unconscious complexity in it. The language of metaphysics cannot apply to Greek tragedy and probably that is why it marks the highest form of this genre. Lear sometimes refers to gods in a way that reminds us of ancient tragedy. But the true mystery and the beyond-reality of the Greeks were not the gods but fate and no power of nature could compare to it or come close to it. Not even gods were able to do that, since they were within nature 12 . In this respect, Lear has affinities with ancient Greek tragedy because his call is not merely to the Gods but more to that power which looms beyond the will of any subjective will, that power that governs nature itself. In the case of Oedipus, that is easier to understand as this

 12

See Dennis J. Schmidt, On Germans and Other Greeks (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 2001).

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Beauty and Pain, and the Escape from Convention in Tragedy

conception of the world, nature, and fate is compatible with the ancient Greek concept of divinity submitted to fate, considered the highest law of being. On the other hand, both tragedies remind us of the alien, of that estranged reality that the protagonists start to experience and which Oedipus embodies to the highest degree. The awareness of what is alien enables us to understand the nature of our own being. And that nature is defined by the absolute fact that human beings are finite. While we experience this through the tragedy we start to understand beauty as the awareness of the limits of being and of the unlimited will to know—and therefore to suffer—that humans have. This experience of beauty is perceived in the peaceful submission, in the wise yielding and acquiescence of the protagonist in Oedipus Coloneus and that perception of beauty is seen as a revelation in King Lear. The ability to experience and grasp the totality of finitude, infinity, freedom’s limits and limitlessness, pain, suffering, resistance, search and love, misery, loneliness, self, world, and one’s conscience constitute beauty. How does Sophocles do that? He escapes the convention of Greek tragedy by following no traditional schemas in the tragedy we are discussing. We already mentioned that Oedipus Coloneus does not follow the traditional schema of reversals and discoveries; on the contrary, it only has a mysterious unraveling of an enigma which is again ended in mystery, in rest and peace. It seems as if peace is to be found only if one agrees not to search for the decoding of the enigma, to understand and decipher the mystery that the resting place of Oedipus symbolizes and most of all that his life appeals to. There is an end to the suffering of the protagonist but no tragic discovery that ruins him. Shakespeare, on the other hand, does something quite different; Lear experiences extreme pain and death and he incurs this misery of his own device, though he is not fully aware of that. In creating this character Shakespeare makes the concept of beauty the core of his tragedy in a way that echoes the ancient Greek conception of beauty, since in King Lear Shakespeare explores the reality of human existence beyond conventions. In many tragedies we can find two of the elements that make up Greek tragedy: love and death.But in King Lear there is the third element coming forward: nature. In this respect, King Lear comes close to Oedipus Coloneus. In both tragedies we perceive the spirit of the tragic as an insight on the nature and fate of mankind, and see it linked to the mood of loss and fall. As long as we live, we belong to death and pain; we belong to them even before our birth. That is our real home in the sense of home as belonging. The caesura in Oedipus, which reminds us of this belonging, constitutes the tragic reality since it is an awkward entity that goes far

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beyond the convention of tragedy known in ancient Greece. In King Lear we detect a particular bond between man, gods, and nature in the storm scene. It is as if time stops and exists in another, non-human, dimension. That is how the caesura is created and that caesura carries the same sense of the tragic. When the caesura occurs in both tragedies, there is only wrath, alienation, and abandonment. It reveals to us the idea of finitude and exposes us to the necessity to go back again to death in order to fix the order of the world. This reality which is perceived simply as space and time is the dimension where man is but thrown and lost, and it makes Lear look the same to deinon as Oedipus seemed first. This is the most sublime part of the tragedy and it reminds us of the finite in us, embodied in the condition of Lear. In such a moment the only attribute left to man is to speak; language here underlines its relation with death—language implies (entails) death. In these moments time is measured through suffering and this leads to the concept of destiny since life can no longer be understood but lived. From Oedipus Coloneus onwards there is no more suffered time, there is no rejection of our nature as time—hence as finite beings— because Oedipus has already come to an understanding of this reality. Oedipus stands at a higher degree of apprehension not because of his ability to think and to reason but because he has lived, experienced, and performed, and has been the embodiment of the todeinon, the monstrous. Oedipus has already embodied the todeinon before the opening of the play by revealing the caesura since Oedipus Rex, which recounts of Oedipus’ earlier occurrences. Oedipus Coloneus shows how the greatest riddle of all has been solved. To Shakespeare this riddle has not been solved yet so he brings it back to our attention through the tragedy and suffering of Lear. Oedipus bears witness to the fact that solution does not lay in the solution of a problem but in the workings of the destiny, ultimately in the order of human nature itself, which man cannot grasp rationally but merely experience. There is no other way to understand it. But this understanding gives peace, it gives relief. Oedipus Coloneus escapes and breaks the convention in an emblematic way. In King Lear, on the other hand, Shakespeare points out how the caesura and the monstrous—in the sense of the tragic that ancient Greek tragedy offered—would fare in the era of metaphysics and Christianity. My contention is that part of that monstrosity is preserved in Lear, since, especially in the two scenes already mentioned, rather than the unraveling of a character, we are confronted with the human being overwhelmed by destiny and the horror of becoming the non-self, of facing the finite, and, above all, death in language. The subject is emptied of everything he has and he is but time, thereby becoming death in flesh and bones and a

28

Beauty and Pain, and the Escape from Convention in Tragedy

reminder of our extremely finite nature. In the storm scene and in most of this tragedy, the character seems to be disclosing, just as time does. Gradually, almost naïvely, but with extreme suffering due to the disappointment and inability to change and accept, Lear becomes the carrier of the poetics of the finitude and limitedness of human life, of how bereft the human being can be. This poetics of time as inevitability, as destiny, unavoidable and extremely painful, represents the real heart of tragedy. That is what Sophocles understood better than anyone in his time and that explains why he wrote a tragedy that escapes all conventions in such a way that it represents an exemplary act of awareness of the tragic. Shakespeare, too, tackled this amazing phenomenon which constitutes the essence of tragedy more than a thousand years later and escaped convention in King Lear, producing what is probably his most awkward tragedy, a play that is shrouded by silence. Both Lear and Oedipus do not recognize themselves for what they are, namely finite and limited beings surrounded by limited possibilities. The Hesperian element that Greek tragedy, Oedipus in particular, seems to anticipate, Lear seems to forget by his unreasonable gesture of dividing the empire and still pretending to be the ruler of a kingdom which he no longer possesses. Oedipus had an eye too many and Lear had an eye less.13 Though the latter was blind in a different way, both characters were blind and this exposed them to the monstrosity that they suffered and embodied. Yet, Oedipus Coloneus is the climax of the awareness of the finitude of man, of the both unwilling and willful potential that man has of bringing forth his own catastrophe. Even though ruined, man can still come to an important understanding of his condition, an understanding that results from his experiencing the pain of knowing, a path which leads ultimately to peacefulness. This is a path that has to be walked on one’s own; after all, no one knows about Oedipus’ burial place. On the other hand, Lear recalls this aspect of the ancient tragedy by making us face the cruelest fate and the catastrophe that knows no mercy until the very end. By not respecting the bounds of the human possibility, both Lear and Oedipus bring about their own destruction. Bearing close resemblances to Antigone, the daughter who accompanied Oedipus and was closer to her father than Ismene, Cordelia becomes the vision of Antigone in King Lear, in a more westernized model, but who, nevertheless, has inherited a lot of features from her literary ancestor. Cordelia, like Antigone, knows the meaning of limits, she knows what cannot be transgressed. Cordelia deals with the mystery of love and Antigone with the mystery of death. Therefore, they both end

 13

See Nicholas Marsh, Shakespeare, the Tragedies (NY: Macmillan, 1998), 14.

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dying and being un-understood by the others. Not to respect the limits of the human being and the secrets of its nature is to invite catastrophe and to ruin that nature, as human beings are unable to deal with what lies beyond those limits. Both sides—on the one hand Oedipus and Lear, and on the other, Cordelia and Antigone—end up dying and becoming embodiments of the monstrous/uncanny. It is impressive that Shakespeare is the only Renaissance tragedian who resorts to such a large degree to the ancient perception of the tragic, which was typical of Greek tragedy, and which reached its acme with Oedipus Coloneus. Both tragedies deal with the issue of death and this is what connects pain, extreme finitude and the conscience of being limited to beauty; these characters remind us of the human, and the noble, in our existence. The key notions that constitute the texture of these tragedies are knowledge, love and strife. The first and second result in the third. Although these elements belong to the very same whole, the struggle between them is never-ending. The characters are eager to know but also eager to witness on behalf of what they know and what they believe in. Everything is about word and love. Lear seems to lose his identity when he calls to nature and seems to become one with it. The story of human being and of nature is one of separation, a separation that defines our sense of the tragic related to it.14 The need to belong and the spoken reality of this craving are the curse of Lear. There is some blind Oedipus in Lear, too. The way the individual disappears, the way it is estranged and annihilated, makes the beauty come to stage because it (it refers to what?) becomes pure time. The protagonist reflects the human reality, the one reality we try to forget, that is, that we are finite. We will all go to nothing. Being but time, we are pain and suffering and this truth is the beauty, the shocking beauty that these tragedies seem to offer. Shakespeare escaped the convention by writing King Lear but the Christian and metaphysical element that was prevalent in Europe when Shakespeare wrote his tragedies had already separated tragedy from its pure ancient spirit. In this respect, Lear’s figure is far more painful than Oedipus, who, in the end, found peace. The inner contradictions, clashes and issues that are inherent in a human being are shown with an unequalled clarity in a tragedy. What most terrifies us is precisely this: we cannot understand and master our own self and our own fate. Yet, these conflicting possibilities, this contradicting potential that life has can lead to enlightenment and peace. And this very thing makes us present to the self and to the world. Beauty arises from tragic pain. The

 14

See Dennis Schmidt, op. cit., 161-162.

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Beauty and Pain, and the Escape from Convention in Tragedy

more the tragedy escapes the convention—as it does in Sophocles and Shakespeare—the more it reveals to us this side of our human condition. Beauty goes beyond the linearity and order that it implies; it lies in the contradictions that make us what we are, human. Death, loss and trauma are what remind us of the finitude of language and the finitude of language is an intimation of our own finitude. Tragedy makes us experience sobriety, the sobriety achieved by quietness, order and compartmentalization15 and this is another type of order the one that an individual has to experience personally. Oedipus was able to reach this stage, Lear couldn’t. His tragedy, nevertheless, reminds us of it. In tragedy we find the memento of the very real capacity of human life to call catastrophe down upon itself suddenly, whether by accident, design, or simple blindness. We learn from it that, knowingly or not, we can bring disaster into the world, even monstrous evil. […] Tragedy presents an image of life that loves and affirms what is most difficult and strange in human being; the beauty of the work of art preserves this for one who understands it. And it does it even while reminding us forcefully of the limits of what we can understand and know; indeed, it is precisely at these limits that we begin to grasp the need for an affirmation, even a love, of that which we cannot understand and which exceeds us. But, in the end, the truth of tragedy is that even the moments of happiness can suddenly be pierced by the sadness of time.”16

Heidegger viewed also the language of tragedy as essentially tragic. Tragedy is linked to its ancient roots, thus keeping it away from the concept of simple imitation. The event of tragedy represents a return to some ancient religious roots that disturb our understanding. Heidegger used to see tragedy as the presenting of language itself. Therefore it becomes a presenting of our own nature, of our concerns and questions related to the nature of our fears and visions, questions that will always remain unanswered. “It is a manifest quality of Shakespearean tragedy that it visits us with such unknown fears, and in almost as a high degree as if the fates of imaginary creatures are our own.”17 Richard E. Palmer, while explaining Dilthey’s theory, maintained that “[l]ife itself is that out of which we must develop our thinking and toward which we direct our

 15

William S. Allen, Ellipsis of Poetry and the Experience of Language after Heidegger, Hoelderlin and Blanchot (Albany: The State U of New York P, 2007) 135. 16 Dennis J. Schmidt, op. cit., p. 284. 17 A. P. Rossiter, “Shakespearean Tragedy,” in Tragedy: Modern Essays in Criticism,” ed. Laurence Michel (Buffalo: State U of New York), 183.

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questioning. We do not try to go beyond it to a realm of ideas. “Behind life itself our thinking cannot go.”18 I believe that is what both Oedipus and Lear keep repeating. The human will to transcend the visible and strive towards unknown worlds will bear witness to the fact that knowledge brings pain in the life of man; we are to make well-thought choices based on how much we are willing to endure. This challenge is the constant reality of the human being. This challenge forces us to consider the insoluble question, that question posed by Sophocles and Shakespeare: “what is man?” can we know what we are? Are we nothing but what our actions make us? Can our actions make us anything or are we victims of fate? What are thoughts, what is will and how do they fit into a universe that ignores our struggles?19

I believe both Oedipus Coloneus and King Lear may well serve as a good starting-point from where to begin this quest.

Conclusions The concept of the tragic in ancient Greek tragedy differs considerably from the one European literature had until German Romanticism brought the concept of Greek tragedy back to literature and to literary studies. Sophocles’ Oedipus Coloneus is an emblematic tragedy through which we can come to a better understanding of the relationship between pain and beauty through the concept of the todeinon, the monstrosity, the uncanniness and the alien in tragedy. Shakespeare—with King Lear—seems to be the only playwright who revived that concept during the Renaissance, thereby breaking the conventions of tragedy which were prevalent in his time. Sophocles has surely done the same in writing a tragedy that pushed to the limits the ancient Greek perception on man, destiny and human nature. Through the comparison of these two tragedies and the perspective this comparison opens to the further study of this genre, of the concept of the convention, fate, death, language, and being and the relations they have with suffering and knowledge. I agree with the assertion that:

 18

Richard E. Palmer, Hermeneutics; Interpretation Theory in Schleiermacher, Dilthey, Heidegger, and Gadamer (Evanston: Northwestern UP, 1969). 19 Nicholas Marsh, op. cit., p.12.

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Beauty and Pain, and the Escape from Convention in Tragedy [t]ragedy reminds the utopian that suffering and all forms of evil are always with us—that change of fortune is the fundamental and inevitable condition of our experience. Whoever seeks to evade this inevitable condition merely hastens its fulfillment. Perhaps that is why, in an age dedicated to the task of bringing to all freedom from fear and insecurity, we are all so fearful and insecure. Certainly, by tragic irony, the utopian hopes of man are today closer to reversal than to realization.20

Although the life of Oedipus and Lear is somehow narrowed into the process of causation, at the end they both reach a hard-won humility and a new understanding of love21 even though this is achieved through great suffering, suffering caused by the pain of knowledge and of going beyond the limits of human nature. These two great tragedies have created an artistic reality in which pain, knowledge, fate and death combine to conceive beauty.

Works Cited Allen William S. Ellipsis of Poetry and the Experience of Language after Heidegger, Hoelderlin and Blanchot. Albany: State U of New York P, 2007. Bradley A. C. Shakespearean Tragedy. New Delhi: Atlantic, 2004. Gadamer Hans-Georg. Who am I and Who Are You and Other Essays. New York: U of New York P, 1993. Heidegger Martin. Introduction to Metaphysics. Yale UP, 2000. Marsh Nicholas. Shakespeare, the Tragedies. NY: Macmillan, 1998. Myers Henry A. “The Tragic Attitude toward Value.” In Tragedy: Modern Essays in Criticism. Ed. Laurence Michel. Buffalo: State U of New York, 1963. Palmer Richard E. Hermeneutics; Interpretation Theory in Schleiermacher, Dilthey, Heidegger, and Gadamer. Evanston: Northwestern UP, 1969. Rossiter A. P. “Shakespearean Tragedy.” In Tragedy: Modern Essays in Criticism. Ed. Laurence Michel. Buffalo: State Uof New York, 1963. Sewall Richard B. “The Tragic Form.” In Tragedy: Modern Essays in Criticism. Ed. Laurence Michel. Buffalo: State U of New York, 1963. Schmidt Dennis J. On Germans and Other Greeks. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 2001.

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Henry A. Myers, “The Tragic Attitude toward Value,” in Tragedy: Modern Essays in Criticism, ed. Laurence Michel (State U of New York at Buffalo), 63. 21 See Richard B. Sewall, “The Tragic Form,” in Tragedy: Modern Essays in Criticism, ed. Laurence Michel, 128.

OBJECTIVIST POETRY AND ITS CONVENTIONS IN THE CONTEXT OF MODERNIST AND POSTMODERNIST AMERICAN POETRY DUBRAVKA ĈURIû

The Study of Poetry as a Marginalized Field within Cultural Studies I will begin this paper by positioning the study of poetry with regards to literary studies in general. For that purpose I will use Joseph Harrington’s essay “Poetry and the Public: The Social Form of Modern U.S. Poetry,” in which he states that “‘poetry studies’—even studies of American poetry—remained distinct from ‘American literature’.” 1 Harrington points to the fact that during the 1990s, modern poetry criticism, or at least some parts of it, despite its domination by a narrowly defined modernist canon, inched a little closer to “cultural studies.” It is indeed interesting to note, as Harrington does, that at a time when historical scholarship has become the norm in American literary criticism, “American literature” continues to neglect poetry, and we join Harrington in asking: why? He further notes that the textualist poetics of high modernism maintained its influence in English departments throughout the 1990s, not only among poetry critics. In fact, as Alan Golding points out, the problem is that much New Americanist work implicitly perpetuates the historical essentializing of poetry as the least “social,” most “transcendent” of genres, treating it by default as a private space untouched by the material and historical determinants shaping literary production in other genres.2

 1

Joseph Harrington, “Poetry and the Public: The Social Form of Modern U.S. Poetry”, in Poetry and Cultural Studies: A Reader, eds. Maria Damon and Ira Livingston (Urbana and Chicago: U of Illinois P, 2009), 268. 2 Quoted in Ibid., 270.

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According to Harrington, high modernists and New Critics conceived of poetry as “a discursive, meditative, and intellectual discourse, of which John Donne was the exemplary craftsman.”3 In those circles, poetry was defined as a domain of pure aesthetic value quite apart from “mere historical value.” In other words, Harrington continues, poetry’s social form in the academy represents the very idea of literature that historicists and cultural critics reject. Modern poetry still appears as a preserve of “unchangeable forms” that appeals only to an “elite,” and the “elite” poetry of the canonized modernist avant-garde dominates in poetry studies.4 Or, as Maria Damon stated in the early 1990s, a great deal of discussions on the nature of poetry concentrates on the “radical subjectivity of the lyric,” emphasizing its tendency toward the subject rather than the object. She also pointed out that many contemporary critics designated the lyric as “the most subject-oriented of all verbal statements even more so than other forms of poetry and literature.”5 But Damon also mentions some other theorists, such as Hans Robert Jauss, who have demonstrated the lyric’s role “in transmitting rather than countering socially normative values.”6 In this regard, she also mentions Robert von Hallberg who has “done much to show the ‘centrism’ of American poetry,” that is, “the congruence of the poetry of a given period with the general national values and intellectual trends of that era.”7 Given those traditional representations of poetry, we might agree with Harrington’s view that “poetry was the raison d’être of and vehicle for New Critical formalism as well as the last genre to become a focus of historical analysis.”8 And since, as Harrington reminds us, “modernism was formed as a cosmopolitan rather than national movement” and, at the same time, “the principal New Critics identified with high modernism, ‘American poetry’ came to sound like an oxymoron.”9 Harrington also reminds us of the influence of Mikhail Bakhtin and British Marxist critics’ disposition “in favor of the novel and against lyric poetry as an object of analysis” on cultural studies in the United States.10 This legacy, he continues, “along

 3

Ibid. Ibid., 271. 5 Maria Damon, The Dark End of the Street: Margins in American Vanguard Poetry (Minneapolis and London: U of Minnesota P, 1993), 18. 6 Ibid., 9. 7 Ibid. 8 Harrington, op. cit., 271. 9 Ibid. 10 Ibid. 4

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with sheer institutional inertia, served to discourage cultural critics and Americanists from engaging poetry.” Furthermore, [i]n the professional imaginary, the corollary of poetry’s hypostatization is the notion that fiction somehow provides a privileged access to “the social.” Accordingly, in U.S. criticism from the 1950s to the 1990s, the emerging field of “American literature” came to be defined preeminently by prose narrative.11

During the 1990s, New Americanists and cultural critics alike perpetuated a centuries-old ideology of poetry and its exclusion from the “New Americanists work” could be understood as a “surprising contradiction of its own principles.”12 It is a contradiction because one of its principles is that all art, including poetry, is embedded within a larger cultural matrix and that all writing is a form of discourse. Harrington concludes that if the exclusion of poetry reveals itself as rhetorically constructed, so, too, does the inclusion of fiction. He writes: To the extent that critics reflexively turn to the content of fiction, their enterprise becomes as textual-formalist as New Criticism privileging of the structure of poetry. Modernist and New Critical poetics problematized representational strategies and insisted on the materiality of the text, practices that resist a methodology premised upon the reflective, referential, or “documentary” quality of literary texts. If it is easier to make a narrative from another narrative, it is also easier, it seems, to represent a representation. Indeed, experimental prose rarely fares better than poetry within theories of American literature. Yet by taking the characters, tropes, or topoi of novels to be more indicative of the Zeitgeist than those of poems, or by using narrative devices as semiotic gene splices from which a larger culture can be cloned, Americanists have transferred “authenticity” from the literary work as autonomous object to the literary work as narrative content. Or rather, they have not considered these works under the social form of their genres. We go to novels to find historical reality because novelists represent historical reality—this premise not only puts a lot of faith in novelists, it also reifies field boundaries by producing a dichotomy between prose narrative as the bearer of “historical value” on the one hand and poetry (understood as nonnarrative lyric) as the repository of “aesthetic value” on the other. This assumption means that “American literature” turns on the same axiomatic logic as “poetry”.13

 11

Harrington, op. cit., 271–272. Golding quoted in ibid., 273. 13 Ibid., 273–274. 12

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Harrington further maintains that [p]oetry’s perceived abilities—in genteel, modernist, radical, and popular/populist poetics alike—to effect equilibrium and ordering, to preserve or transmit aesthetic and ethical values, and to (de)sacralize twentieth-century capitalist society have made it a perennial battleground in the struggle to define the subject of national culture. That is, critics and poets of the early twentieth century understood poetry as inherently practical and social (and in many cases political) because of the putative transcendence that rendered poetry asocial in the post-New Critical academy. Accordingly, the exclusion of American poetry from American literature and the identification of the latter as prose narrative has more to do with institutional history than with any inherent generic or national characteristics.14

The broader question posed in this essay is the relation of poetry (or literature in general) with the field of politics. To address it, I will turn to the work of Pascale Casanova and her thesis that “[l]iterary space translates political and national issues into its own terms—aesthetic, formal, narrative, poetic—and at once affirms and denies them.” 15 She maintains that although literature is not altogether free from political influence, it has its own ways and means of asserting a measure of independence; of constituting itself as a distinct world in opposition to the nation and nationalism, a world in which external concerns appear only in refracted form, transformed and reinterpreted in literary terms and with literary instruments.16

She explains that “for a national literary space to come into being, a nation must attain true political independence.” 17 In the “most autonomous countries,” according to her, literature cannot be reduced to political interests or used to suit national purposes. It is in these countries that the independent laws of literature are invented, and that the extraordinary and improbable construction of what

 14

Ibid., 274-275. Pascale Casanova, The World Republic of Letters, trans. M. B. DeBevoise (Cambridge, MA and London, UK: Harvard UP, 2004), 85. 16 Ibid. 17 Ibid., 81. 15

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may properly be referred to as the autonomous international space of literature is carried out.18

Finally, she stresses that this very long process, through which autonomy is achieved and literary capital hoarded, tends to obscure the political origins of literature; by causing the link between literature and nation to be forgotten, encourages a belief in the existence of a literature that is completely pure, beyond the reach of time and history. Paradoxically, it is time itself that enables literature to free itself from history.19

With all of that in mind, I will now turn to the state of American poetry during the 1930s. Discussing the American Objectivist poets, Louis Zukofsky, George Oppen, Charles Reznikoff, Carl Rakosi, Basil Bunting, and Lorine Niedecker, points to the fact that poetry can be discussed as a social practice, examining and problematizing the significant relationship between poetry and other forms of culture and discourse.20 Addressing the Objectivists, I will be looking into the political dimension of poetry in two ways. Firstly, I will position the Objectivists in the macro-political context of the 1930s capitalist America and its anticommunist outlook at the time, which caused most of them to stop writing poetry due to their country’s political climate, as it was rapidly moving to the right, and because many left-leaning intellectuals feared prosecution, which, for instance, drove George Oppen to his Mexican exile.21 Secondly, in terms of micro-politics, I will discuss the “politics of form,” that is, the “ways that the formal dynamics of a poem shape its ideology; more specifically, how radically innovative poetic styles can have political meanings.”22

The Objectivists and US Macro- and Micro-politics in the 1930s The American poetry scene in the 1930s was not homogenous but divided, along both poetic and political lines. According to Michael Heller,

 18

Ibid., 86. Ibid. 20 Christopher Beach, Poetic Culture: Contemporary American Poetry between Community and Institution (Evanstone, IL: Northwestern UP, 1999), 15. 21 Peter Nicholls, George Oppen and the Fate of Modernism (Oxford: OUP, 2007), 20. 22 Charles Bernstein, “Preface,” in The Politics of Poetic Form: Poetry and Public Policy, ed. Charles Bernstein (New York: Roof, 1990), vii. 19

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the 1930s began with several utopian ideas, including “communism’s classless society, an American rural pastoralism, Douglas’s Social Credit, [and] the fascist goal of an orderly society led by benevolent dictators or wise oligarchies who would save the state.”23 Heller focuses on “[o]ne poetical/political vector of the thirties [that] was aimed at modern life, viewing left-wing politics as its worst excrescence”—in the US 1930s literature, this was the Fugitives. Fugitive poets “embodied some of the most regressive aspects of this tendency.”24 At the opposite pole stood the left-leaning Objectivists. The Fugitives were “[s]outhern-aristocratic in orientation, antebellum in their views of the ordering of society and economics,” and formalist in their poetics, with anti-technology views on modern life.25 Heller quotes Allen Tate’s statement that “only a return to the provinces, to the small self-contained centers of life, will put alldestroying America, to rest.”26 For Heller, this was “regionalism with a vengeance,” but it still does not mean that Tate was calling on his colleagues to become provincial poets. For, as Heller notes, “among the Fugitives, an internal conflict expressed itself in the disparity between the poet’s physical geography and his or her poetic machinery, heavily identified as it was with Eliot and his writings on the metaphysical poets.” 27 More importantly, Heller also sees the concentration of these poets “on traditionalist craft and on the English tradition and canon” in “New Critical attitudes on an appropriate relation of life to art.”28 In the work of Objectivist poets such as Zukofsky, there is a dilemma concerning the question of the poet’s role, “as either reflector of the world or as instrument of change.”29 Heller points out that some of Zukofsky’s poems, written at a time when most Marxist-oriented poets were writing in the manner of “socialist realist” poetry for the masses, were not written as propaganda, but were governed instead by a poetics of open or unfinished composition.30 Pointing to another example, Heller explains that Oppen’s poem Discrete Series was written at the end of the imagist movement and

 23

Michael Heller, “Objectivists in the Thirties: Utopocalyptic Moments”, in The Objectivist Nexus: Essays in Cultural Poetics, eds. Rachel Blau DuPlessis and Peter Quartermain (Tuscaloosa, AL and London, UK: The U of Alabama P, 1999), 144. 24 Ibid., 145. 25 Ibid., 146. 26 Ibid. 27 Ibid. 28 Ibid. 29 Ibid., 148. 30 Ibid., 149.

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“yet pushing against the boundary of language as it interacts with sensory and visual information, suggests an interrogation of imagism’s limits.”31 For a long time, the Objectivists were neglected. Zukofsky, Oppen, Reznikoff, and Rakosi were Jewish. Burton Hatlen has observed that these four poets were marginalized not only due to their Jewish identity in a predominantly Christian society, but also because they were secondgeneration immigrants. These four Jewish-American Objectivists chose to locate themselves both inside and outside of American culture. They wrote in English not Yiddish and were part of America’s secular political and literary culture, while continuing to affirm a distinctive Jewish identity.32 On the other hand, ex-Quaker Basil Bunting and poor and divorced Lorine Niedecker shared with the other four Objectivists their position of marginality, even though their poetry was rooted in rural life rhythms, as opposed to the more urban poetry of Reznikoff, Zukofsky, and Oppen, whereas Rakosi did not fit either of those two patterns.33 The Objectivists were communists, or at least leftists, “acutely aware of the injustices of capitalist society. They offered critical and sometimes bitterly satirical views of that society.” 34 They also recognized the tendency of capitalism to reduce everything, including poetry, to a commodity. As importantly, Hatlen also notes that the 1920s and ’30s saw a consolidation of the mass media, “as the cultural arm of commodity capitalism. The mass-print media had been established for almost a century, and nineteenth-century poets such as [Walt] Whitman and [Emily] Dickinson in America, the Pre-Raphaelites in England, and the symbolists in France had been forced to develop new strategies to maintain control over their work in spite of the power of the media. These strategies included selfpublication (Whitman), the “fine” press (Morris), and the‘little’ magazines […] poets organized themselves into a network of underground subcultures: thus the proliferation of movements, schools, and cenacles starting roughly in the 1870s.35

 31

Ibid., 151. Burton Hatlen, “A Poetics of Marginality and Resistance: The Objectivist Poets in Context”, in The Objectivist Nexus, 47. 33 Ibid., 47. 34 Ibid., 48. 35 Ibid. 32

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The first generation of American modernists “emerged out of this avant-garde underground.” 36 Occupying a marginal position, the Objectivists, as the “second wave” of radical modernists,37 committed themselves to a poetics of resistance: resistance against centralizing cultural hegemonies, against the financial and media oligarchies that were and are steadily consolidating their control over our lives, against the pressure of a language that lulls the reader into a comfortable or despairing acquiescence to these powers.38

But the Objectivists were not the first to occupy that stance. They found a precedent for such a poetics of resistance in the aestheticism of high modernism. And, as Hatlen observes, around 1930 “Jewish and modernist marginality came together, a marriage consummated in the midst of a worldwide political and economic crisis; and out of this marriage the Objectivist movement was born.”39 Rachel Blau DuPlessis and Peter Quartermain have suggested that, genealogically, the Objectivists could be seen as those who identified with, and extended the practices of, high modernists, including Ezra Pound and William Carlos Williams, and in some cases Gertrude Stein, Wallace Stevens, and Marianne Moore. “In reception, they can be identified as a set of persistently under-known and undervalued late-modernist and early contemporary writers.”40 Interestingly, Michael Davidson insists on the existence of “an Objectivist continuum,” referring to “a general tendency toward objectification in much modernist and postmodern poetry,” stressing that objectivism does not imply Eliot’s cult of impersonality, but “the idea of the poem as an entity, produced within other forms of materiality and performative in its approach to language.” 41 The main feature that differentiates Objectivism from other modernist movements, Davidson maintains, is its belief that language is crucially “connected to (and even constitutive of) social materiality.”42 According to DuPlessis and Quartermain, those who viewed

 36

Ibid. Charles Bernstein, “Reznikoff’s Nearness,” in The Objectivist Nexus—Essays in Cultural Poetics, edited by Rachel Blau DuPlessis & Peter Quartermain (Tuscaloosa and London: The U of Alabama P, 1999), 210. 38 Hatlen, op. cit., 48. 39 Ibid., 48-49. 40 Rachel Blau DuPlessis and Peter Quartermain, “Introduction,” in The Objectivist Nexus, 2. 41 Michael Davidson, Ghostlier Demarcations: Modern Poetry and the Material Word (Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London: U of California P, 1997), 23. 42 Ibid. 37

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themselves as part of the Objectivist movement regarded the praxis of the poem as “a mode of thought, cognition, investigation ௅ even epistemology,” so in a broader sense, we might consider most of them realist and materialist authors. That is why the term “Objectivist,” they conclude, “has come to mean a non-symbolist, post-imagist poetics, characterized by a historical, realist, anti-mythological worldview, one in which ‘the detail, not mirage’ calls attention to the materiality of both the world and the word.”43 In February 1931, Zukofsky edited an issue of the magazine Poetry and, under the title of “Program: ‘Objectivists’ 1931”, summed up the fundamental principles of “Objectivist” poetics in his characteristically elliptical language: An objective: (Optics)—The lens bringing the rays from an object to a focus. (Military use)—That which is aimed at. (Use extended to poetry)— Desire for what is objectively perfect, inextricably the direction of historic and contemporary particulars.44

As Hatlen shows, Zukofsky begins with the act of seeing: “out there,” we have an object. In other words, the poetics that Zukofsky outlines here affirms the objective reality of a material world. He carefully distances himself from all forms of philosophical idealism. His poetics thus insisted not on a mental image but on the physical object. This emphatic materialism could be connected to Marx, and even more directly to Lenin, which is not that surprising, given that during the 1930s both Oppen and Rakosi joined the Communist Party, Zukofsky called himself a “small-c” communist and once applied for party membership, Niedecker was at the least a fellow traveler, and Reznikoff read Marx and wrote with sympathy about the Viennese socialists. And it is important to note that almost all of the Objectivists came out of the working class. With all of that in mind, it is interesting that a poetic sense of language as well as the influence of Marxian materialism led the Objectivists to treat words not merely as symbols of things, but as things in their own right, that is, as “‘historical and contemporary particulars’ among all the other such particulars that, collectively, make up the world.”45 In other words, the Objectivists were not interested in the “socialist realism” that emerged from Lenin’s “mirror” theory. As Hatlen explains, socialist realism “always tended

 43

DuPlessis and Quartermain, op. cit., 3. Quoted in Hatlen, op. cit., 38. 45 Ibid., 43. 44

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toward allegory: neither things nor people had any objective reality, except as personifications of larger socio-political forces.”46 Hatlen also argues that, since Zukofsky adopted Pound as his mentor, we could say that the theoretical principles of Objectivism emerged out of the dialogue between them. Many interpreters have pointed out the irony that a young leftist poet took as his mentor an older poet who was at the time moving toward a fascist ideology, but Zukofsky and other Objectivists were attracted by Pound’s poetic methods and his political and social views. In Pound’s early Cantos Zukofsky saw a poetics of collage that acknowledged the force of the mind’s desire (desire determines what objects the mind selects and how they are positioned within the collage), while at the same time keeping the focus on “the direction of historic and contemporary particulars” (the collage form places clear demarcation around each “particular”, thus allowing it to retain its integrity and autonomy).47

Furthermore, In the first ten sections of “A,” written in the late 1920s and 1930s, Zukofsky adapted Poundian collage to the services of a Marxist vision of art as a mode of labor and potentially an instrument of revolution, and in the process demonstrated that there was nothing inherently fascist about the collage method.48

Although Objectivist poetry was devoted to “the detail, not mirage, of seeing, of thinking, with the things as they exist,” their work was not, Hatlen asserts, some kind of documentary realism. They were less interested in the things we see than in the ways we see them. In this respect, Hatlen emphasized that the Objectivists went beyond their modernist models, Pound and Williams, who were still haunted by the dream of a “natural” language. Occupying a no-man’s-land between English and Yiddish, between Jewish and American identities, the Objectivists realized that there was no such thing as natural language and thereby passed beyond modernism into postmodernism. They “admired the experimental work of their predecessors and adapted to their own ends many of the strategies initiated by the modernists,” but refused to see any poetic idiom as offering a privileged notion of “truth.” Following Hatlen, we could say that they

 46

Ibid. Ibid. 48 Ibid. 47

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considered all modes of discourse as potentially available to them, and deliberately played off various poetic idioms against one another, to initiate an interrogation not only of poetic discourse but of all codes that compose our culture and eventually of the “code of codes,” language itself.49

DuPlessis and Quartermain also warn us that there was another important difference between the first and second generation of modernists. William Carlos Williams wrote that the Objectivists agreed “that the poem like every other form of art, is an object, an object that in itself formally presents its case and its meaning by the very form it assumes.”50 DuPlessis and Quartermain insist that Williams as well as Pound in the early 1920s felt uneasy with the permissive qualities of a loosened and vatic imagism. Pound ended up embracing a formalist and intellectual rappel à l’ordre, insisting on a traditionalist and masculinist notion of attention, which DuPlessis and Quartermain see as an archetypal evocation of certain organic principles despite his heteroclite diction. By contrast, the Objectivists worked out a dialectical, materialist, and situational concept of accountability to this notion of “order.” For example, Zukofsky equally emphasized the formalist and historical aspects, “insisting that the poem should be shaped by specific necessities of the particular historical moment in which it is written.”51 Marjorie Perloff has theorized the Objectivists’ historical position in the genealogy of American postmodernism. As Ming-Qian Ma explains, Perloff’s intention was to answer the following question: “In what sense was the work of these poets a departure from that of the ‘oncerevolutionary imagists’?”52 Perloff argues that the Objectivists represent a “larger aesthetic,” articulated by a shift “from the modernist preoccupation with form in the sense of imagistic or symbolist structure, dominated by a lyric ‘I’ to the questioning of representation itself” [emphasis in the original].53 Ma explains: What seems to have preoccupied these poets in their praxis is how to decenter the “I” as the organizing principle underpinning the scheme of mimesis. For the much vexed complication lies in that the “I” as such also

 49

Ibid., 49–50. DuPlessis and Quartermain, op. cit., 3. 51 Ibid., 3. 52 Quoted in Ming-Qian Ma, “Be Aware of ‘the Medusa’s Glance’: The Objectivist Lens and Carl Rakosi’s Poetics of Strabismal Seeing”, in The Objectivist Nexus, 57. 53 Quoted in ibid. 50

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Objectivist Poetry and Its Conventions puns on the “eye,” an optical agency with a corresponding linguistic structure built in.54

Mark Scroggins maintains that Louis Zukofsky’s first important work, Poem beginning “The” (1926), “was a witty response to Eliot’s The Waste Land from the perspective of a Jew, as an outsider to the ‘tradition’ Eliot so valued, and a Marxist who believed fervently in the grand social experiment under way in Soviet Russia and the possibility of a workers’ revolution in the West.”55 The doctrine of Objectivist poetry, Scroggins continues, could be partly understood as an extension of Pound’s Imagist strictures, but Zukofsky went beyond Pound by introducing the critical terms “sincerity” ௅ the poet’s stance of utmost fidelity, both to the experiences, ideas or sensations traced in the writing, and to the denotations, connotations and sound-values of the words used ௅ and “objectification,” the tangible, object-like form into which the poem as a whole is cast, the “rested totality” it assumes in the mind of the reader.56

In his long poem “A,” which he began in 1928, Zukofsky took Pound’s work as a model. But despite the importance of the Poundian impulse for the opening sequences of “A,” Scroggins asserts that the poem demonstrates that Zukofsky was far more than an ephebe of Pound’s: The middle and late sections of “A” reveal that Zukofsky is, first and foremost, a formalist, a poet for whom the essence of poetry lies not in its rhetorical, figurative or communicative aspects, but in its form, in the traditional or innovative shapes into which the poet casts his words. The whole corpus of Zukofsky’s mature writing can be read as a series of formal experiments—though some of those experiments stretch conventional definitions of poetic form.57

Writing about Charles Reznikoff, Charles Bernstein has emphasized his “radical commitment to the poetic sequence, or, series, as details open to reordering.”58 Reading Reznikoff’s poetry leads us to note the importance of the relation of the parts to the whole, and the whole to the part in

 54

Ibid. Mark Scroggings, “US Modernism II: The Other Tradition—Williams, Zukofsky and Olson,” in The Cambridge Companion to Modernist Poetry, eds. Alex Davis and Lee M. Jenkins (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2007), 186. 56 Scroggins, op. cit., 201. 57 Ibid., 187. 58 Bernstein, “Reznikoff’s Nearness”, 216. 55

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his work, “along lines that also suggest the relation of the shot to the sequence […], surface to depth […], the fragment to the total.”59 Bernstein emphasizes Reznikoff’s “rejection of the ‘depth’ of field simulated by various realist and mimetic self-centering procedures in which each detail is subordinated to an overall image or theme or meaning.”60 Reznikoff’s poems constantly intercut, or jump cut, “between and among and within material,” whereby their “surface of local particularities gains primacy.”61 This contrasts with the rhetorical depth of narrative closure that is the aim in “epic montage formats” such as Eliot’s The Waste Land and some of Pound’s Cantos, and even more in more conventional poetry. 62 This is why Bernstein calls Reznikoff’s intention “anti-epic,” where parataxis is activated as a manner of transition, which means that elements “are threaded together like links on a chain, periodically rather than hierarchically ordered and without the subordination of part to whole.”63According to Bernstein, this “cubo-seriality” is modular and multidirectional. Seriality encompasses a vast array of modernist and contemporary poetry,” known for its non-sequentiality.64 One could argue that the early modernist history of seriality started with Gertrude Stein’s Tender Buttons (1912), which is according to Bernstein “the most original rethinking of poetic form in the period.” 65 Other important examples are some of Pound’s Cantos and Zukofsky’s “A.” Bernstein cites still more examples from the modernist period, from George Oppen’s Discrete Series, Lorine Niedecker’s From This Condensery, to Mina Loy’s “Love Songs,” to more contemporary works, such as Robert Creeley’s Words, Pieces, Ron Silliman’s The New Sentence, Lyn Hejinian’s The Cell, and Tom Raworth’s A Serial Biography. In Ma’s interpretation, the Objectivist departure from modernism, as articulated in Zukofsky’s “An Objective,” is marked by “a radical shift from the late-imagist ‘act of vision’ that ‘implicitly legitimates the existence of these things’ [according to Hatlen] to the Objectivist act of attention that attempts to acknowledge and accept the object.”66 Ma insists that in this sense “the Objectivist ‘larger aesthetic’ is manifested not only in a rethinking but also in a thorough revision of a tradition far beyond the

 59

Ibid., 217. Ibid. 61 Ibid. 62 Ibid. 63 Ibid., 218. 64 Ibid., 220. 65 Ibid., 220. 66 Ma, op. cit., 59. 60

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literary.”67 According to him, it opened, “to a great extent, a new area of inquiry in the early 1930s, the significance of which was to receive concentrated critical attention decades later.” 68 What Ron Silliman has designated as Objectivism’s third or renaissance phase, from 1960 onward, corresponds to a surge of philosophical reflection on Western culture as a culture of vision.69 Emphasizing the “lens” in relation to the World, Ma insists that “Objectivist poets find themselves joined by such thinkers as Theodor Adorno, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Martin Heidegger, Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, and Luce Irigaray, in their critique of the construction and function of the ‘I/eye’.”70 Writing recently about George Oppen, Michael Davidson observes that [o]bjectivism is often understood as a movement based around the clear, carefully seen object, freed of “predatory intent,” but it is seldom observed that the object so rendered is also a commodity […] whose importance rests in how it is seen.71

Davidson also notes that a number of recent books in critical theory “have chronicled modernism’s ocularcentrism ௅ from Impressionist pointillism and Pound’s Imagism to Magritte’s optical puns, Duchamp’s satires of retinal art, narrative theories of spatial form and, of course, objectivism.”72 At the same time, he observes, social theorists have provided a critique of modernity’s occularcentrism, pointing out how metaphors of seeing and sight dominate the work of philosophers and theorists from Marx’s theory of ideology as a camera obscura, Heidegger’s “Age of the World Picture,” and Bergson’s durée to Foucault’s emphasis on the panoptical gaze, to Sartre’s “regard” and Laura Mulvey’s theory of the gaze.73

In Davidson’s view, attempts to describe this occularcentrism by reference to new optical technologies (photography, film) or science (optics, comparative anatomy, eugenics) seem inadequate

 67

Ibid. Ibid. 69 Ron Silliman, The New Sentence (New York: Roof, 1987), 136௅141. 70 Ma, op. cit., 59. 71 Michael Davidson, On the Outskirts of Form: Practicing Cultural Poetics (Middletown, Connecticut: Wesleyan UP, 2011), 94. 72 Ibid., 116. 73 Ibid., 116–117. 68

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to the larger epistemological shift produced by a world dominated by the commodity form. Where Louis Zukofsky could rely on an ideal of poetry as a “lens bringing the rays from an object to a focus” […], Oppen worried that the image is obscured by the lens itself.74

Davidson argues that “this skepticism about the clarity of what can be seen is a continuing preoccupation with the question of class that he approached from his double consciousness as proletarian and bourgeois subject.”75 Davidson notes that Oppen, as did his fellow Objectivists, also “built his poetic and philosophical foundations on two […] reactionary figures—Pound and Heidegger, one a polemicist for Mussolini, the other rector of the Third Reich’s Freiburg University.”76 But he adds that Oppen also “transformed their ideas, through social activism in the 1930s, to create something else on his return to poetry in the late 1950s.”77 “Pound observer of Oppen’s early writing that he managed a certain ‘void’,” which Davidson interprets as both a metaphysical as well as linguistic skepticism. 78 “This could equally apply to Oppen’s disjunct linguistic practice—his tendency to truncate phrases, leave semantic and syntactic elements incomplete,” a formal practice that is “directly linked to a philosophical skepticism about universals. Oppen’s odd blend of existentialism and pragmatism places ultimate faith in an ethic by which meaning is constructed from moments of conviction.”79 Emphasizing that Zukofsky belonged to radical modernism, Barret Watten has written that the poet was “[c]aught up in verbal forms resulting from a disconnection to the visual as ‘beyond’ and unreachable.”80 Watten explains that [i]f, as a displaced metropolitan, Zukofsky sees an analogous alienation in the economic, his consciousness of it must be completed in social revolution, as a form of cultural redemption at the very least. By analogy, the completion of the poem, for Zukofsky and for the reader, will transform the demands of its high-order cognitive processing of elements that refuse any stability of representation into an experience of meaning as the redemptive horizon of the poem. Zukofsky’s politics, here, begin with the

 74

Ibid., 117. Ibid. 76 Ibid., 277. 77 Ibid., 274. 78 Ibid. 79 Ibid., 274௅275. 80 Barrett Watten, The Constructivist Moment: From Material Text to Cultural Poetics (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan UP, 2003), 176. 75

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Objectivist Poetry and Its Conventions displacements of the radical fragment; as a free radical, the poem in its incompletion exemplifies a state of total unrest resulting in an eventual “accounting” of “costs.” An American version of the negative example, the poem as object predicts a horizon of yet-to-be-completed revolution.81

According to Watten, there is an “evident split in Zukofsky’s reception,” and I would say in that of other Objectivists as well, “that reproduces the great divide between modernism and Cultural Studies,” between the Objectivists’ legacy for radical formalist poets and their historical emergence as/displacement of the figure of the “New Jew.” According to DuPlessis, the political categories of Jewish particularism and apartness made them suspicious as “a nation within a nation,” with “divided loyalties,” a group that could not be trusted. But the building blocks of the “New Jew,” including assimilation, secularization, ethic character, mixing and purity, emerged forcefully in poetry.82 Watten sees this “[r]adical particularity” coexisting with universal aspirations in the “New Jew,” “this figure of diasporic assimilation, and both are marked in Zukofsky’s combination [shared by several other Objectivists, I would add] of radical formalism and diasporic Marxism.”83 In Watten’s view, this constitutes an antinomy of identity and form: This (non)relation between form and identity becomes even more abstract and generalized in Zukofsky’s reception, with the tradition of radical poetics found in part on his work—such that it is often difficult to see the displaced identity claims in a given formal strategy, as discussed previously in terms on Bernstein’s ideological poetics. In strictly literary terms, Zukofsky’s reception has indeed been productive—from his canonization by the New American poets to the widespread adoption of constructivist aesthetics among Language writers. But in no sense has there been a reconciliation of his aesthetic of the fragment with his revolutionary or cultural poetics, nor has he entered into mass culture as an exemplary modernist (as Joyce and Stein in many senses have). His work maintains an unresolved tension between social identity and radical form.84

The starting point of this essay was the fact that the study of poetry is marginalized within the field of literary studies, due to the belief that poetry cannot give access to the social in the context of the domination of

 81

Ibid. Rachel Blau DuPlessis, Gender, Races, and Religious Cultures in American Poetry, 1908–1934 (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2001), 141. 83 Berret Watten, op.cit., 176–177. 84 Ibid., 177. 82

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the cultural studies paradigm. Discussing Objectivist poets I focused on those interpretations of their work that question this dogmatic belief. Those readings interpret the work of Objectivist poets at the level of macro-politics, in terms of their relations with the Communist Party and Marxist heritage in the US, and then at the level of micro-politics, in terms of their Jewish identity within a predominantly Christian society. Here, the term “micro-politics” also refers to “politics of form” in experimental approaches to poetic form.

Works Cited Beach, Christopher. Poetic Culture: Contemporary American Poetry between Community and Institution. Evanston, IL: Northwestern UP, 1999. Bernstein, Charles. “Reznikoff’s Nearness.” In The Objectivist Nexus: Essays in Cultural Poetics. Eds. Rachel Blau DuPlessis and Peter Quartermain. Tuscaloosa, AL and London, UK: The U of Alabama P, 1999: 210௅239. —. “Preface.” In The Politics of Poetic Form: Poetry and Public Policy. Ed. Charles Bernstein. New York: Roof 1990: vii-viii. DuPlessis, Rachel Blau and Peter Quartermain. “Introduction.” In The Objectivist Nexus: Essays in Cultural Poetics. Eds. Rachel Blau DuPlessis and Peter Quartermain. Tuscaloosa, AL and London, UK: The U of Alabama P, 1999: 1-22. DuPlessis, Rachel Blau. Gender, Races, and Religious Cultures in American Poetry, 1908–1934.Cambridge: CUP, 2001. Casanova, Pascale. The World Republic of Letters. Transl. M. B. Debevoise. Cambridge, MA and London, UK: Harvard UP, 2004. Damon, Maria. The Dark End of the Street: Margins in American Vanguard Poetry. Minneapolis and London: U of Minnesota P, 1993. Davidson, Michael. On the Outskrits of Form: Practicing Cultural Poetics. Middleton, CT: Wesleyan UP, 2011. —. Ghostlier Demarcations: Modern Poetry and the Material Word. Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London: U of California P, 1997. Harrington, Joseph. “Poetry and the Public: The Social Form of Modern U.S. Poetry.” In Poetry and Cultural Studies: A Reader. Eds. Maria Damon and Ira Livingston. Urbana and Chicago: U of Illinois P, 2009: 266௅284. Hatlen, Burton. “A Poetics of Marginality and Resistance: The Objectivist Poets in Context.” In The Objectivist Nexus: Essays in Cultural Poetics. Eds. Rachel Blau DuPlessis and Peter Quartermain. Tuscaloosa, AL and London, UK: The U of Alabama P, 1999: 37௅55.

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Heller, Michael. “Objectivists in the Thirties: Utopocalyptic Moments.” In The Objectivist Nexus: Essays in Cultural Poetics. Eds. Rachel Blau DuPlessis and Peter Quartermain. Tuscaloosa, AL and London, UK: The U of Alabama P, 1999: 144௅158. Ma, Ming-Qian. “Be Aware of ‘the Medusa’s Glance’: The Objectivist Lens and Carl Rakosi’s Poetics of Strabismal Seeing.” In The Objectivist Nexus: Essays in Cultural Poetics. Eds. Rachel Blau DuPlessis and Peter Quartermain. Tuscaloosa, AL and London, UK: The U of Alabama P, 1999: 56௅83. Nicholls, Peter. George Oppen and the Fate of Modernism. Oxford: OUP, 2007. Scroggings, Mark. “US Modernism II: The Other Tradition: Williams, Zukofsky and Olson.” In The Cambridge Companion to Modernist Poetry. Eds. Alex Davis and Lee M. Jenkins. Cambridge: CUP, 2007: 181௅194. Sillian, Ron. The New Sentence. New York: Roof, 1987. Watten, Berret. The Constructivist Moment: From Material Text to Cultural Poetics. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan UP, 2003.

“IN DUBLIN’S FAIR CITY”: JOYCE, BLOOMSDAY, DUBLINERS AND THE INVENTION OF TRADITION BENJAMIN KEATINGE

This essay attempts to trace some inter-textual relationships between James Joyce’s volume of short stories Dubliners, published in 1914, and some examples of more recent stories related to the city of Dublin which have an explicitly acknowledged debt to Joyce. In doing so, it identifies a “mini-tradition” in the post-Joycean Irish short story which echoes the urban realism of Joyce’s stories. The essay also shows how Joyce’s treatment of social customs and conventions in Dubliners has found contemporary resonance in a much-changed urban environment of the 1990s and 2000s. It also points to the importance of Joyce’s representation of Ireland’s capital city in later works, notably Ulysses (1922) and Finnegans Wake (1939) both of which have had a revolutionary impact on the novel. In the case of Ulysses, we have a work of fiction which has inaugurated a social tradition in Dublin, and internationally, known as Bloomsday (16 June 1904), the day on which Ulysses is set and on which it is annually celebrated. This essay therefore examines, on a number of levels, how Joyce’s work revolves thematically around customs and conventions while also stimulating the invention of social and literary traditions in his native country. The phrase I have used in my title “Dublin’s Fair City” will be recognized by all Irish people as referring to a well-known street-ballad called “Molly Malone” which is also an unofficial anthem for the Leinster and Irish rugby teams. Molly Malone is a mythical figure, a beautiful fishmonger who allegedly died young of a fever in 17th century Dublin. Every Dublin person knows the opening lines of the song: “In Dublin’s fair city, / Where the girls are so pretty, / I first set my eyes on sweet Molly Malone, / As she wheeled her wheel-barrow, / Through streets broad and narrow, / Crying ‘Cockles and mussels, alive, alive, oh!’” What fewer Irish people realize is that Molly Malone is a modern fabrication and can claim impeccable postmodern credentials in being an invented

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traditional figure, a copy without an original. The song has been traced no further back than 1883 when it was published, not in Dublin, but in Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA. This knowledge confirms that tradition can often be a simulated and fabricated phenomenon, bordering even on touristic kitsch, as in the statue of Molly Malone erected in 1988 to celebrate the supposed first “millennium” of the city of Dublin. Her monument serves to bolster the city’s self-image and commercial interests irrespective of historical fidelity or accuracy. The same might be said of another Dublin personality who never existed, a certain Leopold Bloom whose imaginary life is celebrated every year on June 16. It is an irony not lost on Joycean scholars that an exiled Irish writer whose Modernist masterpiece Ulysses is radically antiessentialist and polyvalent, should invent a character whose fictional lifein-a-day wanderings round Dublin have become a way of celebrating both the city of Dublin and Irish identity itself, even though Bloom’s fictional origins are Jewish and Hungarian. It is worth dwelling on the momentum which has gathered behind the annual celebration of Bloomsday. On 27 June 1929, the French translation of Ulysses was launched at a lunch gathering at Hôtel Léopold at Les-Vaux-de-Cernay outside Paris, an event famously attended by a drunken Samuel Beckett. This gathering was also a kind of 25th anniversary of the supposed “original” 1904 Bloomsday. The first Dublin Bloomsday was held on 16 June 1954, on the 50th anniversary of the “original” Bloomsday, and again, it was a famous literary gathering which included some notable Irish writers: the poet Patrick Kavanagh, novelist Brian O’Nolan (also known as Flann O’Brien and author of the celebrated post-Joycean novel At Swim-Two-Birds, 1939), as well as poet and critic Anthony Cronin and A.J. Leventhal, a close friend of Samuel Beckett. This expedition was the first to attempt to retrace the path followed by Bloom and Stephen Dedalus as they criss-crossed the city of Dublin in the original novel. The fact that this pilgrimage was abandoned halfway in Bailey’s pub due to the exhaustion and alcoholic inebriation of the participants says something about the literary culture of 1950s Dublin. The 2004 celebrations of Bloomsday, by contrast, were astonishing both in scale and in fervour. They saw 10,000 people gather in central Dublin for a special State-sponsored Bloomsday breakfast, with readings, re-enactments, performances from Ulysses by actors, scholars and amateur Joyce enthusiasts. Similar events were held worldwide, including in Bloom’s “native” Hungarian town of Szombathely, and in cities associated with Joyce like Trieste in Italy, Zurich in Switzerland and, of course, Paris. The manner in which Bloomsday has become a fixture on the international cultural calendar gives us much to ponder on concerning the

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origin of customs, rituals and ceremonies. Bloomsday is clearly a new, secular Feast Day which mirrors, in crucial respects, religious ceremonies of the past. There is the ritual meal in the form of an Irish cooked breakfast consisting of kidneys and other cooked meats. We have a pilgrimage route across the city of Dublin from south, to north and back. And crucially, we have the holy book—Ulysses itself—and its lionised author James Joyce. It may not be altogether surprising that there exists a short story by a certain Seamus Sweeney titled “Bloomsday 3004” in which Bloomsday continues to be celebrated, in a futuristic way, but as a folk tradition, the origins of which have been forgotten. Desmond Fennell, whose book Bloomsway: A Day in the Life of Dublin describes his re-enactment of Ulysses during Dublin’s millennium year (1988), meditates as follows on the social significance of Bloomsday rituals: It is very much a pilgrimage [...] People journey—some this, some that stretch of the sacred path—and people do prescribed things in prescribed places [...] In Dublin today they look across the Bay from the Tower [the Martello Tower, Sandycove, Dublin, where the opening chapter of Ulysses is set], or buy lemon soap in Sweny’s, or eat pork kidneys for breakfast in certain restaurants. In Davy Byrne’s they drink the saint’s particular wine, and eat bread with his particular cheese, doing this in commemoration of him.1

All of this is very much in line with what we know about the evolution of customs and ritual in modern, secular societies which exhibit what historian Eric Hobsbawm first identified as The Invention of Tradition in his book of that title.2 Bloomsday conforms to Hobsbawm’s understanding of fabricated traditions which are “actually invented, constructed and formally instituted” in the comparatively recent past.3 As Desmond Fennell, following Hobsbawm, reminds us, these “invented traditions” can be interpreted as: Reactions against the mass uprooting called modernization, and its cult of novelty, they were novelties themselves, or inno-vations rather, made into affirmations of the past and expressions of continuity. Bloomsday is a



1 Desmond Fennell, Bloomsway: A Day in the Life of Dublin (Dublin: Poolbeg, 1990), 32-33. 2 Eric Hobsbawm & Terence Ranger, ed., The Invention of Tradition (Cambridge: CUP, 1983). 3 Hobsbawm and Ranger, Invention, 1.

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Joyce, Bloomsday, Dubliners and the Invention of Tradition recent instance, a small fight-back against the latest wave of modernisation that swept over us in the 60s.4

Equally important for scholars of Joyce is how to measure and interpret this type of popular celebration of a book which is famously “difficult” and inaccessible. On occasions like Bloomsday, the book tends to be presented to us in democratic terms, as a book for everyone and with Bloom as Everyman. Nonetheless, for actual readers of the novel, the ability to see ourselves in the exploits of Bloom, Molly and Stephen Dedalus may be less apparent. In terms of length, style, allusiveness and density, Ulysses is extremely demanding so that Joycean scholars can sometimes appear as latter-day preachers offering exegesis of a modernday Bible, trying to simplify and explain the Word of Joyce to the general public. This understandable attempt to popularize Joyce’s novel has been given a recent boost in a book by Declan Kiberd titled Ulysses and Us: The Art of Everyday Living (2009). Kiberd argues that Joyce never intended his book to be an elitist masterpiece; on the contrary, Kiberd emphasises Joyce’s democratic credentials and offers us Ulysses as a modern-day, quasi-Biblical guide to the moral and practical problems of life. In a deliberate co-option of the genre of the self-help book, Kiberd wittily explains how Ulysses might assist in everyday routines of: Learning, Thinking, Walking, Praying, Dying, Eating, Reading, Singing, Birthing, Parenting, Teaching and Loving, to name some of his chapter headings. Kiberd’s argument involves foregrounding civic virtues which he sees as being promoted by Joyce and which are also, as we have seen, celebrated and shared at Bloomsday festivities. For Kiberd, the Dublin of 1904 was a more coherent, cohesive and neighbourly city than it is now, a point which he emphasises by way of asserting the sense of ownership which Bloom and Stephen bring to the streets they walk on, a kind of civic harmony which Kiberd suggests has been lost in contemporary Dublin: The streets were then places which people felt that they owned, whereas seldom did they own their own houses, which Leopold Bloom likens to coffins. For him and for them, it was the public zone which was warm, nurturing and affirmative. It was there that the random encounters which propel Ulysses kept on happening, before the rise of the shopping mall put

 4

Fennell, Bloomsway, 37.

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a brake on such unexpected meetings and an end to the idea of a neighbourhood.5

For Kiberd, Joyce’s re-imagination of Dublin’s urban spaces is quintessentially bourgeois rather than bohemian. It contains none of the modernist anxiety exhibited by the figure of the flâneur, as formulated by Walter Benjamin, where the flâneur experiences only alienation in the modern city. On the contrary, the events of the “original” Bloomsday arguably celebrate the modern city as a place of belonging and neighbourliness, however complex a statement Ulysses may make of these virtues. Subsequent Bloomsday celebrations serve to reaffirm these important social values. These considerations bring us to the real subject of this essay which is Joyce’s Dubliners. Although there is no specific annual celebration of this book, it is worth noting that in 2012 a major effort was made by Dublin civic authorities to promote the sense of ownership and awareness among ordinary Dubliners for Joyce’s work. Dubliners was chosen for the One City One Book reading scheme so that during the month of April 2012, the reading of Dubliners was extensively promoted throughout the city of Dublin in a series of events co-ordinated by Dublin City Public Libraries. As The Irish Times noted: The One City One Book concept [...] is a wonderful way to get an entire community engaged in reading, talking about books and sharing their opinions. It’s the biggest book club you can join and [...] it’s hard to imagine a more appropriate book for One City One Book 2012 than Dubliners. It’s interested in all of us, rich and poor, old and young, men and women. It’s filled with humour and love, pain and loss [...] it rings with a love of these streets, of the voices of the people who inhabit them, their wit, their style [...] this one city with this one book, continues to be defined by the stories we write about it.6

Just as Bloomsday is a new tradition which serves to promote civic consciousness in the 21st century city, so Dubliners can also serve this purpose with the additional bonus that ordinary readers are more likely to complete their reading of Dubliners than of the more demanding masterpiece, Ulysses. As this article suggests, the potential for civic identification on the part of contemporary readers with the same urban



5 Declan Kiberd, Ulysses and Us: The Art of Everyday Living (London: Faber and Faber, 2009), 24-25. 6 John Boyle, “Dubliners: Our City, Our Book”, The Irish Times, 31 March 2012, accessed 21 October 2012, http://www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/weekend/2012/0331/1224314150378.html

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spaces which Joyce’s original characters are situated in adds to the value of the reading scheme and to its promotion of civic identity and responsibility. As this article claims, any city, and especially Dublin, is “defined by the stories we write about it” and it is noteworthy that the One City One Book reading scheme continues in its eighth year in 2013 (established in 2006) with another book set in Dublin: James Plunkett’s Strumpet City (1969) an historical novel set in the Dublin of 1913. In the light of these recent civic initiatives relating to Dubliners, it is worth noting that there are ways in which Joyce saw his first published work as inaugurating a tradition like the more celebrated Ulysses. Writing to his brother Stanislaus in September 1905, Joyce argues: When you remember that Dublin has been a capital for thousands of years, that it is the “second” city of the British Empire, that it is nearly three times as big as Venice it seems strange that no artist has given it to the world.7

In defending the book to his publishers, Joyce wrote: “My intention was to write a chapter in the moral history of my country and I chose Dublin for the scene because that city seemed to me the centre of paralysis” 8 and he further argued that by not publishing or delaying publication, Grant Richards would “retard the course of civilization in Ireland by preventing the Irish people from having one good look at themselves in my nicely polished looking-glass.” 9 For an unpublished writer, Joyce had an almost messianic faith in the impact of his work on his home country. That faith has only been repaid slowly and while Dubliners will always have more actual readers than Ulysses, only recently has it had an impact on the civic consciousness of real Dubliners that Joyce claims it might have had if it had been published expeditiously. However, as a critique of the atrophied condition of Irish society at the turn of the last century, Dubliners is undoubtedly effective. The famous trope of paralysis is introduced in the first story—“The Sisters”—in which a priest dies, possibly of syphilitic General Paralysis of the Insane, and where he appears, through the eyes of the young boy-narrator, as a mysteriously corrupt and disgraced representative of the Catholic church.



7 Letter from James Joyce to Stanislaus Joyce, about 24 September 1905. In James Joyce’s Dubliners and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man: A Casebook, ed. Morris Beja (London: Macmillan, 1973), 37. 8 Letter from James Joyce to Grant Richards, 5 May 1906. In Beja, ed., Dubliners: A Casebook, 38. 9 Letter from James Joyce to Grant Richards, 23 June 1906. In Beja, ed., Dubliners: A Casebook, 40.

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This presentation of physical paralysis in the first story sets the scene for an exploration of various types of inertia, claustrophobia, parochialism and inhibition in Ireland’s capital city. These are stories in which custom and ceremony are presented in the most negative sense, as routine and habit and as moral timidity, meanness and lack of ambition. Joyce’s use of a forensic realism and his invention of a style of what he termed “scrupulous meanness”10 together with his use of nuance and suggestion rather than statement and narrative assertion, has offered something new to the evolution of the European short story. Joyce claimed that Dublin was “the centre of paralysis,” but his diagnosis clearly applies in other settings and in other cities. There is a sense in which Joyce wished his stories to herald a break with tradition and to be read as a warning or wake-up call for a civilization sustained by inherited beliefs and customs which no longer fit with a modern sense of the integrity of the individual. As such, his sketches and stories transpose the ancient theme of conflict between the individual and the society into a modern urban setting. What is notable in these stories is the implied failure of the characters to break with custom and to reject inherited values. The critic Anne E. Fernald in an essay on “Modernism and Tradition” identifies the representation of this failure as a distinctively Modernist commentary on the role of custom and convention in ordinary lives. Fernald writes: But the modernist contribution here, with its focus on the heavy toll social custom takes on the individual psyche reveals another facet of the modernist ambivalence to tradition. Furthermore, distinctions among modernism, realism, and naturalism remain. Unlike naturalist novels, with their sense of custom as a veneer and their intense interest in the contours of a character’s descent or rise, modernist texts take custom seriously as an evil influence, and, at the same time, retain some belief in the individual’s potential to shape her or his destiny.11

The “evil influence” of custom is a major thematic strand of these stories which often dramatize the characters’ failure to escape or overcome whatever social constraints surround them. And as Fernald also comments, stylistically speaking, these stories “do not so much end as stop” 12 and instead of closure or conclusion, Joyce dramatises his characters’ indecision, hesitation and timidity. The story “The Sisters” ends in mid-sentence with



10 Letter from James Joyce to Grant Richards, 5 May 1906. In Beja, ed., Dubliners: A Casebook, 38. 11 Anne E. Fernald, “Modernism and Tradition,” in Modernism, ed. Astradur Eysteinsson and Vivian Liska (Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2007), 163-64. 12 Fernald, “Modernism and Tradition”, 163.

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the priest’s sister explaining that her brother suffered a mental decline before his death which alerted his family that “there was something gone wrong with him…,” it is implied something shameful and unspeakable.13 The story “Eveline” ends with the title character “passive, like a helpless animal” as she refuses to join her boyfriend Frank in the journey to Buenos Aires.14 Likewise, the poetic ambitions of the character Little Chandler in the story “A Little Cloud” are undermined by his domestic circumstances in which he sees himself “a prisoner for life.”15 While in “The Boarding House,” Mrs Mooney traps one of her lodgers Mr Doran into a loveless marriage with her daughter Polly, although the story closes just before Mr Doran, under duress from Mrs Mooney, makes his fateful proposal. In most of these stories, then, custom and social convention serve as nets which oblige these people to live as if trapped within the restricted horizons of their lives. However, the collection closes with the celebrated story “The Dead” written in an altogether different mood and added to the collection in 1907, after the other stories had been completed. In the character of Gabriel Conroy, we witness a middle-aged man who comes up against the limitations of his own marriage and his own sense of social convention. Through the revelation of his wife Gretta’s former lover Michael Furey, a man Gabriel has never heard of or met, Gabriel comes to a sense of what is missing in his own life. The passion and spontaneity of Gretta’s ghostly lover seems to spur him towards some kind of recognition and renewal and a break with the customs and conventions which have dominated the story. In the mysterious final lines, we learn that, for Gabriel, “[t]he time had come for him to set out on his journey westward”16 and while it is not specified what the journey is, it suggests a metaphorical journey beyond the limitations of his current and past experience. It suggests also a journey towards some kind of spiritual and geographical heartland; the west of Ireland is often associated with an authentic Irishness, apart from being the place where the fictional Gretta Conroy and Michael Furey come from as well as being the real birthplace of Joyce’s wife Nora Barnacle (born in Galway in 1884) on whose experience Gretta and Michael Furey’s love affair is based on. This determination to break with convention and current experience is mirrored in Stephen Dedalus’ famous declaration at the end of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man: “Amen. So be it. Welcome, O life! I go to encounter for the millionth time the reality of experience and to forge in the smithy of

 13

James Joyce, Dubliners, ed. Terence Brown (London: Penguin, 1992), 10. Ibid., 34. 15 Ibid., 80. 16 Ibid., 225. 14

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my soul the uncreated conscience of my race.”17 Again, the messianic wish to rebel and to recreate against the currents of accepted traditions is strongly felt in Stephen’s consciousness. Thus both Dubliners (1914) and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916) close with a defiant epiphanies against the very social conventions which are so evident in both texts. The influence of Dubliners on the short story tradition in the world at large can hardly be over-emphasised. In Ireland, Joyce’s stories are contiguous with a strong native tradition exploring social constraints on individual lives in both rural and urban settings. More particularly, Dubliners may be said to have inspired a “mini-tradition” of Irish fiction written in response to or in alliance with the spirit of Joyce, and set against the same urban backdrop. In this category of influence, we find volumes produced in self-conscious homage to Joyce as, for example, a collection of short stories titled A New Book of Dubliners which appeared in 1988.18 In his Introduction, editor Ben Forkner draws attention to how Joyce utilised Dublin as a stage or a canvas on which all manner of human experience could be presented as part of Joyce’s self-conscious “gift” of Dublin to the world. The city itself, Forkner suggests, was for Joyce a “theatrical spectacle [...] an immense stage [...] filled [...] with all sorts of off-stage actors [...] always ready to put on a show, and speak out his public parts in the open streets.”19 Those who have lived in Dublin, even for a short time, recognise the intensely local set of warring identities and individuals who occupy the streets, bars, restaurants and workplaces of Ireland’s capital, and this parochialism was all the more pronounced in Joyce’s Dublin of 1904-06. In a recent anthology of writing about Dublin titled Dublines (1996), poet Brendan Kennelly characterises the city as follows: City of talk, gossip, rumour, scandal, delight in the destruction of reputation. City of incestuous knowledge and fluent, articulate poison. Crafty, battered, charming, post-colonial prostitute trying to sell her body and soul to the highest or slyest bidder. City of full-time and/or part-time assassins whose weapons are the tongue and the typewriter. Dublin is a cartoon being endlessly re-drawn by a population of cartoonists. All in all, a demonically interesting place.20

 17

James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, ed. Seamus Deane (London: Penguin, 1992), 275-6. 18 Ben Forkner, ed., A New Book of Dubliners: Short Stories of Modern Dublin (London: Methuen, 1988). 19 Forkner, “Introduction,” A New Book of Dubliners, xxiv. 20 Katie Donovan and Brendan Kennelly, eds., Dublines (Newcastle: Bloodaxe, 1996), 11.

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In Kennelly’s eyes, even modern Dublin, is a city of walkers and talkers. As in Joyce’s time, its central portion can be criss-crossed easily on foot, and also true to the presentation of Joyce’s Dubliners, it sometimes appears that talk, gossip and storytelling bravado are the main occupations of Dublin’s inhabitants. In this sense, central Dublin presents a stage and a play in which everyone has a speaking part. It is noticeable, for example, how many stories in Joyce’s original vision of the city contain nothing but conversation. For example, the story “Ivy Day in the Committee Room” (also included in Forkner’s New Book of Dubliners) contains little but gossip, rumour and idle chatter on the part of the political hacks—Mr O’Connor, Mr Tierney, Mr Henchy, Mr Hynes, Mr Crofton and Mr Lyons—who populate the story. Equally, in the penultimate story “Grace,” a wonderfully comic conversation is conducted around Mr Kernan’s bedside, full of religious non sequiturs, as Mr Kernan’s companions decide to “wash the pot” and seek absolution in a Catholic retreat. 21 The inconsequential chatter of the Misses Morkan’s guests in “The Dead” or Corley and Lenehan’s banter in “Two Gallants” are further examples of the conversational habits of Dubliners. No less typical is the alcoholic haze which stimulates some of these conversations whether it be the long-delayed arrival of a crate of Guinness in “Ivy Day in the Committee Room,” or Mr Kernan’s “helpless” condition at the beginning of “Grace” as he is found passed-out in a lavatory of a citycentre pub, 22 or the inebriation of Feddy Malins in “The Dead” or the evident, and more sinister, alcohol addiction of Farrington in “Counterparts.” Booze-fuelled banter is what many of these stories present to us and the scandal-mongering gossip of Dublin’s inhabitants is one custom or convention which Joyce’s “nicely polished looking-glass” shows to great effect. Some of these characteristics have clearly influenced Forkner in his choice of stories for A New Book of Dubliners. Flann O’Brien’s darkly comic “Drink and Time in Dublin” (1946) presents the type of chronic alcoholism which made O’Brien himself a legendary figure in Dublin’s 1940s and 1950s drinking scene. James Joyce’s contemporary James Stephens (1882-1950) is the author of another story chosen by Forkner titled “Schoolfellows” (1928) which seems to be obliquely inspired by Joyce’s “An Encounter” as it describes the obsessive “stalking” of the narrator by an old school friend whose sole purpose, however, seems to be

 21

Joyce, Dubliners, 162. Ibid., 149.

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to gather funds for drinking. The story concludes with an already tepid relationship turning hostile and acrimonious. In Forkner’s selection, we gain a greater sense of Dublin as it was for much of the twentieth century, a relatively small capital city with a large rural hinterland which only latterly, in the 1990s and 2000s, has come within the orbit of the capital’s now extended commuter belt. We gain a greater sense than in Joyce’s original stories of the inter-relationship between Dublin (town) and the rest of Ireland (country) and of the place of first-generation Dubliners whose backgrounds are rural. Thus, Bryan MacMahon’s story “Ballintierna in the Morning” (1948) shows the contrast between the city and nearby rural Co Kildare. Likewise, John McGahern’s story “Bank Holiday” (1985) shows how the protagonist Patrick McDonagh’s rural background gives him an outsider’s perspective on his adopted city. What is arguably the most complex and searching story of Forkner’s collection “A Memory” (1972) by Mary Lavin also shows the dual identities of Dublin natives who live out of town, or Dublin residents who come from the country, as it portrays the visits of a cerebral University professor James to his town-dwelling partner Myra. The story ends with the same intensity as Joyce’s “The Dead” in presenting the emotional aridity of James the Professor whose emotional life has never allowed him to fully “reach” the women he has loved most. The urban unity and chronological progression of Joyce’s stories, from childhood to youth to maturity and old age, cannot be reproduced in an anthology of the kind produced by Forkner. Not only do these stories differ significantly in terms of their locales, they also offer divergent characterization in terms of class, occupation and outlook. The cohesion of Joyce’s original stories is lost. Nonetheless, an anthology which includes some of the most important Irish practitioners of the post-Joycean short story—including Samuel Beckett, Mary Lavin, Sean O’Faolain, James Plunkett, Benedict Kiely—cannot fail to be of interest. More persuasive as a reinterpretation of Joyce’s vision is a collection which appeared in 2005 titled New Dubliners edited by Oona Frawley.23 In this case, contributors were explicitly asked to respond to Dubliners in whatever way they wished and the collection was designed to coincide with the centenary of the composition of the original stories by Joyce. Highlights of the collection include a story by Joseph O’Connor called “Two Little Clouds” closely modelled on the encounter between Little Chandler and Ignatius Gallaher in Joyce’s “A Little Cloud.” In the original

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Oona Frawley, ed., New Dubliners: Celebrating 100 Years of Joyce’s Dubliners (New York: Pegasus, 2005).

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story, the timid and inadequate Chandler is awed and overwhelmed by his friend Gallaher who has returned to Dublin to bask in his supposed success as a London journalist. The hollowness of Gallaher and his arrogance are conveyed by Joyce, who presents Little Chandler as an enfeebled listener to Gallaher’s boasts. In the updated version by Joseph O’Connor, set in Celtic Tiger Ireland, the boasting and the arrogance come from a newly returned Irish emigrant named Eddie Virago who has resettled in his native city to sell real estate. He is a get-rich-quick lover of Dublin’s more glittering bars and restaurants, a contemporary Ignatius Gallaher who drinks far more than he should, and who overwhelms his more conventional school friend Victor with tales of his success. If O’Connor sees modern Dublin as a fast-paced, acquisitive city, other writers present other changes. Roddy Doyle portrays life in Dublin’s gritty northside suburbs; Colum McCann addresses the new phenomenon of immigration to Ireland and resulting social tensions; Maeve Binchy portrays the dilemmas of teenage pregnancy; Bernard MacLaverty examines the fate of old people in the new Ireland. In doing so, these writers present a genuine cross-section of modern Irish experience and their stories engage with an updated spectrum of experiences a century after Joyce composed the original stories of Dubliners. It is perhaps fitting that the wittiest rewriting of Joyce comes from another master of realism in the short story—William Trevor. His story “Two More Gallants” imagines a University literature scholar, Professor Flacks, being tricked by two of his students into believing that they have discovered the original servant girl on whom Joyce based his story “Two Gallants.”24 Needless to say, the two modern day “gallants”—Heffernan and FitzPatrick—are recreations of Joyce’s originals—Lenehan and Corley— and share some of their idleness and impecunity. The “slavey” of Joyce’s story is now an old Dublin woman but she supposedly remembers the events of Joyce’s story in which her boyfriend, Corley, extracts money from her which she has stolen from her employers, to the amazement and admiration of his friend Lenehan. By presenting this unlikely unearthing of an original model used by Joyce to a meeting of Joyce scholars in Dublin, Professor Flacks ends up as the laughing stock of Dublin’s academic establishment when the whole thing is revealed as a hoax by Heffernan. In presenting the mean trickery of Heffernan and the collusion of the old servant woman he



24 William Trevor, “Two More Gallants,” in Dublines, ed. Katie Donovan and Brendan Kennelly (Newcastle: Bloodaxe, 1996), 80-88. Originally published in William Trevor, The News from Ireland (London: Penguin, 1987).

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has supposedly discovered, Trevor presents an engaging revised version of Joyce’s original “cobweb of human frailty,” as Trevor terms it.25 These various rewritings of Joyce’s original stories give credence to Joyce’s confidence in his collection’s eventual influence in his own country. They are perhaps testament to a strong living tradition of the short story in Ireland which has allowed the individuality and particularity of Joyce’s stories to be reimagined in unpredictable and unconventional ways. Even though it has taken two to three generations for the true impact and originality of Joyce’s example to be fully appreciated in his home city, he has arguably enabled contemporary authors to continue to interrogate Irish codes and conventions in a much changed city. In doing so, Joyce’s example has created traditions of its own.

Works Cited Beja, Morris. Ed. James Joyce’s Dubliners and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man: A Casebook. London: Macmillan, 1973. Boyle, John. “Dubliners: Our City, Our Book.” The Irish Times, 31 March 2012. Accessed 21October 2012. http://www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/weekend/2012/0331/122431415 0378.html Donovan, Katie and Brendan Kennelly. Eds. Dublines. Newcastle: Bloodaxe, 1996. Fennell, Desmond. Bloomsway: A Day in the Life of Dublin. Dublin: Poolbeg, 1990. Fernald, Anne E. “Modernism and Tradition.” In Modernism. Ed. Astradur Eysteinsson and Vivian Liska. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2007: 157-171. Forkner, Ben. Ed. A New Book of Dubliners: Short Stories of Modern Dublin. London: Methuen, 1988. Frawley, Oona. Ed. New Dubliners: Celebrating 100 Years of Joyce’s Dubliners. New York: Pegasus, 2005. Hobsbawm, Ericand Terence Ranger. Eds. The Invention of Tradition. Cambridge: CUP, 1983. Joyce, James. Dubliners. Ed. Terence Brown. London: Penguin, 1992. —. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Ed. Seamus Deane. London: Penguin, 1992. Kiberd, Declan. Ulysses and Us: The Art of Everyday Living. London: Faber and Faber, 2009.

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Trevor, “Two More Gallants”, 88.

THE LIBERATION OF THE SELF THROUGH A SELF-IMPOSED EXILE NADEŽDA STOJKOVIû AND SLAĈANA ŽIVKOVIû

Introduction: the Framework of Contemporary Literary Theory of a Modernist Quest Novel In his theory of archetypes, Northrop Frye has explained that the story of the loss and regaining of identity is the framework of all literature.1 In modern literature, but not unknown in earlier periods, the emphasis shifts from describing the end of the quest towards more accurately presenting the world which urges the hero to set out on a journey, thus producing a severe and profound critique of modern civilization. It all serves to describe the hero’s feeling of separation, disillusionment, opposition to the culture they belong to. Because of that, many of the modern quest myths are often essentially concerned with internal, psychological quests. The beginning of the quest is marked with the hero’s need to dissociate themselves from the “inadequate culture.”2 Inadequate, because it stifles the necessary conditions for the existence of an individual, authentic self, its survival and development. It is never denied that self is formed by culture, and is almost completely implicated in it. Yet, the struggle to defend the self against an entire submission to a culture, becomes a way of transcending it, of going “beyond,” of denying its absoluteness. Modern quest myths explore that residue of human quality beyond the reach of cultural control, [… which] serves to bring culture itself under criticism and keep it from being absolute. [...] The intense conviction of the existence of the self apart from culture is, as culture well knows, its noblest and most generous



1 Northrop Frye, Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays (New York: Princeton UP, 1957). 2 Lioinel Trilling, Beyond Culture (London: Penguin, 1967).

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The Liberation of the Self through a Self-Imposed Exile achievement. At the present moment it may be thought of as a liberating idea without which our developing ideal of community is bound to defeat itself.3

James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist (1917) is proclaimed one of the greatest modernist novels, considered the epitome of the Künstlerroman. It deals with the quest of the main character Stephen Dedalus to achieve and come to an understanding of his own identity as an artist. In this quest he first deliberately detaches himself from his cultural surroundings. He goes on a self-imposed exile to find a mode of life that would allow him to express fully his deepest, innermost self. The fact that he is an artist stresses the fact that his artistic capabilities which by their nature rest on play, intuitive understanding, creativity of the new, critical, detached stance towards the society, allow him an insight that in order to achieve himself he would need to go beyond his culture, in both an actual and metaphorical sense.

The Story of the Formation of Identity Joyce’s semi-autobiographical novel A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, centers upon the life of a young Stephen Dedalus. This is a retrospective journey, a close inspection of the main character’s intellectual evolution which happens as a result of his reactions to the social circumstances that tend to shape the identity of an individual belonging to that society. It depicts his early life and boyhood, the frustrations he then experienced, crisis of faith, his first sexual experience, the remorse he consequently felt, etc. Stephen Dedalus is a young boy who grapples with his nationality, religion, family, morality. The novel follows the gradual development of the realization of his true identity as an artist. This is a truly modernist novel for it engages into today’s yet unsolved, but ages old question, namely, whether human identity is fixed or in a flux. 4 The author does not offer a straightforward answer, just as that answer has not been reached in social theory yet. What he does is insist on showing how one’s perceptions, opinions, and ideas change. In this way Joyce has written a “novel of liberation” in “a discourse on freedom.”5 The novel focuses upon the shift in the sensibility and perception of Stephen Dedalus which enables him to expand psychologically and transcend not

 3

Ibid., 110. Bulson, Eric. The Cambridge Introduction to James Joyce (Cambridge Introductions to Literature) (New York: Cambridge UP, 2006), 48. 5 Pierce 2008, 159. 4

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only beyond the actual experience of the physical world but also beyond the fixity of the traditional perception of identity. In this way, Stephen Dedalus represents a truly modernist character as he goes in search for his own identity and meaning of his experience, rather than accepting the identity patterns prescribed by traditions of the society and culture. The name Stephen Dedalus has a profound symbolic significance. The surname Dedalus bears some characteristics with the great mythical artificer. The uncanny resemblance to the mythological figure of Dedalus is the most fundamental aspect of his name which reflects in his character. Mythical Dedalus possessed in himself and realized the knowledge of how to create a device that could transport man beyond the prescribed limits of his existence. Stephen, too, is able to transcend the boundaries established on his personality by the culture, into his willed exile. That happens only when he has cast-off his social self, and has gained accurate knowledge of who he really is. In the moment of inspiration, enlightenment, Stephen realizes that his true identity has to do with his name, with the qualities of the mythical hero he was named after. He then understands that he too, is at his soul a creator, an artist. His feeling of deliverance from his fake, socially preset self is described as intense and thoroughly natural, and is sharply contrasted with the artificiality and oppressiveness of the social life as he knew it. When he finally sees himself as an artist, he is aware that what he wants to create is life, and that life can be created only out of the freedom of the soul. His soul ached with a desire to cry aloud, the cry of a hawk or eagle on high, to cry piercingly of his deliverance to the winds. This was the call of life to his soul not the dull gross voice of the world of duties and despair, not the inhuman voice that had called him to the pale service of the altar. An instant of wild flight had delivered him and the cry of triumph which his lips withheld cleft his brain. [...] His soul had arisen from the grave of boyhood, spurning her graveclothes. Yes! Yes! Yes! He would create proudly out of the freedom and the power of his soul, as the great artificer whose name he bore, a living thing, new and soaring and beautiful, impalpable, imperishable.6

His name Stephen associates with the first Christian martyr in advancing the new cause, breaking away from the given tradition and confronting persecution by his fellow countrymen for doing so. The social environment that he discards, he then sees as spiritually deadening. This

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James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (London: Wordsworth, 1995), 130.

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insight enables him to name the great concepts, the leading ideals of his country—patriotism, loyalty, language, faith, as in truth “nets flung at the soul to hold it back from flight.” He is free to say that due to them, Ireland has become “the old sow that eats her farrow.” He does not deny his having been formed in and by that culture. “This race and this country and this life produced me, he said. I shall express myself as I am.” Stephen here emphasizes that his individuality and his determination to express it, is what distinguishes him from his culture, and what enables him to “fly by those nets.” Stephen is an artist. He knows the tradition of his culture full well, which allows him to express his individual talent. Stephen Dedalus, just like Joyce himself, is a “modernist.” Modern art, being closely linked to the knowledge of history, does not draw its novelty from the confirmation of modernity, the social reality it springs from, but rather from the articulation of its limits. Modern art “can be seen as originating in protest and reaching against the unlimited totalizing project of modern rationalism.”7 In his famous motto, he challenges such concepts of his culture as “home, fatherland, church,” which are believed to constitute it as a humane culture. For him they are artificial constructs which rather than being expressions of “natural order” are multiple and complex expressions of ideology. They penetrate every aspect of human lives, so that everything becomes politics, and the governing ideology totalitarian, where the border between the state and the individuality is completely camouflaged. Totalitarian culture does not permit the detachment of its members from it, but demands their complete identification with its structure. Stephen spends years in constant struggle with his father, church, nation, to make way for the free expression of his true identity. His methods of fight are subversive to the culture that rests on ration and order as expressed by language and other systems of philosophical, religious, political thought. Silence becomes a mode of self-expression that defies such order. Exile is a place not contained within, but out of the cultural limits. I will tell you what I will do and what I will not do. I will not serve that in which I no longer believe, whether it calls itself my home, my fatherland, or my church: and I will try to express myself in some mode of life or art

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R. Appignanesi, C. Garratt, Postmodernism for Beginners (London: Icon, London, 1996), 86.

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as freely as I can and as wholly as I can, using form my defense the only arms I allow myself to use—silence, exile and cunning.8

Stephen reaches his spiritual independence, maturity, when he sees that those ideals around which his culture is formed are “but a central presence which was never itself, which has always already been transported outside itself in its surrogate.” Derrida explains that there is no natural justification for a society which being based on reason, coherence, law, should repress other human potentials. “There was no center, the center had no natural locus, it was not a fixed locus, but a function.”9

The Interpretation of Identity Realization The novel presents the readers with various complex experiences of the main character that at times may seem contradictory to each other. The author certainly does this intentionally, for the conflicting experiences are the nucleus of the inner personal development. The constant shifting on the part of the main character from engaging in one type of experience to another, significantly different one, as well as a strong tendency towards subjective experience and more importantly, self creativity, surely would undermine the basis of autonomous, self contained traditional identity. Like two other great modernist writers, Virginia Woolf and Joseph Conrad, Joyce does this in his narrative to intentionally break away from the traditional notion of a self, favoring the very contemporary notion of a fragmented and unstable view of the self. His main character has a fluid perception of his own self within the complexities of the experiences he undergoes. It is of crucial relevance for this kind of approach and understanding the concept of identity that the main character is an artist. With this move, Joyce emphasized imaginary vision, creativity and sensibility. It is these qualities that enable an artist, but also any other person inclined to perceive the world through those abilities, to perceive the meaning of life beyond actual experiences that are shaped by the society. This implies a strong and profound social critique. By placing the main character on a quest for the fundamental knowledge of who he really is, Joyce launches severe social critique. The novel presents the society as “inadequate” for the free, unfettered development of one’s innermost potentials. Such a society propagates its own “politics of truth,” its own rationale which

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Joyce, op. cit., 151. Derrida, Jacques. Of Grammatology (Baltimore and London: John Hopkins UP, 1998), 258.

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ensures its own continuation. “Truth does not hold an independent relationship to systems of power. It results from or is coincident with the very power which structures knowledge itself.” The “truth” consequently does not include all members of the society, but strictly those who occupy the central position. “It is clear that those excluded from the terms of truth are the very ones who perceive the inadequacies of the paradigm and experience the sense of urgency required to address it.”10 The culture is inadequate as it reduces the complexity of human potentials, marginalizing and excluding those not contained within its official “truth.”Stephen needs to express the wholeness of his being. He wants “to discover the mode of life or of art whereby your spirit could express itself in unfettered freedom.”11 He wants to live his life fully. To live, to err, to fall, to triumph, to recreate life out of life! A wild angel had appeared to him, the angel of mortal youth and beauty, an envoy from the fair courts of life, to throw open before him in an instant of ecstasy the gates of all the ways of error and glory. On and on and on and on!12

Stephen Dedalus does not fear the sanctions of the culture—the isolation. “I don’t fear to be alone or to be spurned for another or to leave whatever I have to leave.”13 He is aware that the position of an outsider would come as a confirmation of his having crossed the limits imposed by the dominant culture onto his existence towards realizing his authentic individuality. In the aforementioned Derrida’s work, he argues for a theory of Play that calls into question the “structuration of structure,” the transcendental signified that stands behind and authorizes the very possibility of stable and centered structures of a society. The play of difference is “the movement of supplementarity.” 14 For the great philosopher, supplementation is a substitution, or something that insinuates itself. Stephen does precisely this, he represents himself through the function of supplementarity and creates the opportunity to express his own self and his own meaning. By rebelling against the repressive morality and narrow mindedness of his society, nationality, religion, language, Stephen calls our attention to the failure of all absolute powers to achieve or describe the self. Instead, he constitutes his own meaning through the play of differences. In this way, Stephen comes to the epistemology that metanarratives have no place in his view of

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Feminist Readings/Feminists Reading (New York: UP of Virginia 1989), 112. Joyce, op. cit., 190. 12 Ibid., 132. 13 Ibid., 191. 14 Derrida, op. cit., 289. 11

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the world where all meanings are provisory. This is in accordance with Lyotard’s critique of grand narrative, an untold story that unifies and totalizes the world and justifies culture’s power structures.15 He rejects the “grand narrative” of progress and perfectability in favor of uncertainties and provisional conditions. Also, this sort of stance is in line with John Stephen’s understanding of metanarrative as “a global or totalizing cultural narrative schema which orders and explains knowledge and experience.”16 Finally, Stephen Dedalus illustrates these philosophical stances when he becomes elusive of the given social, moral, religious, political order, as all of them have failed to provide him with an interpretation of his given surroundings that would correspond with his own experience. Through this character, Joyce explores an oppositional way of perceiving the culturally determined view of the world and offers a modernist representation of personality as complex, diffuse, unfixed and fluid. By going beyond society, exploring his artistic nature, Stephen Dedalus goes beyond the center, beyond the fixity of the structure of the traditional perception of identity. Van Ghent argues that this novel marks the time of shocking disclosure of the failure of the social environment as a trustworthy carrier of values.17 Stephen Dedalus is endowed with a strong need to transcend this culturally determined view of life. He gains the expansion of his views by directing his passion and energy towards another quality of life, a quality related to visionary imagination and the inner, subjective world. Thus, he endeavours to gain intellectual freedom of what he calls “aesthetic intellection.” Namely, he privately seeks a new view of life that will soothe his complex and anxious feelings. In this search we witness Stephen constantly vacillating between “the hollow sounding voices” which desire him to be like a person that society demands and his own search of “the intangible phantoms, another voice that will lessen his oscillation in life.” He is unable to establish a stable and coherent view of himself throughout the novel. He is fragmented, fluctuating constantly between the two desires. In this, he is not only unknown to himself, but to others as well. Yet, the fragmentation and fluctuation are the basic condition of a self aware, conscientious, contemporary living. Modern identity, as illustrated with Stephen’s, is always in the process of reconstruction, reworking of those fragments, or

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Jean-Francois Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1994), 46. 16 John Stephen, Retelling Stories, Framing Culture (New York: Routledge, 1998), 76. 17 Van Ghent, The English Novel: Form and Function (London: Harper Torchbooks, 1953), 263.

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in Stephen’s words, that means “to live, to err, to fall, to triumph, to recreate life out of life.” This is an attack on the notion of the essentialized collective identity and an attempt to flee from the cultural and spiritual labyrinth. His aesthetic, creative impulse enables him not only to escape beyond the social structures, but it also represents a progressive endeavor to build an identity out of the plethora of influences that he experiences. This also provides him with “a mode of life or of art whereby […] his spirit could express itself in unfettered freedom.”18

Works Cited Appignanesi, R., Garratt, C. Postmodernism for Beginners. London: Icon, 1996. Bulson, Eric. The Cambridge Introduction to James Joyce (Cambridge Introductions to Literature).New York: Cambridge UP, 2006. Derrida, Jacques. Of Grammatology. Baltimore and London: John Hopkins UP, 1998. Feminist Readings/Feminists Reading.New York: UP of Virginia, 1989. Frye, Northrop. Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays. New York: Princeton UP, 1957. Ghent, Van. The English Novel: Form and Function. London: Harper Torchbooks, 1953. Joyce, James. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, London: Wordsworth, 1995. Lyotard, Jean-Francois. The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1994. Stephen, John. Retelling Stories, Framing Culture. New York: Routledge, 1998. Trilling, Lionel. Beyond Culture, London: Penguin, 1967.

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Joyce, op. cit., 361.

[email protected] ARMELA PANAJOTI

Conrad’s novels often feature a parentless young character who in the course of his experience and while trying to find his way between the expectations of his imagination and the reality befriends an older character of paternal disposition. Critics have interpreted this relationship in different ways, but most of them have embedded it in the context of Conrad’s life, that is, more particularly, have related it with the figures of Apollo, Conrad’s father, who died when Conrad was only 10, and Tadeus, Conrad’s uncle, who took care of him and practically became a father substitute especially after both Conrad’s parents died. In this way, the fatherly character or characters in Conrad’s fiction serve as patterns of identification for the younger character. Despite this identification, there are ambivalent implications of oedipal nature involved in his relationship. The variety of fatherly figures in Conrad’s fiction “might be taken to signify an obsessive concern with paternity, as an object either of fear and hatred or of longing: that is, in the two ways that characterize the Oedipus complex.”1 The paradox in adopting this perspective is that Conrad is said not to have been familiar with or worse, not to have wished to be familiar with Freud’s work. Yet, his fiction goes in line with one of Freud’s greatest tenets that the unconscious does not cease to defy our overt identity as subjects. The paper focuses on Conrad’s Lord Jim, an insightful novel published in 1900, the same year as Freud’s The Interpretation of Dreams. In this respect, Gustav Morf writes: Lord Jim is more than a psychological novel, it is a psychoanalytical novel written before psychoanalysis was founded. It appeared in 1900, the very year when Freud published his first book Interpretation of Dreams, which indirectly helps us to explain the novel. Both books, one in a subjective, the other in an objective form, threw light upon “that side of us which, like the

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Catharine Rising, Darkness at Heart: Fathers and Sons in Conrad (New York: Greenwood, 1990), 1.

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[email protected] other hemisphere of the moon, exists stealthily in perpetual darkness, with only a fearful ashy light falling at times on the edge.”2

It was only in the nature of things that Conrad should dislike Freud intensely, as he disliked Dostoievski. Freud was in possession of the same truths as himself, but he appeared to him as a too crude, a too explicit double of himself.3 Lord Jim is a novel of penetrating effect. It makes the reader, the same way it makes Marlow, Brierly or Stein get involved with Jim’s story in an attempt to identify something of the self that can be corrected. This involvement often results in an identification with him, which follows filial and paternal patterns. In this search of self, some of the characters are identified in fatherly roles, others in filial roles. The paper seeks to explore these patterns of identification using Freud’s oedipal model. In my view, the model offers the appropriate conventions for their explanation. I use the word “convention” both in the literal sense, that is, to mean a standard, a norm of conduct or presentation and in the literary sense to mean “established ‘codes’ of basic principles and procedures for types of works that are recurrent in literature.”4 To reconstruct the oedipal model it is necessary that a fatherly figure, a motherly character and a young man be present. What is notable about the young men in Conrad’s fiction is the absence of their biological parents. They are either not mentioned at all, or no longer alive. In most cases characters have lost them very early in life. So, in the case of Jim, we get some remote knowledge that his father was a parson, that he was one of the five children in the family, but we learn nothing about his mother. As it can be noted, these facts echo in one way or another with Conrad’s childhood. The premature death of his parents, the presence of two different fatherly figures in his life and the gnawing doubt of having abandoned Poland for a career as a seaman are motives, which we encounter quite often in Conrad’s fiction, enough to create an unconscious, which exerts great influence upon the characters and the writer himself. In order to understand the nature of the oedipal conflict in Conrad’s Lord Jim, let us first refer to Freud’s analysis which he bases upon Sophocles’ tragedy Oedipus Rex:

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Joseph Conrad, Lord Jim: A Tale, ed. John Batchelor (Oxford: OUP, 1983), 93. Gustav Morf, “On Lord Jim (an Excerpt),” in The Art of Joseph Conrad: A Critical Symposium ed. R. W. Stallman (East Lansing, MI: Michigan State UP, 1960), 141. 4 Julien D. Bonn, ed., A Comprehensive Dictionary of Literature (Delhi: Abhishek, 2010), 36. 3

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His fate [King Oedipus’] moves us only because it might have been our own, because the oracle laid upon us before our birth the very curse which rested upon him. It may be that we were all destined to direct our first sexual impulses toward our mothers, and our first impulses of hatred and violence toward our fathers; our dreams convince us that we were. King Oedipus, who slew his father Laius and wedded his mother Jocasta, is nothing more or less than a wish-fulfilment—the fulfilment of the wish of our childhood. But we, more fortunate than he, in so far as we have not become psychoneurotics, have since our childhood succeeded in withdrawing our sexual impulses from our mothers, and in forgetting our jealousy of our fathers. We recoil from the person for whom this primitive wish of our childhood has been fulfilled with all the force of the repression which these wishes have undergone in our minds since childhood.5

So, this suppressed feeling for the mother and the subsequent desire to eliminate the father is, as we know, at the core of the Oedipus complex. But what model does Conrad use in his fiction? How are these relationships reconstructed in his fiction? What does he make of the convention(s)? My idea is that that father-son relationships follow the oedipal pattern but in a typically Conradian fashion, which I have metaphorically represented in the title as LordJim@Oedipuscomplex .convention in order to suggest that the Oedipus complex is contained in the domain of the Freudian conventions in which Lord Jim is but one user, but a user of unique profile. Before analyzing these relationships, I will focus first on the representation of male and female figures in the novel. Female presence is often argued to be very poor in Conrad’s fiction. Although women are physically absent in his novels, still he uses images which highlight the female and the feminine. Marianne de Kovenn6 points out that the Patusanian landscape is described through images, which evoke the maternal and the feminine. Identified by Robert Wilson 7 as earth, Patusan, dominated by the brown colour and rich in geographical shapes such as sinuous rivers, vaginal hills or menstrual streams, recalls female sensuality:

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A. A. Brill, ed., The Basic Writings of Sigmund Freud, (New York: Modern Library, 1938), 308. 6 Marianne de Kovenn, “The Destructive Element: Lord Jim,” in Lord Jim, ed. Thomas C. Moser (New York and London: Norton, 1996): 473-492. 7 Robert Wilson, Conrad’s Mythology. (Troy, NY: Whitston, 1987), 51.

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the shining sinuosity of the river like an immense letter S of beaten silver; the brown ribbon of houses following the sweep of both banks, overtopped by the twin hills uprising above the nearer tree-tops.8 Red trails are seen like cataracts of rust streaming under the dark-green foliage of bushes and creepers clothing the low cliffs.9

The feminine landscape of Patusan is inviting and as such compensates for Jim’s maternal depravity: Here and there a red gleam twinkled within the bamboo walls, warm, like a living spark, significant of human affections, of shelter, of repose.10

Eager for maternal warmth, Jim seems to be attracted by the Eastern images, which are evidently related to the feminine. This can be noted from the very beginning of the novel when he finds himself in an Eastern hospital and feels enchanted and seduced by the perfumes entering his hospital room. Although biological maternal figures are usually absent in Conrad’s fiction, they are often substituted by another female character who assumes the role of the absent mother. So, in the case of Jim, Doramin’s wife becomes a mother for Jim. But that is not all. Conrad recreates either the motherly figure or the fatherly figure in several characters, thus creating patterns or divisions of these figures into several characters. Dualism is at the core of his fiction and is often, generally speaking, symbolic expression of “the dualism Polish English within himself.” 11 Most often older characters assume the role of the father for the younger character, thus combining features of Conrad’s father and uncle. Let us now see how father-son relationships are constructed and how they reflect elements of the oedipal conflict. There are two things we need to point out about Conrad’s model—how fatherly figures are patterned and how filial characters respond to this patterning. As regards the first, Rising divides the fatherly figures into three distinctive models, not necessarily present in each of Conrad’s novels: “protective, deadly and comic.” 12 Nevertheless, I see a more general division as applicable to Lord Jim, a more binary patterning of fatherly figures into punitive and rewarding. The first group includes fatherly figures (Cornelius, the German skipper, the

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Joseph Conrad, op. cit., 189. Ibid., 177. 10 Ibid., 180. 11 Gustav Morf, op. cit., 141. 12 Catharine Rising, op. cit., 5. 9

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chief engineer of the Patna, Doramin) of a blaming attitude towards Jim who contrive ways to punish him, whereas the rewarding fathers (Marlow, Stein) display a protective attitude and seek to help Jim recover from the Patna episode and start life anew. Second, the young character displays a self-destructive disposition, which leads him either to death or suicide. What is more, he seems to be patterned as exemplary, cowardly and heroic (Big Brierly, Gentleman Brown, Dain Waris), all three patterns embodied in Jim himself. In Freud’s oedipal structure it is the son who conceives and meditates on ways to eliminate the fatherly figure, whereas in Conrad’s fiction we notice the opposite disposition. The fatherly figure is as protective as destructive for the young character. The father-son rivalry is apparently professional rivalry with sexual undertones. Big Brierly’s story prefaces the oedipal mode of the novel. An exemplary filial character, he feels inexplicably embarrassed by his participation as a member of the jury in Jim’s trial for the Patna episode: He seemed consumedly bored by the honour thrust upon him. He had never in his life made a mistake, never had an accident, never a mishap, never a check in his steady rise, and he seemed to be one of those lucky fellows who know nothing of indecision, much less of self-mistrust. At thirty-two he had one of the best commands going in the Eastern trade—and, what’s more, he thought a lot of what he had.13

Nevertheless, he commits suicide. Brierly’s case remains a very mysterious case, because the author himself does not say much in the novel. What is obvious is the fact that Brierly has recognized in Jim something undetected before and the burden of this discovery has proven unbearable to the point of leading him to suicide. There are some conventional elements which can help to consider this case in oedipal terms. It seems clear that Brierly identifies himself with Jim, that is, with the son. Irritated by Jim’s case, by the fact that only Jim is facing the court inquiry, he says: “let him creep twenty feet underground and stay there!”14 At one point in the novel Marlow tells us: No wonder Jim’s case bored him, and while I thought with something akin to fear of the immensity of his contempt for the young man under examination, he was probably holding silent inquiry into his own case. The verdict must have been of unmitigated guilt, and he took the secret of the evidence with him in that leap into the sea.15

 13

Joseph Conrad, op. cit., 42-43; emphasis added. Ibid., 49. 15 Ibid., 43-44; emphasis added. 14

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As it can be inferred from the above, Brierly is overridden with the sense of guilt of the son, which in Freud’s model stems from murder and incest, the two repressed wishes of the Oedipus complex. In my view, two mythological figures converge in the character of Brierly to reinforce his status of the avenging son, namely the giant Briareos and Cronus.16 Wilson argues that Brierly’s name reminds us of Briareos, the fifty-headed and one-hundred-armed giant in Greek mythology, who “fought on the side of Zeus, the party of order and stability” when Cronus and the Titans declared war on Zeus.17 In Lord Jim, Brierly keeps a gold chronometer watch, which I read as a trophy of the son’s victory over the father, seeing enough implications in this object to allude to Cronus (gold-golden, chronometer-Cronus, time/age). Jim’s case mirrors Brierly’s sense of guilt for having supplanted the fathers, namely Jones, the mate of the Ossa and probably his own father. Jones reports that Brierly had already mediated death and had planned to leave him as successor. Like Jim, Brierly is a young captain, who has stepped up very quickly in the professional ladder. This is one of the reasons why Jones does not like him: “He had been promoted over too many heads, not counting my own, and he had a damnable trick of making you feel small, nothing but by the way he said ‘Good morning.’” 18 Brierly’s left orders for Jones are: “Thirty-two miles more on this course and then you are safe. Let’s see—the correction on the log is six per cent. additive; say, then, thirty by the dial to run, and you may come twenty degrees to starboard at once.” 19 Later he commits suicide. He makes amends for his guilt by giving Jones free passage. Jones mentions that Brierly had left two letters, of which one was with orders for him. Jones writes to Brierly’s father but receives no reply: “I wrote fully to his father and did not get a word in reply—neither Thank you, nor Go to the devil!—nothing! Perhaps they did not want to know.”20 All these details can be collectively seen on the oedipal level. It appears that there is a lack of harmony between Brierly and the fatherly



16 In Greek mythology, Cronus, son of Uranus and Gaea, castrated his father upon request of his mother. Later, he married his sister Rhea and ruled during what is known in mythology as the Golden Age. Because he had been told by his parents that he would be supplanted by his children, he swallowed all of them, except for Zeus, who was cleverly spared by his mother and later revenged his siblings by defeating Cronus. 17 Robert Wilson, Conrad’s Mythology. (Troy, NY: Whitston, 1987), 50. 18 Joseph Conrad, op. cit., 44. 19 Ibid. 20 Ibid., 47.

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figures like Jones. The “unmitigated guilt” which Brierly pronounces as a verdict for Jim and later transfers upon himself could be “a wish to die, to escape shame.” 21 Rising calls this desire to die “blissful return of the Conradian hero to the peace and safety of the womb.” 22 In this way, Brierly wishing to “to terminate Oedipal guilt”23 jumps into the maternal of the sea. His jump is also a lesson for Jim that his jump should have been not in the boat but in the sea. If we read carefully the instructions he gives Jones, we understand something more about the guilt that he carries. The thirty-two miles seem to correspond to Brierly’s thirty-two years of age, whereas the twenty degrees to the latitude where he jumps, but it is also the “twenty feet underground,” a punishment which he gives to Jim and himself. The change of course he mentions to Jones is exactly his desire to give him the usurped place. Brierly’s end fulfills what Rising sums up as follows: “The fate of Conrad’s young men suggests that he construed any act of filial self-assertion as an attempt to supplant the father, and hence a punishable impulse.”24 After the court it is Marlow who takes great care of Jim. He assumes the role of the protective father, who wishes to offer him a second chance. Marlow becomes a sort of Tadeus, who helps Jim in unpleasant situations. Marlow offers Jim several opportunities to start, but he moves away from them. In these circumstances, Marlow seeks the advice of Stein, another fatherly figure in philosophical guise, a sort of romantic Apollo, who after examining Jim’s case in Hamletian terms, “How to be,” decides to send him to Patusan. With a letter for Cornelius, which will appoint him agent for Stein and Co. and in the capacity of Stein’s adopted heir, with a silver ring, token of old friendship he introduces himself in Doramin’s house. Jim’s cultural displacement is identified as a jump into another world. By jumping into the Patusanian maternal in a manner25 that recalls “a difficult birth,”26 Jim trespasses the land of the fathers he will acquire in Patusan.

 21

Catharine Rising, op. cit., 58. Ibid., 12. 23 Ibid., 58. 24 Ibid., 6. 25 “He made efforts, tremendous sobbing, gasping efforts, efforts that seemed to burst his eyeballs in their sockets and make him blind, and culminating into one mighty supreme effort in the darkness to crack the earth asunder, to throw it off his limbs—and he felt himself creeping feebly up the bank.” Conrad, op. cit., 185. 26 Marianne de Kovenn, “The Destructive Element: Lord Jim,” in Lord Jim, ed. Thomas C. Moser (New York and London: Norton, 1996): 485. 22

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Soon after that Jim contemplates the solitude around him and remembers Doramin. The first person he meets at Doramin’s house is his wife, figuratively Jim’s new mother after the Patusanian rebirth. The meeting recalls exactly the first moments and the care taken after the birth of a child27: Doramin’s old wife, full of business and commiseration, was issuing shrill orders to her girls. “The old woman,” he said, softly, “made a to-do over me as if I had been her own son. They put me into an immense bed—her state bed—and she ran in and out wiping her eyes to give me pats on the back. I must have been a pitiful object. I just lay there like a log for I don’t know how long.”28

With the Patusanian rebirth Jim meets other fatherly figures, Doramin and Cornelius, but rebirth in the maternal land of Patusan also marks a filial attempt to substitute these figures. The letter Jim has for Cornelius is intended to substitute Jim with Cornelius as agent of Stein. Jim substitutes Cornelius even on a more personal level. The relationship Jim has with Jewel, Cornelius’s stepdaughter makes him hate Jim even more. Several elements assign Jewel a maternal role, for example, the physical similarity she shares with her mother, the maternal care she shows for Jim, the same destiny as her mother’s and other such details. Although Cornelius mistreats Jewel, her approach to Jim makes him jealous to the point of hating Jim to death. He participates in complotting against him and has his share in the Patusanian massacre. The German skipper and the chief engineer of the Patna are two other punitive fatherly figures, whom Rising classifies as comic. Indeed, they are described as comic characters, either physically29 or mentally. According to Rising, they are grotesque figures, who “reflect an apparent need to master fear by comedy.”30 There is mutual dislike between them and Jim. Jim’s jump off the Patna, although described by him as a return into the maternal darkness of the womb 31 , as it should have been following Brierly’s act, ends into the boat, the trap of the fathers. Confused by the

 27

Joseph Conrad, op. cit., 186. Ibid., 186. 29 “Outwardly they were badly matched: one dull-eyed, malevolent, and of soft fleshy curves; the other lean, all hollows, with a head long and bony like the head of an old horse, with sunken cheeks, with sunken temples, with an indifferent glazed glance of sunken eyes.” Joseph Conrad, op. cit., 17. 30 Ibid., 60. 31 “There was no going back. It was as if I had jumped into a well—Into an everlasting deep hole.” Ibid., 82. 28

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darkness of the night and having mistaken Jim for George who actually dies onboard, the members of the Patna crew are frustrated when they recognize Jim in the boat. Although Jim dismisses them as “nobodies,”32 thus denying any ties with them and also implying that he does not wish to be like them, it is Jim who, unlike the grotesque fathers, and overtaken by feelings of shame, faces the court inquiry and bears the guilt of the son. In his filial role, Jim identifies with Dain Waris, whose “intelligent sympathy with Jim’s aspirations”33 points to him as the heroic son, practically what Jim wishes to be. He assumes the role of a brother for Jim but his death erases the possibility of the continuity of a dynasty. The frequent allusions to him as sharing something of the white men, such as his bravery or his intelligence, 34 somehow naturally dismiss the possibility of continuity. On a more oedipal perspective, Rising sees the possibility of Dain’s guilt in his gesture of wearing Stein’s ring on his finger. The ring, a present of Doramin’s to Stein, represents his authority in Patusan. Soon after, Dain Waris is killed: The phallic act of donning the ring, a convenient symbol of Patusan’s feminized jungle, links sexual and political aggrandizement; as the next Rajah of Patusan, he would probably have acquired a wife, or more wives. But Conrad, though tolerant of the dynastic goals of two Malays, Dain Maroola and Lakamba, in prior novels, does not permit Dain Waris to succeed Tunku Allang. The reason for disallowing an ambition supported by the youth’s own father may be that this third aspirant, as a semiEuropean and a potential rival of white rulers, comes too near his creator.35

Jim’s ensuing death by the hand of the punitive Doramin, Dain Waris’s father, is intended to punish an act of double transgression, the breach of promise with the Patusanian community and the oedipal guilt. It is a punishment for the transgression of the maternal land of Patusan, which belongs to the fathers, to Doramin, Stein and Cornelius. Jim is significantly shot with one of M’Neil’s pistols, Stein’s Scottish father: The gun was a token of “eternal friendship” (LJ, 233) from Stein to an old war comrade; Doramin’s gift to Stein, a silver ring, rolls against Jim’s foot to identify him as the victim of a convergence of fathers.36

 32

Ibid., 34. Ibid., 191. 34 “he knew how to fight like a white man,” “he had also a European mind.” Ibid., 191. 35 Catharine Rising, op. cit, 60. 36 Joseph Conrad, op. cit., 53. 33

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Jim also identifies with Gentleman Brown whose massacre of the Patusanian people, in which Dain Waris dies, is an act of cowardice. Marlow’s report of the meeting between the two hints at this identification: And there ran through the rough talk a vein of subtle reference to their common blood, an assumption of common experience; a sickening suggestion of common guilt, of secret knowledge that was like a bond of their minds and of their hearts.37

A simple question suffices Gentleman Brown to awaken in Jim past cowardice and be overwhelmed with feelings of guilt. By referring to Armstrong and by adopting a more psychological argumentation, Rising views Jim’s suicide on a wider plane, which involves Jim’s identification with Brown: But despite a predominance of negative Oedipal impulses, toward submission, castration, and death, Jim is not devoid of positive or parricidal ones, the guilt for which would supply an additional motive for suicide. Armstrong has traced his indulgence toward Brown to an identification with the id of this freebooter, who once ran off with the dying wife of a missionary; as the seducer of a clergyman’s wife, he has done what Jim, a parson’s son, would have liked to do.38

While I agree on the one hand that Jim’s death is a form of selfpunishment for the guilt of the son, I also see it as a “conspiracy” of the fathers against the son. Although I initially divided the fatherly figures into the binary punitive—rewarding, I see this division from a poststructuralist perspective, that is, as complementary rather than as oppositional. Thus Marlow and Stein are extensions of the punitive fatherly patterns, covert representations of the overt fatherly desire to eliminate the son. Indeed, Rising views both as “questionable” 39 and in one instance, referring to Royal Roussel’s hypothesis that Stein could be Jewel’s father, she sees Cornelius as Stein’s double.40 Recognizing in Jim a longing for the maternal womb, a wish to return to the womb, Marlow indirectly suggests that to Stein by repeating Brierly’s words (“let him creep twenty feet underground and stay there!”41) and thus offers him the solution to Jim’s case:

 37

Ibid., 283; emphasis added. Catharine Rising, op. cit., 53. 39 Ibid., 61. 40 Ibid., 54. 41 Joseph Conrad, op. cit., 49. 38

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“Bury him in some sort!”42 Pronounced by a filial figure like Big Brierly and executed by a paternal figure like Stein, the creeping underground represents a death wish of oedipal implication directed towards the filial figure. The grave is Patusan, a land far removed from Jim’s civilization, that “had [once] been used as a grave for some sin, transgression, or misfortune.”43 Even Gustav Morf, by drawing parallels between Jim and Hamlet, views Jim’s death as justified by psychological motives. By exalting Jim to the level of Hamlet and by criticizing Richard Curle who sees Jim as “a passionate and melancholy Pole,”44 he gives Jim’s case a more universal dimension: Jim, like Hamlet, is the personification of that brooding part which every introvert possesses, and which will govern him if he does not govern it. All the difference between a normal person and a neurotic is that the former can keep that part in its proper place, that, unlike Jim (but very much like Conrad), he masters his fate. That is why Jim is not a Pole, but simply a neurotic and, as such, a perfectly true and convincing character. There are thousands of English men and women like him, thousands whose lives are obscured and sometimes destroyed by guilt-complexes. They do not, as a rule, die in such romantic circumstances as Jim or Hamlet, but end by suicide or in a lunatic asylum. Their fate may be less pathetic because it is not grasped and expressed by the mind of an artist, but it is just as real.45

By elevating Jim and Hamlet to archetypes of Masters of fates, Morf’s comment actually helps acknowledge the value and beauty of conventions in allowing us to make interpretations and generalizations of some universal appeal. Despite the universality granted to them by convention, still each of them is contained within the boundaries of their own idiosyncrasy as Lord Jim’s case, I hope, has demonstrated.

Works Cited Bonn, Julien D. Ed. A Comprehensive Dictionary of Literature. Delhi: Abhishek, 2010. Brill, A. A. Ed. The Basic Writings of Sigmund Freud. New York: Modern Library, 1938.

 42

Ibid. Ibid., 133. 44 Gustav Morf, op. cit., 141. 45 Ibid. 43

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Conrad, Joseph. Lord Jim: A Tale. Ed. John Batchelor. Oxford: OUP, 1983. de Kovenn, Marianne. “The Destructive Element: Lord Jim.” In Lord Jim. Ed. Thomas C. Moser, 473-492. New York and London: Norton, 1996. Morf. Gustav. “On Lord Jim (an Excerpt).” In The Art of Joseph Conrad: A Critical Symposium. Ed. R. W. Stallman, 140-141. East Lansing, MI: Michigan State UP, 1960. Rising, Catharine. Darkness at Heart: Fathers and Sons in Conrad. New York: Greenwood, 1990. Wilson, Robert. Conrad’s Mythology. Troy, NY: Whitston, 1987.

SELF AND SELFNESS IN THE MODERN SCOTTISH NOVEL BOŽICA JOVIû

I will here present three Scottish novels: McIlvanney’s The Kiln (1996) and Alasdair Gray’s Lanark (1981) and Poor Things (1995). Convention, as I understand the word to mean, is present in all three novels. The Kiln has a conventional plotting; Lanark in one part deals with the troubles of overcoming conventions in a painter’s life; Poor Things is not so easy to tackle regarding this question. It both establishes and denies convention. First, we have to establish what convention is. If we take as a starting point of our research Cairns Craig’s definition of national literature, which in itself can be taken as a convention, then from there we can widen our research and apply it to the reading of the three mentioned novels, using imagination in defining the boundaries of the expected and its opposite. “The development of the novel is profoundly linked to the development of the modern nation,”1 is a statement at the beginning of his study of modern Scottish novel. A novel is a narrative, therefore, a national identity is the result of discourses. However, it is very important to stress here that Craig does not discuss the term “nation” within a historical or political context; rather, he focuses on the imaginative and creative context of the definition. By stating that the “fundamental role of narrative in the formation of national identity has come increasingly to be recognised in ‘nation theory’: indeed, it is now often argued that nations are nothing more than narratives,”2 he does not understand “narrative” as being “fake,” as it is sometimes understood. A narrative is something that connects the past and the present, and obviously we cannot function unless we do that. Craig deals with a very painful issue of whether there is such a thing as a Scottish tradition. We won’t go in a detailed study of the problem, but suffice it to say that many Scottish intellectuals have viewed



1 Cairns Craig. The Modern Scottish Novel: Narrative and the National Imagination (Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 1999), 9. 2 Ibid.,10.

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the history and tradition (especially cultural) of their people as “a culture of erasure.” “Culture of erasure” has started with the iconoclasm of John Knox and his followers and the establishment of Calvinism as a national religion. The Civil War in Scotland in the 16th century has left behind a deep distrust of artistic representation of the world, and consequently of any works of imagination. This created in a Scottish artist a deep distrust of his own imaginative power, precisely because it has the power to create an alternative reality. However, this discontinuity in the history of Scottish culture has been affirmative rather than negating according to Cairns Craig. Craig regards the notion of a uniform, homogeneous tradition as being wrong when it comes to the definition of Scottish literary tradition: The idea of the nation as a single and unified totality is itself an invention required by a specific phase of the development of the system of nationstates in the global development of modernity. [...] The nation-as-unity is the reflex of the idea of the nation as founded on linguistic purity and homogeneity.3

Therefore, if we change the concept of “tradition,” we will not have problems seeing a “tradition” where up till now its existence has been negated. This brings us to another re-definition: a re-definition of “self.” Scottish philosopher John Macmurray has introduced a term which redefines self: heterocentricity. A heterocentric self means a self that is constituted of “thou and I,” never of an isolated “I”: Modern philosophy is characteristically egocentric. I mean no more that this: that firstly, it takes the Self as its starting-point, and not God, or the world or the community; and that, secondly, the Self is an individual in isolation, an ego or ‘I’, never a ‘thou’.4

Furthermore, Macmurray ascertains that this is impossible: we do not exist in isolation, therefore any study of human personality without this kind of awareness of its nature, is a lie, in a sense. “Identity is developed not as something ‘essential’ but as a dialogue between a variety of interacting discourses,”5 says Craig discussing Macmurray’s philosophy. Macmurray emphasizes Christianity as a religion which teaches the value of the personal. However, the value of the personal does not lie in individuals

 3

Ibid., p. 30. John Macmurray, The Self as Agent (New Jersey: Humanities, 1991; 1957), 31. 5 Cairns Craig, op. cit., 30. 4

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themselves, but in the interaction between one person and another: “the identity of the Self is its relations with otherness rather than its coherence within self. Development of our fundamentally heterocentric selfhood is what makes us persons rather than isolated egos.”6 The same can be said for false notions of “tradition.” Just as the heterocentric self does not mean negation of the Self—it can be interpreted as a negation of the Self if the egocentric definition of the Self is retained—so, what many Scottish intellectuals term as “a culture of erasure” 7 is taken to mean a kind of negation. Allan Massie states: “First, there can, in effect, be no such thing as the Scottish novel because there is no continuing nation.”8 To this Craig replies that tradition “continue[s] to know itself and to recognise its own identity despite the transformations of history.”9 Therefore, we can link the definition of “tradition” and the definition of “self” given here and apply it to the reading of literary texts. William McIlvanney’s novel The Kiln relies on its readers’ acceptance of a conventional construction and plotting: a linear story of a young man with literary ambitions living and surviving in sharply-delineated Scottish urban surroundings. No mysterious detours in narrative, or unexpected metamorphosis in the characters. It is exactly where the beauty of the novel lies: in its uncompromising “squareness” of the narrative technique, its insistence on the logic of the events, people and places it describes, thus awaking in the reader a typical, old-time curiosity and thrill in the pursuit of the meaning of the text. McIlvanney purposely employed all the conventions of traditionally good story-telling. Story-telling is necessary. Even Lyotard ascertains this. Although he does emphasise the differentiation between narratives and metanarratives on one hand, and the postmodern discourse on the other, he by no means wishes to assert the primacy of the latter over the former. Both models, the metanarrative and the postmodern, coexist in today’s world. They are both necessary, although they might appear to be mutually exclusive because they both fulfill one of the functions for which they have been created and that is strengthening the social, political or scientific bonds in society. “All we can do is gaze in wonderment at the diversity of discursive species, just as we do at the diversity of plant or animal species.”10

 6

Ibid., 90. Ibid., 19. 8 Ibid., 14 9 Ibid., 11. 10 Jean-François Lyotard, “The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge,“ in Postmodernism and the Contemporary Novel: A Reader, ed. Bran Nicol (Edinburgh UP, 2002), 83. 7

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The opening sentence of The Kiln: “It is as if, he would think, who I thought I was has dried up like a well and I have to find again the source of who I am”11 prepares the reader for what follows: a tale of growing up in a Scottish small town; a formation of self that can never be taken or understood in isolation. This is as much a tale of one man as it is of a whole community. The narrator/McIlvanney, in order to find the meaning of his existence, has to go all the way back into the past and retell the stories of his father, himself and the town of Graithnock. The heterocentric concept of the self, this specifically Scottish view of the self, is always present with Scottish writers, even in cases when the hero tries to escape his community and redefine himself in isolation as in Trocchi’s Young Adam. Although the superiority of the main character over his (Scottish small town) surrounding is clearly shown at each step of the narrative, nonetheless the hero is, consciously or unconsciously, punished at the end of the novel. He loses, the society wins, or rather, had he allowed it, his social, heterocentric self, would have overcome all the problems, the mass hysteria and fear, and come out, if not a winner, then a survivor. Alasdair Gray published Lanark: A Life in Four Books in 1981. He summarised the novel as “my portrait of the artist as a young Glaswegian,” evoking thus the famous modernist masterpiece A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. “A young Glaswegian artist” is a painter, Duncan Thaw, modelled on the author himself. In the title there are four “books” mentioned. Those four books stand for four very long chapters, which, at places, can be taken as independent unities. They can function on their own. Two books deal with the life and death of Duncan Thaw, and the other two with the life and survival of Lanark, Duncan Thaw’s alter ego in a fantastic Glasgow’s double—the city of Unthank, the place where there is no daylight. Although Lanark is trying to organise his life into a clear narrative, he is not a writer. Actually, he is more of a painter because he is constantly looking for daylight in perpetual twilight of Unthank: “the sky was often dark with strong wind and frequent rain […] a man of about twenty-four […] huddled in a black raincoat […] gazed in a puzzled way at the black sky.”12 At the end of the fantastic part of the novel, Lanark comes out as a survivor, if not a winner, and can finally see the daylight amid the general cataclysm: “[He] propped his chin on his hands and sat a long time watching the moving clouds. He was a slightly worried, ordinary old man but glad to see the light in the sky.”13 This end was promised him by none other than the author himself in one of the metafictional chapters

 11

William McIlvanney, The Kiln (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1996), 1. Alasdair Gray, Lanark: A Life in Four Books (Edinburgh: Canongate, 2002), 3. 13 Ibid., 560. 12

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of the novel in which Gray introduces himself as the Author. Lanark cannot win over such formidable enemies as world politics, world disaster, and the Author himself. He cannot win because in order to do that he has to sacrifice something far more valuable than power: his ordinary humanity. According to Cairns Craig, that kind of heroism is what is asked of a Scottish hero. He has to go back to the ordinary. He has to be humbled so that he can realise the basic truth of his existence: his heterocentricity. Not only his creation but also the creator has to realise the basic truth of his existence: A book is not simply a text, it is an object […] the production processes which connect typesetters in Tennessee with publishers in Edinburgh, readers around the English-speaking world and an author in Glasgow with tree planters, paper-makers, binders, typographers, truck-drivers, bookshop assistants, librarians—a world of work that makes possible the delivery of the aesthetic “work” the writer has created.14

The painter/writer, and the hero of his own tale, Duncan Thaw in his fictional autobiography, discusses the rules of convention with his drawing teacher, Miss Mackenzie. The object of dispute is a shell, the disputants a boy and a woman: “That shell is a simple, delicate, rather lovely thing. Your drawing is like the diagram of a machine.”15 The boy answers: “But surely, Miss Mackenzie, the shell only seems delicate and simple because it’s smaller than we are. To the fish inside it was a suit of armour, a house, a moving fortress.”16 As he grows up, so does the growing disintegration of himself as an observant painter. He cannot recognise faces any more: what he sees is only a distortion (of a conventionalised perception of a human face in a portrait artist): “He wondered what they saw in gargoyles, masks, and antique door knockers that they couldn’t see in each other. Everyone carried on their necks a grotesque art object.”17 In one of the most memorable passages in the novel, the hero, who is also an observing artist of his home city, the city of Glasgow, as well as a fictional chronicler of the real author’s growing up in it, stands on a hill from which there is a magnificent view of the city. His best friend, impressed, says, “Glasgow is a magnificent city [...] Why do we hardly ever notice that?”18 The hero



14 Cairns Craig, “Going Down to Hell is Easy: Lanark, Realism and the Limits of the Imagination,” in The Arts of Alasdair Gray, eds. Robert Crawford and Thom Nairn (Edinburgh UP, 1991), 90. 15 Alasdair Gray, op. cit., 229. 16 Ibid. 17 Ibid., 228. 18 Ibid., 243.

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sulkily replies: “Because nobody imagines living here.”19 Nobody imagines, nobody has come up with a recognisable convention into which people would be able to encase their perception of Glasgow. Alasdair Gray’s Whitbread Award novel Poor Things deals with convention from an upside-down position. Convention is something opposite to the expected and yet silently accepted by the reader. What is more conventional than a Victorian setting, a mysterious birth, a doctor with an aristocratic background, and a history of a beautiful and wronged woman? Exactly. Yet, Gray manages to turn this fictional world upside-down relying on the standards in the narrative that nobody would question: a confused and timid narrator/hero and his opponent, a confident and assertive heroine, husband and wife in the story. They both fall in love with a … grotesque. There are no other words that would describe the third hero of the novel: Godwin Baxter, a gigantic, out-of-proportion person that for McCandless and Bella represents something short of a God. The convention here is depicted as something out-of-proportion—literally, as Godwin Baxter is a man of unrealistically gigantic proportions, whose high-pitched voice has the power of an explosion. Being such, is he a believable character? Absolutely, principally because of his interior qualities which are those of an ordinary but kind human being. Obviously, Alasdair Gray wants to play upon the picture of acceptability, manipulating our expectations as readers as to where the grotesque characters inhabiting an equally grotesque, but plausible, Victorian world would lead us. We had never shaken hands before nor had I looked closely at his, perhaps because in company he kept them half-hidden by his cuffs. The hand I intended to grasp was not so much square as cubical, nearly as thick as broad, with huge thick first knuckles from which the fingers tapered so steeply to babyish tips with rosy wee nails that seemed conical. A cold grue went through meʊI was unable to touch such a hand.20

This is how the central character in the novel Poor Things is described: as a monster. But, as I mentioned earlier, how can a Victorian, aristocratic doctor be described as such and yet be believed in? It is precisely because Gray is playing with our perception of “Victorian,” which has come to be understood as something ambiguous, crooked even. Not by accident does Ian McEwan begin his masterful short story “Solid Geometry” with:

 19 20

Ibid. Alasdair Gray, Poor Things (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1992), 24.

Božica Joviü

91

In Melton Mowbray in 1875 at an auction of articles of “curiosity and worth,” my great-grandfather, in the company of M his friend, bid for the penis of Captain Nicholls who died in Horsemonger jail in 1873. It was bottled in a glass twelve inches long, and, noted my great-grandfather in his diary that night “in a beautiful state of preservation.”21

This has become a sort of convention when dealing with the “dark secrets” of the 19th century. This is a short story about a slow disintegration of a married couple of today. The slightly bizarre opening foreshadows the tragicomic disappearance of the wife’s body due to the conjuring trick the husband and the narrator learned from his wonderful great-grandfather’s diaries. In a similar way, Gray in his latest novel, Old Men in Love, a concoction of historical biographies, a history of the world, stories about story-telling and a failed middle-aged Glaswegian writer—John Tunnock, who is dead and his written papers is all that is left of his existence, Gray plays once again upon our perception of a “Victorian” gentleman. Although Tunnock lives in the present age, he belongs more to the 19th century. His aunt does not know what to do with his legacy: “The typed pages were historical novels, which I detest. I also dislike reading diaries, even those written for publication, and a sample of John’s miserable confessions made me think them unpublishable.”22 We have tried to tackle a few pre-conceived conceptions such as tradition, the sense of self in the world of both the narrators and the authors, the sense of compatibility between the said and intended, as well as notions of bizarre and historically constructed cultural images.

Works Cited Craig, Cairns. The Modern Scottish Novel: Narrative and the National Imaginagion. Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 1999. —. “Going Down to Hell is Easy: Lanark, Realism and the Limits of the Imagination.”The Arts of Alasdair Gray. Eds. Robert Crawford and Thom Nairn. Edinburgh UP, 1991. Gray, Alasdair. Lanark: A Life in Four Books. Edinburgh: Canongate, 2002. —. Poor Things, Episodes from Early Life of Archibald McCandlessM.D. Scottish Public Health Officer, Edited by Alasdair Gray. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1992.



21 Ian McEwan, “Solid Geometry,” The Oxford Book of English Short Stories, ed. A. S. Byatt (Oxford: OUP, 1998), 421. 22 Alasdair Gray, Old Men in Love (London: Bloomsbery, 2007), 6.

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—. Old Men in Love (Are Still Learning; John Tunnock’s Posthumous Papers. London: Bloomsbery, 2007. Lyotard, Jean-François. “The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge.” In Postmodernism and the Contemporary Novel: A Reader. Ed. Bran Nicol. Edinburgh: EUP, 2002. Macmurray, John. The Self as Agent. New Jersey: Humanities, 1991, 1957. McEwan, Ian. “Solid Geometry.” In The Oxford Book of English Short Stories. Ed. A. S. Byatt. Oxford: OUP, 1998. McIlvanney, William. The Kiln. London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1996.

 

METAPHYSICAL CONVENTION IN HUXLEY’S TIME MUST HAVE A STOP JANKO ANDRIJAŠEVIû

One of the necessities of human existence is the impulse to tame the complex and precarious reality we are thrown into. Our minds are not capable of dealing with the immense complexity of the physical and the metaphysical frameworks we spend our lives within. The best we can do is to grapple with thin slices of reality at a time. Scientists say that the central nervous system is capable of processing “at most seven bits of information […] at any time, and that the shortest time it takes to discriminate between one set of bits and another is about 1/18 of a second.”1 Based on this, it turns out that “over a lifetime of seventy years, and counting sixteen hours of waking time each day, this amounts to 185 billion bits of information,”2 in case we are maximally alert at every waking second of our lives (which we are not). Although 185 billion bits of information seems huge, it is just a fraction of zillions of jarring particles of the outside and the inside worlds we are constantly exposed to. Precarious living breeds instability, while certainty steadies the ground beneath our feet. Hence the instinctive impulse towards certainty. We want to be certain, we need to be certain, our very lives depend on it. Sometimes the urge for certainty is so strong that we fail to acknowledge any of the phenomena accompanying our perception, not necessarily because we are incapable of sensing the infinite complexity of reality, but because of the dread of losing a stronghold and being suspended over a precipice. This is where convention comes in handy. It draws a blueprint of certainty and gives guidelines towards stability, which is a noble goal. The problems arise only when the overall multiplicity of actuality is reduced to convention, a crudely distinguishable fraction of the immensely rich environment. Reality oscillates between perceptibility and mystery. This is not just a subjective belief, it is a scientific fact. The better microscopes we invent,

 1

2

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, Flow (New York: Harper Perennial, 2008), 29. Ibid.

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the more intricate the micro-world becomes, and continues to remain a mystery; the better telescopes we invent, the more mind-bogglingly varied space becomes, and remains a mystery. It cannot be said that the human mind has reached any definite frontier in any direction. However unknown many things remain to be, it would be utterly nihilistic to say that in such a world there is no certainty. Of course there is. Without any kind of certainty a meaningful life would be impossible to sustain. So, the conventions that we have are certainties solidified, are the stepping stones for purposeful living. They represent the scaffolding of the known, and are as necessary as are the whirlwinds of the unknown, for how would we know there were unknown things if everything were known, or how would we know there were known things if everything were unknown. Where the aesthetics are concerned, it is difficult to say how convention generates beauty. Besides being one of the most difficult things to define, beauty is also so utterly individual and subjective that it is risky to claim anything either to be or not to be beautiful. Convention, on the other hand, can be classified as necessary rather than beautiful. Or, better still, it is fairly neutral, with the potential to be either beautiful or ugly. It is beautiful when it corresponds with reality, when we are aware of its proper place in the order of things, when it prompts us to grow. On the other hand, convention is ugly when it confines and reduces reality, when it takes on the aura of absoluteness, when it leaves no room for alternatives. If we blindly devote ourselves to convention, spurred by the urge of certainty, we experience a loss of multidimensionality, of mystery, and of authenticity. Conventions are not frameworks that emerge from personal quests, they do not come from within, but from without. Some other people convened and agreed that that is so and so. As soon as we accept readymade conclusions about any kind of reality, we give up authentic probing into that reality. The more we give up our genuine quest, the more blindly do we adhere to conventions fabricated by others. If “they become part of the norms and habit of a culture, people assume that this is how things must be; they come to believe they have no other options.”3 The Buddha said: “Be lamps unto yourselves.”4 So, when thinking about convention, the word beauty rarely comes to mind. Many other terms line up before it—necessity, purposefulness, wholesomeness, restrictiveness, etc.

 3

Ibid., 79. E. A. Burtt, The Teachings of the Compassionate Buddha (New York: Mentor, 1955), 49.

4

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The only beauty that can be attributed to convention perhaps lies in the already mentioned fact that it provides certainty amid the overwhelming multifacetedness of the physical world. But even this kind of certainty is insufficient; people want to be certain also of the world that is to come. This is where convention starts invading the realm of the metaphysical, which is much more puzzling than the physical, not only because of its properties, but also because of the uncertainty of its very existence. We do not need Shakespeare to tell us that there are “undiscovered countries from which no traveller returns.” We know that they might be out there, or might not. But how to accept this rift between the edges of the divide? Uncertainty is a far worse option than either believing or disbelieving in the afterlife. When asked if there is life after death, the majority of people will say either yes or no, only a small percent are ready to acknowledge a genuine doubt. Many more wallow in the comforts of security. The doubters agnostically process pros and cons, the atheists dismiss the thoughts of other worlds, while believers ground much of their life philosophies on the notion of life after death. However, to have a strong belief that death is not the end is not enough. It is difficult to believe in something so undifferentiated and hazy. Some structure must be imposed on it, some blueprint drawn to give palpable outlines to the transcendent abode, to make it more creditable. Or is this only making it less creditable? World mythologies and religions are based on the belief in the afterlife. Most of them give accounts of the next world and a soul’s sojourn in it. In fact, these accounts are mostly very open-ended, but different believers, with different levels of understanding, apply a wide gamut of interpretations, from narrowly literal (these are quick to accuse others of heresy) to widely universal. For some, their belief excludes the beliefs of all other religions, while for others, religions are complementary and in harmony with one another. Aldous Huxley was somebody who could be put in the latter category. He grappled with different religions and was prone to emphasize the common ground that all of them share. However, he liked to think of himself as an agnostic, not a believer, even though he did not dismiss religions, and even though he at times flirted with their dogmatic beliefs. An example of his literary exploitation of a concrete dogma is his novel Time Must Have a Stop, published in 1944. One of the major strands in this book follows posthumous experiences of Eustace Barnack, a hedonist and art-connoisseur, who passes away at the very beginning of the novel. The out-of-body workings of Barnack’s mind are given in about half a dozen hermetic interpolations, which took

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almost two dozen years for the critics to figure out. In the late sixties, Peter Bowering connected Huxley’s text with the Tibetan Book of the Dead, and discovered that the previously impenetrable chapters were essentially very precise renderings of the Buddhist-Lamaist spiritual convention about the mind’s journeying in the Bardo Thodol in between two incarnations. The title of the novel was taken from Shakespeare’s King Henry IV, Part I. The temporal reference in it accentuates the fatal and inexorable fact that the moment of facing death is inevitable, however little thought we give to it and however much we feel it happens only to others. By paying attention to this realization we also start thinking about a proper way of accepting this disturbing fact, and for Huxley the only proper way is a mystical way, while all other “alternatives [...] are impractical.”5 The plot of the novel is “tightly structured”6 and the book has a slight “resemblance to a morality play.”7 One of the main characters, Sebastian Barnack, goes through temptations, gains life experience, and in the end attains some kind of illumination and transformation. This is why the book could perhaps be characterized as a bildungsroman, too. The storyline is set in London and Florence. The main bearers of Huxley’s conclusions and ideas about spiritual development are Sebastian, his uncle Eustace, and Eustace’s relative Bruno Rontini. Eustace Barnack has a fatal heart attack on the first night upon his nephew Sebastian comes to visit him in Florence, and dies in the bathroom. In the rest of the novel, almost right through to the end, he still plays a part in the plot, but in his posthumous form. This element represents an unusual experiment for the time it was written, and a novel way of presenting spiritual ideas. The most original elements of this book, which appear for the first time in Huxley’s opus, are the chapters describing the continuation of existence of Eustace’s mind after his physical demise. Eustace Barnack is a bon vivant. Jerome Meckier also calls him a “degraded Oscar Wilde.”8 Huxley is not ironic towards him like he was when describing hedonistic characters in other novels, but expresses obvious sympathy for uncle Eustace. Resounding with the echoes of Lawrentian reasoning, he makes Eustace say that the world has never suffered as badly because of those who hedonistically seized their days and who “never put off till tomorrow the pleasure you can enjoy today”9 as

 5

Peter Firchow, op. cit., 166. Jerry W. Carlson, op. cit., 62. 7 Jerome Meckier, Aldous Huxley, Satire and Structure, 166. 8 Ibid. 9 Aldous Huxley, Time Must Have a Stop (London: Chatto & Windus, 1945), 119. 6

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it has because of those who have, for seemingly noble reasons, “start[ed] ... wars, ... crusades, or communist revolutions.”10 Even though deep down he knew the genuine unacceptability of Eustace’s values, at least from a conventional ethical standpoint, Huxley had his own reasons to justify him. Eustace “die[s] without forethought.” 11 His belief had been that “so long as one was alive, death didn’t exist, except for other people. And when one was dead, nothing existed, not even death.”12 Huxley, however, proves Eustace wrong. Upon his death he is “unaware that he is dead,”13 but he still continues to exist. Only after some time, awareness slowly starts coming back to him. Seven chapters expound in great detail the state of Eustace’s awareness in an out-of-body space, which the Buddhists call the Bardo. It was from the Tibetan Book of the Dead that Huxley took over the principles that describe the phases Eustace’s mind goes through after the demise of his body. The abovementioned chapters had long presented an enigma to both critics and readers, because they “demand a different kind of attention than that required by the rest of the work.” 14 No matter how hard a reader concentrates, the meaning remains rather hazy unless its explanation is linked with the principles of the Tibetan Book of the Dead. The first literary critic who paid more attention to this was Peter Bowering. In his study on Huxley published in 1968 he explained in detail the parallels between Buddhist beliefs in posthumous existence and the episodes Eustace’s mind goes through in the other world. The original title of the Tibetan Book of the Dead is Bardo Thödol, and the first who translated it into English was Professor Evans-Wentz, who collected, edited, and translated the texts of this ancient Lamaist scripture in the late 1920s. At the time when the novel Time Must Have a Stop was being composed, this scripture was familiar only to a small circle of aficionados of mystical literature like Huxley, while the messages contained in these ancient texts became more widely spread only during the last few decades of the twentieth century. The existence of awareness (the term “soul” cannot be used, for Buddhists usually avoid it15) in the bardo is divided into three phases. The

 10

Ibid., 120. Peter Bowering, op. cit., 162. 12 Aldous Huxley, Time Must Have a Stop, 126. 13 Peter Bowering, op. cit., 172. 14 C. S. Ferns, Aldous Huxley: Novelist (London: The Athelone, 1980), 168. 15 A note must be made here about the term “mind”, which is used instead of the more expected “soul”. However, the Buddhists do not use the word soul, simply 11

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first one is the Chikai Bardo, which “describes the happenings immediately after death,” 16 in which the deceased’s awareness faces a divine aspect which is called Dharma-KƗya, or “the primary clear light seen at the moment of death.” 17 This is a phase in which individual awareness is not aware of its own self and is being offered a chance to merge with the divine light. “If, through a lack of spiritual insight, the dead person is unable to recognize the light as the manifestation of his own spiritual consciousness,”18 then it passes on to the second phase which is called Chonyid Bardo. In this phase “karmic apparitions appear”19 and the dead person “can hear all the weeping and wailing of his friends and relatives, and, although he can see them and can hear them calling upon him, they cannot hear him calling upon them, so he goeth away displeased.” 20 Chonyid Bardo lasts fourteen days. Finally, at the third bardo stage, called Sidpa Bardo, the individual starts “seeking rebirth.”21 This is when the dead person becomes aware that he no longer has a corporeal body and the desire for a new incarnation begins to dominate his consciousness. As a sign of approaching rebirth he sees visions of copulation and, depending on his state of spiritual grace, he is reborn into an earthly womb and a new life commences.22

Eustace Barnack goes through all three phases described in the Tibetan Book of the Dead. At the very beginning he is blinded by the light, but he gradually starts resisting it, because he understands that by drowning in it, however attractive it appeared at first, he would lose his personhood. He is still attached to the “beauties of this earth he cannot leave behind,”23 so that he soon transgresses to the stage of karmic illusions, in which he regains self-consciousness. During this stage he was invited twice to

 because they do not believe in this concept as many other religions do, but they rather refer to the non-material particle that survives the body as “mind.” Huxley is careful to observe this linguistic quirk, because it goes beyond linguistics and probes deeply into Buddhist ontology. 16 Peter Bowering, op. cit., 167. 17 The Tibetan Book of the Dead, ed. W. Y. Evans-Wentz (Oxford: OUP, 2000), 89. 18 Peter Bowering, op. cit., 167. 19 The Tibetan Book of the Dead, 101. 20 Ibid., 102. 21 Ibid., 153. 22 Peter Bowering, op. cit., 167. 23 George Woodcock, op. cit., 234.

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communicate with the living at their spiritist séances, and he also saw from above the images of the modern world, so absurd that the universe itself laughs out loud at it. In these passages Huxley expressed his standing criticism of modern life and “self-willed, unenlightened efforts of men.”24 In the second bardo phase Eustace was also overwhelmed by numerous memories. Some of them were trivial, while some, quite opposite, touched upon his rare journeyings out into pure spirituality. These, for example, included a letter he had written to his lover, telling her that “God alone is commensurate with the cravings you inspire.”25 Besides, when he was still in his early youth, he suddenly noticed in a landscape “an inward and invisible earthquake. Something had broken through the crust of customary appearance. A lava gush from some other, more real order of existence.” 26 This hint of mystical experience represented “a Dantesque [...] ladder which Eustace might profitably have ascended”27 and “reached at least the lower steps of the staircase of understanding.”28 However, the hedonistic attachment to sense gratification, which was getting stronger and stronger over the years, wedged out of his experience all chances for attainment of spiritual enlightenment, and ousted “positive aspects of Eustace’s largely negative karma.”29 “Even death does not release Eustace from the circle of time.”30 In the end, “the ego’s hunger for separateness triumphs”31 and there is the unavoidable shift towards the Sidpa Bardo. In this phase Eustace foresees his future parents, the Weyls, an art dealer with his wife. He also sees himself as a boy who is in a river of refugees together with his parents. He sees his mother falling on the road and two military trucks unabatedly driving over her. What he saw was an extremely bleak incarnation everybody would like to run away from, but due to the debt toward the breached system of morality and spirituality he had made in his previous life, only such a future life scenario was available to him. Bruno Rontini is Eustace’s cousin. His hypothetical account of the bardo would not have been nearly as lush as Eustace’s. While still living on the earth he was “participating in the knowledge of the light.”32 Bruno

 24

Charles M. Holmes, Aldous Huxley and the Way to Reality, 136. Aldous Huxley, Time Must Have a Stop, 97. 26 Ibid., 157. 27 Keith May, op. cit., 161. 28 George Woodcock, op. cit., 234. 29 Peter Bowering, op. cit., 172. 30 George Woodcock, op. cit., 229. 31 Peter Bowering, op. cit., 170. 32 Ibid., 177. 25

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“is not merely a phonograph record in the shape of a man, but a living, changing, and suffering human being.”33 This is why he is “perhaps the most dramatically effective of Huxley’s gurus.”34 Sebastian later recalled that “Bruno could somehow convince you that it all made sense. Not by talking, of course; by just being.”35 That would probably enable him to merge with the primary light in the first bardo stage, and we would lose track of his further development. Huxley did not explicitly announce this in the novel, but if the same measure as applied to Eustace was applied to Bruno, the result would probably be as we suggested. Hence, a conclusion could be drawn that the way one lives one’s life determines the trajectory of the surviving entity in life’s aftermath. Put like this, it sounds almost like an equation. Does such an exact convention concerning such a nonexact matter like human soul have any practical value, or is it just completely out of place in any imaginable way? As previously mentioned, the function of spiritual convention is to give structure to some people’s belief in posthumous existence. It probably soothes the anxiety before the unknown, death being one of the greatest and most universal unknowns. However, the structure in question is not just based on metaphysical mechanics, but primarily on metaphysical ethics. Whether the concept of the afterlife includes the bardo, Heaven and Hell, Valhalla, or an ancestral abode, the access to these otherworldly locations is conditioned by a corresponding system of morality. So, besides a soothing, a spiritual convention also has a didactic and regulative effect. It also probably reflects metaphysical reality in a genuine, though mythic way, and does not deserve to be called a figment of popular imagination. It has been sifted through generations and generations and it harbours universal archetypes. Why is it then that some people have a problem with metaphysical conventions, if, as we have seen, these conventions have a positive effect on the enhancement of human values? Is their non-acceptance of such conventions utterly baseless and random? It may well be sometimes, but more often than not the criticism is largely justified. When does a convention, spiritual or any other, become a phenomenon to be fiercely criticized? At the very point at which it is embraced literally, and at which no room for any alternative is left. A convention accepted in this way testifies about its holder’s narrow-mindedness, a great urge for security due to essential insecurity, and reluctance to plunge into a more thorough personal quest. This frequently results in lack of empathy for holders of

 33

Peter Firchow, op. cit., 170. C. S. Ferns, op. cit., 168. 35 Aldous Huxley, Time Must Have a Stop, 305. 34

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other beliefs, a lack of tolerance for them, a tendency to depersonalize them, and finally an intolerance for their rights. In extreme cases, which history, unfortunately, abounds in, blind adherence to certain conventions leads even to genocide. In order to avoid the dangers of spiritual blindness, the Buddha was reluctant to express his teachings verbally, so he put emphasis on immediate practice. Once the Buddha was reported to have said that people are so foolish as to want words, while books with blank pages would be much more appropriate and accurate. “It is such blank scrolls [...] that are the true scriptures. But I quite see that the people of China are too foolish and ignorant to believe this, so there is nothing for it but to give them copies with some writing on.” 36 For this reason scholars say that Buddhism is not a religion but primarily a method. This is perhaps why Buddhism has the most benevolent historical record compared to any other living religion. Have they also mastered the importance of the subtlety in accepting spiritual conventions? That is a more difficult question exacting thorough research. Convention, spiritual, cultural, ethical, or any other, is a fine example of a human construct that sharply cuts both ways. In order to avoid its ugly blade, it should be embraced with a high level of understanding. When we manage to do so, convention becomes beautiful, just like any other thing that reflects the complexity of humankind.

Works Cited Bowering, Peter. Aldous Huxley: a Study of the Major Novels. London: Athelone, 1968. Burtt, E. A. The Teachings of the Compassionate Buddha. New York, Mento, 1955. Carlson, Jerry W. “Aldous Huxley.” In Dictionary of Literary Biography, Volume 36: British Novelists, 1890-1929: Modernists. Ed. Thomas F. Staley, Detroit: Gale, 1985: 46-69. Csikszentmihalyi, Mihaly. Flow. New York: Harper Perennial, 2008. Ferns, C.S. Aldous Huxley: Novelist. London: Athelone, 1980. Firchow, Peter. Aldous Huxley, Satirist and Novelist. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1972. Holmes, Charles M. Aldous Huxley and the Way to Reality. Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood, 1978.

 36

Wu Ch’êng ên, quoted from: Aldous Huxley, Perennial Philosophy (London: Chatto & Windus, 1946), 147.

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Huxley, Aldous. The Perennial Philosophy. London: Chatto & Windus, 1946. —. Time Must Have a Stop. London: Chatto & Windus, 1945. May, Keith. Aldous Huxley. London: Elek, 1972. Meckier, Jerome. Aldous Huxley, Satire and Structure. London: Chatto & Windus, 1969. The Tibetan Book of the Dead. Ed. W. Y. Evans-Wentz. Oxford: OUP, 2000. Woodcock, George. The Dawn and the Darkest Hour. London: Faber and Faber, 1972.



CONVENTIONS IN THE PRESENTATION OF WOMEN IN VICTORIAN LITERATURE DIJANA TICA

Women in English Literature The idea for this paper came from Shakespeare’s famous sonnet 130, in which he describes his “Dark Lady” as a woman he adores and desires in spite of the fact that she is far from conventional: My mistress’ eyes are nothing like the sun; Coral is far more red than her lips’ red; If snow be white, why then her breasts are dun; If hairs be wires, black wires grow on her head; I have seen roses damasked, red and white, But no such roses see I in her cheeks; And in some perfumes is there more delight Than in the breath that from my mistress reeks. I love to hear her speak, yet well I know That music hath a far more pleasing sound; I grant I never saw a goddess go; My mistress when she walks treads on the ground. And yet, by heaven, I think my love as rare As any she belied with false compare.1

In this sonnet he describes both her physical appearance and her moral characteristics, and informs us that he loves her because she is real, imperfect and available, unlike those celebrated ladies who are too perfect to be true. But Shakespeare was unique among his fellow-sonneteers, who still stuck to what was considered the ideal of female beauty. This is shown in a fictional sonnet created as a complete opposite to the one written by Shakespeare:

 1

Katherine Duncan-Jones, ed., The Arden Shakespeare: Shakespeare’s Sonnets (London: Thomas Nelson and Sons, 1998), 375.

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Conventions in the Presentation of Women in Victorian Literature My mistress’ eyes are brilliant as the sun, And coral’s colour matches her lips’ red; Her snowy breasts are like to others none, And golden wires ornament her head. A bed of damask roses, red and white, I find within the confines of her cheeks, And perfume’s self, conferring all delight, Breathes in the breath that from my mistress reeks. I love to hear her speak, and well I know That only music hath such pleasing sound; In walking she doth like a goddess go, Her dainty feet scarce printing on the ground. In all, by heaven I think my love as rare As any she conceived for compare.2

But the practice of praising one set of female features while criticising the other did not begin with the Renaissance. Even in Anglo-Saxon literature, where female characters were hardly present, they could be divided into two groups: those who behaved in the way the male dominated society expected them and were, because of that, portrayed in a positive light; and those who dared to rebel or be different, deserving because of that not only a very negative portrayal but also punishment by death. In the literature of the Anglo-Saxon warrior society, female characters were mostly presented in the relation to their male relatives: they were daughters, sisters, wives and mothers, whose main task was to make lives of their male relatives easier by working hard, or more beautiful by sitting in their rich clothes at their tables and smiling. The most obvious example comes from the Anglo-Saxon epic poem Beowulf, in which King Hrothgar’s wife Wealhtheow, in her role of a hostess or a cup-bearer, enters the mead-hall adorned in gold, salutes the men gathered there, hands the cup first to her husband, and then to other warriors: Wealhtheow came in, Hrothgar’s queen, observing the courtesies. Adorned in her gold, she graciously saluted the men in hall, then handed the cup first to Hrothgar, their homeland’s guardian, urging him to drink deep and enjoy it because he was dear to them. And he drank it down like the warlord he was, with festive cheer. So the Helming woman went on her rounds,

 2

Helen Vendler, The Art of Shakespeare’s Sonnets (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1999), 556.

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queenly and dignified, decked out in rings, offering the goblet to all ranks, treating the household and the assembled troop until it was Beowulf’s turn to take it from her hand. With measured words she welcomed the Geat and thanked God for granting her wish that a deliverer she could believe in would arrive to ease their afflictions.3

Later on, King Hygelac’s wife, Hygd, is praised because, in spite of her youth and short period spent at court, “her mind was thoughtful and her manners sure. / Haereth’s daughter behaved generously / and stinted nothing when she distributed / bounty to the Geats.”4 This beautiful, wise, courteous and attentive queen is compared to Queen Modtryth, who tortured and killed men who dared to look at her directly during daylight. Having criticised this kind of behaviour, the poet concludes that: “Even a queen / outstanding in beauty must not overstep like that. / A queen should weave peace, not punish the innocent / with loss of life for imagined insults.”5 Besides these roles, as we can see from the previous lines, women were also given the role of peace-weavers, who were forced by their father to marry a man from an enemy tribe or nation in order to prevent bloodshed in the future wars or battles. Such a character in Beowulf is a Danish princess, Hildeburh, who was married to Frisian King Finn, and then lost her son, brother and husband in a fight at Finn’s hall. She was famous for her stoicism. Opposed to these positive characters, were those women whose behaviour and actions did not fit the imposed conventions. They were considered inappropriate and even dangerous and threatening to the stability of patriarchal society. Led by their fear, male authors have always presented powerful, strong, independent women in a negative light, because as daughters of mother earth and bearers of the “chaotic” female principle, they were always in conflict with the civilized world, which, according to their male creators, was based on the male principle. One of the first characters from that group is Grendel’s mother, who is depicted as a terrible, ugly monster, Cain’s descendant, monstrous hell-bride, the hell-dam, who was expelled from the civilized world of Heorot because of her ancestor’s fratricide. Because she poses a threat to the male warrior society, she is

 3

Beowulf: A New Verse Translation, trans. Seamus Heaney (New York and London: W. W. Norton, 2001), 41-3. 4 Ibid., 133. 5 Ibid.

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presented as completely unfeminine: strong, violent, aggressive, ravenous, manipulating and evil, although she basically is a loving mother, completely dedicated to saving her son’s life and, later on, to avenging his death. There is a similar distinction between female characters in English medieval literature. One of the positive characters is Guinevere, King Arthur’s wife, who is presented in the romance Sir Gawain and the Green Knight as a courteous, polite, silent and modest woman, who is the brightest and choicest decoration at her husband’s table.6 She easily becomes frightened, as a woman should, which can be seen at the beginning of the romance, when the Green Knight enters Camelot and challenges her husband and his knights. As far as her physical features are concerned, she is described as: “Fair queen, without a flaw, / She glanced with eyes of grey. / A seemlier that once he saw, / In truth, no man could say.”7 Similar to her is the character of Virgin Mary, depicted on one half of Sir Gawain’s shield, to whom he prays whenever he is in trouble. Their opposites in medieval literature were usually ugly and old witches, or young and beautiful enchantresses, or their “sisters,” the fatal temptresses, who used either their magical powers or their surreal beauty to make “naïve” male heroes yield to them and break the principles their identity was based on. Such characters in Sir Gawain are Morgan, the famous enchantress, and the Lady, ser Bertilak’s beautiful wife and the hostess of his castle. Morgan wants revenge on King Arthur and his knights for being expelled from the world of Camelot and she sends the Green Knight to test their heroic traits and to frighten Guinevere. In the romance, she takes the form of an old, wrinkled woman, all wrapped in silk, in figure short and broad and thickly made. She uses Lady Bertilak as a weapon, because her beauty is supposed to enchant Sir Gawain into breaking his chivalric codes. This lady is even fairer than Guinevere, with fair hair, rich red cheeks, “her bright throat and bosom fair to behold, / Fresh as the first snow fallen upon hills.”8 Throughout the poem she is trying to seduce him and he somehow manages to stay true to his host, her husband, and not to hurt her feelings. But during the third visit to his room, Lady Bertilak cunningly uses his fears about the ensuing fight with the Green Knight to persuade him not only to take her “magical” girdle but also to hide it from

 6

However, in Sir Thomas Malory’s collection, Le Morte d’Arthur, Guinevere is presented in a rather negative light, as a woman whose adulterous relationship with Sir Lancelot has caused the ruin of King Arthur and Camelot. 7 Sir Gawain and the Green Knight: A New Verse Translation, trans. Marie Borroff (New York: W. W. Norton, 1967), 2. 8 Ibid., 20.

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her husband. In the end, when everything is revealed, Sir Gawain, deeply ashamed of himself and disappointed in womankind, delivers a misogynistic speech in which he first remembers how Adam was beguiled by Eve, and Solomon by many women and Samson by Delilah, and David by Bathsheba, and then concludes that the best thing would be to learn to love women without trusting them. What makes this ending even more interesting and also ironic in a way, notices Borroff, is that to Gawain’s various shortcomings “the poet amusingly adds a breach of courtesy as he makes this world famed lover of women lapse momentarily into the sort of antifeminist tirade that was familiar to the medieval audience.”9 These “enemies” of the male gender are later joined by the bigmouthed, tomboyish, quick-tongued, bad-mannered, passionate and lively shrews, who, like Chaucer’s Wife of Bath, dare to claim that they have the same urges and rights like men, and state as their greatest wish equal sovereignty over their husband and their lovers. What this “lusty widow” really wants is to be accepted for what she is and not to be forced into the moulds cast for women by men: Her very stridency, we also realize, is a direct consequence of over-rigid patriarchal ways of thinking and acting. The Wife of Bath is certainly no model of meekness, patience, and chastity. She opens her discourse with the word “experience,” and from that experience of living with five husbands […] she builds up a spirited case against conventional, theoretical, clerically inspired anti-feminism.10

Her “bad” personal traits are also emphasised by her not very flattering physical portrait: she is deaf and gap-toothed, has large buttocks, and wears a hose of the choicest scarlet and an enormous hat. Not surprisingly, her tale is about the relationship between men and women. It tells about a knight from King Arthur’s court, who “unknightly” rapes a girl in the woods and is accordingly sentenced to death by the King. Queen Guinevere asks her husband to let her decide the proper punishment for the unfortunate knight, which he gladly does, adhering to the rules of courtly love, which bids a knight to do whatever his lady desires. She sends the knight on a quest of a year and a day, with the task of finding the right answer to the question what women want the most. He returns desperate for his life because he has not been able to find the one

 9

Marrie Borroff, introduction to Sir Gawain and the Green Knight: A New Verse Translation, viii. 10 Andrew Sanders, The Short Oxford History of English Literature, 3rd ed. (Oxford: OUP, 2004), 61-62.

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answer upon which all the women would agree. His life is saved by an old hag, who tells him that women want the same authority over their husband and lovers, but in return she asks him to marry her, which he reluctantly does, having no other choice. In the end, when she gives him a choice of having her old, ugly and faithful, or young, beautiful and deceitful, he lets her decide, which tells her that he has learned his lesson. She rewards him by turning into a young, beautiful lady, and the Wife of Bath finishes her tale with the following prayer: and may Christ Jesus send Us husbands meek and young and fresh in bed, And grace to overbid them when we wed. And—Jesus hear my prayer!—cut short the lives Of those who won’t be governed by their wives; And all old, angry niggards of their pence, God send them soon a very pestilence!11

During the Renaissance, female characters were mostly present in sonnets, which were the leading literary genre of the age. They create the cult of an ideal woman for whom the poet has ambivalent feelings. She is good, beautiful, pure, sinless, and perfect in every way, like Petrarch’s Laura, who is also said to be lovely to look at, fair-haired, with a modest, dignified bearing. Such a woman is mostly the passive receiver of male admiration and loyalty, and the love the poet feels for her is also pure and holy, completely platonic. However, there are sonnets in which the poet, although aware of the fact that he will never be worthy of that perfection, still suffers because his love is unrequited. Then his beloved seems a bit cruel and dishonest because she does not want to tell him directly whether she loves him or not, and thus prolongs his eternal state of suspense. Some of these characters were inspired by Queen Elizabeth I, who was also known as the “Virgin Queen” since she never married and had no children. Edmund Spencer wrote his most famous work The Faerie Queene (1590) in honour of Queen Elizabeth, who is presented in this allegory mostly in the character of the fairy Queen Gloriana, but also in characters such as Britomart, the female knight of chastity; Belphoebe, the chaste huntress, twin sister of Amoret, and Mercilla, a maiden Queen of high renown.12 In this work we also recognise other stereotypical or conventional heroines:

 11

Geoffrey Chaucer, The Canterbury Tales, trans. Nevill Coghill (London: Penguin, 2003), 292. 12 Margaret Drabble and Jenny Stringer, eds., Concise Companion to English Literature (Oxford: OUP, 1996), 199.

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the good Una, who represents the truth and the true Anglican Church, and serves as a kind of spiritual guide to the main character, Red Cross, or Saint George, the symbol of England; and the bad Duessa, an old and ugly witch in the guise of a beautiful young woman, who symbolises lies and the false Catholic Church. While Una is represented as a lovely lady, whiter than the snow white ass she is riding on, who covers her beauty with a veil, has a milk white lamb as a companion, and is pure, innocent, “and by descent from Royall lynage came / Of ancient Kings and Queenes;”13 Duessa, in her human shape (Fidessa), is “a goodly Lady clad in scarlot red, / Purfled with gold and pearle of rich assay;”14 and in her true form, as a witch, is “a filthy foule old woman […] / Her neather partes misshapen, monstruous.”15 The things change a bit with the appearance of the metaphysical poets, who do not idealise women, but consider them very sensual and often invite them to seize the day. Some of these poets, like John Donne even complain of female fickleness and claim that it is impossible to find a woman who is both beautiful and faithful. When it comes to the Elizabethan plays, here we can find heroines who fit all the existing stereotypes, and even if the authors do not show a negative attitude towards them, there are male characters in their plays who still appreciate silent, humble and obedient women, and condemn those who are strong, resourceful and independent. The typical example is John Webster’s play The Duchess of Malfi (1623), whose eponymous heroine is a beautiful, intelligent, funny, warm and noble woman, who, after she becomes a widow, quickly falls in love with her steward, Antonio Bologna, and, forgetting the social differences between them, takes matters in her own hands and proposes to him. Of course, in the eyes of her brothers, the passionate and jealous twin brother Ferdinand, and the cold, rational and calculated Cardinal, she is a plain whore, who ruined their family reputation when she decided to remarry. At the end of this era, another famous heroine appears, Eve from Milton’s Paradise Lost (1667), who is represented, like in most other works dealing with the same topic, as responsible both for Adam’s fall and the fall of the whole humankind. She is described as beautiful and meek:

 13

Edmund Spenser, The Faerie Queene: The Book One, ed. Carol V. Kaske (Indianapolis: Hackett, 2006), 7. 14 Ibid., 27. 15 Ibid., 36.

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Conventions in the Presentation of Women in Victorian Literature Shee as a vail down to the slender waist Her unadorned golden tresses wore Disheveld, but in wanton ringlets wav’d As the Vine curles her tendrils, which impli’d Subjection, but requir’d with gentle sway, And by her yielded, by him best receivd, Yielded with coy submission, modest pride, And sweet reluctant amorous delay.16

God created her from Adam’s rib at his request because he did not want to be alone and that is why he is seen as her superior in every aspect except for physical beauty. Milton says that they are not equal “as thir sex not equal seemd; / For contemplation hee and valour formd, / For softness shee and sweet attractive Grace, / Hee for God only, shee for God in him.”17 Since she is considered less intelligent it is through his eyes that she observes the world around her. Her typical “female” quality, vanity, which enables Satan to deceive her, appears immediately after her creation, when she falls in love with her own reflection so deeply that only God’s voice is able to separate her from it. So, Satan does not find it hard, after complimenting her on her beauty, to persuade her to eat the forbidden fruit. Later on, her beauty and Adam’s love for her persuade him to do the same, which leads to their final expulsion from Paradise. Because of this, she falls in the category of a temptress. The later literary works also confirm that only good, quiet, passive and moral women manage to succeed in life, while those who do not fit that description are doomed to the eternal fight with their society, resulting at least in a heartache or ruined reputation or, in the most severe cases, even in death. An example of this first type is Pamela, a young servant girl from Samuel Richardson’s novel Pamela (1740), who was written in order to define precisely the role of women, because its author, as well as the society he lived in, feared that they were becoming too daring and arrogant. In this epistolary novel, Pamela, by fighting off the sexual advances of Mr. B and by keeping her most precious possession, her virginity, even at the threat of death, manages eventually to mesmerise him so much that he decides to marry her in spite of their social differences. After getting married, her only wish is to become a good housewife, which was even then considered the only appropriate role for women. Even the heroines of female authors, such as Jane Austen, although more intelligent



16 John Milton, Paradise Lost, ed. Barbara K. Lewalski (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2007), 100-101. 17 Ibid., 100.

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and realistic than those created by male authors, after a short struggle against their society and its imposed roles and standards of behaviour, adjust, get married and continue to live in the only way available to women, as wives, mothers and housewives. This happens even to her favourite heroine, Elizabeth Bennet from Pride and Prejudice (1813), who, in spite of her “unfeminine” and “unconventional” behaviour, strong intelligence, dark eyes, and two rejected marriage proposals, becomes in the end the happy wife of the wealthy and dignified Mr. Darcy, and the mistress of his magnificent estate, Pemberley.

Women in the Victorian Era Although the question of the position of women was present in the previous centuries, it seems that the discussion about their nature, abilities, rights and duties reached its peak during the 19th and at the beginning of the 20th century. This was mostly connected with the fact that family in Victorian society became, more than ever, the centre of the religious, cultural and emotional life in Britain. Surely, this phenomenon, as well as others during that period, was connected with the increasing industrialisation of the British economy, which transformed the household from a place of work into a home, a sanctuary which gave people temporary protection from the ruthless competition of the business world. As a result of this, men and women were efficiently separated in two spheres—the private (home) and the public (outside world). In this process, the most important role was played by the increasingly wealthy middle class, which created the cult of a perfect family with “a male breadwinner, employed outside the home, and his female helpmeet, who nurtured the children, managed the servants, and served as a paragon of domestic virtue.”18 Moreover, the fact that the wife did not have to work outside the home was a symbol of her husband’s business success. Even people from the working class, in spite of their rather modest life conditions, tried to emulate as much as possible the life style and the moral values of their richer neighbours, which additionally shows the cultural and ideological dominance of the middle class. The ideal of home and family was formed and promoted even among the high classes. Throughout her reign, Queen Victoria, unlike her ancestors George IV and William IV, “was a paragon of good manners,

 18

Joseph Black, ed., The Victorian Era. Vol. 5 of The Broadview Anthology of British Literature (Peterborough, Ontario: Broadview, 2006), li.

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constraint and moral uprightness.”19 In 1840, three years after her coronation, she married her cousin, Prince Albert of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha, and gave him nine children. In that way she became “the nation’s icon of domestic femininity and maternal fecundity.”20 She supported the separation of the male and female spheres and expressed the conventional feminine aversion towards power by claiming that women, if they wanted to be good, feminine and amiable housewives, should not rule, which she proved by letting her husband make most decisions. When he died of typhoid in 1861, she was devastated and in the following fifteen years she secluded herself as much as possible from the public gaze, showing once more that a woman’s duties and priorities were mostly domestic. 21 With her exemplary life and conventional attitudes, she perfectly fit the cultural image derived from Coventry Patmore’s narrative poem “The Angel in the House” (1854-63), in which “the figure of the sexless angel crosses into domestic ideology, embodying all the Christian virtues of love, purity and self-sacrifice so as to act as moral centre of the family.”22 Ironically, this image of the ideal woman was supported by two otherwise conflicted concepts—religion and science. From the religious point of view, woman’s nature has always been considered inferior, imperfect, and even inherently evil. This “weaker vessel” was too unstable, foolish and vain to be able to protect itself, so it was supposed to be confined in the home and guarded by religion. Without this protection, these daughters of Eve, or the so-called “magdalenes,” would continue to sin and ruin men with their own bad example, and by being protected in this way, they would all turn into “madonnas,” the descendants of the Virgin Mary, who would then become responsible for keeping their husbands and children free of sin. This process is best described by Françoise Basch: Thus the woman, the very ideal of mother and wife, source of all virtue and purity, appeared as the good conscience of Victorian society. Poets, moralists and philosophers embellished the domestic and family role of the woman with a universal and transcendental dimension. But the mutation of the

 19

Ibid. Ibid., lii. 21 On the other hand, Victoria privately expressed ambivalent attitudes towards family, marriage and childbirth. In her private letters, she was honest about her great disappointment in her eldest son, her belief that marriage for women was frequently a disastrous affair, as well as about her feelings of revulsion towards infants. This only shows that in the Victorian age the public image was more important than private thoughts. 22 Jeannette King, The Victorian Woman Question in Contemporary Feminist Fiction (Basingstoke, Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), 11. 20

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Eve myth into the Mary myth, of temptress into redeemer, implied a fundamental process of desexualization of the woman, who was bit by bit deprived of her carnal attributes: the housewife became at once the pillar of the home and the priestess of a temple. Some even went so far—whether or not under pretext of a scientific investigation—as to affirm categorically the absence of sexual instinct in woman.23

So, this old religious misogynistic view of women was reinforced by the newly popularised scientific discussion about the natural differences between men and women, which was mostly a consequence of the appearance of Darwin’s books The Origin of Species (1859) and The Descent of Man (1871). Scientists such as Thomas Laycock and George Romanes claimed that women had a smaller brain, which meant that their intellectual power was inferior to men’s. In addition, it was believed that women’s relative physical weakness made them “less able to sustain the fatigue of serious or prolonged brain action.”24 Besides, Victorian scientists Patrick Geddes and J. Arthur Thomson, based on their interpretation of sex differences, concluded that men and women differed in their anatomy, physiology, temperament, and intellect. Their findings are best summarized by Cynthia Eagle Russett: The reason for woman’s arrested development was the need to preserve her energies for reproduction; she suffered a foreshortened maturation, but the race gained. And her weaknesses were actually strengths: Darwinian sexual selection explained physical and behavioral differences between the sexes as advantageous in finding mates. Thus women became fragilely attractive, while men grew muscular and courageous, each sex loving in the other what it did not find in itself. It followed, therefore, that women could never expect to match the intellectual and artistic achievements of men, nor could they expect an equal share of power and authority. Nature had decreed a secondary role for women. The great principle of division of labor was here brought to bear: men produced, women reproduced. This was called complementarity.25

These physical differences were simply transferred to the characters of men and women, so it was generally believed that men were “inherently courageous, virile, and combative, and women intuitive, passive, and

 23

Françoise Basch, Relative Creatures: Victorian Women in Society and the Novel, trans. Anthony Rudolf (London: Allen Lane, 1974), 8. 24 Quoted in King, The Victorian Woman Question in Contemporary Feminist Fiction, 13. 25 Cynthia Eagle Russett, Sexual Science: The Victorian Construction of Womanhood (Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard UP, 1991), 11-12.

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altruistic.”26 Such conclusions were then used by the authors such as Isabella Beeton and Sarah Stickney Ellis, who wrote very popular manuals on housekeeping, intended especially for the middle-class wife. These works provided a number of desirable things to their readers, including “the recognition that wifehood did not always come naturally and that the job of the middle-class Victorian wife was neither uncomplicated nor easy.” 27 Besides offering practical advice on cooking, cleaning and overseeing the household, these manuals also instructed the wife “that she was responsible for the ‘moral tone’ that turned an establishment from a house into a home and kept married men mindful of their own domestic duties.”28 So, the women who managed to keep their house clean and tidy, to provide delicious meals and a decent conversation and entertainment, like singing or playing the piano, and who, in addition, were gentle and loving mothers and had a pleasant, positive character, were considered to be doing their job successfully because in that way they encouraged their “husbands to hurry home from their work instead of spending their evenings in dissipation.”29 Those who failed at this, or those who dared to have a mind of their own, or to want something different, and especially those who expressed any level of physical desire, were doomed to criticism, judgment, isolation, or in “extreme” cases, such as adultery, even to exile or death punishment. Fortunately, not all intellectuals of the period believed in the inherent differences between men and women and their separate roles in society. Among them was the famous philosopher John Stuart Mill, whose essay The Subjection of Women (1869) states that women have been enslaved by men and that their so-called nature is just a product of the patriarchal culture: What is now called the nature of women is an eminently artificial thing— the result of forced repression in some directions, unnatural simulation in others. It may be asserted without scruple, that no other class of dependents have had their character so entirely distorted from its natural proportions by their relation with their masters […] In the case of women, a hot-house and stove cultivation has always been carried on some of the capabilities of their nature, for the benefit and pleasure of their masters.30

 26

Black, The Victorian Era, lxi. Claudia Nelson, Family Ties in Victorian England (Westport, CT and London: Praeger, 2007), 26. 28 Ibid., 27. 29 Ibid. 30 John Stuart Mill, On Liberty and Other Essays, ed. John Gray (Oxford: OUP, 2008), 493. 27

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He believed in equality between the sexes and fought for the right of women to decide on their own what they want to do in life and which roles they want to assume. Thanks to him and his female colleagues such as Harriet Martineau, Barbara Bodichon, Josephine Butler, Emily Davis, Millicent Garrett Fawcett and many others, the position of women in Victorian England finally began to change for the better.

Women in the Victorian Novel The novel as the leading literary genre of the period was also used by the middle class for promotion of their most precious values, including the imposed distinction between the spheres and the “angel in the house” image of women. Fortunately, not all novelists supported these concepts, or at least they were able to find some significant faults with them. Therefore, in major Victorian novels the main female character usually does not fit the given standards of physical appearance or moral behaviour. She is constantly criticised by her environment for not being feminine enough. This is particularly the case in the novels which belong to the genre of bildungsroman, such as Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights (1847), or Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre (1847), and especially George Eliot’s The Mill on the Floss (1860), whose heroines in their early age are disobedient, tomboyish, and a bit wild. They generally do not care about their appearance, and they would rather go out with their male friends and brothers than stay inside, play with their dolls, and keep their dresses perfectly clean. This is particularly the case with Catherine Earnshaw from Wuthering Heights, whose character is described by her “nanny” or substitute mother Nelly Dean in the following words: She had ways with her such as I never saw a child take up before; and she put all of us past our patience fifty times and oftener in a day: from the hour she came downstairs till the hour she went to bed, we had not a minute’s security that she wouldn’t be in mischief.31

When it comes to her relationship with her father, “his peevish reproofs wakened in her a naughty delight to provoke him,” and in play “she liked exceedingly to act the little mistress; using her hands freely, and commanding her companions.”32 Similar to her are Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre and Eliot’s Maggie Tulliver, who also have behavioral “issues,” which are in their case more provoked by the unfair treatment received

 31 32

Emily Brontë, Wuthering Heights (London: Penguin, 1994), 49. Ibid.

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from their family members or their surroundings, than a matter of their “naughty” character. In addition to their “unfeminine” behaviour, these heroines mostly possess “unconventional” physical features such as: a more than average height, dark straight hair, and dark eyes. This is mostly the “problem” of Maggie Tulliver, who is often called a gypsy and whose hair is one of the most important topics of her family’s discussions. One of her most rebellious childhood acts is also connected with her hair, because she decides to cut it off in order to prevent her family from scolding her for not keeping it tidy and curly. For Mike Edwards, this decision has a more complex meaning: On one level it is an attempt to meet the repeated demand that she should be tidy and get on with her patchwork like a conventional young lady; her father more than once says that her hair should be cut off. However, no one expects her to take this radical step herself, and in doing so she is wreaking vengeance for the burden of expectation placed upon her. On another level it is a denial of herself: she cuts off her hair because she wants to discipline its disorderliness. Yet again, she is denying her sexuality to the extent that hair is conventionally associated with sexuality and sexual difference. From another point of view, she is asserting her right to define herself, and it is this view that matches the mood of the extract most nearly.33

What is important in both of these cases is the fact that early criticism of their unladylike behaviour and appearance affects their adult life too, because even if they turn into beautiful women, which is the case with Catherine and Maggie, they do not know how to deal with this and often feel insecure. Besides, their unconventional character is often made even more obvious by contrasting them with their opposites. In almost all of these novels, the unconventional heroine has her conventional counterpart. In Wuthering Heights, it is Edgar Linton’s sister Isabella, who is blonde, curly, neat, innocent and naïve, which makes her a very easy prey for the grown up Heathcliff, who manipulates her into marrying him in order to to take revenge on Edgar for marrying his beloved Catherine. In a way, her daughter Cathy could be considered her opposite too, since she is less dark, less wild, and more ladylike. In Jane Eyre, Jane’s opposites in her childhood are her self-righteous and religious cousin Eliza and her beautiful and spoiled cousin Georgiana Reed. At Lowood, she is

 33

Mike Edwards, George Eliot: The Novels (Basingstoke, Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), 38.

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contrasted with the religious, passive, martyr character, Helen Burns, and with the kind and generous superintendent, Miss Maria Temple. At Thornfield, she is juxtaposed with Mr Rochester’s potential wife, the beautiful and cold Blanche Ingram, and at Moor House with her cousins, the kind and intelligent Diana and Mary Rivers. In Thackeray’s Vanity Fair (1847-48), the two main characters are contrasted in the similar way. The orphaned Rebecca Sharp belongs in a way to the temptress type, because she uses her beauty and wit to manipulate men into giving her money and expensive gifts. For this purpose she sometimes even pretends to be an innocent and naïve girl. On the other hand, her school friend Amelia Sedley is another “angel in the house” character, polite, wellbehaved, kind, loving, but weak, boring, passive, spoiled and sometimes even selfish. Hardy’s Tess from Tess of the d’Urbervilles (1891) does not have a real counterpart, except for Mercy Chant, a well-educated and pious girl, whom Angel’s parents would like to see as their daughter-in-law. In The Mill on the Floss, this opposition becomes more significant since Maggie’s “rival” appears in the form of her perfect cousin Lucy Dean, who is a pretty, little, pale, curly blonde, always well-behaved and neat, with the heart of gold and the smile of an angel. Maggie is more than other heroines aware of the fact that women like Lucy have a better chance of succeeding both in real life and in literature. This can be seen from the scene when Maggie returns a book34 she has borrowed from Philip because she does not want to read any longer about blond women triumphing over dark ones. “I didn’t finish the book,” said Maggie. “As soon as I came to the blondhaired young lady reading in the park, I shut it up, and determined to read no further. I foresaw that the lightcomplexioned girl would win away all the love from Corinne and make her miserable. I’m determined to read no more books where the blond-haired women carry away all the happiness. I should begin to have a prejudice against them. If you could give me some story, now, where the dark woman triumphs, it would restore the balance.”35

When Philip jokingly suggests that she might avenge the dark women in her own person by carrying away all the love from her cousin Lucy, Maggie is far from amused:

 34 35

It is Corinne, a novel by Madame de Staël (1766-1817). George Eliot, The Mill on the Floss (Ware: Wordsworth, 1999), 298.

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Conventions in the Presentation of Women in Victorian Literature “Philip, that is not pretty of you, to apply my nonsense to anything real,” said Maggie, looking hurt. “As if I, with my old gowns and want of all accomplishments, could be a rival of dear little Lucy, who knows and does all sorts of charming things, and is ten times prettier than I am—even if I were odious and base enough to wish to be her rival. Besides, I never go to aunt Deane’s when any one is there: it is only because dear Lucy is good, and loves me, that she comes to see me, and will have me go to see her sometimes.”36

Eventually, Maggie does “take away all the love” from Lucy because Lucy’s fiancé, Stephen Guest, falls in love with Maggie the way he has never fallen in love with Lucy. But, before that, when he sees that “tall, dark-eyed nymph with her jet-black coronet of hair”37 for the first time, he concludes that she is too peculiar for him and not the marrying type although he finds himself instantly attracted to her. His reason tells him that Lucy is the right kind of woman for him: Was not Stephen Guest right in his decided opinion that this slim maiden of eighteen was quite the sort of wife a man would not be likely to repent of marrying? […] A man likes his wife to be pretty: well, Lucy was pretty, but not to a maddening extent. A man likes his wife to be accomplished, gentle, affectionate, and not stupid; and Lucy had all these qualifications. […] Stephen was aware that he had sense and independence enough to choose the wife who was likely to make him happy, unbiased by any indirect considerations. He meant to choose Lucy: she was a little darling, and exactly the sort of woman he had always most admired.38

But later on, Stephen stops listening to his reason and starts listening to his heart and passion, and even proposes to Maggie, hoping that this girl of unconventional beauty and behaviour will agree to become his wife. However, Maggie rejects his offer because she cannot build her own happiness on Lucy and Philip’s suffering. In that way, she lays a path to her own final destruction. Most of these unconventional, rebellious, and dark heroines break under the pressures of their society and end their life tragically. Since their authors seem to be supportive and fond of them, their tragic end cannot be considered as a condemnation of their unconventional behaviour but of the unfairness and cruelty of their society. This is not just the matter of their not fitting the standard model of appearance and behaviour; it is also the

 36

Ibid., 299. Ibid., 336. 38 Ibid., 331-332. 37

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matter of the unrealistic expectations that their society imposes on them. Even the strongest and toughest of them seem to desire at some point of their life to meet these expectations, to be what the society wants them to be, or simply to fit in. By doing this, they commit a sin against their own nature, which is painful enough, but the real pain comes with the discovery that this is not enough and that, whatever they do, they will never be considered good enough. By becoming a lady and marrying the rich and respectable Edgar Linton, Catherine Earnshaw for a while manages to control her temper, but when Heathcliff returns, she realises that she has made a mistake and that she cannot be satisfied with her present false life. But the realisation comes too late and she is now torn between her two men—Heathcliff, the love of her life, her soul mate, and Edgar, her loving husband. This situation exhausts her both physically and mentally, and she dies giving birth to her daughter Cathy, leaving both of her “tormentors” inconsolable. Maggie Tulliver also gives in to the pressures of her family and environment. Her need for approval and love makes her do things which go against her natural instincts and deep desires. She gives up Philip Wakem, her spiritual mentor, because she cannot bear the thought of being despised by her beloved brother and her dear ruined father, who consider both Philip and his father, the diabolical lawyer Wakem, their greatest enemies. She gives up Stephen Guest, her first, true, passionate love, because she cannot live with the idea of hurting Philip, Lucy, and, again, her brother Tom. And when she finally returns home after rejecting Stephen’s proposal, she is not rewarded and praised by her society for making the right decision, but condemned as a fallen woman, who has spent several days alone with her cousin’s fiancé and returned unmarried. It is no wonder that in the end the prospect of dying in an attempt to save her brother from the flood seems more appealing than staying in the environment that does not support her, or moving to another place, where she would lead a lonesome, loveless, and weary existence. Hardy’s Tess also fails to meet the expectations of her two men. Her seducer, Alec, sees her as a temptress, an Eve, or as every other woman who says that she had not found out his real intentions until it was too late. After she leaves him and refuses his financial help and the position of his mistress, he realises that she is not like other women and her passive acceptance of her ill fate and her complete lack of artfulness and manipulative skills touch him so deeply that for a while he gives up the life of a rich scoundrel for a humble existence of a convert and a preacher. The love of her life, the misnamed Angel, considers her a pagan goddess, an essence of woman, an innocent child of nature, a paragon of rural

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purity, and when she finally tells him that she has lost her virginity to another man, he simply concludes that she is not the same woman and gives her up. In her state of utter deprivation, when the only thing she can think about is how to help her homeless family, she yields to Alec again, and becomes, what he has always wanted her to be, his mistress. The penitent Angel returns from Brazil after he has realised that Tess is pure in spite of everything that has happened to her. But it is too late, and Tess, torn between her “natural” husband whom she hates, and her legal husband, whom she loves, becomes temporarily insane and kills the one who has violated both her body and soul and given her the label of a fallen woman. For this, she is punished by being hanged in prison, and her unnecessary death once more reminds us how difficult it was to be different in a society that celebrated uniformity and conventions.

Works Cited Austen, Jane. Pride and Prejudice. Ware: Wordsworth, 1992. Basch, Françoise. Relative Creatures: Victorian Women in Society and the Novel. Trans. Anthony Rudolf. London: Allen Lane, 1974. Beowulf: A New Verse Translation. Translated by Seamus Heaney. New York and London: W. W. Norton, 2001. Black, Joseph. Ed. The Victorian Era.Vol. 5 of The Broadview Anthology of British Literature. Peterborough, Ontario: Broadview, 2006. Borroff, Marie. Introduction to Sir Gawain and the Green Knight: A New Verse Translation. New York: W. W. Norton, 1967. Brontë, Charlotte. Jane Eyre. London: Penguin, 1994. Brontë, Emily. Wuthering Heights, London: Penguin, 1994. Chaucer, Geoffrey. The Canterbury Tales. Trans. Nevill Coghill. London: Penguin, 2003. Drabble, Margaret and Jenny Stringer. Eds. Concise Companion to English Literature. Oxford: OUP, 1996. Duncan-Jones, Katherine. Ed. The Arden Shakespeare: Shakespeare’s Sonnets. London: Thomas Nelson and Sons, 1998. Edwards, Mike. George Eliot: The Novels. Basingstoke, Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003. Eliot, George. The Mill on the Floss. Ware, Hertfordshire: Wordsworth, 1999. Hardy, Thomas. Tess of the d’Urbervilles. Ware, Hertfordshire: Wordsworth, 2000. King, Jeannette. The Victorian Woman Question in Contemporary Feminist Fiction. Basingstoke, Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005.

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Mill, John Stuart. On Liberty and Other Essays. Ed. John Gray. Oxford: OUP, 2008. Milton, John. Paradise Lost. Edited by Barbara K. Lewalski. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2007. Nelson, Claudia. Family Ties in Victorian England. Westport, CT and London: Praeger, 2007. Richardson, Samuel. Pamela. London: Penguin, 1980. Russett, Cynthia Eagle. Sexual Science: The Victorian Construction of Womanhood. Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard UP, 1991. Sanders, Andrew. The Short Oxford History of English Literature. 3rd ed. Oxford: OUP, 2003. Sir Gawain and the Green Knight: A New Verse Translation. Trans. Marie Borroff. New York: W. W. Norton, 1967. Spenser, Edmund. The Faerie Queene: The Book One. Ed. Carol V. Kaske. Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 2006. Thackeray, William Makepeace. Vanity Fair. Ware, Hertfordshire: Wordsworth, 2001. Vendler, Helen. The Art of Shakespeare’s Sonnets. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1999.

EMILY DICKINSON AND THE CHALLENGE OF CONVENTION ARBEN BUSHGJOKAJ

Emily Dickinson responded to the cultural and conventional pressures which shaped the lives and works of writers and poets in the nineteenth century, especially when it came to female writers and poets.The context, the forms, and the practices of writing poetry in the nineteenth century shed light on the emergence of Dickinson as a world poet. When most female writers tried to engage in the ideologies that defined the writer or poet of the time and yet stayed within the conventions indicated, Dickinson appears to be bolder and braver and venture beyond the imposed conventions. This appears to increase rather than diminish the mystery of Dickinson as a poet and her greatness in later literary scholarship. In recent years, many scholars have rejected the popular view of Emily Dickinson as a heartsick recluse who spent her entire life pining for an unnamed lover, foregoing sex and companionship in order to concentrate more fully on her writing. Some scholars have argued that research on Emily Dickinson has focused too heavily on her personal life and on the importance of men to her poetry. There can be no doubt, however, that her poetry was a forerunner to modern poetry and that her poems contained some of the most unusual and daring innovations in the history of American poetry. Emily Dickinson, the “Belle of Amherst,” is one of the most highlyregarded poets ever to write. In America, perhaps only Walt Whitman is her equal in legend and in degree of influence. Dickinson, the famous recluse dressed in white, secretly produced an enormous canon of poetry while locked in her room and refusing visitor after visitor. Her personal life and its mysteries have sometimes overshadowed her achievements in poetry and her extraordinary innovations in poetic form, to the dismay of some scholars. The Dickinsons were a visibly spiritual family, attending church every Sunday at the Congregational Church in Amherst. Early in her life, Emily

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found she was ambivalent about religion and could not commit to joining the church officially. When Emily was sixteen, she began to prepare for Mount Holyoke Female Seminary in South Hadley, at that time one of the best boarding schools in New England. In the fall of 1847, Emily and her father traveled by stagecoach to Mount Holyoke Female Seminary. The headmistress of Mount Holyoke, a woman named Mary Lyon, was a religious woman and hoped that many of her pupils would become missionaries and travel to distant lands to convert people to Christianity. At school, Dickinson enjoyed her studies and excelled at them. Although she still missed her family terribly, she had adjusted well to life away from home. Mount Holyoke’s headmistress, Mary Lyon, felt religion was an important part of the girls’ education, and she made it clear that she expected a public declaration of Christian faith from each of her pupils. Dickinson did not feel prepared to make such a declaration. One morning, Lyon stood in front of the entire school at devotions and said: “All young ladies who wish to share that inestimable privilege of becoming Christians will please rise.”1 Every girl in the school stood up except Dickinson, who remained quietly in her seat. Her refusal to stand was an act of bravery, and she fully expected a reprimand. She did not receive one, but for the rest of her time at Mount Holyoke, the other girls thought her very peculiar. Dickinson was labeled an impenitent or a no-hoper, for there was no hope for her soul.2 The Dickinsons were slightly perplexed by Emily Dickinson’s behavior at school. They had not told her to object to the school’s fasting and meditation dictate, and they did wish Dickinson were more religious, but they were not angry with her. The Mount Holyoke administration, though slightly scandalized, welcomed Dickinson back to school despite her steadfast objections. After resting at home for a few weeks Dickinson did finish her term at Mount Holyoke, but she never returned for another school year. Edward Dickinson preferred that Emily stay in Amherst and, if she wanted, take classes at Amherst College. Dickinson was very social as a young woman, despite her later reputation as a recluse. When she resettled at the family home in Amherst, Dickinson regularly attended parties and usually found herself the center of a group of people who were dazzled by her intelligence and wit.

 1

Alfred Habegger, My Wars Are Laid Away in Books: The Life of Emily Dickinson (New York: Random House, 2001), 143. 2 Richard B. Sewall, The Life of Emily Dickinson (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard UP, 1980), 201.

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Dickinson turned twenty in 1850, an eventful year both politically and socially. In New England, a religious movement called The Great Revival was taking place. A fervent renewal of Christian spirituality, the Revival inspired huge numbers of people to officially join churches and declare their faith in Christ. Officially joining the church required a public declaration of faith, and for a man like Edward Dickinson, faith was a private matter. However, on August 11, 1850, he officially joined his church. Lavinia did, too. Dickinson, still unconvinced and unsure, did not.3 Dickinson thought a lot about the Congregationalist faith. She could not accept all of its tenets, and its concepts of judgment and hell frightened her. She gave religious matters her thorough attention. Religious imagery found its way into her poems, which she was writing with more frequency now. She wrote about faith, domestic matters, nature, immortality and, increasingly, death. Dickinson was becoming preoccupied with death and the soul, and her own spiritual investigations gave her a deep well of imagery and metaphor for her poems. She began holding together her many poems in little books which she stitched together using needle and thread. Something changed in her life, and that change is one of the greatest mysteries surrounding Dickinson’s legend. Some time around 1850 she began writing poetry. Her first poems were traditional and followed established form, but as time passed and she began producing huge amounts of poetry, Dickinson began experimenting especially with poetic form. She was also experimenting with structure. Many of her innovations form the basis of modern poetry. In 1862, Dickinson read an article in The Atlantic Monthly by a man named Thomas Wentworth Higginson. The article was titled “Letter to a Young Contributor” and it was full of advice for struggling writers. Its publication seemed almost like a sign. Dickinson and her sister-in-law, Sue, had been brainstorming names of prominent literary figures whom they could approach with Dickinson’s poems. Both women believed that Dickinson needed an objective critic to assess the literary merit of her poems. When Higginson’s article appeared, Dickinson and Sue decided that he was their man. Thomas Wentworth Higginson was a man of letters and a social reformer. He was an abolitionist, and he was in favor of women’s rights. Dickinson admired Higginson’s writing. On April 15, 1862, Dickinson sent Higginson a short note along with four of her poems. She hoped to find in him the kind of mentor or supportive critic that Benjamin Newton

 3

Ibid., 203.

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had been before he died. In her letter to Higginson, Dickinson effectively asked him to be her mentor. In his response, Higginson was encouraging, but not effusive in his praise of her verse. In fact, he urged her not to seek publication since her poems, “though lively and imaginative, lacked form.”4 At times they even seemed technically inept. Dickinson was crushed by Higginson’s response. She took to her bed for a week before responding to his letter. Dickinson had sent the poems certain that they would overawe Higginson, who would urge her to publish immediately. In fact, Higginson was impressed by Dickinson’s poems, but their lack of sheen and roughhewn structure discomfited him. He asked Dickinson if she had ever read Whitman, whose poetry had a similar roughness of structure. Higginson and Dickinson continued corresponding regularly. In later letters, and after having read more of her poetry, Higginson made his admiration for Dickinson’s talent more clear, telling her that she was a gifted poet but should take the next couple of years to study form and polish her verses. Higginson found Dickinson’s enigmatic and extraordinary letters sometimes baffling, sometimes annoyingly oblique, and often enchanting. Dickinson persistently and humbly sought out Thomas Wentworth Higginson’s advice on her poetry, yet she never heeded it. She did not change one word of any of her poems to please him.5 In 1870, Higginson invited Dickinson to visit him in Boston and see him read a paper at a gathering. She declined. Although Higginson’s response to Dickinson’s poetry during their correspondence was restrained and mild, after her death—and as her legend grew and grew—he said that she had been a poet of genius, which he had believed all along. Dickinson began to make her greatest strides in composition. She was incorporating assonant rhyme, broken meter, and unusual and unexpected capitalization of nouns, playing with form in an entirely new way. Higginson characterized her seemingly random capitalization as typical of the Old English style of “distinguishing every noun substantive.”6 In 1870, Thomas Wentworth Higginson and Emily Dickinson would finally meet face to face. In early August, Higginson wrote Dickinson a note saying he would be in Amherst for business around the fifteenth and would like to come see her. She replied saying she would be delighted to finally meet him. After dropping off his suitcases at a hotel in Amherst, Higginson arrived at the Dickinson home. There are detailed facts of the



4 Charles R. Anderson, Stairway of Surprise: Emily Dickinson’s Poetry (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1960), 182. 5 Richard Chase, Emily Dickinson (New York, 1951), 92. 6 E. Miller Budick, Emily Dickinson and the Life of Language: A Study in Symbolic Poetics (London-Baton Rouge: Louisiana State UP, 1985), 144.

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meeting, because Higginson wrote a letter to his wife that night. While waiting for Dickinson in the parlor, he spotted two of his recent books displayed on the shelves. When Dickinson did enter the room, she looked almost like an apparition, holding two-day lilies in her hands. She held the flowers out to Higginson, whispering: “These are my introduction.” The two had a lengthy, odd conversation. Higginson spent most of the visit staring at the unusual woman in wonderment and trying to guess at the meaning of her inscrutable statements.7 During the 1860s and 1870s, Dickinson grew even more reclusive. She stopped wearing clothes that had any hint of color and dressed only in white, she turned away almost every visitor who came to see her, and she locked herself in her room for days at a time.8 Dickinson’s poor health worried her family. They felt sure that her earlier shock, which today would be called a nervous breakdown, was causing all her health problems. Dickinson’s sister Lavinia carried the burden of all the household chores so that her sister could spend her days locked away in her room, writing and reading. Dickinson’s writing haven was filled with plants and flowers. She often sent notes to her sister-in-law Sue Gilbert with a pretty dried flower enclosed. On June 19th, her father’s funeral day, so many mourners were packed into the Dickinson house in Amherst that they spilled out onto the lawn. Emily Dickinson remained in her room during the funeral. She had made a lovely funeral wreath of daisies and this was the only adornment on Edward Dickinson’s coffin. For a week after the funeral, Dickinson wandered around the house in a daze. Exactly one year after Edward’s death, Dickinson’s mother woke up and found she couldn’t move her limbs. She had likely suffered a severe stroke. She was feeble and required constant care, which Dickinson administered to her. Dickinson suffered her first blackout in the spring of 1884. She began to weaken. In April 1884, doctors diagnosed an advanced case of Bright’s Disease, or nephritis, an inflammation of the kidney. Shortly thereafter, Dickinson received the news that Otis Lord had died. For the next two years, Dickinson was effectively an invalid. She rarely left her bed and did not write poetry. In the winter of 1885, Dickinson chose to refuse more medical examinations. As she lay back against her pillows, weak and sick, Dickinson composed her last poem, “So give me back death.”

 7

Denis Donoghue, “Emily Dickinson,” in Connoisseurs of Chaos (New York: Macmillan, 1965), 127-128. 8 John Cody, After Great Pain: The Inner Life of Emily Dickinson (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1971), 121.

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During the first weeks of May 1886, Dickinson seemed to sense her impending death. On May 13th, she complained to Lavinia that she felt especially ill and that it was becoming difficult to breathe. Later that day she fell into a coma. The family held a vigil around her bedside for sixty hours. On the evening of May 16th, Emily Dickinson died. She was buried in a white coffin in Amherst. After she was buried, Lavinia and Sue burned Dickinson’s letters, as she had asked. As she continued to clean out Dickinson’s room, Lavinia stumbled upon a locked box with no label. It was the repository of Dickinson’s life’s work—all of her poetry. Lavinia was astonished, and could not bring herself to burn the poems. As time passed, Lavinia happened upon many secret stashes of poetry and envelopes filled with scraps of paper covered front and back with verse. She immediately felt a deep, intense need to see the poems published. Lavinia would be the first to introduce the world to Dickinson’s poetry. *** Emily Dickinson’s poetry has constantly puzzled scholars and critics who have engaged themselves in the study and analysis of her life and work. In light of the religious concerns in Dickinson studies, Robert Bellah comments that a person’s “life and work are an effort to find a form which will reconcile inner needs and outer pressures.”9 Emily Dickinson’s life and work were not merely an effort but a “struggle […] to use her poetry as the form that expressed her faith, knowing fully well how difficult precise expression is.”10 Dickinson’s mission was to “Tell all the truth but tell it slant” (1129), and to “light lamps” (883), even though one day the poet herself would go out.11 In the early stages of scholarship, some remarked that Emily Dickinson’s poetry suffered from deficiencies in matters of style, grammar, and technicalities of good poetry. The major problems that were highlighted were that some poems are unfinished; a few even seem to be rough drafts; more than one version exists of a number of poems (since she did not publish these poems, she did not have to make a final decision about which word, line, or stanza she preferred); also, she included poems

 9

Robert Bellah, The New Religious Consciousness (NY: Harvard UP, 1997), xix. Regina, A. S. C. Siegfried, “Bibliographic Essay: Selected Criticism for Emily Dickinson’s Religious Background,” in Dickinson Studies. Vol. 52, 1984: 32. 11 Thomas H. Johnson ed., The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson (New York: Little, Brown and Co., 1961). Poems will be referred to by numbers as they appear in this edition, unless specified otherwise. 10

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in her letters, changing them to fit her correspondent or the subject of the letter; Emily Dickinson did not title her poems; the titles were assigned by early editors of her poems. Usually they are referred to by the first line; in her letters, she sometimes writes poems as prose and prose as poetry, so that it is hard to distinguish them; and her occasionally idiosyncratic spelling, punctuation, and word choice can be distracting to readers.12 Whatever the problems there might be, what matters is that Emily Dickinson’s poetry speaks powerfully to readers of all times. It captures her insights and recreates meaningful events in living; it helps us to understand and even to re-live our own experiences through her intensity and with her emotional and intellectual clarity. Her early poems, up to around 1861, are generally considered to be fairly conventional. They follow thematic interests that are sentimental and lack much of her later invention. Scholars disagree over whether some of her early love poetry, for instance, is sincere or humorous. Between 1861 and 1865, however, Dickinson entered what was to be her most creative period, in which she developed much of her experimental style and took on the themes of life and death that are now regarded as being among her most important subjects. Finally, after 1866 she moved into a new phase in which she wrote prodigiously, and which accounts for more than half her output. Dickinson’s poems are full of unconventional vocabulary and syntax, much of which was edited out of the few that were published in her lifetime. While she had phases of experimentation in certain areas, over the course of her life Dickinson had no single set way of structuring her poems. Rarely using the still common pentameter, she experimented with different meters including tri, tetra and di. Even when using these irregular meters, Dickinson would experiment still further, “sometimes running meters over the ends of lines and sometimes stopping them abruptly with dashes and ellipses. In fact, some scholars see her as one of the most experimental of all the 19th century American poets.”13 Dickinson was concerned with the essence of living. “She distilled or eliminated the inessential from experience until what was left was pure,” what was left was the quality or qualities that made the thing or experience itself, that distinguished it from all other things or experiences.14 This was

 12

Thomas Wentworth Higginson, “Emily Dickinson’s Letters,” in The Atlantic Monthly, October 1891, 132. 13 Lyndall Gordon, Lives like loaded guns: Emily Dickinson and her family’s feuds (London: Virago, 2010), 143. 14 Ruth Miller, The Poetry of Emily Dickinson (Middletown, Conn: Wesleyan UP, 1968), 167.

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one way she achieved the absolute. Henry W. Wells explains another result of her concern with essence, “Life is simplified, explained, and reduced to its essence by interpreting the vast whole in relation to the minute particle.”15 In her poems, Dickinson adopts a variety of personas, including a little girl, a queen, a bride, a bridegroom, a wife, a dying woman, a nun, a boy, and a bee. Though nearly 150 of her poems begin with “I,”the speaker is probably fictional, and the poem should not automatically be read as autobiography. Dickinson insisted on the distinction between her poetry and her life: “When I state myself, as the Representative of the Verse, it does not mean—me—but a supposed person.”16 Her seeking the crux of experience affected her style. As part of her seeking essence or the heart of things, she distilled or eliminated inessential language and punctuation from her poems. She leaves out helping verbs and connecting words; she drops endings from verbs and nouns. It is not always clear what her pronouns refer to; sometimes a pronoun refers to a word which does not appear in the poem. At her best, she achieves breathtaking effects by compressing language. Her disregard for the rules of grammar and sentence structure is one reason twentieth century critics found her so appealing; her use of language anticipates the way modern poets use language. The downside of her language is that the compression may be so drastic that the poem is incomprehensible; it becomes a riddle or an intellectual puzzle. Dickinson said in a letter, “All men say ‘what’ to me”; readers are still saying “What?” in response to some of her poems. Her seclusion may have contributed to the obscurity of her poetry. One danger of living alone, in one’s own consciousness, is that the individual may begin to create private meanings for words and private symbols, which others do not have the key to. So language, instead of communicating, baffles the reader. Dickinson does fall into this trap occasionally. Dickinson was enamored of language; she enjoyed words for their own sake, as words. One of her amusements was to read Webster’s Dictionary (1844) and to savor words and their definitions. This interest gives a number of her poems their form—they are really definitions of words, for example “Pain has an element of blank,” “Renunciation is a piercing virtue,” or “Hope is the thing with feathers.” Her linguistic mastery and sense of the dramatic combine in the often striking first lines of her poems,

 15

Henry W. Wells, An Introduction to Emily Dickinson (Chicago: Packard, 1947), 78. 16 Higginson, Letters, 139.

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such as “Just lost when I was saved!,” “I like a look of Agony,” and “I can wade grief.” Dickinson consistently uses the meters of English hymns. She uses the dash to emphasize, to indicate a missing word or words, or to replace a comma or period. She changes the function or part of speech of a word; adjectives and verbs may be used as nouns; for example, in “We talk in careless—and in loss,” careless is an adjective used as a noun. She frequently uses be instead of is or are. She tends to capitalize nouns, for no apparent reason other than that they are nouns. To casual readers of poetry, it may seem that Dickinson uses rhyme infrequently. They are thinking of exact rhyme (for example, see, tree). She does use rhyme, but she uses forms of rhyme that were not generally accepted till late in the nineteenth century and are used by modern poets. Dickinson experimented with rhyme, and her poetry shows what subtle effects can be achieved with these rhymes. Dickinson uses identical rhyme (sane, insane) sparingly. She also uses eye rhyme (though, through), vowel rhymes (see, buy), imperfect rhymes (time, thin), and suspended rhyme (thing, along). She invented her own poetic language. As Cheryl Walker observes, “She created a unique voice in American poetry and would not modulate it.” The critic further remarks that “Dickinson’s style broke with convention. While other women were publishing long, flowery reflections on love, faith, and beauty, Dickinson’s poems fit the writer’s complex ideas into short, tight sentences, with a vocabulary hardly considered to the feminine sensibility of her time.”17 Along the same lines, another literary critic, Christopher Benfey declared that “Dickinson was a non-conformist in her poetry and in her life […]. The point is that Emily Dickinson’s particular skill did not lie in the originality.”18 In fact, the poem “I Dwell in Possibility” by Emily Dickinson is one of the many examples that can confirm these statements: I dwell in Possibility— A fairer House that Prose— More numerous than Windows— Superior—for Doors—

 17

Cheryl Walker, “Locating a Feminist Critical Practice: Between the Kingdom and the Glory,” in Emily Dickinson: a Celebration for Readers, eds. Suzanne Juhasz and C. Miller, Gordon and Breach (1989), 9-19. 18 Christopher Benfey, The World in a Frame (New York: George Braziller, 1989), 8, 30.

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Emily Dickinson and the Challenge of Convention Of Chamber as the Cedars Impregnable of eye— And for an everlasting Roof The Gambrels of the Sky – Of visitors—the fairest— For occupation—This— The Spreading wide my narrow Hands To gather Paradise—(17).

This style, invented by Emily Dickinson herself, she called it her “circumference of expression,” which is her philosophy of her “poetic art” and her “well-roundedness.” “Her distortions of the language are an example of her uniqueness [...] Her English is her own invention […] Her meter too is distinctive. At first glance it looks simple.”19 Over and over again, three and four beats alternate in four-line quatrains: This is my letter to the world That never wrote to Me— The simple news that Nature told— With tender majesty.

These homely rhymes have been traced to the meters of the hymns Emily Dickinson must have sung in church, hymns like this one by Isaac Watts: Come, sound his Praise abroad And hymns of Glory sing: Jehovah is the Sovereign God The universal King.

She may also have studied hymn meters more carefully in her father’s copy of Watts’s Christian Psalmody. But Emily was too original to be content for long with anyone else’s rules. Sometimes she took daring liberties with the pat rhythms of the hymns, breaking the singsong meters to suit her meanings: Just lost, when I was saved! Just felt the world go by! Just girt me for the onset with Eternity, When breath blew back, And on the other side I heard recede the disappointed tide!” (100-101).

 19

Jane Langton, Emily Dickinson (San Diego: David Bender, 1997), 99.

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Though Emily Dickinson was rejected in her time because of her unconventional style, she is, however, the first modern American poet. By the uniqueness or the originality of her poetry, she revolutionized our poetic world. She deliberately broke with convention in order to create her own path. Thanks to her, we’ve had since generations of poets who’ve realized that being a poet means being creative. In her work, Dickinson asserts the importance of the self, a theme closely related to Dickinson’s censure of God. As Dickinson understood it, the mere act of speaking or writing is an affirmation of the will, and the “call of the poet,” in particular, is the call “to explore and express the self to others.”20 For Dickinson, the “self” entails an understanding of identity according to the way it systematizes its perceptions of the world, forms its goals and values, and comes to judgments regarding what it perceives. Nearly all Dickinson’s speakers “behave according to the primacy of the self,” despite the efforts of others to intrude on them.21 Indeed, the self is never more apparent in Dickinson’s poetry than when the speaker brandishes it against some potentially violating force. In “They shut me up in Prose—” (613), the speaker taunts her captives, who have imprisoned her body but not her mind, which remains free and roaming. Because God most often plays the role of culprit as an omnipotent being, he can and does impose compromising conditions upon individuals according to his whim in Dickinson’s work. Against this power, the self is essentially defined. The individual is subject to any amount of suffering, but so long as he or she remains a sovereign self, he or she still has that which separates him or her from other animate and inanimate beings. I’m nobody! Who are you? Are you nobody, too? Then there’s a pair of us—don’t tell! They’d banish us, you know. How dreary to be somebody! How public, like a frog To tell your name the livelong day To an admiring bog!

The speaker exclaims that she is “Nobody,” and asks, “Who are you? / Are you—Nobody—too?” If so, she says, then they are a pair of nobodies,

 20

Thomas H. Johnson, Emily Dickinson: An Interpretive Biography (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard UP, 1955), 57. 21 Albert J. Gelpi, Emily Dickinson: The Mind of the Poet (New York: W. W. Norton, 1965), 122.

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and she admonishes her addressee not to tell, for “they’d banish us—you know!” She says that it would be “dreary” to be “Somebody”—it would be “public” and would require that, “like a Frog,” one tell one’s name “the livelong June— / To an admiring Bog!” Ironically, one of the most famous details of Dickinson lore today is that she was utterly un-famous during her lifetime—she lived a relatively reclusive life in Amherst, Massachusetts, and though she wrote nearly 1,800 poems, she published fewer than ten of them. This poem is her most famous and most playful defense of the kind of spiritual privacy she favored, implying that to be a Nobody is a luxury incomprehensible to the dreary Somebodies—for they are too busy keeping their names in circulation, croaking like frogs in a swamp in the summertime. This poem is an outstanding early example of Dickinson’s often jaunty approach to meter (she uses her trademark dashes quite forcefully to interrupt lines and interfere with the flow of her poem, as in “How dreary—to be—Somebody!”). Further, the poem vividly illustrates her surprising way with language. The juxtaposition in the line “How public—like a Frog—” shocks the firsttime reader, combining elements not typically considered together, and, thus, more powerfully conveying its meaning (frogs are “public” like public figures—or Somebodies—because they are constantly “telling their name”—croaking—to the swamp, reminding all the other frogs of their identities). The soul selects her own society, Then shuts the door; On her divine majority Obtrude no more. Unmoved, she notes the chariot’s pausing At her low gate; Unmoved, an emperor is kneeling Upon her mat. I’ve known her from an ample nation Choose one; Then close the valves of her attention Like stone.

The speaker says that “the Soul selects her own Society—” and then “shuts the Door,” refusing to admit anyone else—even if “an Emperor be kneeling / Upon her mat—.” Indeed, the soul often chooses no more than a single person from “an ample nation” and then closes “the Valves of her attention” to the rest of the world.

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Whereas “I’m Nobody! Who are you?” takes a playful tone to the idea of reclusiveness and privacy, the tone of “The Soul selects her own Society—” is quieter, grander, and more ominous. The idea that “The Soul selects her own Society” (that people choose a few companions who matter to them and exclude everyone else from their inner consciousness) conjures up images of a solemn ceremony with the ritual closing of the door, the chariots, the emperor, and the ponderous Valves of the Soul’s attention. Essentially, the middle stanza functions to emphasize the Soul’s stonily uncompromising attitude toward anyone trying to enter into her Society once the metaphorical door is shut—even chariots, even an emperor, cannot persuade her. The third stanza then illustrates the severity of the Soul’s exclusiveness—even from “an ample nation” of people, she easily settles on one single person to include, summarily and unhesitatingly locking out everyone else. The concluding stanza, with its emphasis on the “One” who is chosen, gives “The Soul selects her own Society—” the feel of a tragic love poem, although we need not reduce our understanding of the poem to see its theme as merely romantic. The poem is an excellent example of Dickinson’s tightly focused skills with metaphor and imagery; cycling through her regal list of door, divine Majority, chariots, emperor, mat, ample nation, and stony valves of attention, Dickinson continually surprises the reader with her vivid and unexpected series of images, each of which furthers the somber mood of the poem. *** Emily Dickinson will never be forgotten, not only for the kind of person she was, but also for her poetry and the important contributions she brought into American poetry. “After Emily Dickinson’s work became known, female poets in America could take their work more seriously. She redeemed the poetess for them, and made her a genuine poet.”22 This is true. However, while Emily Dickinson’s poetry redeemed the poetess, it saved the whole American poetic world from the strict rules of convention. Thanks to her, we have now many liberties we didn’t have before. She is the one who introduced, by her examples and courage, the concept of poetic license. Although she declares herself in one of her poems “I am Nobody,” I definitely believe she is somebody.

 22

Cheryl Walker, op. cit., 140.

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Works Cited Anderson, Charles R. Stairway of Surprise: Emily Dickinson’s Poetry. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1960. Bellah, Robert. The New Religious Consciousness. Harvard UP: NY, 1997. Benfey, Christopher. The World in a Frame. New York: George Braziller, 1989. Budick, E. Miller. Emily Dickinson and the Life of Language: A Study in Symbolic Poetics. London/Baton Rouge: Louisiana State UP, 1985. Chase, Richard. Emily Dickinson. New York, 1951. Cody, John. After Great Pain: The Inner Life of Emily Dickinson. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1971. Donoghue, Denis. “Emily Dickinson.” Connoisseurs of Chaos. New York: Macmillan, 1965: 100-128. Gelpi, Albert J. Emily Dickinson: The Mind of the Poet. New York: W. W. Norton, 1965. Gordon, Lyndall. Lives like loaded guns: Emily Dickinson and her family’s feuds. London: Virago, 2010. Habegger, Alfred. My Wars Are Laid Away in Books: The Life of Emily Dickinson. Random House: New York, 2001. Higginson, Thomas Wentworth. “Emily Dickinson’s Letters.” In The Atlantic Monthly, October 1891. Johnson, Thomas H. Ed. Emily Dickinson: An Interpretive Biography. Cambridge, Mass: The Belknap of Harvard UP. 1955. —. Ed. The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson. New York: Little, Brown, 1961. —. Ed. The Letters of Emily Dickinson. Cambridge. Mass: Harvard UP, 1965. Langton, Jane. Emily Dickinson. San Diego: David Bender, 1997. Miller, Ruth. The Poetry of Emily Dickinson. Middletown, Conn: Wesleyan UP, 1968. Sewall, Richard B. The Life of Emily Dickinson. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1980. Siegfried, Regina, A. S. C. “Bibliographic Essay: Selected Criticism for Emily Dickinson’s Religious Background.” In Dickinson Studies. Vol. 52, 1984: 32-53. Walker, Cheryl. “Locating a Feminist Critical Practice: Between the Kingdom and the Glory.” In Emily Dickinson: a Celebration for Readers. Edited by Suzanne Juhasz and Cristanne Miller. Gordon and Breach, 1989: 9-19. Wells, Henry W. An Introduction to Emily Dickinson. Chicago: Packard, 1947.

BREATHTAKING BEAUTY: GENDER AND RACE CONVENTIONS IN TONI MORRISON’S THE BLUEST EYE ALEKSANDRA IZGARJAN

Introduction The title of the article points to the detrimental effect the ideal of white female beauty has had on the African American community. By imposing images of white beauty which are “breath taking,” the white community symbolically suffocates the African American community and breaks it physically and psychologically. The novel focuses on two important periods in American and African American history. Morrison wrote the novel in the late 1960s and early 1970s, the period of questioning of the Civil Rights Movement and its results, especially desegregation of educational institutions in the South. It was also the time of Black Aesthetics movement and the slogans which promoted racial pride of African Americans. In examination of the tenets of these movements and their applicability, Morrison goes back to the 1940s which in many ways triggered the struggle for civil rights for African Americans. The exodus of African Americans from the rural South to the North followed economic crises; they were hoping to escape not just the sharecropping system and poverty of the South, but also the Black Codes and other forms of racial oppression. During the Second World War, African American soldiers were subjected to oppression and marginalization within the ranks of the American army. However this service also empowered them since they experienced different treatment in Europe and came home determined to ask for their rights as legitimate citizens of the U.S. who fought for their country in the war. Morrison chose to focus on the lives of African American families in the urban ghettoes in the northern cities in order to exemplify all the hardships African Americans had to struggle with on a daily basis during the 1940s. The families of the major protagonists in the novel, the MacTeers and the Breedloves are trying to survive in the harsh aftermath of the Great Depression in which they can aspire only to menial

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jobs and have to contend with appalling living conditions. The great migration also caused severance of their ties with their folklore, oral tradition and culture, making them more alienated and prone to the influence of the white media and the ideology of white supremacy.

Conventions of Beauty, Mass Media, and Consumerism The connection between the ideology of beauty, mass media and consumerism points to the ways they participate in the constructions of race and gender categories in both white and African American communities. This is especially relevant given the historical framework of the novel which corresponds to the rising influence of the mass media (particularly the film industry and color motion pictures) on African Americans. In Susan Willis’ opinion in the 1940s, “total immersion in commodities [was] a fairly recent historical phenomenon for the broad mass of Afro-Americans.” 1 African American female characters in the novel go to the cinema and watch films featuring white, usually blond, actresses such as Jean Harlow, Betty Grable, Ginger Rogers and Shirley Temple, who are presented as paragons of beauty. Their first reaction to this encounter is a desire to emulate actresses on screen, but they quickly realize the futility of this endeavor since their skin color can never match that of their white idols. This realization triggers different reactions. Some African American characters struggle to reject the ideal of white beauty, some use beauty products which are supposed to help them come closer to it and some start hating themselves for not being able to fulfill it. In underlining the connection between the ideology of the white beauty and consumerism, Morrison exposes the process of indoctrination of the African American community. It is particularly revealing in the case of girls in the novel who are also its principal protagonists. The main narrator, Claudia MacTeer, is given a white doll and she is expected to adore it: Adults, older girls, shops, magazines, newspapers, window signs—all the world agreed that a blue-eyed, yellow-haired, pink-skinned doll was what

 1

Susan Willis, “I Shop Therefore I Am: Is There a Place for Afro-American Culture in Commodity Culture?” in Changing Our Words: Essays on Criticism, Theory and Writing by Black Women, ed. Cheryl A. Wall (Piscataway: Rutgers UP, 1989), 180-81, quoted in Jerome Bump, “Racism and Appearance in The Bluest Eye: A Template for an Ethical Emotive Criticism,” College Literature 31.2 (Spring 2010), 158.

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every girl child treasured. “Here,” they said, “this is beautiful, and if you are on this day ‘worthy’ you may have it.”2

Claudia at first cannot make herself love the doll since it is so different from her. Furthermore, she feels that her parents, by spending their hard earned money on the white doll, are complicit in the conspiracy to make her feel less worthy. Desperate to resist this encroachment, Claudia makes it her mission to dismember white dolls in order to find out what the secret of their beauty is, only to realize that the dolls inside have nothing more that sawdust and metal disks that make them imitate human sounds. Morrison draws the parallel between the artificiality of the doll and the white society’s insistence on the models of beauty which lead to uniformity and mimicry. She exposes the irony of the equation in which African Americans who do not conform to the white ideal of beauty are labeled as subhuman in contrast to the mechanical doll. Struggling against the pressure to like the doll which she sees as her enemy, Claudia longs for a different Christmas present, a day spent with her grandparents, filled with music, tasty food and coziness of her grandmother’s kitchen. In Claudia’s desire, Morrison underlines alienation of African Americans in the North who, under the pressures of poverty and grubbiness of everyday lives, distanced themselves from comforts such as Claudia describes. Claudia herself testifies that in a short while she succumbed to the pressure of the media and taught herself to like white dolls and Shirley Temple. This defeat reflects the power of the media which cause African Americans to believe that they will get closer to the ideal of beauty by consuming products associated with it, since they cannot aspire to fully attain it. Claudia, Frieda and Pecola drink milk from a Shirley Temple cup hoping that it would make them similar to her, at the same time metaphorically imbibing the doctrine of the white beauty. Claudia, however, harbors conflicting emotions and animosity towards the actress similar to her hatred of the white dolls. She instinctively feels that Shirley Temple is distancing her from her African American identity. This feeling is revealed in her dissatisfaction with the film in which Shirley is the one who dances and jokes with Bojangles instead of an African American girl. Apart from the images of Shirley Temple which abound in the novel, the girls also eat Mary Jane candies. Eating the candy and consuming white, blue-eyed, blonde haired Mary Jane makes Pecola forget her anger at being treated as invisible by the shop owner and her shame for

 2

Toni Morrison, The Bluest Eye (New York: Plume, 1994), 20-21.

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being black: “To eat the candy is somehow to eat the eyes, eat Mary Jane. Love Mary Jane. Be Mary Jane.”3 The characters in the novel use beauty products which promote the same message. Their names, such as Nu Nile hair straightener and Instant Brown Brighten Cream, show underlying assumption that their consumers have to deny or at least suppress their blackness if they want the product to work.4 In this vicious circle of constantly trying and failing to attain the white ideal, some African Americans characters start blaming themselves for ineffectiveness, which further leads to depression, self-hatred and violence. Their alienation recalls Fanon’s statement that the colonized Arab is “permanently an alien in his own country, lives in a state of absolute depersonalization.”5 The fact that African Americans permanently lived in the state of exile and depersonalization in their own country makes them forever split between American and African American identity as W. E. DuBois has effectively shown with his notion of double consciousness of African Americans. Morrison further reveals that the victims rarely blame the system, but blame themselves, which corresponds to the ideology of the American dream in which an individual is at fault if he/she does not succeed in achieving the dream. Thus, socialization in American society which privileges the ideal of white beauty and master narrative of selfreliance (which are reinforced by educational and religious institutions and media) tends to blame an individual for failing to achieve success conveniently absolving the society of its responsibility.

Ideology of Beauty and Master Narratives The same mechanism of justification of racial and social inequality that underlies the national ethos of self-reliance and American dream can be found in the master narratives Morrison uses to reflect colonialization of African Americans. In Pecola’s story we can see traces of myths (Demeter and Persephone) and traditional fairy tales (Cinderella, Ugly Duckling and Snow White) which Morrison utilizes to show that these text do not work in the African American community: Pecola is not transformed into a

 3

Ibid., 50. This is particularly evident in the name of Nu Nile hair straightener which suggests that the consumers should forget about their African roots exemplified in the river Nile. 5 Frantz Fanon, Toward the African Revolution (New York: Grove, 1967), 53. 4

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beauty and neither a fairy god mother nor a prince come to save her. 6 Another text that shows the inefficiency of western myths is the primer presenting the ideal white nuclear family which lives in a perfect white house very much resembling the Fishers for whom Pauline works. Pauline prefers the white family over her own; she never tires of taking care of their needs, while she completely neglects her husband, children and home which leads to their utter disintegration. Pauline is also an avid consumer of films which promote the ideal of the white beauty and Morrison directly links this ideology with Pauline’s acceptance of the role of the mammy. She looked at their houses, smelled their linen, touched their silk draperies, and loved all of it. [...] She became what is known as an ideal servant, for such a role filled practically all of her needs. [...] Soon she stopped trying to keep her own house. The things she could afford to buy did not last, had no beauty or style and were absorbed by the dingy storefront. More and more she neglected her house, her children, her man—they were like afterthoughts one has just before sleep, the early-morning and late-evening edges of her day, the dark edges that made the daily life with the Fishers lighter, more delicate, more lovely.7

Morrison utilizes stereotypes of African American women, particularly mammy, to foreground the ways race and gender are constructed in American society. In the character of Pauline Breedlove she creates a mammy who embraces the values promoted by the stereotype. Clearly Pauline acts as a mimic and accepts both her subservient role and her masters’ perception of her: “We’ll never let her go. We could never find anybody like Polly. She will not leave the kitchen until everything is in order. Really, she is the ideal servant.” 8 However, instead of blaming Pauline for embracing the role of mammy instead of using it for mockery and subversion, Morrison exonerates her by giving the readers a glimpse into her wretched life. She also shows on the example of Claudia and the white dolls how very early in life African American girls are conditioned to be mammies of white children. As Frever states: Morrison makes it clear [...] that the “fondest wish” enforced upon the young narrator is not only a gender script, not only a script of motherhood pressed into her unwilling hands in the form of a baby doll whose “dimpled

 6

On Morrison’s use of fairy tales in The Bluest Eye see Bessie W. Jones, “Ironic Use of Fairy Tale Motifs in The Bluest Eye,” in The World of Toni Morrison, eds. Bessie W. Jones and Audrey L. Vinson (Dubuque: Kendall/Hunt, 1985). 7 Morrison, op. cit., 127-128. 8 Ibid., 128.

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Particularly the master narrative of the primer underlines the imposition of the white values on the African American community. Sharp juxtaposition of the idyllic world from the primer and harsh reality of African American families in the novel is another example of the way education and media indoctrinate African Americans to make them feel less worthy for falling short of the ideal. Counterpoint to the primer sections is the same text without punctuation or spacing which successfully shows how nonsensical the primer passages must appear to poor African Americans. At the same time it reflects gradual fragmentation of the community and the mind of its most fragile member Pecola as she sinks into madness. The jumbled order of seasons in which the primer text appears is also indicative of the disjointed world of the novel which is caused by Pecola’s tragedy and closes the circle of the novel connecting the beginning which is also the end. It is Morrison’s way to show that what seems inconsequential to the wider white world, abuse, rape and lunacy of a black girl, should have major consequences. In the dynamics between Pecola and Pauline, Morrison recreates the stereotype of the tragic mulatta to emphasize alienation of characters who harbor aspirations to pass as white. Pecola, gets her name after the tragic mulatta Peola from the film “Imitation of Life” whose very title points to yearning of some characters in the novel, including Pecola’s mother Pauline, to mimic white values. Pecola rejects her African American mother (who works as a mammy) in order to assimilate into the white world pretending she is white. In an ironic twist, Morrison’s Pecola is rejected by her own mother who is convinced that she truly lives only when she works in the house of her employers since that life resembles the fantastic life from the movies. The distance between the mother and daughter is reflected in the fact that Pecola is allowed to address Pauline only as Mrs. Breedlove, while her white employers call her Polly. Both Pauline and Pecola’s “education at the movies” makes them exchange their reality in the African American community for exploitation in the white world which is ultimately the goal of the ideology of beauty—to

 9

Trinna S. Frever, “‘Oh! You Beautiful Doll!’: Icon, Image, and Culture in Works by Alvarez, Cisneros, and Morrison,” Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature, 28, no. 1, (Spring 2009): 123.

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make African Americans hate themselves, their families and their life, to make them feel inadequate so that they can be ruled more easily. At the center of the novel is the master narrative of ugliness that is being enforced on African Americans. Claudia, as the primary narrator, is trying to break the silence surrounding Pecola’s life and share the secret of what the Thing is, the Thing that makes some people beautiful and some ugly. According to Jerome Bump, Morrison’s particular focus on ugliness enables readers to feel “what it is like to be judged by racial hierarchies of skin color and the master and family narratives that reinforce them.”10 The Thing then becomes fear of ugliness and “the most powerful emotional response to the novel for most readers [is] fear of being rejected because of our appearance, abandoned by the group, left homeless.”11 By becoming part of the population of the text, the reader, according to Morrison, is implicated in the conspiracy that makes Pecola a scapegoat of the whole community.12 Thus, another secret that Morrison reveals is the mechanism of colonization that is absorbed by the black community. All of our waste which we dumped on her and which she absorbed. And all of our beauty, which was hers first and which she gave to us. All of us—all who knew her—felt so wholesome after we cleaned ourselves on her. We were so beautiful when we stood astride her ugliness. Her simplicity decorated us, her guilt sanctified us, her pain made us glow with health, her awkwardness made us think we had a sense of humor. Her inarticulateness made us believe we were eloquent. Her poverty kept us generous. Even her waking dreams we used—to silence our own nightmares. And she let us, and thereby deserved our contempt.13

In revisiting the scenes of her childhood, trying to address injustices she has witnessed, Claudia resembles different young female narrators in the works of American women writers who rise up against their marginalization in American society and can be seen as master narratives counter to the dominant ones in the white society. The character that particularly resembles Claudia is Maxine Hong Kingston’s young female narrator in The Woman Warrior who also goes back in time to expose misogyny and racism both in American and Asian American communities. It is evident that Morrison and Kingston use the psyche of the young female narrator who claims her voice to break the silence imposed on the



10 Bump, “Racism and Appearance in The Bluest Eye: A Template for an Ethical Emotive Criticism,” 152. 11 Ibid., 155. 12 Morrison, op. cit., 124. 13 Ibid., 205.

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oppressed as the locus of struggle between the center and the margin. By becoming narrators and investigators of crimes against women, children, immigrants and ethnic minorities, both narrators “report” on their communities and gain at least a modicum of justice for those for whom they speak.

Colonizing Beauty Homi Bhabha contends that mimicry is in itself subversive since it presupposes the notion that the colonized object can be a duplicate of the colonized subject. That is why ambivalence is inherent to mimicry; the colonizer wants the colonized to emulate values, traditions and culture of the colonizing culture, but at the same time the colonizer perceives the colonized who comes too close to the ideal as a threat. This ambivalence of the colonizer, and the fact that mimicry inevitably at some points resembles mockery, destabilizes the process of colonization. However, Morrison’s mimics in The Bluest Eye do not use their mimicry as mockery. On the contrary, their desire to imitate the members of white middle class is apparent in the novel. Yet, it is precisely this desire both on the part of the colonizer and the colonized that enables Morrison to mock the process of white dominance and colonization of African Americans. She subverts the power of the white colonizers by showing how in their need to have colonized race which would be taught to imitate them, they expose their own weakness and uncertainty of their true value, which in turn makes them appear ridiculous. Consequently although Pauline is cast in the role of the contended servant, her mimicry opens the space for subversion since it serves Morrison to satirize the whites who impose white ideals on African Americans and manipulate them into accepting them by keeping them as their cheap labor force. Another good example of the mockery of both colonization of African Americans and women in American society are three prostitutes Poland, China and the Maginot Line. Morrison uses their names to reflect the invasion of the female body by colonial forces by recalling the fall of Poland, China and France under the advent of German and Japanese forces which embraced both colonial and racist ideology. Although the prostitutes use beauty products such as skin bleach and hair straightener to make themselves more attractive to their clients, they do not fall victims to the ideal of white beauty like Pauline and Pecola do. Nor are they victims of their clients. Despite the

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fact that they are selling their bodies, they are the ones in control and reserve only contempt for their clients using them the way they are used.14 Equally important is Morrison’s unwillingness to give too much power to the strategies of mockery and subversion in the novel. Instead, she foregrounds the debilitating effects of the process of indoctrination on the members of the African American community. The characters such as Pauline are not featured mocking their white employers since they are too stunned by the brutality of white colonization. Pauline as a generic character represents the army of African Americans who left the South to come to the North only to find themselves rejected and alienated in the white world. She feels lonely without her family and community and symbolically loses “all the bits of color from that time down home”15 that represent her joy in life. Pauline’s loss of African American identity is evident in the moment when she watches the film with Jean Harlow and loses a tooth. This symbolic loss of a part of her body mirrors loss of self in the process of indoctrination. Pauline longs for her tooth, her healthy body (which is associated with her life in the African American community in the South), but she will never be able to retrieve it. She ascribes great value to this moment, describing it as something she never got over. In a flash, she realizes that she will never resemble the white actress; however this realization does not turn her away from the movies. On the contrary, it only makes her more dissatisfied with herself and her family life: There I was, five months pregnant, trying to look like Jean Harlow, and a front tooth gone. Everything went then. Look like I just didn’t care no more after that. I let my hair go back, plaited it up, and settled down to just being ugly. I still went to the pictures, though, but the meanness got worse.16

 14

In that respect, they resemble similar characters of American women writers, such as Allende’s Transito Soto, who use their marginalized position of prostitutes for the subversion of the power of the center. Morrison herself creates another subversive mimic in the character of Pilate who masterfully plays the character of Aunt Jemima and humiliates herself in front of the white policemen in order to placate them and give them the illusion of power over her so that they would release her nephew out of jail. In the same novel Morrison uses mockery of mimicry when the members of the African American community rename their street from Doctor into No Doctor Street and hospital from Mercy into No Mercy to show the callousness of the white society which would not grant them equal health care. 15 Morrison, op. cit., 115. 16 Ibid., 123.

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From then on, she passively accepts her ugliness and her role of the servant turning all her aggression and pent up frustrations first on her husband, and then her children. She goes to the movies in order to fill the emptiness inside of her and falls victim to what Morrison calls the two most dangerous ideas in the history of human kind: romantic love and physical beauty. Her loss of identity predominantly featured in the loss of a part of her body metaphorically makes the female body the site of contested forces of the white and black community.

The Body From the beginning of colonialization, the body featured as the dominant metaphor for invasion, deracination and control. “The body is the crucial site for inscription” 17 for the very fact that physical characteristics determine how the colonial subject and object are perceived and constructed. In that sense, the body becomes “a text, a space in which conflicting discourses can be written and read, it is a specially material text, one that demonstrates how subjectivity, however constructed it may in fact be, is ‘felt’ as inescapably material and permanent.” 18 Morrison uses the female body as the site of colonial invasion, but also as a vessel of colonial ideology. Pauline connects colors to her sexuality, she recalls colors of her childhood in the South when she experiences an orgasm but as she accepts imperial ideology of white supremacy and fashions her body to resemble the white ideal, it stops being the locus of African American culture. Rather it turns into the site of colonization represented both by Cholly’s male power and white culture. While previously Pauline had power during sex, her body making Cholly experience orgasm, Pauline relinquishes that power once she subscribes to the ideal of white beauty and Christianity, and Cholly and their children become a cross she has to bear. She distances herself from her husband, and as the vicious circle of violence dominates their relationship and their love making becomes mechanical and violent, Pauline is no longer capable of recalling colors. Geraldine is another example of an African American female character who equates her sexuality with blackness and body. She denies herself any physical, and particularly sexual enjoyment, in order to be able to distance herself from her race and assume white identity. Her and her

 17

Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths and Helen Tiffin, eds., Key Concepts in Post-Colonial Studies (London: Routledge, 2001), 183. 18 Ibid., 184.

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husband’s love making is also mechanical. Only her cat’s blackness and sensuality attract her and she allows herself physical contact solely with the cat privileging it over her husband and son. Geraldine’s hybrid identity, reflected in her desire to pass for white, is personified in the cat’s black fur and blue eyes. Ultimately, Cholly’s rape of Pecola can be interpreted as an attempt of blackness in the novel, which Cholly represents, to claim Pecola’s body as she too tries to distance herself from her African American identity in order to escape abuse and marginalization within family and community. However Cholly’s violation breaks her mind and body and pushes her further into acceptance of white values embodied in the blue eyes. In the case of Pecola, Morrison shows the toll of the constant struggle on the part of African Americans to negotiate their American (white) and African American identities and discover a viable mode of existence in American society. Morrison’s use of the body as a site of oppression and resistance certainly recalls Young’s notion of colonial desire: [C]lass, gender and race are circulated promiscuously and crossed with each other, transformed into mutually defining metaphors that mutate within intricate webs of surreptitious cultural values that are then internalized by those they define. [...] And so too racial theory, which ostensibly seeks to keep races forever apart, transmutes into expressions of the clandestine, furtive forms of what can be called “colonial desire”: a covert but insistent obsession with transgressive, inter-racial sex, hybridity and miscegenation.19

This colonial obsession is apparent in the novel which abounds with the descriptions of prostitution, incest and various forms of sexual abuse of African American girls. The connection between transgressive sex and colonial invasion is evident in Cholly’s rape of Pecola and his own sexual violation by white men. As he is making love to a black girl Darlen, white men see them and “his body remains paralyzed”20 under their gaze. They make him rape her and since he cannot afford to hate them, his hatred turns on the black woman. Their bodies become significations of the racial divide: Never did he once consider directing his hatred toward the hunters. Such an emotion would have destroyed him. They were big, white, armed men. He was small, black, helpless. His subconscious knew what his conscious



19 Robert Young, Colonial Desire: Hybridity in Theory, Culture and Race (New York: Routledge, 1995), xii. 20 Morrison, op. cit., 148.

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His rape of Pecola is a recreation of his and Darlene’s rape. He rapes her because at the same time he pities her and hates her for witnessing his failure as a man, husband and father. Claudia interprets his rape as an act of love since he at least saw Pecola and in an instant, wanted to touch her and love her. But his love is poisoned with hatred and proves fatal. Just like her father, Pecola is fixed by his rapist gaze: “The loved one is shorn, neutralized, frozen in the glare of the lover’s inward eye.”22 In the acts of love making, of beautification and violation, the bodies of Morrison’s characters become performative and perpetually constructed within hegemonic discourse of white supremacy. Both gender and race become acts, enactments of social conventions 23 and as such they are performances that maintain the social order which imposes those conventions on the subjects. Butler contends that only certain bodies are perceived and imposed as normative while other bodies are marginalized. Morrison to a certain extent subverts the dominant position of the white bodies in the novel by foregrounding black bodies of her characters, but she also shows how “reiteration of hegemonic norms” 24 and normative constraints destroys black bodies and in that way questions their authority just like the Maginot Line, Poland and China decentralize the power of normative social conventions through their transgressive sexuality.

Disease of the Body, Disease of the Mind Erasure of African American identity and its replacement with a Eurocentric white ideal, leads to individual, familial and communal disintegration in the novel. All the characters who try to negate their African American traits and who aspire toward white race and assimilation suffer from different forms of physical and psychological deformities. Mr.

 21

Ibid., 151. Ibid., 206. 23 Judith Butler, “Performative Acts and Gender Constitution: An Essay in Phenomenology and Feminist Theory,” Theatre Journal 40, no. 4 (1988): 519. 24 Judith Butler, Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex” (New York: Routledge, 1993), 106. 22

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Henry, who buys beauty products trying to minimize his blackness, and who is obsessed with the ideal of white beauty, is a regular client of prostitutes and a child molester. He insinuates himself into Claudia and Frieda’s confidence bribing them with candy and then sexually abuses Frieda. Geraldine who suppresses her “funk,” her sexuality, which she equates with her blackness, becomes repressed and withdraws all her affection from her son and husband bestowing it instead on a black cat who symbolically has blue eyes. Her son Louis Jr. grows into a bully and abuses Pecola whom both he and his mother see as the epitome of ugliness because of her dark skin. Elihue Whitcomb aka Soaphead Church is another character in the novel who comes from a long family line of people who are products of miscegenation and who try to deny their African American roots. His suppression of his true identity leads to his mental instability. Like Mr. Henry, he also boasts of sexual abuse of many African American girls. He assumes that he is God and promises Pecola blue eyes triggering her lunacy. Thus, it can be said that, like Ophelia’s, Pecola’s madness is representative of all the psychotic disorders of the characters in the novel and that she acts the ultimate symptom bearer of the whole community. It can also be said that Cholly’s rape of Pecola is the ultimate result of the marginalization of her family within white and African American community. The Breedloves, as the darkest members of both communities, are also the poorest victims of various forms of abuse which stem from their marginalization and internalization of self-hatred. Before the rape, Pecola is obsessed with invisibility and disappearance since she wants to escape the scenes of family violence and withdraw into her inner world. This desire becomes more pronounced after the rape morphing into her desire for blue eyes. As a result of her continual exposure to the ideal of white beauty, Pecola starts believing that if she had blue eyes nothing bad could happen to her and that her violation would be erased: It had occurred to Pecola some time ago that if her eyes, those eyes that held the pictures, and knew the sights—if those eyes of hers were different, that is to say, beautiful, she herself would be different. [...] If she looked different, beautiful, maybe Cholly would be different, and Mrs. Breedlove too. Maybe they’d say, “Why look at the pretty-eyed Pecola, We mustn’t do bad things in front of those pretty eyes.” Pretty eyes. Pretty blue eyes. Big blue pretty eyes. [...] Alice-and jerry-blue-storybook-eyes.25

 25

Morrison, op. cit., 46.

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Blue eyes symbolically stand for perception, Pecola is taught to believe that the blue eyes of the children from the primer who live in the ideal white world cannot see the squalor and tragedy of the black world and that by desiring and ultimately obtaining such blue eyes she would be closer to the ideal of beauty which protects its owner. Clearly blue eyes and beauty here are constructed as a commodity which can be obtained and purchased. Morrison shows society in which beauty, rather than goodness, triumphs. Pecola rightly assumes that if she were beautiful none of the evil things would have happened to her since all the members of her community who are white, or at least light skinned (the Fishers and the Peals, particularly Maureen Peal), are perceived as beautiful and do not suffer any misfortunes. Blue eyes also stand for identity (the homonyms eye and I). Pecola, like her mother, desperately wishes for the white identity, for the safety and stability of the white house and white family like the ones from the primer. However, in order to assume that identity, she first has to completely erase her body of a black girl and negate her African American identity. This task of completely eradicating herself and making her self invisible takes an enormous psychological toll. Her desire for blue eyes and white beauty results in a split identity reflected in two voiced discourse at the end of the novel. Pecola creates a double self, an alter ego who is her only friend and who can see her blue eyes. In claiming that her eyes are prettier than the ones in books, such as the primer, Pecola’s alter ego validates her and this escape into lunacy proves to be the only relief of a poor African American girl. Pecola’s strategy of erasure brings to mind Franz Fanon’s haunting description of the experience of the white man’s gaze: I had to meet the white man’s eyes. An unfamiliar weight burdened me. In the white world the man of color encounters difficulties in the development of his bodily schema. [...] I was battered down by tom-toms, cannibalism, intellectual deficiency, fetishism, racial defects [...] I took myself far off from my own presence [...] What else could it be for me but an amputation, an excision, a hemorrhage that spattered my whole body with black blood?26

Similarly to Fanon, DuBois locates the origin of African American double consciousness in the gaze of the white man perpetually directed at the black body: “It is a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others, of

 26

Franz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, (London: Pluto, 1986), 110-112, quoted in Homi Bhabha, The Location of Culture, (New York: Routledge, 1994), 42.

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measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity.”27 The issue of perception gains importance considering the fact that Pecola’s body is never described in the novel, it is only constructed through what Morrison in the Afterword to the novel describes as “the damaging internalization of assumptions of immutable inferiority originating in an outside gaze.”28 Her project then becomes exploration of how it is possible to assert racial beauty in the face of decades of such damaging internalizations, “how something as grotesque as the demonization of the entire race could take root inside the most delicate member of society: a child; the most vulnerable member: a female.”29 She excavates layers of history of the African American community, history of the notion of ugliness and why it came to be accepted by the black people. It was as though some mysterious all-knowing master had given each one a cloak of ugliness to wear, and they had each accepted it without question. The master had said, “You are ugly people.” They had looked about themselves and saw nothing to contradict the statement; saw in fact, support for it leaning at them from every billboard, every movie, every glance. “Yes,” they had said. “You are right.” And they took their ugliness in their hands, threw it as a mantle over them, and went about the world with it.30

Morrison shows that the Breedloves are not ugly in themselves, those are not their physical features that make them such nor their behavior. Rather their ugliness comes from conviction which is the result of their indoctrination. As Morrison states, “the novel pecks away at the gaze that condemned” her school friend into thinking that it is better to pray to become a “freak,” an African American girl with blue eyes, than to be “what she was.” 31 But it also pecks away at the need of the African American community in the 1960s and 1970s (and certainly there have been similar attempts before, particularly during the Harlem Renaissance) to reclaim the notion of racial beauty, to assert the rights of African Americans to it. The verdict of ugliness passed on by the white jury and accepted by the black defendants problematizes the assumption on the part of the black nationalist movements that the motto “Black is beautiful” would be immediately embraced by all African Americans. The novel

 27

W. E. B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk, (New York: Signet, 1995), 45. Morrison, op. cit., 210. 29 Ibid., 210. 30 Ibid., 39. 31 Ibid., 210. 28

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poses questions not just as to who decides what and who is beautiful, but also why the African American community cannot take its beauty and beauty of its members for granted but needs “wide public articulation”32 in order to enable it to exist.

Conclusion Morrison’s novel represents an indictment of both communities it represents. While at the beginning of the novel Claudia and Frieda blame themselves for not being able to grow marigolds out of the seeds they planted (which were supposed to work as a counter magic to Pecola’s tragic destiny), as an adult Claudia realizes that the real problem was the soil in which they tried to sow. Consequently, it is American society which is not nurturing, which does not take care of the members who do not conform to its conventions. Instead it uses conventions to raise doubts and fear, to stir envy and hatred and control African Americans and other members of marginalized groups, to keep them uneducated and as a cheap labour force. At the same time, the novel is an indictment of the African American community which adopts white values and is unable or unwilling to protect its members from abuse. In Bryson’s opinion, improving the position of African American working class women who are at the bottom of American society would entail a change of the entire social structure. Black women’s experience of gender, “race” and frequently also class oppression shows that these are not simply separate systems which produce cumulative disadvantage, but that they are dynamically interconnected. This means that systems of oppression are mutually reinforcing, producing experience of gender which vary with “race” and experiences of “race” which vary with gender.33

Morrison exposes these systems of oppression and deconstructs conventions of gender and race through postmodern literary strategies such as fragmented text and polyvocality in order to point out the instability of the conventions, such as the ideal of white beauty, since they depend on mutual consent of people who make up the nation or the community which upholds the values reflected in the conventions.

 32

Ibid. Valerie Bryson, Feminist Political Theory (New York: Palgrave, Macmillan, 2003), 229. 33

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Works Cited Ashcroft Bill, Gareth Griffiths and Helen Tiffin. Eds. Key Concepts in Post-Colonial Studies. London: Routledge, 2001. Bhabha, Homi. The Location of Culture. New York: Routledge, 1994. Bryson, Valerie. Feminist Political Theory. New York: Palgrave, Macmillan, 2003. Bump, Jerome. “Racism and Appearance in The Bluest Eye: A Template for an Ethical Emotive Criticism.” In College Literature 31.2 (Spring 2010): 148-170. Butler, Judith. Bodies That Matter On the Discursive Limits of “Sex”. New York: Routledge, 1993. —. “Performative Acts and Gender Constitution: An Essay in Phenomenology and Feminist Theory.” In Theatre Journal 40, no. 4. (1988): 519-531. Du Bois, W. E. B. The Souls of Black Folk. New York: Signet, 1995. Fanon, Frantz. Toward the African Revolution. New York: Grove, 1967. Frever, Trinna S. “‘Oh! You Beautiful Doll!’: Icon, Image, and Culture in Works by Alvarez, Cisneros, and Morrison.” In Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature, 28, no. 1, (Spring 2009): 121-139. Jones, Bessie W. “Ironic Use of Fairy Tale Motifs in The Bluest Eye.” In The World of Toni Morrison. Eds. Bessie W. Jones and Audrey L. Vinson. Dubuque: Kendall/Hunt, 1985. Morrison, Toni. The Bluest Eye. New York: Plume, 1994. Young, Robert. Colonial Desire: Hybridity in Theory, Culture and Race. New York: Routledge, 1995.

MARTHA GRAHAM’S CHOREOGRAPHY: CONVENTION, TRANSGRESSION AND BEAUTY JEANINE BELGODERE

Artistic transgression refers to a complex reality. New attitudes, ideas and art works often arouse negative judgements because they call into question established norms and values. However, if transgression means the dismissal of another norm, it does not imply the lack of rules. Transgression is not outside the realm of the normative. Rather, it produces new norms which are not yet accepted or acknowledged by followers of the dominant aesthetic who find their values and taste challenged. In his commentary upon Henry Bergson’s thought, Jacques Chevalier throws light on the perception of transgression: Order is the only reality. What we call disorder is only the presence of an order that we were not looking for […] I walk into a room: I find it “in disorder”; yet the position of each object is perfectly explained by the action of efficient causes: but it is not the order I had wanted and that I was expecting.1

In the late 1920s, Martha Graham (1894-1991), who is widely regarded as the mother of modern dance, set about creating her own form of dancing. In so doing, she departed from the conventions and technical vocabulary of traditional 19th century ballet, which has long been associated with the Apollonian ideal of beauty. At the time, Graham’s critics, among them the dancer Michel Fokine (1880-1942), who was a prolific choreographer for Serge de Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes2 from 1909

 1

“Or il n’y a de réel que l’ordre. Ce que nous appelons désordre n’est que la présence d’un ordre que nous ne cherchions pas […] J’entre dans une chambre: je la trouve ‘en désordre’; cependant la position de chaque objet s’explique parfaitement par le jeu des causes efficientes: mais ce n’est pas l’ordre que j’eusse voulu et que j’attendais.” Bergson par Jacques Chevalier (Paris: Librairie Plon, 1941), 233-234. 2 The Ballets Russes were founded in 1909 by Serge de Diaghilev (1872-1929), both an art critic and a highly gifted organizer. In 1909, the Ballets Russes caused a

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to 1914, described her dance as ugly. Graham was transgressing the aesthetic norms of ballet. For example, she danced barefoot and fully integrated the floor into her technique, thereby acknowledging the power of gravity and broadening the expressive and dramatic potentialities of movement. She invented many kinds of falls, including the swift back fall. We will first present how Martha Graham developed her unconventional dance expression and will then illustrate how she transgressed the balletic norms through examples of major choreographies that she created in the late 1920s and 1930s. Gradually, Graham’s language of movements evolved. She enlarged her palette of themes and refined her technique, while incorporating elements of ballet technique into her body movements. We will emphasize the groundbreaking dance expression Graham began to exhibit in the 1930s and expanded throughout the 1940s, and how it laid the foundations for a new set of norms and an ideal of beauty which came to be widely accepted by the dance community and audiences. In this way we will show how Graham’s transgressions became a new choreographic language, a new type of norm, a new canon of beauty.

Martha Graham’s Transgression of the Aesthetics of Ballet At the close of the 19th century, the only recognized and revered form of dance was classical ballet, which was viewed as the norm in the field of choreography. Ballet originated in Italy in the fifteenth century during the Renaissance era. However it developed in France in the seventeenth century, evolving from court dance. Pierre Beauchamp (1631-1705), who was Louis XIV’s ballet master, codified the five open positions of the feet, to which correspond positions of the head and arms.

 sensation in Paris, at le Théâtre des Champs Élysées, because of its vitality, originality and sumptuous decors. With the Ballets Russes, the academism and stereotyped poses of 19th century ballet were discarded. Classical dance was reconceived. Vaslav Nijinsky, Mikhail Fokine, Anna Pavlova, Bronislava Nijinska, Léonide Massine and George Balanchine were among the dancers and choreographers associated with Diaghilev’s company. Serge de Diaghilev was seeking to create a more harmonious relationship between choreography, music and scenery and asked the most innovative choreographers, composers such as Darius Milhaud, Stravinsky and Eric Satie, and painters such as Alexander Benois, Léon Bakst, Picasso and André Derain to collaborate with the Ballets Russes. After his death, the Ballets Russes, which had a major influence on contemporary ballet, became the Ballet Russe of Monte Carlo.

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The ballet technique is primarily based on the turnout of the dancer’s leg, the rising up on toes, the quiet even hip, the pointed feet to lengthen the line of the leg in a graceful manner. Traditional ballet emphasizes harmonious and smooth movements, aerial lightness, gracefulness, symmetry and order. It is thus clear that ballet reflects the Apollonian Greek ideal, where the laws of balance and regularity prevail, as exemplified by Classical Greek art and architecture. Regarding subject matter, before the thematic and stylistic breakthroughs of the Ballets Russes in 1909, ballet favoured topics that essentially involved stories of princes, princesses and fairies. Traditional ballet, particularly romantic ballet, reached its peak around 1850. It primarily conveyed an image of woman as sylph or swan. Woman was depicted as an immaterial and out of reach creature, a feminine ideal built up by generations of ballet masters. In this and other ways ballet was estranged from everyday human realities and the currents of history, with its struggle and social changes. Moreover, at the end of the 19th century, ballet emphasized virtuosity and to the detriment of emotional and spiritual depth. As ballet had become the European norm for dance as a fine art, a transgression of its rules was inevitable. This meant that other norms, that is to say other forms of dancing, were quite likely to emerge. The first dancers who departed from ballet in the early 20th century were the pioneers of modern dance, Isadora Duncan,3 Ruth Saint-Denis

 3

Isadora Duncan was born in 1877 in San Francisco. In 1899, she moved to Europe where she drew the enthusiasm of many artists. Isadora Duncan is widely regarded as the pioneer of modern dance. She was the first dancer to reject the canons, themes, constraining costumes and virtuosity of 19th century ballet. Instead, she danced barefoot in a light Greek tunic, which was a revolution at the time. As Isadora was concerned with restoring to dance its lost vitality and spirituality, she sought its origins in Classical Greek art and in the primary rhythms of nature. Inspired by the wave, she created a flowing and organic dance that reveals the harmony between man and nature, the body and the soul. Isadora viewed the solar plexus as the center from which all motion emanates. Isadora was a revolutionary in her dance and in her life. In 1904, she founded her first free school for poor children in Berlin. She also felt sympathy for the Russian revolution and taught in Soviet Union from 1921 to 1924. Isadora was the first choreographer to set dances to Classical music. She used the music of Chopin, Schubert, Brahms and Wagner for her choreographies. Isadora’s life bears a tragic stamp. In 1913, she lost her two children who were drowned in the river Seine in Paris. She died in Nice at the age of 49 when her trailing shawl was entangled in the wheel spokes of her car. If Isadora inspired generations of dancers and choreographers, she was also the muse of many poets, sculptors, painters, and theatre directors.

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and Ted Shawn. They discarded ballet attire including the tutu, the pink slippers and the corset, thereby freeing the body from constraining clothes. They also turned away from the stilted balletic style. Whereas ballet was primarily concerned with virtuosity and flights of fancy transcending daily life, modern dancers used gesture as a means of conveying humanity’s timeless emotions, hopes and struggles. However, Graham went beyond the pioneers. In the late twenties and early thirties, she revealed herself as a revolutionary choreographer, both in style, technique and themes. If she broke away from three centuries of academic tradition, she also dismissed the undulating and fluid lines of Isadora Duncan’s lyricism, as well as the oriental appeal and lushness of her first choreographies, in the Denishawn vein.4 Because Graham challenged the balletic rules and the concept of the beautiful as reflected in ballet, she became at the source of an utterly new and iconoclastic dance. We observe a first kind of transgression in Graham’s rejection of the extremely codified steps and positions that characterize ballet. Unlike the ballet technique, Graham’s does not derive from a set of pre-established steps and gestures. Instead, Graham looked for the origin of movement in breathing, the primary biological rhythm.When the breath is out of the body, the contraction phenomenon occurs, when it is in the body, the release phenomenon occurs, hence Graham’s fundamental method of the contraction and release of energy, which involves the pelvis, as well as the spine, which she called the tree of life.This technique enabled Graham to give voice to a broad spectrum of emotions, as explained by Susan Au: Contraction which curved the chest inwards and rounded the back, caused the dancer to focus on his own centre; it could be used to suggest fear, sorrow, withdrawal or introversion. Release, which expanded the chest by filling the lungs with air, could signify affirmation, acceptance or ecstasy. When used in conjunction, the two movements heightened each other’s effect; also the emotional states they communicated could be subtly varied: a contraction with the head raised could create the effect of a gasp of joy. The principle of Contraction and Release could also be applied to other parts of the body. As Graham developed her dance technique, she added



4 The main proponents of modern dance were taught at the Denishawn School, which was founded in Los Angeles in 1915 by Ted Shawn and Ruth Saint Denis. Ballet, diverse styles of ethnical dances, as well as the principles of the expressive movement laid down by François Delsarte, a French opera singer and musician, who related gestures to emotional states, were part of the school’s curriculum. Both Ted and Ruth restored to dance a deep spiritual and emotional significance by drawing upon oriental religions and dances.

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shapes like the spiral, a basic form of nature to give a more lyrical dimension to her dancing.5

Thus, Graham’s choreographic language relies on an organic conception of movement and stems from her belief that gesture must proceed from an inner impulse and be meaningful. Once, when Graham was still a child, her father, who was a psychiatrist, told her that movement never lies. Her father’s remark resonated in her profoundly as years later Graham wrote: “Dance should illuminate the landscape of man’s soul.”6 It is hardly surprising that Graham devised her technique with a view to making apparent our inmost being and primordial experiences. Among these experiences, some were closely related to an epoch characterized by chaos, torment and revolt. In the early and late 1930s, mankind was faced with major crises and tragedies including the Great Depression of 1929, the Spanish civil war to which Graham was particularly receptive and the rise of Nazism. Graham emphasized the need for the artist to relate to present day history and so to make choreographies that were rooted in the spirit of the time, reflecting its mood: But we belong to our era. Ballet corresponded to the 17th and 18th century, to the relations between man and woman in those times. Woman was a doll, a queen of fairy tales, an ethereal being. Today man is faced with austere and terrible realities. He does not want to forget himself but to know himself.7

As Graham grounded her dances in the sociohistorical reality of her day, she was definitely breaking away from the concerns of traditional ballet. In order to articulate her response to tragic events, to voice her own views and to portray her emotions through movement with the utmost intensity, she dug down to the essence of experience with significant gesture, which she used with a taut economy of means. In the early and late 1930s, Graham’s dance mainly employed sharp and percussive thrusts, abrupt tensions that were followed by sudden bursts of energy, which clearly challenged the harmony and balance of

 5

Susan Au, Ballet and Modern Dance (London, New York: Thames and Hudson world of art, 2002), 119-120. 6 Blood Memory, (New York: Doubleday, 1991), 163. 7 “Mais nous sommes de notre époque. Le ballet correspondait, au dix-septième et au dix-huitième siècle, aux rapports d’alors entre l’homme et la femme. La femme était une poupée, une reine de contes de fée, un être éthéré. Aujourd’hui l’homme est confronté à des réalités austères et terribles; il veut se connaitre et non s’oublier.” in “Martha Graham nous dit”, Ballet-Danse, Juin-août 1982, n° 9, 42.

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cosmic order. Her sturdy and angular body movements transgressed the traditionally accepted idea of beauty which, according to Edmund Burke, includes the qualities of smoothness, delicacy, and gracefulness.8 These features rightly apply to classical ballet, especially romantic ballet. In the wake of Isadora Duncan, Graham performed with bare feet to be in direct contact with the dance floor and to feel it, so as to stress man’s vital connection with the earth. Her barefoot dance also transgressed the balletic norm in which ballerinas wear pointed shoes to assert mastery over gravity and to signify the search for elevation and lightness. Graham’s conception of the dancer’s relationship with the floor, which she used in a different way than ballet dancers, was a bold step. In Graham’s dances, the floor was not treated as a spring-board, as a place from which one escapes into the air so as to defy gravity and to give an impression of flight, but as a vital source of energy. Graham recognized the pull of gravity, especially by incorporating falls into her technique. Martha Graham also favoured off-centred positions, postures on the verge of unbalance. By emphasizing an asymmetrical vocabulary of movements, she was transgressing another rule of ballet, where the asymmetries do not dominate the art form and are different in character from Graham’s aesthetic. Ballet also includes inclinations of the torso and tilts of the head but these breaks in symmetry are gentle and so occur with no violence.

Examples of Transgressive Works From the late 1920s throughout the late 1930s, Graham gave birth to many choreographies including Revolt (1927), Heretic,9 Lamentation (1930) and Chronicle (1936) that make evident Graham’s new approach to movement, her transition to a predominantly angular and forceful style, and her deep commitment to social and historical issues. Lamentation, a solo piece that was set to piano music by Zoltan Kodaly, exemplifies Graham’s departure from ballet, with respect to her own attitude to dancing, subject matter and body movements. First, she breaks with the conventional idea that dance cannot be static, that the dancer must cover a lot of space, and fill the stage with movement. The transgressive aspect of this solo lies in Graham’s portrayal of a solitary being who hardly dances. Graham casts a grief-stricken figure in a seated position,



8 Edmund Burke, A Philosophical Inquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (London: U of Notre Dame P, 1958), 119. 9 Elizabeth Kendall, Where She Danced (New York: Alfred A. Knoff, 1979), 208.

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almost tied up to a bench. Only her bare feet, her hands and a part of her face are visible. She is encased in a sheath-dress, an elastic jersey, tubular and shapeless, that she slowly extends into long diagonal folds, pushing it in all directions to suggest perhaps her resistance to confinement, her struggle with grief, or her attempt to tame her emotions. To convincingly express the woman’s sorrow and response to it, she uses minimal, straight and sharp gestures that are reminiscent of the aesthetics of Cubism and of Art Deco: “The dance is a powerful one not only because it abstracted the densities, rhythms and shapes of New York, 1930. The jersey pyramid recalled the grandeur of an Art Deco tower rising on its triangle base, skyscraper’s reeling.”10 Lamentation primarily reads as the pared down expression of hindrance and universal suffering. The solo dates from 1930, which leads me to argue that it is likely to be related to the Great Depression and its tragic impact on people’s lives. The choreography thus depicts not just a solitary individual but a city in lamentation. Heretic also reveals Graham’s transgression of the thematic and technical conventions of ballet. Graham portrays an outcast in the grip of a stern and vindictive group of women, which was a daring and new theme in the field of choreography. She displays blunt and angular motions with no transitions in between movements. These movements stand in stark contrast to the aerial, graceful and smooth moves of the ballerina. Graham’s treatment of the floor as a dynamic component of the choreography, almost as partner to the dancer, represents a further transgression of ballet aesthetics. A tight-knit group of women enact their strong opposition to the heretic by relentlessly pounding their heels on the dance floor in unison, a dramatic action that takes on symbolic meaning as the women’s firm condemnation of the outsider. The heretic momentarily manages to break through the implacable group but the women stand close together again to bar the outsider’s way. At the end of the dance, the heretic falls silently to the floor where she lies between the two rows of women: “The final movement of the dance was the outsider’s noiseless fall after failing to penetrate the resistance: the heretic condemned.”11 In Heretic, Martha Graham uses the dramatic and symbolic power of juxtaposed oppositions to enhance the conflict between the ostracized woman and her fierce antagonists. The contrasted postures of the group and of the heretic are combined with a jarring difference in the colour of their costumes and hairstyles. The women are clad in long, dark and close-

 10

Heretic (1929) was set to an old Breton popular song. Don Mac Donagh, Martha Graham, a biography, (New York: Popular Library, 1975), 66.

11

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fitting jersey dresses, whereas the isolated woman wears a white flowing dress. Their hair is drawn straight back, held up in a net. In contrast, the heretic’s hair is loose. The rigid severity of the women is intensified by their dark attire. We observe here a reversal of the biblical and conventional significance of colours. White is usually associated with God, light and festivals. It identifies the heretic, while black, a colour more commonly associated with funerals, the powers of darkness, evil and death, defines the adamant women who embody the voice of the community, of the orthodox majority. The heretic faces a conformist and oppressive society that discriminates against the nonconforming other. She may be resisting the dark forces of puritanism, a theme that runs through many of Graham’s works, including Letter to the World (1940), a work inspired by the life and poetry of Emily Dickinson and in which she opposes puritanism with sensuality. Given the date of the creation of Heretic, we perceive a connection with the social events of the time. In 1930, the world was undergoing a deep economic crisis. In hard times, man is prone to look for a scapegoat, whom they might hold responsible for. Graham may have been aware of this situation, in which case it is likely that Heretic reflects the historic tensions of the era. Graham certainly identified with the protagonist, stating that Heretic mirrored her own marginalized position within the dance community in the early 1930s, a situation which was also common to other modern dancers: To many people, I was a heretic. A heretic is a woman who is put upon in all she does, a woman who is frightened. Everyplace she goes she goes against the heavy beat and footsteps of those she opposes. Maybe she is a heretic in a religious way maybe in a social way. I felt at the time that I was a heretic. I was outside of the realm of women. I did not dance the way that people danced. I had what I called a contraction and release. I used the floor. I used the flexed foot. I showed effort. My foot was bare. In many ways I showed onstage what most people came to the theatre to avoid.12

Heretic, like Lamentation, blends Graham’s personal history with echoes of larger social issues that affected her generation, issues that traditional ballet ignored. Thus, in Heretic, Graham disrupts the stylistic and thematic conventions of ballet. She breaks free of an aesthetic ideal based on the rules of traditional harmony and standards of beauty, in part because this formal language could not adequately express her resistance to exclusion as a woman and a creator. By featuring a female outcast, who

 12

Blood Memory, op.cit., 114.

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is also a rebel, as well as intolerant women, Graham creates new representations of woman that go beyond the ethereal and idealized images conveyed by romantic ballet. In Heretic, as well as in other pieces, woman is no longer pictured as a nymph, a creature of dream, a disembodied heroine. Instead, woman is earthly and rooted in reality. This is shown through Graham’s grounded body movements. Created in 1936, Steps in the Street, which is part of Graham’s Chronicle,13 further illustrates her transgression of traditional ballet aesthetics, as well as her assertion of a non conventional language. More complex than Heretic in terms of movement and choreographic patterns, Steps in the Street elaborates on the firm and angular motions that already typify Heretic. The women’s closed wrists, quick leaps, as well as a repetitive sequence of swift and jerky movements on the floor that exemplify Graham’s contraction and release method further enhance her energetic and stark expression. Right at the opening of the choreography, a leading female dancer enters the stage in complete silence. Only the sound of her feet pounding on the floor disturbs the silence. She is soon joined by eight other women, all dressed in long, black close fitting dresses. They take up the lead dancer’s pounding of heels into the floor, which immediately creates a mood of anxiety and fear. Gradually their motions mount to a crescendo, in tune with expressionistic music by Wallingford Constantine Riegger. The women dance in a darting manner. Their energetic movements bursting out in the dance space, which they invade and seem to conquer might symbolise the women’s triumph over an impending danger. In Steps in the Street, Graham’s sturdy language of movements forcefully conveys the turmoil of a chaotic and tragic era marked by the Spanish civil war and the rise of fascism in Europe. It reflects back images of disarray, as well as strength and resilience. In Deep Song (1937), which was also inspired by the Spanish civil war, Graham developed a whole language based on contractions, crawls and falls on the floor that she used as symbols of mankind’s painful experience in war. These choreographies assert Graham’s preoccupation with war and fascism, themes that ballet had never tackled. In Lamentation, Heretic, but especially in Steps in the Street and Deep Song, Graham’s transgression of ballet aesthetics is also an echo of historical transgressions.

 13

The sculptor Isamu Noguchi designed the setting for Chronicle. Graham worked extensively with Noguchi, who created many spare settings for her works, including Appalachian Spring, Night Journey, Cave of the Heart, Errand into the Maze and Herodiade.

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When Graham created Night Journey in 1947, her second foray into Greek mythology, she breached another norm of ballet by probing into the complex workings of the mind and heart. In such works, Graham is not primarily concerned with the expression of harmonious forms. She prefers to go beyond the calm and beautiful appearance, thereby disrupting the Apollonian ideal of beauty by digging deep into the soul of her characters. In her journey into the mysteries of man’s desire and passion, Graham revisited Greek myths, which she subtly re-interpreted in the light of Jungian psychoanalysis. As in many other choreographies that derive from Greek myths, Graham embodies heroines such as Medea, Jocasta and Ariadne, who stand for archetypes of the universal female experience and as powerful symbols of the human soul. Night Journey draws on the Oedipus legend but Graham offers a personal version, relating the story from a woman’s viewpoint. She turns it into the story of Jocasta, the mother of Oedipus, who stands at the core of the dance drama. Introspection is the driving force of the action. It compels Jocasta to ponder on the motives for her behaviour. As Jocasta finds out that she committed incest, she is ready to take her own life. It is on such a scene that Night Journey opens: Jocasta is holding a coiled rope of silken cords in her hands, an erotic symbol, which Tiresias, the blind seer, snatches out of her hands, thereby starting the dance action that forces Jocasta to relive the past events that led her to commit incest and so re-experience her tragedy. In Night Journey, as in other creations including Cave of the Heart (1946), where Graham interprets the story of Medea and Jason, violent, jarring and spasmodic movements are meant to convey spiritual and emotional undercurrents, deep motives and elemental emotions. Graham also makes lavish use of falls to the floor and recoveries, dances on her knees and moves in a reptilian manner to express, for example, Medea’s desire for vengeance and the ravaging power of jealousy. Unlike ballerinas, Graham’s archetypal heroines do not seek to escape from the floor, a metaphor for their existential condition which they recognize and face. Graham thus committed further transgressions by uncovering the world of desire and the strength of passion and by exploring the theme of eroticism, which at the time was taboo in the field of choreography. One of the most intense moments in Night Journey shows Jocasta as she “sits back and crosses her knees, opening and closing, opening and closing”14, a highly suggestive movement by which she invites Oedipus to penetrate into the intimacy of her body.

 14

Blood Memory, op. cit., 214.

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Martha Graham’s Transgression of Ballet’s Norms and a New Canon of Beauty for Dance In the early 1930s, the dance community and theatre-goers were not yet ready for Graham’s transgressive dance, which was arousing harsh criticism from many detractors, including critics and ballet choreographers such as Michel Fokine. One of the most outstanding reformers of ballet, Fokine looked upon Graham’s dance as lacking in harmony and as the embodiment of ugliness. He wrote: “Everything that I saw was ugly in its form and the content was heinous […] The feet were always turned inwards.”15 In her autobiography, Blood Memory, Graham relates that in 1930, she was invited by the conductor Leopold Stokowski to dance the Chosen One in the Rite of Spring, a choreography that would be reconstructed by the ballet choreographer Leonide Massine, who had been the principal dancer and choreographer in Diaglilev’s Ballets Russes from 1915 to 1921. However, Massine was reluctant to accept Graham in the role of the leading dancer, as she was not a ballerina. So, he asked her to withdraw: “You should withdraw. You will have a terrible disaster if you are not a classical ballet dancer.”16 Graham would not resign. She danced the Chosen One. Massine’s a priori judgment about Graham’s dance style, as well as Fokine’s disparaging comment upon her choreography, clearly show that in the 1930s Graham’s dance was frowned upon by distinguished ballet choreographers. Likewise, spectators in the US did not respond favourably to Graham’s works, as they were accustomed to the graceful and aerial movements of the ballerina. They also venerated vaudeville shows and styles of dancing such as the foxtrot, the charleston, tap and jazz dancing. On the whole, the general public was more interested in dance forms that aimed at entertaining them rather than communicating deep emotional and spiritual experiences. Moreover, foreign art forms appealed to them more than American art. They held in high regard artists who came from Europe, which made it difficult for American modern dancers to be heard. Culture, fashion and tastes, which depend on the time, largely account for the fact that the general public showed little interest in modern dance in the 1930s. Viewers are inclined to adhere to what is familiar and comfortable to the mind. They tend to feel ill at ease with what is likely to

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“Tout ce que je voyais était laid de par sa forme et haineux de par son contenu. Les pieds étaient placés toujours en dedans.” In “Un Art Triste”, Ballet-Danse, n° 9, 1982, op.cit., 72. 16 Graham quotes Léonide Massine in Blood Memory, op. cit., 129.

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question their taste, so that what is alien to them is resented as disorder, and contrary to their norm. Indeed, Graham’s dance was disturbing and challenging. It broke the traditional moulds. The works that she created in the 1930s were by no means sweet, pretty or diverting. They were dances of social and political protest. From the mid-forties onwards, Graham delved into the world of the collective unconscious, thus bringing to the fore what was still a non-existent and unexplored field in choreography. For a long time spectators did not yield to Graham’s iconoclastic dance form and it took many years before her choreography grew in popularity and gained recognition within the dance world. In the US, Graham began to draw the positive attention of audiences in the late 1930s and early 1940s, before she was widely accepted in Europe. Understandably, her transgressive dance was better received in a country, where there was no tradition of ballet, beyond what had been imported from Europe around 1840. Moreover, from the late 1930s, Graham tackled themes that were rooted in the history and culture of the US, which strongly appealed to the American people. In Paris, where Graham performed with her company in 1954, her choreographies met with mitigated success. However, when Graham returned to France in 1976 with her company, she was triumphant and highly acclaimed as the mother of modern dance. Why did Graham’s transgressive dance become a normative one? The shift in values and in taste may be ascribed to factors that were related to the evolution of Graham’s creative work, as well as to a changing sociocultural landscape. Martha Graham’s creative life spanned sixty five years. She created choreographies from 1926 to 1991. In the course of her long career, she moved away from topics of social and political protest. While she continued to explore the world of confinement, grief and resistance and if the conflict between puritanism and paganism still haunted her, she broadened her range of subject matter. Her new themes encompassed her personal heritage, the American experience and American Indian culture. In 1935, Graham created Frontier17, which was set to Louis Horst’s music. In this solo, which is a tribute to the pioneer spirit of her ancestors, Graham explores a boundless territory, while revealing a sense of space that is specifically American. In American Document18, an epic dance fresco in which Graham traces the history of the US, she incorporated excerpts from the Declaration of Independence,

 17

Louis Horst composed the music while Isamu Noguchi designed the setting for Frontier. 18 For American Document, Ray Green made the music and Arch Lauterer, who collaborated on many of Graham’s works from 1935 onwards, designed the setting.

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from Abraham Lincoln’s speech at Gettysburg, as well as extracts from Walt Whitman’s poems. While Graham’s interest in the early history and traditions of her country led her to create Appalachian Spring (1944), set to the music of Aaron Coplan, the ritualistic customs of the Penitentes, a sect from the Southwest of the US, inspired El Penitente.19 Appalachian Spring, a buoyant piece, in which Isamu Noguchi’s spare setting suggested a farmyard, tells the story of a Husbandman and his Bride who are confident of the future, a wise Pioneer Woman, a stern Revivalist followed by a congregation of four women, while evoking the expansion of her country westward. Thus, Graham’s own fellow citizens could easily identify themselves with the experiences her choreography conveyed. Graham also created portraits of women (Judith, 1962; Herodiade, 1944), turned to the heroines of Greek myths, (Clytemnestra, 1958) and gave birth to works such as Acrobats of God (1960) and Maple Leaf Rag (1990) that reveal her gift for wit and sense of humour. Graham’s technique and aesthetics also evolved. She deviated from the austere aspect and the stiff transitions of her earlier works, as illustrated by Heretic. Even though Graham still displayed a staccato style, she also developed lyrical bodily motions, especially from the mid-forties on. Graham softened her expression by bringing more curves into her dances, which gave them a less abrupt and a smoother aspect, without sacrificing emotional intensity. While Graham stylized movement and enriched her technique over the years, she preserved its fundamentals, which included the contraction and release of energy, angular gestures, a lavish use of the floor, the spiral, falls and recoveries, torsions and prances, twists on the knees, as well as turns with a changing and swinging axis. However, she welcomed the turnout of the leg, pointed feet, the refined arabesques and the grand jetés, that are an integral part of ballet vocabulary. In the words of the French Neo-classic choreographer Maurice Béjart (1927-2007): “All choreographers use certain classical foundations including Martha Graham.”20 In addition, Graham’s costumes became more elaborate and varied. Graham relinquished the long sombre dresses that were typical of the 1930s. However, her costumes were still plain and functional. Like the stage settings they were reduced to the essentials. They were used as expressive, dramatic and symbolic components of the work. Far from being static and decorative, they enhanced the dancer’s movement, continued it and channelled the flow of energy. Conceived in close

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For El Penitente, which was choreographed in 1940, Louis Horst composed the music. Arch Lauterer designed the setting. 20 “Tous les chorégraphes se servent de certaines bases classiques, y compris Martha Graham,” in Ainsi danse Zarathoustra (Arles: Actes Sud, 2006), 98.

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connection with the dance theme in mind, Graham’s costumes gave the body more fullness so as to convey feelings of joy, freedom and buoyancy or hampered the dancer’s moves in order to emphasize confinement and sorrow. The novel stylistic, technical and thematic elements that Graham introduced in her dance were initially influenced by her own personal history. Her falling in love with Erick Hawkins, who was the first man to join Graham’s company in 1938,21 and who had studied at the School of American Ballet, certainly inspired new themes. Graham also engaged other highly trained ballet dancers who added their own touch to her works. She even created choreographies specifically for outstanding ballet dancers, such as Rudolf Nureyev and Margot Fonteyn who were given the central roles in Lucifer (1975). In 1959, George Balanchine, who was the director of the New York City Ballet, asked Graham to create the first part of Episode, a work that her company and four dancers from the New York City Ballet interpreted. The second part was choreographed by Balanchine. This invitation proved Graham’s dance had achieved recognition among distinguished ballet choreographers. A profound change in the sociocultural landscape also accounts for an evolution of taste and contributed to a better understanding and appreciation of Graham’s dance. Ballet itself evolved, due to the influence of modern dance on it, and to the revolutionary contribution of such choreographers as Michel Fokine and Vaslav Nijinsky. As early as 1913, Nijinsky, the leading dancer with Serge de Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes, had paved the way for a renaissance of ballet. His choreographies of Afternoon of a Faun, imbued with eroticism, and The Rite of Spring, set to Stravinsky’s music, caused havoc at the Théâtre des Champs Élysées, as they transgressed the longstanding conventional criteria of ballet, including the quest for elevation and the ideal of gracefulness. Nijinky ushered in a pagan theme, turned the feet in, used heavy steps, clenched fists and violent jumps. He was to influence many Neo-classic ballet choreographers, including George Balanchine who, like Graham and other modern dancers, introduced angular forms and broken movements. Much later in the 1940s, American ballet choreographers such as Agnes de Mille, Antony Tudor and Jerome Robbins still worked in the ballet idiom but turned to contemporary themes, borrowed movements from modern dance, used familiar gestures from everyday life and valued

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From 1926 to 1938, Martha Graham’s company was only made up of female dancers.

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ordinary characters such as the sailors in Robbins’ Fancy Free (1944). These choreographers were highly instrumental in the flourishing of American ballet. The era was also marked by a growing interest in the human psyche due to the spreading of Freud’s and Jung’s psychoanalytic theories. These had favoured the development of surrealism that still permeated the arts and literary works. Agnes de Mille and Antony Tudor explored the human soul. Influenced by Freud, Tudor’s psychological ballets reveal inner states and render dramatic conflicts in a subtle, poetic and sober way. In the wake of Graham, Tudor delved into the psychology of his characters, as well as universal human experiences. His creations were also fuelled by the tragedies of history. When Graham choreographed Deep Song in 1937, Tudor created Dark Elegies, a choreography which may have been inspired by the death of children when the town of Guernica was destroyed by the Nazi bomber force during the Spanish civil war. Owing to reciprocal influences such as these, the dividing line between ballet and modern dance was no longer as clear-cut as in the past. In Germany, in the 1930s, the modern choreographer Kurt Jooss blended the two forms of dancing. In France, in the 1950s, Maurice Béjart expanded the vocabulary of ballet while exploring such themes as man’s innermost feelings, sensuality and destiny, which were chief concerns of Graham and other modern dancers. As audiences became more acquainted with a renovated ballet, which drew upon modern dance, and modern dance companies that integrated elements of the ballet idiom into their works, Graham’s choreography was much less alien to them. Moreover, in the 1970s, in France, audiences became more familiar with regular performances by the companies of such choreographers as Merce Cunningham and Paul Taylor, who had been members of Graham’s company. Although Cunningham and Taylor rejected Graham’s narrative and psychological dance, they still had inherited her technique. These choreographers played a major role in leading both critics and spectators to understand the prime importance of Graham’s work. In light of the profound changes that occurred in the field of choreography, Graham’s aesthetics of dance was no longer new by the 1970s. It became another normative language, especially since many dancers who had trained with her and created their own dance styles still adopted her choreographic vocabulary, which meant that Graham’s technique had become one of the primary references within the dance world. Thus, we observe a double movement which explains why Graham’s dance was no longer viewed as transgressive. Firstly, Graham evolved towards a more classic style, especially in such abstract pieces as

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Diversion of Angels22 and Maple leaf Rag, a humorous and joyous dance that was set to one of the ragtimes of Scott Joplin. Secondly, because of a shifting sociocultural context, wider audiences and the dance community took an enthusiastic interest in her works all over the world. Such a meeting accounts for a major shift in taste that took place in 20th century dance. Martha Graham broke free of the conventions of traditional 19th century ballet. She gave birth to an innovative language of movements, which in the early thirties and late thirties was highly transgressive of the longstanding ideal of the beautiful that ballet embodied. Graham’s new dance was then viewed as outside of the norm because it was conveying another canon of beauty. However, transgression belongs to the realm of the normative. It is only a phenomenon that gives rise to a negative judgement. Graham’s unconventional choreography gradually gained recognition. Today, it is regarded as the classic of modern dance. Therefore, Graham’s transgressions became a new normative language. Eventually, Martha Graham’s choreographic adventure reveals the complexity of conventional beauty. Indeed, it is grounded in a history where yesterday’s transgressions are not alien to today’s norms.

Works Cited Au, Susan. Ballet and Modern Dance. London, New York: Thames and Hudson World of Art, 2002. Béjart, Maurice. Ainsi danse Zarathoustra. Arles: Actes Sud, 2006. Burke, Edmund. A Philosophical Inquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful. London: U of Notre Dame P, 1958. Chevalier, Jacques. Bergson. Paris: Librairie Plon, 1941. Fokine, Mikhail. “Un Art Triste”. Ballet-Danse, n° 9, juin-août 1982: 7074. Graham, Martha. Blood Memory. New York: Double Day, 1991. —. in Mac Donagh, Don. Martha Graham, a Biography. New York: Popular Library, 1975. Graham, Martha. “Martha Graham nous dit”. Ballet-Danse. n° 9, juin-août 1982: 42-53. Kendall, Elizabeth. Where she danced. New York: Alfred A. Knoff, 1979. Mac Donagh, Don. Martha Graham, a Biography. New York: Popular Library, 1975.

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This work dates from 1948. Norman Dello Joio composed the music for it while Noguchi created the stage design.

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Filmography Martha Graham. The Dancer Revealed. PBS’s American Master series. 1994. Martha Graham. An American Original in Performance, produced by Nathan Kroll, 1959.

AMERICAN CONTEMPORARY ART: A LOOK INTO THE RHETORIC OF ARTISTIC CONVENTION IN CLASSICAL SCULPTURE CLAUDINE ARMAND

In art history, throughout time, the concept of convention along with its closely-related term, the so-called canon of Western art with its tenacious implications in terms of representation and reception, have been under constant scrutiny. From the era of classical art through the Renaissance to the modern and post-postmodern age, those concepts have been extensively used, challenged, and reshaped, shaken up and subverted. At the time of the Renaissance and in particular in the 18th century, the interconnectedness of beauty and convention was a highly debated topic. Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz’s comments on the links between agreement, harmony, beauty, and love, are an interesting case in point as the German philosopher highlighted the idea that beauty derives from an “agreement” or “convention”: Now unity in proximity is nothing but harmony [Unbereinstimmung], and since any particular being agrees with one rather than another being, there flows from the harmony the order from which beauty arises, and beauty awakens love.1

A further look into semantics reminds us that the term convention in art foregrounds a set of rules agreed upon by artists, art theorists and historians on the one hand and by artists and audience on the other. As James Ackerman points out, conventions “function like languages in facilitating communication between the artist and the viewer.”2 However, what is the spectator’s response when faced with art forms and practices

 1

Gottfried Wilhelm Liebniz, “On Wisdom,” vol. 7, Die Philosophischen Schriften von Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, ed. C. I. Gerhardt (Berlin: Weidmann, 1875-1890), VII, 87. 2 James S. Ackerman, “Preface,” Origins, Imitation, Conventions: Representation in the Visual Arts (Cambridge: MIT, 2002), x.

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that belong to a totally different tradition and culture? This is explicitly stated by art historian H. W. Janson3 when he writes in his famous book on the history of Western art, History of Art, that before the Greek era, the works of art were like fascinating strangers. We approach them fully aware of their alien background and of the “language difficulties” they present. If it turns out that, after all, we can understand something of what they have to say, we are surprised and grateful. As soon as we reach the Greeks, our attitude undergoes a change. They are not strangers but relatives, we feel, older members of our own family whom we recognize immediately. A Greek temple will remind us at a glance of the bank around the corner, a Greek statue will bring to mind countless other statues we have seen somewhere, and a Greek coin will make us want to reach for the small change in our own pockets.4

Such a prosaic and reductive view of the art of the pre-Hellenistic period overshadowing the legacy of neighboring countries like Egypt highlights the impact of conventions while underscoring a typical ideological Western discourse. Likewise, the quote sets forth the power of tradition (by definition, tradition is “that which has been handed down to us”) and the close interaction of perception, representation and interpretation. The air of familiarity Janson hints at is exactly what contemporary artist Fred Wilson felt was missing when, as an African-American student living in New York City, he would visit the Metropolitan Museum or the MoMA. And it is the awareness of recurrent Eurocentric patterns and practices that urged him to go into institutional critique and focus on the display strategies common to various museums. He explains: It has been my experience that there has to be a rupture with our assumptions in order to grow. Art can effect this rupture without causing harm. I simply like to use the metaphors that I see embedded in museums to reach

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I purposely mention H. W. Janson’s History of Art, a popular art reference book in the United Sates which offers a classic survey of Western art (the 6th edition came out in 2001). Wilson uses a copy of the book in Untitled (Atlas), 1995 analyzed in the first part of this paper. Besides, in 1992 he did a performance (ReFashioning Art History) at the Parish Art Museum, Southampton, New York which consisted in a guided tour with the curator of the museum. Wilson had an early version of Janson’s book in his hands and when the curator commented upon a particular work, he ripped off the pages of the corresponding chapters of the book, threw the pages on the floor or put them behind the picture frames. 4 H. W. Janson, History of Art, 5th edition (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1995), 110.

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larger truths. I work with so many different museums around the globe and see the same issues, the same omissions, the same things invisible to most curators all over the Western world.5

If we consider the second meaning of the term “convention” as stated by Nelson Goodman (the conventional is “the artificial, the invented, the optional”), the Platonic philosophy comes to mind. In The Republic, Plato warns the reader of the dangers of appearances and of the limits of representation: “by images, I mean, in the first place, reflections in water and in solid, smooth and polished bodies and the like.”6 The emphasis on the glistening surface brings to the fore the concept of aesthetic pleasure and the various techniques used to please the viewer’s eye. As Gombrich writes in Art and Illusion, pictorial conventions serve “the perfection of naturalistic representation,” which is called “illusion.” 7 It is therefore necessary to consider the contexts of production and reception along with the shifting nature of conventions and the evolution of man’s perception across periods and cultures. For instance, in the 19th and 20th century, art historians, artists and critics have constantly defied the traditional criteria of beauty and today words like “beauty” and “convention” simply sound irrelevant.

Selecting and Correcting Fred Wilson’s interest in the concept of representation and the way representational conventions have shaped our perception and beliefs has led him to look into the aesthetic canons of Western art, namely ancient classical art so as to understand how conventions arise, prevail, and have evolved over time. As stated by Leibniz, conventions establish norm, generate standards and models, like the paradigm of ideal beauty set up as early as the 5th century BC, at the time of the so-called high Classical Style whose impact on the development of sculpture in Western civilization has been tremendous. We can mention for example, Polykleitos’s theory on the ideal proportions of the human body formulated in his book, Canon or Praxiteles’s views of ideal beauty in the portrayal of the female nude. In Panta Rhei: A Gallery of Ancient Classical Art (1992) Fred Wilson has appropriated the conventional model of the classical museum by

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Maurice Berger, Fred Wilson: Objects and Installations 1979-2000 (Baltimore: U of Maryland Baltimore, 2001), 34. 6 Plato, The Republic, Book VI, trans. Benjamin Jowett (New York: Cosimo, 2008), 174. 7 Ibid., 4.

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designing a space showing a wide range of reproductions of classical figures and fragments such as statues, torsos, busts, heads, and medallions. In this installation of randomly displayed sculptures and artifacts sitting on bases and plinths of various heights and sizes or lying upside down, it is the Artemis/Bast piece that draws the eye. Here Wilson has created a hybrid figure by grafting the head of the Egyptian cat goddess Bast on the body of the Greek deity Artemis, one of the twelve Olympians. The goddess of the hunt and of virginity is presented according to the traditional canons of beauty in ancient sculpture-making: the frontal view, the contrapposto pose, and the flowing drapery. However, by adding the cat’s head with its bulgy neck, he has broken the harmony and unity of the piece according to the western canons while picking up an Egyptian practice, syncretism, and creating an animal-headed deity often disparaged by the Greeks and Romans as being primitive. What is more, Artemis’s head lying on the pedestal with plaster chips all around her is the visible signs of destruction, here the violent gesture of the artist’s smashing the piece (which is what he sometimes does), a gesture contesting the hegemony of Western thought and its deeply entrenched beliefs in the superiority of ancient Greek art over Egyptian art. Wilson explains: “Bast was exploding from the head of Artemis,”8 which evokes other elements in the room protruding out of sculptures, like the black metal piece surmounted by a disk emerging from a female trunk (reminiscent of some African sculptures). Likewise, this piece recalls some creation myths and legends of Antiquity reporting the birth of gods and goddesses like Athena—another goddess and mythic contemporary artists have appropriated—who is said to have risen from her father’s head and in full battle armor after Zeus swallowed her mother. Nevertheless, even if the chips and the armless figure evoke visions of mutilation and destruction, the title of the installation foregrounds images of harmony and connectedness. “Panta Rhei,” taken from a famous statement by Heraclitus (504-500 BC) means “all sensible things are ever in a state of flux” and, as a consequence, there can be no knowledge of them. Once more we are reminded of Plato and the surface/depth dialectic. As Vijay Tankha explains in Ancient Greek Philosophy: Thales to Georgias, for Heraclitus the surface meaning must be discarded to reach a deeper depth and for him binary oppositions were one (unlike Plato’s doctrine): “the continual conflict of opposites was itself a harmony, a

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See “Constructing the Spectacle of Culture Museums”. Interview Ivan Karp and Fred Wilson” in Reesa Greenberg, Bruce W. Fergusson, Sandy Nairne (ed.). Thinking about Exhibitions. Abingdon (Oxon and New York: Routledge, 1996), 254.

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concord-discord that was woven into the fabric of nature.”9 Although Plato believed that it was impossible to consider contraries to belong to the same thing and at the same time (like pleasure and pain), he did however repeat the same image of fluidity and of the river as a mirror that might be deceptive for those who only look at its surface. In terms of rhetoric, the river is a common trope which has been used in many writings dealing with the conventions of ideal beauty. A good example is Johann Joachim Winckelman’s well-known History of the Art of Antiquity published in 1764 in which the writer devotes lengthy passages to lyrical descriptions of antique statues. Here is an example taken from Chapter 4 on the Art of the Greeks whose subtitle is “Section One: Reasons and Causes for the Development of Greek Art and for its Superiority over the Art of Other Peoples.” It gives a detailed list of the conventions of beauty in the drawing of the nude: “The greater the unity in the combination of forms, and in the flowing of one from the other, the greater the beauty of the whole.”10 In Panta Rhei: A Gallery of Ancient Classical Art, the dichotomy between surface and depth is given greater prominence in Wilson’s choice of the goddess, Artemis, a liminal figure between the civilized world and the savage world. Thus the composite statue along with the suturing process may be said to be emblematic of the artist’s desire to overturn the traditional chasm between Greek/Roman civilization and Egyptian culture, as illustrated by The Mete of the Muse (2004-2007). Here two black and white standing figures are juxtaposed on a white pedestal in a white-walled gallery: the Egyptian one (carved from a single block), immobile, stiff and hieratic and the Greek one, suffused with life, as light as the famous statues of the nymph Daphne pursued by Apollo. “Mete” refers both to the meeting of the Greek goddesses of artistic inspiration, music, and memory and to measurement. Moreover, “muse” and “museum” are also etymologically close, the museum being the institution that shelters the muses. Part of the installation presented at Metro Pictures in New York in 1992 (also exhibited the same year at the Biennial in Cairo, Egypt) was a reproduction of the god Atlas, Untitled (Atlas), 1992 (plaster and books). According to mythology, Atlas, the leader of the Titans, was punished by Zeus and condemned to hold up the heavens with bare hands and bear the weight on his shoulders forever. Here the strong muscular god is bending

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Vijay Tankha, Ancient Greek Philosophy: Thales to Georgias (Delhi: Dorling Kindersley, 2006), 60. 10 Johann Joachim Winckelmann, History of the Art of Antiquity, trans. Harry Francis Mallgrave (Los Angeles: Getty, 2006), 197.

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down under the weight of heavy art history books that are piled up on his shoulders. Among the books are Janson’s art history book at the top and one entitled The Great Masters, another hint at the legacy of European art, in particular Italian art. Between the pedestal and the base is a book of African Art which is literally squeezed between the two white supports. Wilson explains that African Art could be interpreted as “‘being underfoot’ all of art history or could be seen as providing the foundation for all art history” (Swanson). Is it not African art that gave modern art a new impetus in the early 1900s? A close look at the body and the legs seems to reveal different patches of plaster that have been grafted on the skin. Obviously the skin grafting process is a reminder of the archaeological excavations from the 15th century onward of Antique pieces in Rome and in its surroundings, of the numerous copies that were made following those discoveries and of the debates that were held over the restoration of the pieces, like Apollo the Belvedere. Winckelmann depicts Apollo as follows: “in him is combined the vigor of maturity with the soft forms of the most beautiful springtime of youth […] The ancients shaped the forms of heroes heroically and endowed certain parts with a sublimity greater than found in nature.”11 In his Discourses on Art, Joshua Reynolds praised the statue of Apollo for being the epitome of “Ideal Beauty” and insisted on the idea that beauty depends on convention: “There is a rule, obtained out of general nature, to contradict which is to fall into deformity.”12 Furthermore, to achieve ideal beauty, the artist must select and correct human imperfections: “For perfect beauty in any species must combine all the characters which are beautiful in that species,”13 which reminds us of the legend about Zeuxis in the 4th century BC who on being asked to draw the portrait of Helen of Troy, selected the prettiest features of five models to create the image of perfect beauty.14 To Reynolds, the gifted artist corrects nature by herself, her imperfect state by her perfect. His eye being enabled to distinguish the accidental deficiencies, excrescences, and

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Ibid., 200. Joshua Reynolds, Discourses on Art, ed. Robert Wark (New Haven and London: Yale UP, 1997), 46. 13 Ibid., 47. 14 For example, An Artist’s Studio with Five Female Models (1687) by Johann Heiss, and François André Vincent’s Zeuxis Choosing the Most Beautiful Girls of Crotone as his Models (1789, painted for Louis XVI) and Zeuxis Selecting Models by Victor Motez (1858). 12

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deformities of things, from their general figures, he makes out an abstract idea of their forms more perfect than any one original.15

Therefore, we may say that Fred Wilson’s appropriation and treatment of the myth of Atlas functions as a counterpoint to the conventional standards of beauty underscored by Western art history books while being a strategy for correcting history’s omissions. As art historian Maurice Berger aptly states, the installation “reinvokes the fragments of a problematic past to create progressive allegories of art history’s long standing state of denial about the sources of Western art.”16

Beauties and Stereotypes From Untitled (Atlas) to Atlas (1995), the shift is from art history and the concept of representation to history in the broad sense of the term including the history of African Americans, the legacies of the past and the repercussions in the present. Here the copy of god has been superseded by another copy, namely that of the stereotypical figurine of a grinning black man dressed as a waiter who is holding a globe in his left hand showing the itinerary of the slave trade from Africa via Europe to the American continent. Both works are copies, the first one is the copy of a copy of a Greek original honoring a deity whereas the second is the reproduction of a racially-charged caricature of a black man as replicated on postcards, posters and ceramic collectibles. As regards the concept of convention in relation to beauty, a parallel between the two pieces brings out a series of opposites: high art /low art, the heroic versus the ordinary, and in terms of technique, proportion versus disproportion. As far as the material is concerned, a contrast can also be noted between the white plaster evocative of white marble and the brown color of the ceramic base. Furthermore, the partially covered body of the god Atlas with his muscular torso and head bent down has been replaced by the small and plump body of a black figure gazing at the viewer. Therefore, Fred Wilson’s handling of the paradigm of beauty associated with antique sculptures and his repetition of the motif serve as a critical tool and a comment on the weight of history and on race relations in our contemporary world, a theme that runs throughout his work. Grey Area (Black Version) (1993) takes up the issue of race through the figure of the famous icon of Egypt, Queen Nefertiti. Like Apollo the

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Reynolds, op. cit., 44. Berger, op. cit., 17.

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Belvedere, her bust has been the object of numerous copies and she is regarded as the paragon of perfect and timeless beauty.17 To quote Edward Said, she is part of the “prodigious cultural repertoire” of “figures like the Sphinx or Cleopatra standing on the Oriental stage, a repertoire that nourished the European imagination.”18 The piece consists of five plaster busts of the queen presented frontally and resting on five separate wooden shelves ranging from white to grey to black. The same year Wilson did another version Grey Area (Brown Version), this time with a value scale ranging in color from oatmeal to dark chocolate, according to the wall label. Each bust is sitting on a base that is fixed to a large panel on the wall and on each wooden base Wilson has carved the name of the queen pointing to its Egyptian roots “NEFER-T-ITI meaning “the beautiful one who has come.” In the Neues Museum in Berlin which is the home of the Egyptian queen, the bust—believed to be the original dating from ancient Egypt (1340 BC)—is the focus of the renovated museum. As in a shrine, Nefertiti sits in the middle of a dome-ceilinged room, insulated and protected by a glass showcase around which spectators move around. In Grey Area (Brown Version) the busts are placed high, so the viewers have to look up as if they were standing in front of a monumental statue on a pedestal. However, they cannot appropriate it, cannot move around it. She is untouchable and unreachable though the aura of the mythic figure is debunked by the serial strategy used by the artist. The viewers are not gazing at a unique work of art but at a series of reproductions that are gazing back at them. It is obvious that behind the representation of the repeated icon lies a discourse of colonialism dominated by practices of conquest and pilfering. More recently the bust of Nefertiti has been an object of tension and controversy over the authenticity of the piece (unearthed by the German archaeologist Ludwig Borchardt in 1912) and over Egypt’s claiming the return of the queen.19 Apart from her missing left eye, the bust is in perfect condition20: no holes or scars are visible. In Wilson’s installation however,



17 Like the Greeks whose canonical model of beauty was based on the Golden Rule defining the proportion of length versus height, the Egyptians had their own system of ideal facial proportion consisting of a grid with meshes of equal-sized squares (measure of the finger), as visible in the queen’s face. 18 Edward W. Said, Orientalism (London: Penguin, 1995), 63. 19 To celebrate the 100th anniversary of the discovery of the bust by Ludwig Borchardt, the Neues Museum is organizing a show entitled “In the Light of Amarna—100 Years of the Find of Nefertiti” (Dec. 6-April 13, 2013). 20 Nevertheless in 2009 a CT scan of the sculpture revealed a different Nefertiti with “creases around the corners of her mouth” […] “less prominent cheekbones,

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this impression is contradicted by the play on light and shade that confers some ghostly appearance on the queen, an effect somehow similar to Andy Warhol’s duplicated portraits of Marilyn Monroe in which the palette of colors is gradually reduced from garish colors to black and grey patches. Besides, by repeating the bust of Nefertiti without its original colors which have been so highly praised for the quality of the pigments that enhance her beauty (the color of her skin, the shades of color of her jewellery), Wilson has left out the superficial, the frivolous and cosmetic aspect (the word “cosmetic,” from the Greek kosmos means order, arrangement, adornment). What he has brought out is the stylized shape of the figure and the shadows, which for Plato, are relegated to the margins of representation as they are far removed from truth. For Wilson, the shadows are as much part of the work as the configuration of the piece and the support. They reinforce the ephemeral dimension of art and therefore deflate the myth of timeless beauty.21 The pedestal on which a sculpture is placed has also been an object of reflection for Fred Wilson ever since he started examining museum displays as it points to the distinction between what is art and what is not, what partakes of beauty and what does not, as in Guarded View (1991) which shows four mannequins dressed in museum guard uniforms standing on a pedestal or in Viewing the Invisible (1998) an installation in which the cart of the museum’s cleaning man was added in the middle of a gallery. Grey Area is a multilayered piece combining a reflection on representation and on the conventional paradigm of beauty,22 on race and identity in the past and today as well as on questions pertaining to history with its legacy of empirical conquests, as suggested by the title of the installation presented at the Cairo Biennial, Re-Claiming Egypt. In an article published in the Los Angeles Times entitled “Fred Wilson: Reading

 and a bump on her nose”. For more information, see http://news.national geo graphic.com/news/2009/03/090331-nefertiti-bust-picture.html 21 The Brooklyn Museum has a rich collection of Egyptian art with various representations of Nefertiti. It has recently enriched its collection and a new exhibition entitled “Egypt Reborn: Art of Eternity” has been set up. 22 Likewise, the piece is resonant with other echoes such as Kenneth Clark’s comments on the superiority of Greek and Roman art over African art in his book Civilisation: “Compare a Negro mask with Apollo the Belvedere (for four hundred years the most admired piece in the world, Napoleon’s greatest boast to have looted it from the Vatican, but now forgotten). But the mask is in a world of fear and darkness, ready to inflict punishment for the smallest infringement of taboo. The Hellenistic world is of light and confidence, beyond the day to day struggle to survive”. (Chapter one—The Skin of our Teeth). http://employees.oneonta.edu/farberas/ARTH/arth200/clark_civilisation.html

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between the Color Lines,” Christopher Knight ponders over the color issue that underlies the work: From a Eurocentric point of view, Western civilization’s ancestry in Egypt is traced to rulers who were white. From an Afrocentric viewpoint, those rulers were black. In the original Berlin sculpture, Nefertiti has richly tanned skin. But is skin color the factor that determines race? What is race, anyway? Are such categories meaningful in any biological sense? Or are they cultural constructions, just like standards of beauty—the kind that museums articulate and perpetuate, purposefully or not?

Amputated Beauties In other pieces, Fred Wilson runs counter the canonical model of beauty by challenging the classical paradigm of unity. Untitled (Head and Nose), 1991, (plaster, wooden shelf) can be seen as a foil to both Nefertiti and Apollo as well as a parody of Winckelmann’s and his followers’ writings eulogizing the Greeks’ concepts of beauty: the focus on symmetry, on the harmony of whole and part, and on the parallel between the representation of human perfection and god: The wise who have pondered the causes of universal beauty, exploring its presence in created things and seeking to reach the source of highest beauty, have located it in the perfect harmony of beings with their purposes and of the parts with one another and with the whole. The highest beauty is in God, and the concept of human beauty will approach perfection the more it can be conceived in accordance and harmony with the highest being who differentiates for us the concept of unity and indivisibility apart from matter.23

Here Wilson uses an image of disfiguration (the broken nose of an ancient black statue ravaged by time or by deliberate intention), another reminder of the numerous amputated statues and broken pieces found on sites, like the fragments of the Parthenon among others. Juxtaposed to the black head sitting on a base is the brand new cast of a nose painted in white and moulded according to European conventions. This magnified detail contradicts Winckelmann’s view of the part being overshadowed in favour of the whole, which is also signalled by the wrinkles around the eyes of the black figure’s face. Wilson may also have had in mind Rodin, the sculptor who challenged 19th century conventions, for example by freeing himself from the classical canons of proportion, by enlarging

 23

Winckelmann, op. cit., 195.

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fragments or by choosing models based on common people, as in Man with the Broken Nose (1863) which was rejected by the Salon jury in 1865 and finally accepted 18 years later when he carved it in marble. Or, living in Brooklyn, Wilson may have seen The Brooklyn Black Head in the rich collection of the Brooklyn Museum. Another form of amputation is visible in Laocoon (part of the installation created for the Venice Biennale of 2003, Speak of Me As I Am), another famous icon of ancient Greek art that has inspired so many artists and writers and a sculpture that has been highly debated as to its origins and authenticity. As we can see here, Fred Wilson has carved the figure out of the group which Pliny the Elder praised in his Naturalis Historia for being “hewn of a single block of stone”24 and which Wincklemann greatly admired for the expression of suffering that is reflected in the body: “The movement of Laokoon’s muscles is driven beyond truth to the limits of possibility; they lie like hills that flow into one another, in order to express the greatest exertion of powers in suffering and resisting.”25 Once more, Winckelmann points to the unity of the piece as a whole and the delicate sense of continuity and fluidity created by the sea serpents twisting around the priest’s and his two sons’ bodies. Part of the fascination of the Laocoon group has always been its dynamic composition with the interlocking bodies. Here Wilson has reduced the sculpture to a single viewpoint. Laocoon is presented frontally, his head tilted to the right in the direction of a small turbaned black figurine holding/offering an open book. Two time periods, two visions of art and of the world are set side by side. On the one hand, the piece foregrounds the principles of classicism and the power of art to represent emotional intensity endowing the hero with a god-like status, a vision which nevertheless exposes the contradictions in Winckelmann’s doctrine of ideal beauty, namely the tension between beauty and expression and the idea that the expression of emotions disturbs the placidity of an ideal. On the other hand, the representation is closer to Hegel’s conception that art is essentially sensuous. The world of sensuality and exoticism is embodied by the half-naked black figurine whose body is enhanced by its glistening surface reflecting light, her clothes (the golden skirt, the turban) and her bright red lips. What is striking is her position that is both seductive and submissive. Moreover, the two figures are sitting on different bases, the one on the right being slightly lower and uneven than the other where Laocoon sits. The link between the two figures is the heavy white book she is holding which symbolizes the

 24 25

Ibid., 202. Ibid., 203.

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intellectual world of knowledge. Unlike the two figures, it has been roughly carved and looks like one massive block. Is the black figurine holding a mirror up to Laocoon, inviting him to read an essay or theoretical text meticulously depicting him, be it by Pliny the Elder, by Virgil, Winckelmann, Lessing etc. or by any art historian interpreting the sculpture? Or is the text similar to an ekphrastic poem? Does the book show various representations and interpretations of the group? Or can this element be interpreted as an interstitial object filling the gap between two cultures and civilizations, what Homi Bhabha calls the “Third Space” in The Location of Culture which is “the precondition for the articulation of cultural difference”? 26 The piece also has to be seen in relation to the artist’s project at Venice. Wilson’s reflection revolved around the concept of representation and contemporary issues, like the presence of black people and immigrants in today’s Venice compared to the past, their various representations in art (in paintings and sculptures) and in the commercial world (as commodity objects). To conclude, we can say that conventions are part of Fred Wilson’s material that he appropriates and subverts, like the conventions that generate beauty. On the plaque of the Nefertiti busts at the Brooklyn museum he added the following note: “I use beauty as a way of helping people to receive difficult or upsetting ideas. The topical issues are merely a vehicle for making one aware of one’s own perceptual shift—which is the real thrill.” His multi-media work invites a reflection on the way the conventions of the past have impacted on man’s perception and beliefs and in his practice they function as a commentary on contemporary issues and differences. Past and present collide but are often intertwined through his technique of juxtaposition, of hybridization and grafting and through his personal involvement, for example, in his performances within official institutions or outside in public spaces. In an interview, Wilson explains: I like pairing disparate objects to distill a complex thought to its essence. If I own the item, I sometimes break it. It’s as if the meaning emerges from the violent act. I destroy a bit of the reverence I have for the object, which forces me to look beyond the familiar.27

Even if we cannot say that he has a radical approach, Fred Wilson is an artist who is constantly reshuffling the cards of history (the history of African American people but also of other communities) and the cards of

 26 27

Homi Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 1994), 39. Berger, op. cit., 38.

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art history appropriating icons and concepts that he turns upside down to shift the focus, reorient the viewer’s gaze, open up divergent perspectives and alternative readings. For what matters above all for him is the viewers’ experiences and what they draw from the interaction with the work. Finally, his handling of the conventions of classical art function both as a statement on our time and as a way to unveil the omissions, the deficiencies and contradictions of the past as well as of the present. “boundary,” now only in phrase metes and bounds, 1471, from O. Fr. mete, from L. meta “goal, boundary.”

Works Cited Ackerman, James S. Origins, Imitation, Conventions: Representation in the Visual Arts. Cambridge: MIT, 2002. Bhabha, Homi. The Location of Culture. London: Routledge, 1994. Berger, Maurice. Fred Wilson: Objects and Installations 1979-2000. Baltimore: U of Maryland Baltimore, 2001. Clark, Kenneth. “The Skin of our Teeth,” in Civilisation. BBC, 1969. Janson, H. W. History of Art. 5th Edition. New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1995. Gombrich, Ernst. Art and Illusion: A Study in the Psychology of Pictorial Representation. Princeton: Princeton UP, 2000. Greenberg, Reesa, Bruce W. Fergusson, and Sandy Nairne. In Thinking about Exhibition. Eds. “Constructing the Spectacle of Culture Museums. Interview Ivan Karp and Fred Wilson.” Abingdon, Oxon and New York: Routledge, 1996. Knight, Christopher. “Fred Wilson: reading between the Color Lines”. Los Angeles Times. Web. 24 Dec. 2003. http://articles.latimes.com/2003/dec/24/entertainment/et-knight24 Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm. “On Wisdom.” Vol. 7. In Die Philosophischen Schriften von Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz. Ed. C. I. Gerhardt. Berlin: Weidmann, 1875-1890. Plato. The Republic. Book VI. Trans. Benjamin Jowett. New York: Cosimo, 2008. Reynolds, Joshua. Discourses on Art. Ed. Robert Wark. New Haven and London: Yale UP, 1997. Said, Edward W. Orientalism. London: Penguin, 1995. Swanson, Erin. “On the Cultural Trail with Fred Wilson. Part I” Web. Feb. 27, 2009.http://www.examiner.com/article/on-the-cultural-trail-with-fredwilson-part-1

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Tankha, Vijay. Ancient Greek Philosophy: Thales to Georgias. Delhi: Dorling Kindersley, 2006. Winckelmann, Johann Joachim. History of the Art of Antiquity. Trans. Harry Francis Mallgrave. Los Angeles: Getty, 2006.

Note The following works can be seen online: The Mete of the Muse (2004-2007) http://www.visualartsource.com/index.php?page=editorial&aID=1148 Untitled (Atlas) (1992) http://www.djibnet.com/photo/fred+wilson/dscn42874934979029.html Atlas (1995) http://www.artnet.com/Magazine/news/ntm3/ntm5-1-7.asp Grey Area (Brown Version) (1993) http://www.brooklynmuseum.org/opencollection/objects/5046/Grey_A rea_Brown_version Panta Rhei: A Gallery of Ancient Classical Art (1992) in the exhibition catalog written by Maurice Berger. Fred Wilson: Objects and Installations 1979-2000. Baltimore: University of Maryland Baltimore, 2001. Laocoon (2003) in exhibition catalog of the Venice Biennale, Fred Wilson, Speak of Me As I Am. Cambridge: MIT, 2003.

DOUBLING OF CONVENTION: JULIAN BARNES’S BEFORE SHE MET ME,TALKING IT OVER AND LOVE, ETC. ALEKSANDRA ŽEŽELJ KOCIû

“Our bodies are our gardens, to which our wills are gardeners.” —Othello, William Shakespeare This essay explores the issue of convention in the postmodern fictional world of Julian Barnes’s Before She Met Me (1982), Talking It Over (1991) and Love, etc. (2000). The entitled doubling has been triggered off by these palimpsest-like texts precisely because they disclose interpretation that simultaneously avoids and perpetuates the conventions of not only a lovenovel genre, but emotional relationships as well. Further, the essay poses several questions: whether the above-mentioned novels turn against their postmodernist bases in order to reveal an aesthetic appreciation of a form as a keeper of meaning; if there is stability of convention or not; what are the situational specificities that lead to the arbitrary or alternative conventions; and finally, whether particular comprehension can avoid convention. Just as modernists break the Victorian tradition, postmodernism can be said to build on a few modernist characteristics,1 ensuring the stability of convention in its very appellation, choosing to be named merely in terms of its opposite, whereby modernism is the norm while postmodernism is a deviation. 2 Namely, John Barth discusses the human tendency to place things into categories that are nothing but indispensable fictions.3 The labeling of literary achievements with prefixes high-, late-, proto- and post-

 1

Derek Maus, “Postmodernism: An Overview,” in Postmodernism, ed. Derek Maus (San Diego, CA: Greenhaven, 2001), 13. 2 Oliver, one of the main characters of Love, etc., wonders about non-fiction being named merely in terms of its opposite; as cited in Julian Barnes, Love, etc. (London: QPD, 2000), 94–95. 3 John Barth, “The Tragic View of Categories,” in Postmodernism, ed. Derek Maus, 57–58.

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becomes a need, even though it is not always easy to differentiate between the tenets of any chosen opposing poles. For instance, the modernist beliefs that are said to have undergone crisis in the age of postmodernism are “critical, magical and utopian impulses.” So, it is still possible for the ethos of modernism—i.e. dissolution of surface, routine and convention in the name of passionate quest for what is concealed, suppressed or prohibited 4 —to prove every so often alive almost a century after its awakening. Taking into account that the debate on postmodernism has been an ongoing process, which in its very definition does not welcome closures, let alone proposes them, some of its basic principles will still be outlined hereafter, putting a special emphasis on its ideas as embraced by Julian Barnes’s fiction. First, relying on Hutcheon’s understanding of a poetics of postmodernism, historiographic metafiction is self-reflexive in its theoretical selfawareness of history and fiction as human constructs.5 Its inherent contradictoriness is that it always works within conventions in order to subvert them. Thus, the debate on the margins and the boundaries of social and artistic conventions opens up, revealing typically postmodern transgressing of previously accepted limits.6 Parody is a perfect postmodern form because it paradoxically both incorporates and challenges that which it parodies.7 Narrators in fiction become multiple, offering shifting perspectives. Postmodern art forms at once use and abuse, install and then destabilize convention in parodic ways.8 Ambiguity, irony and play are some of the tools expressive of multivalence,9 doubleness of both continuity and change, both authority and transgression. Postmodern discourse boasts its paradoxical incorporation of the past, allowing the artist to speak to a discourse from within it. 10 Postmodern fiction, doubled and contradictory,11 contests the conventions of both historiography and the novel form,

 4

My translation; henceforth all quotations from Serbian are translated into English by the author herself; as cited in Viktor Žmegaþ, Povijesna poetika romana (Zagreb: Grafiþki zavod Hrvatske, 1987), 399-400. 5 Linda Hutcheon, A Poetics of Postmodernism—History, Theory, Fiction (London: Routledge, 1988), 5. 6 Ibid., 9. 7 Ibid., 11. 8 Ibid., 23. 9 Ibid., 2730. 10 Ibid., 35. 11 Ibid., 119.

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presenting imaginative reconstruction of the past.12 Suggesting alternative notions of subjectivity, postmodernism does not deny that the past existed—it merely puts forward the idea that we know past events today only through their traces, texts, the facts we construct and to which we grant meaning.13 To this point, Derrida observes that “all objects of thought and perception bear the trace of other things, other moments, other presences. To bear the trace of other things is to be shadowed by alterity, which literally means otherness.”14 Différance can refer to the whole complex of its meanings at once, for it is immediately and irreducibly multivalent.15 Thus, the trace is simultaneously traced and effaced, simultaneously alive and dead.16 Also, language is merely a chain of signifiers or associations based on conventions that are understood within a given cultural context.17 Similarly, Calvino mentions the combinatorial play of narrative possibilities, permutations and transformations that display the indeterminateness of ideas that cannot be subjected to measurement.18 Hassan’s postmodernism speaks of the enemy within, i.e. it precisely evokes what it wishes to surpass or suppress—modernism itself. One discourse incorporates layers of other traditions and conventions. History is a palimpsest and culture is permeable to time past, time present, and time future—we are all a little Victorian, modern, and postmodern. Postmodernism engages a double view that advocates seeming contradiction of sameness and difference, unity and rupture.19 According to Eco, the postmodern discourse, in order to be understood, demands the ironic rethinking rather than the negation of the already said.20 It goes without saying that to decenter is not to deny. To Barthelme’s mind, the postmodern era might be the world of conventional signs, where writing, as the process of not-knowing, is hed-

 12

Ibid., 90-92. Ibid., 225. 14 Jacques Derrida, “Différance,” in Literary Theory: An Anthology—Second Edition, eds. Julie Rivkin and Michael Ryan (Oxford: Blackwell, 2004), 278. 15 Ibid., 283. 16 Ibid., 295. 17 as cited in Postmodernism, ed. Derek Maus, 18. 18 Italo Calvino, “The New Understanding of Language,” in Postmodernism, ed. Derek Maus, 30–32. 19 Ihab Hassan, “Ten Points About Postmodernism,” in Postmodernism, ed. Derek Maus, 38–40. 20 Umberto Eco, “Irony as the Defining Principle of Postmodernism,” in Postmodernism, ed. Derek Maus, 46. 13

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ged about with prohibitions, roads that may not be taken.21 Postmodernism is masturbatory since it speaks only to the already tenured.22 To close this short outline, postmodernism concurrently asserts and undermines, incorporates and challenges, rethinks and transgresses, subverts and works within conventions. It is only logical that love in such a world will be pursued and suspected, desired and doubted, as Barnes’s novels will invariably demonstrate. Since Barnes’s work is well-known for exploring alternative understandings of history, it also goes on to show the ways history has been recorded in a variety of genres, all of which make use of literary conventions. 23 The construction of narratives is all about selection and organization of events that employ conventions. Barnes views love as an antidote to history’s horrors, but he admits the difficulty of discussing love seriously in prose, believing that there is no genre that answers to the name of love prose. He also expresses frustration with the fact that poetry is generally considered to be the genre of love.24 The essay dates back the genre of love-novel to the ancient romances25 as a generic term for the group of ancient love-adventure narratives, 26 which present stereotypical plots based on the motives of purposefully separating two young people in love. These love stories present the young couple’s faithfulness to each other,27 as well as their idealized, flawless love that undergoes one or a series of hindering events, after which they



21 Donald Barthelme, “Postmodernism and the Art of Writing,” in Postmodernism, ed. Derek Maus, 49-51. 22 Ibid., 54. 23 Gregory J. Rubinson, “History’s Genres: Julian Barnes’s A History of the World in 10 ½ Chapters,” in Modern Language Studies, Vol. 30, No. 2 (Autumn, 2000), 164. 24 Ibid., 172. 25 The English have two terms—novel and romance—the meanings of which are not always strictly differentiated. In everyday usage romances denote sub-literary products made for magazines or a series of love novels adapted to the taste of wide audience. (as cited in Miron Flašar, 1986, xxii) Romances can also stand for novels featuring out-of-ordinary adventures, mysterious or supernatural circumstances, difficult quests and miraculous triumphs, usually divided into three broad categories: historical, philosophical and sensational. (as cited in Gregg Crane, 2007, 26–31) In addition, the narrative type of romance is, according to Northrop Frye, the nearest of all literary forms to the wish-fulfillment dream. (as cited in Edward Quinn, 2004, 298) 26 Miron Flašar, „Predgovor,” u Povesti iz antiþke književnosti—životi, putevi, podvizi, vojne, ur. Miron Flašar (Beograd: Srpska književna zadruga, 1986), xxiii. 27 Ibid., xvi.

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happily reunite in their exemplary affection.28 Furthermore, the essential quality of the world of ancient romances is the rigid polarity of the good and the evil, whereby they eventually parade a classical melodrama of triumph.29 The only acceptable ending is a happy ending with one acceptable form of love—the one that respects social norms, i.e. marriage. There is no libertinism in this world, while happiness is reachable through individual character strength no matter how harsh life conditions enveloping them prove to be. 30 Unlike postmodernism, the ancient romance’s convention is that restless, disquieting passions are forever a trait of socalled negative, i.e. anti-, heroes.31 The medieval romance, the poetry of troubadours and the Elizabethan poets celebrate the ideal of chivalry, as well as courtly love as a code of behavior that transforms sexual desire into a noble, unrequited passion.32 The medieval knight is an idealized hero who exemplifies the perfect unity of courage, moral dignity, generosity, composure and devotion in love.33 He loves his dame for her beauty and moral qualities, and they together form a world of augmented social conventions. Cervantes pioneers the problematization of a hero’s characterization and the European novel seems to be, all of a sudden, based on parody.34 In addition, the liebestod tradition introduces the motif of romantic tragedies, as in e.g. Romeo and Juliet, while Shakespeare also initiates a comic perspective on love, later further developed by e.g. Congreve and Sheridan. Further, the 19th century concurrently depicts growth of love as an expression of spiritual longings, enabling the move toward a basic unity of self and other on one, and a new ideal centered on marriage as a contract motivated by love and threatened by adultery on the other side. A proto-feminist Kate Chopin describes a wife character as a prisoner of love-marriage convention and of her own internalization of it. The 20th century’s concept of love gets mostly challenged by Freudian theory, which might be one of the factors to blame for Vivian Gornick’s notion that “love is no longer viable as a literary



28 Darko Novakoviü, „Grþki ljubavni roman,” u Ksenofont Efeški, efeške priþe— Nepoznat autor, pripovijest o apoloniju, kralju tirskome, ur. Darko Novakoviü (Zagreb: SNL, 1980), 12. 29 Ibid., 18. 30 Ibid., 19. 31 Viktor Žmegaþ, op.cit., 14. 32 Edward Quinn, Collins Dictionary—Literary Terms (Glasgow: Harper Collins, 2004), 191. 33 Viktor Žmegaþ, op.cit., 25. 34 Ibid., 28.

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theme.”35 Then, The End of the Novel of Love (1997) marks an intensified doubt as regards to the complex concept of love, but does not quite succeed in diminishing the continuing appeal of romantic love in literature as such. Julian Barnes is one of the authors who shatters the novel genre with his insistence on “writing books that look like novels but are something else altogether when you open them up.” 36 He even offers his own definition of a novel: “It’s an extended piece of prose, largely fictional, which is planned and executed as a whole piece.” He argues for greater inclusivity rather than exclusivity of this broad form, since “the novel always starts with life,” and he does not see one reason as to “why it would not be inventive and playful and break what supposed rules there are.” His determination is to challenge himself and the limits of the genre because: “In order to write you have to convince yourself that it is a new departure not only for yourself but for the entire history of the novel.”37 It can be easily discerned that Before She Met Me destroys the convention of a stock cuckold, since conventional cuckolds are supposed to be comic and laughable and thus objects of contemptuous amusement. Barnes’s men become mentally cuckolded, without becoming foolish or contemptible.38 As a novel of unease and a study in paranoia, exaggeration and unjustified sexual worry, this novel poses the ultimate question of freedom and control, giving us a reason to believe that conventions are somehow always lurking behind the postmodern mask of noconventionalized world. Furthermore, stabbing your best friend and yourself does not really qualify for a conventional happy ending, but rather illustrates Barnes’s great capacity to surprise his readers. Graham, the main protagonist, suffers from retrospective jealousy 39 directed at all the real and imagined ex-lovers of his second wife. His perversion of Ann’s sexual archive and history precisely illustrates the postmodernist technique of crushing the barriers between life and fiction, thus showing that boundaries between the real and the imaginary are forever blurred.40 His historical narrative is a montage of disparate forms, his self is an auto-generative self-fulfilling bricolage, his construction is a

 35

Edward Quinn, op.cit., 192-193. Merritt Moseley, Understanding Julian Barnes (Columbia, South Carolina: U of South Carolina P, 1997), 8. 37 Ibid., 9-11. 38 Ibid., 15. 39 Julian Barnes, Before She Met Me (London: Vintage, 2009b), 45. 40 Matthew Pateman, Julian Barnes (Horndon, Tavistock, Devon: Northcote, 2002), 16, 18. 36

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total fabrication, he invents his own referent.41 Even though Graham is somewhat aware that his many versions of Ann’s narrative are increasingly being constructed by himself, it does not quite cross his mind that he is, in fact, practicing an extreme form of self-invention.42 After his life with Barbara,43 he ends up having an etched image of love as a game of chess,44 in which he somehow always loses to his opponent, if not constantly performing an act of mental arm-wrestling. Having fixed love as a competitive skill, Graham this time around starts playing even more complicated games—with himself. His fascination for Ann intensifies to the extent that he wants to be her. He conducts interior duo-dialogues45 with Ann, watches the movies she side-appears in, he dresses her up in his diary, eats her leftovers so that he can make sure she is inside himself.46 He constructs mosaics of safe and unsafe places on geographical maps he is and is not allowed to visit. 47 His sneering dreams make up the aptly named The Clash of Genres48, demanding that we wonder about our real identity—are we ultimately a construct that somebody else invents for us, or that we invent for ourselves, or both, or neither of the two, but something else altogether? Postmodernist questions of multiple pictures are evoked, as well as the strangeness of ways “the past caught up and tugged at the present.” 49 Barnes shows how the past can, and often does, change our present, the unsayable becoming stronger than already voiced out loud. People get haunted by what they make up and are obviously often unable “to unknow the knowledge.”50 Desdemona’s strawberry handkerchief takes the form of Jack’s and Ann’s books, maps, cigars, winks, hugs and other evidence. “Our little Othello” 51 does not need an Iago to be mischievous and intriguing when he is forever capable of producing one within himself. Even the noblest emotions, such as love and faith, are always potential

 41

Ibid., 19-20. Ibid., 21. 43 Graham mentions that Barbara was always Marxist about emotions, believing that they should not exist for themselves, but should do some work if they were to eat. (As cited in Julian Barnes, 2009b, 34) 44 Julian Barnes, Before She Met Me, 15. 45 Ibid., 27. 46 Ibid., 54. 47 Ibid., 58. 48 Ibid., 85; note that this is the name of the season of comedy-thrillers that Graham goes out to watch, on the lookout for evidence of Ann’s on-screen adultery. 49 Ibid., 92. 50 Ibid., 153. 51 Ibid., 71. 42

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victims to hate and doubt, and thus effortlessly become warped, distorted and deformed. As Barnes proclaims: “Love that gets out of hand can easily turn into madness, it can easily be curdled.”52 Graham evokes Derrida’s abovementioned notion of traces when he starts feeling the absent presences of Ann’s ex-lovers growing on himself. 53 Again, a foul brutishness may sometimes be well-hidden beneath a pretense of normality, the proof of which is Graham himself, mirrored in Ann’s butcher.54 Having started to be visually stimulated by the cinema like never before in his life, Graham fears that public cuckolding55 will engulf his other identities he shares with Ann. His dreams and imaginings become unshiftable facts56 to his mind, while his spreading sickness is as carnivalesque as pop-culture. Thus, postmodernism rewrites history and creates a world in which characters are bound to tell a different story each time and begin to “fictionalize their fictioneering,”57 as Jack, Ann and Barbara amply demonstrate. The characters are together rewriting both their multiple pasts and presents, which all add up to a world of apparently deceptive, i.e. postmodern, nature. So, intertextually, Othello turns into Shelley’s Ozymandias and rekindles the inevitable decline and decay of many. The objects of our constructs get mutilated in the process, showing “the haughty gap between life and dramatic convention.”58 Investigating the multiplicity of truth, Barnes poses a variety of questions regarding the quality of love in the postmodern era: can we conclude that any given love’s honeymoon phase does not last; is romantic love bound to end; do marriages have their design faults59; should we love people less before the passion consumes us both; do our intimate confessions prove aggressive to others60; do some of us have the wrong genes to start with61; what does it ultimately depend on whether we control our emotions or not; how is jealousy related to love; is there a reservoir of jealousy that we keep within us and why should it operate retrospectively62; can sadness

 52

as cited in Patrick McGrath and Julian Barnes, “Julian Barnes,” in BOMB, No. 21 (Fall, 1987), 23. 53 Julian Barnes, Before She Met Me, 104. 54 Ibid., 130. 55 Ibid., 126. 56 Ibid., 61. 57 Ibid., 71. 58 Ibid., 171. 59 Ibid., 52. 60 Ibid., 55. 61 Ibid., 78. 62 Ibid., 122.

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be violent63; what if what we call hiccups in our love-relationship are, in fact, the only truth while the rest of it is basically what we call a hiccup; where does betrayal come from, etc. Before She Met Me is a perfect novel to show how the postmodernist text turns against itself to reveal layers of past literary conventions, as well as how metaphor (which is somewhat at odds with certain tenets of postmodernist thought, especially those that claim that meaning is simply an arbitrary cultural construction) can be applied to it as love as a physical force, love as a patient, love as madness and love as war.64 Talking It Over presents a Stuart-Gillian-Oliver triangle in which a woman is classically torn between two lovers, but here the two unfaithful lovers do not have a sexual affair as we would most logically assume. In fact, Oliver does seduce Gillian by the traditional convention of courtship, whereby she becomes guilty of betrayal, if not of the stock cuckolding of her first husband. Amidst typically postmodern multiple narrators, we can discern varying versions of the same set of events to be read by the reader. The novel poses the question of the instability of identity, which is, in turn, constructed, as self- and other-representation.65 Obviously, being in love alters the context of perception, which then alters the interpretation of the loved object. The context as a determining factor in the construction or recognition of identity has a necessary effect on the ability to love. Namely, characters create the events so as they could reach their goals, but often end up achieving just the opposite of their intentions. For instance, Gillian as Oliver’s wife, devises a scene for her ex-husband Stuart to watch and thus help him find his closure to their own past love relationship. Actually, what she effects is finding herself in Stuart’s arms again, wild and passionate this time around in Love, etc., whose ending just throws up a new set of questions,66 coming back to the endmost issue of abandoned alternatives and forgotten choices. “What are our lives but doomed attempts to revive a cliché?”67 Stuart and Oliver, the two men of the triangle, are sketched as striking opposites, but also as each other’s doppelgangers: namely, Stuart remembers everything, while Oliver remembers all the important things believing that memory gets polluted with trivia, clogged up with

 63

Ibid., 135. George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, Metaphors We Live By (Chicago & London: The U of Chicago P, 2003), 49. 65 Matthew Pateman, op. cit., 58. 66 Julian Barnes, Love, etc., 245. 67 Ibid., 247; 248. 64

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rubbish 68 ;Stuart has money, Oliver does not; Dumb Stuart is “the dry monk,” Sophisticated Oliver is “the damp sinner”;69 Stuart is 100% manmade fiber, while Oliver is silk and viscose, sleek but inclined to rumple70; Stuart needs only one version of Gillian, while Oliver does not find one settled picture of her,71 etc. Numerous comparisons and examples strewn across the novel pose a number of postmodernist queries: the possibility of multiple images of being whoever you are pretending to be72; past and present as states being hopelessly interwoven;73 memory as an act of will74; intertextuality75; layers beneath an overpaint76; impossibility of conventionally living happily ever after77; people’s transfigurations—real and imagined78; playfulness of games and lies, talking as disclosing or hiding evidence 79 ; no-classical reversals of fortune 80 ; the parodiable and unparodiable matters81; multiple versions of reality with some stories deliberately left silenced if not muted;82 mixture of comic and gothic genres83; mixture of values in the overlapping discourses of love and commerce.84 In a complete postmodern reversal of people’s roles, Stuart utters: “That used to be my future.”85 And, we can always mold ourselves into our opposite. The protagonists’ voices all talk over one another, as if in front of a disinterested party who handles them like puppets. Still, they all manage to

 68

Julian Barnes, Talking It Over (London: Vintage, 2009a), 5-9. Ibid., 20; 33. 70 Ibid., 87. 71 Ibid., 174. 72 Ibid., 17. 73 Ibid., 15. 74 Ibid., 14. 75 Oliver patronizingly compares Stuart to Tristan, Don Juan, Casanova (as cited in Julian Barnes, 2009a, 26); inversion of F. Kafka’s beetle (62); Nicolas Chamfort’s quotations on love and marriage (143); allusion to Aesop’s “A Hare and a Tortoise” story (194); allusion to W. Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet (212); Wordsworth, Coleridge, Shelley, Keats (as cited in Julian Barnes, 2000, 17); “The Song ofRoland” (85); Lord Byron (232). 76 Julian Barnes, Talking It Over, 59; 119. 77 Ibid., 80. 78 Ibid., 95-96. 79 Ibid., 132. 80 Ibid., 135. 81 Ibid., 155; note an interesting idea that you cannot parody rhinestones since they are already parodies of diamonds. 82 Ibid., 171. 83 Ibid., 200-202. 84 Ibid., 225-234. 85 Ibid., 267. 69

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talk a wide range of love-related issues over, in the sense of talking something thoroughly and honestly—is our adult love-life characterized by conspicuous father(mother)-figure; does love come in all sorts of packaging; is real love a frog not having to turn into a prince; is emotional damage irreversible; are we somehow defective if our marriage does not succeed; does being in love make you liable to love even more and can you feel happy and trapped at the same time; should we invent the immutable rules of marriage so that we cannot hurt or be hurt; what is the real value of love; is love always headed in the direction of comedy; why does our capacity to hurt someone remain undiminished in marriage; is love an ultimate illusion, just like money. It seems only right to agree with Stuart’s notion that love, like money, exists because people agree to place a certain value on it. To our mind, love is thus made a convention that even postmodernist thinking cannot deconstruct. Barnes perpetuates love-as-container metaphor since we find ourselves in love, to great or lesser extent. And, he goes on to say that “what is constant is the human heart and human passions. And the change in who does what with whom—that’s a superficial change.” 86 There is the challenge of the past, of the already said which cannot be eliminated in the magical combination of words “I love you madly.”87 Love, etc. could be a moment of summary and assessment of the ideas presented in Talking It Over.88 The novel’s bleakness is due to the seeming collapse of the categories of faith, love and desire. Although the classical pattern of the reversals of fortune is followed, the reunited lovers are a far cry from being overjoyed in their state of love since their emotions never come near a definite closure or any definite sense of an ending. Postmodern novels resemble life in that the ending is just the start of another story: “You can’t put life down the way you can put a book down.”89 This novel further elaborates the idea as to why it is not always possible to divide people into definite categories of love and etc. depending on whether they believe love to be the most important thing in life or not. The subjective and objective versions of our past poison us and often leave flotsam in their wake. Our ability to reclaim love may be hindered by precisely the vision that enables this love in the first place. Every relationship has its ghosts, shadows, the abandoned alternatives, the unled lives. It is always an unanswerable question if it is present, past or future when we come (back) to love our ex-lover with our changed eyes.

 86

as cited in Patrick McGrath and Julian Barnes, op. cit., 21. Umberto Eco, op. cit., 46. 88 Matthew Pateman, op. cit., 82. 89 Julian Barnes, Love, etc., 93. 87

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What is the exact moment when we start “managing love”? Can love be contained in the convention of marriage? Does love always become the same in the end? Which end? Why do we purposefully inflict pain on our loved ones? Is love about power? Decision time: would we rather be loved or to love? This is one of the ways of looking at a postmodern vicious circle of diverse possibilities. Also, the prominent feature of Love, etc. is its structure, i.e. its apparent lack of traditional novelistic form. The characters overhear and eavesdrop on one another, take the reader into their confidence, unite so as to suffocate an undesirable speaker, get angry at a reader’s conspicuous absence, get manipulated by others’ stories, etc. Many side-stories that get told in the course of the novel serve the purpose of mirroring, doubling or paralleling Oliver’s idea that news always contain the oldest stories known to the tribe, such as brutality, greed, hatred, selfishness, etc. Finally, postmodernism does not need to annihilate conventions when it can subtly double or triple them. The frequency of the word always in Barnes’s fictional world might designate the utmost convention of time, possibly reiterating the fact that things have always been the same, without changing at all. Love occupies a paradoxical position in postmodern culture: it is at once uniquely desirable and conspicuously naïve,90 endlessly pursued and ceaselessly suspected. The worn-out phrase “I love you”91 obliterates the difference, the uniqueness of desire it sets out to capture and affirms the difference it sets out to efface. Love is silent too because it does not know how to speak. Desire is unable to name itself. What is not able to be said is what presses to be given form. In the 20th century desire is more voluble than ever before. In historiographic metafictions the role of fantasy becomes crucial since everyday obligations and preoccupations can render desire an absurdity. “I love you” is always a quotation; isn’t desire inevitably allusive, derivative, citational?92 Consequently, Barnes’s novels have a long literary pedigree stretching back to the Elizabethan poets and classical literature, but love today makes itself at once yearned for and distrusted. The postmodern lover is at once skeptical and idealizing, and therefore restless, unsatisfied, dis-placed and solitary. After all, since “love

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Catherine Belsey, “Postmodern Love: Questioning the Metaphysics of Desire,” in New Literary History, Vol. 25, No. 3, 25th Anniversary Issue (Part 1) (Summer, 1994), 683. 91 C. Belsey’s analysis is based on the incentive of Roland Barthes’s ideas. 92 Ibid., 685-690.

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is a Victorian idea,”93 what gives a postmodern (wo)man the right to desire a thing from the past? In the postmodern “semiotics of inverted commas,”94 the world proves an overwhelming museum of signs and conventions. In such a situation, everyone, including Barnes, might be only a translator and a commentator of already existent archetypes in literature that has been made a long time ago.95 Still, we project predicates onto reality, as Goodman states,96 while artworks require interpretation within the system of rules, the rules which are conventionally established and provide only a relative standard of fidelity. Art, in fact, fabricates what we call facts. Postmodern literature demonstrates its constant element of mutability and metamorphosis. Julian Barnes upholds postmodernism in his examination of the relationship between fiction and reality, life and art, showing that truth and love are majestically manifold. He shows us that there are no final endings even to stories of ordinary people. 97 After all, “beauty is not a fixed quality; it is an ongoing dialogue.”98

Works Cited Barnes, Julian. Before She Met Me. London: Vintage, 2009b. —. Love, etc. London: QPD, 2000. —. Talking it Over. London: Vintage, 2009a. Barth, John. “The Tragic View of Categories.” In: Postmodernism. Ed. Derek Maus. San Diego, CA: Greenhaven, 2001: 57-65. Barthelme, Donald. “Postmodernism and the Art of Writing.” In Postmodernism. Ed. Derek Maus. San Diego, CA: Greenhaven, 2001: 49-55. Belsey, Catherine. “Postmodern Love: Questioning the Metaphysics of Desire.” In New Literary History, Vol. 25, No. 3, 25th Anniversary Issue (Part 1) (Summer, 1994): 683-705. Calvino, Italo. “The New Understanding of Language.” In Postmodernism. Ed. Derek Maus. San Diego, CA: Greenhaven, 2001: 28-35.

 93

Ibid., 701. Viktor Žmegaþ, op.cit., 405. 95 Ibid., 414. 96 accessed Sept. 20, 2012. 97 Zoran Paunoviü, „Jedanaesto poglavlje Barnsove istorije,” u Istorija, fikcija, mit—Eseji o anglo-ameriþkoj književnosti, Zoran Paunoviü (Beograd: Geopoetika, 2006), 81. 98 Curtis White, “Is There Room for Art and Beauty in Postmodernism?” in Postmodernism, ed. Derek Maus, 150. 94

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Crane, Gregg. The Cambridge Introduction to The Nineteenth-Century American Novel. Cambridge: CUP, 2007: 26-102 Derrida, Jacques. “Différance.” In Literary Theory: An Anthology— Second Edition. Eds. Julie Rivkin and Michael Ryan. Oxford: Blackwell, 2004: 278-299. Eco, Umberto. “Irony as the Defining Principle of Postmodernism.” In Postmodernism. Ed. Derek Maus. San Diego, CA: Greenhaven, 2001: 43-48. Flašar, Miron. „Predgovor.” U Povesti iz antiþke književnosti—životi, putevi, podvizi, vojne. Ur. Miron Flašar. Beograd: Srpska književna zadruga, 1986: vii–c. Hassan, Ihab. “Ten Points About Postmodernism.” In Postmodernism. Ed. Derek Maus. San Diego, CA: Greenhaven, 2001: 36-42. Hutcheon, Linda. A Poetics of Postmodernism—History, Theory, Fiction. London: Routledge, 1988. Lakoff, George and Johnson, Mark. Metaphors We Live By. Chicago & London: U of Chicago P, 2003. Maus, Derek. “Postmodernism: An Overview.” In Postmodernism. Ed. Derek Maus. San Diego, CA: Greenhaven, 2001. McGrath, Patrick and Barnes, Julian. “Julian Barnes.” In BOMB, No. 21, (Fall, 1987): 20.23. Moseley, Merritt. Understanding Julian Barnes. Columbia, South Carolina: U of South Carolina P, 1997. Novakoviü, Darko. Ur. „Grþki ljubavni roman.” U Ksenofont Efeški, efeške priþe—Nepoznat autor, pripovijest o apoloniju, kralju tirskome. Zagreb: SNL, 1980: 5-38. Pateman, Matthew. Julian Barnes. Horndon, Tavistock, Devon: Northcote, 2002. Paunoviü, Zoran. „Jedanaesto poglavlje Barnsove istorije.” U Istorija, fikcija, mit—Eseji o anglo-ameriþkoj književnosti. Zoran Paunoviü. Beograd: Geopoetika, 2006: 79-83. Quinn, Edward. Ed. Collins Dictionary—Literary Terms. Glasgow: Harper Collins, 2004. Rubinson, Gregory J. “History’s Genres: Julian Barnes’s A History of the World in 10 ½ Chapters.” In Modern Language Studies, Vol. 30, No. 2 (Autumn, 2000): 159-179. White, Curtis. “Is There Room for Art and Beauty in Postmodernism?” In Postmodernism. Ed. Derek Maus. San Diego, CA: Greenhaven, 2001:145-151. Žmegaþ, V. Povijesna poetika romana. Zagreb: Grafiþki zavod Hrvatske, 1987.

THE CONCEPT OF BEAUTY IN POSTMODERNISM AND DIGITAL MEDIA AS IN HOWARD GARDNER’S TRUTH, BEAUTY AND GOODNESS REFRAMED SLAĈANA ŽIVKOVIû AND NADEŽDA STOJKOVIû

Introduction The aim of this paper is to present the concept of beauty as the great ideal of human striving, and to demonstrate its significance in postmodernism and the advent of digital media. The time has long since passed when aesthetics could be defined as the study of beauty and art, when the word beauty is used in aesthetics. This is not a paper about the philosophy of art. The subject of beauty and the subject of art are not the same thing. Are there not a thousand different ways of enjoying, admiring, or even defining art that have nothing to do with beauty? Of course.1

But, what is beauty? What do people mean by beauty? The notion of beauty, whether it is an inner or outer quality, has been long debated. Theorists have tried to define and express beauty in their own terms for their own time, but the attempt seems hopeless, because the factors that determine this phenomenon are constantly evolving. We could debate whether, and to what extent, the perception of beauty depends on postmodernism and digital media. Traditional conceptions of beautiful objects no longer suffice. The experience of beauty depends on

 1

James Kirwan, Beauty (UK: Manchester UP, 1999), 312.

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the creation of objects and experiences that are “interesting, memorable, and invite to revisit it.”2

Judgements of Beauty through History Dealing with beauty we start our discussion with Gardner’s words: “Why should we care about the beautiful (the true and the good)? Such caring is fundamental to our condition as human beings, and has been so for thousands of years.” Beauty is a phenomenon which is as old as mankind. From ancient times, many scientists, artists, philosophers, psychologists, poets, have tried to define beauty and show its importance for human lives. They have devoted great attention to understand what makes something beautiful. To understand the traditional concept of beauty, we briefly go back to the Ancient Greeks. The Greeks perceived beauty as interchangeable with excellence, perfection, and satisfaction. Plato glorified beauty as the highest value of human beings. “If there is anything worth living for, it is to behold beauty.” If you can grasp the significance of his words, it will be clear that they seem so strong and, at the same time, so perfect in their simplicity. His remark that “beauty is the only thing worth living for” has often in modern times been invoked whenever attempts have been made to give precedence to aesthetic values. Aristotle took a scientific, mathematical approach to the nature of beauty. He found that the superior forms of beauty were order, symmetry and definiteness, and these were universal elements of this virtue. In Aristotle’s opinion, the concept of beauty occurs when all parts work together in harmony so that no one part draws unjust attention to itself. Kant suggested the subjective approach to beauty in that the aesthetic experience was purely subjective and took place within the mind. The feelings of pleasure were derived from the aesthetic experience, from one’s own refinement of individual taste. “If a man does not find a work of art beautiful, a hundred voices praising it will not force his innermost agreement.” It can be said that Kant’s theory of beauty is a modern form of Platonism, and it has laid the foundation for aesthetic thoughts, including that of the twentieth century. According to Kant, beauty is restricted to only one kind of aesthetic value, that is, the cool beauty of form, a beauty without emotions.

 2

Howard Gardner, The Disciplined Mind: Beyond Standardized Tests and Facts to the K12 Education Every Child Deserves (England: Penguin, 2000), 38.

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The general characteristic of the 20th century is a rejection of beauty as an aesthetic ideal, culminating in postmodernism’s anti-aesthetics. “Beauty had disappeared not only from the advanced art of the 1960s, but from the advanced philosophy of art of that decade as well.”3 Beauty has come to be viewed as an aesthetic crime. He explains how the anti-beauty revolution has been born, and how the new wave of modernism has removed beauty from its throne. “The concept of beauty became abruptly politicized by avant-garde artists.”4 It is a sudden increase in the importance on physical beauty, particularly for women. The fashion, cosmetics and plastic surgery industries are rapidly growing. The beauty industry continues to move upward, so, by the beginning of the 21st century it is mostly run by large corporations and has become a multibillion dollar business. Thanks to modern technology and digital media, we are exposed to images of the ideal, perfect woman. We are not aware of the fact how prevalent and damaging the media influence is. The beauty, as an aesthetic value, has vanished in modern works of digital art. “We are losing beauty, and with it there is the danger of losing the meaning of life.”5 Wolf explores the ideal of a perfect beauty, and shows that the interpretation of beauty is a creation of society. It means that society creates pressure on people to act in a certain manner, and to look in a certain way. So, Wolf states that the beauty myth is the way women have created a notion in their mind that they do not measure up when it comes to their looks. Today, the emphasis is on physical attractiveness, so, people constantly strive to achieve perfection. The myth of beauty spreads the belief that an objective measurement of beauty exists, and that women must want to embody it, and that men must want to possess such women who embody beauty. The author has brought to light the tyranny of the beauty myth through the ages and its oppressive function in the contemporary age. “Beauty is a currency system […] It is an expression of power relations in which women must compete for resources that men have appropriated for themselves.”6

 3

C. Arthur Danto, The Abuse of Beauty: Aesthetics and the Concept of Art (Chicago and La Salle: Open Court, 2003), 71. 4 Ibid., 62. 5 Scruton, Roger. Why Beauty in Art Matters: BBC documentary details philosopher’s views on aesthetics http://www.theepochtimes.com. Nov. 24, 2012, 241. 6 Naomi Wolf, The Beauty Myth: How images of female beauty are used against women (New York: William Morrow, 1992), 196.

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Since there are no principles of taste, and there are no laws of taste, and judgements of beauty are not based on concepts. “These are properties of self-validating pleasures that are labeled beautiful and recognized as having aesthetic merit.”7 The judgement of beauty orders the emotions and desires of those who make it. It may express their pleasure and their taste: but it is pleasure in what they value and taste for their true ideals.8 Beauty judgements, whether they pertain to natural objects or to artworks, are positive aesthetic appraisals emergent in all stages of human development and in all cultures.9 Anyone with a serious interest in the arts can document how one’s judgment of beauty has changed over time, constituting what Gardner calls the individual portfolio of experiences and judgments of beauty. We should redefine beauty for ourselves so that it includes far more than perfect features, artfully enhanced make-up, hairstyling and clothing […] A truly beautiful woman makes the best of her physical assets but, more importantly, she also radiates a personal quality which is attractive.10

Is Beauty Globalized? How is the classical concept of beauty compared to the concept of beauty in contemporary society? A new concept of beauty has encouraged new questions about what it has come to mean in the globalized world. What does beauty mean to people in the contemporary world experiencing spectacular technological changes? Today, in the age of globalization, it is a fact that new media technology predominates in various aspects of our lives. In a rapidly expanding digital world, computer networks and Internet technologies have changed our view of the world and our perceptions of beauty as well. Let us think about the options available with global assessment of the Internet and digital media. “The digital media have ushered in a chaotic

 7

Mary Mothersill, Beauty Restored (Oxford: Clarendon, 1984), 253. Roger Scruton, Beauty. A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: OUP, 2009), 23. 9 Ronald Moore, Natural Beauty: A Theory of Aesthetics Beyond the Arts (Broadview, 2008), 85. 10 Nancy C. Baker, The beauty trap: exploring woman’s greatest obsession (New York: F. Watts, 1984), 95. 8

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state of affairs.”11Anyone can experiment, create and manipulate digital images. Anyone can make and remake works of art using Photoshop. From the smallest to the largest artwork, Photoshop has delivered an excellent result and performance to accomplish our needs. But, in this world of Photo-shopped images it is hard to find real beauty. The manipulation of a photo gives a realistic view of an unreal picture. The photos are manipulated and changed to fit unrealistic ideals that we view over and over again. No wonder our perception of beauty is distorted. With creating new forms of art (digital art) and, thus, a new concept of art, things are put to new uses and have new meanings, “which go beyond the distinction between the beautiful and the ugly, the true and the false, the useful and the useless, good taste and bad.”12 So, virtual beauty has been born. In an age of computers and in the world of virtual reality, how do we determine beauty? Can the artificial be beautiful? Can it be characterized as beautiful in the same way as nature, a flower? Doesn’t that depend on the relationship between a person and an object? How can we understand beauty when modern artistic creations shock us rather than delight? Postmodernism and the digital media have shaped societies in the last decades. Postmodernism is characterized by the creation of new forms, it refers to new thoughts, actions and reflections connected to many changes in modern society. In this new context, beauty as the classical virtue needs to be reframed, and reframing it entails rethinking how to educate on this virtue. Media technologies challenge the ideas of beauty, as they offer great amounts of information, which offer different and new ways of relating to others, and allow new forms of creating and accepting beauty. The expansion of globalization has led to a homogenization of beauty ideals throughout the world. Thanks to new media technologies we have never seen the growth of the beauty industry involving factory production and the marketing of brands like this. In the 21th century “beauty stopped being important, art increasingly aimed to disturb and break moral taboos, it was not beauty but originality however achieved.”13 The narrative of aesthetic redemption assures us that sooner or later we will see all art as beautiful, however ugly it appeared.14

 11

Howard Gardner, The Disciplined Mind: Beyond Standardized Tests and Facts to the K12 Education Every Child Deserves (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2011), 152. 12 Ibid., 85. 13 Scruton, op. cit., 2012, 79. 14 Danto, op. cit., 91.

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Today, beauty has been given another look. Artists are now criticized severely if their works seem to aim at beauty. In the last few years, however, some artists, critics, and curators have begun to give beauty another look. The resulting discussion is often confused, with arts pundits sometimes seeing beauty as a betrayal of the artist’s authentic role, other times working hard to find beauty in the apparently grotesque or disgusting.15

How to solve a problem? Only if we face a problem directly and look squarely at the threats to beauty posed by postmodernism and the digital media can we think in a right way about this virtue and its status today and going forward.

Renewed Interest in Beauty in the 21st Century Gardner examines the significance of this virtue in the age when new media technologies have deeply shaken our worldview. He deals with the question of whether beauty is still valued in postmodernism and the digital era. Postmodernists are skeptical about the nature, or even the existence of beauty as the human virtue. The other challenge comes from contemporary media that create opportunities for doing things in different ways. Is media altering our perception? Of course they are! Media constantly changes our perception of what beauty is. Gardner analyzes the challenges and shows how this traditional virtue can be powerfully reframed for our time. Despite our ever-changing world, beauty (together with truth and goodness) should remain a cornerstone of our society.16 Gardner provides a report on the theory and revision of great human ideal(s). He argues how the concept of beauty may be reframed, reformulated in the current century. “We must strive to identify and affirm beauty, while remaining open to revising it in the light of new knowledge. Only through philosophy can one begin to think about the nature of statements and claims that invoke the terms truth, beauty and goodness.”17 What about the invitation to revisit? Obviously, it is an invitation to think about feeling again and again. Gardner believes that the main characteristics of beauty can be preserved, and he argues what the true meaning of beauty really is. He

 15

Ibid., 142. Gardner, op. cit., 131. 17 Ibid., 213. 16

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discusses the current status of the classical virtue from multidisciplinary perspectives, history, biology, psychology, sociology and anthropology. According to Gardner “the trio of virtues (among them is beauty) remain essential to the human experience and, indeed, to human survival. They (it) must not and will not be abandoned”. What would a world be like where there were no experiences that we called beautiful? In this globalized world, no wonder that the purpose of art is “not to make stunning objects, but rather to shock us or make us think anew.”18 Or consider digital media where works of art can be made and remade through Photoshop. Thus, the term beauty has new meaning, and it “seems floating aimlessly in cyberspace.”19 Gardner, as a professor of education, suggests that education should strive for a deep understanding of three classical principles, namely, truth, beauty, and goodness. The purpose of education should be to enhance students’ deep understanding of truth (and falsity), beauty (and ugliness), and goodness (and evil) as defined by their various cultures, and to help “to rise to the challenges of the future—while preserving the traditional goals of education.” The final goals are educated people who understand the biological, the physical and the social world.20

In Defense of Beauty Beauty is, in one sense, perfectly familiar and unremarkable, and yet, in another sense, it is mysterious. 21 Beautiful is what we like, what is fascinating, interesting, great, inspiring to us, it gives us pleasure, a warm and positive feeling. “Across cultures and epochs, certain scenes are traditionally seen as beautiful—gorgeous landscapes, streams and rivers swell and water rushes over lovely waterfalls, a gorgeous sunset with an amazing array of colors and tones.”22 Gardner identifies three main criteria of the beautiful. The first criterion is interestingness. Why create interesting objects or perform interesting actions? In this sense, those who appreciate arts seek out material that is interesting, engaging, exciting, and unexpected, thus, the reaction is positive and we are satisfied with the final result. Many artists have responded to this demand, and perhaps they have helped to create it by fashioning exotic objects or carrying out sensational activities and

 18

Ibid., 196. Ibid., 186. 20 Ibid., 149. 21 Moore, op. cit., 235. 22 Danto, op. cit., 89. 19

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making sure that these activities are performed in galleries and observed by critics.23 Gardner’s second criterion is focused on the memorable form of a work. Throughout our lives we encounter unusual things, and they certainly elicit interest. We recall them and identify them as memorable. What about the invitation to revisit? “It is an invitation to think about feeling again and again. Beauty reveals itself in the course of an experience with an object. We are inclined to revisit the beautiful object periodically in order to recreate or even amplify the pleasurable feeling.” Gardner continues on how this concept may be reframed, reformulated in the next century. He states that beauty (together with truth and goodness) remains the crucial bedrock of our existence, even in the light of technological advances. And so, in our time, once we are open to experiences that are interesting, memorable, and worthy of revisiting, we are likely to have excitement that signals beauty. With respect to beauty, the canon is gone. We have access to all the works of art ever created and we can each form our own portfolio (physical, virtual or just in your head) of beauty. These will be things that we find interesting and memorable, things we wish to revisit.24

According to Nancy Etcoff beauty is a universal part of human experience, and it provokes pleasure, rivets attention, and impels actions that help ensure the survival of our genes.25 “By far the most valuable things we know or can imagine, are certain states of consciousness, which may roughly be described as the pleasures of human intercourse and the enjoyment of beautiful objects.”26 He considers that the value of natural beauty is superior to the value of artistic beauty, because “we think that the emotional contemplation of a natural scene is in some way a better state of things than that of a painted landscape”, and it would be better to “substitute for the best works of representative art real objects equally beautiful. Beauty is a basic pleasure. Try to imagine that you have become immune to beauty.”27

 23

Gardner, op. cit., 67. Ibid., 64. 25 Nancy Etcoff, Survival of the Prettiest: The Science of Beauty (New York: Doubleday, 1999), 214. 26 Moore, op. cit., 21. 27 Etcoff, op. cit., 123. 24

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Conclusion We stop right here. We invite you to think about this eternal human question. The more people understand the concept of beauty, the more they realize that it plays a great role in their lives. There is one more important thing to perceive—without the ideal of beauty, the motivation in the human heart—to create, to achieve, and to love others—the world may never exists, because beauty is the essence of all that. As long as human beings survive on the planet, “a thing of beauty will be a joy forever: its loveliness increases; it will never pass into nothingness.” But, “we could hardly survive if we did not navigate through […] the beautiful (and what is not beautiful). Just try to do so!”28

Works Cited Baker, C. Nancy. The Beauty Trap: Exploring Woman’s Greatest Obsession. New York: F. Watts, 1984. Danto, C. Arthur. The Abuse of Beauty: Aesthetics and the Concept of Art. Chicago and La Salle: Open Court, 2003. Etcoff, Nancy. Survival of the Prettiest: The Science of Beauty. New York: Doubleday, 1999. Gardner, Howard. The Disciplined Mind: Beyond Standardized Tests and Facts to the K12 Education Every Child Deserves. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2000. —. Truth, Beauty and Goodness Reframed: Educating for the Virtues in the Twenty-First Century. New York: Basic, 2011. Kirwan, James. Beauty. UK: Manchester UP, 1999. Moore, Ronald. Natural Beauty: A Theory of Aesthetics Beyond the Arts. Broadview, 2008. Mothersill, Mary. Beauty Restored. Oxford: Clarendon, 1984. Schenk, Ronald. The Soul of Beauty. A Psychological Investigation of Appearance. Cranbury, NJ: Associated UP, 1992. Scruton, Roger. Beauty. A Very Short Introduction. Oxford: OUP, 2009. —. Why Beauty in Art Matters: BBC documentary details philosopher’s views on aesthetics http://www.theepochtimes.comNovember 24, 2012. Wolf, Naomi. The Beauty Myth: How Images of Female Beauty Are Used Against Women. New York: William Morrow, 1992.

 28

Gardner, op. cit., 64.

IAN MCEWAN’S ENDURING LOVE: A LOVER’S DISCOURSE AS THE CONVENTIONAL FORM OF LOVE OLGA VELIUGO

Say you love me, say “my love” to me… —D.H. Lawrence

It is a popular modern conviction that love has a discursive nature—an idea, pointed out by Denis de Rougemont,1 developed by Roland Barthes2 and Julia Kristeva, 3 and supported by contemporary scholars, including philosophers, 4 literary critics, 5 and linguists. 6 Love inevitably initiates a corresponding discourse, for a lover experiences a deep natural need to express his/her feelings both verbally and non-verbally, and to get the Other’s response. The connection between the most precious human emotion and the words it seeks to be expressed in is so tight and ancient, that love discourse can be viewed as a conventional form of the existence of love. The end of the 20th century witnessed a growing popularity of love discourse which is partly due to postmodern interest in the issues of language, interpretation, and interrelation between reality and discourse. The development of love discourse can be observed primarily in literature which

 1

Denis de Rougemont, Love Declared. Essays on the Myth of Love, trans. Richard Howard (NY: Pantheon, 1963), 19. 2 Roland Barthes, A Lover’s Discourse: Fragments, trans. Richard Howard (N.Y.: Hill and Wang, 2010). 3 Julia Kristeva, Tales of Love (N.Y.: Columbia University Press, 1987). 4 Ⱥɥɟɧɚ ȼ. ɋɟɜɚɫɬɟɟɧɤɨ, “Ʉɭɥɶɬɭɪɧɨ-ɢɫɬɨɪɢɱɟɫɤɢɟ ɮɨɪɦɵ ɷɤɡɢɫɬɟɧɰɢɚɥɶɧɨɝɨ ɩɟɪɟɠɢɜɚɧɢɹ: ɬɟɦɚ ɥɸɛɜɢ ɢ ɟɟ ɞɢɫɤɭɪɫɢɜɧɵɟ ɬɪɚɧɫɮɨɪɦɚɰɢɢ”.Ⱥɜɬɨɪɟɮɟɪɚɬ ɞɢɫɫ. ... ɤɚɧɞ. ɮɢɥɨɫɨɮɫɤɢɯ ɧɚɭɤ: 09.00.13. (ȿɤɚɬɟɪɢɧɛɭɪɝ, 2002). 5 Catherine Belsey, Desire: Love Stories in Western Culture (Oxford: Blackwell, 1994). 6 ȿɤɚɬɟɪɢɧɚ ɂ. Ɇɚɬɜɟɟɜɚ, “ɋɢɬɭɚɰɢɹ ɩɪɢɡɧɚɧɢɹ ɜ ɥɸɛɜɢ ɢ ɟɟ ɞɢɫɤɭɪɫɢɜɧɚɹ ɪɟɚɥɢɡɚɰɢɹ ɜ ɚɧɝɥɢɣɫɤɨɦ ɹɡɵɤɟ”. Ⱦɢɫɫ. ɤɚɧɞ. ɮɢɥɨɥ. ɧɚɭɤ: 10.02.04. (ɂɪɤɭɬɫɤ, 2010).

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offers a unique opportunity for a lover to unfold his/her amorous speech. In particular, the British novel demonstrates a gradual movement from constructing love plots to addressing the psychology of the characters, the priority being transferred from love theme to love discourse. What is more, the reader seems to be always interested in love discourse. In comparison, the discourse of sexuality itself can hardly arouse such an acute and steady interest unless accompanied by the words of love: dialogues, love letters, self-reflection of the protagonists upon their emotions and the phenomenon of love itself, etc. Love discourse desperately tries to affirm its uniqueness; and with it, it is a strongly (and rather conservatively) codified type of narration. Why do we continue to be fascinated by endless variations of the conventional love discourse, with its eternal I love you cliché? Ian McEwan’s novel Enduring Love, 1999, provides some insight into the matter. In its attempt to define once again what love is, it offers a contemporary reconsideration of the conventional discourse of romantic love that dates back to medieval courtly love and is struggling to survive in the routine of contemporary day-to-day life. The starting point of the story refers to an extraordinary tragic event— the emergence of an uncontrolled balloon over a peaceful picnic area, with a helpless boy in the basket. The course of life of the people, who rushed to help and eventually witnessed John Logan—one of the rescuers—die, has dramatically changed ever since. The protagonists, Joe and Clarissa, a happy middle-aged couple, face the interference of the Other: Jed, a young man, suffering from Clérambault’s syndrome (otherwise known as erotomania), falls in love with Joe and pursues him. The irony of the situation lies in its total absurdity: as most of Jed’s persecution consists in abundant phone calls, love letters, and conversations—actually, nothing more than love discourse which nevertheless exercises a tremendous power—Joe has no legal opportunity to protect Clarissa and himself, as well as their love, from Jed until the unfortunate lover openly threatens the couple. As a result, Joe and Clarissa’s relationship falls apart. A closer examination of this unconventional love triangle reveals that the rival’s place here is occupied by a lover who worships conventional romantic love. This kind of love originates from courtly love and retains traditional features of chivalry. Jed’s beloved, Joe, is socially superior and totally unapproachable, whereas Jed’s love is exclusively spiritual, infinitely romantic (love at first sight), and faithful. Moreover, Jed, in full conformity with the essence of courtly love, subjectively perceives his own feelings as analogous to divine love: “Everything we do together, everything we are is in God’s care, and our love takes its existence, form

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and meaning from His love.”7 With the help of love Jed wants Joe to come to believe in God, i.e. to come to the Absolute which is a version of the Socratic staircase.8 Also, according to the traditions of courtly love, Jed’s love is of explicit discursive nature: it manifests itself in its excessive discourse. Jed’s letters to Joe are represented in chapters 11, 16 and in appendix 2. They are metaphorical (lexical stylistic devices are used in plenty, e.g.: “Our love! First bathing me, then warming me through the pane,”9 lyrical (the beauty of nature is admired), and sentimental (the lover’s sentimentality is stressed, e.g.: “The old tears streaming”10; “I have to stop writing to hug myself”11). It is clear enough that suchlike letters could as well be written by a woman tortured by unrequited love12: When are you going to leave me alone? You’ve got me. I can’t do anything. […] Dear Joe, I feel happiness running through me like an electrical current. I close my eyes and see you; I can feel your presence all around me.13

These fragments of love discourse reflect a typical change for a lover from acute happiness to vast desperation. In conclusion to one of the letters Jed writes: I’m earning our happiness day by day and I don’t care if it takes me a lifetime. A thousand days—this is my birthday letter to you. You know it already, but I need to tell you again that I adore you. I live for you. I love you. Thank you for loving me, thank you for accepting me, thank you for recognizing what I am doing for our love.14 —these words testify to the conventional romantic ideal of self-sacrifice

for the sake of love and the beloved.

 7

Ian McEwan, Enduring Love (Surrey: Vintage, 1998), 97. Plato, Symposium, trans. Christopher Gill (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1999). 9 McEwan, Enduring Love, 244. 10 Ibid., 244. 11 Ibid., 245. 12 David Malcolm, Understanding Ian McEwan (Columbia, South Carolina: University of South Carolina Press, 2002), 177. 13 McEwan, op. cit., 91, 93, 95. 14 Ibid., 245. 8

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All these are the conventional features of the traditional romantic love discourse.15 In this way Jed’s love discourse is identical to the classical discourse of a “normal” lover, which is highlighted by many literary critics. 16 But these features (with the only exception of the religious constituent) are also typical symptoms of a mental disorder, erotic delusion, and obsession. Thus, men and women, the sane and the insane practice quite the same type of love discourse. The words I love you are repeated by all the main characters, but the reality that lies behind the discourse is totally different. The emotions hidden behind are implied but not expressed, whereas the declaration of love itself is more like the metonymy of the unsaid. The words of love become the conventional form that can contain very different and controversial meanings. For instance, Joe retells his conversation with Clarissa: “’Oh Joe,’ she said, ‘I’ve missed you all day, and I love you, [...] And Oh God, I love you.’ And Oh God I loved her’.”17 Here, like in Jed’s discourse, God is addressed, though neither Joe, nor Clarissa are actually religious, the mentioning of God being just an emphasis. The mentioned minor detail reveals how metaphoric love discourse is, a subjective interpretation of reality, that is, a construction of a different reality, rather than its reflection. If lovers make use of the same universal language, a code, it becomes difficult to differentiate between love and erotic delusion, that is, a binary opposition (love—hatred, good—evil, Eros—Thanatos) vanishes, becomes decentralized, the normal and the marginal become blurred. Not only Jed, but also Joe and Clarissa demonstrate their fixations and obsessions: Joe is obsessed with Jed persecuting him and with feeling guilty for Logan’s death. Clarissa—a literary critic and a college teacher—is obsessed with John Keats. These obsessions are, in one way or another, of discursive origin: on the one hand, they take place in the realm of discourse, on the other hand, they are obsessions not with the Other, but rather with the Other’s discourse. E.g. Jed reads Joe’s articles that arouse a revolt in him (Chapter 16); Joe reads through Jed’s letters without success trying to find evidence against him; Clarissa looks for Keats’ last letter to his beloved.

 15

Barthes, Fragments, 95, 175. Roger Clark and Andy Gordon, Ian McEwan’s Enduring Love (N.Y.: Continuum, 2003), 33; Malcolm, Understanding, 174; Peter Childs, Ian McEwan’s Enduring Love (Routledge, 2007), 35. 17 McEwan, op. cit., 52. 16

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A parallel with Keats’ love story adds to the diminishing differences between normal and marginal love discourses. In Peter Childs’ opinion, Jed’s letters to Joe are symmetrical to Keats’ letters to Fanny: both did not send their last letters, and the letters themselves are very similar in content.18 Thus, a hidden parallelism of discourses can be found here, aiming at reconsideration and deconstruction of the traditional comparison of love with madness, the latter, in Barthes’ opinion, being very typical of the whole literary tradition.19 Such reconsideration inevitably raises the issue of what love is, and where its ontological barriers lie. Frederick Holmes puts a question, whether love can or must be sane and reasonable. Obsession can as well be its inherent quality,20 a necessary constituent of conventional romantic love. Reflecting upon Jed’s feelings, Joe comes to the conclusion: “De Clerambault’s syndrome was a dark distorting mirror that reflected and parodied a brighter world of lovers whose reckless abandon to their cause was sane.”21 But the issue of the border between the norm and the disorder remains open. To support this idea Appendix 1 offers a medical view of Clerambault’s syndrome: “The pathological extensions of love not only touch upon but overlap with normal experience, and it is not always easy to accept that one of our most valued experiences may merge into psychopathology.” 22 Thus, romantic love discourse is deconstructed as one of the universal codes, which cannot, according to Jean-François Lyotard, claim to the “speculative unity” of all knowledge and does not correspond to reality.23 In other words, romantic ideals are reconsidered in the discourses of the protagonists. On the one hand, Jed’s abnormal, marginal love corresponds to the ideal of courtly romantic love and proves to be most stable and enduring. On the other hand, the fragility and instability of Joe and Clarissa’s normal relationship are stressed. In this way, presented as pathology, the conventional romantic love discourse in McEwan’s novel is reconsidered, deconstructed, and parodied.

 18

Childs, Ian McEwan’s, 20. Barthes, Fragments, 120. 20 Frederick M. Holmes, Julian Barnes (Basingstoke: Palgrave MacMillan, 2009), 107. 21 McEwan, op. cit., 128. 22 Ibid., 242. 23 Jean-François Lyotard. The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, trans. Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), 35. 19

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Although very romantic and emotional, Jed’s “pathological” discourse sounds at the same time very reasonable and sane: It suits you and it protects you that I’m a madman. Help! There’s a man outside offering me love and the love of God! Call the police, call an ambulance! There’s no problem with Joe Rose. His world is in place, everything fits, and all the problems are with Jed Parry, the patient idiot who stands in the street like a beggar, waiting to glimpse his loved one and to offer his love.24

The above cited fragment demonstrates Jed’s capacity for reflection and adequate critical analysis of the situation, as well as of the Other’s emotional state. It also means that Jed’s insanity, paradoxically, cannot be traced within his discourse, whereas Jed’s love, vice versa, exists within the discourse only. In other words, Jed’s love is nothing but love discourse: no more conventional constituents of love (like physical attraction, passion, care, etc.) can be detected in Jed’s attitude to Joe. If it were not for love discourse, Jed’s feelings could not be called love whatsoever. So, discourse becomes one of the conventional forms love can take. Probably this is one of the reasons why a lover desperately needs to hear words of love from the beloved, a verbal confirmation of the reciprocal feelings. Jed’s discourse constructs its own linguistic reality—the reality of love, and the insanity of this love lies in the obvious discrepancy with the extralinguistic reality. A question arises, which of the two contradictory forces present here— the discourse itself or the deeds that lie behind—is “real.” If the conventional view suggests that love should be supported by appropriate deeds, and mere words, however beautiful, mean nothing, in postmodern culture the matter does not seem to be so simple. Firstly, discourse exercises a great power which cannot be ignored (Jed’s discourse dramatically affects Joe and Clarissa’s relationship eventually ruining it). Secondly, it lasts, sometimes longer than extralinguistic factors (in this respect, Jed’s love discourse is literature 25 : it is neither a lie, nor the truth—it is fiction). Thirdly, a contemporary view suggests, that love

 24 25

McEwan, op. cit., 136. Kristeva, Tales, 1.

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embraces everything, including hatred, and can be destructive as well—in psychoanalytical terms, it combines both Eros and Thanatos.26 According to the idea of the novel, the main constituent of love, which signifies the domination of Eros over Thanatos, is empathy. It is due to empathy that people come to an understanding, and communication takes place. In this respect, Jed’s love is nothing but total lack of empathy, the so-called “solipsism,”27 and “egotism.”28 Although any discourse is undoubtedly dialogical,29 and so is Jed’s love discourse, its fatality lies in the wrong interpretation and a total lack of mutual understanding. Can this inability to understand the Other be argued as a solid ground for differentiating between the norm and the pathology concerning love discourse? Hardly. After Jed’s interference Joe and Clarissa’s love also comes to an abrupt reduction of empathy, with the only difference that it is not expressed in physical violence, as with Jed, but is reduced to the sphere of discourse only. Here are the specifics of the modern conscience: as D. H. Lawrence puts it, the word is separated from the deed, in contrast to the chivalry,30 and the conflicts are formed and solved in the sphere of discourse. Over centuries love discourse changes, and contemporary love discourse has acquired very specific characteristics, so that it can be rightly called the love discourse of a new type. The whole novel (with the exception of the appendices) is a story told by Joe, Jed’s and Clarissa’s authentic voices being incorporated in the form of letters. Thus, the narrative can be viewed as Joe’s love discourse, as it affirms Joe’s love for Clarissa. This love discourse is definitely unconventional, implicit, avoiding sentimentality and pretending to be something else—a diary-like story of Joe’s about facing the Other, a personal account of a few extraordinary events and the acute emotions they have aroused. The core of the transformations that love discourse has undergone lies in a shift from the external conflict to the internal one. As Rougemont

 26

Ⱥɧɞɪɟɣ Ɇ. Ɋɭɞɟɧɤɨ, “Ɏɢɥɨɫɨɮɫɤɨ-ɚɧɬɪɨɩɨɥɨɝɢɱɟɫɤɚɹ ɷɤɫɩɥɢɤɚɰɢɹ ɮɟɧɨɦɟɧɚ ɥɸɛɜɢ: ɨɬ ɤɥɚɫɫɢɤɢ ɞɨ ɩɨɫɬɦɨɞɟɪɧɚ”. Ⱦɢɫɫ. ɤɚɧɞ. ɮɢɥɨɫɨɮɫɤɢɯ ɧɚɭɤ: 09.00.13. (Ɋɨɫɬɨɜ-ɧɚ-Ⱦɨɧɭ, 2007), 105. 27 Malcolm, Understanding, 174; Paul Edwards, “Solipsism, Narrative and Love in Enduring Love,” Ian McEwan’s Enduring Love, ed. Peter Childs. (Routledge, 2007), 78. 28 Clark and Gordon, 34. 29 Julia Kristeva, “Word, Dialogue and the Novel,” in Desire in Language: A Semiotic Approach to Literature and Art (N.Y.: Columbia University Press, 1980). 30 David H. Lawrence, “A propos of ‘Lady Chatterley’s Lover’,” in Lady Chatterley’s Lover (London: Penguin, 1994), 307.

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observes, in classical literature love does not represent a problem in itself, it is a source of a problem only in case it contradicts a moral duty.31 This is not the case now: in the modern world love itself is problematic: having lost its status of the absolute, it is considered to be a relative and ambivalent phenomenon. Moreover, contemporary writers are often rather pessimistic about naïve expectations of happiness love may eventually bring (compare also with Julian Barnes’s fiction, novels Love (1971) by Angela Carter and Love, Again (1996) by Doris Lessing, etc.). Likewise, the happy end of Enduring Love is not included in the tale Joe tells; instead, it is mentioned in one of the appendices, thus inevitably acquiring a secondary status. However, contemporary love discourse still retains many of its conventional discursive qualities which in Enduring Love are present within some of Joe and Clarissa’s conversations, and Jed’s marginal love discourse. Irrespectively of its rather horrid after effects (including a murder and a suicide attempt), Jed’s love discourse remains infinitely beautiful in itself. It is not accidental, that the last pages of the novel are dedicated to Jed’s words about his love—the words that can outlive the lover—and it hardly matters whether they are part of the medical history or a novel. The eternal beauty of the conventional sentimental love discourse is explained by the simple fact that it is with the help of the discourse that love asserts itself as the meaning of human life. Values may be reconsidered, the ways people love and talk about love may change, but love itself remains a constant, something people always long for, and it is especially relevant at the turn of the centuries. 32 “The most unoriginal thing we can say to one another is still the thing we long to hear”33: love and the words I love you remain the most valuable human experience ever possible. Thus, McEwan’s Enduring Love is another evidence of a new tendency: the British novel at the turn of the centuries demonstrates a notable movement from the postmodern aesthetics to what is now being termed as postpostmodernism. The process is marked by tiredness from

 31

Rougemont, Love Declared, 12. Reinhard Sieder. “Liebe: Diskurse und Praktiken: Editorial”. Österreichische Zeitschrift für Geschichtswissenschaften. 18.3 (2007), 5. 33 Jeanette Winterson, Written on the Body (N.Y.: Alfred A. Knopf, 1993), 9. 32

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the postmodern cynicism and a turn to lyricism, “new sentimentality,” “new humanism,”34 that is, to human feelings.

Works Cited Barthes, Roland. A Lover’s Discourse: Fragments. Transl. Richard Howard. N.Y: Hill and Wang, 2010. Belsey, Catherine. Desire: Love stories in Western Culture. Oxford: Blackwell, 1994. Childs, Peter. Ian McEwan’s Enduring Love. Routledge, 2007. Clark, Roger, and Gordon, Andy. Ian McEwan’s Enduring Love. N.Y: Continuum, 2003. Edwards, Paul. “Solipsism, narrative and love in Enduring Love”. In Ian McEwan’s Enduring Love. Ed. Peter Childs, 78-90. Routledge, 2007. Holmes, Frederick M. Julian Barnes. Basingstoke: Palgrave MacMillan, 2009. Kristeva, Julia. “Word, Dialogue and the Novel”. In Desire in Language: A Semiotic Approach to Literature and Art. N.Y.: Columbia UP, 1980. —. Tales of Love. N.Y: Columbia UP, 1987: 64-92. Lawrence, David H. “A propos of ‘Lady Chatterley’s Lover’.” In Lady Chatterley’s Lover. London: Penguin, 1994: 305-335. Lyotard, Jean-François. The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge. Translated by Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1984. Malcolm, David. Understanding Ian McEwan. Columbia, South Carolina: U of South Carolina P, 2002. McEwan, Ian. Enduring Love. Surrey: Vintage, 1998. Plato. The Symposium. Translated by Christopher Gill. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1999. Rougemont, Denis de. Love Declared. Essays on the Myth of Love. Translated by Richard Howard. NY: Pantheon, 1963. Ryan, Kiernan. “After the Fall.” In Ian McEwan’s Enduring Love. Peter Childs. Routledge, 2007: 44-54. Sieder, Reinhard. “Liebe: Diskurse und Praktiken: Editorial”. Österreichische Zeitschrift für Geschichtswissenschaften. 18.3 (2007): 5-12. Winterson, Jeanette. Written on the Body. N.Y.: Alfred A. Knopf, 1993.



34 ɇɚɞɟɠɞɚ Ȼ. Ɇɚɧɶɤɨɜɫɤɚɹ, “ɉɨɫɬɩɨɫɬɦɨɞɟɪɧɢɡɦ”.In Ʌɟɤɫɢɤɨɧ ɧɨɧɤɥɚɫɫɢɤɢ. ɏɭɞɨɠɟɫɬɜɟɧɧɨ-ɷɫɬɟɬɢɱɟɫɤɚɹ ɤɭɥɶɬɭɪɚ XX ɜɟɤɚ, ed. ȼ.ȼ. Ȼɵɱɤɨɜ (Ɇɨɫɤɜɚ: Ɋɨɫɫɢɣɫɤɚɹ ɩɨɥɢɬɢɱɟɫɤɚɹ ɷɧɰɢɤɥɨɩɟɞɢɹ, 2003), 353.

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Ɇɚɧɶɤɨɜɫɤɚɹ, ɇɚɞɟɠɞɚ Ȼ. “ɉɨɫɬɩɨɫɬɦɨɞɟɪɧɢɡɦ.” In Ʌɟɤɫɢɤɨɧ ɧɨɧɤɥɚɫɫɢɤɢ. ɏɭɞɨɠɟɫɬɜɟɧɧɨ-ɷɫɬɟɬɢɱɟɫɤɚɹ ɤɭɥɶɬɭɪɚ XX ɜɟɤɚ, ed. ȼ. ȼ. Ȼɵɱɤɨɜ. Ɇɨɫɤɜɚ: Ɋɨɫɫɢɣɫɤɚɹ ɩɨɥɢɬɢɱɟɫɤɚɹ ɷɧɰɢɤɥɨɩɟɞɢɹ, 2003. Ɇɚɬɜɟɟɜɚ, ȿɤɚɬɟɪɢɧɚ ɂ. “ɋɢɬɭɚɰɢɹ ɩɪɢɡɧɚɧɢɹ ɜ ɥɸɛɜɢ ɢ ɟɟ ɞɢɫɤɭɪɫɢɜɧɚɹ ɪɟɚɥɢɡɚɰɢɹ ɜ ɚɧɝɥɢɣɫɤɨɦ ɹɡɵɤɟ”. Ⱦɢɫɫ. ɤɚɧɞ. ɮɢɥɨɥ. ɧɚɭɤ: 10.02.04. ɂɪɤɭɬɫɤ, 2010. Ɋɭɞɟɧɤɨ, Ⱥɧɞɪɟɣ Ɇ. “Ɏɢɥɨɫɨɮɫɤɨ-ɚɧɬɪɨɩɨɥɨɝɢɱɟɫɤɚɹ ɷɤɫɩɥɢɤɚɰɢɹ ɮɟɧɨɦɟɧɚ ɥɸɛɜɢ: ɨɬ ɤɥɚɫɫɢɤɢ ɞɨ ɩɨɫɬɦɨɞɟɪɧɚ”. Ⱦɢɫɫ. ɤɚɧɞ. ɮɢɥɨɫɨɮɫɤɢɯ ɧɚɭɤ: 09.00.13. Ɋɨɫɬɨɜ-ɧɚ-Ⱦɨɧɭ, 2007. ɋɟɜɚɫɬɟɟɧɤɨ, Ⱥɥɟɧɚ ȼ. “Ʉɭɥɶɬɭɪɧɨ-ɢɫɬɨɪɢɱɟɫɤɢɟ ɮɨɪɦɵ ɷɤɡɢɫɬɟɧɰɢɚɥɶɧɨɝɨ ɩɟɪɟɠɢɜɚɧɢɹ: ɬɟɦɚ ɥɸɛɜɢ ɢ ɟɟ ɞɢɫɤɭɪɫɢɜɧɵɟ ɬɪɚɧɫɮɨɪɦɚɰɢɢ”. Fɜɬɨɪɟɮɟɪɚɬ ɞɢɫɫ. ... ɤɚɧɞ. ɮɢɥɨɫɨɮɫɤɢɯ ɧɚɭɤ: 09.00.13. ȿɤɚɬɟɪɢɧɛɭɪɝ, 2002. 

THE BEAUTY OF OPERATIC AND POSTMODERN CONVENTION(S) IN MICHAEL BERKELEY AND IAN MCEWAN‫ތ‬S FOR YOU (2008) JEAN-PHILIPPE HEBERLE

This article examines how the beauty of convention(s) is at work in For You, an opera by English composer Michael Berkeley and acclaimed English novelist Ian McEwan, which was premiered under the baton of Michael Rafferty by Music Theatre Wales on 28 October 2008 at Linbury Studio Theatre in London. Beauty points at the formal aesthetic qualities of an artistic or literary work as well as at the pleasure and joy stemming from the work itself and from its fabric while convention underlines the “traditional” and “conventional” methods or styles used for the conception and elaboration of the work itself. In For You, the beauty of convention(s) lies in the aesthetic quality of the opera, most particularly in Berkeley and McEwan‫ތ‬s use of operatic and postmodern literary conventions (arias, ensembles, duets, acts, scenes, hybrid genres and styles, quotations, intertextual references, etc.) as well as in the pleasure of playing with these conventional forms and genres. I will thus study the way Berkeley and McEwan play with operatic conventions and references to key works and genres of western literature and opera as well as with typical postmodern conventions. Through the interaction/interplay between beauty and convention in For You, I will then ponder over the following questions: Hoes does convention generate beauty? Is this interplay a simple postmodern game or is it an apt means to express Man‫ތ‬s postmodern condition and conception of art? The respect of conventions in For You dwells on different musical and postmodern literary aspects of the opera such as self-references, metaartistic comments, literary and operatic intertextuality, stylistic and generic hybridity or eclecticism, elements of high and low culture, etc. The piling up and recycling of operatic and literary conventions and references contribute to foregrounding the postmodern aesthetics of the work and generate beauty.

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Before dealing with these aspects of the work, I will begin with a few words about the partnership between Ian McEwan and Michael Berkeley, and then I will give a brief summary of the libretto. Berkley and McEwan first teamed up for the pacifist oratorio Or Shall We Die? in 1983. After this collaboration, they decided to keep on writing together and working on an opera project about sexual obsession. It took them twenty-five years to finally complete their project. In the meantime, Berkeley wrote two operas with Australian writer David Malouf (Baa Baa Black Sheep in 1993 and Jane Eyre in 2000) and Ian McEwan pursued his career as one of the most prominent and successful English novelists of his generation, publishing some of his best novels including, for instance, Amsterdam (1998), Atonement (2002) and On Chesil Beach (2007). As for the libretto of For You, it is based on two sources as shown by Andrew Burn in the booklet of the commercial recording of the opera: Two sources helped fashion McEwan’s impressive and highly effective libretto: Docktor Glass, a novel by the Swede Hjalmar Söderberg, where a doctor, in love with the wife of a patient, abandons his ethical principles, and Leporella, a short story by the Austrian writer Stefan Zweig in which a maid, having interpreted her master’s offhand comments as a declaration of love, undertakes a terrible action to, in her mind, free him.1

McEwan’s story thus deals with Charles Frieth, an eminent composer and conductor in his mid-sixties as well as a compulsive pervert womaniser, who is oblivious of his faithful and seriously ill wife, Antonia. When the opera begins, he is rehearsing one of his early works before preparing for the world premiere of a new piece of work entitled “Demonic Aubade” with Robin, his personal assistant. During the rehearsal, Charles humiliates, forgives and seduces Joan, the horn player. When he is away Antonia’s doctor tries to persuade her to come and live with him. Charles Frieth’s Polish housekeeper, Maria, deludes herself into believing that he is in love with her. She actually misreads the signal she thinks he is sending to her. This leads to a destructive love and causes her to murder Charles’s wife at hospital. Not only does she kill her but she leaves false clues to make sure the police will assume Charles is the murderer. He is then arrested and sent to prison. As can been seen when one is knowledgeable about McEwans’s novels, the libretto also encapsulates some of the themes that permeate his

 1

Andrew Burn, “Obsession: Berkeley and McEwan’s For You,” in the booklet of the recording of For You, (Perivale: Signum records, 2010), 8. (See complete discographic references in the discography section after this article).

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books. It is indeed another variation on sexual obsessions as well as a story of cheatery, hypocrisy, perversity, treason, misunderstanding, illusion, disillusion, and tragedy. In fact, most of the main themes tackled in For You are summed up, sang and highlighted by the six main characters of the opera in the tutti finale of act 1: Tutti Silence and deceit, ambition and defeat, love, music loyalty, self-delusion— these are the elements of deadly confusion.

In a typical postmodern vein and aesthetics the characters clearly voice the main themes dealt with in the story and (meta)comment upon the action as a chorus would do in a Greek tragedy. The libretto is so reminiscent of some of McEwan’s novels that the following statement he made about the way he apprehends his work as a novelist can also be applied to For You: I have contradictory fantasies and aspirations about my work. I like precision and clarity in sentences, and I value the implied meaning, the spring, in the space between them. Certain observed details I revel in and consider ends in themselves. I prefer a work of fiction to be self-contained, supported by its own internal struts and beams, resembling the world, but somehow immune from it. I like stories, and I am always looking for the one which I imagine to be irresistible. Against all this, I value a documentary quality, and an engagement with a society and its values; I like to think about the tension between the private worlds of individuals and the public sphere by which they are contained. Another polarity that fascinates me is of men and women, their mutual dependency, fear and love, and the play of power between them. Perhaps I can reconcile, or at least summarise, these contradictory impulses in this way: the process of writing a novel is educative in two senses; as the work unfolds, it teaches you its own rules, it tells how it should be written; at the same time it is an act of discovery, in a harsh world, of the precise extent of human worth.2

In the “harsh world” of For You the spectator is again confronted with our postmodern era, i.e. to an age of exhaustion that is no longer confident in the progress of humanity. Indeed, pessimism and disillusionment prevail in the libretto, and there is no confidence in the ideals of the Enlightenment and in the capacity of humanity to progress and become more mature as

 2

Ian McEwan, “Author Statement,” Literature—British Council (accessed on 1 September 2012)

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shown by the eternal themes presented in the opera: cheatery, hypocrisy, social barriers and the other themes mentioned above. If cheatery, a manifestation of the incapacity of humanity to improve itself morally, is constantly dealt with throughout the plot, hypocrisy—a subform of cheatery to a certain extent—is most particularly tackled in Act 1, scene 2 through Simon’s ironical comment about superficial and false social relations at work: Simon A reception at the Garrick in honour of a retiring surgeon. The glinting tray of Canapés, an indecent multitude of colleagues, oily speeches of passionate insincerity. I think we can all agree, this is not an age of plain speaking.

The notions of equality and democracy are other central ideals of the Enlightenment. The society of For You seems to be completely out keeping with such notions since it appears as a class-minded world epitomised by Charles’s relation with Robin, his assistant, the members of the orchestra and Maria, his Polish housekeeper. The themes of the opera are thus typical and conventional postmodern themes. Yet the postmodern characteristics of the libretto are not circumscribed to themes as its very fabric also epitomises the way postmodern writers use and play with conventions. Even if postmodernism is complex, varied and sometimes contradictory, it is often based on pastiches or parodies of conventional work or forms. Regarding parody, there is a clear parody of classical myths in For You to convey the idea that they are no longer relevant to speak of the postmodern era as shown, Act 1, scene 2, in the following part of the duet between Antonia and Simon: Antonia I dread that moment of oblivion, that rehearsal for death. The cheerful porter with his trolley coming to collect me from the ward. I think of Charon, the boatman, taking me across the River Styx. Then corridors, fluorescent ceiling lights, the elevator to a special little room, the calming voices, the cannula inserted, the chemical poison, then coldness racing up my arm with such violent speed, and then, nothing, nothing.

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Simon Exactly, nothing, and nothing to fear, and when you wake … Unnoticed, Maria comes in with a tray. Antonia If I wake. What did the poet write of death? The anaesthetic from which none comes round. Simon Best not to think of Larkin at such times.

Indeed, in this passage Antonia, who is about to be operated on, compares anaesthetic to death through the myth of Charon, apparently showing her belief in the afterworld since the myth focuses on a rite of passage between the world of the living and the world of the dead. Yet, in her next cue, she alludes to another reference to death by quoting a line from “Aubade,” a poem by Philip Larkin “The anaesthetic from which none comes round.” What Larkin expresses here is the impossibility of an afterlife. After death there is nothing, no after world. A more pessimistic less “religious”/“mythical” approach to death is presented here through the debunking/deconstruction of the myth of Charon to show that myths are no longer adapted to our present situation or, in this case, to postmodern views on death. Sometimes postmodern writers do recycle myths to express the impermanence of some questions and of human experience, but it is not the way they are recycled in For You. Their debunking and parody here is reinforced by a pun based on a reference to the cornucopia or the horn of plenty. Not only is there a pun but there seems to be a kind of burlesque treatment of the myth, Act 1, scene 6, since the expression is applied to a bawdy situation: Antonia We agreed you’d never bring your work at home. Is this the flute whose husband owns a bank, or the harp with the autistic son, or the cello with the house in Wales? Joan None of these. I am the horn. Antonia Of course. The horn of plenty. Joan That’s cheap.

Consequently, McEwan uses parody to acknowledge the fact that we are inevitably separated from the past, that our era has sometimes new ways of envisaging human experience.

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The reference to myths is also part of the aesthetics and fabric of postmodern works. Glenn Ward in his book entitled Postmodernism reminds us that postmodern works are a patchwork of pre-existing styles, genres and conventions: The postmodern text is openly assembled from different genres and styles. A recent review in the music magazine Wire puts it well: ‫ދ‬genius lies in the poise and skill of the blend rather than in the breathtaking innovation of the ingredients‫ތ‬. A related practice is eclecticism. As we saw with architecture, this involves openness to a wide range of forms and devices. Postmodern artists can hop between genres at will, without appearing to privilege any. While it is impossible simply to invent a new style out of the blue, it is equally impossible to avoid having a style. Regardless of how resourceful they may be, artists are always working within pre-existing cultural languages and conventions. Eclecticism means throwing these together, reshuffling the cards. For artists in this vein all of culture is there to be plundered, irrespective of high/low distinctions.3

Eclecticism of genres is what characterises For You. It incorporates elements from Restoration plays, elements from thrillers as well as elements from some of Mozart’s most famous operas. Just like in plays from the Restoration, the main character of the story, Charles Frieth is both a womaniser and a libertine. Many aspects of the story, apart from the libertine/rake and dysfunctional marriage themes, are taken from the Restoration plays of the seventeenth century. For example, the importance of wit over humour4 in such plays is illustrated by cues like, “I am the horn /The horn of plenty” (Act 1, scene 2), or lines like “and my kingdom for a computer” (Act 2, scene 2). The libretto of For You is also pregnant with misunderstandings and quid pro quos, another key feature with the decline of the rake of Restoration drama. Here, the decline of the rake/libertine is epitomised through Charles’s arrest and punishment. Finally, the limited number of characters, their types and goals are absolutely in keeping with the conventions to be found in English Restoration comedies: The comedy of the Restoration, then, inherited and absorbed a number of comic traditions to produce a highly flexible and highly diverse repertory that could incorporate new elements without strain, all in a highly

 3

Glenn Ward, Postmodernism (London: Hodder, 2003), 30. Difference between wit and humour: Wit is the ability to say things that are clever and amusing, and humour is more simply the ability to say things that are funny. 4

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conventional form that required only minor adjustments. A limited number of familiar character types (young lovers, blocking parents, witty servants, fools, gulls, bullies, cast mistresses, whores, cuckolds, unhappy wives) in search of a limited number of goals (courtship, seduction, cuckolding, gulling) in a theatre that expected considerable variety in all its entertainments produced a comedy at once conservative in its adherence to its traditions yet ever-changing in response to the concerns of the society that produced and supported it.5

What Brian Corman writes in this extract from his article “Comedy” about the adaptation of an old theatrical form could be applied to For You, which also adapts the thriller genre to our present day society. Indeed, For You is not a classical mystery thriller or whodunnit as the spectator knows who committed the crime and who will be wrongly accused of the murder. Actually, it verges more on the psychological thriller genre with echoes of Ruth Rendell’s A Judgement in Stone (1977), a novel which examines the differences between British classes in the 1970s. As has just been seen, McEwan’s libretto borrows elements from different genres including a genre not mentioned yet: opera. Regarding this genre, McEwan wrote a libretto for a particular type of opera called a number opera. That kind of musico-dramatic work consists of easily detachable sections or numbers (arias, duets, ensembles, etc.) and differs from Wagnerian or Verdian operas in which the music is continuous. Such operas were very common in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. For example, the Da Ponte-Mozart trilogy (The Marriage of Figaro, Don Giovanni and Cosi fan tutte) is an illustration of the genre. The reason why Berkeley and McEwan resort to that type of opera and its conventions is probably linked to the plot focalizing on the portrait of a libertine. Indeed, all three Da Ponte-Mozart operas deal with love, cheatery and fidelity, and Count Almaviva (The Marriage of Figaro) and Don Juan (Don Giovanni) are two libertines. The parallel between Charles Frieth and Don Juan is obvious to draw since both characters are punished for their behaviour at the end of the last act. The moral condemnation or judgment of a character is not very common for McEwan and it is rather something he does not do or eschews in his novels. In an interview about For You, which is available on YouTube, he justifies the moralistic ending of the libretto through operatic convention:

 5

Brian Corman, “Comedy,” in Dorothy Payne Fisk, ed. The Cambridge Companion to English Restoration Theatre (Cambridge, CUP, 2000), 56.

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The Beauty of Operatic and Postmodern Convention(s) in For You It has something of a Don Giovanni like end: Charles being led off to hell. Strange that in the writing of an opera, we never do that in fiction, it’s curiously moral that the wicked should be punished; I have never punished the wicked so nakedly. Something about the opera convention leads one to do this.6

Consequently, the conventional operatic model for For You is the number opera with its arias, duets, etc. Duets or arias, contrary to recitatives are moments when the action stops and the characters give vent to their feelings. It is a moment of reflection (as in arias) or a moment of interaction between two characters (as in duets). In the aria sung by Maria, Act 1, scene 3, she actually performs a song in which she recollects her native homeland: Maria Song Ah, Robin, you should go. It’s so beautiful and sad. We have virgin forests of the kind you lost in England five hundred years ago, where wolves and eagles hunt, and clear rivers you can put your lips to and drink.

The song emphasises the pastoral aspect of Maria’s native country. Even if it is an idealisation as she is told by Simon (“How romantic! I’ve heard the cities are rather grim, and in between are treeless potato fields.”), this pastoral song is actually a folk song. Whether it is a real (Polish) folk song or a fake one is not important.7 What is important here is that popular music is associated with Maria to foreground her modest social origins and the social gap that exists between the Polish housekeeper on the one hand, and Charles and Simon on the other. Not only does the integration of popular elements stresses this gap but it is also part of the postmodern aesthetics where high and low culture coexist, even if opera has always been, well before the postmodern era, an art form that has often merged

 6

Ian McEwan, “Michael Berkeley and Ian McEwan talk about new opera For You,” Music Theatre Wales, 21 April 2008 (YouTube) (accessed on 1 Sept.2012) 7 According to Andrew Burn,“the concept of the Polish folksong [in For You] had its origin in Janáþek’s The Excursions of Mr Brouþek.” Andrew Burn, “Obsession: Berkeley and McEwan’s For You,” 9.

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serious and popular culture. Once again the operas by Mozart may serve as a good example to illustrate such a point. The aria is not the only “number” that appears as a meta-commentary element in For You. For instance, the duet of Act 1, scene 2, between Simon and Antonia is a good case in point to show how music is a vital element to convey drama and meaning in an opera: Simon (softly) You must pack a case. I’ll come back for you tonight if I can find a bed that’s free. He goes towards her, hesitates. Too much to say. Antonia Yes. Too much to say. Simon Impossible to say it. Antonia Impossible. And no need. Simon Because you know. Antonia We know. Simon Only silence. Antonia Silence will say it all. Repeats, overlapping. Simon takes his coat. Simon I’m late. I must leave you. A doctor’s duty. Antonia The hospital? At this hour?

What both characters perform at this moment of the opera is a love duet. The music, because of the conventional function of the love duet, tells us more than the words do: “Yes. Too much to say. Impossible to say it.” Simon and Antonia cannot express or reveal their love in words for social or moral reasons, but they are “betrayed” by the music and operatic conventions. It is a good example of how in an opera drama is conveyed through music and conventions.

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The same situation occurs in Act 2, scene 2, where there is some kind of a “blind” love duet between Charles and Maria. Maria is aside, but she performs, without Charles being aware of it a love duet. It reinforces the idea that she is in love and misreads Charles’s words, which feed unconsciously her misunderstanding and inability to grasp his dry and black sense of humour: Maria Was the operation a success? Charles Oh yes, a success. Antonia will not die— the good doctor has done his work, but I could wring his neck, that loathsome snake. Maria (aside) Angry with the doctor for saving her worthless life! Charles If murder was among your household duties I’d send you to the hospital now. Hah! Maria (aside) To succeed where the doctor failed, and end her misery! Charles But I know that I’m a hypocrite and a fool ... [...] Let me put you a simple question— Maria, have you ever thought of marriage? Maria You’re asking me? Oh no, I mean, but yes, but no, but yes, I mean, my answer is of course, it’s yes of course, a simple yes.

The last duet I would like to mention and analyse is not a duet performed by the characters of For You. It is a duet that Charles refers to in words and music when he sings the line “Man und Weib und Weib und Mann” Act 2, scene 1: Charles I remember that snowstorm on the bridge when we crossed the river to my first concert

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at the Festival Hall, and as we walked we were singing The Magic Flute, Mann und Weib und Weib und Mann— my God, how happy we were.

The line in German is taken from the famous Papageno-Papagena duet in Mozart’s The Magic Flute. It is quoted by Charles to convey the evanescence of love by pinpointing the difference between his present situation with Antonia and yesteryear when they were two soul mates. In the passage above, Charles recalls the time when he and Antonia were one. The chiasmus8 (“husband and wife and wife and husband”) in the sentence quoted by Charles from the duet between Papageno and Papagena shows that the two characters of The Magic Flute are soul mates, and it mirrors and embodies the very function of the love duet, which is to express requited love between two persons. McEwan and Berkeley resort to the duet form in For You for two reasons that are intricately intertwined: 1) the duet is dramatically important to fully convey the situation of the characters; 2) the duet reinforces “the implied meaning” of the text, which is so much valued by McEwan (see his first quotation above with references in note 1), and shows that operatic conventions with music convey drama and meaning(s). The way the duet is used in For You is somehow part of the meta-operatic and self-reflexive aspects of the opera. These aspects appear several times in the work with references to other composers (Britten and Vivaldi for instance) together with some artistic questions being raised: artistic creation and the conflict between the private and public spheres (between the private man and the musician), artistic creation and mundane and petty behaviour as well as artistic creation and high aims/ideals. All this is most particularly voiced by Charles, Act 2, scene 4: Charles Charles comes away from the orchestra. The light of artistic creation is also blinding. The artist can’t see the suffering he causes to those around him. And they’ll never understand the purity of his goal, how the heat of his invention won’t melt the ice in his heart. He must be ruthless!

 8

A chiasmus is a figure of speech in which two clauses are related to one another in a crossing structure.

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The Beauty of Operatic and Postmodern Convention(s) in For You No religion, no purpose except this: make something perfect before you die. Life is short, art is for all time— History will forgive my ways because My music outstared the sun.

To conclude, For You is a perfect example of postmodern aesthetics applied to the world of opera. The formal and stylistic eclecticism of the work forces the spectator to be active and finding pleasure in the way both composer and librettist play with intertextual references. These references and conventions are used either to be debunked or to be revitalised. The tension between desperate and eclectic elements is part of the postmodern aesthetics and mirrors to a certain extent the condition and dualities in which postmodern Man leaves. The recycling of operatic conventions illustrates Fredric Jameson’s statement on postmodern art: “the writers and artists of the present day will no longer be able to invent new styles and worlds [...] only a limited number of combinations are possible; the most unique ones have been thought of already.”9 He expresses in other words what Roland Barthes writes about text as “a tissue of quotations drawn from the innumerable centres of culture”10 in his essay “The Death of the Author.” As regards McEwan and Berkekey, they play with the conventions of postmodern aesthetics to disparage them or to parody them even if at times they keep some of these conventions as a perfect means to express the condition of art and of the artist today.

Works Cited McEwan, Ian. For You. London: Vintage, 2008. Barthes, Roland. Image—Music—Text. Trans. Stephen Heath. Fontana, 1977. Harvey, David. The Condition of Postmodernity: An Enquiry Origins of Cultural Change. Oxford: Blackwell, 1989. Jameson, Fredric. Postmodernism: Or, the Cultural Logic Capitalism. Durham: Duke UP, 1992. Payne Fisk, Dorothy. Ed. The Cambridge Companion to Restoration Theatre. Cambridge: CUP, 2000. Sadie, Stanley. Ed. The New Grove Dictionary of Opera. 4 vols. Macmillan, 1992.

London: into the of Late English London:

 9

Fredric Jameson, in Glenn Ward, Postmodernism, 30. Roland Barthes, “The Death of the Author,” in Image—Music—Text, trans. Stephen Heath (London, Fontana, 1977), 146.

10

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Ward, Glenn. Postmodernism. London: Hodder, 2003.

Discography Berkeley, Michael. For You. The Music Theatre Wales Ensemble, Michael Rafferty, cond. Cd, Signum Classics, SIGCD208. Perivale: Signum, 2010.  

CONTRIBUTORS

Janko ANDRIJAŠEVIû (b. 1971) graduated from the English Department of the Faculty of Philosophy in Nikšiü in 1995. He got his M. A. degree at the Faculty of Philology of the University of Belgarde in 2000. In 2005 he defended his doctoral disseration about religious elements in Aldous Huxley’s prose at the Faculty of Philosophy of the University of Novi Sad. Since 1995 he has been employed as a lecturer at the Faculty of Philosophy in Nikšiü. Claudine ARMAND is Associate Professor in the English department, Université de Lorraine, Nancy, France where she teaches mainly American literature and visual art. Her fields of interest are literature and the textimage interaction. She is the author of an exhibition catalogue, Anne Ryan: Collages (Giverny, Museum of American Art, Terra Foundation, 2001). She has written several articles on various modern artists as well as on contemporary African-American artists. She has co-edited three collections of essays including one entitled Ancrages/Passages (Nancy: PUN, 2006), one on the myth of Prometheus in the arts and literature, Créatures et créateurs de Prométhée (Nancy: PUN, 2010) and one on London-New York: Exchanges and Cross-Cultural Influences in the Arts and Literature (Nancy: PUN, 2012). She is a member of IDEA (dedicated to the study of interdisciplinary theories and practices) and is currently coediting a book on “Positioning Interdisciplinarity”. She also continues to explore the works of American contemporary artists. Jeannine BELGODERE is Associate Professor of English at the University of Le Havre, France. The main areas of her research are dance aesthetics, the interrelations between the arts and Native American culture. She lectures on the history of modern dance in the US, the cultural expressions of Native Americans, and Native American sculpture. She has published articles on the sculptural works of the Apache artist Allan Houser, the choreography of Isadora Duncan, the modernist and graceful aspects of Duncan’s dance aesthetics, the traditions and rituals of Native Americans, especially the Pueblos, the poetry of Walt Whitman and Sylvia Plath. In September 2010, she published a few articles on the US including “The Major American Dance Companies,” “The Sun Dance,” “Allan Houser.”

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Contributors

She contributed these articles to the Dictionary Larousse à présent. In 2004 and 2009, she was a Visiting Professor at the University of New Mexico (Department of Theatre and Dance). In 2010 she was granted a six-month sabbatical. She was a Guest Professor at the University of New Mexico (Department of Art and Art History). During her successive stays in the US, she conducted research on South-western Indian ceremonials. Arben BUSHGJOKAJ is a professor of American Literature and Cultural Studies at the English and American Studies Department, “Luigj Gurakuqi” University of Shkodra, Albania. He has been teaching American Studies and related subjects for over thirteen years. He completed his doctorate in Austria, in 2007, with a mark of excellence. His academic research is mainly focused on American Literature of the late nineteenth century and post-colonial literature as well. Dubravka ĈURIû (Dubrovnik, 1961), associate professor at Faculty for Media and Communication, Singidunum University, Belgrade. She has published the following books: Discourses of Popular Culture (Diskursi popularne kulture, FMK, 2011), Politics of poetry—Transition and Experiment in Poetry (Politika poezije—tranzicija i pesniþki eksperiment, 2010), Poetry, Theory, Gender—Modern and Postmodern American Women Poets (Poezija teorija rod—moderne i postmoderne ameriþke pesnikinje, 2009), Speech of the Other (Govor druge, 2006) and Language, Poetry, Postmodernism—Language poetry in the Context of Modern and Postmodern American Poetry (Jezik, poezija, postmodernizam—jeziþka poezija u kontekstu moderne i postmoderne ameriþke poezije, 2002). She coedited the book Impossible Histories—Historical Avant-gardes, Neoavant-gardes, and Post-avant-gardes in Yugoslavia, 1918-1991 (2003, second edition 2006), as well as the following anthologies Discursive Bodies of Poetry—Poetry and Poetics of New Generation of Women Poets (Diskurzivna tela poezije—poezija i autopoetike nove generacije pesnikinja, 2004), and an anthology of new American poetry, New Poetry Order (Novi pesniþki poredak, 2001). Miloš D. ĈURIû is a Senior Lecturer in English at the Faculty of Electrical Engineering, University of Belgrade, where he teaches nine subjects for undergraduate students and two subjects for postgraduate students (English for M.Sc. in Electrical Engineering and English for PhD in Electrical Engineering). He is also the Visiting Senior Lecturer in English at the Faculty of Mechanical Engineering in Belgrade, as well as worked as the Visiting Senior Lecturer at the Faculty of Medicine, University of

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Belgrade, where he taught the undergraduate course on English for Academic Medical Purposes. The focus of his scientific work and publication is on English for Academic Purposes (English for Electrical Engineering, English for Software Engineering and English for Mechanical Engineering), Theory of Translation, English Language Teaching Methodology, Semantics, Discourse Analysis, and Acoustic Phonetics. He is a Member of the Presidency and Member of the Board of Directors of the Association of Scientific and Technical Translators and Interpreters of Serbia. He is also the Member of the PHILOLOGIA Association (located at the Faculty of Philology in Belgrade), Member of the Association of English Teachers of Serbia, European Society for the Study of English, Applied Linguistics Association, Mathematics of Language Association and many international associations and societies. He is also an expert in acoustic consulting (he has acted so far in capacity of a Consultant for Acoustics within an international project of Acoustic Consulting for the Castle “Naftashma” in Russia). Jean-Philippe HEBERLÉ is Professor of British literature and civilization at the University of Lorraine, France. He teaches British literature and opera, art history as well as the history of ideas in the UK. His field of research is mainly opera. He is the author of many articles about the relationship between music and literature, music and society, and music and the history of ideas in British opera in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. In 2006, he published a book in French on the British composer Michael Tippett, Michael Tippett, ou l’expression de la dualité en mots et en notes (2006). He has co-edited two other books, Créatures et créateurs de Promethée (2010) and London-New York: Exchanges and Cross-Cultural Influences in the Arts and Literature (2012). He has also recently co-edited an issue of the French journal of British civilization devoted to the English Musical Renaissance. Aleksandra IZGARJAN is an Assistant Professor, University of Novi Sad. She teaches courses in American Literature and American studies at the English Department as well as at the Center for Gender Studies, Association of Centers for Interdisciplinary and Multidisciplinary Studies. She has recently participated in the following projects: “Comparative Studies of Serbian and Foreign Literatures and Cultures” and “Serbian and Foreign Literature and Culture in Contact and Discontact”. She has published two books and more than thirty articles in the field of literature and gender studies. She was guest lecturer at New York University, Howard University and University of Alabama at Tuscaloosa, USA.

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Contributors

Božica JOVIû was born in Sarajevo, Bosnia Herzegovina, in 1976. She had her BA of Arts in English Literature at the University of East Sarajevo in 2001. She earned her MA in English Literature at the University of Bergen, Norway, in 2004. From 2005 till 2011 she worked as a Teaching Assistant at the English Department at the University of East Sarajevo. She had her PhD in English Literature from the University of Belgrade in 2011. She is a Fulbright alumnus, having spent nine months researching at the Fulbright School of Arts and Sciences, the University of Arkansas in 2009/2010. She currently holds the post of Assistant Professor of English and American Literature at the English Department of the University of East Sarajevo. She was also engaged by the English Department at the University of Banja Luka to teach for three semesters in 2012/2013. Benjamin KEATINGE is Dean of the Faculty of Languages, Cultures and Communications at the South East European University, Macedonia where he teaches English literature. He holds a doctorate on Samuel Beckett from Trinity College Dublin and he has published several articles on Beckett as well as on modern and contemporary Irish poetry. Marija KRIVOKAPIû-KNEŽEVIû teaches 19th- and 20th century British Literature at the Faculty of Philosophy, University of Montenegro, where she also works as a vice-dean for science and international relations. Her publications focus on the work on D. H. Lawrence (Lawrence in Italy, Belgrade 2000; Quest for the Transcendent in D. H. Lawrence’s Prose, Niksic, 2009, as well as dozen of other short publications), but her recent interest also include contemporary Native American literature (co-authored with Sanja Runtiü, Suvremena književnost ameriþkih starosjedilaca, Osijek, 2013), and travel writing. Together with Aleksandra Nikþeviü-Batriüeviü, she co-edited the following Cambridge Scholars Publishing editions: Culture-Bound Translation and Language in a Global Era, History, Politics, Identity: Reading Literature in a Changing World, Recounting Cultural Encounters, On the Borders of Convention and The Face of the Other in Anglo-American Literature. She edited and co-edited a series of translations of British, Canadian, South African, and Native American authors. She is the current general editor of linguistics and literature journal Folia linguistica et litteraria. She has also been a coordinator of an international project for the advancement of language studies, SEEPALS 2010-2013, financed by the European Commission.

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Maja MUHIû is lecturer of cultural studies, post-colonial theory, and culture of the English-speaking countries at the South East European University in Tetovo. She holds a Ph.D. in philosophy from Ss Cyril and Methodius University, Skopje. Her focus is on interpretive/symbolic anthropology with special emphasis on the Americal anthropological trends and the work of Clifford Geertz. During 2007-2008, Muhiü spent a semester at the Department of Anthropology at the University of California, Berkeley. In the previous years, she has also visited and worked closely with other renowned universities, such as The University of Santa Barbara, California. As a result of her stay there and her cooperation with the Department of Religious Studies, Muhiü shows up as the co-author of the Encyclopedia of Global Religion (2011) edited by Mark Juergensmeyer and Wade Clark Roof. She has also published her work in the recent After Yugoslavia: Identities and Politics within the Successor States (2011) edited by Robert Hudson and Glenn Bowman. Muhiü has published a number of articles in philosophical and anthropological journals. She participated as a guest speaker at a number of conferences in the Balkans, Japan, and the USA. Aleksandra NIKýEVIû-BATRIûEVIû teaches courses on American literature, American women poetry and feminist literary theory and criticism at the University of Montenegro (Faculty of Philosophy, Department of English Language and Literature). Her M.A. and Ph.D are in American literature. Her publications include papers on Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton, second wave feminism, Herman Melville and other American authors. She has organized nine international conferences on English language and literary studies at the Faculty of Philosophy, University of Montenegro, and five on women writing (with the following topics: woman writing; female characters in literary works; visions, revisions: woman writing and their place in literary canon; from margin to the centre: feminism, literature, theory; poetry today). As a member of the Centre for young scholars in the Montenegrin Academy of Science and Arts, she organized two conferences on the topics of 1) literatury text and the possibilities of its interpretation and 2) the creativity of women in Montenegro. She has also initiated numerous translational projects (literary texts and literary theory). Most of these translations have been published in Ars, a journal for literature and culture, and later collected in editions, published by Open Cultural Forum from Cetinje. As coordinator of a project financially supported by the Ministry of Science and Ministry of Education of Montenegro, she organized a conference on literary theory at the turn of the century, at the Faculty of Philosophy, University of

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Contributors

Montenegro. She has been president of “Montenegrin Association for Anglo-American Literary Studies dr Biljana Milatoviü,” from 2008 onward. She is also a member of the editorial board of journals for language, literary and cultural studies Ars (Open Cultural Forum, Cetinje), Lingua Montenegrina (Institute for Montenegrin Language and Literature), Folia Linguistica et Literaria (Institute for Language and Literature, Faculty of Philosophy, University of Montenegro), Journal of Teaching English Language for Specific and Academic Purposes, published by the Faculty of Electronic Engineering, University of Niš, Serbia, Anglisticum Journal, Spain, and Reþi (Beograd). She has edited or co-edited sixteen books, published in Montenegro or in Great Britain (Cambridge Scholars Publishing). She is currently writing a book about literary canon and feminist interventions in it. Armela PANAJOTI started teaching at the Department of Foreign Languages, University of Vlora, Albania soon after her graduation with a Gold Medal (award given to an Albanian student whose grades are all ten—highest Albanian grade). She completed her doctoral thesis on Conrad at the Department of English, University of Tirana, Albania. She is also a member of Joseph Conrad Society (UK). She gave an immense contribution to the foundation of ASSE, the Albanian Society for the Study of English and is at present chair of ASSE, general editor of in esse: English Studies in Albania, the journal the society publishes as well as member of the Board of ESSE (European Society for the Study of English). For this contribution she was nominated to join the English Association’s Fellowship as a Corresponding Fellow, which she did in February 2011. Bavjola SHATRO is professor of Albanian Contemporary Literature and World Literature in Aleksandër Moisiu University, Albania. She holds a doctorate in Literary Studies from the Institute of Literary Research in the National Center of Albanian Studies in Tirana. She has numerous articles published in different peer-reviewed journals in the USA (University of Mississippi, University of Illinois, University of Chicago), in Italy (Universita’ La Sapienza, Rome), in Albania, Macedonia, Kosova etc. She is author and co-author of 5 books in the field of literary studies. She has wide academic experience in different universities such as Pennsylvania State University (USA) the Swedish university Abo Akadami (Finland), University of Turku (Finland), University of Pavia (Italy) etc. She is a member of several academic boards.

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Nadežda STOJKOVIû, PhD, Assistant Professor, Lecturer of English Language, Faculty of Electronic Engineering, University of Niš, Serbia. Her main areas of interest and research: relationship between language and identity, literature, ESP. Author of textbooks Written and Spoken Communications in English for Science and Technology, Faculty of Electronic Engineering, Niš, 2005, and co-author of English for Students of Information and Communication Technologies, Faculty of Electronic Engineering, Niš, 2012. Author of a chapter in each of the following books: Identity and Difference, Peter Lang, Switzerland, 2005, Metafrastikes Optikes: Epiloges ke Diaforetikotita, Athens University: Parousia, 2006, Languages for Specific Purposes—Searching for Common Solutions, Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2007, Education Landscapes in the 21s Century: Cross-cultural Challenges and Multi-disciplinary Perspectives, Cambridge Scholars, 2008, Recounting Cultural Encounters, Cambridge Scholars, 2009, Identity Issues, Cambridge Scholars, 2010. Dijana TICA was born in Banja Luka in 1977. She graduated from the Faculty of Philosophy, Department of English, Banja Luka, in 2000. She got her MA in English literature from the Faculty of Philosophy, Banja Luka, in 2006. She has worked at the Faculty of Philology, Department of English, Banjaluka, since 2001. She is especially interested in English literature of the eighteenth and nineteenth century and Shakespeare. At the moment, she is finishing her doctoral thesis titled “Tragic Heroines in English Nineteenth Century Novels.” Olga A.VELIUGO, MA, postgraduate student at the Department of World Literature at Minsk State Linguistic University, Belarus. She has taught business English at Belarusian State Economic University for a number of years. At the moment she is completing her PhD thesis Aesthetic Implementation of Love Discourse in Julian Barnes’s and Ian McEwan’s Fiction. Her academic interests include: love discourse, literary discourse analysis, contemporary British novel, postmodern aesthetics. Aleksandra ŽEŽELJ KOCIû holds an MA from the Faculty of Philology, University of Belgrade, Serbia, where she is currently working on her doctoral dissertation. Her primary interest is modern Anglo-American prose and drama. She has been working as an English Teacher at Philological High School in Belgrade since 2004. She has published a number of papers on diverse literary issues.

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Contributors

Slaÿana ŽIVKOVIû, PhD, is a lecturer at the Technical College of Vocational Studies & Faculty of Civil Engineering and Architecture, University of Niš, Serbia. Her research interests include ESP, literature. She has published seven books and a monograph. She is the author of many articles presented at international conferences, and published in journals. Among her recent contributions are co-authored works with N. Stojkoviü, English for Students of Information and Communication Technologies, 2012, “The impact of English for Specific Purposes in the age of globalisation“ and “Intercultural Communication as Medium of Cultural Diplomacy,“ in Building Cultural Bridges in Education, 2013, accepted by Cambridge Scholars for publication.

INDEX

A Adam, 107, 109, 110 Adorno, Theodor, 46 Albert of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha, Prince, 112 ancient romances, 190, 191 Austen, Jane, 110 Pride and Prejudice, 110 Aeschylean spirit, 21, 22 American Objectivist poets, 37-49 American Indian culture, 166 American rural pastoralism, 38 Anglican Church, 109 Annual Reviews of Anthropology, 4 Apollo, Apollonian,73, 79, 155, 157, 164, 178, 180, 182 Aristotle, 17, 202 Art Deco, 161 Artemis, 176, 177 Athena, 176 Atlantic Monthly, The, 25 Atlas, 179 B Bakhtin, Mikhail, 34 Balanchine, George, 168 Barnacle, Nora, 58 Barnes, Julian, 187, 188, 190, 192194, 197-199 Before She Met Me, 187, 192, 195 Talking It Over, 187, 195, 197 Love, etc., 187, 195, 197, 198 Barth, John, 187 Barthelme, Donald, 189 Barthes, Roland, 211, 215, 232 Bathsheba, 107 Beauchamp, Pierre, 156

Beckett, Samuel, 52, 61 Beeton, Isabella, 114 Béjart, Maurice, 167, 169 Benjamin, Walter, 55 Beowulf, 104, 106 Bergson, Henri, 155 Berkeley, Michael, 221, 222, 227, 231 Bernstein, Leonard, 44, 45 Bhabha, Homi, 144, 184 Bible, 54 bildungsroman, 96, 115 Binchy, Maeve, 62 Black Aesthetics, 137 Black Codes, 137 Bodichon, Barbara, 115 Borchardt, Ludwig, 180 Bradley, Andrew Cecil, 19-24 Brontë, Charlotte, 115, 116 Brontë, Emily, 115 Brooklyn Museum, 183, 184 Buddha, 94, 101 Bunting, Basil, 37, 39 Butler, Josephine, 115 C Calvinism, 86 Calvino, Italo, 189 Carter, Angela, 218 Casanova, Pascale, 36 Catholic Church, 56, 109 Cervantes, Miguel de, 191 Chaucer, Goeffrey, 107 Childs, Peter, 215 Chopin, Kate, 191 Cinderella, 140 Civil Rights Movement, 137 Classical Greek art, 157

244 Cleopatra, 180 Clifford, James, 2, 6, 7 Communist Party, 41, 49 Congregational Church, 123 Congreve, William, 191 Conrad, Joseph, 69, 73-7, 79 Lord Jim, 73, 74, 76, 78 Coplan, Aaron, 167 Craig, Cairns, 85-87, 89 Crapanzano, Vincent, 6, 9-11 Creeley, Robert, 45 crisis of representation, 2, 5, 11, 13 Cronin, Anthony, 52 Cronus, 78 Cubism, 161 cultural ecology, 3 Cunningham, Merce, 169 D Damon, Maria, 34 Daphne, 177 Darwin, Charles, 113 Davis, Emily, 115 de Diaghilev, Serge, 155, 168 Ballets Russes, 155, 157, 165, 168 Declaration of Independence, 166 de Mille, Agnes, 168, 169 Derrida, Jacques, 46, 69, 70, 189, 194 Dickinson, Emily, 124-135, 162 Donne, John, 34, 109 Don Juan, 227 Dostoevsky, Fyodor, 11 Douglas, Mery, 3 Doyle, Roddy, 62 Dublin City Public Libraries, 55 DuBois, W. E., 140, 150 Duncan, Isidora, 157, 158, 160, 235 Duncan, Thaw, 88, 89 E Eco, Umberto, 189, 197 Elder, the Plinty, 183, 184 Eliot, George, 115, 116 The Mill on the Floss, 115, 117

Index Eliot, T. S., 38, 40, 44, 45 The Waste Land, 44, 45 Elizabeth I, Queen, 108 Elizabethan plays, 109 Elizabethan poets, 191, 198 Ellis, Sarah Stickney, 114 Eros, 214, 217 Etcoff, Nancy, 208 evolutionist anthropology, 3 F Fabian, Johannes, 8, 9 Fabian, Joseph, 2 Fanon, Franz, 140, 150 Fawcett, Millicent Garrett, 115 Fennell, Desmond, 53 Fischer, Michale, 6 Fokine, Michel, 155, 165, 168 Fonteyn, Margot, 168 Foucault, Michel, 46 Freud, Sigmund, Freudian, 73-75, 77, 78, 169, 191 Frye, Northrop, 65 Fugitive poets, 38 G Gadamer, Hans-Georg, 18, 19 Gardner, Howard, 201, 202, 204, 206-208 Geddes, Patrick, 113 Geertz, Clifford, 1-3, 5, 7-12 George IV, 111 German Romanticism, 18, 24, 31 Goodman, Nelson, 175, 199 Gornick, Vivian, 191 Grabble, Betty, 138 Graham, Martha, 155, 156, 158-170 Gray, Alasdair, 85, 88-91 Great Depression, 137, 138, 159, 161 Great Revival, The, 125 Greek tragedy, 18, 20-22, 25-29, 31, 223 Guinevere, 106

The Beauty of Convention: Essays in Literature and Culture H Hallberg, Robert von, 34 Hardy, Thomas, 117, 119 Tess of the d’Urbervilles, 117 Harlem Renaissance, 151 Harlow, Jean, 138, 145 Harrington, Joseph, 33-36 Hassan, Ihab, 189 Hawkins, Erick, 168 Heidegger, Martin, 30, 46, 47 Hejinian, Lyn, 45 Helen of Troy, 178 Heraclitus, 176 Higginson, Thomas Wentworth, 125-127 historiographic metafiction, 188, 198 Hobsbawm, Eric, 53 Horst, Louis, 166 Hutcheon, Lynda, 188 Huxley, Aldous, 93, 95-100 Time Must Have a Stop, 93, 95, 97 I Imagism, 39, 43, 46 interpretive anthropology, 1-3, 5, 12, 13 Irigaray, Luce, 46 Irish Times, The, 55 J James Joyce, 51-63, 66, 68, 69, 71 A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, 58, 59, 66, 72, 88 Bloomsday, 51-55 Dubliners, 51, 55, 56, 61, 62 Finnegan’s Wake, 51 Ulysses, 51-56 Jameson, Fredric, 232 Janson, H. W., 174, 178 Jauss, Hans Robert, 34 Jocasta, 75, 164 Joplin, Scott, 170 Jung, Carl Gustav, 164, 169

245

K Kant, Immanuel, 9, 202 Kavanagh, Patrick, 52 Keats, John, 214, 215 Kennelly, Brendan, 59, 60 Kiely, Benedict, 61 King Arthur, 106, 107 Kingston, Maxine Hong, 143 Kodaly, Zoltan, 160 Kristeva, Julia, 211 Künstlerroman, 66 L Larcom, Joan, 6 Larkin, Philip, 225 Lavin, Mary, 61 Lawrence, David Herbert, 211, 217 Laycock, Thomas, 113 Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm, 173, 175 Lenin, Vladimir Ilich, 41 Lessing, Doris, 218 Leventhal, A. J., 52 Linbury Studio Theatre, 221 Lincoln, Abraham, 167 Los Angeles Times, 182 Louis XIV, 156 Loy, Mina, 45 Lyotard, Jean-Francois, 70, 87, 215 M MacLaverty, Bernard, 62 MacMahon, Bryan, 61 Macmurray, John, 86 Malouf, David, 222 Marcus, George, 6 Martineau, Harriet, 115 Marx, Karl, 41, 46 Marxism, Marxist, 34, 38, 41, 42, 44, 48, 49 McCann, Colum, 62 McEwan, Ian, 211, 212, 215, 218, 221-223, 225, 227, 231, 232 Amsterdam, 222 Atonement, 222 Enduring Love, 212, 218

246 For You, 221-232 McIlvanney, William, 85, 87, 88 The Kiln, 85, 87, 88 Medea, 164 medieval romance, 191 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, 46 Metro Pictures, 177 Mill, John Stuart, 114 Milton, John, 109, 110 Paradise Lost, 109 “Molly Malone”, 51 MoMA, 174 Monroe, Marilyn, 181 Morrison, Toni,137-152 The Bluest Eye, 137, 144 Moore, Marianne, 40 Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus, 226, 227, 229, 231 Mulvey, Laura, 46 Music Theatre Wales, 221 N Nazism, 159 New Americanist, 33, 35 New Book of Dubliners, A, 59, 60 New Criticism, 35 New York City Ballet, 168 Niedecker, Lorine, 37, 39, 41, 45 Nijinsky, Vaslav, 168 Noureev, Rudolf, 168 O O’Connor, Joseph, 61, 62 Oedipus, Oedipus complex, 73, 75, 78 O’Faolain, Sean, 61 O’Nolan, Brian, 52 Oppen, George, 37-39, 41, 45-47 Ortner, Sherry B., 3 P Parthenon, 182 Patmore, Coventry, 112 Persephone, 140 Plato, Platonic philosophy, 17, 108, 175-177, 181, 202

Index Plunkett, James, 56, 61 Polykleitos, 175 Pound, Ezra, 40, 42-47 Cantos, 42, 45 Praxiteles, 175 Pre-Raphaelites, 39 R Rafferty, Michael, 221 Rakosi, Carl, 37, 39 Raworth, Tom, 45 Riegger, Wallingford Constantine, 163 Renaissance, 29, 31, 104, 108, 156, 173 Rendell, Ruth, 227 Restoration, 226 Reynolds, Joshua, 178 Reznikoff, Charles, 37, 39, 41, 44, 45 Richards, Grant, 56 Richardson, Samuel, 110 Robbins, Jerome, 168, 169 Rodin, Auguste, 183 Rogers, Ginger, 138 Romanes, George, 113 Rosaldo, Renato, 6, 12 Rougemont, Denis de, 211, 217 S Said, Edward, 180 Saint-Denis, Ruth, 157 Satan, 110 Schneider, David, 2, 3, 8 Schneider, Mark, 7 School of American Ballet, 168 Shakespeare, William, 17-31, 95, 96, 103, 187 King Henry IV, 96 King Lear, 17-29, 31 Macbeth,18, 19, 23 Hamlet, 18, 19, 23, 79, 83 Othello, 18, 19, 23, 187, 194 Romeo and Juliet, 191 Shelley, Percy Bysshe, 194

The Beauty of Convention: Essays in Literature and Culture Sheridan, Richard Brinsley, 191 Silliman, Ron, 46 Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, 106 Snow White, 140 Solomon, 107 Sophocles, 17, 19, 20, 22, 24-26, 28,30, 31, 74 Antigone,17, 19 Oedipus Coloneus, 17, 18, 2224, 26-29, 31 Oedipus Rex, 17, 24, 27, 74 Spanish civil war, 159, 163, 169 Spencer, Edmund, 108 Stein, Gertrude, 40 Stevens, Wallace, 40 Stokowski, Leopold, 165 Stravinsky, Igor, 168 Sweeney, Seamus, 53 T Talcot Parsons, 7 Tate, Allen, 38 Taylor, Paul, 169 Temple, Shirley, 138, 139 Thackeray, William Makepeace, 117 Thanatos, 214, 217 Théâtre des Champs Élysées, 168 Thomson, J. Arthur, 113 Tibetan Book of the Dead, 96-98 Tiresias, 164 Trocchi, Alexander, 88 Trevor, William, 62, 63 Tudor, Antony, 168, 169 Turner, Terence, 3

247

Turner, Victor, 3 U Ugly Duckling, 140 Unbereinstimmung, 173 V Venice Biennale, 183 Verdi, Giuseppe, 227 Victoria, Queen, 111 Viennese socialists, 41 Virgil, 184 Vivaldi, Antonio, 231 W Wagner, Richard, 227 Ward, Glenn, 226 Warhol, Andy, 181 Watts, Isaac, 132 Webster, John, 109 Webster’s Dictionary, 130 William IV, 111 Whitman, Walt, 39, 123, 126, 167, 235 Wilde, Oscar, 96 Williams, William Carlos, 40, 42, 43 Wilson, Fred, 174-185 Winckelman, Johann Joachim, 177, 178, 182-184 Wolf, Virginia, 69 Z Zeus, 78, 176, 178 Zukofsky, Louis, 37-39, 41-45, 47, 48