Victor Turner and the Construction of Cultural Criticism: Between Literature and Anthropology [1 ed.] 0253205948, 9780253205940

Table of contents :
Contents
Preface and Acknowledgments
Introduction • Kathleen M. Ashley
Part I: Cultural Theory and Literary Studies
Experiencing Murder: Ritualistic Interpretation of Ancient Texts • Mieke Bal
Aesthetics, Romance, and Turner • David Raybin
Liminality, Carnival, and Social Structure: The Case of Late Medieval Biblical Drama • C. Clifford Flanigan
Narratives of Ritual and Desire • Thomas Pavel
Liminality and Fiction in Cooper, Hawthorne, Cather, and Fitzgerald • Robert Daly
Mud, Mirrors, and Making Up: Liminality and Reflexivity in Between the Acts • Barbara A. Babcock
Symbolism and the Problematics of Postmodern Representation • Stephen William Foster
Part II: Turner’s Theory and Practice
Victor Turner’s Definition, Theory, and Sense of Ritual • Ronald L. Grimes
“Hyperion to a Satyr”: Criticism and Anti-structure in the Work of Victor Turner • Frederick Turner
The Literary Roots of Victor Turner’s Anthropology • Edith Turner
Victor Turner’s Career and Publications • Frank E. Manning
Contributors
Index

Citation preview

VICTOR TURNER AND THE CONSTRUCTION OF CULTURAL CRITICISM

VICTOR TURNER AND THE CONSTRUCTION OF CULTURAL CRITICISM Between Literature and Anthropology EDITED BY

KATHLEEN M. ASHLEY

INDIANA UNIVERSITY PRESS Bloomington and Indianapolis

© 1990 by Indiana University Press All rights reserved No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. The Association of American University Presses’ Resolution on Permission constitutes the only exception to this prohibition. The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences— Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1984. Manufactured in the United States of America Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Victor Turner and the construction of cultural criticism : Between literature and anthropology / edited by Kathleen M. Ashley. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references. ISBN 0-253-31003-2 (alk. paper). — ISBN 0-253-20594-8 (pbk. alk. paper) 1. Literature and anthropology. 2. Turner, Victor Witter. 3. Literature— History and criticism—Theory, etc. I. Ashley, Kathleen. PN51.B45 1990 801'.95— dc20 89-46338 CIP 1 2 3 4 5 94 93 92 91 90

CONTENTS PREFACE AND ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

VU

INTRODUCTION

ÎX

Kathleen M . Ashley

Part I:

Cultural Theory and Literary Studies

Experiencing Murder

3

Ritualistic Interpretation of Ancient Texts

Mieke Bal

Aesthetics, Romance, and Turner

21

David Raybin

Liminality, Carnival, and Social Structure

42

The Case of Late Medieval Biblical Drama

C. Clifford Flanigan Narratives of Ritual and Desire Thomas Pavel Liminality and Fiction in Cooper, Hawthorne, Cather, and Fitzgerald Robert Daly Mud, Mirrors, and Making Up

64 70

86

Liminality and Reflexivity in Between the Acts

Barbara A. Babcock

Symbolism and the Problematics of Postmodern Representation

117

Stephen William Foster

Part II:

Turner’s Theory and Practice

Victor Turner’s Definition, Theory, and Senseof Ritual

141

Ronald L. Grimes

“Hyperion to a Satyr” Criticism and Anti-structure in the Work of Victor Turner

Frederick Turner

147

vi

Contents

The Literary Rootsof Victor Turner’sAnthropology

163

Edith Turner

Victor Turner’s Career andPublications

170

Frank E. M anning CONTRIBUTORS INDEX

179 181

PREFACE

AND

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This volume had its inception at a 1983 NEH Summer Seminar on Symbolic Anthropology conducted by Professor J. Christopher Crocker at the Univer­ sity of Virginia. Not only did we read the most important work of Victor Turner, but the Turners themselves spent a memorable afternoon with our seminar group talking about a recent trip to Israel. After Victor Turner’s death that winter, I organized an MLA Special Ses­ sion on the implications of his work for literary studies. Papers from that session form the nucleus of this book. In finding other essays for the collec­ tion, I would especially like to thank Professor Thomas Pavel, who recom­ mended several contributors. Shannon Toner and Johnette Lundy gave many hours to the preparation of the manuscript, always cheerfully and efficiently. They continue to be models of collegiality, hard work, and grace under pressure. The Dean’s Office of the College of Arts and Sciences at the University of Southern Maine, under Deans Hatala, Reno, and Davis, supported the manuscript preparation with grants and the original research with Harvard borrowing privileges. I am grateful for this important assistance. Finally, no words can convey my appreciation for the many kinds of sup­ port offered me by Jack, who has seen me through all the vicissitudes of the project. The bibliographic essay by Frank E. Manning, “Turner’s Career and Publi­ cations,” originally appeared under the title “Victor Turner: A Tribute” in Recherches Sémiotiques/Semiotic Inquiry 4:2 (1984), 195-201, and is reprinted by permission. The essay by Mieke Bal, “Experiencing Murder: Ritualistic Interpretation of Ancient Texts,” was originally published as “Speech, Murder, Tricks, and Gender: Judges 4 and 5” in Recherches Sémiotiques/Semiotic Inquiry 7:2 (1987), 127-151, and is reprinted by permission.

INTRODUCTION

Kathleen M. Ashley

The Discourses of Interdisciplinarity In the current attempts to redefine literature as social “artifact” or social “discourse,” and to situate literary studies within cultural criticism, an indis­ pensable role has been played by those who take society and culture as their primary subjects—sociologists and anthropologists. Cultural anthropologist Clifford Geertz has identified a recent develop­ ment that he calls “blurred genres”—the destabilizing of traditional bound­ aries between the social sciences and the humanities. Anthropologists have borrowed analogies and imagery from the humanities with an alacrity that both intrigues and alarms Geertz. His conclusion is that “as social theory turns from propulsive metaphors (the language of pistons) toward ludic ones (the language of pastimes), the humanities are connected to its arguments not in the fashion of skeptical bystanders but, as the source of its imagery, chargeable accomplices” (1980:171). Meanwhile, on the other side of the crumbling wall, literary study has been adopting concerns and strategies from sociology and anthropology. As Richard Macksey notes, “The recent disciplinary promiscuity among social scientists of Geertz’s persuasion looks . . . like chastity itself when compared with the concupiscence of literary critics in search of models and methods, not to mention texts, to abduct from other disciplines” (312). The proliferation of journals devoted to some form of cultural criticism is only one sign of the growing interest in situating literature within a larger social discourse. Collections of essays have also explored the interdisciplinary terrain between the social sciences and literary studies. The Spring 1988 issue of Critical Inquiry grappled with how a sociology of literature (which grew out of nineteenth-century realist and Marxist ideas of literature as a “mirror” of society) might be redefined in contemporary theoretical terms. Another collection, Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography, examines appropriate tools from textual criticism and discourse theory for the processes of cultural representation in the post-modern era. In his “ Introduction,” James Clifford argues that the essays are “ postanthropological” and “post-literary” in their conception of ethnography as both fiction and mode of cultural criticism. This collection of essays on anthropology and literature is in the first place, therefore, a contribution to an interdisciplinary project that is simulta­ neously refiguring social thought and acculturating literary activity. Al­

though most of the essays focus on the ways in which Victor Turner’s ideas might expand the practice of literary criticism and literary history, we also learn of Turner’s early study of classical and English literatures, his adoption of the metaphors of drama to describe social actions, and his interest in narratives such as Icelandic saga and the Japanese Tale of Genji in Edith Turner’s description of “The Literary Roots of Victor Turner’s Anthropol­ ogy,” below. The borrowing has flowed both ways between anthropology and literature, and the results of the commerce have fruitfully unsettled both disciplines. Within the framework of interdisciplinary dialogue, the volume represents an analysis of Turner’s chief concepts addressed to those who are construct­ ing new forms of cultural study. The essays provide evidence for humans as collective makers of meaning through symbolic actions and cultural perform­ ances; all the authors seek—albeit by widely differing routes—to provide alternatives to formalist methods of literary analysis. David Raybin’s discus­ sion of the medieval romance genre, for example, connects the development of the genre to that of a leisured class in twelfth-century France, for whom the romance functioned ideologically. Thomas Pavel challenges a purely for­ malist narratology by showing how Turner’s phases of social drama offer the referential nucleus of certain narrative categories. Likewise, C. Clifford Flanigan argues for the “necessity of breaking with the formalist and aes­ thetic models of the past” and of placing medieval plays within a cultural and historical context.

Cultural Theory and the Problem of Change To situate Turner’s contributions to the formation of cultural criticism, I will focus in my Introduction on a recurrently thorny problem in any theory of history, including literary history—understanding change. Traditional ac­ counts of change saw it as a series of dramatic “discontinuities (produced by war, revolutions, great men)” (Said, 222). Contemporary cultural analysis has sought other explanations, chiefly from varieties of Marxist, structuralist, and post-structuralist theoiy. Classical Marxist historiography posited change through dialectical forces; transformations occur as a result of inevitable contradictions within social structures. Marxists have therefore criticized the Annales school structuralists for assuming that social structures will remain unchanged if left to themselves, arguing instead that “historical” (Marxist) analysis is based on the assumption that structures contain the seeds of their own de-structuring.1 The debate between the two schools of French historians turns on the preference of the Annales structuralists for continuing traditions, repetition, and la longue durée (socioeconomic patterns persisting over long periods of time), whereas the Marxists talk of contradiction, struggle, and historical discontinuities.2 Taking a broader view, synchronic historical analyses can be differentiated from linear

and diachronic analyses which posit “development” and “progress.” As Mau­ rice Mandelbaum points out, a structuralist approach is less concerned with the relationship “of antecedent to consequent” than with elucidating the rela­ tionship between part and whole—or, one might add, between part and part. If the structural approach tends to treat systems as if they were without his­ tory, Marxism has been attacked for its thesis of the inevitability of sequenced change through class conflict and for its utopian teleology. Cultural theory has uncomfortably steered a course between the Scylla of undertheorized transfor­ mation and the Charybdis of deterministic change. How cultural change takes place has also been a subject for disagreement. For classical Marxism, the modes of production of material/economic life determine the character of the “superstructure” (social, political, cultural processes). Literary theorists such as Lukacs and Goldmann have followed out the implications of literature as epiphenomenon which is less real than the socioeconomic base it reflects and which changes with changes in the base. The manifest drawbacks of seeing literary activity as mere reflection, analogue, or homology of an external, socioeconomic “reality” have led such other Marxist critics as Pierre Machery, Terry Eagleton, and Fredric Jameson to provide more sophisticated explanations of the relation between literature and history.3 This is attempted chiefly through elaboration of various forms of “mediation” between text and system. The mediations are “realities, at once translucent and deformative, that are formed by the literary codes, institutions, and fields interposed between the social referent and the text as well as between the work and its readers” (Viala, 563). As Dominick LaCapra puts it, a text is situated within a “net­ work,” and an exploration of networks makes it possible to “avoid the one­ sidedness of analyses that stress either the symptomatic and representative nature of art (as did even Lukacs and Lucien Goldmann, for whom art was critical solely as an expression of larger forces) or the way ‘great’ art is itself an exceptional critical force for constructive change (as those affiliated with the Frankfurt School tended to argue)” (1982:64-65). Literary production is now a process; the text is both a “produced object” and a “productive activ­ ity,” a “distinct practice of signification related not to nondiscursive truth but to other practices of signification” (Frow, 21). It has a reality not depen­ dent upon an extradiscursive realm of history. Nevertheless, as Frow notes, unlike the post-structuralists, Eagleton, Machery, and Jameson all retain a conviction that there is history which remains outside the text. Furthermore, Jameson makes the utopian gesture of belief in Marxist tele­ ology of a “world historical plot of humankind’s primordial unity, subse­ quent alienation, revolutionary redemption, and ultimate self recovery in the realm of communism” (Frow, 47). Jameson acknowledges that his analysis began with “the idea that a given social formation consisted in the coexist­ ence of various synchronic systems or modes of production, each with its own dynamic or time scheme—a kind of metasynchronicity,” and that he had shifted to a “description of cultural revolution which had been couched in

the more diachronic language of systemic transformation” (1981:97). The inconsistency between his structuralist and Marxist models of systemic change he explains this way: The triumphant moment in which a new systemic dominant gains ascendancy is therefore only the diachronic manifestation o f a constant struggle for the per­ petuation and reproduction of its dominance, a struggle which must continue throughout its life course, accompanied at all moments by the systemic or structural antagonism of those older and newer models of production that resist assimilation or seek deliverance from it. . . . Cultural revolution thus conceived may be said to be beyond the opposition between synchrony and diachrony. (97)

Thus, even the most sophisticated Marxist critic asks for an act of faith in the existence and inevitability of “revolution.” Formalist theory of literary evolution has exerted a fascination even upon cultural critics because it provides a powerful if mechanistic explanation of how literary systems change through universal laws of production and trans­ formation. According to the Russian Formalists, at each moment the literary field has a dominant literary mode, which is then “automatized” and super­ seded by a new dominant through a process of “defamiliarization” of mate­ rial. As Frow notes, “the historical dimension of the text involves not only its past (the norms against which it reacts) but its future (the transformation of the norm-breaking features of a text into a new norm)” (85). Preoccupied with what gives “literariness,” the Formalists saw literature as “an autono­ mous reality governed by its own regularity and more or less independent of contiguous spheres of culture” (Steiner, 245).4 In a critique of this theory, Jauss says that Russian Formalism imposed upon itself the limitation of considering and describing the evolution of literary genres and forms as an unilinear process. It disregarded the func­ tion of literary genres in quotidian history, and dismissed the questions of their reception by and influence on the contemporary and later audiences as mere sociologism and psychologism. The historicity of literature nonetheless is not absorbed into the succession o f aesthetic-formal systems and the changing hierarchies of genres. . . . Since literary genres have their “locus in life” and therefore their social function, literary evolution must also, beyond its own relationship between synchrony and diachrony, be determinable through its social function within the general process of history. (107)

Bourdieu, too, has commented on the structuralist severing of external causality from “the field of strategic possibilities” : It is not possible to consider the cultural order as a system totally independent of the actors and institutions that put it into practice and bring it into exis­ tence: if only because there does not seem any way to account for changes in this arbitrarily isolated and thereby dehistoricized universe unless we endow it with an immanent propensity for autotransformation. . . . The same criticism

can be directed against the Russian formalists. Like Foucault, who drew on the same sources, they considered only the system of work, the network of rela­ tionships between texts, their “intertextuality.,, Hence, again like Foucault, they were obliged to locate the dynamic principle of this system in the textual system itself. (543)

Foucault’s work presupposes history in the shift of epistemes or discursive formulations; however, his interest is less in theory of historical change than in the correlations between textual formations in the same period. Disruptive shifts in episteme are asserted, but the process of change itself is never ana­ lyzed. Foucault says he does not deny history but holds “in suspense the general, empty category of change in order to reveal transformations at dif­ ferent levels” (200). His chief contribution has been the idea of a code governing what can be apprehended at any time, with an implied isomor­ phism between the discourses of a given period.5 To the extent that Foucault’s model of discursive power subsumes individ­ ual actors and intentions, it becomes difficult to theorize acts of resistance and subversion to cultural codes, as Barbara Leah Harmon has observed in her lengthy review of Stephen Greenblatt’s Renaissance Self-Fashioning. Greenblatt confesses in his famous Foucauldian epilogue that “there were, as far as I could tell, no moments of pure, unfettered subjectivity; indeed, the human subject itself began to seem remarkably unfree, the ideological prod­ uct of the relations of power in a particular society. . . . If there remained traces of free choice, the choice was among possibilities whose range was strictly delineated by the social and ideological system in force” (256). Har­ mon comments that “having abandoned the humanist camp and entered the post-structuralist one [Greenblatt] needed, also, to protect himself from the dangers associated with the latter position, from the accusation that it is a determinist, and finally a reactionary position, unable to accommodate resis­ tance or social change” (63). As Harmon notes, Greenblatt’s examples of resistance to the social order depend upon a recuperation of the idea of “the self’ and of the special status of “literary discourse”—both of which post­ structuralist cultural criticism would question. The monolithic force of Foucault’s “power-knowledge” formations results in perhaps insufficient attention to possibilities of failure or historical change. Edward Said has criticized Foucault’s theories of power because “they make not even a nominal allowance for emergent movements, and none for revolutions, counterhegemony, or historical blocks. In human his­ tory there is always something beyond the reach of dominating systems, no matter how deeply they saturate society, and this is obviously what makes change possible, limits power in Foucault’s sense, and hobbles the theory of that power” (246-247).6 Feminist critics have also objected to the “neodeterminism” of post struc­ turalism. Linda Alcoff, writing on “ Cultural Feminism versus Post­ structuralism” in a recent Signs, summarizes the views of Derrida and

Foucault that “we are constructs— that is, our experience of our very subjec­ tivity is a construct mediated by and/or grounded on a social discourse be­ yond (way beyond) individual control. As Foucault puts it, ‘we are bodies totally imprinted by history’ ” (Alcoff, 416). She objects on both cultural and feminist grounds to post-structuralism’s tendency to “erase any room for maneuver by the individual within a social discourse or set of institutions” (417). Judith Newton has also made the argument in “History as Usual? Feminism and the ‘New Historicism’ ” that “a feminist and materialist literary/historical practice tends to produce ‘history’ in a way which allows us better to account for social change and human agency” (117). As cultural critics of many persuasions confront the work of Marxist, struc­ turalist, and post-structuralist theorists, the problems of historical change and human agency demand attention. The agenda of the 1990s would ap­ pear to be further theoretical exploration of these two problems, building on but pushing beyond the fundamental insights of the past thirty years. Marxist theoreticians have been engaged in this project for several years; Alex Callinicos’s Making History: Agency, Structure, and Change in Social Theory (1988) is a particularly clear account of the impasses of the past, with a proposal of how they might be negotiated to preserve both the power of social structures and the possibility of human agency. Alain Touraine’s Return of the Actor (1988) provides an analogous critique of sociology aimed at retheorizing society’s capacity for change, or what he calls “the sociology of action.” Reviewing a broad interdisciplinary trend toward the dynamic and against the static struc­ tural approach, the new journal Cultural Dynamics also promises to be a “forum for discussing theories which model the processes of change and transformation” (1). Closer to literary studies, David Simpson writes in a recent issue of Critical Inquiry (Summer 1988) on “Literary Criticism and the Return to ‘His­ tory’ ”— though he limits his essay to a review of past criticism and a caveat about how to proceed in the future with materialist historical criticism.7 If, as he suggests, we replace every use of the word “culture” with “subculture,” The megalith o f a normative and all-governing historical paradigm vanishes at once; we anticipate instead a world made of a complex assembly of interests and factions, each struggling to become the culture (or perhaps not). Difference is reinscribed where literary criticism has all too often been content to image sameness. This does not by definition mean that there are not dominant struc­ tures: quite the opposite. But it may assist us in maintaining the model of a past in which there were determinate choices apparent, and determinate conflicts and alliances that informed them. This is not to celebrate pluralism or diversity as a matter of faith, but to recognize the place of material inequalities in the formation of social consciousness and in the resolution of social conflicts. Cul­ tures emerge as the result of competing or cooperating subcultures. (744)

Similarly, he calls for a concept of subjectivity “made up of both idiosyncrasy and intersubjectivity.” As he points out, Dérida and Foucault made

massive claims for the primacy of the intersubjective, whether in language or in discourse; and Althusser made similar claims for the power of ideology. These extreme arguments were surely therapeutic alternatives to a humanist tradition, but they do not seem to me to meet the needs of a detailed analytical method. Subjectivity must rather be imagined as the site of determinate (if not always visible) forces inclining us to decisions that range between relatively unconstrained and highly constrained. Neither free will nor historical automa­ tism, taken alone, works adequately as an explanation of particular acts (espe­ cially acts in language). (745)

Poised, then, at a new and as yet undefined stage of cultural criticism, we may find uses for concepts already explored by other theorists of culture. The second part of my Introduction will therefore focus on key ideas in the work of anthropologist Victor Turner over his thirty-year career. They have been taken up by the essays in this volume in various ways, but I will trace the relevance of several of these seminal concepts for the problem of theorizing cultural change.

Social Dramas Most cultural theorists have assumed either a functional or an evolutionary conception of historical change (if they have one at all). The structuralists tend to treat systems, whether social or literary, as self-regulating mecha­ nisms. Marxists see states of equilibrium and disequilibrium as the alternat­ ing processes by which an inevitable sequence of historical transformation takes place.8 From the beginning of his career, Turner had been preoccupied with theories of change not found in orthodox anthropology: I looked for evidence o f the development o f new cultural ideals and attempts at their realization and at various modes of social behavior that did not pro­ ceed from the structural properties of organized social groups. I found in the data o f art, literature, philosophy, political and juridical thought, history, com­ parative religion, and similar documents far more suggestive ideas about the nature of the social than the work of my colleagues doing their “normal social science” under the then paradigm o f structural functionalism. (1976:46)

Turner's earliest ethnography, Schism and Continuity in an African Society (1957), was functionalist in the reigning mode of British social anthropology, but where others of the Manchester School used mechanical language, Turner chose a ludic metaphor for Ndembu “social dramas.” Furthermore, within his model, the dynamic, conflictual elements played a larger role than usual in structuralist-functionalist analysis. Clifford Geertz has commented that where the functional approach has been least impressive . . . is in dealing with social change. . . . The emphasis on systems in balance, on social homeostasis, and on timeless structural pictures, leads to a bias in favor o f “well-integrated”

societies in a stable equilibrium and to a tendency to emphasize the functional aspects of a people’s social usages and customs rather than their dysfunctional implications. (1973:143)

The “processual form,, of social dramas through stages of breach/crisis/ redress/reintegration or schism emphasized diachrony, not static equilib­ rium within society. The fullest discussion of his concept of “social dramas” in their relation to literary forms may be found in a collection of essays, On Narrative. Turner argues that social drama is universally the form of political action and social transformation. It is therefore available as both the social ground and a structure for narrative. It is the “experiential matrix from which the many genres of cultural performance, beginning with redressive ritual and juridical procedures and eventually including oral and literary narrative have been generated” (154).9 Thomas Pavel’s essay “Narratives of Ritual and Desire,” below, takes up Turner’s paradigm of social drama and explores his insight that “categories of narrative grammar coincide with stages of social dramas.” Pavel concludes that “older structuralist narratology often proposed static models, and insuf­ ficiently reflected on its categories, such that a more dynamic theory of plot is needed, which would explain not only the architecture of plot but also the principles of its movement.” He notes the relevance of Turner’s model of social drama especially for narratives of external conflict and those produced by societies still patterned by ritual actions. David Raybin in “Aesthetics, Romance, and Turner,” below, connects the “redressive” phase of social drama to the production of “signs, innovated meanings, and new orderings”—the realm of symbolic action and art. He analyzes the emergence of chivalric romance in twelfth-century France as an example of “how art’s symbolic, indeed ritualistic, role allows it to be a center for the establishing and ordering of a definable, self-aware social unit”—in this case, a new nonfeudal nobility. Teresa de Lauretis argues that “despite his quarrel with structuralism on the point of sequence (the stages of social drama are irreversible, the move­ ment of ritual is transformative, he insists), Turner’s model is also very much an integrative one” (127). While it is true that Turner’s concept of social drama is his most functionalist, de Lauretis minimizes the element of indeter­ minacy on which Turner always insists, and which allows for the possibility of change in even the most highly structured system. As Turner notes, “even where ordering rules and customs are strongly sanctioned, indeterminacy may be produced and ambiguities within the universe of relatively determi­ nate elements. . . . Indeterminacy should not be regarded as the absence of social being. . . . Rather, it is potentiality, the possibility of becoming” (1981:154). Barbara Babcock’s essay “Mud, Mirrors, and Making Up: Liminality and Reflexivity in Between the Acts” below, explores the interrela­ tionships of indeterminacy, reflexivity, and subversion from a feminist perspective.

Ritual Turner’s fieldwork among the Ndembu led him to a reexamination of rit­ ual, moving him further beyond functionalism. Barbara Babcock and John MacAloon describe this turn as “semiotic”: “The units or ‘molecules’ of ritual, and of all cultural performances, are symbols woven into complex semiotic tapestries. Social relations are as much meaningful as material con­ structions, and symbolic processes and forms are not merely functional in­ struments or mediating mechanisms but political ‘actants’ in the fullest sense” (1987:8-9). Turner’s fullest analyses of ritual as social process and theoretical construct »are to be found in three books published in the late 1960s: The Forest of Symbols: Aspects of Ndembu Ritual (1967); The Drums of Affliction (1968); and The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-structure (1969). Ronald Grimes offers a critique of Turner’s “Definition, Theory, and Sense of Ritual,” pointing out the many inconsistencies in the way Turner employed the term. However, he argues that the effect o f Turner’s theory of ritual on the field of ritual studies has been to break the stranglehold of conservatism. The vast majority of definitions and theories had been functionalist, emphasizing the extent to which ritual con­ serves the status quo and resists change. Ritual had been portrayed as the most backward-looking, foot-dragging o f cultural forms. It was hardly capable of acting on society; rather, it was a “repository” or “reflection” of it. Always it was passive, inert. Turner painted another picture, that of a cultural agent, energetic, subversive, creative, socially critical.

As Grimes points out, the range of areas to which Turner related ritual was vast: “brain physiology, drama, religion, social processes, art, literature, poli­ tics, and a host of others.” In her essay “Experiencing Murder: Ritualistic Interpretation of Ancient Texts,” below, Mieke Bal explores the usefulness of Turner’s concept of ritual for semiotics and feminist studies. Working through the text’s dominant symbols, the basic units of ritual according to Turner, she moves toward an understanding of the social rituals and ideolog­ ical stances implied in the (male) epic and (female) lyric accounts of the murder of Sisera in Judges 4 and 5. Turner sees a central ritual symbol (like Kavula of Ndembu Chihamba rite) as not only ambiguous and polysemous but also generative: “an inexhaustible matrix of concepts, a fount of definitions” (1975:180). He was explicit about the thrust of his theory of symbolism: “Since I regard cultural symbols in­ cluding ritual symbols as originating in and sustaining processes involving temporal changes in social relations, and not as timeless entities, I have tried to treat the crucial properties of ritual symbols as being involved in these dynamic developments. Symbols instigate social action” (1974:55). For Turner, it is through metaphoric equations, symbolic vehicles, and ritual actions that social transformations take place.

Stephen Foster offers a contemporary critique of symbolic anthropology in his essay “Symbolism and the Problematics of Postmodern Representation,” below, pointing out how the uncertain status of meaning in postmodern discourse calls into question unreflexive symbolic interpretations: “My con­ tention is that symbols do not come with meanings in tow: meaning is actively attributed to symbolic forms on particular occasions under particular politi­ cal and historical circumstances.” Foster acknowledges that Turner “partially recognizes this problem in displacing interpretation, that is, in treating it as something else besides a mechanistic coding process, by stressing the impor­ tance of context.”

Liminality Turner’s interest in temporal process led him to modify “static compara­ tive morphological analysis” by means of two “theoretic operators”—the concepts of “liminality” and “social anti-structure” (1974:45). The notion of a “limen” was adopted from van Gennep’s model of rites of passages, where the interstitial phase between old and new statuses is called the margin or limen. Turner emphasized the importance of this middle state of “liminality” as one of ambiguity, even paradox, outside or mediating between customary categories. In The Ritual Process (1969) and later work, he generalized liminality beyond rites of passage in tribal societies to more complex cul­ tures, eventually tracing “liminoid” phenomena in western European soci­ ety. Turner drew attention to the similarities between the “leisure genres of art and entertainment in complex industrial societies and the rituals and myths of archaic, tribal, and early agrarian cultures” (1977:43). Perhaps most significant for our theme, liminality was portrayed as a “realm of possibility” where new combinations of cultural givens could be playfully tested. Liminal situations and genres were thus “seedbeds of cul­ tural creativity,” giving rise to new ideas and new paradigms. Liminality is therefore closely related to Bakhtin’s concept of the “carnivalesque” as a space for utopian but not deterministic transformations. Carnivalesque phe­ nomena in Bakhtin have ambivalent functions, as Dominick LaCapra points out, testing and contesting “all aspects of society and culture through festive laughter: those that are questionable may be readied for change: those that are deemed legitimate may be reinforced” (1983:306). For LaCapra, the value of Bakhtin as cultural theorist is this vision of a utopian dimension, an “experimental fantasy,” that explores possibilities of historical transforma­ tion. As John Frow says, however, in the later works of Bakhtin “the critical Marxism of the early books is increasingly replaced by a populist vocabulary concerned with permanent or recurrent structures of antagonism rather than with differential structures of change” (98). C. Clifford Flanigan in “Liminality, Carnival, and Social Structure: The Case of Late Medieval Biblical Drama,” below, analyzes the “discourse of

otherness” in Turner and Bakhtin, noting that for both, interest in antistruc­ tural, carnivalesque, or even subversive phenomena predominated. Al­ though, semiotically, anti-structure requires structure, Turner and Bakhtin tended to conceive of social structures and official cultures in negative terms as that which was to be transcended, with creativity and communitas flowing from festive liminality. Frederick Turner elaborates on this insight in “ ‘Hyperion to a Satyr’: Criti­ cism and Anti-structure in the Work of Victor Turner,” below: “For him cul­ tural reality originated in the hot, liquid, protean fertility of communitas, anti­ structure, ‘experience’ in Dilthey’s sense, charismatic liminality, ‘betwixt and between’ the settled and solid states of social routine. This fecund seedbed would be sheltered from any charge of blasphemy by the plea that all action in this space was ‘only’ subjunctive, only, so to speak, in question marks.” Frederick Turner explores the implications of Victor Turner’s “subjunc­ tive” for the organization of the academy, its disciplines, and its pedagogy, as well as literary criticism, arguing that literature would take its place as part of a “spectrum of ritual and ‘rituoid’ human activities” once traditional disci­ plinary boundaries were erased.

Reflexivity Perhaps most important for a post-modern criticism was Turner’s insight that the ritual, the liminal, the subjunctive, and the playful are deeply reflex­ ive. Modern cultural critics (Adorno is a particularly blatant example) have often denied reflexive and therefore subversive potential to all but the most elite and esoteric art forms. Turner profoundly disagreed. The ability to function in the meta mode is not just held by sophisticated intellectuals: “there never were any innocent unconscious savages, living in a state of unreflective and instinctive harmony. We human beings are all and always sophisticated, conscious, capable of laughter at our own institutions, in­ venting our lives collectively as we go on, playing games, performing our own being.” Robert Daly in “Liminality and Fiction in Cooper, Hawthorne, Cather, and Fitzgerald,” below, analyzes the uses of liminality in American fictions. He argues that many American writers have portrayed liminal situations of time and history precisely in order to be able to imagine and examine our cultural alternatives. In the writings of his last decade, Turner pursued his interest in reflexivity. Barbara Babcock’s work on “narrative reflexivity” provided him with the basis for comparisons between ritual and literary forms: “Ritual and litera­ ture, in their different ways . . . provide ‘metalanguages’ for discussing soci­ ality . . . [they are] society talking about itself’ (1976:51). Turner took the further notions of “cultural performance” (from Singer and others) and “metacommunication” (from Bateson) to develop his concept of the plural

reflexive functions of liminal or subjunctive frameworks such as festivals and other performative and narrative genres.10 Insights from his earlier work on traditional ritual and social drama were expanded to modern Western socie­ ties, with the caveat that in complex modern societies performance is usually optional, not prescribed. Barbara Babcock, below, uses a mirror image of reflexivity to gain an understanding of Virginia Woolf’s Between the Acts. Mirroring performances of many kinds and at many levels, the novel is a reflection upon the “playful as well as the serious aspects of creativity.” And that creativity appears to arise most often in the spaces and silences between the acts of the play and between the speaking of words, in the liminal transi­ tions and reflexive moments. In its discussions of the relationship between social systems and individual works, in assessing the relative weights of social constructs and human agency, and in understanding how systems or societies change, cultural criti­ cism may find useful the cultural theories of Victor Turner. His key concepts of “social drama,” “symbol,” “ritual,” “liminality,” “reflexivity,” and “per­ formative genres” provide a means—sometimes through broad construc­ tions, sometimes through fine-grained analyses— to bring together socioeconomic and political structures with their individual actants. They allow us to conceptualize the processes by which the experiencing individual is transformed as well as those by which the members of a culture might imagine alternative social possibilities. Perhaps most important, Turner pro­ vides a fundamentally semiotic understanding of the performative genres through which cultures create and communicate meaning.

NOTES 1. See Albert Soboul, “Description et mesure en histoire sociale.” 2. See Ferdinand Braudel, “Histoire et sciences sociales: La longue durée” 3. See also the critique of literature as “superstructural” in Raymond Williams, Problems in Materialism and Culture; also John Frow’s chapter on “Marxism and Struc­ turalism,” pp. 18-50. 4. On the Formalists, see also Fredric Jameson, The Prison-House of Language. 5. See especially Alan Sheridan, Michel Foucault: The Will to Truth, pp. 89-110. 6. He quotes Williams’s critique of Lukacs and Goldmann in Politics and Letters'. “However dominant a social system may be, the very meaning of its domination involves a limitation or selection of the activities it covers, so that by definition it cannot exhaust all experience, which therefore always potentially contains space for alternative acts and alternative intentions which are not yet articulated as a social institution or even project” (Said, p. 240). See also Dana Polan on Foucault’s descrip­ tions of power/knowledge which leaves no room for its failure; “Fables of Transgres­ sion: The Reading of Politics and the Politics of Reading in Foucauldian Discourse.” 7. Stanley Fish and Annabel Patterson have also weighed in on the issue; see their essays on “Change” and “Theories o f Order and Disorder” in a recent South Atlantic Quarterly (1987). 8. See the comparison of functionalism and the dialectic as sharing an evolution-

ary notion of social change in Pierre L. van den Berghe, “Dialectic and Functional­ ism,” in Demerath and Peterson. 9. See also the detailed analysis of social dramas in Dramas, Fields, and Metaphors. 10. For example, “Liminality and the Performative Genres,” in John J. MacAloon, Ritey Drama, Festival, Spectacle, pp. 19-41.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Adorno, Theodor. Aesthetic Theory. Trans. C. Lenhardt. Ed. Gretel Adorno and Rolf Tiedmann. London and New York: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1984. Alcoff, Linda. “Cultural Feminism versus Post-structuralism: The Identity Crisis in Feminist Theory.” Signs 13 (1988), 405-436. Babcock, Barbara, and John MacAloon. “Commemorative Essay.” Semiotica 65 (1987), 1-27. Bourdieu, Pierre. “Flaubert’s Point of View.” Critical Inquiry Special Issue on the Sociology o f Literature. Ed. Priscilla Ferguson, Philippe Desan, and Wendy Griswold. 14 (1988), 539-562. Braudel, Ferdinand. “Histoire et sciences sociales: La longue durée.” Annales ESC XIII (1958), 725-753. (Trans, in Economy and Society in Early Modern Europe: Essays from “Annales.” Ed. Peter Burke. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1972, pp. 11-42.) Callinicos, Alex. Making History: Agency, Structure, and Change in Social Theory. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1988. Clifford, James, and George Marcus, eds. Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986. De Lauretis, Teresa. Alice Doesn't: Feminism, Semiotics, Cinema. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984. Fish, Stanley. “Change.” South Atlantic Quarterly 86 (1987), 423-444. Foucault, Michel. The Archaeology of Knowledge. New York: Pantheon, 1973. Frow, John. Marxism and Literary History. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1986. Geertz, Clifford. “Blurred Genres: The Refiguration of Social Thought.” American Scholar 49 (1980), 165-179. ______ “Ritual and Social Change.” In The Interpretation of Cultures. New York: Basic Books, 1973, pp. 142-169. Harmon, Barbara Leah. “Refashioning the Renaissance.” Diacritics 14 (1984), 52-65. Jameson, Fredric. The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1981. ---------- The Prison-House of Language: A Critical Account of Structuralism and Russian Formalism. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1972. Jauss, Hans Robert. Towards an Aesthetic of Reception Trans. Timothy Bahti. Minneapo­ lis: University of Minnesota Press, 1982. LaCapra, Dominick. “Bakhtin, Marxism, and the Carnivalesque.” In Rethinking Intel­ lectual History: Texts, Contexts, Language. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1983. LaCapra, Dominick, and Steven L. Kaplan, eds. Modem European Intellectual History: Reappraisals and New Perspectives. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1982. Macksey, Richard. “Introduction: ‘A New Text o f the World.’ ” Genre XVI (1983), 307-316. Mandelbaum, Maurice. “A Note on History as Narrative.” History and Theory VI (1967), 413-419.

Newton, Judith. “History as Usual? Feminism and the ‘New Historicism.’ ” Cultural Critique 9 (1988), 87-121. Patterson, Annabel. “Theories of Order and Disorder.” South Atlantic Quarterly 86 (1987) , 519-543. Pinxten, R., et al. “Cultural Dynamics: A Vision and a Perspective.” Cultural Dynam­ ics: An International Journal for the Study of Processes and Temporality of Culture 1 (1988) , 1-28. Polan, Dana. “Fables of Transgression: The Reading of Politics and the Politics of Reading in Foucauldian Discourse.” Boundary 2 (1982). Said, Edward. The World, the Text, and the Critic. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1983. Sheridan, Alan. Michel Foucault: The Will To Truth. London: Tavistock Publications, 1980. Simpson, David. “Literary Criticism and the Return to ‘History.’ ” Critical Inquiry 14 (1988), 721-747. Soboul, Albert. “Description et mesure en histoire sociale.” In L'Histoire sociale: sources et méthodes. Ed. Ernest Labrousse. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1967. Steiner, Peter. Russian Formalism: A Metapoetics. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1984. Touraine, Alain. Return of the Actor: Social Theory in Postindustrial Society. Trans. Myma Godzich. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988. Turner, Victor. “African Ritual and Literary Mode: Is a Comparative Symbology Possible?” In The Literature of Fact. Ed. Angus Fletcher. New York: Columbia University Press, 1976, pp. 45-81. ______ Dramas, Fields, and Metaphors. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1974. _______The Drums of Affliction. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1968. _______ The Forest of Symbols: Aspects of Ndembu Ritual. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1967. ______ “Liminality and the Performative Genres.” In Rite, Drama, Festival, Spectacle: Rehearsals toward a Theory of Cultural Performance. Ed. John J. MacAloon. Phila­ delphia: ISHI, 1984, pp. 19-41. ______ Revelation and Divination in Ndembu Ritual. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1975. _______ The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-structure. Chicago: Aldine, 1969. _______ Schism and Continuity in an African Society. Manchester: Manchester Univer­ sity Press, 1957. ______ “Social Dramas and Stories about Them.” In On Narrative. Ed. W. J. T. Mitchell. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981, pp. 137-164. ______ “Variations on the Theme of Liminality.” In Secular Ritual. Ed. Sally Moore and Barbara Myerhoff. Assen: Van Gorcum, 1977, pp. 36-52. Van den Berghe, Pierre L. “Dialectic and Functionalism.” In System, Change, and Conflict. Ed. N. J. Demerath III and Richard A. Peterson. New York: The Free Press, 1967, pp. 293-306. Viala, Alain. “Prismatic Effects.” Critical Inquiry Special Issue on the Sociology of Literature. Ed. Priscilla Ferguson, Philippe Desan, and Wendy Griswold. 14 (1988), 563-573. Williams, Raymond. Problems in Materialism and Culture. London: New Left (Verso), 1980.

I. Cultural Theory and Literary Studies

EXPERIENCING MURDER RITUALISTIC INTERPRETATION OF ANCIENT TEXTS Mieke Bal

In this contribution, I will explore the possibilities for use of the concept of ritual for the interpretation of ancient texts. The concept is examined solely in its problem-solving capacities for the specific purpose of interpretation, and secondarily for the explanation of problems of interpretation. In order to be as specific as possible, and as the transposition of a concept from one disci­ pline into another requires, I will discuss in some depth a single case of a text that scholars have found difficult to interpret, the account, in the biblical book of Judges, of Sisera’s murder by Yael. I will try to argue that the concept of ritual, used as an “experience-distant” (Geertz) concept that allows the inter­ preter to bridge the gap between his or her framework and the context of the text, is indispensable (1) to avoid ethnocentric and sexist interpretation and (2) to interpret the text as a semiotic object at all. Hence, it serves the purpose of a critical analysis (in the Habermasian sense) as well as a subtle literary one, while it can be fruitfully integrated in the toolbox of women’s studies. I will mainly draw from one paper by Turner (1967), not only because it provides a carefully formulated definition of ritual which defies too-easy transfer into a different discipline, but also because it discusses explicitly the relations be­ tween symbolic anthropology and other, related fields. Although the issue of ideology is not raised, I will argue that it is precisely the explicit discussion of interdisciplinary relations that allows us to integrate Turner’s ideas, and the concept of ritual in particular, into ideological criticism.

The Case The murder of Sisera by Yael has been found, in the history of exegesis, a most disturbing case. In the book of Judges, murder occurs quite frequently, sometimes within military action, sometimes in combination with rape, and sometimes within personal relations. Among all these violent events, there are

three cases of the murder of a man by a woman. It is indirect in the case of Samson and Delilah, which appealed so strongly to the imagination that it has become one of the best-known stories of the Bible, although mostly in a dis­ torted version. The murder is changed at the very last moment into suicide when the tyrant Abimelech, who has his brain crushed by an anonymous woman, keeps just enough of it to ask his servant to kill him quickly in order to avoid the shame of being killed by a woman. The case is alluded to in II Samuel 11:21 in a most disturbing—reversed, that is—manner (Bal 1987; there are also three murders of women by men: Jephthah’s daughter in Judges 11, Samson’s first wife in Judges 14, and the Levite’s wife in Judges 19. These murders are discussed in Bal 1988, Death and Dissymetry.) Our case under consideration here is the third of this series. It is narrated in detail, and as a result the story is almost as tough as the rape and murder of a woman by men in chapter 19, which is definitely less often discussed. Yael’s act is disturbing: on the one hand, the victim is an enemy of the people, so the woman is doing well, but on the other hand, she is a woman and kills a man, and this is just not done. Obviously the case raises the problem of conflicting loyalties for the massively male readers who have commented on the text (for an extensive account of commentaries, see Bal, Murder and Difference). Second, the case is disturbing because the cruel details are expanded in the text, as are the horri­ ble and taboo-transgressing procedures and the explicitly mentioned shame befalling not only the victim but also, in one of the versions of this story, the failing executioner, the leader Barak who shares his enemy’s shame. The third reason why the case is problematic is the most interesting one, and makes it available for my purpose in this article. It consists of the doubling of the account. Indeed, the story is narrated twice, in chapter 4 and in chapter 5 of the book. Moreover, the first version is part of the epic tradition and is generally attributed to a male poet; the second version is part of the famous Song of Deborah and is generally attributed to a female voice (although the latter attribution is less general than the former). The epic version is consid­ ered the more recent one; the lyric version is seen as one of the oldest texts of the Hebrew Bible (not necessarily in its present form; see van Dijk-Hemmes 1988). Hence, questions of date, of genre, and of gender seem to be related. The interpretation of ancient texts requires that historical considerations are integrated; furthermore, the history of their reception cannot be ig­ nored, since it is with their subsequent reading traditions that they have reached us; moreover, the key moments of that tradition have to be ex­ plained. These extra considerations are needed because of the otherwise unbridgeable gap between the context and function of the texts in their past and the present use made of them. The case of Yael, then, poses the follow­ ing problems of interpretation: (1) What are the differences between the two accounts? (2) Why are there two accounts at all, and why have both been integrated into the canon?

(3) Why is it that critics react so emotionally to this murder, much more so than in other, similar cases? (4) Why are critics inclined to ignore or explain away the differences be­ tween the two accounts, conflating them in their emotional reaction to the event? (5) Why is the question of gender of the respective poets so little seriously discussed? (6) What is the relation between ethnocentrism and sexism in these reac­ tions, and in what way does the text provoke them? These problems can be solved with the substantial help offered by Turner’s discussion of ritual. But why and how is that concept applicable at all?

Ritual and Text “By ‘ritual’ I mean prescribed formal behavior for occasions not given over to technological routine, having reference to beliefs in mystical beings or powers,” writes Turner (1967:19) in his theoretical paper that serves here as a basic methodological source. At first sight, this definition makes the application to written texts, whose contexts have necessarily been lost, highly problematic. One side issue, however, the relation between ritual symbols and social values, helps us solve this problem: “dominant symbols are re­ garded not merely as means to the fulfillment of the avowed purposes of a given ritual, but also and more importantly refer to values that are regarded as ends in themselves” (20). This enlarged view of the basic units of ritual allowed Turner to develop his ideas of the place, function, and importance of ritual in society, which constitutes in my view one of his major contributions. It allows textual critics to start at the other end, at the symbol, that is, and reverse the argument that then comes to lead to the assumption that a given unit, once conceived of as a symbol, can be understood much better if con­ sidered part of a ritual, with the social implication that entails. The book of Judges contains stories where the element of ritual is explic­ itly mentioned (the weeping over Jephthah’s daughter) or which are not understandable without the assumption that there is a ritual involved (the dance before the bride-capture scene in the last chapter), or which are ut­ terly unacceptable, hence their incorporation into the canon, incomprehen­ sible without a ritual context (the cutting into twelve pieces of the dead body of the murdered woman in chapter 19). The assumption that this body of texts has partly originated from ritual traditions is therefore plausible before­ hand. Second, in the case of Yael, one element of the story is generally acknowledged as ritualistic: the invitation of Yael addressed to the weary Sisera on his flight from the battlefield, which is assumed to be part of the hospitality ritual so sacred in the ancient Mediterranean area. Third, the hospitality ritual can be pointed at because of the fixed, stereotyped lan-

guage used. Verbal elements of rituals share with nonverbal symbols the qual­ ities of condensation, unification of disparate signification, polarization of meanings, and the implication of several distinct levels of the social order (Turner 1967:28); I will argue that it is only through the assumption that this is the case that the invitation scene (Judges 4:18) can be interpreted at all. A fourth argument in favor of a ritualistic interpretation can be argued only in the course of analysis. A great number of details that are generally acknowl­ edged as striking or problematic receive an integrated meaning when con­ ceived of as ritual symbols. This concordance argument shall come to stand in the place of the informants that we will by necessity do without, supported in this function by the reception of the texts. A fifth argument can be used as a background for the enterprise. Literature has, by its linguistic and cultural nature, a mediating function between the individual and the social motiva­ tions. This mediating function, according to Turner (37), characterizes the ritual symbol as well. The integration of social norms and individual desires can be acted out, ideally, through language, since the expression of fantasies in language is culturally validated and allows for otherwise unacceptable thoughts to escape from repression. Language itself shares this conjunction of the ut­ terly individual and the utterly social in its function as a tool that bridges the gap between the two as far as it is possible at all. The implications of this commonplace idea have been seen as fartherreaching: literature, or art in general for that matter, has been considered a form of ritual. Hardin rightly argues against such a generalization, that, first, it deprives the concept of the limitation indispensable for any concept to be of use, and, second, it ignores the basic difference between ritual and representa­ tion, as that between a happening and the representation of a happening. Nevertheless, the mediating function of representation allows for two ways of conceiving of art, not as identical but as related to ritual to a certain extent. On the one hand, ritual can be represented, as is the case within the dialogue between Sisera and Yael in chapter 4. On the other hand, the participation in a representational practice can be, under specified circumstances, such as oral, communal performance, a ritual practice. The common aspects between ritual and a literary event, such as the use of condensed symbols, repetition, commu­ nity, make for a relation that allows us not to equate the two but to understand the one better through insight into the other. This, however, entails a paradox. The very loss of the context which, as I have argued, necessitates the use of ritual for interpretation makes it ex­ tremely difficult to provide evidence for it. As a result, a ritualistic interpreta­ tion can never be tested. In order to make up for this, I will try to show that some textual problems and elements make a better case than others, while those are at the same time the cases that needed the concept most badly. If literature as a process can be considered ritual, there is no point in such a general claim. Therefore, I will not develop it in general but rather will try to distinguish different levels of meaning where the concept of ritual is helpful, and delimit where it ceases to be specific enough.

Earlier I termed the concept “experience-distant/’ In this sense, it helps to make Turner’s distinction in levels of meaning operational. Where the latter argues (1967:48-58) that exegetical or indigenous interpretation sometimes closes off the interpretative process itself, Geertz would formulate the same problem differently: the closure is brought about by our incapacity to under­ stand experience-near concepts. This distinction not only is a welcome justifi­ cation for me for dealing with biblical material as a relative outsider, but also will help delimit the field of application of the concepts. Turner’s second level, the operational, indicates what the symbol does within a given ritual. This level can be conceived of as the bridge between the two sets of concepts. The positionail meaning specifies what a symbol means within its semantic field in the given case; this will allow me to differentiate, within the text, the presence of different semantic fields, which entails the misunderstanding between the two characters that brings the event about. These preliminary remarks are meant to both justify and present the use of the concept of ritual in a differential interpretation of the two accounts of Sisera’s murder. In order to gain space, I will not go into the details of the history of the reception of these texts, which I have done elsewhere (Murder and Difference). I will start with a first analysis that should enhance the differ­ ence and the need for the anthropological concept.

Difference The two fragments of the murder scene both occur toward the end of the respective chapters; both are followed by one closing episode. The murder scenes are as follows: Judges 5:24-27 24. Blessed above [the]women be Yael the wife of Cheber the Kenite above [the] women in the tent blessed. 25. He asked for water milk she gave in a lordly bowl she handed him cream. 26. Her hand she stretched out to the tent peg her right hand to the worker’s hammer and she hammered Sisera, she smashed his head and she shattered and pierced his temple. 27. Between her feet he collapsed, fell down, he lay still between her feet he col­ lapsed, he fell down there where he had sunk, he fell down, destroyed/ mastered. Judges 4:17-21 17. And Sisera fled on his feet to the tent of Yael, the wife of Cheber the Kenite, for peace between Jabin King of Hazor and the house of Cheber the Kenite. 18. And Yael went out to meet Sisera and said unto him: Turn in my lord, turn in to me, fear not. And he turned in to her, to the tent and she covered him with a covering. 19. And he said unto her: Let me, pray, drink a little water for I am thirsty. And she opened the milkbag and she gave him to drink and she covered him.

20. And he said unto her: Stand in the opening of the tent and it shall be when a man comes and he asks you and says: is here a man, you shall say: none. 21. And Yael the wife of Cheber took the peg and she took the hammer in her hand and she came softly unto him and she smote the peg into his temple and it penetrated the ground and he was in a deep sleep and he was weary and he died.

Since the lyric version is often taken to be historically the first, I have put it first here, too; I assume the order of the sequence does have some impact on the reading of the two passages. The canonical order is not impossible, but it seems useful to estrange the texts from their traditional readings. The lyric version (5) devotes four verses to the murder. One is praise of Yael, one describes the ceremony that precedes the murder, one the act itself, and one the agony. The epic version (4) has three verses which describe the ceremony of the encounter, one has a dialogue on Sisera’s initiative, and one describes both the act of the murder and the victim’s death. A first comparison shows that the lyric is more extensive on the killing and the agony, while the epic is more elaborate on the encounter, and shortens the description of the murder and death. This distribution of topics points at a significant difference of focus, and forms the starting point for the analysis. Let me first draw a guideline from the direct con­ text, which is revealing here. In the epic version, which is younger, Debo­ rah is “quoted” by the poet as threatening her partner Barak when the latter dares not undertake the battle without Deborah’s help. The threat consists of the prophecy of this murder: if Barak needs Deborah’s help, then the enemy will fall by the hand of a woman. This attribution to Debo­ rah of an ideologeme (ideological unit, see Jameson) that relates the oppo­ sition honor/shame to that between the sexes, is entirely absent from the lyric version and can be considered therefore a contribution of the male subject. Being specific to the version uttered by the male voice, it is a neat example of projection: the woman who represents shame is supposed to utter its conditions. It can be represented as in figure 1. The murder scene is the imaginary realization of this fantasy. In the epic version, the issue of honor and shame is stressed throughout the whole story. Commentaries have indicated Barak, the leader of the Israelite army, as its real victim. He consumes his shame as a focalizer (for this concept, see Bal 1986); he hears Deborah utter the threat, and he sees the result when con­ fronted with Sisera’s body in Yael’s tent. Sisera’s annihilation is in fact Barak’s. This narratological structure reflects the projection hypothesis: the focalizer, he who has the fantasy, makes the woman who is the major character in his fantasy be its actor, carry it out. This necessitates a subtle, analytical treatment of the category of the subject. The primary subject, the male voice, delegates the task of utterance of the ideologeme to a female voice, but the latter exists only as embedded in the male voice; the subject of action, the active murderess as well as the active

I male speaker [

J

projection

T

embedded female speaker ▼ male fantasy

male fantasy ▼ male audience

prophetess and second military leader, is doing only what the male fantasy supposes her to do. It is the subject of focalization, although, or perhaps be­ cause, utterly passive, who is the most characteristic subject of this fiction. These narratological categories will not be elaborated here, but one point has to be enhanced. The question who, in a given text, can be considered the subject of a given narrative act, pertains not only to narrative analysis in itself. It will be shown shortly that those questions have their bearing on the decision whether, and to what extent, the concept of ritual applies. What functions as a ritual symbol for one subject may be devoid of such a function for another. The difference between the ritual and the directly pragmatic function of language makes for the misunderstanding between Yael and Sisera in the epic version, and for the profound difference between the two versions as a whole.

Ritual Language The question that arises from this is: why is this honor/shame opposition so important, and why should it be related to the opposition between the sexes? In other words: how arose this particular ideologeme that differenti­ ates the epic version from the lyric? It is here, I would venture, that the concept of ritual can be of help, in several respects. It will help to under­ stand the text, but through that understanding, it will help undercut the essentialist view of gender that makes sex-specific views seem universal, and historically specific views seem eternal. In other words, it will serve the pur­ pose of both literary analysis and feminist critique.

The leader Sisera, whose superiority was defined by the iron chars he had and the Israelites did not have, ceases to exist as a powerful social subject when he leaves his char while quitting his army. Between the moment of abdication of his social position and the moment when Barak focalizes his dead body, Sisera’s world becomes smaller and smaller. Arriving at Yael’s tent, he is trapped between the two armies, in a friendly camp, but one which is only recently and ambivalently so; he is literally lost. We can formulate this in a more experience-distant language. Sisera has been separated from his community. Entering a domain where loyalties are unclear, where his position is marginal, and where he can be only in a state of transition, he seems to be undergoing a rite of passage (van Gennep). If that is the case, the next step should be the integration into the adult world. I will argue shortly that this is indeed what Sisera attempts to accomplish but which he fails to succeed in doing, precisely because he fails to grasp the ritual nature of the “passage,” of the transition. How can this claim be substantiated? First, we have to examine Yael’s words—projected, again, by the male voice that “quotes,” invents them. Indeed, if critics are so sensitive to the taboo of hospitality involved in this scene, it is because the phrase “turn in to me my lord” has a ritual meaning. Throughout the Hebrew Bible it is used for the invitation, the offering of hospitality, which is the equivalent of safety. It has the character of a for­ mula, a fixed phrase that will always have the same form whenever used within a similar context. It is this context that gives it the connotation of safety. For the weary traveler, especially when the latter is fleeing from a major danger, the phrase is welcomed as an absolute guarantee. So much so that the next phrase, “fear not,” which seems part of it, is disturbingly super­ fluous. The insistence on safety, in a negatively formulated second phrase, introduces the possibility of misunderstanding and abuse. In fact, “fear not” is equally a ritually symbolic expression, but not within the same ritual. Quite to the contrary, it is part of the exhortation to battle. It is within this context that it is used throughout the war reports of the Bible. For an experienced military man, the phrase should have run a bell; for the initiate in the state of transition that Sisera has become in the meantime, it is evidence only of his radical dispossession that he fails to grasp the contradictory character of the statement as a whole. What Yael is propos­ ing, then, is an invitation to battle within the usually safe harbor of her home. The opposition between these two meanings is mediated by a third possible ritual meaning: sexual initiative. It is only when we assume that the scene is a mixture of the two well-known rituals that we are able to notice that both are repeated within the tent, where the woman covers and feeds the man, and next, kills him. When we provisionally maximalize the ritualistic assumption, we will be sensitive to this repetitive structure. How, then, can the sexual domain be integrated at this point? We know that there is another ritual known from biblical sources, and that is the election of the sexual partner. The strongest evidence is given in Genesis 24,

where the whole procedure is narrated four times. It consists of asking for water and then getting more; the surplus given by the woman indicates her as the chosen. Yael is thus proposed as a sexual partner (Zakovitch). At the same time, the surplus she offers differentiates water, as the minimal condi­ tion of life, from food, as the beginning of restauration, of new life, in this case milky the beginning of life. If this ritual is implied here, it becomes inevitable to integrate the set of rituals as played out within the rite of passage, as van Gennep has examined and Turner further analyzed them (van Gennep, Turner 1969). In this ritual, social roles are reversed; here, the former leader is represented in a state of absolute dependency, isolation from the world, regressing to the very begin­ ning of life. The ritual provokes strong anxiety, and in fact, the capacity of living through this anxiety is the primal test the initiate undergoes. Sisera fatally fails to recognize the ritual, hence the temporal character of the situa­ tion as well as the conventional need to respect and accept it. He displays his lack of insight when trying to escape the position that has befallen him by giving an order for which he does not qualify. That is indeed his fatal mistake: Sisera tries to reestablish the contact with the outside world which would undo the ritual situation. He significantly attempts to secure the border between inside and outside, while he gives an order to her who has over him the absolute power of a mother over her baby. Ironically, he does so by inadvertently confirming that he does not qualify: making use of the possibility of ambiguous use of fixed expressions in He­ brew, the poet makes him say “none” as the required answer to the possible question, “Is there a man in here?” The scene within the tent, indeed, is a repetition of the invitation scene. Again, Yael has the initiative; again, care and war are mixed. And again, the two characters speak a different language, Yael speaking that of the rite of passage, Sisera only acknowledging the hospitality ritual. The dialogues between the two characters represent but one level of meaning. At the level of the diegesis, of what happens, other factors play their part. The tent itself, as the location of the (ritual) death, represents the site of the rite of passage. Within that space, there is again a mirroring unit that reflects the separation brought about, respectively, by Sisera’s flight from his army, his arrival at the intermediate space of the friendly camp within the enemy’s territory, his enclosure within the tent. There is a word used here which scholars have taken great pains to translate: the word indicating the object used by Yael to cover Sisera. The word is a hapax, and one can only guess what it means. Some (Boling) say blanket or fly-net, the one being related to the act of covering, the other to the ethnographic context (the climate). Curtain is another possibility. Zakovitch insists that the object does function as a blanket, and derives from that function the sexual con­ notation of the event. The meaning curtain connoting also the bed scene, since beds in hot climates can have curtains, seems to me the most stimulat­ ing translation because it connotes equally well separation: the curtain

around the bed makes for the function of the doorway, so crucial in an­ cient literature, as the border, the very site of transition from one state to another. What the doorway, and the neutral domain of the camp, refer to in the first part of the episode, the curtain then comes to indicate in the mirroring indoor scene. I can hardly blame the reader who would feel that there is some excess in this ritualistic view. Indeed, there is a dizzying number of rituals involved, and the repetition of the whole set makes for another ritual aspect. I will try to justify the apparently loose use of the concept later; here, it is relevant to notice that Sisera himself has been entangled in this complex whole of ritual­ istic language and behavior. And that is precisely the idea. As Boling put it, Sisera is duped and doped by the same move. Doped: the goat milk offered to him when he asked for water is said to have been slightly somniferic; some argue (Zakovitch) that milk here is a euphemism for wine, and that before the murder, the couple had a merry party. The doping adds to the duping, by the false offer of hospitality and safety, of food, rest, and loving care. Critics have been particularly keen to stress these aspects of the story. Their sensitivity to them suggests that we should take this pragmatic dimension into account. How can it be explained? The most striking features of this epic version of the murder scene should be considered apologetic. The episode is made up of explanations of, I would say, of excuses for, Sisera’s death. This links the ritualistic analysis to the honor/shame problem. Even an enemy of the people needs excuses for get­ ting killed by a woman, and the excuses consist exactly of those factors that relate honor and gender: the ritual o f social relations (hospitality) and of military bravery (exhortation to battle) are related to the election of the sexual partner, the motherly care, and are all integrated in the rite of passage that suspends Sisera’s manhood until he shows, by his attempt at escape, that he cannot face the anxiety it represents. Choosing to be “no man,” then, he cannot survive the ritual. As a non-man, he will undergo the penetration, in his soft flesh, of the hard object, that men are supposed to perform. What I am interested in, so far, is the representation of danger for the male sex by the rite of passage and more specifically by the tent of the woman, in other words, the female domain, in this seminomadic culture where the rite is accomplished, combined with the stress on apologizing explanation. It is obviously from the point of view of the honor/shame opposition that Sisera’s fate has to be excused. All this is in the epic, not in the lyric, text. If the epic version is indeed younger, we can consider these specific additions; in any case, I submit that these relations between honor/shame and gender are specific for the male voice. It is easy to understand why, on the other hand, details have been suppressed—again, if we can take this epic to be a response to the lyric. The most striking difference here is the shortness of the account of Sisera’s death. Instead of the extensive description of his agony, we find only the verb “died” preceded by, again, an explanation. Modern translations, which

replace the general Hebrew conjunction by conjunctions of causal relations, have: he was in a deep sleep, because weary, so he died. He died because he was sleeping, and he slept because he was weary. The fantasy is full of causal logic, and that is perhaps its most characteristic feature. (This may be relevant also within the problematic of orality-literacy, since one feature of orality is the style of juxtaposition; see Ong; Lemaire.) Yael at Work In order to understand what exactly has been suppressed in- this remark­ able shortness of the representation of death, we have to take a closer look at the representation, by the female voice of Deborah, of the “same” event. The first striking difference is, of course, the phrase that introduces the murder: “blessed above the women be Yael,” repeated with the addition “above the women in the tent.” (Fokkelien van Dijk-Hemmes wrote an exten­ sive study of this phrase in her assessment of the relations between Judges 4 and 5, in which she assumes the lyric to be a Midrash on the epic.) The change in what is considered “blessed” for a woman is an obviously relevant issue. Let me just point out that the praise of Yael by Deborah, suppressed from the epic version, disturbs many commentators who use it as evidence of the “primitive” and even “savage” spirit of this very early text. It seems obvious that such a judgment is based on implicit sexism, combined with ethnocentrism and the straightforward evolutionism that usually supports it. Moreover, such hasty and unwarranted—and irrelevant—evaluations ignore generic difference. The Song of Deborah has many of these enthusiastic appraisals, none of which are called “primitive” by the critics, and which are a feature of the lyric as a genre. The problem here is clearly the conflict of loyalties pointed at earlier. Yael is blamed not so much for killing but for killing a man while being a woman, thus bringing shame upon her victim. Her praise by Deborah is therefore not acceptable for whoever identifies with the victim of shame. A second “detail” that has disappeared in the later version is the cream handed to him in a lordly bowl. The lordly bowl contrasts with the worker’s hammer, while the cream is the third element of an instance of the device, common in lyrical poetry, of a gradation in three phases. Finally, the repeti­ tion in the description of Sisera’s agony and death has been described by many commentators as set in a tone of “savage delight” and as “the gloating preservation of the gruesome details,” and has been blamed systematically. The epic version presents, in a circular structure, a series of male charac­ ters—the king Jabin, the leader Barak, the enemy leader Sisera, then back to Barak, and ending with Jabin—and in the epic Sisera is the center of that structure and the mediator between the parties involved, as well as the prin­ cipal character. The episode in the Song of Deborah represents only one character that acts as a subject: the woman Yael. In the introduction of this

character, her sex and her place are specified. The phrase “the women in the tent” reminds us of Sara, whose only subversive action—standing in her tent, she laughed—disturbed fellow characters (the messengers of the lord) and critics, and reminds us of the division of labor and space in the seminomadic society of the days. This “detail” has an important structural func­ tion to which we shall return. Yael is the main character. Her name is mentioned, while the name of Sisera is replaced by a pronoun. Grammati­ cally, Yael is the subject of all verbs save the verb “asked,” which implies dependency on the addressee, and the verbs of verse 27 which express Sisera’s suffering. Sisera becomes the subject of active verbs, becomes a charac­ ter only at the moment of his destruction. Verse 25 has a parallel construction in three phases, a classical tricolon. In the epic, the gradation water-milk-cream has been replaced by a simple binary opposition between the minimal water and the nourishing milk. Moreover, the framework of the ritual of hospitality is absent from the lyric version. If we take the “lordly bowl” also into consideration, we have a gradation going from the water as minimal supply for survival, through milk as nourishment, to a sumptuous treat. As such, the gradation points at the honorable recep­ tion that befalls Sisera. The lordly bowl signifies the honor that becomes a man who is allowed to enter into the female domain. But this gesture has a ritual aspect as well, as the honor that accompanies the sentenced-to-death. Most striking, the honor is represented here outside the opposition honor/ shame which gave it its meaning in the epic version. The honorable reception of Sisera is simply due to the other who visits Yael in her domain. The lordly bowl stands also in sharp contrast to the laborer’s hammer. The honored guest is treated not only as honorable but, by the same token, also as a nonlaborer, as a useless member of society. The worker’s hammer, by contrast, is the instrument of work, of daily life, of activity, and in the case of nomadic tribes where the task of dressing the tents was the women’s part, it is the instrument of female activity. Taking the worker’s hammer, Yael is treating the intruder as a stranger who came to transgress the limits between the world of work and the world of social hierarchy on the one hand, and the world of women and the world of men on the other. It is not surprising, then, that the following verse presents Yael at work. Indeed, manipulating the instruments of the world of labor that her society has assigned to her as a woman, she accomplishes the gestures that represent her work. At the same time, she acts as a member of the larger group wherein the group of women is integrated by destroying the enemy of the people to which she decided to belong. The verse requires the combination of two codes to be understandable: a political code, which would stress the integration of what happens in the life of the seminomadic tribe, and a sexspecific code that would stress the relation of what happens to gender. The theme that is thus enhanced can then be described as the ritual suspension of the transgression of limits between different worlds.

Realism versus Representation Consequently critics address one question here. How is it possible that Yael could kill Sisera who, in this version, is supposed to be standing or sitting, and not asleep? The question is related to a realistic view of represen­ tation which is not necessarily relevant in the case of mythical expression of fantasies. If we compare the two versions, we can assume that the author of the epic version was worried by the same question, and answered it, as we have seen, by alleging apologetic explanations. Some critics, including talmudic commentators (quoted by Zakovitch), go even further. If the epic author specifies that Sisera was killed because he was asleep, and asleep because he was weary, they follow this track and assume that he was weary because he was drunk, doped, or/and exhausted by sexual efforts; drunk because the goat milk was somniferic, and according to some, Yael gave him wine instead of milk. In short: he could be killed because Yael has duped him, and the circle is complete. Realism, then, is related to sexism: in order to be true, logically motivated, that is, the account must blame the woman. Realistically speaking, the gesture is indeed, hardly likely. The tent peg was of wood, we may assume, since the military inferiority of the Israelites was due to the fact that they did not have iron. Yael beats the enemy with her own weapons, in her own domain. Imagining the gesture as accomplished on the temple of an awake man, and according to the poetic rhythm of the verse, we cannot but wonder: was he “really” standing? The penetration of the hard object into the soft flesh, in the hammering rhythm, is doubtless one of the “details” that have suggested the so-often-proposed sexual interpreta­ tion of this scene. Within such an interpretation, Yael is courting Sisera with the honorable reception that she gives him, and she qualifies, according to the ritual selection of the sexual partner, as his future wife. Her generosity becomes slightly ironical then: the ritual prescribes that she give more than the water that was asked for; by giving still more, she is pushing it. But her hammering points to a reversal of sexual roles. The problem at stake involves the status of literature in relation to repre­ sentation, and entails its distinction from ritual. It has been advanced (Har­ din) that literature and ritual are incompatible at precisely this point. Since ritual involves the participation of the community in and for which it func­ tions, the idea of representation would undermine its very effect. The ques­ tion is pernicious, because representation is an ambiguous concept in itself, but it has to be answered in order for the place of the concept of ritual in literary studies to be specified. I will return to it shortly; in order to make a convincing case, I will first have to go further into the problem of this case. The question was: was he really standing? To put it differently: is the question of his position simply not taken into account, considered irrelevant? That cannot be. For in the next verse, it is specified that he fell.

My answer to the realistic question will have to be, then, that, ignoring the standards of realism, the poetess presents him as standing because he had to fall. To fall is not only the passage from the standing position to lying down; it is also the transition from the position of the respectable leader to that of annihilation, from life to death; and, according to those who read the text within the isotopy of sexuality, the transition from sexual tension to postorgastic relaxation. The verb is repeated three times, and at the end of the gradation, the result is given: destroyed, which is, significantly, the same verb as “mastered.” The question of realistic plausibility, then, is relevant only from the point of view of the later epic version; as it stands, the lyric version has a strong internal logic, where the position of the victim is motivated from the point of view of the major event to which all the other events lead. So, he had to fall, for yet another reason. He had to fall in order to activate the thematic line that was latent in the milk motif, and which receives a place, here, in a quite different structure. According to Yair Zakovitch, who summa­ rizes rabbinic commentaries in his plea for a sexual reading of both versions, the phrase “between her feet” is the strongest evidence for such a reading. The phrase is striking indeed, for its concretely bodily aspect, and its repetition stresses it. But I doubt whether the sexual reality is so clear here, for I consider this conflation of the body with sexuality a simplistic fallacy, informed by a simplified view of psychoanalysis. As recent feminist studies have pointed out, the relationship between mother and child is also a bodily one (e.g., Gallop; Hirsch). Interestingly, “between her feet he sank” comes directly from Deuter­ onomy, and there, in 28:57, it describes afterbirth. The logic of Zakovitch’s argument is not quite clear: he finds in the idea of the placenta evidence for the theme of sexual pleasure! If we take a closer look at the passage in Deuter­ onomy, we find that the phrase represents the utmost misery:; the afterbirth, there, is eaten by the woman who produces it, and the image does depict the misery that will befall the disobedient people. If the image of mothering is inherent to the milk motif, it must be in order to oppose it ironically to this negative, absolute representation of regression in relation to the mother. The nursed baby becomes a failed baby, and even that only token of beginning existence regresses back, eaten by where it came from. The image is disturbing. How can we interpret it? Sisera’s destruction is not represented here in the fantasy of shame as opposed to social honor, opposing man to non-man. It is represented in three phases which appeal to the resources of fantasy at the disposal of women in a social context where their place is so constricted. He falls, he stops living, he returns to the phase of the beginning of life in order to make a false start as afterbirth, as aborted. In other words: language, here, tries to express that he has never existed. The opposition man-non-man, which is predicated upon the derogation of women in the epic, turns out to be a resentful perversion of the opposition human-non-human, predicated upon the power of women to give or to withhold life as potential mothers. Using the verb “to express” here is to opt for representation as opposed—if

it is indeed to be considered as its antonym—to ritual. Two levels have to be distinguished. On the level of the text as it stands, we cannot but conclude that the language of the Song is basically different from the formulaic phrases in the epic version. If the latter are fragments of a body of ritualistic language at the disposal of those who participated in the performance of these texts as oral poems, the evocation of Sisera’s death in the Song is not, as far as we can ever know, related to such stereotyped language. This is not to say that the Song lacks ritual aspects. It has the status of a ritual as a whole, as far as it has been sung, probably at a festival commemorating the battle. The force of Deborah as leader, poetess, and prophet makes her an ideal ritual performer (Bal, Murder and Difference). But the fragment of her Song under consideration here is precisely that narrative part of it that has no ritual function separately. If the introductory phrase “Blessed be Yael . . . ” certainly suggests audience partici­ pation, there is no event other than the cathartic emotions that is the purpose of it; hence, calling this narrative a ritual as narrative would be pointless. It is the cathartic effect in its specifically female character here, as distinct from the specifically male apologetic flavor of the epic version, that has been misunderstood later or, perhaps, too well understood by those who reacted so violently to it. The effect has to be seen as historically specific, and ethno­ graphic circumstances cannot be ignored. In a society where women are “in the tent,” where their position is restricted by a strong division of labor, the moments when they have power over a man are likely to be limited and specific to gender roles. The confrontation of a woman with the enemy of her people liberates the imagination of the reversal of power positions. How is it when a woman has power over a man? The images that come, liberated as they are from the constraints of the epic tradition that is not involved in the Song, are metonymically inspired by the experiences of power this woman can imagine: to kill, to cohabitate, to give birth. To kill takes the form of a reversal of sexual intercourse, of a reversal of birthgiving. The woman penetrates the man, the mother eats the child. The pleasure of this power is the pleasure of the subver­ sion of roles, as a carnival (Bakhtin; Morson and Emerson), within the very limited space assigned to women: the tent. To be, as a character, the represen­ tation of this pleasure makes Yael “blessed above the women in the tent.” Is this to suggest that, as soon as women are free to fantasize, they become cruel monsters, abusing their power over life? In other words, should the fantasizing man of the epic version feel he is right to fear women and to feel ashamed of being involved with them? It is here that the concept of ritual as I have used it can help to avoid both ethnocentrism and sexism.

The Forest of Rituals “I came to see performances of ritual as distinct phases in the social pro­ cesses whereby groups became adjusted to internal changes and adapted to their external environment. From this standpoint the ritual symbol becomes

a factor in social action, a positive force in an activity field.” This is how Turner (1967:20) substantiates his claim that ritual is basically a social pro­ cess, and yet relates to the mental life of individuals. The methodological consequences of this conjunction are numerous, and include the necessity to differentiate the meaning of symbols in each context. This is crucial in the interpretation of the Sisera murder. Although the “event” is most surely the same, there is no similarity whatsoever between the meaning of this event in the two accounts. This seemingly obvious conclusion has, to my knowledge, never been reached. At the level of the cathartic effect of each account for the participating audience—say, the least “ritual” of all ritual aspects in­ volved, and in any case the least specific—the meanings are in no way re­ lated. The most striking feature here is not so much the shift in the stress laid on the agony versus on the circumstances surrounding it, but the importance of the opposed character. Where Sisera is utterly futile for the evocation of female power in the hallucinatory representation of such a situation, Yael is extremely important, more so than Sisera himself, in the epic representation of female danger and the shame it entails. This has to be so because the function assigned to the woman here is that of the scapegoat (Girard) who is by definition the most relevant character where the scapegoat is the issue. In this reconstruction, the literary process has the exorcizing effect that rituals can have also. This is not to say that a text is a ritual; in certain ways, it functions as one. This is a first level where ritualistic interpretation can have something to say. The context, not the text, or rather, as Culler argued, the pressure of the framing on the text; the audience, not the author; emotions, not cognition determine in what way the two processes are related. The epic text functions, by its effect of relief when the scapegoat is expelled, to strengthen the community. This is how the temporarily revolutionary effect of ritual is ultimately conservative: the evocation of Sisera’s liminal position releases the acceptance of a social order where a leader such as he has the power that structures the group. Rephrased in experience-near language, this amounts to the following caricatural idea: let the woman have power for a moment, feel the anxiety that situation triggers, and you will never let her have it again. A second level of ritualistic interpretation is at stake when one claims that a given text is about ritual, that there is ritual in a text. This is not the case in the Song of Deborah, while it may be the case in the epic version. If critics react emotionally to the violation of the hospitality rite, it is because they have been made aware that such a rite is “told.” The belief in rules as powers whose transgression/offense will necessarily endanger the social order, as distinct from the view of rules as patterns of behavior willingly submitted to for the sake of the community, makes for the feeling that the promise of hospitality entails safety, makes one feel safe. Sisera’s behavior in the tent, his mistaken reappropriation of the commander’s position, represents, hence is about, the strong feeling that ritual brings forth: the certainty of magic. The third level, which is also absent—or not traceable—in the Song and

strongly present in the epic, is the synecdochical adoption of ritual. The insertion in the dialogue of portions of ritual language is not a representa­ tion in the thematic sense. The text, here, is not “about” ritual, but inserts it, integrates it. Fragments of the text can receive a context that is ritual, while at the same time they keep their semantic function in the text. The relations are graphically represented in figure 2, where the square (the magic box) is part of the text and part of the ritual, each only partially. The double cotext thus provided makes such a fragment particularly “symbolic” in Turner’s sense: condensed, contradictory, multileveled. Since different rituals are in­ volved at this level, formulas receive a different meaning for each antagonist. “Fear not” means “safety” for Sisera, “you are at war” for Yael, and the answer dictated “no man” means, within the one context “hiding,” hence “safe,” and within the other “nonexistent,” hence “dead.” The two charac­ ters have, then, a different exegetic meaning in mind, and therefore, their semantic fields are incompatible. If interpreted in this way, the text does not need to appeal to common sense or moral standards, nor does it need to be “excused” for its cruelty by ethnocentric contempt. There is, moreover, not so much a matter of opposi­ tion between the two accounts, but a deep, irreducible difference. The expe­ riences involved are ultimately gender-specific. The language used is generically specific, and one can venture that the two are related. What is “primitive,” ancient, that is, becomes a matter of the entire process. Perhaps the allegedly older text is so striking—or even considered older—because it is concerned so exclusively with the female fantasy, and so insultingly little with the male anxiety. The concept of ritual, even though it has been shown to apply at so many levels and in so many ways, is discriminatory enough. The incantatory version is clearly less directly ritual than the exorcizing version. And although less “realistic,” it is more representational. Against the opposition worded by Hardin, who feels that the concept of ritual is in danger of becoming too general, I would argue that it can be fruitfully used in many different ways which all enrich literary criticism con­ siderably, as long as one distinguishes the different meanings it generates: the semantic level (“about”), the structural level (how it is inserted), and the pragmatic level (its emotional impact). Each helps us to understand why an­ cient texts continue to fascinate and continue to make people angry, accord­ ing to the group to which they belong. text ◄ -

ritual

BIBLIOGRAPHY Bakhtin, Mikhail. The Dialogic Imagination. Ed. Michael Holquist. Trans. Caryl Emer­ son and Michael Holquist. Austin: The University of Texas Press, 1981. Bal, Mieke. Femmes imaginaires: L 'ancien testament au risque d 'une narratologie critique. Utrecht, HES/ Montreal, HMH/ Paris: Nizet, 1986. (Shorter version: Lethal Love: Reading Biblical Love-Stories, Differently. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987.) ______ Narratology: Introduction to the Theory of Narrative. Trans. Christine van Boheemen. Toronto: The University of Toronto Press, 1985. _______ Murderand Difference:Gender, Genre, and Scholarship on the Murder of Sisera. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988. ________Death and Dissymetry: The Politics of Coherence in the Book offudges. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1988. Boling, Robert G. fudges: A New Translation and Commentary. Garden City, N.Y.: Dou­ bleday and Co., 1975. Culler, Jonathan. Framing the Sign; Criticism and Its Institutions. Norman and London: The University of Oklahoma Press, 1988. Dijk-Hemmes, Fokkelien van. “Interpretaties van de relatie tussen Richteren 4 en 5.” Proeven van Vrouwenstudies Theologie I, 149-217. Leiden/Utrecht: IMO Re­ search Pamphlets, 1988. Gallop, Jane. Thinking through the Body. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988. Geertz, Clifford (1974). “ ‘From the Native’s Point of View’: On the Nature of An­ thropological Understanding.” Ed. Morris Freilich. In The Pleasures of Anthro­ pology. New York: New American Library, 1983. Gennep, Arnold van (1907). The Rites of Passage. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1960. Girard, Rene (1972). Violence and the Sacred. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1977. Habermas, Jurgen. Knowledge and Human Interest. London: Heinemann, 1972. Hardin, Richard F. “ ‘Ritual’ in Recent Criticism: The Elusive Sense of Community.” PMLA 98 (1983), 846-861. Hirsch, Marianne. The Mother-Daughter Plot. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989. Jameson, Fredric. The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act. Lon­ don: Methuen, 1981. Lemaire, Ria. Passions et Positions: Pour une sémiotique du sujet dans le Poésie lyrique médiéval en langues romanes. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1988. Morson, Gary Saul, and Caryl Emerson, eds. Rethinking Bakhtin: Extensions and Chal­ lenges. Evanston, 111.: Northwestern University Press, 1989. Ong, Walter. Interfaces of the Word: Studies in the Evolution of Consciousness and Culture. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1977. Turner, Victor. The Forest of Symbols: Aspects of Ndembu Ritual. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Presss, 1967. ________ The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-structure. Chicago: Aldine, 1969. Zakovitch, Yair. ‘‘Siseras Tod.” Zeitschrifi für die Alttestament liehe Wissenschaft 93 (1982), 364-374.

AESTHETICS, ROMANCE, AND TURNER D a v id R a y b in

i

Most of the time we just assume the cultural presence of imaginative litera­ ture. Could we conceive of the nineteenth century without Dickens, Balzac, and Dostoevsky, of the seventeenth century without Cervantes, Milton, and Moliere, of the fourteenth century without Dante, Petrarch, and Chaucer? Such writers and their cultures seem indissociable. For the medievalist, though, limitations in the extent and variety of surviv­ ing literary materials compel an investigation of the literary presence: medi­ eval literature may not be taken for granted. From the eleventh century in France, the surviving vernacular corpus comprises the Vie de Saint Alexis, an assonanced, stanzaic, and sad retelling of the saint’s life. It was not until about 1100 that there appeared in France, the main literary center, our earliest surviving modern-language epics (chansons de geste), not until around 1130 the earliest lyrics, not until 1150 the earliest romances, 1165 the earli­ est chivalric romances, 1175 beast epics and fabliaux, and not until 1200 were our oldest surviving prose romances and largely secular dramatic work created. All told, only around one hundred vernacular narratives survive from twelfth-century France. Presented with a literary horizon so initially barren, and so slow to fill, one is led to question the whys of literature, and indeed of art in general. Why do people compose, read and listen to, and preserve imaginative texts? How does a work of art relate to its original cultural surroundings? Can we observe literature performing a particularized social role? The responses, I believe, are important not just to those studying medieval literature, but to anyone interested in observing and understanding any kind of society or art. Victor Turner’s work provides directions for answering many of the ques­ tions I’ve posed. In this essay I speak of literary texts, audiences, aesthetics, and general cultural criticism, all of them important to understanding the role of art in a culture. At the heart of my argument lies Turner’s anthropol-

ogy, a symbolic anthropology which provides a methodology and a forum for interpreting customs and artifacts in relation to the societies in which they were produced. Time and time again, as I have searched through the laby­ rinth of cross-disciplinary study, I have found myself returning to Turner, to discover some key or link that brought me a step closer to comprehending the underlying enigma: what need, what use, do people have for art? Sections II and III of this essay, working on a theoretical level, consider the role of art in society. First, dealing in broad terms, I look at what art is, and how cultures make use of it. Noting that the world of artistic production and reception is inherently ideological, with art’s polemical qualities coming into particular play during times of social strain, I employ Turner’s model of “Social Drama” as a structure for showing how artistic activity can and in­ deed does offer an individual or people a controlled means for (re)evaluating and even (re)structuring a social order. Next, drawing on Turner’s concepts of liminality and communitas, I argue that art plays a distinct, definable, “antistructural” role in social evolution. Art serves as a kind of clearing­ house for ideas of all kinds—radical, conservative, and everything in be­ tween. Working in a socially fixed realm of disorder, of discontinuity, of a mild form of chaos, artists help us to create orderly systems and definitions. In Section IV the essay moves from theory to practice. Turning to the twelfth century in northern France, I study the phenomenon of the chivalric romance to suggest how the theory can help us to understand the nature and development of a particular historical moment and literary form. Romance, I argue, relates in an ideologically complex but nonetheless structurally delimitable (if multifaceted and bidirectional) way to the world that saw it created. The solutions, even in this relatively clear-cut case, are not simple, but the example will show, I hope, how what Turner has told us about the nature of art and the behavior of human beings in society enables us to learn many important things about the relationship of a literature and its culture, and indeed about the nature and function of art. II Shelly voiced my main premise well. The most unfailing herald, companion, and follower of the awakening of a great people to work a beneficial change in opinion or institution, is poetry. . . . Poets are the hierophants of an unapprehended inspiration; the mirrors of the gigantic shadows which futurity casts upon the present; the words which express what they understand not; the trumpets which sing to battle, and feel not what they inspire; the influence which is moved not, but moves. Poets are the unacknowledged legislators o f the world.

In another passage he argues that poets “measure the circumference and sound the depths of human nature with a comprehensive and all-penetrating

spirit, and they are themselves perhaps the most sincerely astonished at its manifestations; for it is less their spirit than the spirit of the age.” “The spirit of the age.” People have for some 150 years agreed that the ring is nice, but what does it mean? To get a grasp on the idea, I think it helps to look briefly at a relatively simple schema for differentiating the two basic types of communal knowledge and understanding. Pierre Bourdieu has dis­ tinguished a society’s doxa from its heterodoxy and orthodoxy. Heterodoxy and orthodoxy, he argues, together constitute a culture’s “universe of possi­ ble discourse,” the things people talk about, the things about which they agree and disagree. Food, sports, clothes, politics, everything we commonly discuss and consider fits into and constitutes our universe of discourse. Doxa, on the other hand, refers to “the class of that which is taken for granted,” those underlying principles which, under normal circumstances, are “beyond question and which each agent tacitly accords by the mere fact of acting in accord with a social convention” (169). It is something like doxa, I think, that Shelley was referring when he talked about a hitherto unrecognized “spirit of the age” which wells out through the voices of poets. At their most revolu­ tionary, poets dig deep into a society’s conceptual foundations. My basic assertion, to which I return in Section IV, is that the various art forms offer a significant medium for the social expression of ideology. The work of art is looked to to provide a sense of a people’s or group’s underly­ ing spirit, to offer an articulation of the kinds of things people don’t talk about under ordinary circumstances, at least not in a conscious way. Allow me to stress “conscious,” as ideology itself, and with it ideological discussion, is of course never really absent. Ideology, in the broad sense in which I am using the term, comprises not just a people’s doxa, which is what comes into particular play in art, but also the people’s “universe of discourse” ; ideology is always present: orthodoxy and heterodoxy are always available for discus­ sion. Art, though, is looked to for something else. The group’s generally untouched spirit, its doxa, borne in the womb of art, comes into general consideration only rarely. What I would like to get at here is first of all those situations which cause this art-borne spirit, doxa, to surface, and second the way in which the surfac­ ing of ideology fits into the social fabric. Shelley was talking about the excep­ tional case, the revolutionary case in which the poet’s voice not only expresses doxa to an unknowing world, and perhaps an unknowing self, but goes further to lead his contemporaries to consider, to question, even to understand, the previously unimaginable. What causes this to happen? More­ over, why is it poets people should turn to for such enlightenment? The anthropologist’s typical explanation for ideological turbulence is to see it as a function of large-scale social strain. Clifford Geertz, for example, suggests that the usefulness of ideology as a critical concept is at its greatest during times of stress, when ideology as a moving force comes into active play.1 Bourdieu insists on the connection between strain and the emergence of the undiscussable: “The critique which brings the undiscussed into discus-

sion . . . has as the condition of its possibility objective crisis, which, in breaking the immediate fit between the subjective structures and the objec­ tive structures, destroys self-evidence practically” and permits “that the question of the natural or conventional character . . . of social facts . . . be raised” (168-169). Or, to rephrase it somewhat, crisis leads to the conscious consideration of ideology. Such arguments suggest a broad, fundamental outline. The particulars of my thesis, given its concern with the why and how of artistic ideological activity, depend on anthropological work that suggests more exactly how such activity works in social terms. The key study in this area is Victor Turner's analysis of what he determined to be the four phases of Social Drama. Turner’s primary fieldwork was among the Ndembu of Zambia. His con­ clusions, as he realized, apply equally to many other cultures, advanced as well as primitive. Turner seems to have started from much the same anthro­ pological position as I have just been indicating: “Conflict,” he writes, “seems to bring fundamental aspects of society, normally overlaid by cus­ toms and habits of daily intercourse, into frightening prom inence” (1974:35). Observing the Ndembu, though, Turner took the notion a step further to recognize that reactions to strain are not random. “Conflict was rife in the groups of two dozen or so kinsfolk who make up a village com­ munity. It manifested itself in public episodes of tensional irruption which I called ‘social dramas’ ” (1974:33). Such episodes were highly structured, following what was typically a four-phase developmental pattern. After (1) an initial “breach of norm-governed social relations” there would ensue (2) “a phase of mounting crisis” (3) an attempt at “redressive action” (some­ times followed by regression to crisis and a further redressive attempt), and, finally, (4) either the “reintegration of the disturbed social group or . . . the social recognition and legitimization of irreparable schism” (1974:38-41). Moreover, Turner postulated, such a processual pattern for dealing with crisis was common cross-culturally, irrespective of social mi­ lieu. Regardless of the outcome of a particular conflict, given the unfolding of a social drama the basic structure of an affected society is laid open, and possibly transformed. Looking a little more closely at some of these phases allows us to see where, how, and why art and its ideological function fit in the process. Phase 1 is relatively simple. Breaches of “regular, norm-governed social relations” (1974:38) may come in a variety of circumstances and forms, but they are significant largely insofar as they are sufficiently public and substan­ tial as to instigate crisis. Phase 2 is more substantial. “Among the Ndembu,” Turner noted, the phase of crisis exposes the pattern of current factional intrigue, hitherto covert and privately conducted, within the social group . . . and beneath it there becomes visible the less plastic, more durable, but nonetheless gradually

changing basic Ndembu social structure, made up of relations that have a high degree of constancy and consistency— that are supported by normative pat­ terns laid down in the course of deep regularities of conditioning, training and social experience. (1974:38-39)

It is exposure of the underlying social structure that is important. For here is where we need to reconsider Bourdieu’s distinction between doxa and the “universe of discourse.” Crisis exposes for discussion and evaluation doxa, the underlying, normally unquestioned, and even unrecognized principles on which the social superstructure is based. When such principles become dis­ cussable, they simultaneously become open to change, to ideological exami­ nation and assault. From solid foundation we move to fluid “anti-structure,” and in what Turner calls a “liminal” phase of unfettered possibilities, a rebel­ lious, revolutionary, radically new set of suddenly plausible ordering princi­ ples “takes up its menacing stance in the forum itself and, as it were, dares the representatives of order to grapple with it” (1974:39). Under such cir­ cumstances, I argue, art is looked to, indeed is expected, to offer the signs, innovated meanings, and orderings that will permit a return to stability. The actual turn to art takes place in the crucial Phase 3 of redressive action. Turner schematizes that “In order to limit the spread of crisis, certain adjustive and redressive ‘mechanisms’ . . . » informal or formal, institutional­ ized or ad hoc, are swiftly brought into operation by leading or structurally representative members of the disturbed social system” (1974:39). The threatened society, in other words, seeks to protect itself, employing what­ ever defensive instruments and procedures are available to it. Turner sug­ gests a variety of such mechanisms, most of them juridical in one form or another, but with “the performance of public ritual” also a possibility. Then, in what seems to be a casual phrase tacked on at the end of a major theoreti­ cal statement, Turner mentions what seems to me to be the key to under­ standing how art functions in crisis: When one is studying social change, at whatever social level, I would give one piece o f advice: study carefully what happens in phase three, the would-be redressive phase o f social dramas, and ask whether the redressive machinery is capable of handling crisis so as to restore, more or less, the status quo ante, or at least to restore peace among the contending groups. Then ask, if so, how precisely? And if not, why not? It is in the redressive phase that both pragmatic techniques and symbolic action reach their fullest expression. (1974:40-41)

The key words are “symbolic action.” When structural modes fail, one turns to the area of what Turner calls liminal “anti-structure.” When ordinary, direct discourse is ineffective, one turns to indirect, symbolic discourse. One turns to signs, innovated meanings, and new orderings. One turns to the realm of art Art is not, of course, the only arena for symbolic expression. As Geertz has pointed out, ideologies generally present a “highly figurative nature,” provid-

ing those who adopt them “novel symbolic frames against which to match the myriad ‘unfamiliar somethings’ that, like a journey to a strange country, are produced by a transformation in political life” (220). Art, though, as Su­ zanne Langer has argued, offers an unusual and powerful type of symbolic presence. Whereas normally “semanticists . . . think of a symbol as essen­ tially a sign which stands for something else and is used to represent that thing in discourse,” there is another, “more primitive function of symbols, which is to formulate experience as something imaginable in the first place. . . . ” This, Langer continues, is the greatest intellectual value and . . . prime office of symbols— their power of formulating experience, and presenting it objectively for contemplation, logi­ cal intuition, recognition, understanding. . . . And this function every good work of art does perform. . . . The myriad forms of subjectivity, the infinitely complex sense of life, cannot be rendered linguistically, that is, stated. But they are precisely what comes to light in a good work of art. . . . (132-133)

Unlike the political manifesto, the work of art doesn’t ordinarily belabor its audience. Typically, the work of art speaks in symbols and forms, and therefore speaks discreetly, generally nonthreateningly, often hiding the implications and power of its message. It may offer some blatant surface message, but such messages tend to long-range cultural insignificance. More commonly, the art work makes no overtly political statements at all. Rather, it expresses intuitions, tendencies, and feelings, joined together in what are in more successful works relatively complete and unified ways of looking at and reacting to the world. Dealing in metaphors, art condenses disparate concepts or ideas into “a single symbol of complex vital and emotive import” (Langer, 68) which, if an observer accepts it, allows for new and wider perceptions and understandings of how the things of the world fit together. The observer who opens his or her mind to the success­ ful work of art is by that very act affected by the experience, whether the perspectives taken to the encounter be confirmed, elucidated, qualified, modified, refuted, or denied. What, then, is the consequence of a group’s turn to artistic production during times of communal stress? Speaking in broad terms, Langer postu­ lates that “in the growth of human understanding, the principle of meta­ phorical expression plays a vastly greater role than most people realize” (104). Art, she reminds us, is “apt to be in the vanguard of cultural advance” (69). Geertz explains this somewhat by including art—the aesthetic—in his list of the “programs” that organize human experience: “Cultural pat­ terns—religious, philosophical, aesthetic, scientific, ideological—are ‘pro­ grams’; they provide a template or blueprint for the organization of social and psychological processes” (216). His perception gains greater weight and direction when we recall that art is inherently ideological: “Whatever else ideologies may be—projections of unacknowledged fears, disguises for ulte­ rior motives, phatic expressions of group solidarity— they are, most dis-

tinctly, maps of problematic social reality and matrices for the creation of collective conscience” (Geertz, 220—my italics). When a social group changes in its structure, size, or importance, or when a new social group develops within an established social context, the mem­ bers of that group search, consciously or not, comprehendingly or not, for some means of group-directed self-identification. Artistic production pro­ vides such a means. When, to return to Turner’s frame, crisis has so devel­ oped that established structures are overturned and the group has moved to a liminal mode, when traditional juridical or ritualistic strategies prove unsat­ isfactory as modes of redressive action, the group will seek to extricate itself from its dilemma by turning to symbolic action, by adapting models con­ structed in the antistructural artistic frame. In a brief but important analysis of the effectiveness of symbols in ritual—which along with art is one of the basic repositories for symbols and symbolic activity—Turner indicates how ritual serves to coalesce and direct group consciousness. Substituting in our own minds “artistic symbols” for “ritual symbols,” we may get from this discussion a powerful sense of how art’s symbolic, indeed ritualistic, role allows it to be a center for the establishing and ordering of a definable, selfaware social unit: I regard cultural symbols including ritual symbols as originating in and sus­ taining processes involving temporal changes in social relations, and not as timeless entities. . . . Symbols instigate social action . . . they condense many references, uniting them in a single cognitive and affective field. . . . [Symbols] may reinforce the will o f those exposed to them to obey moral command­ ments, maintain covenants, repay debts, keep up obligations, avoid illicit be­ havior. In these ways anomie is prevented or avoided and a milieu is created in which a society’s members cannot see any fundamental conflict between them­ selves as individuals and society. There is set up, in their minds, a symbiotic interpenetration of individual and society. (1974:55-56)

Art need not dictate; it need not impose; it need not state in any direct form that “such” is the way the world should be. Yet it nonetheless does offer models, for behavior and for thought, and in so doing the symbol system that is art allows the individual to intuit a sense of his or her position in the evolving social frame, and to act in accord with that intuition. The conse­ quence is group consciousness, group awareness, indeed group mentality. We get a world where people know whom they are like, whom they are unlike, how they should and should not act, and how it all fits together.

Ill We have explored what art is, how art works, when art works, and where art works. What remains to be discussed, before we turn to the exemplary case of twelfth-century romance, are (1) how a society arranges to have artists

available for its time of need—where do artists and their work fit into the noncrisis social structure? and (2) the role art plays in longer-term social evolution—is art in any moral or progressive sense useful to society? My key critical devices in approaching these areas are Victor Turner’s concepts of communitas and antistructural liminality. My argument to this point is that we turn to our artists in times of stress, looking to them for ideological answers, because the symbolic modes in which they work are particularly appropriate to offering creative solutions to problems which structurally bound techniques for remediation are incapable of resolving. Artists—on one level even “establishment” artists who are asked to perform and may seek to perform structural roles—exist outside ordinary structure, as outsiders and marginals, in liminal, antistructural areas set aside for such voices. Turner speaks of “the state of outsiderhood . . . the condition of being either permanently and by ascription set outside the structural arrangements of a given social system, or being situationally or temporarily set apart, or voluntarily setting oneself apart from the behavior of status-occupying, role-playing members of that system. . . . Such outsiders would include, in various cultures, shamans, diviners, mediums, priests, those in monastic seclusion, hippies, hoboes, and gypsies.” He distinguishes these from what he calls “ ‘marginals,’ who are simultaneously members (by ascription, optation, self-definition, or achievement) of two or more groups whose social definitions and cultural normas are distinct from, and often even opposed to, one another” (1974:233). Changing perspective a bit, I think we may see both arenas as typical developing grounds for artists. On the one hand, like “shamans, diviners, mediums, priests,” artists often are “situationally or temporarily set apart,” or “voluntarily” set apart. Most cities and universities, for example, espe­ cially larger ones, have their artistic subcultures. In the midst of otherwise structured environments, we find groups of artists—painters, actors, danc­ ers, sculptors, writers, et al. who band together in common lifestyles, actively searching out distinctive environments and modes of living. They consider themselves and are considered by others intrinsically different from those who live in the other world about them. On the other hand, extending this understanding of the artistic world as a distinctive one, we may note that like “marginals,” artists indeed belong to two distinct and often antagonistic worlds—the structural world from which they have come and generally in which they earn their income, and the antistructural world in which, among themselves, they conceive, create, and first communicate their art. Kenelm Burridge has described prophets, whom Turner would seem to class as “outsiders,” as those in whom “Mind and emotions are confused; two different worlds have met in the same person” (160). This seems an apt definition for artists, highlighting a primary source of their distinctive vision. Artists’ liminal status, their place betwixt and be­ tween two worlds, allows and encourages them to make connections others are not independently able to conceive.

Finally, in their use of symbols, and in their creation of new forms and orders (or reaffirmation of old ones), artists act very much like prophets— not to mention shamans. All of these individuals are expected to speak in the metaphorical terms which, as Langer puts it, are “the natural instrument of our greatest mental achievement— [the] abstract thinking” (104) which al­ lows a human being to restructure ordinary conceptions of experience and develop new modes and values. What seems important of both groups, of outsiders and marginals, is that they function in realms set intrinsically apart from ordinary social structures and thus see the structured world from out­ side. In this respect, the artist seems almost the type of outsider and marginal. Where, though, in more concrete terms, does the artist’s antistructural world fit in relation to the common world of everyday experience? In Dra­ mas, Fields, and Metaphors, Turner proposed that whereas in everyday life people in tribal societies have little time to devote to protophilosophical or theological speculation . . . in protracted liminal peri­ ods, through which everyone must pass, they become a privileged class, largely supported by the labor of others— though often exposed by way of compensa­ tion to annealing hardships— with abundant opportunity to learn and specu­ late about what the tribe considers its “ultimate things.’’ (259)

Turner supports the assertion, in Dramas, Fields, and Metaphors and else­ where, with a wide range of examples, drawn from the Ndembu and many other cultures. As he would have been the first to agree, however, this use of antistructural yet planned liminality as a training ground is not restricted to tribal societies. We, in the advanced and civilized Western world, act similarly with our universities—which all students know are not part of the “real world” into which one enters upon graduation—our conferences, which serve many fine intellectual purposes and generally support our power struc­ tures, but rarely add to the supply of bread on our nations’ tables, and, to offer some contemporary examples, our seminars, workshops, and retreats, which, with or without religion, seem to be increasingly popular as arenas for developing new ideas. Moreover, and this is crucial, we use liminality also as the ground for training our poets. Voicing their prophecies from the chinks and edges of our social order, marginals, as Turner notes, “ produce from their ranks a disproportionately high number of writers, artists and philosophers” (1974:233). Indeed, that is a particularly significant cultural function of marginality: we marginalize our artists, and support them—if only minimally; that is part of the marginalization—precisely so that they may “learn and speculate” about our “ultimate things.” And it is those ultimate things, the foundations of orthodoxy and heterodoxy in normal times, the underlying doxa at times of stress, ideology in one form or another at all times, that become subjects about which our artists are thinking when they paint, and sculpt, and draw, and compose, and play, and dance, and write. Artists do

not necessarily choose to be the vehicles for developing ideological models or for creating symbolic forms: they don’t need to choose; it is intrinsic to the status that we impose upon them. Their art would not be “good,” that is to say, would not meet with social success, if it did not fulfill such a function. Artists think, and create, all the time, not just on Tuesdays and Thursdays or during moments of revolutionary fervor. It is most particularly during times of stress, however, that a people turns consciously to its artists, that we others look to our painters and poets for ideological answers. We may not look often, but when we do look our reasons are serious, our concerns sub­ stantial. As Turner suggests in The Ritual Process, we are bound by a basic human and social need to escape from the very structures that are the foun­ dations of our social order. Even as we as social beings need our culturally and socially imposed “constraints and boundaries [if we are] to keep chaos at bay,” so too, to continue in Turner’s words, “human beings have had to create—by structural means—spaces and times in the calendar . . . [and] cultural cycles . . . which cannot be captured in the classifieatory nets of their quotidian, routinized spheres of action. These liminal areas of time and space— rituals, carnivals, dramas, and latterly films—are open to the play of thought, feeling, and will” (1977:vii). These are the spaces of artists, in which, as Turner puts it, “are generated new models, often fantastic, some of which may have sufficient power and plausibility to replace eventually the force-backed political and jural models that control the centers of a society’s ongoing life.” It is in this area of antistructural liminality, what Turner bril­ liantly calls “the subjunctive mood” of the social process, that “suppositions, desires, hypotheses, possibilities, and so forth, all become legitimate” (1977:vii). Turner’s sense of the power of artistic activity to help mold a finer, more humanistic world is strong and optimistic. Art, as it fits into Turner’s con­ struct, is a positive and essential force in cultural development, especially insofar as it is closely associated with the expression of what he called “communitas, a spontaneously generated relationship between leveled and equal total and individuated human beings, stripped of structural attributes.” Communitas, to Turner, is crucial, “the fous et origo of all structures and, at the same time, their critique.” It offers a forum for creative, human-directed development the “very existence [of which] puts all structural rules in ques­ tion and suggests new possibilities.” Most important, “Communitas strains toward universalism and openness.” Where “Structures, like most species, get specialized, communitas, like man and his direct evolutionary forebears, remains open and unspecialized, a spring of pure possibility as well as the immediate release from day-to-day structural necessities and obligatoriness” (1974:202). Comparing structure to the liminal phase that is typical of com­ munitas, Turner argues that men who are heavily involved in jural-political, overt and conscious structure are not free to meditate and speculate on the combinations and oppositions of

social and political structure and stratification. . . . This involvement entails such affects as anxiety, aggression, envy, fear, exultation, an emotional flood­ ing which does not encourage either rational or wise reflection. . . . [Alterna­ tively, in] the liminal periods o f major rites de passage the “passengers” and “crew” are free, under ritual exigency, to contemplate for a while the myster­ ies that confront all men, the difficulties that peculiarly beset their own society, their personal problems, and the ways in which their own wisest predecessors have sought to order, explain, explain away, cloak, or mask . . . these mysteries and difficulties. In liminality resides the germ . . . of philosophy and pure sci­ ence. (1974:241-242)

From the courtrooms of structure come the rules which keep a social order intact; from the speculations of liminality and communitas—and thus, more important, from art—come our forms for social advance. Such a view of the power of art is very different from, to offer just one example, that suggested by the traditional, if somewhat discredited, Marxist cultural theory of a functionalist “base and superstructure.” As Raymond Williams explains it, “Within this tendency, the basic ‘facts' or ‘structure’ of a given society and/or period are received or are established by general analy­ sis, and their ‘reflection’ in actual works is more or less traced. Thus both the content and the form of the new eighteenth-century realist novel can be shown as dependent on the already known facts of the increasing social importance of the commercial bourgeoisie” (24). Socio-economic base comes first, and aesthetic superstructure mechanically falls in line with it. Where Turner’s view sees art, the product and repository of communitas, as offering a vision of the broad cultural future, the functionalist view discovers in the individual art work a reading only of its own present. Art is seen simply as a product of cultural development, in no way as a cause. Taking the comparison with Marxism a bit further, Turner’s conception would seem also at variance with the more refined formulation of someone like Fredric Jameson, who argues that Each mode of production necessarily produces a special kind of reality and a determinate life world, a distinct time and space in which its subjects must live and which limits their activities and gives them its own unique content. It is therefore necessary for each successive mode of production, as it gradually or violently replaces a previous one, to be accompanied by what can henceforth be called a cultural revolution, which retrains and reprograms people to live in that particular life world. . . . (4)

Jameson’s view does not limit the artist’s ideological power to create new forms and ideas— “we can go so far,” he says, “as to suggest that the sym­ bolic acts of the producers of a new culture virtually bring that life world into being for the first time, albeit in an imaginary mode” (5)—but, like the traditional Marxist formulation, it does restrict the artist to the present. Art, by this view, can help people adapt. It can join in the long-term movement to

the utopian socialist world. But it does not in and of itself lead to broad social change. Turner’s construction allows for a different conclusion. In allowing us to see art as liminal, as outside structured time and space, Turner grants the artist a communal power to suggest not just the present of humankind, but the course of our future. Expressing, indeed bringing out, the timeless, uni­ versal qualities common to all people, art is able to join in the egalitarian model of communitas, and push us toward its realization. Art, in its many and varied forms, speaks ultimately to a highly progressive, distinctly human goal: the creation and maintenance of a more humane, more humanistic world. Not all art does this directly, of course. At a given historical moment, some forms of art may be more attractive to innovative symbolic behavior than will others: as more ideologically conscious audiences and artists focus their at­ tention and creativity on the radical disciplines, their fellows and colleagues will patronize and work in the more conservative ones. Moreover, even if the artist be antistructural, art’s power, lying as much in the acceptance or rejec­ tion of the audience as in the artist’s own conception or accomplishment, can be and indeed often is used in structural ways, and structural ways tend to be conservative. Man, as Turner concludes Dramas, Fields, and Metaphors, “is both a structural and an antistructural entity, who grows through anti­ structure and conserves through structure” (298). Nevertheless, although both attitudes be necessary, it is the liminal art, the art of imagination and newness, that offers communitas, that offers vision. As Turner puts it, quot­ ing Blake, “Sometimes art expresses or replicates institutionalized structure to legitimate or criticize; but often it combines the factors of culture . . . in novel and unprecedented ways. The unusual, the paradoxical, the illogical, even the perverse, stimulate thought and pose problems, ‘cleanse the Doors of Perception . . . ’ ” (255-256). To sum up, I quote what sounds like Shelley but is in fact from The Ritual Process: Prophets and artists tend to be liminal and marginal people, “edgemen,” who strive with a passionate sincerity to rid themselves of the clichés associated with status incumbency and role playing and to enter into vital relations with other men in fact or imagination. In their productions we may catch glimpses of that unused evolutionary potential in mankind which has not yet been externalized and fixed in structure. (128)

Is Turner saying, am I saying, that poets are “the unacknowledged legislators of mankind”? For myself, I will not dispute the inference. As for Turner: I believe it would be an interesting exercise to study the key words and expres­ sions o f major conceptual archetypes or foundation metaphors, both in the periods during which they first appeared in their full social and cultural set­ tings and in their subsequent expansion and modification in changing fields of

social relations. I would expect these to appear in the work o f exceptionally liminal thinkers— poets, writers, religious prophets, “the unacknowledged leg­ islators of mankind”—just before outstanding limina of history, major crises o f societal change, since such shamanistic figures are possessed by spirits of change before changes become visible in public arenas. (1974:28)

IV In this final section, I will offer a narrative outline of how the kind of study Turner asks for might be conducted, and suggest the results that it might be expected to achieve. My basic argument is that the early chivalric romance developed partly in response to, partly in anticipation of the need of a liminal social group—a newly forming, not quite established or self-conscious nobil­ ity—to define for itself an identity: its vehicle was the invention of the artbased symbol system that is the chivalric romance. What is most curious about this generic development, and this is remarkably in line with Turner’s hypothesis, is that the form the early writers created, and the metaphors and archetypes that underlie it, mirror the situation of the nobles themselves, thus providing the matter to form a group consciousness. The central meta­ phor, the archetypal theme that dominates the early romance, is that of the individual (1) entering into a liminal state marked by nakedness, ignorance, or symbolic death, (2) seemingly gaining a sense of his essential humanity (communitas) during or as a consequence of his stay in this condition, and (3) developing through various adventures a new identity which serves as a model of what has been determined to be appropriate behavior. My principal references will be to the seminal romances of Crestiens de Troies, the most important of the French romanciers, but I will refer also to Beroul’s Tristan and to two works related to the chivalric romance, Piramus et Tisbe and the Lais of Marie de France. Toward 1075, the French aristocracy numbered some 1,000 families, total­ ing something on the order of .15% of the entire French population.2 By 1175, the French nobility included something in the neighborhood of 24,000 families, more like 1.25% of a much larger population.3 The late eleventhcentury aristocracy traced its roots back to the late ninth and early tenth centuries, and founded its power on landlordship, the structural center of a socio-economic order fundamentally unchanged over some hundreds of years. Its size remained relatively constant over time. The late twelfth-century nobility, on the other hand, was a genealogically mixed group, including among its members the descendants of peripheral branches of aristocratic families, the descendants of knightly families which had never achieved sub­ stantial landownership, and newly made successes, former serfs, slaves, and peasant farmers who had succeeded both in grabbing favor or power and in concealing their own or their forebears’ initial lowly status. It appears rare that their ancestry would have been traced back more than two or three

generations. The power of these nobles was based on control of the ban, a new type of political lordship reaping its profits from taxation and often unrelated to landownership. In the late eleventh, early twelfth centuries, the period to which date our earliest chansons de geste, the influence of the nobil­ ity, like its size, was generally insignificant. The aristocracy was all-powerful. By the last third of the twelfth century, when the chivalric romance made its appearance, the numbers and influence of the nobility had so increased as to allow for political domination and the beginnings of an assimilation of those above them.4 We can get a feel here for a hierarchy under tremendous strain. The same could be said of the society as a whole. There is not space here to convey a sense of the extraordinary scope of the changes that transformed northwest­ ern Europe during these hundred years, to give an idea of what it meant to live in a social order where cities were new and strange; where industrial products and imported goods were creating a range of supply and choice unimaginable just a few years earlier; where governments were being central­ ized and federalized, and people had to relate to authority in what were often radically new ways; where famine was at its lowest level in many centuries; where living standards, life expectancies, and population itself were higher probably than northwestern Europe had ever known. Nonetheless, given even the outlines of such a context, we can imagine how the elite in such a world could be the actors in an enormous Social Drama. The rise of the nobility is an attack on the established order, a breach of the established rules and customs. Crisis inevitably develops: Who’s in charge? In some ways aristocrats had retained their power: individual aristocrats surely did not abandon their wealth and position. But the simple burgeoning of population, wealth, and perhaps most important, opportunity meant that many more people—and especially those whom we call nobles—pushed their claims as well. Change is of course gradual, but for a time at least there is uncertainty, confusion, chaos, the antistructural liminality of communitas. Redressive mechanisms are called for, but the traditional jural and administrative proce­ dures do not work. Whether consciously or not, for people are rarely aware that they live in a chaotic world, the noble (and perhaps even certain of the aristocrats) searched for some new kinds of answers. In this context, the heterogeneity of the nobility is important. Unlike the aristocrats, who knew who they were, how they interrelated, and what were their powers, the nobility joined people with different backgrounds and pow­ ers, and no real sense of a group identity. They might have known what they wanted, wealth, prestige, and power, and all the trappings thereof—the mea­ sure of an aristocrat—but their model was external, outside the group. To achieve their goals, not as individuals but as a social unit, they needed a symbol system that would offer to them the material for a class conscious­ ness. They found the ideology they required, a redressive mechanism that would allow for a workable and comprehensible representation of social structure, in what was a new literary form: the chivalric romance.

Why a new form? An older literary type, the chanson de geste, survives from the twelfth century in some thirty examples. Set generally in the warlike atmosphere of Christian/pagan conflict, these poems deal with such large and central social problems as the interobligational duties of warrior and king, and what is seen as the complex relationship of human and divine authority. The chansons are pseudo-historical, using a Carolingian frame to present characters who are at once real figures, the ancestors of the current aristocracy, and heroes, much larger than life. We see them more as repre­ sentatives of a social type than as discrete, self-conscious individuals. Through them the chansons tell their audience how it is that an aristocrat (the aristocracy provides almost every character in these poems) ought to act in relation to his king and god. The chivalric romance is rather different. Generally set in the mystical, often fantastic realm of King Arthur, the romance of chivalry moves the focal point of its presentation away from the external social order and into the hearts and minds of the principal poetic actants. Love, marriage, freedom of action and expression, the symbolic proving of one’s worth—the representa­ tive acts of a social being’s unique existence— take over center stage. The paradigm, when any is offered, lies in the hero’s method, not in the particu­ lar accomplishments. The instructive focus is on communicating to an elite audience how it feels and looks to act properly, not, as in the chanson de geste, on indicating what proper action necessarily is. Style, with its emphasis more on form than on content, is seen as the key element in forming one’s charac­ ter. “Noble behavior and refined manners” (139), to borrow Erich Auer­ bach’s phrase, become the emblems of what it means to be part of the group. The typical story of a chivalric romance sees an individual leave court to embark on an adventure, use wit to accomplish it, and, if all goes well, end up romantically involved with a stranger. Hero and beloved tend to marry, and if, as is usually the case, they have withdrawn from society, we see them reintegrated, generally in a hierarchically elevated capacity. (When the pro­ tagonist does not travel from home, or when the beloved is not so much of a stranger, as in Piramus et Tisbe, Tristan, Crestiens’s Cliges and Le Chevalier de la Charette, and certain of Marie’s lais, the romantic involvement either is unsuccessful, or is successful only at great cost or without social integration.) The key terms that tend not only to be repeated but to be at the heart of the romance ethos are avanture,5 suggesting the desire to prove oneself in the face of the unknown and unexpected, engin,6 the imaginative capacity that enables one to function effectively in such a context, amors, the hoped-for, intensely personal reward that drives one to adventure in the first place, and corteisie, the behavioral mode one must practice if one is to fit into the world at all. These terms have in common that they emphasize the need for the individual to function as an independent entity outside the context of the ordinary behavior of the prototypical Arthurian society.7 The protagonist, like the nobles who would have looked to the chivalric romance for the behavioral models that forged the symbols of a class identity, is presented as

simultaneously a member of two worlds, the courtly world which frames the romance, and the wilderness world (with its own civilized spaces and inter­ ludes) in which adventures take place. The protagonist thus is, by Turner’s definition, a marginal, experiencing, and bringing the audience to experi­ ence, the anti-structure that is communitas. This matching of the audience’s liminal position, and by extension of its need for the symbolic representations of its humanity that are the character­ istic element of communitas, is emphasized by what is the most compelling archetypal feature of the romance: the protagonist’s entry into a state of nakedness, ignorance, or, most commonly, symbolic death. Erec and Enide enter into the land of Limors (li mors = death), where the unconscious Erec is for some hours presumed to be dead. Fenice, the beloved of Cliges, feigns death, and is indeed buried. Lancelot, the Knight of the Cart, suffers serious injuries in crossing the Sword Bridge (symbolic of death) into the realm of Logres (also symbolic of death). Yvain loses his sanity, tears off his clothes, and lives some weeks naked in the wilderness. Perceval is a young boy, igno­ rant of all. Tristan and Yseut live in a bower in the forest of Morrois (perhaps symbolic of death; certainly symbolic of the natural state and of poverty, both typical antistructural habitats for communitas)8 where, Beroul repeat­ edly tells us, they suffer more greatly than anyone else ever has. Piramus seems to have died, leading Tisbe to kill herself, leading Piramus to kill him­ self (not a happy ending!). The liminal protagonist in Marie’s “Bisclavret” spends a goodly time trapped in the form of a werewolf. Other of her protag­ onists experience poverty or abandonment, and it is rare that one of Marie’s lais not include a lover who dies, seems to die, crosses over water (symbolic of death), or wishes he or she were dead. I will not dwell on the morbid. Indeed, just as important as the liminal moments is that most of these prostrate lovers are presented as emerging from their ordeals wiser, stronger, more mature, and far better able to deal with the problematics of their world. Erec, Cliges, and Yvain, for example, close their respective romances by succeeding in endeavors carefully constructed to sym­ bolize what the particular romance postulates as proper behavior. Then, like various of Marie’s protagonists (some of whom also achieve postcomatose tri­ umphs symbolic of their new understanding), they become admired kings, those who must deal most effectively with the whole of society. Tristan comes to understand his love, and consciously to accept it. He is perceived by all as the prototypical lover. Perceval moves from primal ignorance toward a state that contemporary readers perceived as something like sainthood. Such consequences are characteristic of what Turner projects as the peda­ gogical function of communitas. In tribal society, Turner says, it is normal that ritual entry into a liminal state result in the development at least in principle or potentiality if not always in practice o f a total rather than a partial perspective on the life of society. After his immersion in the depths o f liminality— very frequently symbolized in ritual

and myth as a grave that is also a womb— after this profound experience of humiliation and humility, a man who at the end of the ritual becomes the incumbent of a senior political status or even merely of a higher position in some particularistic segment of the social structure can surely never again be quite so parochial, so particularistic, in his social loyalties. (1974:259-260)

The romance protagonist thus becomes far more paradigmatic, far more of a model for how one ought to act, after the liminal experience than he or she was before. The reader or listener, moving along with the protagonist through anti-structure and back to structure, shares in the liminality, the accompanying communitas, and the human knowledge that they bring. The consequence, as Auerbach notes, is that the magical, irreal, ostensibly superficial romance, the apparent model of an artificial form, contained and developed “a class ethics which as such claimed and indeed attained acceptance and validity in this real and earthly world,” offering to “those who submit to its dictates the feeling that they belong to a community of the elect, a circle of solidarity . . . set apart from the common herd” (136-137). The acceptance of the art form led to, permitted, the establishment of a class consciousness. Indeed, the social consequences of the rise of the romance of chivalry may be observed on a number of levels. The formation of a class consciousness among a group already economically and jurally distinct would in itself have been a substantial effect, but that is not exactly what seems to have happened. Given a different type of ethos, a different type of art form, the twelfth century might have seen a nobility develop, for example, as an entirely separate group, joining in a caste system in which its members occupied a distinctive hierarchi­ cal level below the aristocracy and above the bourgeoisie. Instead, perhaps influenced in part by the symbol system of the romance, perhaps by virtue of the adaptability of the chivalric behavioral model to a wide range of character and circumstance, there developed a social system in which distinctions were not so sharp. It is significant that as the twelfth century waned and the thir­ teenth moved in, the chanson de geste, the penultimate aristocratic genre, evolved to include the most central romance techniques, symbols, and values, even to stress, as it had not done before, avanture, engin, amors, and corteisie. The king’s son-in-law might not confuse his status with that of the third son of a penurious knight, and indeed subtle differentiations in rank would have been clear throughout the hierarchy, but the subtlety in and of itself empha­ sizes the crucial fact that the broader differentiation, aristocrat and noble, had lost some of its particular significance. The concept of nobility extended to encompass all levels of the elite, including the uppermost. Aristocrats were aristocrats, but all were nobles.9 This extension of the chivalric ideal beyond the limits of a particular class has had far-reaching social consequences. After stretching its influence to the highest ranks in its earliest years, in succeeding years the code began to appeal to those hierarchically less endowed as well. As Auerbach noted, “The ethics of feudalism, the ideal conception of the perfect knight . . . attained a

very considerable and very long-lived influence. Concepts associated with it—courage, honor, loyalty, mutual respect, refined manners, service to women—continued to cast their spell on the contemporaries of completely changed cultural periods,, (137). In the thirteenth century, as in the nine­ teenth and twentieth, large masses of individuals, first the bourgeois and then the laborer, generally quite unconscious of the historical implications of their actions, aware only that their social glances were upwards, turned to the chivalric model for a sense of how one ought to act. One might well argue that the chivalric symbols established in the twelfth century in France have never since been absent from the mentalities of liter­ ate Western minds. One might see these symbols, borne on the winds of industrialization and economic growth, of universal and liberal education, of the political and social emancipation of the less privileged, and of the move­ ment to capitalism and perhaps beyond, as having spread to represent some of the fundamental values of Western culture. We in the capitalist, realist, eminently materialist twentieth-century West seem very much to love, to struggle, to honor, and even to seek the unknown and conquer it only with our native wit, in romantic and lyrical ways remarkably similar to those the chivalric romance proposed to the twelfth-century noble. Style, how it is that we face the world, is still what counts. My final question is why. Auerbach proposes one answer, an explanation closely tied to the fantastic, symbolic nature particular to the romance: “pre­ cisely because it is so removed from reality, it could—as an ideal—adapt itself to any and every situation, at least as long as there were any ruling classes at all” (139). Certainly there is some truth to this, but I think a stronger explana­ tion is less tied to the individual form, and less dependent on the contingencies of a elite-dominated social structure. At one point, Turner compares his con­ cept of communitas, which “strains toward universalism and openness,” with “Durkheim’s notion of ‘mechanical solidarity/ which is a bond between indi­ viduals who are collectively in opposition to another solidarity group” (202). Auerbach’s passing insistence on the continued existence of “ruling classes” as necessary to the continuance of the romance ideal seems closer to Durkheim. If the romance model is just another symbol system, then indeed it may be bound to a particular type of social order. But if, on the contrary, the romance, conceived in the antistructural chaos of liminality for a people in search of itself, does in some way tap into the universality and humanity that are the marks of communitas, then perhaps it offers a model that is not so bound to social order. Perhaps avanture, engin, amors, and corteisie suggest qualities that are basic parts of us all. Perhaps the genre’s survival and power, and the continued vitality of its ethos, are signs of something deep in human nature. Are we here witness to a large step on the path toward civilization? Is to allow us to make such steps the ultimate function of art in society, the key to the way art always works? The rise of the chivalric romance, indeed the development of any significant art form, tells us something central and essential about what it means that we are human.

NOTES 1. Geertz, who uses the term as conveying a much more consciously political sense than I do, seems to be defining ideology as a response to . . . cultural as well as social and psychological strain. It is a loss of orientation that most directly gives rise to ideological activity, an inability, for lack of usable models, to comprehend the universe of civic rights and responsibilities in which one finds oneself located . . . a confluence of sociopsychological strain and an absence of cultural resources by means of which to make sense of that strain, each exacerbating the other . . . sets the stage for the rise of systematic (political, moral, or economic) ideologies. (219-220) 2. See Philip Contamine, p. 23. For a more detailed look at the size of the aristoc­ racy, see Raybin, pp. 214-221. 3. See Contamine, p. 31. For a more detailed look at the size of the nobility, see Raybin, pp. 221-230. 4. For a general, broadly based synthesis of socio-historical studies concerning twelfth-century northern France, see Raybin, esp. pp. 25-237. Some useful sources for the aristocracy and nobility are P. Bonenfant and F. Despy, “La Noblesse en Brabant aux X lle et XHIe siècles”; Eric Bournazel, Le Gouvernement Capetien; Jacques Chedeville, Chartres et ses campagnes; Georges Duby, Guerriers et Paysans and Hommes et Structures du Moyen Age; Theodore Evergates, Feudal Society in the Bailliage of Troyes; Robert Fossier, La Terre et les Hommes en Picardie; Leopold Genicot, Les hommes—La noblesse; Jean-François Lemarignier, Le Gouvernement Royal aux Premiers Temps Capetiens; Edmund Perroy, “Social Mobility among the French Noblesse in the Later Mid­ dle Ages”; and Timothy Reuter, ed., The Medieval Nobility. 5. On avanture, see Auerbach, esp. pp. 134ff. 6. On engin, see Robert W. Hanning, pp. 133-146. 7. The switch in literary emphasis from the structure of the group to the role of the individual matches remarkably a general schema proposed by Turner: As societies diversify economically and socially and as particularistic multiplex ties of locality and kinship yield place to a wide range of single-interest rela­ tionships between members of functional groups over ever wider geographical areas, individual option and voluntarism thrive at the expense of predeter­ mined corporate obligations. Even obligations are chosen; they result from entering into corporate relations. The individual replaces the group as the crucial ethical unit. (1974:200) 8. See Turner (1974:243-244, 265-267). 9. For a summary o f evidence regarding the changing use of different words signi­ fying nobles, see Raybin, pp. 196-200. Bonefant and Despy, Bournazel, Chedeville, Duby (Hommes), Evergates, and Fossier also examine the use of titles.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Editions Beroul. Le Roman de Tristan. Ed. Ernest Muret. 4th ed. Paris: Librairie Honore Cham­ pion, 1974.

Crestiens de Troies. Le Chevalier au Lion. Ed. Mario Roques. Paris: Librairie Honore Champion, 1975. _______ Le Chevalier de la Charette. Ed. Mario Roques. Paris: Librairie Honore Champion, 1972. ______ Cliges. Ed. Alexandre Micha. Paris: Librairie Honore Champion, 1970. _______Erec et Enide. Ed. Mario Roques. Paris: Librairie Honore Champion, 1970. _______Perceval. Ed. William Roach. 2nd ed. Geneva: Librairie Droz, 1959. Marie de France. Les Lais. Ed. Jean Rychner. Paris: Librairie Honore Champion, 1971. Piramus et Tisbe. Ed. C. de Boer. Paris: Librairie Ancienne Honore Champion, 1921.

WORKS CITED Auerbach, Erich. Mimesis. Trans. Willard R. Trask. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1953. Bonenfant, P. and Despy, F. “La Noblesse en Brabant aux X lle et XHIe siècles.” Le Moyen Âge 64 (1958), 27-66. Bourdieu, Pierre. Outline of a Theory of Practice. Trans. Richard Nice. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977. Bournazel, Eric. Le Gourvemment Capétien au XXIIe Siècle, 1108-1180. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1975. Burridge, Kenelm. New Heaven, New Earth. New York: Schocken Books, 1969. Chedeville, Jacques. Chartres et ses campagnes, XIe-XIle siècles. Paris: Klincksieck, 1973. Contamine, Philip. La Noblesse au Moyen ÂgeKParis: Presses Universitaires de France, 1976. Duby, Georges. Guerriers et Paysans. Paris: Gallimard, 1973. ______ Hommes et Structures du Moyen Âge. Paris: Mouton, 1973. Evergates, Theodore. Feudal Society in the Bailliage of Troyes under the Counts of Cham­ pagne, 1152-1284. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1975. Fossier, Robert. La Terre et les Hommes en Picardie. 2 vols. Paris: Beatrice-Nauwelaerts, 1968. Geertz, Clifford. The Interpretation of Cultures. New York: Basic Books, 1973. Genicot, Leopold. Les hommes— La noblesse. Vol. II of L'Economie rurale namuroise au bas Moyen Âge. Louvain: n.p., 1960. Gombrich, E. H. Art and Illusion. 2nd ed., rev. Bollingen Series XXXV.5. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1969. Hanning, Robert W. ‘Engin in Twelfth Century Romance: An Examination of the Roman dEneas and Hue de Rotelande’s Ipomedon. ” Yale French Studies 51 (Ap­ proaches to Medieval Romance), 133-146. Jameson, Fredric. “The Ideological Analysis of Space.” Critical Exchange 14 (1983), 1-15. Langer, Suzanne K. Problems of Art. New York: Scribner’s, 1957. Lemarignier, Jean-François. Le Gouvernement Royal aux Premiers Temps Capétiens, 9871108. Paris: Picard, 1965. Perroy, Edmund. “Social Mobility among the French Noblesse in the Later Middle Ages.” Past and Present 23 (April 1962), 25-38. Raybin, David. The Development of a Leisured Class in Twelfth-Century Northern France and England: Mental Changes as Indicated through the Patterned Examination of Literature and Society. Diss. Columbia University, 1981. Ann Arbor: UMI, 1981. 8113547.

Reuter, Timothy, ed. The Medieval Nobility. Amsterdam: North Holland Publishing Company, 1978. Shelley, Percy Bysshe. “A Defence of Poetry.” In Selected Poetry and Prose of Shelley. Ed. Carlos Baker. New York: Modern Library, 1951, pp. 494-522. Turner, Victor. Dramas, Fields, and Metaphors. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1974. _______The Ritual Process. (1969) Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1977. Williams, Raymond. The Sociology of Culture. New York: Schocken, 1981.

LIMINALITY, CARNIVAL, AND SOCIAL STRUCTURE THE CASE OF LATE MEDIEVAL BIBLICAL DRAMA C.

C lifford F la n ig a n

One of the most important aspects of late twentieth-century social theory and cultural history is the discovery of heterology, or the recognition of different and antistructural elements in various forms of social and cultural production. Obviously the most important advocates of “the other” and of a sense of difference that pervades all things are those deconstructive thinkers who maintain that all language is unavoidably entwined in a system of differ­ ences, of oppositions that cannot be overcome, so that every form of mean­ ing can only be deferred and can never reach the unambiguous object which it seems to seek. Although this form of discourse is today most prominent in philosophy and literary studies, it is important to recall its anthropological roots. Jacques Derrida, who is usually regarded as the most prominent advocate of a decon­ structive philosophy, burst into prominence on the American scene with an essay of very great importance that provided a thoroughgoing critique of Claude Lévi-Strauss’s system of structural anthropology, a system which in Derrida’s view all too readily allowed one to identify the unifying center of a culture. For Derrida, any attentive reading of a culture will readily identify both structural and antistructural elements; thus readings of social actions, like readings of verbal texts, will always deconstruct themselves, for in point­ ing to the ways that social institutions make sense of life, such readings will also point to the ways in which these constructive elements are subversive of every meaning which they put forth. Structure always implies anti-structure for Derrida, every affirmation undercuts itself in the very act of affirmation. Despite the early use of deconstructive discourse to address issues raised in anthropological studies, such claims are still rare in the discourses of the social sciences. Even those social historians and theorists who are sympa-

the tic to current Continental strains of thought seem a bit uncomfortable with such assertions. But the discovery of otherness as a feature of cultural language systems as well as of verbal language systems has not been for­ gotten, even if it is not generally articulated in the by now familiar post­ structuralist terminology. In this essay I intend to examine the discourse about otherness in society as it has been articulated by Mikhail Bakhtin and Victor Turner. Turner’s work and his journey from functionalist anthropologist to social theorist are well known, and his theory of the antistructural has received a great deal of attention, though not, surprisingly, in relationship to the discourse about otherness. Bakhtin’s work is perhaps now even better known than Turner’s, having emerged in the present decade into a prominence that contrasts sharply with the obscurity which surrounded both it and its author in the 1930s and 1940s when it was actually produced. Like the discourses of deconstruction, Bakhtin’s work has been mostly appropriated by literary studies, but its ramifications for anthropological study cannot be overlooked. Indeed, as all of Bakhtin’s work testifies, his concern with texts was centered not on their internal grammar but on their relationship to society and on their cultural function. In order to make clear the differences in the theories of otherness articulated by Turner and Bakhtin, and to point to some of their respective assets and liabilities, I want to view them in the light of a subject matter which, surprisingly, given their interests, neither man considered at any length: the late medieval biblical drama. In the process, I hope that we can learn something both of the two theorists who are the subject of this inquiry and about reading medieval dramatic texts in light of a theory of otherness and difference.

I It will be useful to begin with a brief consideration of the various critical modes which have been employed to characterize these plays since they reemerged into the scholarly consciousness in the second half of the nine­ teenth century, a topic I have considered more comprehensively elsewhere. To the earliest students of these texts, and indeed to most readers who con­ sidered them before the rise of Anglo-American formalism in the 1940s, these plays seemed examples of folk production in its most naive guise. For ideological reasons which O. B. Hardison has delineated in the most convinc­ ing and enduring chapter of his Christian Rite and Christian Drama in the Middle Ages , the enactment of biblical narrative which constitutes the greater part of this tradition was thought to be a subject not worthy of serious concern in pre-World War II scholarship. Thus the first wave of medieval drama scholars turned their attention to nonbiblical elements, above all to comic episodes and to episodes which appeared to be derived from a popular and ultimately pagan tradition. Yet since it seemed utterly obvious that the

purpose of the plays was to teach biblical stories as fact and dogma, scholars of this generation could regard them only as silly and incongruent without, however, pausing to reflect on this incongruency. To their credit, early twentieth-century critics saw far more clearly than the formalists who were to follow them that the plays were full of inconsistencies and gaps. Nevertheless, these early writers could regard such disunity only as a negative feature, and this judgment allowed them to dismiss the plays with­ out serious regard for their larger social contexts (the plays were always treated as “literature,” and almost no attention was given to them as enact­ ments) or for the social contexts which produced them and in which they were originally presented. Typical of this mode of reading are these words which begin Homer A. Watt's essay on “The Dramatic Unity of the Secunda Pastorum,” which was published in 1940 and reprinted as late as 1965: Considered as effective drama many of the English miracle plays are, it must be admitted, pretty sorry stuff. Indeed, they could hardly be otherwise. The es­ sential story was dictated by biblical material that did not always offer a dra­ matic conflict. In transferring this material from Bible to play the anonymous authors were concerned primarily with the task of putting brief episodes into dialogue form and not with that of developing action, conflict, characters. Where they tried to season the playlet with contemporary elements, they found themselves cramped by the necessity of sticking essentially to the biblical epi­ sodes. As a result there is often a lack of unity and economy in the plays, and the added bits o f contemporary realism are foreign to story and mood. The entire effect, in brief, is agglutinative, as though the authors were tom be­ tween a responsibility to reproduce the biblical originals and a desire to enter­ tain the audience by odd items of bickering among characters, monologue acts, and occasional slapstick stuff wedged into the play to provide entertain­ ment but totally unrelated to the main biblical action. So Cain’s boy in the Towneley play of The Killing of Abel is an obvious intruder, as is also Iak Garcio of the first shepherds’ play of the same cycle. (270-271)

Thus Watt and the critics of his generation felt that the plays were lacking in unity and dismissed them as poor art. Even as Watt wrote, however, a major paradigm change was taking place in Anglo-American literary studies, and, though it was late in coming to medieval “literature,” it was finally to recuperate these texts as works of art. In order to do so, this mode of critical inquiry sought to deny that the rough inconsistencies which Watt and others like him found in the texts were inconsistencies. Indeed, students of English biblical drama in the late fifties and all through the sixties (Continental plays were almost never submitted to this kind of analysis) repeatedly “demon­ strated” that these texts were highly unified. They did so by placing them in the contexts of the learned Latin and vernacular religious literature of the period. The inconsistencies which the previous generation found were now shown to be the products of great subtlety. The comic elements were said to have religious significance in that they served as analogs to the serious action.

Not surprisingly, these new critics claimed that apparent discrepancies served the purpose of irony—the very touchstone of literariness and artistic achievement for this generation of literary academics—and that these ironies were resolved, though held in tension by the well-wrought urn that these plays constituted. Far from being pretty sorry stuff, the Wakefield Second Shepherds’ Play now became a canonical demonstration of the unity that was thought to characterize all aesthetic production. In the process of remaking the plays in the new critical image, scholars had to revise their estimation of their contexts. Rather than being viewed as the products of semiliterate folk, the plays were now thought to have been produced by clerics as repre­ sentatives of the high and dominant culture of late medieval England. As mouthpieces of the authorized church, the plays were said to manifest no cultural or ideological tension. Two brief quotations from much-cited studies of the English drama will highlight this approach to the plays. Hardin Craig, writing in 1955 at the end of a long and distinguished career as a student of the medieval drama, com­ bined this view of the plays with an older one which denied them any literary significance: The religious drama had no dramatic technique or dramatic purpose, and no artistic self-consciousness. Its life blood was religion, and its success de­ pended on its awakening and releasing a pent-up body of religious knowl­ edge and feelings. . . . This drama had no theory and aimed consciously at no dramatic effects, and when it succeeded, its success came from the import of its message or from the moving quality of some particular story it had to tell. (23)

In a mode more typical of new critical discourse, V. A. Kolve, in his The Play Called Corpus Christiy still widely regarded as the definitive study of these texts, insisted that the Middle English biblical drama had great artistic merit which arises out of the fact that this drama “necessarily concentrates atten­ tion on the main action’’ so that “there is little room for digression in either the episode or the cycle as a whole.” For Kolve, The cycles presented so great a range of action, with such a variety of rhythms and textures, that even those quiet, formal episodes that seem at first glance undramatic are found in performance to be essential to the whole. . . . The need to select and concentrate, the need to make every line suitable for human speech and more or less natural to a human event, and the need to find rhythms and patterns of action that could hold the attention of an audience for a period of many hours, saved the drama from the characteristic defects of most religious writing contemporary with it. It was concise, robust, and imagi­ native; and these qualities, so rare among the related writings, grew from the demands of the genre itself. (267-278)

Neither here nor anywhere else in either Kolve’s or Craig’s study was there any consideration of the social context of the plays’ production or recep-

tion, nor any perception of the possible difficulties which would arise if these texts were submitted to a more probing ideological analysis. From this perspective the new critics and defenders of the plays’ religiosity ap­ pear at least as naive as the positivistic depreciators of the texts of a gener­ ation earlier. In the most recent literature on the plays, this lack of concern for social context and ideological analysis is beginning, but only barely, to be re­ dressed. In his Dramatic Design in the Chester Cycle, Peter Travis, stimulated by recent studies of the cultic nature of the medieval Latin music drama, ponders the question of whether or to what degree the Chester cycle might be considered a ritual, a genre which he rather oddly defines as “a communal form of canonized magic.” As soon as he raises this question, however, Travis dismisses this possibility, opting instead to demonstrate that the cycle “cre­ ates its own semiotic system” : The Corpus Christi play is not actually ritual; it is a serious form of play made even more serious by its deliberate imitation of certain ritual tech­ niques. The play sometimes pretends to share ritual power to reactualize sacred realities and this pretense to ritual magic is heightened by the illusionistic techniques which I have been discussing. But it is all ultimately illusion, achieved by the temporary fusion o f artistic deception and suspen­ sion o f disbelief. (22)

Although Travis endorses Adolph Jensen’s definition of cult, which he understands as “the demonstration (sometimes dramatic) of an ideal social order expressing the community’s sense of its ideal place in that order,” and further claims that the cycle was performed “for its healthful social effects,” concern with the cycle as a social performance is never developed. Most telling in this regard is his one reference to Victor Turner in his books. Turner, Travis claims, has characterized the “old” as symbolic o f “structured society”— “society as a structure o f jural, political, and economic positions, offices, statuses, and roles, in which the individual is only ambiguously grasped behind the social persona.” This everyday order o f society, which we call societasy is represented by the Chester dramatist in episodes four and five [of the Nativity play]. . . . Here, the jural, political, and economic powers are the world as symbolized (nonsatirically) by Octavian’s court, by his senators, and by his taxes. The rest o f the pageant’s episodes and characters repre­ sent the emergence o f what Turner called communitas— society as an undif­ ferentiated, hom ogeneous whole, made up o f “concrete idiosyncratic individuals who though differing in physical and mental endowment, are nevertheless regarded as equal in terms o f shared humanity.” In celebrat­ ing the transition from societas to communitas, the Chester “Nativity” avoids any confrontation between the two orders, with the single exception of its structural keystone, episode five, in which Joseph meets Octavian’s mes­ senger Preco. (117)

Here Travis comes close to important insights concerning the possible social functions of the cycle, especially when he suggests that these observations be added to his fundamental claim that the plays address their audience as if it were composed of unbelievers. Yet so strong is Travis’s attraction for the transcendence of aesthetics, an attraction still extraordinarily common in literary studies even today, that Turner’s characteristic pattern of social ac­ tion is reduced to oppositions within the text of the plays. The possibility of genuine ideological inquiry is never seriously entertained, nor are we ever told anything about the rationale of the practice of play performance in late medieval cities. These remarks are not meant to be dismissive of Travis’s book, which is the finest study we possess of an individual English cycle of biblical drama. Rather, it is the high quality of analysis in this study which makes its author’s blindness toward the social function of the plays he studies all the more frustrating. Much the same might be said of a more general study of the cycle plays, David Mills’s chapter on “Religious Drama and Civic Ceremonial” in the medieval volume of The Revels History of Drama in English. Here we are intriguingly told that The drama of religious ceremonial in a town may be considered as the product of two impulses. On the one hand, the towns of the Middle Ages, in so far as they were felt to be distinct from the villages, required a mythology to explain the origins and purpose of their communities. On the other hand the Church, from the thirteenth century onwards, embarked on a definition of its mythol­ ogy and rituals which placed the doctrine of transubstantiation and its adminis­ tration by a sacrificial priesthood at its center, and simultaneously initiated a wide-ranging programme of clerical and lay education to enable the mythology and rituals to be better understood. (152)

Here Mills seems to come directly to issues of social function and to the dialectics of ideology which seem apparent in any contemporary reading of the cycle dramas. But Mills’s promise is never kept. Although he claims that his chapter “will examine ways in which these two impulses contribute to the creations of new dramatic forms,” the subject is never really broached, pri­ marily, I think, because Mills refuses to avail himself of the paradigms and vocabulary of the social sciences or of contemporary literary theory and remains bound to the fantasy of “artistically autonomous forms” which has dominated literary studies for the past several decades.

II If I have expended considerable space on past scholarship on the medieval biblical drama, I have done so in the hope that such a review will make clear the necessity of breaking with the formalist, aesthetic models of the past and of situating these plays in their socio-historical contexts. Here Turner’s con-

ception of ritual provides an exceedingly useful heuristic aid. By employing it we will readily be able to grasp the surviving texts as blueprints for social enactment and come to some understanding of their function within the urban life of the later Middle Ages. In the present context there is no need to rehearse the contours of Turner’s program, worked out over more than two decades. But I do wish to stress that while Turner did indeed put a great deal of distance between himself and earlier generations of English social anthro­ pologists, whom he at least once characterized as representatives of “the now obsolescent functionalist schools of anthropology and sociology,” in a broader sense Turner shares many of the assumptions of functionalism. Al­ though the course of Turner’s research led him to privilege “anti-structure” over “structure” in his study of ritual, he never entirely lost the concept of the importance of the role that “structure”— in its English rather than French guise—played in cultic phenomena. Turner never denied that rituals mirror, reinforce, and ultimately reestablish the social structures prevailing in the societies which produced them. Gradually, of course, he chose to emphasize what he considered his special contribution to the story of cultic activity, the claim that rituals are not merely bastions of social conservatism whose symbols merely condense already established cultural values. But there can never be an anti-structure without a structure, and Turner never thought otherwise. So that I might avoid any possible misunderstanding on this matter, let me emphasize that in drawing attention to many of the claims of functionalism which Turner shared and modified, I am here limiting my concern to purely “religious” institutions, and wish only to further the claim that institutions such as myths and rituals have a socially identifiable and vital function in the models of social dynamics which social scientists construct; what is central to this broadly defined functionalism is the claim that homologies between reli­ gious practices and social structures can be constructed (my language here is perhaps less essentialist than the terminology which many traditional func­ tionalists would likely use). In setting himself apart from Durkheim and his own immediate predecessors such as Malinowski and Radcliffe-Browne, Turner stressed the now widely held view that a ritual not only represents or expresses a society’s self-understanding, but actually creates that self­ understanding. For Turner, then, rituals are performatives, or to use a more traditional term appropriate to the theological discourse of the Middle Ages, rituals have a sacramental quality in that they are believed to bring into being the “reality” which they sign. Although certainly the emphasis in contempo­ rary anthropology has shifted to performance and away from mere represen­ tation, such functionalist claims have been fundamental to anthropology from its beginnings; Durkheim put it this way: “The cult is not simply a system of signs by which faith is outwardly translated; it is a collection of the means by which this is created and recreated periodically. . . . Whether it consists in material acts or mental operations it is always this which is effica­ cious” (417).

III Even a casual consideration will reveal how fruitful approaching the medi­ eval biblical drama from this perspective can be. As an example let me cite a play which has never—and for good reason—been interpreted as a work of literary artistry, the fifteenth-century Corpus Christi play which survives from the small town of Künzelsau, not far from Würzburg, edited two de­ cades ago by Peter Liebenow. Its subject matter is not unlike that of the English biblical cycle plays; beginning with the creation of the angels, the plot winds its way through the requisite great moments in salvation history down to the final judgment. It is striking to note in this play the absence of all of those features which enabled the Anglo-American new critics to appro­ priate the medieval drama as high art. As best as I can tell, there is little of the kind of humor which caused critics to single out, for example, the shep­ herds’ plays in the Wakefield cycle for special praise. Similarly, there is a striking absence of the analogies between the “secular” and the “sacred” elements of the plays, which new critics frequently privileged by claiming that they were the source of ironies that could be resolved in the aesthetic realm. What is inscribed in the play even more strongly than in its English coun­ terparts, however, is its close ties to the civic and commercial life of Künzel­ sau. The drama was performed in the town market place, and no doubt the performance entailed the use of contemporary dress by the leading charac­ ters, another feature of the English plays which have received a great deal of critical attention as a source for artistic ambiguities. Yet as best as I can tell from reading the text, almost no attention is called to the German setting of the play, in contrast to the English plays in which characters are often trans­ parently English. It is probably significant that the Künzelsau play was performed not by a craft or religious lay guild, but apparently by the students of the diocesan seminary located in the town. This condition of its production may help to account for what is surely one of the most prominent features of the play, the pronounced omnipresence of an expositor who addresses the audience be­ fore and after each brief enactment of a biblical scene and interprets it, primarily in moral terms. At one point he denounces the decrees issued by the Council of Basil which advocated conciliarism. At the play’s end the expositor is replaced by a character designated “the Pope” who brings the performance to a conclusion with a harangue to the audience on the impor­ tance of clergy and the need to always honor and obey the local parish priest. Even the genius of V. A. Kolve would have a difficult time generating a formalist reading of this drama. It is significant that the one recent study of this play, by the South African Germanist Elizabeth Wainwright, does not make any attempt to redeem the work as art. Although a formalist literary critic might be puzzled by this play, any stu­ dent of anthropology is not likely to share this puzzlement. A social perfor-

mance which enacts the chief events in a culture’s prevailing mythology is obviously a ritual; even an amateur anthropologist coming upon such an enactment in an archaic culture would immediately recognize it as such. It is only our Western privileging of our myths or the literary student’s stubborn belief in the realm of “art” which can account for the reluctance to apply the usual generic designation to this fifteenth-century civic performance. In fact, wherever we turn in the text of the Künzelsau performance, we see evidence of the play’s ritual function. Unlike most of the surviving English plays which were not part of the actual ecclesiastical liturgy of Corpus Christi, and were sometimes not even performed on that feast day itself, the Künzelsau play was part of the ecclesiastical ritual for Corpus Christi, and was presented at various stopping places in the course of the procession which carried the exposed eucharistie host to various locations within the city walls. Processions were, of course, a common and important form of ritual ac­ tion in late medieval Christianity. They were performed on most of the major feast days of the year, either within or outside church buildings. They were charged with a number of symbolic meanings, representing as they did a passage from one stage of life to another. As rituals, they were not consid­ ered mere gestures or empty signs, for they were believed to function sacra­ mentally, to effect that to which they signaled (Kirchner, 25ff). Even more striking is the fact that the Künzelsau procession and play was a theophoric one. The relics of the saints preserved in the local churches were carried in the procession. Most important, the reserved host was also carried, and when the procession stopped in order to allow the performance of a biblical scene to commence, the actors and presumably members of the audience arranged themselves before the monstrance. There are several references in the speeches of the rector processionis to “God who is present here.” Thus the play was thought to be enacted not merely for the town’s inhabitants and tourists, but in the ritually charged presence of God and his saints. They are the ideal spectators to whom the action is at least partially addressed. They are wit­ nesses to the town’s fidelity to the Christian myth demonstrated in proces­ sion and play, and they are called upon to guarantee that the patterns of action held out in the enacted myth will prevail on the same streets on the more quotidian occasions of the year. But it is not only the theophoric function of their performance that brings these plays into relationship with ecclesiastical ritual. The clergy and students of the local seminary at Künzelsau marched in procession in their usual ecclesiastical vestments. A vested choir also was part of the procession; it frequently sang Latin liturgical pieces in the course of the production. The expositor repeatedly calls for liturgical actions on the part of the audience. At the play’s beginning, for example, the spectators are called on to kneel before the sacrament while the choir sings the hymn “O vere digna hostia” (2). A few moments later they are again instructed to kneel and recite the “Ave Maria” (2). At the moment of the resurrection we find the following stage direction: “Tunc chorus and totus populus incipiat Christ ist er-

standen” (151). At the play’s end, angels give the crowd the Latin blessing used at the end of Mass, and the choir responds with an “Amen” in the customary tone used each Sunday at sung mass (217). In all of these details we see that the Künzelsau play sought to tie together life as it was transacted in the streets with the prevailing mythical paradigms which were thought to determine that life. I do not mean to suggest that the play somehow sought to sanctify the secular, for the distinction between sacred and secular was as unknown to late medieval society as it is in a socalled primitive one. It is important to emphasize, however, that the play did not exist in the pure realm of “the wholly other,” but was tied to the eco­ nomic life of the town, a fact that is made abundantly clear by the town accounts which have been separately published by Elizabeth Wainwright and Peter Liebenow. Künzelsau was constantly involved in a quest for promi­ nence in which the neighboring town of Ingelfinger was its greatest rival. The disputes between these towns turned on many issues, but the most promi­ nent subject among them concerned the number of market days each town was permitted to have. Related to this question was one concerned with whether one of Künzelsau’s or Ingelfinger’s parish churches would serve as a deanery for the diocese. In fact, the Corpus Christi drama may have been instituted at Künzelsau when the town lost the deanery to its rival; the new practice allowed it to display its clergy with splendor and pomp. These details, and others like them, point to the place of the play within Künzelsau’s civic life and to the way that what we would term economic and religious concerns were intertwined. Many of the play’s constituent elements were drawn from “secular” as well as from “religious” paradigms. I alluded to the liturgical model of processions earlier. But processions were certainly not the monopoly of the church. As researchers such as Glynne Wickham, Elie Konigson, and Alan Knight have reminded us, secular processions in­ volving royalty or civic officials were a frequent feature of late medieval urban life, especially on the holidays and festivals which were celebrated with such great frequency in this period. These processions often had a pro­ nounced dramatic character, and of course, they served the ritual purpose of establishing and reinforcing the prevailing political order. Thus when the city fathers and the clergy of Künzelsau instituted the Corpus Christi procession, they drew upon patterns and precedents well established in both the ecclesi­ astical and political realms. This duality of traditions points to the function of the Corpus Christi procession and plays: by enacting the paradigmatic events of the culture’s prevailing myth in the places where daily life was lived and daily business was transacted, the events of biblical history were presented not as events long past, but as present realities involving German people of the fifteenth century. In the playing areas which were at the same time streets of the town, no clear lines of demarcation between audience and players could be drawn. All stood in the presence of Christ in the reserved sacra­ ment, and all became participants in the one great drama of salvation sacramentally enacted before the eyes of the citizenry. Thus the two dispa-

rate arenas of myth and contemporary life were melded together so that the resulting presentation made clear the patterns of actions sanctioned as deter­ minative for this community.

IV Thus far I have described the Kiinzelsau plays in terms on which both Turner and his more orthodox functionalist predecessors would find easy to agree; I have argued that the plays serve a structuralist function of reinforc­ ing the social, political, and intellectual hierarchies of the city. But what of Turner’s own contribution to ritual theory, his emphasis on the liminal and the antistructural? What role, if any, do these features have in any possible reading and interpretation of the dramatic texts for Kiinzelsau? There are two answers that might be given to this question. In the first place, it seems clear that some rituals are more open to Turner’s manner of post-functionalist interpretation than others. It is easier to speak of the “an­ tistructural” in the kinds of plays which the Anglo-American critics have privileged than it is with plays such as the one from Kiinzelsau. Especially toward the end of his career, Turner gave, great emphasis to liminal elements in ritual. In the reductive “Notes on Processual Symbolic Analysis” (which forms one of the appendixes to Image and Pilgrimage in Christian Culture: Anthropological Perspectives, written with his wife Edith), Turner’s character­ ization of ritual depends entirely on his concern with the antistructural. As we have already suggested, there can be no anti-structure or communitas without structure or societas, yet these more traditional concerns of anthro­ pological theory are present only by the implication in sentences such as the following: “Since ritual is itself an orchestration of many different kinds of performance and is expressed in terms of all the five senses, we may suppose that underlying any ritual system there is not merely a single syntax and vocabulary, but several ‘generative grammars’ ” (200). Anyone who has fol­ lowed the path by which Turner arrived at such a conclusion is not likely to disagree. But the point is that toward the end of his career, notions of the liminal came to occupy such a central place in Turner’s writing (and appar­ ently in his life as well) that they seem to have acquired transcendent value and became depicted as that which was quintessential^ real, a kind of primal unity. The structural apparently became for Turner only that which was to be transcended. This is hardly an adequate model for discussing all rituals. At least on the surface level, a play such as the one from Kiinzelsau seems to display much more “structure” than Turner’s last writings allow. The very least one could say is that the works of the later Turner, in contrast to the accounts of his African field work earlier in his career, seem to lose interest in the structural or cultural-affirmative aspects of ritual. Second, however, as Turner himself has implicitly taught us, where one thing is asserted, its opposite can also be claimed. There is at least one

striking aspect of the Künzelsau play which is more “antistructural” than Turner’s taste allowed, though it is an aspect which is not unique to it, and which, in fact, it shares with most medieval biblical plays, whether from England or the Continent. Late medieval plays are often notoriously antiSemitic, and the Künzelsau play is no exception. It has an important charac­ ter designated “Synagoga” who personifies the contemporary Christian notion of Jews as the slayers of Jesus. Such anti-Semitism is a feature of the “structural” elements of the drama, serving to delineate the Christian com­ munity against Jews who were regarded as aliens or worse. But it is important to notice that this structural anti-Semitism is tempered by a strikingly anti-Christian gesture: the Jewish clergy who according to the Gospel accounts condemn Jesus to death are here and elsewhere in the medi­ eval drama repertory depicted not as Jews of the past, but as contemporary Christian clergy. Many of the visual arts of the period depict Annas and Caiphas in copes and miters, and that is almost certainly the way they were costumed in Künzelsau and elsewhere. Earlier medieval drama scholarship usually attributed this strange situation to medieval naivete or to a lack of historical sense. There is no doubt some limited truth in such claims (though not much, I think). It is certainly true that such costuming may have pos­ sessed a certain neutrality because many fifteenth-century people had no other way to imagine the garb of ecclesiastical officials. But such observations cannot minimize the startling scene which met the citizens of Künzelsau when they saw actors, perhaps even clergy or seminary students, dressed as clergy and addressed as “prelaten,” nonetheless condemning Jesus to death. Such a phenomenon might well be interpreted as highly “antistructural” by a late twentieth-century reader; indeed, it might even be viewed as subver­ sive, since it uncovers a view of the ecclesiastical establishment which sets it against the ideals of its supposed founder and thus opposes it to the figure with whom the audience is supposed to sympathize. In the scenes which depict Jesus’ arrest and interrogation, characters who looked and dressed like the bishops who often visited the city and directly controlled many of its affairs become the cohorts of the villainous character Synagoga; they thus become alien to the community which is called into being by the ritual. Here is a kind of liminality and otherness with which Turner seems ill equipped to deal because its implications are so deeply subversive. Turner does not seem to include such a reversal in his characterization of anti-structure; for him the liminal is more benignly the source of “flow” with its “holistic sensa­ tion,” with its pervasive “loss of ego” in which “the self becomes irrelevant” (1978:254). The claim made here that there are elements in the late medieval biblical plays which may reach beyond the liminal to the positively subversive may seen extreme, especially for the play from Künzelsau. But if we wish to un­ derstand the way these enactments functioned within the societies which produced them, we need to keep in mind not only the surviving texts and the modes of performance that can be extrapolated from them, but also the

context in which the performance took place. None of the records published for Künzelsau thus far have yielded information on this topic. However, the Records of Early English Drama project, though far from complete, has already provided us with a wealth of information about the performance conditions of plays in England, and since our concern here is not to read an individual play or even to characterize national traditions of biblical drama, it seems reasonable to take this evidence into consideration (see, for example, Johnston and Rogerson as well as Clopper). Not surprisingly, a festival, almost saturnalian, atmosphere usually pre­ vailed at the times of the plays’ production. The days of the performance were often marked by prodigious eating and drinking. Charles PhythianAdams’s research into the social life of fifteen-century Coventry, for exam­ ple, has uncovered records that show that the trade guilds responsible for the plays in that city purchased such quantities of beer for their rehearsals that it is difficult to imagine how it could all have been consumed. On performance day itself in Coventry there was a strictly ordered parade in which every guild member was to march with his guild. Yet the time of the performance pro­ vided opportunities for disorder of various sorts, against which civic officials issued sundry cautions. Indeed, civil unrest seems always to have been a possibility at play time; towns frequently took special precautions that order be kept at these times, and the church offered indulgences for attendance at the plays on the condition that the recipient engage in no lewd or disorderly behavior.

V If the possibility of this kind of cultural subversion seems to go beyond the sense of otherness which Turner describes, it immediately calls to mind the work of Mikhail Bakhtin. To the best of my knowledge Bakhtin only obliquely mentioned late medieval biblical drama in his writings, but the nature of late medieval festivity such as that which frequently surrounded the performance of these plays always remained a central concern for him. Indeed, Bakhtin argues that “the traditional Corpus Christi procession had a clearly ex­ pressed carnivalesque character with a prevailing bodily note. . . . The popu­ lar marketplace aspect of this feast was to a certain extent a satirical drama which parodied the Church ritual of the Corpus Christi” (320). Although in the Rabelais book Bakhtin is primarily concerned with the exuberant carnivals of the Renaissance, he insists that the immediate ances­ tors of carnival were the popular celebrations which surrounded officially sanctioned ecclesiastical holidays in the late Middle Ages. Thus for Bakhtin official culture promulgated these days as holidays, but the popular festivities which marked its often raucous celebration had little or nothing to do with the event that was officially commemorated. On the contrary, these occa­ sions, Bakhtin claims, provided members of social groups which were not

part of the ruling class with an opportunity to “express their criticism, their deep distrust of official truth, and their highest hopes and aspirations,” aspi­ rations which apparently set them against the theology and ideology of the establishment (269). At numerous places in his study of Rabelais and His World, Bakhtin claims that the medieval feast had two faces; the one was “its official, ecclesiastical face” which “was turned to the past and sanctioned the existing order.” Its other face, however, was “the face of the people of the marketplace” which looked to the future. Carnival laughter “builds its own world in opposition to the official world, its own church versus the official church, its own state versus the official state” (88). Thus Bakhtin’s work demands that we pay special attention to, indeed privilege, those subversive elements which we can find in the biblical plays and in the popular festivity which surrounds them. Such festivity points, to use the felicitous phrases that Katerina Clark and Michael Holquist have employed in their recent study of Bakhtin, to a “gap in the fabric of society.” Because “the dominant ideology seeks to author the social order as a unified text, fixed, ,complete, and for­ ever,” such festivity is always a threat to the prevailing order of things (301). On first consideration, Bakhtin’s views seem to go far beyond Turner’s in pointing to the way that the discourse of the other seems inscribed in the late medieval drama. He makes us aware not so much of discontinuities in the surviving written texts and the texts of social action which surround them— though he certainly does that—as of possibilities for our recognition of such discontinuities. Bakhtin’s book enables us to speak of a political and eco­ nomic content of the plays, subjects which never appeared in New Critical or even historicist characterizations of these texts. Yet the more we explore Bakhtin’s model and its relevance for medieval drama studies, the more problematic it seems. Fundamental to the whole Bakhtinian enterprise is a distinction between monologism and dialogism, between cultural phenom­ ena which are rigidly ideological and cultural phenomena which allow many voices to surface without trying to reconcile or level them. The great pleth­ ora of criticism and theory currently appearing in response to Bakhtin’s insights surely demonstrates the heuristic fruitfulness of this distinction. But at least in the Rabelais book, Bakhtin seems to reduce this dichotomy to a simple and even simplistic division between the forms of social, political, philosophical, and theological oppression mediated in monological and au­ thorized discourse on one hand, and liberating dialogical popular discourse on the other. Popular culture is thus regarded by Bakhtin as infinitely freer than high culture. As Professors Clark and Holquist have noted with more than a little understatement, there is a strong element of idealization, even utopian visionariness, in Bakhtin’s analysis of carnival. In this regard Bakhtin is as good a guide as Turner—but surely not a better guide, despite first impressions—for constructing interpretive models which will take with utter seriousness the alterity and the sense of ideological otherness which can be discovered in the late medieval biblical drama. If Bakhtin’s model enables us to see the popular in places where we might not

have expected it, it also obscures at every turn the way that the antiestablish­ ment is mingled with the official and the established. There is, of course, another way of reading Bakhtin, one which would stress the dialogism which is at the center of his articles and books on novelistic discourse. On this account Bakhtin sees all thought and all social action as a form of never-ending dialogue. In one of the earliest groups of essays which called the attention of Western critics to Bakhtin’s work, Julia Kristeva argued for reading him in this way (see also DeMan and Todorov). Were we to follow her suggestion, the biblical drama and the festivities which sur­ round it might be regarded as a dialogue between popular culture and estab­ lished culture. Here one could claim, as Clark and Holquist do, that “carnival enacts the intertextuality of ideologies official and unofficial” (304). By extension (and here we can see some of the many similarities be­ tween Bakhtin and Turner) such a dialogue would provide a way for society to find new forms of social organization, new knowledge, understood as a feature of both intellectual and social life. There are certainly moments even in the Rabelais book which suggest such a reading. At one point Bakhtin asserts that “popular festive forms look to the future. They present the victory of this future, of the golden age, over the past. . . . The birth of the new, of the great and the better, is as indispensable and as inevitable as the death of the old. The one is transferred to the other, the better turns the worse into ridicule and kills it” (256). This quotation, while it may seem to offer support for Kristeva’s view of Bakhtin as proto-deconstructionist, at the same time points to the inherent difficulties in the main thrust of Bakhtin’s Rabelais book; it is difficult to deny that Bakhtin’s claims are often put forth in ways which are sometimes ex­ tremely inconsistent and at moments even contradictory. Such moments make clear how for Bakhtin “official” and “popular” are, among other things, expressions of value and value judgments. Far from being dialogic, Bakhtin insists on describing official culture in wholly negative terms, while “carnival” and “festival,” as expressions of a popular mentality, are invested with exclusively positive values. It must be admitted, however, that in quotations such as the one cited above, Bakhtin seems only boldly to make explicit much that is implied in the later Turner’s notions of the liminal and of communitas. This similarity points directly to the way that both Bakhtin’s and Turner’s models have a powerful but only partial usefulness for the study of medieval biblical drama— and of much else besides, perhaps. Although Bakhtin’s sense of the other is much more pronounced than Turner’s, it suffers from the shortsightedness that characterizes the later Turner’s work: paradoxically, neither Bakhtin nor Turner views official culture with sufficient serious­ ness. The later Turner writes almost exclusively of “anti-structure,” some­ how taking for granted the “structure” which it subverts. Bakhtin more directly confronts established culture, but only to dismiss it in negative terms which are hopelessly naive and out of keeping with both professional

medieval scholarship and the experience of history. Bakhtin’s notion of festivity sets it in such a radical perspective that he is forced to make claims for its powers and its subversiveness which cannot be historically justified, least of all by a study of the late medieval biblical plays. Turner’s notions of the way that festivity is centered in the liminal is finally addressed in terms that suggest a transcendent, religious, and paradoxically personal experi­ ence. But even here these two great masters of the festive other have more in common than might first appear. The later Turner was, it seems fair to say, obsessed with Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s studies of “flow,” a term which is defined in his “Notes on Processual Symbolic Analysis” thus: “the merging of action and awareness, the crucial component of enjoyment. Flow is the holistic sensation present when we act with total involvement . . . . There is no dualism in flow. . . . There is a loss of ego, the self becomes irrelevant. Flow is an internal state so enjoyable that people sometimes forsake a comfortable life for its sake” (254). Clearly “flow,” which in Turner’s model characterizes the liminal state, offers an experience of transcendence, a return to the primal condition of being. In the liminal state “homogeneity is sought, instead of heterogeneity.” Members of religious communities feel themselves to be “impregnated by unity” and “purified from divisiveness and plurality” (255). Thus flow is an escape from the structural, and this escape grants life a sublime and ontologically—Turner would, I fear, say “theologically”—validated meaning. Not surprisingly, Bakhtin makes a similar claim: “The feast is a primary, inde­ structible ingredient of human civilization. . . . [It] means liberation from all that is utilitarian, practical. It is the temporary transfer to the Utopian world. . . . The feast transgresses all limited objectives.” These striking remarks point to what, for me, is the gravest limitation in both Bakhtin’s and Turner’s otherwise extraordinarily insightful perspec­ tives. In the end, both are essentialists. We began this study by inquiring about the way that we might use their models for our understanding of medieval biblical drama. We are now brought to the conclusion that both have more in common with the Middle Ages than they, or we, might have expected. Neither Bakhtin nor Turner in the end defines his activities as model building, as offering yet another insight into the heterogeneity that is experience and the contradictoriness which characterizes our attempts to understand it. Both, with a religiouslike fervor, offer their views as truth, not as heuristic devices, but as descriptions of being. It is this ontological fallacy that leads them to such excesses that their own dialogical and dialectical insights are subverted by the way that one member of the opposition which each describes is invested with ultimate value. Appropriately, there is some­ thing highly ironic about the way that both Turner and Bakhtin privilege the antistructural. Although the relationship is a complicated one, Turner’s championing of the liminal seems tied to his Roman Catholicism; indeed, Turner’s apparently increasingly conservative religious commitments loom ever larger in his final books. In a little-read article which appeared in a

Catholic semipopular liturgiological journal in 1976, Turner defended even the Latin pre-Vatican II liturgy in the name of the liminal: The Catholic Church has, over the ages, succeeded in creating a sort of “tribal” community which counteracts the alienation of the growing division of labor and political nationalism and class conflict. The creation of a single body of ritual has been one of its supreme instruments in forming bonds which on a global scale replicate even while they transcend those of tribal society. The dismemberment, the sparagmos, of this ritual body, would represent a defeat for charity, depriving the social process o f its religious center. Spiritual creativeness flourishes within the liminal space protected by organic ritual rich in symbolism shaped by history; it is not extinguished by them. I would plead in conclusion that the living tradition of spiritual knowledge cognizantly pre­ served in the traditional Roman Rite should not be lightly abandoned to the disintegrative forces o f personal religious romanticism, political opportunism and collective millenarianism. We must not dynamite the liturgical rock of Peter. (“Ritual, Tribal and Catholic,” 520)

Although this quotation does not quite sound like a paragraph out of Turner's professional writings, the connection with his anthropological and social program is clear. In the end, it would seem, Turner defends the struc­ tural and hierarchical by reference to the way it creates opportunities for the experiencing of the antistructural. Or is it the other way around? And even here Turner's claims may have their parallels in Bakhtin’s life and work, for Clark and Holquist have argued that all of Bakhtin's assertions are but masks for the expression of a theological program which he derived from his Rus­ sian Orthodoxy but was unable to express directly in the Soviet Union. If this claim is accepted, then both Bakhtin and Turner's celebration of otherness and dialogism can be seen as motivated by structural and monological com­ mitments. Whether the student of medieval drama wishes to follow Turner and Bakhtin in this regard will be determined by his philosophical or reli­ gious commitments. But critically it would be disastrous to do so, for to read medieval texts from this perspective would be to privilege one aspect over streams of oppositions and contradictions that a more perceptive and honest reading might readily discover.

VI I began this essay by suggesting that reading the late medieval biblical drama as a form of social action rather than as a literary text has great advantages. My exploration of the hermeneutic presuppositions of Victor Turner and Mikhail Bakhtin has, however, led me to be critical of their ap­ proaches and to suggest that they are monologically motivated and ideologi­ cally predisposed to cut off the system of oppositions and disharmonies that other ways of reading might more profitably highlight. But this critique is by

no means intended to minimize the enormous utility that their models offer if they are accepted as models rather than revelations. Under such circum­ stances, it seems to me that, especially if they are combined with insights for the new social history which is everywhere affecting our image of medieval culture, the insights which we gain from these champions of otherness can lead us to produce new and convincing readings of both those plays in which structural elements seem to dominate, as at Künzelsau, and those plays, such as the frequently anthologized works of the “Wakefield Master,” that seem to tip the scale at least partially toward the antistructural. I cannot offer such a reading here, but I shall conclude by sketching out some of the elements that might be included in a reading that takes both sides of Bakhtin’s and Turner’s dichotomy into account. My example is the play of the Annuncia­ tion in the Wakefield cycle (text in Bevington, 356-367). The play is divided into three parts; in the first God has a long initial monologue in which with rich theological nuances he restates many of the chief events of salvation history, seen in light of a theory of recapitulation in which the initial loss in Eden by means of a man, a woman, and a tree is now to be remedied by a new set of man, woman, and tree. This portion ends with God’s sending Gabriel to Mary. The second part consists of the Annunciation proper, a dramatization of the sole biblical account of this event in the first chapter of Luke. This in turn is followed by the third and longest part, which centers on what David Bevington has called “the free-wheeling and chiefly invented story of Joseph’s fears of cuckoldry,” based both on the Protoevangelium of James and on a fabliaulike narrative “with its perennial mirth at the expense of impotent old husbands and attractive wives” (355). What Professor Bevington’s otherwise excellent introduction does not sug­ gest is that there is a fourth “source,” if that is the correct term, the practice of marriage in fifteenth-century English towns and the prevailing discourse about this practice. Mary and Joseph are—and certainly I am making no new claims here—depicted as a fifteenth-century couple. In the course of the play Joseph, not surprisingly, is first alienated from his wife who has become pregnant in his nine-month absence from home, then is puzzled, and finally is reconciled to her, but only by means of divine intervention. Clearly there is much here that is derived from late medieval official cul­ ture. The doctrinally correct proclamation by God at the play’s beginning is nearly unique in the cycle, having a parallel only in the play of creation. The traditional understanding of the incarnation, the doctrines of the divine na­ ture of Jesus and of the unique place of Mary in the divine economy are clearly articulated in elevated and sublime language set off from quotidian discourse that follows it. Beyond these specific dogmatic concerns, the play offers a view of the incarnation and the pervasiveness of figurai relationships that fully encompasses both the fictive world that is enacted and the everyday world of late medieval England which is present both inside and outside the play’s fictive frame. To again quote Bevington, the playwright “set the mo­ ment of the Incarnation in a typically and believably human context for his

medieval audience” (355); in so doing he reinforces the most fundamental claim of the Christian mythology, that the divine is encountered in the mate­ rial and in the midst of ordinary human life, a claim not without significance for the way that fifteenth-century English people constructed and perceived the world which they inhabited. So far I have alluded to the theological and religious concerns of the play, and in fact, these have been the chief concerns of the several essays that have been written to explicate it. Yet the play serves the purpose of building up and reinforcing traditional culture in more than a specifically and narrowly “religious” way. Surely one of its chief concerns centers on the appropriate roles that spouses should play in their relationship to each other. Mary’s role is not ultimately problematic; she is the good wife, a model for women in the audience. Joseph’s place is far more complex; we can provisionally say that by the end of the play he represents an authorized role model for husbands, or at least for the very best husbands as they were imagined. The point is that this play, like many in the English cycles, holds out models for ideal (and idealized) conjugal relationships as they were defined by prevailing social practices, authorized fictions, and civil and ecclesiastical law. These accepted models of conduct were then further legitimized and validated in the course of the performance by their being projected into the enacted Christian myth. Their presence there makes them appear as eternally valid patterns, although if we were to examine them closely, we would see that they bear the marks of the fifteenth century at every turn. The social historian Charles Phythian-Adams has suggested that the En­ glish Annunciation plays hint at late medieval taboos against marriage across age barriers; this claim offers us considerable insight into the function of that part of the play which deals with “Joseph’s problem with Mary.” Explana­ tions for the inclusion of this material, which is certainly extraneous to the presentation of the Annunciation story itself, have varied according to the theoretical model which underlies such explication of the play. To critics writing in the first half of the century, episodes such as this one were exam­ ples of crude and inappropriate humor thrown in by the playwright because he could not otherwise keep the attention of his ignorant audience. In the last three decades the inclusion of this material has been explained by im­ plicit reference to the new critical model which sees “literary” texts as the inevitable containers of tensions and ironies which are thought somehow resolved by the supposed unity of “the work of art.” Thus Bevington claims that “Joseph expresses doubt so that the audience, like him, may pass through skepticism to an abiding faith.” Such an interpretation at least has the advantage of taking audience reaction into account. While I would cer­ tainly not consider it “wrong,” I think that it has the effect that such new critical remarks sought—to produce a reading which obscures the systems of difference and contradiction that might otherwise be discovered in the text being scrutinized. On further reflection, in fact, the play does not at all seem to come to the

neat and satisfying closure which is often claimed for it. Especially when considered in the light of contemporary English social practices, incongrui­ ties and dissonances stubbornly remain, no matter how hard critics of various formal and theological persuasions have attempted to resolve them into di­ vine harmonies. From this observation we are led to see how it is possible to claim that the antistructural appears inscribed in the text which we have thus far read in a way which favors its role as reinforcer of high culture. If the play hints at a taboo against marriage across age barriers, as I think it does, it also paradoxically seems to authorize such a forbidden marriage arrangement by making it part of the divine economy. If the supposed quint­ essential models of conjugal behavior were involved in such a marriage, why should it be taboo? To see this is likewise to see problems with the claim that Mary is offered in the play as a role model for wives, and later, for mothers. For as the audience knew well, Mary’s conjugal role is different from that of other wives, and in many ways she violates the rules for married women contained in church and civil law and certainly in social practice. Sexuality is no concern of hers, and that is not the case for the majority of the women in the play’s original audiences. Mary’s problems with an impotent but jealous husband are resolved in a manner which, according to the claims of the mythology, is unique and therefore cannot furnish a universally valid exam­ ple. Similarly the solution to “Joseph’s problem’’ is unique, as is the interpre­ tation that we bring to the extraordinarily surprising line in which, in answer to Joseph’s question “Who owe this child though gose withall?” Mary replies “Sir, ye, and God of heven.” It seems reasonable to conclude that although the play does hold out Mary and Joseph as models for conjugal conduct, and in this way serves to reinforce the prevailing social structure, the universaliz­ ing claims on which such modes are based are partially and paradoxically undercut by the very conditions that enable Mary and Joseph to function as models. Thus the play simultaneously affirms and undercuts the inherited social and theological order. Of course, the Wakefield Annunciation is only one drama within a long cycle, and the opposition of structural and antistructural plays itself out repeatedly, modifying, qualifying, and undercutting the perspectives offered earlier in the performance. Thus all of its attempts to affirm the hierarchical order of things are frustrated by the antistructural which can be discerned in readings which favor it. And conversely, although the very conditions of production likely afforded to the cycle’s original audience a liminal or nearliminal experience, that experience was festive and therefore temporary, bounded by the orderliness of life before and after the holiday, a form of life regulated by inherited social mores and enforced by civic and ecclesiastical officials. The goal of this essay as articulated near its beginning was to explore ways that Victor Turner’s and Mikhail Bakhtin’s theories of social performance might enhance our understanding of the medieval biblical drama. In the process of dealing with this question, it was necessary to take both Bakhtin

and Turner to task for their perhaps unexpected sins of essentialism and monologism, which in any case are hardly sins by everyone’s standards. If the middle word of this essay has been critical, the last must deservedly be lauda­ tory. Whatever the limitations of his program, Victor Turner is surely among the most provocative— in every sense of that term—thinkers of our time. His writings are endlessly exciting and reward one with new insights upon every rereading. My examples have been drawn from late medieval biblical drama, but I hope that it is by now obvious that my ultimate subject has been the utility of Turner’s thought for texts of all sorts taken from all of the human sciences. Surely within this wide realm, Turner’s foregrounding of a struc­ ture beyond structure has had for many, this writer included, the effect of creating a communitas which has been the starting point for a subversive interrogation of those structures that are the inherited principles of our various scholarly disciplines. Given its enormous vitality, Turner’s view of society (and the mechanisms by which it is maintained and transformed) is likely to continue to play this liminal role for a long time to come.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Bakhtin, Mikhail. Rabelais and His World. Trans. Helene Iswolsky. Cambridge, Mass.: Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 1968. Bevington, David, ed. Medieval Drama. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1975. Clark, Katerina, and Michael Holquist. Mikhail Bakhtin. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1984. Clopper, Lawrence, ed. Records of Early English Drama: Chester. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1979. Craig, Hardin. English Religious Drama of the Middle Ages. London: Oxford University Press, 1955. Csikszentmihalyi, Mihaly. Beyond Boredom and Anxiety: The Experience of Play in Work and Games. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1975. DeMan, Paul. “Dialogue and Dialogism.” Poetics Today 4 (1983), 99-107. Derrida, Jacques. “Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sci­ ences.” In The Structuralist Controversy: The Languages of Criticism and the Sci­ ences of Man. Ed. Richard Macksey and Eugenio Donato. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1970, pp. 242-272. Durkheim, Emile. The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life. Trans. Joseph Ward Swain. London: George Allen and Unwin Ltd, 1915. Reprint. New York: The Free Press, 1965. Flanigan, C. Clifford. “Comparative Literature and the Study of Medieval Drama.” Yearbook of Comparative and General Literature 35 (1986), 56-104. Hardison, O. B. Christian Rite and Christian Drama in the Middle Ages: Essays on the Origin and Early History of Modem Drama. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1965. Jensen, Adolph E. Myth and Cult among Primitive Peoples. Trans. Marianna Tax Choldin and Wolfgang Weissleer. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1963. Johnston, Alexandra, and Margaret [Dorrell] Rogerson, eds. Records of Early English Drama: York. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1979. Kirchner, Thomas. Raumerfahrung im geistlichen Spiel des Mittelalters. Europäische

Hochschulschriften. Reihe XXX: Theater-, Film-, und Fernschewissenschaften 20. Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 1985. Knight, Alan E. Aspects of Genre in Late Medieval Drama. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1983. Kolve, V. The Play Called Corpus Christi. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1966. Konigson, Elie. L'espace théâtral médiéval. Paris: Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, 1975. Kristeva, Julia. “Word, Dialogue, and the Novel.” In Desire in Language: A Semiotic Approach to Literature and Art. Ed. Leon S. Roudiez. Trans. Thomas Gora, Alice Jardine, and Leon S. Roudiez. New York: Columbia University Press, 1980, pp. 65-91. Liebenow, Peter, ed. Das Künzelsauer Fronleichnamspiel. Ausgaben deutscher Liter­ atur des XV. bis XVIII. Jahrhunderts. Reihe Drama II. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1969. Mills, David. “Religious Drama and Civic Ceremonial.” In The Revels History of Drama in English. Vol I: Medieval Drama. Ed. A. Cawley, Marion James, Peter F. McDonald, and David Mills. New York: Methuen, 1983, pp. 152-209. Phythian-Adams, Charles. Desolation of a City: Coventry and the Urban Crisis of the Late Middle Ages. Past and Present Publications. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979. Todorov, Tzvetan. Mikhail Bakhtin: The Dialogical Principle. Trans. Wlad Godzich. Theory and History of Literature 13. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984. Travis, Peter. Dramatic Design in the Chester Cycle. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982. Turner, Victor, and Edith Turner. Image and Pilgrimage in Christian Culture: Anthropo­ logical Perspectives. New York: Columbia University Press, 1978. ________“Ritual, Tribal and Catholic.” Worship 50 (1976), 504-524. Wainwright, Elizabeth. Studien zum deutschen Prozessionsspiel. Münchener Beiträge Zur Mediävistik un Renaissance-Forschung 16. München: Beck, 1974. Watt, Homer A. “The Dramatic Unity of the Secunda Pastorum." In Essays and Studies in Honor of Carleton Brown. New York: New York University Press, 1940. Re­ printed in Middle English Survey: Critical Essays. Ed. Edward Vastas. Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1965, pp. 271-282. Wickham, Glynne. Early English Stages, 1200-1600. 3 vols. New York: Columbia Uni­ versity Press, 1958-1981.

NARRATIVES OF RITUAL AND DESIRE T hom as P a v e l

Narratological research and a good deal of what today we call structuralism started as an austere grammatical project, aimed at the discovery of regulari­ ties in literary behavior. In most cases, the regularities uncovered did not reach too high in the heaven of abstraction. Grammars are of a mixed na­ ture; categories introduced by Propp: Absence, Lack, Violation, Mark, Fight, etc., have been attacked by Lévi-Strauss as too abstract, and by Greimas as too concrete. There are excuses, to be sure. Younger than linguistics, whose example it energetically followed, narratology devoted only a minimal part of its efforts to conceptualization of its categorical instruments. But a grammar with vague or empty categories cannot lead to interesting descriptions. The question is of some consequence, since its neglect seriously under­ mined progress in narratology. This is especially true of categories suscepti­ ble of extranarrative interpretation; it is also true of reflection about larger units of narrative organization. The units in Propp’s model express purely narrative elements, since categories such as Absence or Lack refer to elements of the story, namely, the absence of a parent, or the lack of food. The ab­ sence of an authority figure in a folktale belongs to the fictional world de­ picted by the tale in question. The interesting question here is how the fictional world and its categories relate to the empirical world. For, if a signifi­ cant relation could be established between the units of fictional narratives and the extranarrative world, narratologists would possess a powerful tool for textual interpretation. Victor Turner’s anthropology offers a strikingly appropriate solution to this difficulty. It avoids the hyperrealist fallacy, which consists in closely matching narrative categories and raw facts and believing that the former describe the latter: for instance, that a conflict in a story necessarily refers to a real one. But neither is Turner tempted by the self-referential fallacy, which assumes that since narratives constitute a self-enclosed world, their catego­ ries form an algebraic structure lacking any links to the actual universe. For him, stories represent the real social life so effectively because social life itself

is organized according to cultural categories. These are established along the same lines as narrative categories. In an important paper (1981), Turner showed how some of the categories of narrative grammar coincide with the stages of social dramas. These are assumed to be spontaneous units of social process, occurring “within groups of persons who share values and interests and who have a real or alleged common history” (69). Made up of four phases, “breach, crisis, redress and either reintegration or recognition of schism” (69), social dramas offer the referential nucleus of narrative categories such as Violation, Lack, Lack fu l­ filled, etc. Sociological interpretations are particularly illuminating for narra­ tives of external conflict, where the Violation refers to a breach in the social order, and the Lack to the effects of the breach. The Theban part of Oedi­ pus’s story, for instance, develops around a Violation (parricide and incest) which causes a major Lack (the plague): in Turner’s terms, the breach leads to a crisis. Another variety of external conflict originates in a fundamental Lack experienced by the social group independently of any preceding Violation, and fulfilled through the efforts of the hero. The slaying of Chthonian mon­ sters, the Sphinx included, may belong to this type: here the crisis does not originate in a breach, although it must be followed, as in any social drama, by an attempt at redressing the social equilibrium. In narratives oriented toward internal conflict, the main categories of Lack and Violation acquire a different referential basis. Lack, for instance, is often related to the psychoanalytical notion of desire (Bersani; Kristeva). In his recent book Reading for the Plot, Peter Brooks offers a novel approach to the relation between desire and the narrative deployment, and links together Freud’s death instinct, Lacan’s desire, with the breathless advancement of plot toward its unavoidable end, and at the same time with the irresistible urge to narrate it. Plot (narrative of desire) and the act of narration (the desire of narrative) betray a common origin. The argument takes as its example a nineteenth-century half-realist, halffantastic novel, La Peau de chagrin by Balzac, and runs as follows: Ambition, this privileged narrative motor in nineteenth-century stories of social promo­ tion, can be described as a mechanism of incessant desire. The advancement of the hero, driven by the “desiring machine” and caught in the “overheated circuit of power and signification,” can be compared with the dynamic of modern narrative text, based on a plot “of energy and devourment.” The magic shagreen grants every desire of its owner, but shrinks with each ful­ filled wish, bringing the owner’s death closer and closer. To Peter Brooks, this allegory foreshadows Freud’s Beyond the Pleasure Principle. Similar to the ambivalent talisman, the hidden face of desire is death instinct. Since narra­ tive also is moved forward by desire, “the ultimate determinants of meaning lie at the end, and narrative desire is ultimately, inexorably, desire for the end.” Moreover, just as at the origin of plot lies a Freudian mixture of desire and death, the act of narration embodies the Lacanian desire, the irreducible relation to a phantasm, which lets itself be obscurely sensed as something else

than it says. “Narrative is hence condemned to saying other than it would mean, spinning out its movement toward a meaning that would be the end of its movement.” Narrative desire is a primary human drive, an everinadequate but ever-insisting bid to offer the indestructible unconscious de­ sire a scene where it could deploy its inability to limpidly speak about itself. Peter Brooks’s beautiful conceptual performance suggests a further ques­ tion: is desire as origin of plot a force sufficiently differentiated to account for the various possible narrative articulations? And if such variety is ac­ knowledged, where would La Peau de chagrin stand with respect to the larger family of repetitious plots? And, intimately related to this question, what is the pertinence of Victor Turner’s critical theory for a typology of plots? Forever propelled forward by the energy of inexhaustible desire, heroes such as Raphael in La Peau de chagrin, Tamburlaine in Marlowe’s tragedy, and Quixote understand that to satisfy desire means to invent a new cosmos, and to force the model upon the actual world (Pavel). These heroes, which I called elsewhere “ontological founders,” represent just one kind of repeti­ tious agent set in motion by the dynamics of desire. Other figures easily come to mind: Scheherazade, forever threatened with execution, Lazarillo de Tormes and his recurrent need for money and shelter, Chichikhov and his search for dead souls, Fanny Hill and her innumerable lovers, K. and his attempts to come closer to the castle. But notice that novels or plays about such heroes do not possess an integrated plot in the usual sense of a coherent story of conflict. Inextinguishable desire typically occasions episodic texts, picaresque novels, and repetitious tragedies. Such texts cannot end in an Aristotelian sense. They are often left unfinished by their authors, or else the last episode—success or death—is brought in arbitrarily, as a kind of extradiegetic device to stop desire’s indefinite replay. Lazarillo’s marriage or Tamburlaine’s death exemplifies such clumsy interruptions of a series of epi­ sodes which is potentially endless. Desire by itself fails to articulate a plot. In addition to the difficulty of developing a nonarbitrary end, the abovementioned narratives and plays often do not offer explicit reasons for the birth of inexhaustible desire. Tamburlaine wants an earthly crown just be­ cause in Renaissance tragedies everyone does; likewise, Lazarillo’s struggle for survival and Fanny Hill’s succession of lovers are attributed to un­ problematic impulses, in no need of narrative motivation. These poorly differentiated structures can be constrained in two important ways, namely, by better narrative integration of either their beginnings or their ends. Sisyphus’s and Faust’s myths exemplify these two solutions. In the Sisyphus type, the repetitious structure receives an explicit motivation: it derives from an earlier transgression, which, perhaps significantly, includes insubordination to the law of death. Among his numerous wrong deeds, Sisyphus twice avoids death by cunningly handcuffing Hades and later by playing an elaborate trick on Persephone. Eternal succession of effort and disappointment rewards unwillingness to face the reality of death. Quixote’s plight bears narrative similarities with Sisyphus’s: the hidalgo’s tribulations

originate in an equivalent trespass, which amounts to insubordination to the reality principle. Folly and perennial disappointment punish Quixote’s guilty involvement with the imaginary. Conversely, Faustian stories, while leaving desire without a narrative expla­ nation, set a terminus ad quem to the succession of episodes. Marlowe’s Doctor FaustuSy as well as Goethe’s Faust, exhibits the compositional difficulties of this type of structure. Since death and eternal damnation are serious matters, and since, moreover, in Faustian plots their presence at the end is deter­ mined by contract from the beginning, any desire in the middle is bound to sound frivolous. It is perhaps in order to avoid the feeling of frivolity that Goethe limits the first part of his Faust to a single episode, that of Margarete, which downplays the repetitious nature of Fausts’s desire. It remains none­ theless true that, lacking a principle of growth, both Marlowe’s and Goethe’s tragedies could in principle accommodate indefinitely more episodes before the last one. La Peau de chagrin belongs to the Faustian family of plots, exhibiting a desire/death contract, with the particular clause that each fulfilled desire visibly shortens the life of the agent. This means that while Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus may accumulate in principle any number of episodes, since the death of the hero, ineluctable as it is, depends on an unpredictable decision of Lucifer, in Balzac’s novel the unavoidable end is, as it were, put into the hands of the hero himself. This type of plot structure strongly contrasts with the more coherent plots of external conflict, whose composition is described by Victor Turner as containing both an explicit crisis and an attempt to solve it. In Turner’s view, the stage of a social drama at which solution of conflicts can be implemented usually contains a ritual element. The ritual, described by Turner (1969) as the antistructural element of the society, abolishes oppositions and hierar­ chies, does away with sex distinctions, reduces society at the level of communitas, such that new structural configurations could be implemented and a solution of the crisis made plausible. Folktales such as the Dragon Slayer (Aarne-Thompson type 300) represent the fictional counterpart of this type of plot organization, and folklorists and historians of religion have long known that they relate to ritual practices. In a classic paper, Mircea Eliade showed how folktales such as Le Petit Poucet or Barbe-Bleue originate in initiation scenarios: “The forest where Petit Poucet and his brothers get lost is the bush where, in a great number of primitive societies, boys are still taken for their initiation (that is to be killed and resurrected symbolically)” (7). Less predictably, Vladimir Propp himself, in his second, less well known book on The Historical Roots of the Fairy Tale, arrives at the conclusion that the Dragon Slayer achieves a syn­ thesis between rituals of royal succession, initiation rituals, and ritual sto­ ries about the journal in the netherworld. In what could be called the Propp-Eliade-Turner hypothesis, the well-knit, richly articulated folktale must be correlated with the presence of ritual. These kind of stories are

deployed both as adventurous tales of desire with an unknown outcome, and as a ritual pattern of tests necessarily leading to a new stage; as such, they appear to be a particularly happy crystallization of the human narra­ tive faculty. They bring together the dynamics of plot and the statics of antistructural elements, the flow of temporality and extratemporal mean­ ing, activity and reflection, desire and ritual. But as soon as ritual loses its intimate relation to the customs of the com­ munity, other narrative forms are ready to usurp its place. Perhaps this is why true plots of inexhaustible desire appear so late in history, when socially sanctioned initiation molds loosen their powerful grip, leaving individuals more or less alone with their ever-growing desires. Shifts in ideas about human destiny bring about the erosion of narrative constraints grounded in traditional patterns of individual growth. The turning point was the first half of the nineteenth century. Boundless desire, previously reserved for such exceptional beings as Tamburlaine and Faustus, became the common experi­ ence of the democratic age. A native of this age, as Tocqueville notes in the second volume of Democracy in America, “clings to this world’s goods as if he were certain never to die; and he is so hasty in grasping at all within his reach that one would suppose he was constantly afraid of not living enough to enjoy them. He clutches everything, he holds nothing fast, but soon loosens his grasp to pursue fresh gratifications” (144). It is worth noting that Tocqueville undertook his journey to America in 1831, the year of La Peau de chagrin. Couched in more theoretical language, Tocqueville’s quotation is the equivalent of the dissipatory system which Ra­ phael, in La Peau de chagrin, would follow until self-destruction. Such a sys­ tem conceives destiny as an entropie movement of desire, constrained only by the remote, hidden face of death. In a sense, Freud’s Beyond the Pleasure Principle, its intended generality notwithstanding, can be read as a descrip­ tion oijust this system, and may refer to the same kind of behavior as Balzac’s remarks, or Tocqueville’s descriptions. Exasperation of desire and its unme­ diated relation to death instinct is a feature of individual psyche which dan­ gerously develops in those periods when one lacks social mechanisms for countering entropie desire. It is a consequence of Turner’s theory of the ritual process that destiny becomes an open-ended frenzy when individual growth stops being sustained by an orderly succession of stages, rigorously separated by rites of passage. To conclude, older structuralist narratology often proposed static models, and insufficiently reflected on its categories, such that a more dynamic the­ ory of plot is needed, which would explain not only the architecture of plot but also the principles of its movement; this kind of model may have to take into account Freudian and Lacanian theories of desire. But a fully relevant theory of plot must as well make use of the rich anthropological notions of social drama and ritual, and learn to relate formal literary structures to the cultural texture that makes them possible. Victor Turner’s work undoubtedly will provide the stimulus for such a theory.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Balzac, Honoré de. (1831) La Peau de chagrin. In La Comédie humaine, vol. IX. Bib­ liothèque de la Pléiade, Paris: Gallimard, 1950. Bersani, Leo. “Le réalisme et la peur du désir.” In R. Barthes et al., Littérature et réalité. Paris: Seuil, 1982, pp. 47-80. Brooks, Peter. Reading for the Plot. New York: Knopf, 1984. Eliade, Mircea. “Littérature orale.” In Histoire des littératures, vol. I. Paris: Gallimard, 1955, pp. 3-26. Freud, Sigmund. (1914) Beyond the Pleasure Principle. In The Standard Edition, vol. 13. London: Hogarth, 1955. Greimas, A. J. Sémantique Structurale. Paris: Larousse, 1966. Kristeva, Julia. Desire in Language. New York: Columbia University Press, 1980. Lacan, Jacques. Ecrits. Paris: Seuil, 1966. Lévi-Strauss, Claude. “L’Analyse morphologique des contes russes.” International Journal of Slavic Linguistics and Poetics 3 (1960), 122-149. Pavel, Thomas G. “Incomplete Worlds, Ritual Emotions.” Philosophy and Literature 7 (1983), 48-58. Propp, Vladimir. (1928) Morphology of the Folktale. Bloomington: Indiana Research Center in Anthropology, 1958. ________(1946) Les Racines historiques du conte merveilleux. Paris: Gallimard, 1983. Tocqueville, Alexis de. (1840) Democracy in America, vol. 2. Trans. Henry Reeve and Francis Bowen. New York: Vintage Books, 1945. Turner, Victor. The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-structure. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1969; 1977. ________“Social Dramas and Stories about Them.” In On Narrative, ed. W. J. T. Mitchell. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981, pp. 137-164.

LIMINALITY AND FICTION IN COOPER, HAWTHORNE, CATHER, AND FITZGERALD R obert D a ly

Although the focus of his field work was on African culture, particularly on the Ndembu of Zambia, Victor Turner developed theories of liminality, communitas, and pilgrimage that contribute significantly to our current discus­ sions of American literature and cultural criticism. Indeed, the resonances are so strong and his theories so apt that American writers from William Bradford to Andrew Delbanco often seem to be discussing Turner’s notions of social process. As Edith Turner has recently observed, his first work on liminality oc­ curred during a liminal period in their own lives, after they sold their house in Manchester and moved to Hastings to wait for the visas that would enable him to take up a professorship at Cornell: “We were in a state of suspense. The place of our waiting was on the margin of the sea, roughly at the spot where William the Conqueror first penetrated Britain—which was an event known to the English as a changing point in history; while Hastings itself was felt to be a threshold, a gateway.” At this time, they were reading Arnold van Gennep’s Rites of Passage, in which “the importance of the liminal, marginal, inner phase of rites of passage was first recognized” (7). In that time of waiting by the English Channel, of being no longer quite British, not yet quite American, the Turners could feel some sympathy with other “liminars,” as Turner would later call those in this condition, a condi­ tion easier to recognize than to define. In The Ritual Process Turner sug­ gested the richness of the category: The attributes o f liminality or of liminal personae (“threshold people”) are necessarily ambiguous, since this condition and these persons elude or slip through the network of classifications that normally locate states and positions in cultural space. Liminal entities are neither here nor there; they are betwixt and between the positions assigned and arrayed by law, custom, convention,

and ceremonial. As such, their ambiguous and indeterminate attributes are expressed by a rich variety of symbols in the many societies that ritualize social and cultural transitions. (95)

Although the rituals associated with liminality function conservatively to preserve or restore order, the condition itself can be a field of freedom in which what Frederick Jackson Turner called “the bondage of the past” is, or appears to be, broken. In Dramas, Fields, and Metaphors, Victor Turner suggests that “in this gap between ordered worlds almost anything may happen. In this interim of ‘liminality,’ the possibility exists of standing aside not only from one’s own social position but from all social positions and of formulating a potentially unlimited series of alternative social arrangements” (13-14). The liminal adolescent—no longer a child, not yet an adult—is free to contemplate a multiplicity of possible adulthoods. Indeed, the anxiety attendant upon this condition is often balanced by an exhilaration in the freedom it affords. This freedom operates, as Turner made clear in On the Edge of the Bush, for both individuals and larger groups: “ ‘Liminars’ . . . may be initiands or nov­ ices in passage from one sociocultural state and status to another, or even whole populations undergoing transition . . . ” (159). And this emphasis on freedom as a positive and necessary aspect of the role played by liminality in regeneration and renewal illuminates how far Turner developed the idea beyond the notions of such predecessors as Arnold van Gennep and Henri Junod. Turner acknowledges his debt to both but explains that van Gennep “never followed up the implications of his discovery of the liminal beyond mentioning that when individuals or groups are in a liminal state of suspen­ sion, separated from their previous condition, and not yet incorporated into their new one, they present a threat to themselves and to the entire group, requiring their segregation from quotidian life in a milieu hedged around by ritual interdictions.” Turner’s view is not opposed to van Gennep’s, but it is larger. Liminality does occasion danger and fear, but it also enables choice and multiplicity. In distinguishing his own view, Turner argues that “for me the essence of liminality is to be found in its release from normal constraints, making possible the deconstruction of the ‘uninteresting’ constructions of common sense . . . into cultural units which may then be reconstructed in novel ways. . . . ” Although it is not “totally unconstrained” and not com­ pletely original—it “must bear some traces of its antecedent and subsequent stages”—liminality “is the domain of the ‘interesting,’ or of ‘uncommon sense’ ” (1985:159-160). Liminality offers an escape from the current structures of society, or at least from one’s place in them. It occasions the development of a community and communion of equals, which Turner calls communitas, “a liminal phenomenon, consisting of a blend of humility and comradeship” (1985:173). Although liminality and communitas are common among initiands in societies that ritual­ ize social transition, they must be sought out in societies that do not. Such societies seek them, Turner makes clear, in pilgrimage and in the arts.

“Pilgrimages . . . were . . . ‘functional equivalents,’ in complex cultures dominated by the major historical religions, partly of rites de passage in prelit­ erate, small-scale societies” (1974:65). In such large and complex societies, liminality may be sought and used in “the arts, including literature,” through which “a community of human beings sharing a tradition of ideas and cus­ toms may bend existentially back upon itself and survey its extant condition not solely in cognitive terms but also by means of tropes, metaphors, metonyms, and symbolic configurations . . . ” (1985:124). In this context, then, it is not surprising that what we now call American literature has among its earliest practitioners some who called themselves Pilgrims, whose leader noted their condition upon arrival. Before them “the whole country, full of woods and thickets, represented a wild and savage hue. If they looked behind them, there was the mighty ocean which they had passed and was now as a main bar and gulf to separate them from all civil parts of the world” (Bradford, 62). Stranded on that shoreline, no longer British, not yet American, our Pilgrim forebears were clearly liminal, and William Bradford knew it. Although he does not use the word, Andrew Delbanco has recently argued that we have been intermittently liminal ever since, that the “process of change in ideas and feelings” in America “can be understood only in conjunction with the large material fact that stands at our beginning as a nation: the migration from one continent to another,” the “journey out of one culture into another (whether physical, political, or imaginative)” that has defined the Puritans and all later waves of American immigrants. And in Delbanco’s cogent account, we are all immigrants, fol­ lowing still “the belief that our lives can be radically renewed” by our pil­ grimage (250-251). Between the early American historian and the contemporary American scholar are many other writers who use fiction both to recreate liminality and to respond to it. One way to understand Victor Turner’s influence and to put his work to good use is to note the recurrence of liminality in American history and literature and to explore the uses of fiction in responding to it. In fact, James Fenimore Cooper was too late. By the time he first heard of the frontier, it was already beyond him, moving away to the West. Cooperstown was settled. Although stories of the frontier remained in the memories of trappers and Indians who had known it in their youth, the rich multiplicity of cultures in that earlier America had been replaced by a culture that Coo­ per considered narrow and sterile, the New England culture he satirizes in Satanstoe in the figure of Jason Newcome. A Yankee schoolmaster, Newcome would teach and discipline all America. He assumes that the customs of his Connecticut neighborhood constitute the only culture worth preserving and that all else is barbarism and irrelevance, wishes to reform the rich and varied language of his contemporaries to make it more linear and monosignificant, and looks forward to the day when the entire country will be brought tidily within the cultural boundaries defined by his small town.

Long before he wrote Home as Found, Cooper was cordially dissatisfied with the state of American culture. By his own time, he believed, the Newcomes had won. Indian, French, Dutch, African, English, and other cul­ tures, languages, and moneys that had mixed and mingled in the American past had been crowded out by a single cultural coinage that Cooper thought debased. The country had grown up, to be sure, but badly. In fiction, however, he could advert to the frontier and to the period in American history just before and during the last of the French and Indian Wars. However problematic the historicity of the actual frontier, a retrospec­ tive view of it offered Cooper, as it would later offer Frederick Jackson Turner, an image of freedom and cultural possibility. Turner argued that “for a mo­ ment, at the frontier, the bonds of custom are broken and unrestraint is triumphant. There is not tabula rasa. The stubborn American environment is there with its imperious summons to accept its conditions; the inherited ways of doing things are also there; and yet, in spite of environment, and in spite of custom, each frontier did indeed furnish a new field of opportunity, a gate of escape from the bondage of the past.” Cooper locates that freedom from historical determinism on the frontier and on the sea, and Turner follows him in recognizing the similarity between the two: “What the Mediterranean Sea was to the Greeks, breaking the bond of custom, offering new experiences, calling out new institutions and activities, that, and more, the ever retreating frontier has been to the United States directly, and to the nations of Europe more remotely” (57-58).1 The frontier and the sea are described as bound­ aries, as dividing lines, not as bounded. They are not settled. Cooper set The Last of the Mohicans on the frontier at a particular moment in time, the period of the last French and Indian War. After that war, in the Treaty of Paris, France ceded to England its colonial empire in the St. Law­ rence Valley and all its land claims west of the Mississippi. The language of America gradually became English, its coinage and culture more uniform. But before and during that war, in the time in which Cooper set his greatest works, the nation stood on a threshold. No longer savage, not yet civilized, no longer wild, not yet settled and formed, the nation was, Cooper observes in Satanstoe, in its adolescence: “This period in the history of a country, may be likened to the hobbledehoy condition in ourselves, when we have lost the graces of child­ hood, without having attained the finished forms of men” (368). Spatially and temporally, then, by setting his fictions on the frontier in the time of the nation’s adolescence, Cooper placed his characters in a liminal condition. The liminal period in America may be symbolized by a wilderness, but Cooper insists that it was no longer a pristine wilderness but already somewhere between that and a civilization: “Of course, the whole of the open space was more or less disfigured by stumps, dead and girdled trees, charred stubs, log-heaps, brush, and all the other unseemly accompaniments of the first eight or ten years of the existence of a new settlement” (1962:368). Like Turner, Cooper emphasizes the mediate nature of the limi­ nal condition and explores its relation to fiction.

As Wolfgang Iser has cogently argued, fiction is not merely opposed to fact in some simple dialectic; it is a third term mediating between fact and imagi­ nation, giving to fact a human significance (making it matter to us) and to imagination a recognizable and expressible form (making it make sense to us). Fiction is not a subset of either fact or imagination: This act of fictionalizing cannot be deduced from the repeated reality and so clearly brings into play an imaginary quality which links up with the reality reproduced in the text. Thus the fictionalizing act converts the reality repro­ duced into a sign which endows the imaginary with an articulate gestalt. . . . The act of fictionalizing is therefore not identical to this protean potential of the imaginary, for it is a guided act, imbued with direction, and aiming at something which in turn endows the imaginary with an articulate gestalt— a gestalt that is quite different from the fantasies, projections, daydreams and other reveries that ordinarily give the imaginary a direct route into our experience. (205)

As Iser makes clear, fiction is itself betwixt and between. It is appropriate, then, that Cooper turns to fiction to enact a liminal time and place in American history, a time and place in which Americans and America were free to make choices. Convinced that America had made a poor choice in the single and narrow hegemony of the culture of New Eng­ land, convinced that “something surely is worthy to be saved from the wreck of the past” (1962:419), Cooper chose to save the rich multiplicity of what he called “usages,” of customs and conventions, and the concomitant sophisti­ cation about cultural assumptions that had been lost in the America of his own time and omitted from books of history. In the America of his fiction, many cultures mix and compete, and one attains identity, not by learning the codes of any one culture, but by mastering several. In The Last of the Mohicans, for example, Major Duncan Heyward often seems childish in his clinging to the codes of chivalric Europe despite their inapplicability to American circumstances. In one crucial scene, however, his knowledge of French language and culture is absolutely essential to the safety of the group, and it becomes clear that one survives in Cooper's America by learning something of Indian culture without forgetting one's knowledge of Europe. Challenged by a French sentinel who, he thinks, might be a ghost, Hawkeye is completely at a loss: “Qui vive?” demanded a stern, quick voice, which sounded like a challenge from another world, issuing out of that solitary and solemn place. “What says it?” whispered the scout. “It speaks neither Indian nor English!”

Given Hawk-eye's linguistic limitations, a French sentinel might as well be a ghost, a revenant of a vanished and forgotten time. For Hawk-eye, the senti­ nel is so utterly outre that he hardly seems human, as Hawk-eye's use of the impersonal pronoun suggests. Although Cooper has riddled his text with

explanatory footnotes, moreover, he makes no attempt to translate the French conversation of Heyward and the sentinel. If we cannot understand it, our puzzlement stands as one more evidence of what we have lost as a culture and what Cooper’s fiction will save for us from the wreck of the past. Heyward does not share in that puzzlement. He answers the sentinel, con­ verses with him, and convinces him that Heyward is human, French, and of a social class and authority superior to his own. When the sentinel asks, “Etesvous officier du roi?” Heyward replies, “Sans doute, mon camarade; me prends-tu pour un provincial! Je suis capitaine de chasseurs (Heyward well knew that the other was of a regiment in the line)” (1983:137). In his work on social class, Pierre Bourdieu observes that any social code—language, drinks, automobiles, holiday resorts, clothing— “provides the small number of distinctive features which, functioning as a system of differences, differen­ tial deviations, allow the most fundamental social differences to be expressed almost as completely as through the most complex and refined expressive systems available in the legitimate arts” (226). Heyward knows not only the French language but also the class structure and the social codes in which the language is implicated. Heyward understands and the sentinel does not need to be told that officer outranks sentinel, that Paris outranks the provinces, and that cavalry outranks infantry. The conversation illustrates Bourdieu’s argument that the “classificatory systems” of society “are not so much means of knowledge as means of power, harnessed to social functions and overtly or covertly aimed at satisfying the interests of a group” (477). His knowledge of French language and culture enables Heyward to so overawe the sentinel that even when Cora, an acknowledged member of the English enemy, also speaks French to him, he does not infer that one can know French without being French and that Heyward might not be what he represents. Instead, the French sentinel has been lured by language and by his own monolingualism into the belief that he is in his own familiar world among friends. He walks off carelessly, singing of France, only be be killed by Chingachgook. So powerful is language in establishing not only a society but also a sense of common humanity that Washington Irving changed the nationality and language of Henry Hudson. In fact, Hudson was an Englishman sailing for a Dutch company. In Irving’s fiction, “Rip Van Winkle,” Irving changes him into a Dutch Hendrick Hudson precisely so that he will be unable to speak English and will be, in British America, an alien, not quite human. In losing all but one of the languages and “usages” of its past, the America of Coo­ per’s time risked a loss of cultural identity and of human possibility. In fiction, Cooper could take it back to the spatial liminality of the frontier and the temporal liminality of the nation’s adolescence in order to find in these the freedom to recover and recreate the foundations of an American culture richer than that available in his own time and place. He could take his read­ ers back, then, not merely to escape adulthood but to make different choices, to grow up again, and this time to make a better job of it. Liminality and fiction were central in that process.

Even more than Cooper, Hawthorne recognized that on the frontier “there is not tabula rasa”: there is no pastoral idyll free of history, free of the generic demands of earlier fictions, free of characteristic modes of percep­ tion and discourse left over from earlier times. On Hawthorne’s frontier, characters attempt to reenact paradigms of Biblical and chivalric heroism, lie accordingly about their own actions and motives, and blight their lives. As Victor Turner has argued, liminality guarantees nothing. It merely occasions the freedom to imagine alternatives; it does not compel one to exercise that freedom or to imagine wisely and well. Although his earliest tales center on the liminality of adolescence and the frontier, Hawthorne was too good a historian to accept unexamined the common belief that Denis Donoghue has called “the most influential idea in American studies,” the idea “that the American experience is exceptional if not unique . . . and that it is best un­ derstood as a conspiracy of man and nature to circumvent the structures imposed by history, politics, and economics.” In April of 1975, Leo Marx questioned that idea in an open letter to the conference on American studies being held in Salzburg. Although Marx had argued in The Machine in the Garden that “the peculiar traits of American writing must be traceable to the special character of the environment” (343), he urged European scholars at the conference to “expose, once and for all, the dangers inherent in all variations of the idea of American exceptionalism,” and wrote that they were “well qualified to help correct the record, and to demonstrate the extent to which American society, for good or evil, is chiefly to be understood as a development of Anglo-European history.”2 Hawthorne had begun to ques­ tion that idea by 1832, in “Roger Malvin’s Burial.” Like Iser, he saw fiction as a form differing from either fact or imagination but incorporating and shaping both. His own fiction is a house of many customs, and we enter it only to find that “the floor of our familiar room has become a neutral territory, somewhere between the real world and fairy­ land, where the Actual and the Imaginary may meet, and each imbue itself with the nature of the other” (1962:36). In America, both were apparently in short supply, and Hawthorne’s twelve years of reading at the Manning household in Salem stand as evidence of his need for the “history, legends, symbols, paintings, sculpture, monuments, shrines, holy days, ballads, patri­ otic songs, heroes, and . . . villains” that Henry Steele Commager identifies with a usable past (13). Francis Grund had argued in the 1830s that an American could get along without these since “his country is in his understanding; he carries it with him wherever he goes, whether he emigrates to the shores of the Pacific or the Gulf of Mexico; his home is wherever he finds minds congenial with his own.”3 But as late as October of 1854, Hawthorne could still write to Long­ fellow that carrying America in the mind was precisely what Americans could not do: “The English are intensely patriotic; their island being not too big to be taken bodily into each of their hearts; whereas we must dilute and attenu­ ate our patriotism till it becomes little better than none. We have so much

country that we have really no country at all; and I feel the want of one, every day of my life.”4 One way of overcoming or at least balancing the centrifugal forces of distance and variety would be through a literary culture national rather than local. Indeed, one source of the English awareness of national culture is clear from Marius Bewley’s observation that “without Shakespeare, Milton, Jane Austen, and Dickens, it is difficult to imagine that the English would know how to think and act like Englishmen” (Miller, 280). And in The Search for a Usable Past, Henry Steele Commager suggests that a similar founding of national culture on literature was taking place in America: “the sentiment of American nationalism was, to an extraordinary degree, a liter­ ary creation, and . . . the national memory was a literary and, in a sense, a contrived memory” (25). It is clear, however, that Hawthorne found the national memory of his contemporaries all too convenient a fiction, all too contrived. In the Salem Advertiser for 2 May 1846, he wrote of William Gilmore Simms’s “series of picturesque and highly ornamented lectures on ‘American History, as suited to the purposes of Art,’ ” that “they abound in brilliant paragraphs, and appear to bring out, as by a skillfully applied varnish, all the lights and shades that lie upon the surface of our history; but yet, we cannot help feeling that the real treasures of his subject have escaped the author’s notice. The themes suggested by him, viewed as he views them, would produce nothing but historical novels, cast in the same worn out mould that has been in use these thirty years, and which it is time to break and fling away.”5 Hawthorne wished to plumb the depths of American history, not to cover it with varnish. He could write, then, neither history nor the historical fiction that simply valorized the frontier as the place where Americans could escape from his­ tory into the prelapsarian world of nature, and where nature, accommodat­ ing and Wordsworthian, would serve instead of culture in forging an individual and national identity. He could, however, gesture ironically in the direction of both forms, then go on to write something quite different, some­ thing that would provide his readers less with an alternative history than with alternative ways of looking at history. In his historical introduction to “ Roger Malvin’s Burial,” he claims that he is merely recording the events of the “well-remembered ‘Lovell’s Fight’ ” (337), the centennial of which his own contemporaries were cele­ brating when he began the tale. Investigation of Lovell’s Fight, however, reveals Hawthorne’s irony. Even the serious historians of Hawthorne’s time agreed that Lovell’s Fight was the culmination of a rather routine scalp-hunting expedition. The whites blundered into an Indian ambush and were routed. Hawthorne’s contemporaries were reading exaggerated historical importance into this battle, portraying it as an example of early American chivalric heroism, and falsifying their accounts accordingly. By turning their ancestors into paper heroes, by falsifying their relation of the past, they risked cutting off their descendants from the sense of continuous history on which national culture and identity depend. By denying the

humility and liminality of their forebears—transforming them from fron­ tier farmers into a glittering aristocracy— Hawthorne’s contemporaries de­ nied themselves what Turner calls “communitas, ” the sense of comradeship among equals to which liminality is supposed to lead and from which iden­ tification of self with communal culture derives (1969:45-165; 1974:274). Hawthorne’s tale, then, had somehow to counter these serious historical and cultural mistakes. But Hawthorne did not simply write a correct history, setting the record straight and recording the facts as he knew them, and he knew them well and in detail. Instead, he wrote a fiction of one Reuben Bourne, a youngster on the frontier, whose liminality leads only to isolation because of a lie he tells about his relation to his surrogate father, Roger Malvin. Hawthorne ignores the battle altogether, focusing his tale on its aftermath and on the effects of lying about it. Reuben Bourne returns home and is welcomed as a chivalric hero: “all acknowledged that he might worthily demand the hand of the fair maiden, to whose father he had been ‘faithful unto death’ ” (348). A young man of little self-knowledge and unformed character, he is compelled by the expectations of his admirers to falsify his account of the death and burial of Roger Malvin. This falsification causes the townspeople to believe that Mal­ vin is properly buried, that all is well, and Reuben can hardly mount an expedition to return and bury him as promised. The disparity between his public role as chivalric hero and his private sense of himself as coward and liar wears him down. Self-sacrificial, asexual, chivalric heroism is, however, not the only hero­ ism. In his character’s last name and in a “daydream” apostrophized in the tale, Hawthorne presents an alternative both to the impossible paper heroes celebrated by his contemporaries and to the tragedy that the belief in such heroes and such celebrations has worked on Reuben. “Bourne” is one of the most famous names in the annals of New England, a name associated not with conquest but with the founding and building of the colony. In Thomas Hutchinson’s History of the Colony and Province of Massachusetts Bay, which Hawthorne checked out of the Salem Athenaeum twice while writing the story, one Richard Bourne and his descendants are celebrated as founders: “I am not preserving from oblivion the names of heroes whose chief merit is the overthrow of cities, provinces and empires, but the names of founders of a flourishing town and colony if not of the whole British empire in America.”6 Such heroes are not chivalric knights. They are founding mothers and fathers, matriarchs and patriarchs, parents of America, and Reuben Bourne might well have become one of their number. Hawthorne suggests as much in his self-conscious apostrophe to one ver­ sion of the American dream: Oh! who, in the enthusiasm of a day-dream, has not wished that he were a wanderer in a world of summer wilderness, with one fair and gentle being hanging lightly on his arm? In youth, his free and exulting step would know no

barrier but the rolling ocean or the snow-topt mountains; calmer manhood would choose a home, where Nature had strewn a double wealth, in the vale of some transparent stream; and when hoary age, after long, long years of that pure life, stole on and found him there, it would find him the father of a race, the patriarch of a people, the founder of a mighty nation yet to be. (“Roger Malvin’s Burial,’* 352)

Of course this is a fiction. Of course his far descendants’ view of this fron­ tiersman is just another story, “a day-dream,” and those who know New England will smile at the necessity that it be set in a world of summer wilder­ ness. Less obvious but just as compelling is Michael Colacurcio’s argument that “the answer to the narrator’s rampantly rhetorical question—all but lapsed in the last extremity of poetic diction—is supposed to be ‘not quite everybody’ ” (122). Nevertheless, this fiction operates as an alternative to the chivalric one in which Reuben unwittingly invests his life, and it is far more conducive to the founding and maintaining of a culture than is the notion of frontier Ameri­ cans as misplaced knights, clanking in armor around our eastern forests and nobly slaughtering neighbors for the greater glory of a curious God. Like young Duncan Heyward at the beginning of Cooper’s Mohicans, Reuben Bourne has put his faith in the wrong fiction. Instead of becoming “the patriarch of a people,” like Richard Bourne, Reuben misuses his liminal period, loses the land he had inherited, kills his only son, and ends in the delusion that, having now appeased his bloodthirsty version of God, he can finally pray. He is, in the end, completely cut off from his history and his culture. In making chivalric heroes of their ancestors, Hawthorne’s contem­ poraries risked a similar historical isolation, and the story is clearly a para­ bolic warning, not against fiction but against that particular fiction and against the literalist tendency to hypostatize metaphors and fictive images into facts. Where his contemporaries would deny liminality and assert an unbroken continuity from the metrical romances of Europe to the accounts of the American frontier, Hawthorne would take his readers back to an adolescent Reuben Bourne on the frontier, dramatize the existence of choice and the choices badly made, and attempt to replace a death-dealing fiction with some on which a culture might live.7 That Hawthorne uses liminality as an appropriate subject for fiction and fiction as an appropriate response to liminality becomes clear in his treat­ ment of New England’s past in a sketch entitled “Main-Street,” in which fiction comes to the aid of history. An itinerant showman turns up in Salem and announces his intention to portray its history though a “certain pictorial exhibition, somewhat in the nature of a puppet-show, by means of which I propose to call up the multiform and many-colored Past before the specta­ tor, and show him the ghosts of his forefathers, amid a succession of historic incidents, with no greater trouble than the turning of a crank” (49). Such an artistic reenactment of history is clearly necessary for the children

of the town, since their own transition to adulthood is not going well. The standard mythic stories “their fathers and grandsires tell them” have become a “vain legend! They cannot make it true and real to their conceptions.” Although “the children listen . . . nothing impresses them, except their own experience.” The great danger of filiopietism and ancestor worship, of por­ traying early America as pastoral idyll or prelapsarian Eden or heroic age of perfect chivalry, is that the children of the present will be able to make no connection across the yawning gulf of difference between them and their forebears. Trapped in a present that seems totally unlike their storied past, they will see the past as “vain legend” and be impressed only by “their own experience,” suffering a diminishment of history and a corresponding loss of imagination. Like the New Englanders who cannot recognize “the gray champion” when their history walks before them in human form, these chil­ dren need a usable past, one that will be “real to their conceptions” (71-72). As the showman’s reenactment progresses, it becomes clear that the fig­ ures in this usable past will be human, all too human, capable of the terri­ ble faithlessness that beset Salem Village in the spring and summer of 1692. Whatever the “cause” of the events— real witches, real-estate grabs, sexual repression, ergot poisoning, psychological projection, and the dark undersides of Puritanism and human nature have all been plausibly mar­ shaled—one clear and awful effect was the breaking of faith among fami­ lies, friends, neighbors, fellow human beings: “Among the multitude, meanwhile, there is a horror, fear, and distrust; and friend looks askance at friend, and the husband at his wife, and the wife at him, and even the mother at her little child; as if, in every creature that God has made, they suspected a witch, or dreaded an accuser” (77-78).8 As Goodman Brown, Richard Digby, Parson Hooper, Giovanni Guasconti, Hester Prynne, Miles Coverdale, and other Hawthorne characters are forever finding out, we cannot really know whether our husbands, wives, children, and neighbors are witches, devils, aliens, phantoms, or just folks. Such things are inscruta­ ble, and, in sharing communitas, we take them on faith. When that faith breaks, family, friendship, town, and country are doomed. On that point, Hawthorne is not ambiguous, vague, plurisignificant, or ironic, ever. It would be, then, otiose for his contemporaries and countrymen to throw away their lives merely in order to discover this truth yet again. “MainStreet” is one way of showing that we live and die by faith, by imagination, by positing what we cannot know. If Hawthorne’s audience figures in the story are any indication, however, he was not sanguine about his chances for success. No sooner has the show­ man begun than two critics evince the faithlessness that proved so destructive at Salem. In their own way, they reenact the very history that they do not understand. One argues that the scenes presented are not sufficiently realis­ tic in their details, the other that the genealogy is inaccurate. Like the poor judges at Salem, trying out test after test to determine the precise spiritual state of their neighbors, these two are aggressively missing the point.

Instead of trying to accommodate their simplistic criteria, the showman replies that “we must now and then ask a little aid from the spectator’s imagination,” urges his critics not to “break the illusion of the scene,” and suggests, “let me entreat you to take another point of view. Sit further back, by that young lady, in whose face I have watched the reflection of every changing scene; only oblige me by sitting there; and, take my word for it, the slips of pasteboard shall assume spiritual life, and the bedaubed canvas be­ come an airy and changeable reflex of what it purports to represent” (52, 63). In this the most reflexive of his sketches, it is ominous that his audience figures refuse to lend the showman the operational faith on which fiction depends. Instead, they cling to realism and genealogical accuracy as the only reliable indices of truth. One need only get the names right and provide lots of details in order to get them to believe lies. Perhaps because the mythic histories of America were rich in genealogy and detail, Hawthorne eschewed both. In “Roger Malvin’s Burial,” he invited his readers to notice “the sub­ stitution of fictitious names” for the participants in the fight (337). In his romances, he claimed considerable latitude with regard to the plausibility of particular details. And in “Main-Street” he portrayed an author figure trying to convey to audience figures some truths about America’s usable past, trying to get them to take another point of view, and failing because he could not overcome generic expectations conditioned by the mythic history to which they were accustomed. Hawthorne’s implication is that history is not an unbroken chain binding us to the dead body of the past, that it is an act of the creative imagination, that whether history has an independent existence, it clearly has no indepen­ dent intelligibility. A crude literalism—manifested in “Main-Street” by a conflation of detail with truth and in “Roger Malvin’s Burial” by an insis­ tence that chivalric myth was fact—could destroy history, could “bring the course of time to a sudden period” (“Main-Street,” 50). To make their his­ tory “true and real to their conceptions,” Americans had to replace their reductive view with a sophisticated historicism that would enable them to recognize their history and use it. In such a history, facts were metaphoric and histories and stories always twice-told tales, since the early accounts were tales to begin with. Although different in many ways, Hawthorne was like Cooper in taking his readers back to liminal periods in American history, showing them crucial choices badly made, and using fiction to recover and understand those choices, to offer Americans something more than the end­ less and unconscious repetition of past mistakes. Stephen Donadio has argued that later American writers saw their nation as “a society perpetually coming into being” (84), and Turner’s work illumi­ nates the fictions of several later American writers, among them Willa Cather and F. Scott Fitzgerald. In My Antonia, Willa Cather situates her story on the trackless prairie of Nebraska, in a part of the country called “the middle border” or “the Great Divide,” since it seemed to be not a place at all but rather a huge border or boundary between the East and West, both of which

had reality as places. Her narrator describes this liminal land as “not a coun­ try at all, but the material out of which countries are made” (7). Cather suggests, moreover, that this land is a fit setting for an epic about the foundation of a culture. Her story is rich with allusions to the Odyssey and with explicit references to Vergil’s hope that he would be able to make his own familiar land—his father’s farm on the sloping banks of the river Mincio just outside Mantua—a fit setting for poetry. She has her narrator study a passage in the third book of Vergil’s Georgies: “primus ego in patrium mecum, modo vita supersit, / Aonio rediens deducam vertice Musas” (264), which may be translated as “I shall be the first, if I live, to bring back with me into my own country the muses from the Aonian peak.” These lines suggest the similarity of Cather’s project and illuminate her creation, in Antonia Shimerda, of an epic heroine who founds and maintains a culture, in part by telling stories. Antonia builds and protects her own garden; bears and raises children to whom she gives the names, teaches the language, and tells the stories of their ancestors; and creates out on the prairie a culture in compari­ son with which Jim Burden finds the town culture of Black Hawk empty and disappointing. By the end of the story, she stands with the Homeric and Vergilian heroes: “She was a rich mine of life, like the founders of early races” (353). For Cather, the liminality of “the Great Divide” afforded yet again the freedom to imagine the heroic possibility, and one became heroic by becoming, inter alia, a shaper of fictions. In The Great Gatsby, Nick Carraway becomes liminal when, “instead of being the warm center of the world, the Middle West now seemed like the ragged edge of the universe” (3). In this state, he cannot yet identify with his country and cannot find the magnificent language with which the book con­ cludes. His language as the book opens is stilted, linear, and empty, and his description of the Carraways is as hackneyed and preposterous as Gatsby’s initial description of his own noble forebears. But West Egg is something of a frontier, where Nick can self-consciously echo Cooper in feeling that “I was a guide, a pathfinder, an original settler” (4). In telling the story, Carraway comes gradually to realize the inadequacy of his view that “personality” is nothing more than “an unbroken series of successful gestures” (2) and the inadequacy of the language with which the book opens. At the end of chapter six, having just described Gatsby’s love for Daisy, from Gatsby’s point of view, in language that echoes Plato’s Sympo­ sium, Nick has an experience very like anamnesis, in which he almost recov­ ers the memory of his past: Through all he said, even through his appalling sentimentality, I was reminded of something— an elusive rhythm, a fragment of lost words, that I had heard somewhere a long time ago. For a moment a phrase tried to take shape in my mouth and my lips parted like a dumb man’s, as though there was more strug­ gling upon them than a wisp of startled air. But they made no sound, and what I had almost remembered was uncommunicable forever. (112)

Not quite forever. The liminality of West Egg and Gatsby enables Nick to recover through storytelling his own youth and that of the country. Once he has grown beyond his early belief that “life is much more successfully looked at from a single window, after all” (4), he finds that he can remem­ ber the time in his adolescence when he and his companions were “unut­ terably aware of our identity with this country” (177). Only after this participation in another point of view and this experience of communitas with Gatsby can Nick stand on a modern Long Island and find the lan­ guage to bring back “ the old island here that flowered once for Dutch sailors’ eyes—a fresh green breast of the New World” (182). Only then can he “come back home” (178), where the heroic possibilities of Gatsby’s prostituted dream remain, “where the dark fields of the republic rolled on under the night” (182). In his first draft, Fitzgerald had ended his first chapter with these words. But by the final draft, he had made Nick’s movement from liminality to community through the act of fiction a central subject of the book. This recovery of the language and vision of epic is effected by the actual process of telling the story, of recovering past possibilities through fiction. Although examples could be multiplied, these suggest that many American authors focus on the condition of liminality, that they (albeit for different reasons and in different ways) attempt to use and transcend this condition in fictions that can ground perception and discourse less in the isolated individ­ ual person than in a community, and that their fictions both embody and foster such communities. The notions of liminality, communitas, and pilgrim­ age developed by Victor Turner enable us to recognize the artistic choices and the larger cultural significance of this fiction and to understand the ways in which these writers attempt the literary creation and maintenance of cul­ ture by writing and rewriting on the enormous palimpsest of America.

NOTES 1. Frederick Jackson Turner, pp. 57-58. In this discussion I use “culture” in the sense defined by Clifford Geertz: “it denotes an historically transmitted pattern of meanings embodied in symbols, a system of inherited conceptions expressed in sym­ bolic forms by means of which men communicate, perpetuate, and develop their knowledge about and attitudes toward life.” The Interpretation of Cultures, p. 89. In his review of Culture Theory, Anthony F. C. Wallace develops some of the implications of this understanding o f culture as a system of symbols and meanings: “Culture” refers to a system of ideas about the nature of the world and how people should behave in it that is shared, and shared uniquely, by members of a community. The system is learned by children and forms a template, as it were, for the underlying conceptions of self, society and human nature that guide all behavior in that community. Because these ideas are encoded in public symbols such as literary texts, art, the dance, drama and religious ritual, they are accessible to anthropological observation and inquiry, (p. 36)

2. Donoghue, Times Literary Supplement, p. 658. Leo Marx’s letter is quoted from p. 658. 3. Grund, The Americans, p. 149. See also Grund, Aristocracy in America. 4. Nathaniel Hawthorne, Letter (ALS) to Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, 24 Octo­ ber 1854, quoted by permission of the Houghton Library, Harvard University. For this permission I am grateful to Rodney G. Dennis, Curator of Manuscripts. 5. Quoted in Pearce, Historicism Once More, p. 165. 6. Hutchinson, p. 353. The edition which Hawthorne checked out of the Salem Athenaeum was the third, bound in two volumes and published in Boston in 1795. In this edition the description o f Richard Bourne appears in the second volume on page 412. For information on Hawthorne’s borrowings from the Salem Athenaeum, see M. L. Kesselring, “Hawthorne’s Reading, 1828-1850.” 7. For the interaction of history and chivalric expectation in the tale, see Daly, pp. 99-115. For a learned analysis of the historical significance of Lovell’s Fight, see David Levin. For the most sophisticated historicist reading of the tale, see Colacurcio, pp. 107-130. 8. For a detailed analysis of this aspect of Hawthorne’s epistemology, see Co­ lacurcio, pp. 283-313, 439, 519.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Bourdieu, Pierre. Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste. Trans. Richard Nice. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1984. Bradford, William. Of Plymouth Plantation, 1620-1647. Ed. Samuel Eliot Morison. New York: Alfred Knopf, 1975. Cather, Willa. My Antonia. Boston: Houghton, Mifflin, 1954. Colacurcio, Michael J. The Province of Piety: Moral History in Hawthorne's Early Tales. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1984. Commager, Henry Steele. The Search for a Usable Past and Other Essays in Historiogra­ phy. New York: Alfred Knopf, 1967. Cooper, James Fenimore. The Last of the Mohicans: A Narrative of 1757. Ed. James Franklin Beard et al. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1983. ______ Satanstoe; or The Littlepage Manuscripts: A Tale of the Colony. Ed. Robert L. Hough. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1962. Daly, Robert. “History and Chivalric Myth in ‘Roger Malvin’s Burial.’ ” Essex Institute Historical Collections 109 (1973), 99-115. Delbanco, Andrew. The Puritan Ordeal. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1989. Donadio, Stephen. Nietzsche, Henry Jamesf and the Artistic Will. New York: Oxford University Press, 1978. Donoghue, Denis. “Thoughts after Salzburg.” Times Literary Supplement, 13 June 1975, p. 658. Fitzgerald, F. Scott. The Great Gatsby. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1953. Geertz, Clifford. The Interpretation of Cultures. New York: Basic Books, 1973. Grund, Francis J. The Americans in Their Moral, Social, and Political Relations. New York, 1837. Reprint. New York: Johnson Reprint Corp., 1968. ________Aristocracy in America: From the Sketch-book of a German Nobleman. London, 1839; New York: Harper, 1959. Hawthorne, Nathaniel. “Main-Street.” The Snow Image, in The Centenary Edition of the Works of Nathaniel Hawthorne. Ed. Roy Harvey Pearce et al. vol. XI. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1974. ________ “Roger Malvin’s Burial.” Mosses from an Old Manse, in The Centenary Edition

of the Works of Nathaniel Hawthorne. Ed. Roy Harvey Pearce et al. vol. X. Colum­ bus: Ohio State University Press, 1974. ________ The Scarlet Letter. In The Centenary Edition of the Works of Nathaniel Hawthorne. Ed. Roy Harvey Pearce et al. vol. I. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1962. Hutchinson, Thomas. The History of the Colony and Province of Massachusetts Bay. Ed. Lawrence Shaw Mayo. vol. II. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1936. Iser, Wolfgang. “Feigning in Fiction.” In Identity of the Literary Text. Ed. Mario J. Valdes and Owen Miller. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1985. Kesselring, M. L. “Hawthorne’s Reading, 1828-1850.” Bulletin of the New York Public Library 53 (Feb., Mar., Apr. 1949), 55-71, 121-138, 173-194. Levin, David. “Modem Misjudgement of Racial Imperialism in Hawthorne and Parkman.” Yearbook of English Studies 13 (1983), 145-158. Marx, Leo. The Machine in the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in America. New York: Oxford University Press, 1964. Miller, Perry, ed. Major Writers of America. New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1962. Pearce, Roy Harvey. Historicism Once More: Problems and Occasions for the American Scholar. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1969. Turner, Edith L. B. “From the Ndembu to Broadway.” Prologue to Victor Turner, On the Edge of the Bush: Anthropology as Experience. Ed. Edith L. B. Turner. Tucson: University o f Arizona Press, 1985. Turner, Frederick Jackson. The Significance of the Frontier in American History. Ed. Harold P. Simonson, New York: Frederick Ungar, 1963. Turner, Victor. Dramas, Fields, and Metaphors: Symbolic Action in Human Society. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1974. ________On the Edge of the Bush: Anthropology as Experience. Ed. Edith L. B. Turner. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1985. ________ The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-structure. New York: Aldine, 1969. Wallace, Anthony F. C. Review of Culture Theory. Ed. Richard A. Schweder and Rob­ ert A. LeVine. In The New York Times Book Review 10 (Mar. 1985), 36.

MUD, MIRRORS, AND MAKING UP LIMINALITY AND REFLEXIVITY IN BETW EEN THE A C TS B arb a ra A . Babcock and these curious intervals in life— I’ve had many— are the most fruitful artistically— one becomes fertilized. . . . — Virginia Woolf, Diary, 16.ix.29 The mirror itself is the instrument of a universal magic that changes things into a spectacle, spectacles into things, myself unto another, and another unto myself. Artists have often mused upon mirrors because beneath this “mechanical trick,” they recognized just as they did in the case of the trick of perspective, the metamorphosis of seeing and seen which defines both our flesh and the painter’s vocation. — Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Primacy of Perception writing is precisely working (in) the inbetween, inspecting the process of the same and the other without which nothing can live, undoing the work o f death— to admit this is first to want the two, as well as both, the ensemble of one and the other, not fixed in sequence of struggle and expulsion or some other form of death but infinitely dynamized by an incessant process of exchange from one subject to another. A process of different subjects knowing one another anew only from the living boundaries of the other: a multiple and inexhaustible course with millions of encounters and transformations of the same

into the other and into the in-between, from which woman takes her forms. . . . — Hélène Cixous, “The Laugh of the Medusa”

Pretext Originally titled “The Spectacle of Fabrication: Between the Acts' Mirror of ‘Making U p/ ” this essay was written in the summer of 1974 for submission to a Virginia Woolf symposium at the University of California at Santa Cruz. Rejected for that gathering, it was revised for presentation in The Aesthetics of Performance: A Symposium in Honor ofJoseph Doherty held at the University of Texas, Austin, Texas, March, 1975. A longer, final version of this essay con­ stituted a key chapter of my University of Chicago Ph.D. dissertation on narrative reflexivity completed that same year and entitled Mirrors, Masks, and Metafiction: Studies in Narrative Reflexivity. As a consequence of postgrad­ uate work in anthropology at Chicago after the completion of my coursework in comparative literature and of seminars with Victor Turner in particular, who became a member of my doctoral committee, the scope and implications of my concerns extended far beyond the self-contained world of novels about writing novels to the inevitable and necessary role of reflexivity in all human communication and symbolic systems. Although he had never counted Woolf among his favorite authors, Turner was, given his own celebration of the liminal, particularly taken with my discussion of her interstitial aesthetic and the connections I was beginning to elaborate between liminality and reflexiv­ ity.1As he turned his attention from the betwixt and betweens of tribal ritual to the “liminoid” genres of postindustrial society in the last decade of his life, Turner carried this preoccupation with “man’s glassy essence” into his own writings, lectures, and symposia organized—notably “Cultural Frames and Reflections: Ritual Drama and Spectacle” (1977).2 At the same time, I turned from libraries and literature to dusty Pueblo plazas and a study of clowning, reflexivity, and cultural critique. One conse­ quence of this anthropological turn on my part was that neither the disserta­ tion nor the Woolf essay was published then. They were, however, widely disseminated in manuscript form in the process of being reviewed by several presses and journals who kept them an unconscionable length of time. By the time Indiana University Press finally accepted the dissertation for publica­ tion, it was five years out of date and I was too involved in Pueblo studies to take the time necessary to revise. As a result of this lengthy and widespread “unofficial” publication, I have had the less-than-pleasant experience of en­ countering my ideas and my words appropriated without attribution in more

than one context. From Woolfs perspective on authorship and anonymity and “thinking in common” (ROO, 68), this really shouldn’t matter, but it does, given the increasingly competitive structures and reward systems of academe that she was spared. The premium placed on authorial originality produces wholesale appropriation of unpublished materials—a disease that particularly victimizes creative and collegial women. It matters too because such practices now place me in the awkward position of having to assert, “but this was written in 1974, before . . . ,” lest I be accused of appropriat­ ing and failing to acknowledge the appropriator. Indeed, much of this essay was written in 1974-75 and is printed here unchanged. There are, however, some significant additions and re-visions, given the changes both in my own interests and in Woolf scholarship in the last decade and a half—changes occasioned for the most part by feminist theory and practice. The combination of feminist interpretations and the publication of massive amounts of autobiographical and manuscript materi­ als has reshaped Woolf scholarship and has resulted in rereadings upon rereadings upon rereadings . . . As I sort through the files of “orts, scraps, and fragments” accumulated from my own readings and teachings of Between the Acts and its critics, and think about rewriting this essay, I see continuity with a difference but am overwhelmed by the fertility of the interval. Too much has happened; too much has been written. Then, I focused on the indeterminacy, intertextuality, dialogism, and reflexivity of Woolfs text, but did not emphasize the politics of such writing practices. I was seduced and intrigued by her interstitial aesthetic but not conscious of its feminist implications. It was not until I read the Cixous statement cited above and encountered Irigaray saying, as she literally wrote between the lines of men’s texts, that “the feminine must be deciphered as inter-dict: within the signs or between them, between the realized meanings, between the lines . . . ” (,Speculum, 22), that I understood what Woolf was trying to do and I to describe, and why it mattered so much to both of us. “Exploring the interstices and interrupting the seeming continuities of dis­ course are among Woolfs favourite strategies: those of the woman in the corner who raises a doubt as to patriarchal centralities” (Bowlby, 165). The world of hesitation, interruption, and liminal anti-structure is, especially for the woman writer, a world of resistance and revision. “Interruptions there will always be” (ROO, 81), not only because of the nature of women’s lives but because “ ‘Interruption’— ‘breaking in between’—is practiced repeat­ edly as a form of feminist questioning” (Bowlby, 165).3 In addition to incorporating the insights of recent readings of Between the Acts, my revised reading reexamines liminality and reflexivity and the spaces in-between and makes some of these feminist implications explicit. Since this essay was originally written, much more has been published on narrative reflexivity and indeterminacy, and reader response criticism has become a minor industry. I have not updated the essay in these areas because time and space are limited and because nothing I have read substantially revised my

initial reading of the novel. Neither is there space for a critical review of the interpretative history of Between the Acts, which should also be written. This last “unfinished” novel has been described, I think rightly, as both “the most symbolical of all Virginia Woolfs works” (Daiches, 124) and “the final most relentless achievement of that questioning and undermining of literary and historical narrative forms which she had been practising throughout” (Bowlby, 147). It is surely, as its title implies, the most deconstructive of her works in its nonessentialist play of language, in its multivocality and rejection of the concepts of identity and a unified self, and in its dismantling of binary oppositions and insistence on inhabiting interstices— “a little not quite here or there” (BTA, 149).4 Her fiction anticipates Der­ rida’s preoccupation with “undecidables” such as the “pharmakon” which “escape from inclusion in the philosophical (binary) opposition and which nonetheless inhabit it, resist and disorganize it, but without ever constituting a third term, without ever occasioning a solution in the form of speculative dialectics” (Derrida, 36). Not surprisingly, therefore, Between the Acts has evoked contradictory and extreme opinions as to what the “action” of the novel consists of and what it means. Espousing the aesthete stereotype of Woolf, many critics have repeat­ edly separated art and politics and read the novel as either the triumph or the failure of her aesthetic vision on the eve of war—taking one side or the other of the opposition of “unity” and “dispersal” that the novel interro­ gates. Recent studies by Transue and Zwerdling exemplify these extremes. Woolf herself would caution against saying “that they were this or were that” (MD, 10), as have her contemporary feminist critics who insist that her politi­ cal vision and the novel’s experimental design are inseparable, that the poli­ tics of her writing lies precisely in her textual practice (Johnstone 1987, Marcus 1987, 1988, and Moi 1985).

Text In Between the Acts Virginia Woolf muses upon mirrors, uses mirrors and reflective surfaces as symbolic things, and turns the novel itself into a mirror reflecting the creative process. Like Wallace Stevens, she believed that the function of the poet was to study and understand the fictive world. When she was not creating fictions she was writing about fictions— her own and others’—in her diary, her letters, and her critical essays. Her last novel is “a creation within a creation” which combines creating and writing about creat­ ing and makes criticism an integral part of the creative process.5 While Between the Acts is not an explicitly reflexive work in the sense of Velasquez’s Las Meninas, the famous painting of a painter painting a painting, or Gide’s Les Faux-Monnayeurs, the classic novel of the novelist writing a novel, it is nonetheless implicitly reflexive in its depiction of the creating of an illusion and in its examination of the interrelation of art and life, of actor and audi-

ence, of seeing and seen as well as of past, present, and future, and of male and female. For, as Rachel Bowlby and others have pointed out, issues of literary representation, historical narrative, and sexual difference are insepa­ rable in Woolf s work (15).6 All of Virginia Woolfs novels may be regarded as “mirrors held up primar­ ily to the imagination” insofar as they are concerned with the processes of perception and creation, include artist-characters and discussions of art, and exhibit an obvious and self-conscious artistry (Hartman 1961; 20). “One makes up,” she wrote in Mrs. Dalloway, “the better part of life” (MD, 61). Between the Acts is, paradoxically, the culmination of this reflexive tradition; it differs, however, in emphasis and explicitness. Words, books, mirrors, and the creation and re-creation of art are moved to center stage. The author is an actor, the book is a theater, and “the play is the thing.”7 This difference is signaled by the title itself which, unlike those of her other novels, is a term of art. The “action” of the novel takes place before, between, and after the acts of the annual village pageant; the pageant itself consists of a parodie survey of British literary and imperial history; and the novel as a whole may well be a re-creation of A Midsummer Night's Dream, Shakespeare’s re­ creation through the mirror of a folk pageant. Such seasonal dramas and festivals are in turn the re-creations or survivals of ancient fertility rituals.8 Between the Acts' commentary on words, books, the pageant, illusion (and the failure thereof), the authoress Miss La Trobe, and the role of her audi­ ence as well as the very language in which it is written constitutes a subversive speculation on her own art. In this last novel Woolf “has faced squarely her understanding of the process by which she knows her world—which, if it is not tautological, is precisely the process of awareness of process” (Summ erhayes, 3 3 6 -3 3 7 ). This infinitely regressive consciousness of self-consciousness— this awareness of the epistemological paradox of self­ reflection—is an implicit critique of her own aesthetic and of the limits of aesthetic compensation. As Maria DiBattista points out, “Between the Acts is a war book of the most compelling and searching kind, a novel that makes history its subject matter in order to question the validity of art, the limits of the book, and the powers of illusion in a world absorbed in the work of destruction” (1980:195). In their preoccupation, however, with the destruction of World War II, with the debilitating effects of self-consciousness, and, particularly in Vir­ ginia Woolfs case, with the negative consequences of narcissism, critics have tended to forget that “there is something antic about creating, although the enterprise be serious. And there is a matching antic spirit that goes with writing about it . . . ” (Bruner 1973:17). Woolf enjoyed “romping” with words and “making up” “at intervals . . . during the drudgery” of her biog­ raphy of Roger Fry, and she knew how to play with mirrors.9 Before we dismiss her self-conscious artificing as inconsequential fooling around, we might consider that “the ability to differentiate or abstract oneself from a task, to turn around on one’s own performance and, so to speak, see oneself,

©ne’s own performance as differentiated from another,” is a primary prereq­ uisite of “serious play”— a condition of creativity (Bruner 1972:5). In Between the Acts Virginia Woolf reminds a tragically preoccupied genera­ tion (between the wars) of the dynamic mystery of mind, of the playful as well as the serious aspects of creativity, of fertility and natality as well as death and destruction. That the novel is a playful reflection on narrative itself and that there is something primal and generative about such reflexivity is marked initially and finally by her parody of the traditional narrative frame. The novel begins: It was a summer’s night and they were talking, in the big room with the win­ dows open to the garden, about the cesspool. (BTA, 9)

It ends: It was night before roads were made, or houses. It was the night that dwellers in caves had watched from some high place among the rocks. Then the curtain rose. They spoke. (BTA, 219)

In their “coincidence of opposites” and their inversions, this combination of “big rooms” and “cesspools,” of cave dwellings and country houses, of past and present, and the transformation of the ending into a beginning also establish a “liminoid” frame for this very liminal novel.10 Woolfs curtain rises not only on Giles and Isa but also on some of the most interesting “fiction” of our own day which plays games with and en­ joys—as do Borges, Barth, and Cortazar, and more recently Cixous, Irigaray, and Wittig—the possibilities of language and the pleasures of literary par­ ody. And the game itself, while expressing the writer’s consciousness of the way verbal structures intervene between us and reality, offers us new possi­ bilities of reality (Levine, 234). It also offers, as Julia Kristeva’s similar sub­ version of signifying practices demonstrates, new possibilities for critique. In reviewing her own critical practice, Kristeva suggests that “it was perhaps also necessary to be a woman to attempt to take up that exorbitant wager of carrying the rational project to the outer borders of the signifying venture of men” (1980:x). But how are these mirrors and gaps and liminal possibilities related, and how are they gender-inflected? In the first place, Between the Acts could be said to enact the realization that “whoever reflects recognizes that there are empty and lonely spaces between one’s experiences [and that] perhaps these gaps are the products of reflection or at least its fruits” (Bruner 1973:60). Further, the novel expresses the belief that the spaces between acts are as important as and as much a part of experience as the acts themselves; that “words must be interspersed with pauses, silences, to be understood,” and that the “deepest understanding, especially as between persons, comes often in the silence that follows an utterance” (Ong, 187). Or, as Mary Douglas as well as Turner has demonstrated, what falls between the categories of various

systems of structuring or classifying reality is as important as—perhaps sym­ bolically more important than— that which fits. From this perspective, Be­ tween the Acts affirms “that there is a sense in which a performance that is both more original and more specifically female develops in the spaces left by the male performance’* (Simmel, 76). In a diary note concerning The Years, Virginia Woolf wrote: “I think I see how I can bring in interludes— I mean spaces of silence” (AWD, 252). By the time she started writing Between the Acts three years later, the concept became so refined that silence appears to mean “that which transpires literally be­ tween the acts of spoken thought” (Richter, 229). This aesthetic of silence and space is evident also both in her critical writing on fiction and in an early version of the novel. As early as 1919 in “The Anatomy of Fiction,” she notes regarding Jane Austen that “between the sentences, apart from the story, a little shape of some kind builds itself up” (GR, 54). And in the April, 1938, Pointz Hall typescript, the narrator observes: That feeling slipped between the space that separates one word from another; like a blue flower between two stones. What breadth of time, what river of people feeling. . . . ran between those islands of speech; leaving the old man high and dry on his; them on theirs.11

Perhaps most important, in an essay on Sterne, whom she hails as “the forerunner of the moderns” because of his “interest in silence rather than speech,” she makes the connection between in-between spaces and reflec­ tion which I’ve suggested here: what he doesn’t say makes us “consult our own minds” and reflect upon what he does say and upon what we add to fill the gap (CRII, 71). Her essay on “The Russian Point of View” similarly links indeterminacy, inconclusiveness, categorical confusion, and reflexivity (CR, 177-187). That spaces are reflexive and therefore subversive is comi­ cally explicit when Orlando goes to sleep as a man and wakes up as a woman. H is/her biographer observes: “ It is these pauses that are our un­ doing. It is then that sedition enters the fortress and our troops rise in insurrection” (O, 80). In Turner’s terms, such liminal figures and spaces “break the cake of custom and enfranchise speculation” (1967:106). In Mary Douglas’s, “dirt,” i.e., anomaly, ambiguity, invites us “to turn round and confront the categories on which [one’s] whole surrounding culture has been built up and to recognize them for the fictive, man-made, arbi­ trary creations that they are” (200). Mirrors are used throughout the world to symbolize moments of transi­ tion between states, between the acts of personal as well as social experi­ ence. When Lewis Carroll has Alice go through a looking glass as a passage between worlds, he is simply playing on this widely held—if not univer­ sal—belief that mirrors designate the Urnen between the worlds. Mirrors are a symbol, in our culture and many others, both of the moment of passage between worlds (thus the covering of the mirror when a person

dies to keep the soul from harm until the body can be appropriately in­ terred) and of the possibility of using one world to comment upon the other, often in an inverted and licentious manner. The latter is evidenced in the fool or jester’s use of the mirror and in the wearing of small mirrors by clowning and dancing characters in festivals throughout the Old World. As Grabes remarks in his important study of mirror imagery in the Middle Ages and Renaissance, not only was the mirror an especially powerful vehicle for expressing a multi­ plicity of moral and material modes of perception— more importantly, as an object which could visibly “re-make” any other object, the mirror was a para­ digm for the kind of poetic creativity which, according to Giordano Bruno, perceived the unit in dissimilars and thus gave expression to universal analo­ gies. (255)12

Woolfs awareness of these powers of mirroring is ironically explicit in her oft-quoted inversion of female narcissism in A Room of One's Own: Women have served all these centuries as looking-glasses possessing the magic and delicious power of reflecting the figure of man at twice its natural size. Without that power probably the earth would still be swamp and jungle. . . . Whatever may be their use in civilised societies, mirrors are essential to all violent and heroic action. . . . if she begins to tell the truth, the figure in the looking-glass shrinks; his fitness for life is diminished. . . . The looking-glass vision is o f supreme importance because it charges the vitality; it stimulates the nervous system. Take it away and man may die, like the drug fiend deprived of his cocaine. (35-36)

That “the earth would still be swamp and jungle” without this power sug­ gests that reflexivity is essential for the construction of any system. But, as Between the Acts demonstrates, the reverse is also, therefore, possible—reflex­ ivity is the vehicle of deconstruction and critique, of re-making and un­ making, enabling the movement in a single midsummer’s day from man-made structures back to swamp, mud, primal matrix. As Miss La Trobe drinks away her disappointment after the pageant, “words of one syllable” sink down into the mud, and “the mud became fertile.” “She set down her glass. She heard the first words” (BTA, 212). In all these aspects, mirrors are apposite to both the context and the subject matter of Woolfs liminal novel. Every level of narrative context or setting from the most distant to the most immediate is an interstitial space: the period between World Wars I and II; the moment of transition between decades: June, 1939; a Midsummer’s Day: the summer solstice or turning point in the career of the sun; the moments between the acts of the pageant; the spaces between spoken words. Similarly, context from the author’s point of view as well as the reader’s may be described as an in-between space. As noted, the larger part of the novel was written in moments of “making up” between her struggles with the facts of Roger Fry’s biography. And for the

reader, “the novel as a whole is a pageant occurring literally between the acts of the drama which the reader himself plays before and after reading it” (Gra­ ham, 200). Whatever we might define as the “subject” of the narrative is similarly an interstitial or uncertain phenomenon: the interval in and love-hate ambiva­ lence of Giles’s and Isa’s relationship; the temporal confusion of past, pres­ ent, and future; the war between the sexes between the wars as well as the relationships between the characters which occur between the acts of the pageant; the transitions between dreaming and waking, thought and speech, subjective (private) and objective (public) self; the interpenetration of poetry and prose, of lyric murmurs and orders for fish, of vision and fact; or the confusions of backstage and frontstage, of actor and audience, of illusion and reality, of experience and reflection. This list is by no means exhaustive, and the innumerable possible referents which may be (and have been) ascribed to the title alone are testimony that virtually every aspect of the novel is in some way “betwixt and between” fixed stages or categories. Vir­ ginia Woolf posits a world, a family, and art itself hovering between the acts: “a little not quite here or there” (BTA, 149); “They were neither one thing nor the other” (BTA, 178).13 This subject or theme of uncertainty is also reflected in the form of the novel itself and in the language in which it is written. Her “interesting at­ tempt in a new method,” (AWD, 359) realizes a conception of the novel as the “intertextual” and interstitial process that she expressed in conversations with herself and with others. To herself she makes the following comments when she first sketches out the book: Let it be random and tentative . . . don’t I implore lay down a scheme; call in all the cosmic immensities; and force my tired and diffident brain to embrace another whole— all parts contributing— not yet awhile. . . . Why not Poyntzet Hall: a centre: all literature discussed in connection with real little incongruous living humour; and anything that comes into my head; but “I” rejected: “we” substituted: to whom at the end there shall be an invoca­ tion? “We” . . . the composed of many different things . . . we all life, all art, all waifs and strays— a rambling capricious but somehow unified whole— the present state of my mind? . . . and a perpetual variety and change from intensity to prose, and facts— and notes; and— but eno’: I must read Roger. . . . (AWD, 289-290)

And in a conversation with Stephen Spender, she came out with something like this: “I don’t think there’s any form in which the novel has to be written. My idea is to make use of every form and bring it within a unity which is that particular novel. There’s no reason why a novel shouldn’t be written partly in prose, and with scenes in it like those in a play. I would like to write a novel which is a fusion of poetry and dialogue as in a play. I would like to experiment with every form and bring it within the scope of the novel.” (Spender, 154)

Again, in a 1927 essay, “The Narrow Bridge of Art,” she prophetically de­ scribed her last novel: If then, we are daring and risk ridicule and try to see in what direction we who seem to be moving so fast are going, we may guess that we are going in the direction of prose and that in ten or fifteen years’ time prose will be used for purposes for which prose has never been used before. That cannibal, the novel, which has devoured so many forms of art will by then have devoured even more. We shall be forced to invent new names for different books which masquerade under this one heading. And it is possible that there will be among the so-called novels ones which we shall scarcely know how to christen. It will be written in prose, but in prose which has many of the characteristics of poetry. It will have something of the exaltation of poetry, but much of the ordinariness o f prose. It will be dramatic, and yet not a play. It will be read, not acted. . . . (GR, 18)

This inconclusive or all-inclusive aesthetic and the creation of “an always incipient cosmos” (Stevens 1971, 229) in the shape of a “queer conglomera­ tion of incongruous things” (GR, 18), of “orts, scraps, and fragments” in Between the Acts, implies a phenomenological aesthetic and metaphysic— a formal and ideological openness. This was a mutually influential vision that she shared with feminist and relativist Ruth Benedict, who read and admired The Waves when writing her anthropological classic Patterns of Culture (1934).14 Woolf, in turn, was reading Patterns in 1940 when writing Between the Acts: “I’m reading Ruth Benedict with pressure of suggestions—about culture pattern—which suggests rather too much” (AWD, 340). The loud­ speaking anonymous voice that asks at the end of the pageant, “how's this wall, the great wall, which we call, perhaps miscall, civilization, to be built by (here the mirrors flicked and flashed) orts, scraps, and fragments like ourselves?" (BTA, 188) echoes Benedict’s fragmentary concept of culture as a process of combining and recombining disparate elements. This too suggests that Woolf s insistence on the processes of perception and creation and her re­ fusal of any delimiting syntheses are the consequence neither of a failure of vision nor of the unfinished, unrevised state of the novel. The liminal form, the bricolage, and the multivocality of Between the Acts seem rather a deliberate critique of a variety of masculine structures begin­ ning with “his” sentence. Her processual vision is very likely a questioning of Clive Bell’s notion of “significant form” and the tendency in his and Roger Fry’s writings on art between 1910 and 1925 toward a purely formalist and self-contained aesthetic insisting on the radical separation of art and life. Her rejection of “I” and substitution of “we” and her evocation of “the common voice singing out of doors” who has no house and is sometimes a man, sometimes a woman (Silver 1979:382), is a critique too of their assumptions of masculine authority, originality, and class privilege—of all that Oxbridge “culture” implies.15 In contrast, Woolf presents an amateur village pageant, written and directed by “Miss Whatshername,” with cows and music filling in

the gaps and with “looking-glasses and voices in the bushes,” the meaning of which she refuses to explain (BTA, 213). In Turner’s terms, structure has been displaced by anti-structure; in Kristeva’s terms, the “symbolic” order in this novel is deliberately ruptured and remodeled by the influx of maternal/ feminine “semiotic” choral Every aspect of the novel reflects this semiotic/symbolic interaction char­ acteristic of the signifying practice. One instance on the level of character and narrative action is the recurrent and unfinished dialogue between Lucy Swithin, a “unifier,” and her brother, Bartholomew Oliver, a “separatist,” which, like the last words of the gramophone, ends inconclusively: “The gramophone gurgled Unity—Dispersity. It gurgled Un . . . dis . . . And ceased” (BTA, 201). Woolfs mockery of the playwright, Miss La Trobe, with her fear of intervals, her anxiety to connect, and her “passion for getting things up” (BTA, 58), suggests a denial of the feminine and an overidentifica­ tion with the “symbolic” on La Trobe’s part. At the first interval, she is described as follows: “Curse! Blast! Damn ’em!“ Miss La Trobe in her rage stubbed her toe against a root. Here was her downfall; here was the Interval. Writing this skimbleskamble stuff in her cottage, she had agreed to cut the play here; a slave to her audience— to Mrs. Sands’ grumble— about tea; about dinner— she had gashed the scene here. Just as she had brewed emotion, she split it. . . . (BTA, 94)

And at the end of the same interval: Over there behind the tree Miss La Trobe gnashed her teeth. She crushed her manuscript. The actors delayed. Every moment the audience flipped the noose; split up into scraps and fragments. (BTA, 122)

Miss La Trobe’s concern to maintain her illusion involves, like Mrs. Ram­ sey’s matchmaking, a “refusal to sustain the separateness of things in an over great anticipation of final unity” (Hartman 1961:31). In contrast, Woolfs tone as well as her indefinite expansion and exploitation of every interval in the novel should warn us against identifying—as many have— the author’s aesthetic with that of her dramatist. In contrast to Miss La Trobe’s horror of scraps and fragments, Virginia Woolf “never losefs] a chance of the whimsi­ cal and perilous charm of daily life, with its meetings and words and acci­ dents,” and her cursing of fragments would probably take the form: “my God, what scraps!” 17 Moreover, as Geoffrey Hartman reminds us: “each art­ ist resists his [her] own vision. This resistance, however, cannot take place except in the space of fiction, and requires the creation of a work of art which is its own implicit critique” (1961:231). Between the Acts is the culmination of Virginia Woolfs continuous doubting of the continuity she repeatedly posited. It is almost as though she spent her life trying to overcome the spaces between things, to connect only to realize on reflecting that “truth” or “reality” resides as much in the interruptions,

in the moments between, as in the moments of unity. In contrast to Miss La Trobe, the novelist’s performance expresses a willingness to rest in uncertain­ ties and an awareness that keeping the imagination alive involves staying alive to space, to “The mobile and immobile flickering / In the area between is and was” (Stevens 1954:474), to the “eternal interstices of unreason” (Borges, 115). She uses blank spaces as transitions, interrupts every sequence she initiates, and blows gaps between words. Like the sculptor Henry Moore who discovered that “the hole connects one side to another, making it imme­ diately more three-dimensional” (Bruner 1973:22), Virginia Woolf realizes the paradox that blank spaces, interruptions, and mirrors are as much means of imaginative continuity as they are instances of discontinuity. In commenting on her discursive practices in Between the Acts, J. Hillis Miller queries if the “gap” may not hide a positive truth, “being,” and sug­ gests that “women may be especially able to reach down through the false veils woven by male egoism to get at this truth and express it, as words, for example, rise up from the mud to initiate Miss La Trobe’s new play” (229). While he recognizes the power of the in-between, Miller does not see, as feminist theorists have, that women have no choice but to inhabit these un­ tenable, unstable “lacunae”— for women, firm ground is not available ground. In Les Guérrillieres, a novel that makes explicit the violence hidden in the depths of Woolfs texts (Jardine, 232), Monique Wittig asserts that woman’s language is “apparent precisely in the intervals that your masters have not been able to fill with their words of proprietors and possessors, this can be found in the gaps, in all that which is not a continuation of their discourse . . . ” (112—113). The fact that woman’s sentence could not make sense or be heard within the masculine structure is what “gives the suggestive power and greater openness to Woolfs ‘between,’ to the suspended or undecidable ‘woman’s sentence,’ and to her continued refusal to come to a con­ clusion, to complete the sentence” (Bowlby, 170). The most obvious gap in Between the Acts is the absence of transitions. In contrast to her other novels with their “curiously wrought bridges that a traveller must dawdle over” (Rosenberg, 219), here the parts, the “scenes,” into which the text is divided are separated from one another by blank spaces. Italics are used to demarcate the abrupt shifts from the language of the pageant to the words which interrupt and surround it. These two levels are so confused that there is little to separate them but this typographic space. The pageant’s mirroring of the main text includes a reduplication of its holes and spaces: in Act 2, the parody of restoration drama, the producer omits a scene and “begs the audience to imagine that in the interval . . . ” (BTA, 141). Woolf uses ellipses as well as italics to underline the discontinu­ ous and inconclusive nature of language. And when she does not actually create a space diacritically, she creates one with intervening phrases and clauses between subject and verb or verb and object as in the first sentence of the novel: “It was a summer’s night and they were talking, in the big room with the windows open to the garden, about the cesspool” (BTA, 3). Beyond

the embedded sentences, conversations—both dialogues and “soliloquies in solitude,” descriptions of scenes, and the script of the play are fragmented to the point that one almost growls with Miss La Trobe, “O the torture of these interruptions!” (BTA, 79). And sometimes there is no obvious continuity to interrupt when the narrative consists of a patchwork of phrases detached from their immediate context or quotations separated from their speaker or snatched from another work of literature. Like Walter Benjamin, Woolf “robbed” history and literature of authority and tradition by tearing frag­ ments out of context and arranging them afresh. “By quotation, she sought to rob history of its power over women” (Marcus 1988:75).18 For women, Cixous tells us, to write is voler, to fly or to steal; “it’s no accident: women take after birds and robbers” (1983:291). As my preceding discussion has implied, these spaces and interruptions also operate as mirrors in that they constitute a form of narrative self­ commentary. By means of dashes and parentheses, the narrator not only interrupts the sentence, she comments on what she has just said or reported being said and on the shape of the masculine sentence she has inherited. This dialogue with one’s self and one’s text functions to shift our attention from what is narrated to the process of narrating itself. On the other hand, quota­ tion from and allusion to other writers constitutes a dialogue with other liter­ ary texts and creates within the narrative an intertextual space which comments both backward to the original text and forward to the present narrative scene. The novel’s pervasive parody (including self-parody) is the antic aspect of Woolfs intertextual dialogue. The grimmer intertexts— the newspaper article, the repeated allusions to Procne and Philomela, the innu­ merable bird images—function like the chorus in Greek tragedy to tell a story of rape, of silencing, of having to write otherwise, of “undifferentiated voices who sing like birds in the pauses of the wind” (CR, 30).19 In addition to this implicit commentary made on the medium by which she does with language, she explicitly describes what she does through repeated comments on words. Unlike her artist characters Isa Oliver and Miss La Trobe, Virginia Woolf hides neither her art nor her presence. Explicit metanarration usually takes the form of comments on the spoken and unspo­ ken language of the novel’s characters and the pageant’s actors. Or, it may take the form of discourse upon words in and of themselves irrespective of any speaker, of discourse on the hazards and possibilities of language. Again and again, she remarks upon the poetic or non referential use of language and evokes the “semiotic.” In the first scene of the novel, words are de­ scribed as something to be savored for their own sake: “they were talking— not shaping pellets of information or handing ideas from one to another, but rolling words, like sweets on their tongues; which, as they thinned to trans­ parency, gave off pink, green, and sweetness” (BTA, 10). In the moments before the pageant begins, we are warned that “Words this afternoon ceased to lie flat in the sentence. They rose, became menacing and shook their fists at you” (BTA, 59). And, again, at the end of the pageant, with Miss La Trobe

lamenting her “failure” and seeking solace in drink, we are reminded of the primal, creative power of language: “Words of one syllable sank down into the mud. She drowsed; she nodded. The mud became fertile. Words rose above the intolerably laden dumb oxen plodding through the mud. Words without meaning—wonderful words” (BTA, 212). In addition to fracturing and blowing gaps in grammatical, conversational, and narrative sequences, Woolf explicitly comments on the linear and sequen­ tial ordering of language. For example, after Lucy Swithin’s announcement: “I’ve been nailing the placard on the Bam,” the following remarks are made regarding repetition and the expectation of a fixed conversational sequence: The words were like the first peal of a chime of bells. As the first peals, you hear the second; as the second peals, you hear the third. So when Isa heard Mrs. Swithin say: “I’ve been nailing the placard on the Barn,” she knew she would say next: “For the pageant.’’ And he would say: “Today? By Jupiter! I’d forgotten!” [the conversation continues with a discussion of whether it will be wet or fine which parodies the famous conversation of Mr. and Mrs. Ramsey in To the Lighthouse] Every summer, for seven summers now, Isa had heard the same words; about the hammer and the nails; the pageant and the weather. Every year it was— one or the other. The same chime followed the same chime, only this year she heard: “The girl screamed and hit him about the face with a hammer.” (BTA, 21-22) [This quotation which interrupts the predictable sequence is from the previously mentioned newspaper intertext about a barracks rape.]

Another type of explicit and embedded metanarration is the running com­ mentary made by characters within the novel on the pageant within the novel. The most notable is the Reverend G. W. Streatfield’s comments at the conclusion of the pageant. The narrator playfully imagines his puzzled “in­ terpretation,” his “summing up” of the “Message” of the pageant as begin­ ning with the invocation: “O Lord, protect and preserve us from words the defilers, from words the impure! What need have we of words to remind us? Must I be Thomas, you Jane?” (BTA, 190). When he concludes with an appeal for donations for “The illumination of our dear old church,” his “word was cut in two. A zoom severed it. Twelve aeroplanes in perfect forma­ tion like a flight of wild duck came overhead. That was the music. The audi­ ence gaped; the audience gazed” (BTA, 193). Thus, Woolf combines ironic comment on the inadequacies of her medium and profound distrust of lan­ guage with observations about the audience and the audience’s observations about the drama and about the context of the pageant. It is a doubly subver­ sive move to interrupt Streatfield’s patriarchal platitudes with the “music” of the military-industrial complex.

One of the best examples of the spaces and mirrors created between words, of the confusion of levels of verbal reality, and of explicit as well as implicit narrative self-commentary occurs in the description of the following scene from Act 2 of the pageant: . . . the stage was empty; the emotion must be continued; the only thing to continue the emotion was the song; the words were inaudible. “Louder! Louder!” She threatened them with her clenched fists. Digging and delving (they sang), hedging and ditching, we pass . . . Summer and winter, autumn and spring return . . . All passes but we, all changes . . . but we remain forever the same . . . (The breeze blew gaps between their words.) “Louder!” “Louder!” Miss La Trobe vociferated. Palaces tumble down (they resumed), Babylon, Nineveh, Troy . . . The words died away. Only a few great names— Babylon, Nineveh, Clytemnestra, Agamemnon, Troy— floated across the open space. Then the wind rose, and in the rustle of the leaves even the great words became inaudible; and the audience sat staring at the villagers, whose mouths opened, but no sound came. And the stage was empty. Miss La Trobe leant against the tree paralyzed. Her power had left her . . . Illusion had failed. “This is death,” she mur­ mured, “death.” Then suddenly, as the illusion petered out, the cows took up the burden. One had lost her calf. In the very nick of time she lifted her great moon-eyed head and bellowed. All the great moon-eyed heads laid themselves back. From cow after cow came the same yearning bellow. The whole world was filled with dumb yearning. It was the primeval voice sounding loud in the ear of the present moment. . . . The cows annihilated the gap; bridged the distance; filled the emptiness and continued the emotion. (BTA, 139-141)

This lack of verbal connectedness, like the refrain about it, “orts, scraps, fragments,” paradoxically becomes a (if not the) means of connecting. But if not verbal connectedness, then what? Obviously nature both destroys and rescues this particular cultural performance, but it’s more complicated than that. Not insignificantly, it is a cow bellowing for her calf that fills the gap. The most common manifestation of the Great Mother as Preserver is the horned, milk-giving Moon-cow who appears in Greek mythology as Io, in Egyptian mythology as Hathor, from whom Isis evolved (Walker, 180-182). In later iconography, Isis is frequently depicted as a cow’s head on a human body. The “primeval voice” could also be read as Demeter calling for her daughter Persephone. In fact, the entire novel is a palimpsest of mythical elements associated with goddess figures, including Artemis, Themis, and Juno as well. Allusions within allusions all evoking the maternal semiotic, the female power of generation, the image of the female writer regathering the fragments of patriarchal culture—allying “the functioning of that ‘air or song beneath the text’ with woman” (Kristeva 1986:97). “Placing words to­ gether on a page, she set free the fertile and promiscuous Mother Tongue” (Marcus 1987:16). As Evelyn Haller (114) observes, Isis was “the stable, life-

giving, female factor. . . . while pharoahs came and went and her brother and consort died each year to be reborn as Horus with the flooding of the Nile, Isis remained constant, the source of life.” She also argues that Woolf chose, for personal and political reasons, “to eschew male-dominated sys­ tems of thought for one informed by the oldest, most enduring, and most coherent female myth: that of Isis” (113).20 Virginia Woolfs reflexive use of language, literature, and mythology mir­ rors in microcosm the drama of the novel between the acts: “we watch the drama of the novel, becoming an audience for it; the audience in the novel is drama, watching drama which reflects the audience itself.” It is, as Ann Wilkinson points out, like “holding a mirror to a mirror, seeing the reflec­ tions scale down into infinity” (152). The most literal form of such “interior duplication,” i.e., “the symbolic shuffling of the planes of reality and fic­ tion,” is the play-within-the-play (Livingstone, 405). The art-within-art ad infinitum of the pageant between the acts of the novel and the novel between the acts of the pageant and the play within the pageant and the seasonal fertility ritual within the midsummer’s pageant is both a creation of vision in depth and a critique of the single realistic mirror or representation. As Woolf says of Miss La Trobe, “another play always lay behind the play she had just written” (BTA, 63). That this is also a critique of a masculine vision of things is expressed in the reflection of mother goddess worship and matriarchal ritual in each of the novel’s mirror surfaces and the evocation of Isis ritual— specifically the June festival celebrated when the star of Isis arose—in the play behind the play behind the play. When the waters of the Nile began to rise attendant upon this ritual, processions on the banks in her honor fea­ tured mirrors “similar to the spirit and fact of the mirror dance at Pointz Hall” (Haller 1983:116-117; BTA, 183ff). In Woolfs midsummer pageant as in holiday shows generally, it is “cus­ tomary to make game with the difference between art and life by witty transi­ tions back and forth between them” (Barber, 141). Like the Elizabethan dramatists she so much admired— she noted on finishing Between the Acts, “my ‘higher life’ is almost entirely the Elizabethan play” (AWD, 365)—she makes comedy out of the incongruity between art and life, between makebelieve and reality (or turbans and dishcloths) when she puts pageantry on the stage. And like her holes, this incongruous pageant is also a means to unity and depth: “drama becomes, then, not only a principle of unity in the novel, but a diagram for the process of unification by which Art, Life and History are created, both within the novel and without” (Wilkinson, 154). Miss La Trobe’s pageant, entitled “The Masculine Conception of Life,” is a multiple mirror reflecting directly the drama of relationships within which it occurs— the problems of male and female relationships. The three plays that make up the “acts” of the pageant and can be read as parodies of Shake­ speare, Congreve, and Gilbert and Sullivan are all at bottom the same play about love between the sexes (Naremore, 233). But more important, in its crude parody of English literature, this piece of folk dramatics, like Bottom’s

play, reflects inversely the author’s sophisticated and, as discussed above, strategic uses of past literature in allusion, quotation, and parody as well as a consciousness of the creative or poetic act itself which pervades her noveldrama. Similarly, the players’ “uncritical imaginativeness’’ in “openly climbing in the window of aesthetic illusion’’ (Barber, 151-152) and getting stuck mid­ way dramatizes the confusion of background and foreground, of backstage and frontstage, of past and present that is the deliberate effect of such so­ phisticated mise en abyme as Between the Acts. That Woolf succeed in confusing figure and ground is evident in the antithetical readings of the “subject” and the meaning of the novel. While the majority of critics read the action be­ fore, between, and after the acts of the pageant as primary, Daiches regards the pageant as the main drama of the novel. But which is the reality and which the reflection? Is our focus not on the drama of the interrelationships of the two dramas themselves, which is in turn a reflection of the relationship between ourselves and the novel? The larger implication of this interstitial aesthetic is a concept of the equiv­ alence and therefore interchangeability of the component elements of the cosmos: man and animal, male and female, reality and imagination, actor and audience, life and art. “What is involved is . . . the reinterpretation of reality to exclude mutually hostile opposites by making microcosm and macrocosm reciprocal facets of a total reality” (Livingstone, 394). By means of mirrors and interior duplication, she criticizes the dialectical construction of her own novels and creates rather a “balanced irresolution,” an unending dialogue between herself and her reader. Between the Acts is, as she said in her last essay, “The Reader,” “ a world where nothing is concluded” (Silver 1979:429). However, in contrast to Turner, who chose not to focus on the dark side of liminality and anti-structure, Woolf was all too aware of the monstrous ambi­ guity, the “abjection” of such a world. In the middle of the “half an hour’s interval, for tea,” Giles, kicking “a barbaric stone” down the path to the Barn, encounters an olive green ring . . . a snake. Dead? No, choked with a toad in its mouth. The snake was unable to swallow; the toad was unable to die. A spasm made the ribs contract; blood oozed. It was birth the wrong way round— a mon­ strous inversion. So, raising his foot, he stamped on them. The mass crushed and slithered. The white canvas on his tennis shoes was bloodstained and sticky. But it was action. Action relieved him. He strode to the Bam, with blood on his shoes. (BTA, 99)

Like all liminal symbols, this scene is extremely multivocal and polysemous and merits lengthy analysis in and of itself. Briefly, snakes and toads are “naturally” ambivalent. In Egyptian mythology, the frog or toad was a sym­ bol of the fetus. Serpents are everywhere identified with the Mother God­ dess, and there is widespread belief that menstruation is initiated by

copulation with the serpent (Walker, 903—909). The “olive green ring” sug­ gests the Ouroborus, specifically the Python at Delphi. Sandra Shattuck reads “the mythological level of Giles’ violent act as Apollo’s killing of the python at Delphi and the possibility of ‘an imagined transition from a matri­ archal order to a patriarchal one’ ” (290). This possibility also explains Giles’s stone kicking if one reads these “pre-historic” stones as icons of the pre-Hellenic Creatress, Themis, who taught the survivors of the flood to repopulate the earth by flinging “the bones of their mother,” i.e., stones, behind them as they walked (Walker, 990-991). If read from Julia Kristeva’s perspective, the “monstrous inversion,” the violence, and the “bloodstained and sticky” tennis shoes epitomize the “abjection”— “birth the wrong way round”—of Giles “confronting the maternal.” “What disturbs identity, sys­ tem, order. What does not respect borders, positions, rules” ensures life—is, in Turner’s terms, “the forts et origo of all structure” (Dramas, Fields, Meta­ phors, 202), the “seedbed of cultural creativity” (“Liminal to Liminoid,” 60)—but also “causes abjection” (Kristevea 1982;4).21 Woolfs creation of an inconclusive world like Miss La Trobe’s pageant engenders a space for the audience or reader to enter and imagine and re­ create—a space that is also an unsettling, abjecting “hole.” The “vulgar” but “exhilarating” Mrs. Manresa embodies this ambivalence. Her flaunting of decorum, like Woolf s breach of the then-accepted novelistic conventions, is “a desirable, at least valuable, quality—for everybody felt, directly she spoke, ‘She’s said it, she’s done it, not I,’ and could take advantage of the breach of decorum, of the fresh air that blew in, to follow like leaping dolphins in the wake of an ice-breaking vessel” (BTA, 41). With regard to the “double-voiced discourse” and feminist intertexts of Between the Acts, it should be noted that like Mrs. Manresa, Virginia Woolf described her friend, the composer Ethel Smyth, as “an ironclad . . . one of the icebreakers, the gun runners, the window smashers,” and that dolphins are identified with Themis, the fishgoddess (Walker, 313-314).22 While it would seem—and is often argued—that like vulgarity such reflex­ ive or narcissistic concern with one’s art excludes rather than includes one’s audience, Woolf not only says but enacts the opposite. How is it that art turned in upon itself implicates the reader in the spectacle of fabrication? In the first place both the role of the reader and the self-reflexiveness of the work “have in common a playing with the reality of fiction” (Nelson, 175). More specifically, the reader is involved because fabrication is a protest against and a questioning of the immediacy of the self-evident (Iser 1974:161). Such play with mirrors denies any “teleology that might endow the self with a final, determinate meaning” and forces the reader to reflect upon his own interpretative processes (Iser 1974:169-170). “In this sense,” Kristeva argues (1986:117), “textual experience represents one of the most daring explorations the subject can allow himself, one that delves into his constitutive process.” Reflexivity creates “places of indeterminacy”—gaps or holes in the text—

which the reader must fill in with his own imagination and which thus con­ fuse the distinction between actor and audience, between writer and reader.23 More recently, Macherey has explored the political implications of this, arguing that the silences, gaps, and contradictions of a text reveal its ideological determination; what it is forbidden to say. What Woolf implies and Kristeva makes explicit (1977:519) is that “what is not represented, what is not said, what remains outside of nominations and ideologies” is “fe­ male.”24 Indeterminacy invites us to explore, develop, and fill in a space of significance— to speak what the text does not. But, once the reader “enters into the movement of the text, he [she] will find himself [herself] increasingly drawn into the exposure of the conditions that underlie his [her] own judge­ ment. . . . In this process lies the esthetic dynamism of such texts: they reso­ lutely resist all attempts at total comprehension, for this is the only way in which they can break down the barriers to the reader’s contemplation of his [her] own ideas” (Iser 1974:169-170). And once the reader becomes aware of her own passion to connect, her instinct to compare, she realizes that her own capacity for metaphor is infinite and that reading is as much the produc­ tion as the interpretation of metaphor (Culler, 219-229). The reflexivity of Between the Acts is as much about the performance of the reader and about the creation of the text in reading as it is about the perfor­ mance of the writer. This final novel is a graphic exposition of her concept of the “creative reader”—her belief that involvement of the reader or specta­ tor as collaborator is essential in the curious situation of artistic communica­ tion.25 Between the Acts embodies the aesthetic dynamism she ascribed to the Elizabethan play, for “it will not suffer itself to be read passively, but takes us and reads us; flouts our preconceptions; questions principles which we had got in the habit of taking for granted” (CR, 48). In fact, the Elizabethan playhouse in which “one feels half the work of the dramatist was done by the public” (CR, 52) may be regarded as the model for the interdependence of author and reader in Between the Acts. This is also, as Brenda Silver has ar­ gued, the model of community that the novel advocates (1977:291-298). We are told by Bartholomew before the pageant begins that “our part is to be the audience. And a very important part too” (BTA, 58). Just how impor­ tant is manifest in Miss La Trobe’s wish that she could do away with the audience: “O to write a play without an audience— the play” (BTA, 180), which is, of course, belied by the very structure of her pageant, which, like the novel itself, “makes everyone do something” (BTA, 58). And when she turns the mirrors on the audience in the “awful show-up” of the final para­ bolic scene of her pageant, the novel-drama shows “the audience/reader as participator and the work of art as a mirror in which the reader views him­ self’ (Richter, 238-239), and reflector and reflected merge: Look! Out they come, from the bushes— the riff-raff. Children? Imps— elves— demons. Holding what? Tin cans? Bedroom candlesticks? Old jars? My dear, that’s the cheval glass from the Rectory! And the mirror— that I lent her.

My mother’s. Cracked. What’s the notion? Anything that’s bright enough to reflect, presumably, ourselves? Mopping, mowing, whisking, frisking, the looking-glasses darted, flashed, exposed. People in the back rows stood up to see the fun. Down they sat, caught themselves . . . What an awful show-up! (BTA, 183-184)

Turning the pageant mirrors on the audience is thus neither simply a fool’s mockery nor a failure of illusion; it is a deliberate and brilliant confusion of reality and reflection or, in Goffman’s terms, a breaking of “frame” which remarks on the indignity of any closed system, including the perfect aesthetic structure. The formal and ideological openness of such infinite reflection is anti-aesthetic only in the sense of being opposed to formal closure and a radical separation of art and life. Mirrors and gaps are the mark of an inter­ stitial aesthetic which insists on the audience’s share in the performance, which defines the space of literature as “the open intimacy of one who writes and one who reads, the space violently exposed through the mutual struggle between the faculty of expression and the faculty of apprehension” (Blanchot, 29). Textual indeterminacies like the antistructural aspects of liminality provoke the interpretative process which produces a tension be­ tween unity and disparity. “The act of reading ‘creates’ a world, the presen­ tational form of the work itself, erected between the determinations or ellipses of the text and the responses of the reader” (Macksey, 307). And, as John Dewey observed, without this act of re-creation the text cannot be perceived as a work of art. The ultimate exposure of the reader’s share within the novel itself is Mrs. Manresa’s “making up” in the players’ mirrors while others turn away: All evaded or shaded themselves— save Mrs. Manresa who, facing herself in the glass, used it as a glass; had out her mirror; powdered her nose; and moved one curl, disturbed by the breeze, to its place. “Magnificent!” cried old Bartholomew. Alone she preserved unashamed her identity, and faced without blinking herself. Calmly she reddened her lips. (BTA, 186)

This public display is in stark contrast to Isa’s solitary self-contemplation in the first scene of the novel, and it implies a view of art and of language radically different from Isa’s scribbling verses in an account book for fear of being read. Isa realizes that “she who speaks enters into a system of relations which presupposes his [her] presence and at the same time makes him [her] open and vulnerable” (Merleau-Ponty 1971:24), but unlike Mrs. Manresa and Mrs. Woolf, she refuses to take that risk and confines her poetry to her library, her account book and her mutterings to herself. Woolf herself suf­ fered from “looking-glass shame” and could not “powder her nose in pub­ lic” (MB, 68), but she took a middle path between these public and private extremes and dared to write, realizing that “to write is to offer your word to others, that they may complete it” (Barthes, 17), and realizing that language

for all its inadequacies is “the gesture of renewal and recovery which unites me with myself and others” (Merleau-Ponty 1971:23)— “ ‘F rejected: ‘we’ substituted” (AWD, 289). In describing the “revelation” as well as the “hor­ ror” of her “moments of being,” Woolf confessed, it is a token o f some real thing behind appearance; and I make it real by putting it into words. It is only by putting it into words that I make it whole; this wholeness means that it has lost its power to hurt me; it gives me, perhaps because by doing so I take away the pain, a great delight to put the severed parts together. Perhaps this is the strongest pleasure known to me. It is the rapture I get when in writing I seem to be discovering what belongs to what; making a scene come right; making a character come together. From this I reach what I might call a philosophy; at any rate it is a constant idea o f mine; that behind the cotton wool is hidden a pattern; that we— I mean all human beings— are connected with this; that the whole world is a work of art; that we are parts o f the work o f art. (MB, 72)

Like the “rambling capricious but somehow unified whole” (AWD, 290) of which they are a part, the mirrors at the pageant’s “end” reveal that “we inhabit neither private nor public worlds, but rather some hazy, shifting ground in between” (Naremore, 228). There was, as Brenda Silver has pointed out, an urgency on the eve of war on Woolfs part “to equate the instinct to create with the instinct of self-preservation and community sur­ vival” (1979:381). The last “lady in the looking-glass”26 who faces herself without blinking expresses the unending interstitial drama of creation and re-creation in such “mirrors of the soul” as novels and pageants, and drama­ tizes the hermeneutic circularity between text interpretation and selfinterpretation which occurs between the pageant and its audience and be­ tween the novel and its readers.27 Turner would describe this circularity as communitas. After reading my discussion of the mutual involvement of author and reader in the original version of this essay, he suggested that “perhaps my other ‘anti-structural’ dimension, the social one of communitas, is pres­ ent in ‘reflexivity.’ . . . Communitas is precisely, at least in its cognitive as­ pect, plural reflexivity . . . inter-subjective reflexivity, where each one is the true mirror of all” (Personal communication 1975. See Post-text below). Such transient undifferentiated states of communion between identities— “moments of being”—are, he argues, both the origin and the critique of all structures, “the metastructural aspect of social relations” (Turner 1969:131). But long before Woolf or Turner so created and interpreted plural reflexivity in “forests of symbols” with “looking-glasses in the bushes,” Jane Harrison similarly suggested that “art is in its very origin social, and social means human and collective. Moral and social are, in their final analysis, the same. That human, collective emotion, out of which we have seen the choral dance arise, is in its essence moral; that is, it unites” (1913:218). And so, when the curtain rises in the last words of the novel, we may well ask with Miss La Trobe’s audience, “but which play?”28

Post-text Finger Lake Eagle River Wisconsin August 4, 1975 My Dear Barbara,

Beneath the lattice o f lean long birches and incipient oaks and facing the frail green water o f a small lake, I’m reading your thesis with delighted awe. Awe that you have seen processual pattern in so many works anesthetized by “positive” structuralists, and delight that my “in-between” ways of peering at life are shared by someone so heroically endowed to carry them into the high cultures of the West. . . . I would have been critical had you not distinguished “reflexive” from “reflective” by endowing the former with a fierce energy which replicated spontaneity and indi­ cates the curve on which our age is going from criticality to post-criticality. When criticism, even self-criticism, doubles back on itself, it has to find force from original creative sources. And where else than from the “in-between,” the “interstitial” (mem­ orably discussed in the Virginia Woolf piece)? This is where the more pious Marxists and non-phenomenological “structuralists” get nonplussed. For you do see that it is not an either-or matter between “life-crisis” model and “carnival” model, but rather the “gap” and “marriage” between these “systems” that is the creative, never-to-beverbally-grasped yet, for writers, always-to-be-verbally-attempted “significant space” (which is how Bellow describes arriving in Europe (so much classified, laminated, and stratified), where— as Edie says in a poem— ’’the random event may happen.” You’ve got me in a “dédoublement” of parentheses! Your constant stress (in the Sterne and Woolf pieces particularly) on the mutual involvement of author and reader (real and fictional) in the creative process leads me to suggest that perhaps my other “anti-structural” dimension, the social one of communitas, is present in “reflexivity”— which after all can involve the plural (ils se pensent). Communitas is precisely, at least in its cognitive aspect, plural reflexivity— breaking the entrapment o f Narcissus, whereas “structure” is only “reciprocity,” “barter,” “exchange,” “transaction”; not self actively bending back on itself. One thinks of Boehme’s ungrund and grand here, not of market arrangements or taro feasts. Working in tribal and peasant societies has made me sensitive to this intersubjective reflexivity, where each one is the true mirror of all. Not “binary” opposi­ tion but permutations and combinations o f relationships between varying numbers of entities, and the flashing of signals from cluster to cluster on different planes and levels. And so we redeem the superorganic from its bondage to the mechanical and pay consciousness its tribute. . . . Love from us both, Vic

NOTES Abbreviations Used: AWD = A Writer's Diary BTA = Between the Acts CEII = Collected Essays, Volume 2 CR = The Common Reader CRII = The Second Common Reader CSF = The Complete Shorter Fiction of Virginia Woolf GR = Granite and Rainbow MB = Moments of Being MD = Mrs. Dalloway O = Orlando ROO = A Room of One's Own 1. For further discussion of the relationship between liminality and reflexivity and their interconnections in Turner’s work, see Babcock, “Dancing”; “Reflexivity”; “The Arts”, and Babcock and MacAloon 1987. 2. Turner coorganized with Barbara Myerhoff and Barbara Babcock this interdisci­ plinary Wenner-Gren Conference which focused on the reflexive dimension of cul­ tural performances with Barbara Myerhoff and Barbara Babcock. He did not live to see it published as Rite, Drama, Festival, Spectacle: Rehearsals toward a Theory of Cultural Performance (1984), edited by John MacAloön. This conference also engendered two American Anthropological Association symposia concerned with reflexivity in 1976 and 1978 and subsequently published as Babcock (1980) and Ruby (1982). 3. For more on interruption, self-interruption, and the constitution of the feminine “subject” in Woolf, see Kamuf. 4. Although not speaking specifically o f Between the Acts, Toril Moi argues that “W oolf. . . seems to practice what we might now call a ‘deconstructive’ form of writing” and identifies many o f these features (1985:9ff.). She also suggests that “a combination o f Derridean and Kristevan theory . . . would seem to hold considerable promise for future feminist readings of W oolf’ (15). 5. In a dialogue entitled “The Critic as Artist” (1969:365), Oscar Wilde describes criticism as “a creation within a creation.” 6. Moi (1985) and Marcus (1987, 1988) make similar assertions. 7. In Adagia, Wallace Stevens epigrammatically notes that (1971:157) “Authors are actors, books are theatres.” The latter part of the sentence is, of course, Hamlet’s famous reference to the play within the play he’s invented to catch Claudius. 8. For more on seasonal fertility rituals and the relationship of comedy thereto, see Harrison (1903, 1912, 1913, 1921), Barber (1963), James (1961), and Little (1977, 1983). Shattuck (1987:278) says that given the “uncanny reverberations” between Harrison’s Ancient Art and Ritual and Between the Acts, “one would almost say that W oolf s work is a fictional rewrite o f Harrison’s scholarship. It is as if Woolf were staging Harrison’s work, providing a theatre where creative scholarship and creative writing combine in their efforts at taking up questions about art, society, religion, the family, history, war.” 9. See AWD: Tuesday, April 11th, 1938: “Last night I began making up again: summers night: a complete whole: that’s my idea” (288); Tuesday, April 26th, 1938: “here am I sketching out a new book; only don’t please impose that huge burden on me again, I implore. Let it be random and tentative: something I can blow of a morning, to relieve myself of Roger . . . ” (289); Thursday, October 6th, 1938: “I’m taking a frisk at R H. at which I can only write for one hour. Like the Waves. I enjoy it

intensely: head screwed up over Roger” (304). Saturday, November 28, 1940, on finish­ ing the pageant: “I’ve enjoyed writing almost every page. This book was only (I must note) written at intervals when the pressure was at its highest, during the drudgery of Roger” (359). 10. The term “liminality,” which denotes the betwixt-and-between phase of a rite of passage, was derived from van Gennep and introduced into American anthropo­ logical discourse by Victor Turner in 1964. By 1972, it had been used to describe so many interstitial phenomena, from tribal ritual to post-modern theatre, that Turner felt compelled to introduce the term “liminoid” to refer to the secular leisure genres and optional play forms o f complex industrial society, reserving “liminal” to describe sacred, prescribed ritualized transitions between states in small-scale, stable societies. He insisted, rightly, that liminoid genres are similar to but not identical with the ritually liminal. Turner first made this distinction in his comments on papers pre­ sented in the “Forms of Symbolic Inversion” symposium in 1972 (later published in Babcock, ed., 1978:276-296) and subsequently developed it in “Liminal to Limi­ noid.” That distinction never really caught on— in part because the term “liminoid” was “gratingly neologistic”; in part because Turner himself had already coupled “li­ minal” with phenomena other than tribal ritual; but in largest part because the simi­ larities among various “betwixt and between” phenomena are greater than their differences, whatever the social, historical, or generic context. For all these reasons, I have used the term “liminal” rather than “liminoid” in the remainder of this essay. 11. Pointz Hall Typescript, pp. 5 and 12. Quoted in Richter (1970:229). 12. For discussion of the symbolic significance of mirrors, see Sir James Frazer (203-204); for discussion of the fool’s use of the mirror, see William Willeford (3356); for discussion o f mirror imagery in the Middle Ages and Renaissance, see Grabes; for a feminist view of mirrors “from the other side,” see Irigaray (1985a and 1985b). 13. Cf. James Naremore (234). In discussing Woolfs characters as spectators rather than actors, Maxine Chastaing similarly notes that they are situated “before the action, in front of the action, after the action,” and concludes his discussion with the comment that “her entire corpus merits the title of a single book: Between the Acts” (88). 14. For further discussion o f Patterns of Culture and the influence of The Waves thereon, see Babcock (in press). As my remarks imply, there is much more to be said about the reciprocal influences between these two women writers who shared an ability “to rethink life into poetry” (CEII: 191). 15. As quoted above, Woolf envisioned multivocality and suggested rejecting “I” and substituting “We” when she first sketched out the novel in 1938. Many of these heretical ideas about the nature of art and creativity as plural and anonymous and androgynous that informed Between the Acts were made explicit in her unfinished essays “Anon” and “The Reader,” begun in the fall of 1940, and subsequently edited and published by Brenda Silver (1979). 16. “Within any language,” Kristeva argues, there is a “heterogeneousness anterior to meaning and signification, which operates through, despite, and in excess of it . . . this disposition we shall call semiotic” (1980:133). She borrows the term “c/wra” from Plato’s Timaeus ”to denote an essentially mobile and extremely provisional articula­ tion. . . . All discourse moves with and against the chora in the sense that it simulta­ neously depends upon and refutes it . . . the semiotic chora is no more than the place where the subject is both generated and negated” (1986:93-95). Following Plato, she describes this as both “nourishing and maternal.” The “semiotic” is both the precon­ dition of the “symbolic” and that which remodels the symbolic order. This formula­ tion is strikingly similar to the dialectic between the “liminality”/ “anti-structure”/ “communitas” and the “structure” that Turner posits. Poetic discourse such as Woolfs Between the Acts repeatedly dramatizes the resumption of the semiotic within

the symbolic, signified by the title, the fertile mud that words sink into and rise above, and the mirrors that mark the limen between the semiotic and the symbolic. There is much more to be said about “the mirror stage” and about narcissism, especially female narcissism in relation to this process and in relation to Woolfs practice. 17. The statement about “the whimsical and perilous charm of daily life” is Virginia Woolfs own, made about Logan Pearsall Smith, whose Trivia she reviewed in 1918. Quoted in Hafley (1954). The comment about scraps she made in a letter to Lytton Strachey concerning his “The End of General Gordon.” Quoted in Michael Holroyd (1968,11:251). 18. For further discussion o f motley, bricolage, and quotative pastiche as a princi­ ple o f ritual clowning and cultural critique, see Babcock (“Arrange Me”). 19. For a discussion o f novelistic parody in terms of the concepts of “dialogisme” and “intertextualité, ” see Julia Kristeva’s “Bakhtine, le mot, le dialogue et le roman,” in Kristeva (1969:143-173). See also Herman Meyer (1968) for discussion of the literary uses and functions o f quotation, and see Avrom Fleishman, “Virginia Woolf: Tradition and Modernity,” in Alan Friedman, ed. (1975), for specific discussion of Woolfs use of literary quotation and allusion. As Marcus (1977, 1987, 1988) demon­ strates, there is much to be said about Woolf s intertextuality and the political as well as aesthetic uses to which she puts it. There is also much more to be said about intertextuality as a specifically feminist strategy for telling forgotten or forbidden stories within the story, as a mode of what Elaine Showalter calls “double-voiced discourse.” As years of misreading Woolf attest, however, this strategy is at times too subtle. In this regard, see Marcus (1987:73-95) for various male misreadings of the myth of Procne and Philomela, notably Geoffrey Hartman’s “The Voice in the Shut­ tle” (1970:337-355). 20. In addition to Haller’s fine essay on Woolfs use of Egyptian myth, see also Marcus (1977, 1987, 1988), Rosenman (1986), Moore (1984), and Shattuck (1987) for more on the mythical sources and intertexts of Between the Acts. 21. As with Kristeva’s concept of the “semiotic,” there is much more to be said about “abjection” in relation to Woolf. Her “Sketch of the Past” in Moments of Being (1976) is a striking autobiographical description o f the power and the horror of the abject. It has come to my attention that Makiko Minow-Pinkney reads Woolf s oeuvre as an anticipation of Kristeva’s theory, but I have not yet been able to obtain her Virginia Woolf and the Problem of the Subject (Brighton: Harvester Press, 1987). 22. These statements about Ethel Smyth were made by Woolf in “Professions for Women” and are quoted in Marcus (1988:122-154). 23. The term and the concept “places of indeterminacy” were first formulated by the phenomenological critic Roman Ingarden. See The Cognition of the Literary Work of Art (50ff.). Ingarden’s notion was subsequently developed and tellingly applied to prose fiction by Wolfgang Iser in “Indeterminacy and the Reader’s Response in Prose Fiction” (1971:1-45) and in The Implied Reader (1974). 24. This presumably is the argument of the aforementioned book by MinowPinkney. 25. All of Virginia Woolfs writing— both fiction and critical essays— implies the concept of the “creative reader,” who is not insignificantly also a “common” reader, a concept which she explicitly develops in describing the “difficult and complex art of reading” in “How Should One Read a Book?” (CRIL234-245). 26. “The Lady in the Looking-Glass: A Reflection” is the title of a meditation on mirrors and perception published by Virginia Woolf in Harper's Magazine in 1929. Only in the mirror is “the woman herself’ revealed. “ . . . the looking-glass began to pour over her a light that seemed to fix her; that seemed like some acid to bite off the unessential and superficial and to leave only the truth. It was an enthralling specta­ cle.” The naked “truth,” however, is “empty” and unattractive, and Woolf concludes that “people should not leave looking-glasses hanging in their rooms” (CSF, 219).

27. For a complex and illuminating discussion of this circularity, see Paul Ricoeur (1973; 1974). 28. My thanks to the students in two graduate Virginia Woolf seminars at the University of Arizona, and to my colleague Susan Aiken, who encouraged reading otherwise; to Jay Cox for incomparable and invaluable research and computer assis­ tance; to Annette Kolodny who has enabled by providing research and technological assistance and by her example; and, most of all, to Kit Hinsley, who has loved, sup­ ported, and criticized between the lines and between the drafts of this text.

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SYMBOLISM AND THE PROBLEMATICS OF POSTMODERN REPRESENTATION Stephen W illia m Foster What, then, is truth? A mobile army of metaphors, metonyms, and anthropomorphisms— in short, a sum of human relations, which have been enhanced transposed, and embellished poetically and rhetorically, and which after long use seem firm, canonical, and obligatory to a people; truths are illusions about which one has forgotten that this is what they are. . . . — Nietzsche, On Truth and Lie in an Extra Moral Sense

In his well-known fable “The Library of Babel,” Jorges Luis Borges (1962) tells of a totalizing architecture, an archive of all possible books in all con­ ceivable languages. It contains all possible permutations and errors, and— somewhere— the book that catalogues all the others. This representation of all possible “knowledge” seems to promise a power which is inchoate yet alluring; the librarians travel frenetically from one part of the library to the next, desperately searching for this book of books, in order to determine its secret meaning. Borges’s image, however, can be read not as stating the obvious point that there is a “crisis of representation,” but as representing (“describing”) the process of struggle with this problematic which resonates powerfully with a social world saturated with uncertainty and disenchant­ ment. This postmodern world raises many questions: Where and what is power? How can knowledge be stabilized? What systems of categories are viable? Are there truths? What is interpretation? How can we know what anything means? Answers to these and related questions are not readily forthcoming either

from philosophical reflection or from a close “analysis of the facts” ; precisely because of such conditions, representation, imagery, metaphor, and symbols swim up out of the cacophony of discourse as constructs which promise or intimate meaning, but do not disclose it. Hence the tension which motivates interpretation, the reason for the librarians’ sprint from one part of the archive to another, ceaselessly raiding and rummaging through the shelves (no full stop except in death). Anthropologists and literary critics have be­ come eloquent commentators on this complex of dilemmas and paradoxes. Recent work in both fields have given frequent testimony to this problematic and suggests a self-conscious, sporadically self-reflective acknowledgment of its importance. From this perspective, a critical evaluation or cultural analysis of interpre­ tation, in the sense of “the interpretation of symbolism,” is long overdue. In this essay, I will suggest some beginning points for such a project by decon­ structing symbolic anthropology, taking a case in point, in order to define, with intended irony, what Borges and others “mean” by raising the issue of meaning, the problematics of representation. This problematic furthermore situates the movement that can be observed from symbol to discourse as a locus of interpretation. Historically, symbolic analysis has been understood as a method of “decoding” what symbols (or texts and their elements) “mean.” The paradigm of structural linguistics and semiology took the ques­ tion of meaning as a matter of establishing stable relations between symbols or signifiers and denotative and connotative “sense.” Literary studies and anthropology have both applied this understanding of the relation of symbols and meaning to the domain of tulture, that is, to social discourse broadly conceived. With the dawn of postmodernity, the stability of this relation between symbols and meaning has become problematized (Harvey, 1989). What a symbol means is no longer any one “thing” (if it ever was). There is no referential foundation or substrate, but only symbolic forms scattered and situated by the forces of rhetoric and the configurations of power as they prevail on a given occasion or at a particular historical moment. This formu­ lation raises suspicions about what anthropology does when it interprets sym­ bols and what literary studies does when it reads texts. Lyotard (xxiv) defines the “postmodern as incredulity toward metanarra­ tives.” This definition suggests a suspicion regarding not just the locus of meaning but the very possibility of grounding it. A writer such as Borges dramatizes this suspicion, makes its pathos painfully palpable, and in “The Library of Babel” tells us about its consequences. The fictions that Borges poses also make him a critic of the postmodern, since they tell stories which are also cautionary tales. Borges goes further than adopting an incredulity toward metanarratives. He denies them altogether, or rather makes them coincident with the fictions that vibrantly emerge from his “essays.” Like Borges, Roland Barthes is a writer who is difficult to categorize. And like Borges, Barthes is critic, essayist, and, above all, ethnographer of the

postmodern. Both writers reflect in depth on the problematics of representa­ tion which characterize the history of the present. From Elements of Semiology to his last writings, there is a shift in Barthes’s regard for the relation be­ tween signifier and signified which reiterates the emergence of this problem­ atic. Semiology at first promoted an expectation that signifier conveyed meaning, externalized by means of an interpretive “science.” In his later work, Barthes becomes less earnest and more playful in regard to the link of signifier and signified. That link no longer is to be discovered through analy­ sis, but is to be specified or claimed in the practice of writing. Barthes (1985:125) suggests what the shift from modernism to postmodernism looks like from the perspective of semiology: “The signifier: we must be deter­ mined to keep taking advantage of this word for a long time yet (we should note once and for all that it’s not a question of defining the term but of using it; i.e., ‘metaphorizing’ it, using it in opposition—mainly to the signified, which we believed in the early modernist days of semiology to be its corre­ late, but which we now in the postmodern understand more fully as its adver­ sary).” It is in part Barthes’s ultimate refusal to submit to a stable method and framework which makes his writing literature as well as criticism, a claim which applies to Borges as well. The problematization of representation, for instance in its guise as narra­ tive, has led both anthropologists and critics also to ask how it is that narrative conveys imagined definitions of the real (Ricoeur). They have begun to see their work as (meta)narratives; they simultaneously produce and interrogate narratives, texts, and representations, a project which has manifestly become an art in itself. This project in turn raises important questions for postmodern criticism: How can representation be approached now? What forms of repre­ sentation are salient in current discourse? How has narrative become a means of questioning how narrative (artificially or fictionally) stabilizes definitions of the real? How has the recognition of narrative, text, and representation as interpretive tropes finalized (and come to express) the move to postmodernity as a slant on and attitude toward meaning and it difficulties? These nebulous questions (like the others mentioned earlier) are not, how­ ever, simply dispersed arbitrarily like the ruined fragments of monuments which have only partly survived a war. The relations among them are specifi­ able and derive from particular historical conditions. James Clifford (1981:541) characterizes this condition as follows: “Reality is no longer a given, a natural, familiar environment. The self, cut loose from its attach­ ments, must discover meaning where it may. . . . ” He elaborates: “The post­ war context was structured by a basically ironic experience of culture. For every local custom or truth, there was always an exotic alternative, a possible juxtaposition or incongruity. Below (psychologically) and beyond (geographi­ cally) any ordinary reality there existed another reality.” This recurrent problematization of meaning and augmentation of uncer­ tainty, one gathers, has not always been the prevailing semantic and experi­ ential situation. Or so it is claimed. Its origins are recent and associated

broadly with the demise of what are presumed to have been well-integrated cultural systems situated in European societies and in exotic climes as well: Colonialism, war, and change have precluded them now. Of course, such an assumed historicism can also be seen simply as romanticism or as a nostalgia for a particular experience of culture which never really existed (cf. Stewart 1988). Yet this delineation of history— the history of cultures and of repre­ sentation—situates how “the interpretation of symbolism” has been prac­ ticed, so its assumptions deserve to be spelled out, at least schematically. This is a figurative history at best, hardly one that could be documented straight­ forwardly. It falls roughly into three “ideal type” phases: (1) The baseline for this history is a primordial (“primitive”?) world in which symbols have a transparency that immediately discloses or defines the real. This episteme denies or occludes symbolism per se, since within the sub­ jective experience of transparent representation what is and what meaning is has a direct and immediate accessibility which precludes a project of deci­ phering or deciding what the meaning is behind the symbol. Within this viewpoint, nothing is symbolic because the “symbol” is contiguous and con­ tinuous with the real. There is no gulf between symbol and meaning, since under this regime nothing is hidden, everything is immediately given or evoked; there is no symbol “containing” meaning. There is no question of symbols “conveying” meaning, because the meaning of “reality,” along with that reality itself, is already at hand. For the inhabitants of this putative world, interpretation is superfluous (or undifferentiated from action and experience) by virtue of this transparency of representation. Their experi­ ence by this epistemological stance is already saturated and made coherent by present “sense.” Interrogation and interpretation are our problems but not problems for the Other. (2) At one remove (in time and/or in space) from this baseline is a stage in which symbols become recognized as subject to analysis or interpretation. If there is no immediate assurance of a reality or of meaning as there was in (1), in this context it is at least accessible; it can be obtained by undertaking a project, research, a “close reading,” “decoding.” Symbols express and convey meaning though they are not coincident with meaning. Behind or beyond the symbol, there is a semantic ground which is explicable and can be externalized, though symbols do not manifest it directly or on their surface. This delineation of representation problematizes symbolism without problematizing meaning. If an effort is undertaken or if the puzzle is solved, one can get to meaning or to systems of meaning as evinced in the Other’s experience of the world. (3) The postmodern problematization of representation opens a wider gulf between symbol and meaning, placing symbols and systems of symbols at the center of an unbounded proliferation and continual attribution and reattribution of meaning to symbolic forms. Meaning is ceaselessly arbi­ trated, but no methodology appears on the horizon for bringing the process of arbitrating meaning to a satisfying full stop. The order promised by semi­ ology explodes, is recognized as illusory and impossible. The textbook “arbi-

trariness of symbols” ceases to be a name for the conventional link between symbol and meaning, since it is precisely that convention which is lacking. The arbitrariness of symbols comes in with a vengeance, and quasi-scientific aspirations of establishing a theory of symbols, a symbolic anthropology, or a description of “universal symbolization processes” are dashed on the rocky shores of postmodernism: The Other turns out not to be the exotic (a bejeweled coffer of ascendant if abstruse signification), but the problematization of the self, of social relations, and of the prospects for an ethics of “civilized” life. An acknowledgment of these disheartening problematizations is implicit in a certain distance from “the interpretation of symbolism” at which criti­ cism and anthropology currently pursue their labors. The shifting ground and uncertain status of representation—a veritable, intractable forêt sauvage— suggested by this apocryphal, tripartite history, sit­ uate the “conflict of interpretations” evident in postmodern discourse. I will return to this theme and to a further consideration of how each of the three perspectives on symbolism is appropriated by interpretation after discussing a pivotal case at greater length. Perhaps Victor Turner’s virtuoso interpreta­ tions of symbolism in The Forest of Symbols (1967) and elsewhere can be viewed as paradigmatic for symbolic anthropology. If so, they can serve as a “locus of articulation” for deconstructing this type of analysis. Turner’s work is situated at the second stage of the “history” outlined above, in which the decoding of symbolism and the externalization of meaning through interpre­ tation are taken for granted. Turner (1967:19) formulates his definition of symbols in quite general terms: A symbol is “a thing regarded by general consent as naturally typifying or representing or recalling something by possession of analogous qualities or by association in fact or in thought.” He states that he had to study symbols through a “time series,” as a flow of events, in ritual and social processes. Through a course of events, such as a ritual or a conflict between groups, “the symbol becomes associated with human interests, purposes, ends, and means, whether these are explicitly formulated or have to be in­ ferred from the observed behavior” (1967:20). Given the diverse “vectors” of meaning dictated by this approach, Turner easily recognizes that “A single symbol, in fact, represents many things at the same time: it is multivocal not univocal. Its referents are not all of the same logical order but are drawn from many domains of social experience and ethical evaluation” (1969:52). These complexities are to be unraveled by means of three analytic tactics: (a) examining the symbol’s “external form and observable characteristics”; (b) taking into account indigenous interpretations of the symbol; and (c) relating the symbol to its context in social and ritual discourse (Turner 1967:20). The breadth of conception and the diversity of meanings claimed as refer­ ences of a symbol do not anticipate precisely what sort of meaningful content will be discovered in symbols. What meanings Turner actually uncovers in his interpretations thus become rather significant. For instance, he states that for the Ndembu with whom he lived in northwestern Zambia, the “milk tree”

(mudyi) is a major (“dominant”) symbol in their society. This tree exudes “milky beads if the thin bark is scratched” (Turner 1967:20). Ndembu women “say with reference to its observable characteristics that the milk tree stands for human breast milk and also for the breasts that supply it” (1967:20). It also refers to the mother’s role as “archetype of protector, nourisher, and teacher” (1967:22). Turner then reconsiders the milk tree symbol by examining native exegeses and contexts, assigning to it a global sociological significance: At one level of abstraction, the milk tree stands for matriliny, the principle on which the continuity of Ndembu society depends. Matriliny governs succession to office and inheritance o f property, and it vests dominant rights of residence in local units. More than any other principle of social organization it confers order and structure on Ndembu social life. . . . It stands for tribal custom . . . itself. The principle of matriliny, the backbone of Ndembu social organization, as an element in the semantic structure of the milk tree, itself symbolizes the total system o f interrelations between groups and persons that make up Ndembu society. Some of the meanings of important symbols may themselves be symbols, each with its own system of meaning. (Turner 1967:21)

Turner designates the milk tree a “dominant” symbol for the Ndembu on the basis of its capacity to represent the social system as a whole and by noting that one of his informants compared it to the British flag flying outside the nearby administrative headquarters. The obvious reference here is to Durk­ heim’s comparison of the Australian churinga with the flag as a familiar sym­ bol of a society. In fact, Turner’s symbol closely resembles the Durkheimian “collective representation” both in regard to a collective consensus as to its meaning and in regard to its ultimate reference, which in both cases is, broadly speak­ ing, to “the social,” to social processes, social groups, and to the meaning of society itself. Turner’s style of interpreting symbols is forcefully precon­ strained by this sociological presumption, or bias. The axiom of the multivocality of symbolism is circumscribed by seeking social meaning for symbols and in thus ascribing to them a functional relevance for “the social system” or for social solidarity. Turner’s version of “the interpretation of symbolism” is confident in the kind of meanings it associates with the symbols which it decodes. Clearly, there are a number of other possible options or biases. For Turner, symbols make sense primarily in social terms. Symbolism is a com­ mentary on the social order and how it is reformed and reformulated, adapted and adjusted to the exigencies of a given population over time. The assurances of understanding the Other which Turner’s aesthetically appealing style of analysis provides lose much of their immediacy if interpre­ tation is viewed as a process of production rather than as a discovery proce­ dure. With the presumption of symbolic transparency, understanding was at hand in activity or in narrative; one simply recorded or read it. With the reign of the symbolic, meaning was to be discovered, decoded, uncovered; it

resided there on the stable semantic ground just beyond the symbols which indicated or pointed to it. But with the problematization of representation, these certainties are no longer so evident. The practice of interpretation becomes an activity similar to cultural production in other domains, a cre­ ative resituating and recontextualizing of meaning, with no easily identifiable end point or “final” meaning in sight. The meanings which the Other lives by get rearticulated, placed in a context foreign to them, and are therefore transformed or modified, so that the analyst can no longer claim to have “gotten into the mind” (or the social world) of the Other. Interpretation participates in the creation of a different, historically situated relation to unfamiliar “symbol systems,” rather than reconstituting them in familiar terms (Boon). In his compelling implementation of what has become (with the work of Clifford Geertz) an exemplary approach to symbolic analysis, Turner relies on principles which, from the viewpoint of postmodernity have to be ques­ tioned. One is the notion of convention or consensus within a designated group regarding a symbol’s meaning. Whatever the case with language, with its dictionaries and other forms of contrived semantic certainty, with symbols it is often difficult to locate any sort of “accepted agreement” regarding their meaning. Even in “small-scale” societies, native exegesis rarely supplies it without considerable interpolation on the part of the analyst. It is problem­ atic that interpretations of symbols can be stabilized and documented on the basis of a consensus about what they mean to those who use them. Instead, symbolic forms have what de Certeau (103) calls “semantic tropisms,” affini­ ties with certain meanings which have accumulated about them as a conse­ quence of their histories and are ever subject to revision. Resorting to “conventional meaning” is thus best understood as a rhetorical tactic, an artificial means of establishing given meaning for a given symbol. My conten­ tion is that symbols do not come with meanings in tow; meaning is actively attributed to symbolic forms on particular occasions under particular politi­ cal and historical circumstances (cf. Wagner and de Certeau). Turner partially recognizes this problem in displacing interpretation, that is, in treating it as something else beside a mechanistic decoding process, by stressing the importance of context. A symbol has a range of meanings. What meaning is foregrounded under some conditions may not be important in another. Context helps to structure that range of potential meanings for a symbol, but that structure is highly variable and may be quite fragile. Turner seems to employ context in a way similar to convention: to ground or stabi­ lize a “reading” of the symbol (to establish a given reading as definitive) in face of its productive potential to convey diverse and even contradictory meanings. In this approach, there is a tacit recognition that to “decode” the meaning of a symbol is really to displace the unit of analysis from the symbol per se to a unit such as symbol+context. The interpretation of symbolism therefore implies its own limits and prefigures a move from interpreting symbols to interpreting forms of discourse.

Context refers to the inescapable embeddedness of representation. But that embeddedness no more provides a stable grounding for meaning than “given meaning” or dictionary definitions do, since context is itself recon­ structed, negotiable, “up for grabs.” The process of interpretation for the Other and for the interpreter alike involves the creation of a context, or the re-creation of a context to surround or embed whatever is being interpreted. In this aspect at least, the invention and the interpretation of symbolism are comparable. Hence, what Turner establishes as the ultimate reference or content of symbolic forms, that is, “the social,” is instead its ultimate con­ text. Because meaning comes out of social processes, though symbols may not finally refer to “the social,” it is the “state” of those processes at a given moment which accounts for meaning. If any stable meaning is possible for a symbolic form, that possibility relates to the conditions under which is was posed and interpreted. Symbols and meanings are brought together however tenuously in the white heat of social events, not paraded about, already linked hand in hand, after being taken out of cold storage (a cultural reper­ toire) for the occasion. Here “social events” also encompass interpretive practices. Or so it would seem from the perspective of the complex societies which must be contended with now. It is difficult to decide whether such a critique of Turner’s symbolic anthropology pertains only to the crisis of representa­ tion which currently prevails, or whether it also pertains to the Ndembu and to societies of a “type” remote from postmodernity. But even taking the interpretation of symbolism simply as a method, it seems clear that Turner found it insidious and unsatisfactory. In thê progression of his work after The Forest of Symbols, specifically in The Ritual Process (1969) and then in Image and Pilgrimage (1978), he moves further and further away from the interpre­ tation of symbolism, instead adopting more emphatically a “ symbol+context” point of view in his focus on ritual sequences, pilgrimage, process, and discourse. Although he never fully escapes his earlier paradigm, these displacements constitute a “critique in action,” a powerful modifica­ tion of “the interpretation of symbolism” as an art of decoding. Interpreta­ tion becomes instead closer to an art of “reading.” This move does not entirely succeed. Turner holds fast to a particular slant on meaning which results in his veering away from a thorough recognition of the problematization of representation. In a manner of speaking, he “de­ fends against” this problematic quite eloquently by insisting on a social “function” for ritual activity, a social meaning for ritual discourse. While that orientation is not in itself in error, it leaves out other equally important domains of meaning which may also accrue to or encrust discourse. What is in error is his universalizing of his interpretations, so that instead of holding fast to the particular, he makes them speak through their particulars to what ritual is “in general,” what pilgrimage does anywhere (structure and anti­ structure among the Ndembu and among the flower children of the 1960s). Such is the limitation in the trajectory of Turner’s interpretive practice.

Writers such as Barthes or Foucault, on the other hand, insist on what might be called a hegemony of particulars, a meticulous art of nuance that is a clear acknowledgment of the problematics of representation. They historicize this problematics and “represent” and actualize it in their work. They are practitioners of the intricacies of postmodern representation; they are characteristically highly suspicious of the sort of generalities which Turner’s style of interpretation seems to suggest. They reflect upon but finally refuse to decide once and for all “what it all means.” Their work is firmly situated at the third stage of the three-part history outlined earlier. Interpretation as “decoding” (even in Turner’s expert and supple hands) appears in this light as somewhat mechanistic, constricted, and impoverished. The question of representation is no longer how to decipher the meaning of symbols but how to claim the possibility of meaning through writing. Acceding to a method such as Turner’s, although opened to the criticisms I have outlined, may be more comforting than eschewing method altogether. Transgressions of the kind evident in the work of Borges, Barthes, and Fou­ cault do not, however, locate them in a landscape of methodless discourse. Their writing is well worth investigating for the techniques, predisposition, and conceits through which it stylizes and re-presents “the real.” Their work suggests that torturing, eroding, and reflecting upon method in the course of interpretation may be a viable advance over taking methods of interpreta­ tion, such as structuralism or symbolic analysis, as programs. With the dawn of the postmodern, interpretation has increasingly become an object of in­ terpretation; narratives are at the same time metanarratives. As I will try to show in the remainder of this essay, the problematics of representation has become interior to interpretation as well as continuing as one of its contexts. Interpretations double back upon themselves. These writers invest in their interpretations a certain self-consciousness about their writing and about the process of representation; their interpretations are avowedly experimental, ironic, labyrinthine, interminable (cf. Marcus and Cushing). The separation between social or political discourse and analytic discourse is blurred. The critical discourse on literature itself becomes literary (Hartman). Interpreta­ tions of ritual or cultural systems are more overtly understood as cultural practices, or as narrative quests for meaning. If interpretation is associated with semiology, as the foregoing detour into “the interpretation of symbolism” would suggest, then one of Barthes’s for­ mulations in his “Inaugural Lecture” (1982:474) can be taken as nicely sum­ marizing what I am saying about meaning and method: “semiology is not a grid; it does not permit a direct apprehension of the real through the imposi­ tion of a general transparency which would render it intelligible. It seeks instead to elicit the real, in places and by moments, and it says that these efforts to elicit the real are possible without a grid. It is in fact precisely when semiology becomes a grid that it elicits nothing at all.” I have already argued that without a grid or a bona fide method, interpretation and the question of what interpretation is become one and the same: criticism/writing/literature.

This formulation of postmodern discourse is already a formidable tradition within and without anthropology and literary studies. In order to character­ ize precisely this (covert?) tradition, writing as a craft, as a world view, and as a project has to be understood in connection with (1) the “symbolics” of the archive (the accumulation of the discourses), (2) the “author-function,” and (3) narrative as descriptive of both the real and the process of representing it. In “Fantasia of the Library,” Foucault states: “The Bible has become a bookstore, and the magic power of the image has become a devouring appe­ tite for reading” (106). Foucault is referring specifically to Flaubert’s last work, Bouvard et Pécuchet, in which these two pilgrims of the archive “are directly tempted by books, by their endless multiplicity, by the frothing of works in the gray expanse of the library” (“Fantasia,” 106). In this striking formulation, Foucault identifies in Flaubert a far-reaching problem of repre­ sentation which situates similar problematizations of meaning in the postmodern. (The question of Flaubert as a postmodern author can be left aside except to say that he might be taken as a “founder of discursivity” of a sort that we are still embedded in and grappling with today.) This devouring appetite for reading situates the postmodern quest or pilgrimage for mean­ ing, refers to one of its common tactics, and also dramatizes how meaning recedes to the vanishing point as one pursues it. Once there was a single book, the Biblè, which was unitary locus of mean­ ing, a source of morals, cosmology, and eschatalogy, a singular, radiating, and inimitable enshrinement of a fixed, totalized understanding of “the real.” When it required interpretation, certified “officers” (of the Church) were authorized to say what it meant (de Certeau, 172). No doubt, this retrospective glance romanticizes the past relation of representation to meaning. It is a nostalgic background for understanding what has now hap­ pened with representation. Straightforward representation has now been dis­ persed by the problematizations that were discussed earlier. The devouring appetite for books is a symptom of this dispersal. In Flau­ bert’s The Temptation of Saint Anthony, Foucault identified this dispersal as a complex appropriation and deployment of the archive, that is, a carefully orchestrated interweave of references to its contents. In the novel, these references appear as the glistening phantasms and puppet-show imageries which haunt Saint Anthony, tempt and preoccupy him. They beckon and deceive, dissolve kaleidoscopically, resolve into ever-more ramified and be­ guiling scenarios— “meanings”—only to recede again into the shadows. The book is a compendium or hallucinatory tapestry of shadows and lights, but Foucault shows that its underpinnings are more prosaic: The fragments which compose the book’s grand design have all been excerpted from the archive; they are all literary allusions, appropriations, or borrowings from preexisting, often familiar texts. Their sources are easily traced, so that “the visionary experience arises from the black and white surfaces of the printed signs, from the closed and dusty volume that opens with a flight of forgotten words; fantasies are carefully deployed in the hushed library, with its columns

of books, with its titles aligned on shelves to form a tight enclosure, but within confines that also liberate impossible worlds. The imagery now resides between the book and the lamp” (“Fantasia,” 90). Speaking figuratively, the library supersedes the cathedral as the destination of pilgrimage. The raiding and reordering in the archive usurps the cathedral’s ritual space as the latest site chosen as the sacred grove. Books substitute for The Book which no longer grants the satisfactions of ultimate meaning. The Temptation of Saint Anthony is a grandiose imitation of The Book, an attempt to resynthesize and to resolve the disparate images from the archive—Saint An­ thony’s visionary experience—into a comprehensive restatement, a full stop, a glimmering crystal of meaning, a polished articulation. The Temptation develops the encapsulated visions in depth as they recede, through a series of stages, to the distance; it constitutes a volume behind tf ; thread of its speeches and under its line of successions. Each element (setting, character, speech, alteration of scenery) is effectively placed at a definite point in the linear sequence, but each element also has its vertical system of corre­ spondences and is situated at a specific depth in the fiction. This explains why The Temptation can be the book of books: it unites in a single “volume” a series of linguistic elements that derive from existing books and that are, by virtue of their specific documentary character, the repetition of things said in the past. The library is opened, catalogued, sectioned, repeated, and rearranged in a new space; and this “volume” into which Flaubert has forced it is both the thickness of a book that develops according to the necessarily linear thread of its text and a procession o f marionettes that, in deploying its boxed visions, also opens up a domain in depth. (“Fantasia,” 105)

Actually, The Temptation of Saint Anthony fails to yield a final reordering of the archive, a book of books; its deployment of diverse elements instead opens a discursive space, as Foucault playfully puts it, a “volume,” a new ritual space in which Flaubert then continues to write. (He had already re­ written The Temptation three times.) This space is the one in which Bouvard and Pecuchet dance and gyrate, becoming copyists: “They will occupy them­ selves by copying books, copying their own books, copying every book; and unquestionably they will copy Bouvard et Pecuchet. Because to copy is to do nothing; it is to be the books being copied. It is to be this tiny protrusion of redoubled language, of discourse folded upon itself; this invisible existence transforms fleeting words into an enduring and distant murmur” (“Fanta­ sia,” 109). These archivists’ and copyists’ devouring appetite for books is a hunger for meaning, an expression of a void desiring to be filled (cf. Do­ nato). They undertake this ceaseless ritual of consumption and appropriation in order to inscribe upon the body, or within the self, a text which is of their own making, a fiction that can be read, a private domain of certainty, making of themselves a substitute book of books. The archivist is a bricouleur and researcher par excellence, an obsessive structuralist attempting to stem the tide of representations without referents.

What has happened to the symbol and its interpretation with this entry into the archive? With the form of discourse evident in Flaubert, the symbol is submerged or swallowed up, its “meaning” fluctuates wildly, contingent on the stylization of the discourse as a whole. Individual symbols, discrete ele­ ments cease to have a meaning in themselves. They are “floating signifiers,” motifs in a screen of images which together have a certain (meaningful?) “effect.” The interpretation of symbolism would do little to help specify this “effect,” which is instead performative, dependent mainly upon a reading. Representation has been displaced so as to operate at the level of discourse as written and read, while discourse comes increasingly to reflect upon itself, to meditate upon its own contour and significance, to become meta­ discourse. (This point will be discussed further below.) Representation does not convey “the real” in the case of Flaubert, but allows an extended musing upon what options, in terms of writing practices, exist for posing and composing, decomposing and reconstituting it layer by layer. This twittering thicket of “symbols” does not constitute a consistent or coherent hermeneutic field. It becomes encyclopedic, exhaustively documen­ tary, a dazzling, repetitious tabulation of potential representations, castles in the air, detailed classifications, vast Dali landscapes scattered with idiosyn­ cratic images. The archive spills out a potential for symbolism which can be put together in a limitless number of ways. Its richness and variety are daunt­ ing. As with Flaubert, attempts to order it once and for all are stymied, stimulating yet more writing. Symbols become uninterpretable because of the problematization of the textual authority which the book of books once seemed to promise. Now no one is certifièd to say what discourse “means.” In “What Is an Author?” Foucault sums up this situation as follows: today’s writing . . . is identified with its own exteriority. This means that it is an interplay of signs arranged less according to its signified content than ac­ cording to the very nature of the signifier. Writing unfolds like a game [jeu] that invariably goes beyond its own rules and transgresses its limits. In writing, the point is not to manifest or exalt the act of writing, nor is it to pin a subject within language; it is rather a question of creating a space into which the writing subject constantly disappears. (“Author,” 142)

The impulse to give shape and meaning to the text, to discourse, to the symbol seems inexhaustible. What strategies are available to help stabilize this gridless cacophony? The “author-function” and the question of narrative re­ main to be discussed in this connection. It is noteworthy that writing as a practice and slant on representation is really no more than an obsessive insis­ tence on interpreting in the face of recognizing the impossibility of grounding any interpretation unshakably; I will return to this point below. But whatever pretense of meaning emerges from writing does not arise from the authority or dictates of “the real” or of “the text.” It is now made to rest in part upon what Foucault calls the “author-function,” which is a historically derived sys­ tem of thought about texts and discourse, not a transcendental constant.

As is certainly evident, problematizing meaning and representation leads directly to problematizing the interpretation of symbols, texts, and dis­ courses as “sites” where currents of import and signification cross, inter­ weave, and disperse again, where meaning conflicts, is contested, or may remain unresolved. Interpretation must attempt to cut through this thicket of elements, to make it cohere, or to give it a shape. Interposing the name of an author begins that process by collecting together a series of texts, perhaps seeing them as continuous and possibly organized according to a defined system of thematic preoccupations. The texts produced by an author can be seen as coherent or “meaningful.” the author’s name being posed as a sym­ bol of that projected significance and order. “The author’s name manifests the appearance of a certain discursive set and indicates the status of this discourse within a society and a culture” (“Author,” 147). Associating a number of texts with an author’s name begins to surround each text with a historically specifiable context: “the fact that several texts have been placed under the same name indicates that there has been established among them a relationship of homogeneity, filiation, authentification of some texts by the use of others, reciprocal explication or concomitant utilization” (“Author,” 147). Interpretation is thus rooted in a set of simple questions, if often difficult to answer: Who wrote this text? When was it written? What were the circumstances of its composition? Starting with what design? Foucault con­ tends that answering these questions, utilizing the author in doing so, is how the significance of a text is for us ascribed and determined. The resulting hermeneutic depends upon the projective construction of the author which is itself opened to divergent attribution. Once constructed, “the author” situates a system of discourse, brings that system into being, yet derives in part from it. This dialectic parallels that observed earlier between context and content; here again, author+text or context+text becomes the discur­ sive formation to be interpreted. Foucault (“Author,” 151) draws from Saint Jerome in defining the particu­ lars of how the author is made to function to organize discourses: The au­ thor is (1) “a field of conceptual or theoretical coherence,” (2) “a stylistic unity,” (3) “a historical figure at the crossroads of a certain number of events,” and (4) “a constant level of value,” wherein a more or less uniform “quality” of the words can be discerned. Foucault’s claim is that it is custom­ ary in modern criticism for the author-function to be defined or invoked in these four ways. He is quite particular in the importance he assigns to it: “The modes of circulation, valorization, attribution, and appropriation of discourses vary with each culture and are modified within each. The manner in which they are articulated according to social relationships can be more readily understood, I believe, in the activity of the author-function and in its modifications, than in the themes or concepts that discourses set in motion” (“Author,” 158). The appropriation of the author-function by interpretation is motivated by a more poignant mission than mere “understanding.” The author-

function is invested in the battle interpretation wages against the problemat­ ics of representation. For if, as I have argued, the interpretation of symbol­ ism is precluded by the impossibility of a stable link between the elements of discourse and signification, then as William Burroughs has said, “nothing is true, everything is permitted.” Against this apparent invitation to incompre­ hensibility, nihilism, or irrationality is posed the author-function. Meaning proliferates wildly, in a mad spiral of projection, attribution, and strategic inventiveness. “The author is therefore the ideological figure by which one marks the manner in which we fear the proliferation of meaning” (Foucault, “Author,” 159). The author-function describes a process of structuring an otherwise fluid domain, like the formation of a crystal out of a solution. The author exhaustively orders and categorizes the entire archive. The author allows a limitation of the cancerous and dangerous proliferation of significations. . . . The author is the principle of thrift in the proliferation of meaning. . . . the author is not an indefinite source of significations which fill a work; the author does not precede the works, he is a certain functional principle by which in our culture, one limits, excludes, and chooses; in short by which one impedes the free circulation, the free manipulation, the free compo­ sition, decomposition, and recomposition of fiction. (“Author,” 158-159)

Or of discourse in general. Interpretation in this guise is blatantly reduction­ ist and intentionally exclusionary; it is a systematic, rationalized denial of the problematics of representation. Clearly, postmodernity revels in rather than resists or denies this problematic. By folding this discussion of the authorfunction back upon the earlier consideration of Turner’s work, it will be evident how similar and how little advanced interpretation by authorfunction is over the interpretation of symbolism. As a text to be interpreted, the Ndembu— the culture of the Other— poses a wilderness of signifiers, a forest to be mapped and traversed. The anthro­ pologist picks out a limited array of “key symbols,” shows how they inter­ connect, and situates them within the “culture” in order to claim an understanding of the Other (Ortner). Culture is a conventional rhetorical figure in anthropological discourse, as in the author in criticism, so that a close parallel can be noted between the author-function in criticism and the “culture-function” in anthropology. Each of these tropes grounds its respec­ tive form of interpretation and gives it closure. This parallel crops up again when it is said that the Other are authors of their social discourse. It is reflected also in the recent use of “text” as an interpretive device, “reading” the social discourse of the Other is order to comprehend its “meaning” (Geertz). What is telling is the insistence on the stability of “culture” and “the author” as interpretive tropes, as ideological interventions, and as a way of controlling meaning, despite their contingent status. They function as rhetorical figures in ongoing attempts to delineate representation; they ad­ dress the problematics of representation by denying and attempting to over­ ride them.

I have pointed out that criticism and anthropology have both moved closer to literature. For their part, anthropologists have increasingly begun to ques­ tion and to experiment with ethnographic interpretation, making visible the process of writing and interpreting while asking how it is possible for mean­ ing to be obtained through the Other. Many of these experiments have taken the form of narratives which “double-track” the process: telling about the Other and the interpersonal “technologies” for managing the encounter which made possible the resulting disclosures (e.g., Crapanzano, FavretSaada). These narratives are metanarratives at the same time. Since these books have been discussed exhaustively elsewhere, I will not rehearse here their importance for the practice of anthropology (see Clifford and Marcus). Instead, I will discuss narrative as yet another interpretive tactic, as generat­ ing a plethora of metanarratives, and as a way of addressing the problematics of representation. The particular appeal of narrative is its ability to organize the most diverse and unexpected materials into a sequence of events that are arranged to make a story (Ricoeur). The most elementary concept of a story is that it is composed of a beginning and ending, a resolution and denouement. A story is continuous, is bounded, and achieves closure at the end. Given the prolif­ eration of signifiers, narrative has its comforts, since its carefully controlled structure constrains and focuses meaning. It has usually been viewed as “fic­ tion,” and is therefore not considered an appropriate framework through which truths of an “objective” sort can be disclosed. The Clifford and Mar­ cus collection rightly questions this dissociation of narrative from “descrip­ tion” and blurs the boundary between fiction and science by suggesting how effective narrative can be in ethnographic analysis. How does narrative help to address the demise of symbolism and the erosion or collapse of representation? Narrative refers to particular events and situations but is also spun out of broader historical circumstances, often stated only implicitly. Interpreting narrative must begin with the suspicion that it can be read in at least two registers. Unlike ritual, Turner’s multimedia theater of symbolic forms, strict narrative is uncompromising in its insistence upon its “nonsymbolic” status: it is a flat, burnished surface with no depth. Thus the many travel books written in the nineteenth century by Europeans who visited North Africa present themselves not as allegories of encounters with the Other (the “Ori­ ent”), but as transparent descriptions or microhistories (Foster 1982, 1983). The travel account claims directly to textualize a set of experiences. In Mogreb el-Acksa (1930), a classic of the travel literature genre, Cunningham Graham recounts his 1897 journey from the coast of Morocco into the Atlas mountains. His destination was Taroudant, a “city to which an air of mystery clings” (4), located on the edge of the Sahara desert. The author notes that no account of the city existed at the time, and that was “forbidden” to nonMoslems; few Europeans visited it. On his journey, Cunningham Graham traveled disguised as a Turkish taleb (doctor) and was accompanied by a Syr-

ian (Christian) interpreter who was easily taken to be Moslem. Their journey fails to reach its objective. The party is “found out” to be Christian and is detained by a local mountain kaid who disallows their continuing toward the Sus. They finally turn back to Marrakech and the coast. This failed “pilgrim­ age,” as Cunningham Graham (xii) revealingly calls it, nevertheless allows him to tell of numerous encounters along the way. He exorcises his Euro­ pean curiosity about the exotic and discloses his opinions of the region’s political disorder. The author initially apologizes for the “lack of analysis” (xiii) in his writing. The narrative winds like a thread through a labyrinth. It takes the reader into the mountains, through a frustrating experience of waiting for days outside the crenelated walls of the kaid's castle. The climax is an audience with the kaid himself, followed by an equally compelling denouement when at last the party reaches Marrakech. As he listens to a Berber herdsman playing on his pipe, the author brings his narrative to a lyrical close with a nostalgia in which his story invites the reader to indulge: as he sang, the noise of trains and omnibuses faded away; the smoky towns grew fainter; the rush, the hurry, and the commonness of modern life sank out of sight; and in their place I saw again the valley of the N’fiss, the giant Kasbah with its four truncated towers, the Kaid, his wounded horse, the Persian, and the strange entrancing half-feudal, half-Arcadian life, which to have been seen but for a fortnight consoled me for my failure, and will remain with me a constant vision (seen in the mind, of course, as ghosts are seen); but ever fresh and unforgettable. (340)

The narrative thread delineates a pathway, a tunnel of vision through the countryside and the city, but hardly an adequate description of the Atlas, of Berbers, of Morocco, or of Marrakech; another thread would disclose another sequence of views. The narrative links together a series of repre­ sentations based on a singular experience. It thus purveys only its own idio­ syncratic domain; an aerial (omniscient) view is not available. Narrative does not make the more grandiose claim of a “scanning” ethnography to sketch the entire landscape. A closer inspection of this narrative suggests that it does not stick to its own prescriptions not to analyze (or to moralize). It does not remain re­ stricted to its narrow story alone, but spills out quixotically into “ethno­ graphic” digressions, indulging itself in specifying the character of the Arabs and the Berber tribesmen, spelling out a protectionist political agenda, and by turns maligning and lauding exotic social customs. These transgressions of the narrative dye the social landscape adjacent to its path, embellishing the narrative with a putative echo of “the real” in watered silk: an etching half hand-colored in a frame. The narrative framework turns out to be a rhetori­ cal intervention; instead of opinion or analysis, the reader is led to credit the story with self-evident truth. Arbitrary significance becomes legitimate and stable representation. In its portrayal of the politics of precolonial Morocco

and in its call for European intervention, Cunningham Graham’s account poses “analysis” simply as a story, as an innocent addition to travel literature, if only to give himself the assurance of defining a reality for himself. Narrative, the author-function, and the interpretation of symbolism turn out to be strategic responses to the postmodern crisis of representation. These discursive “technologies” point clearly to a central feature of the postmodern: There is in the history of the present a dialectical coexistence of a suspicion in regard to definitive meaning and an effort to establish, create, or discover it. There is positivism or science, and there is its refusal. There is uncertainty and pathos, and an overwhelmingly transparent effort to deny “alienation” (a term now long out of vogue, perhaps because we have be­ come acclimated to this condition). Turner’s interpretation of symbolism was an effort to acknowledge the complexity of this state of affairs, to recognize the “depths” of the problem of meaning and meaningfulness, yet to assert that the complexity could be “straightened out,” or “gotten to the bottom of,” so that an orderly and satisfying analysis would become feasible. This premise now appears naive, but the notion of depth, multifacetedness, or complexity survived the transition to the other styles of interpretive practice I have been discussing. The tactical deployment of the author, of “culture,” and of narrative in recent discursive practices attempts to address the problematics of postmodern representation mainly by means of rhetorical interventions (Hamon). Local and contingent forms of power and knowledge are displaced into globalized, overly abstracted rhetorical figures which are thereby made to take on the coloration of “truth.” The resulting stylizations of “the real,” rhetorically constructed, are then subjected to rhetorical deconstruction, criticized as merely the “latest rage,” as politically incorrect reifications, or simply as inelegant or wrong, not hav­ ing taken adequate account of “other realities” or the realities of the Other. There are endless accusations and counteractions, controversies which deter­ mine the power of contending forms of putative knowledge (Rabinow). The giddy ferris wheel of criticism/writing/literature revolves ever more quickly in order to feed the “devouring appetite for reading.” Such is the backdrop for what Turner (1982:7) has confessed, for his part, to have become “a personal voyage of discovery.” Meaning is not transparent or symbolic but open-ended (therefore a prob­ lem). Barthes links these semiotic conditions with the history of literature as a whole: From ancient times to the efforts o f our avant-garde, literature has been con­ cerned to represent something. What? I will put it crudely: the real. The real is not representable, and it is because men ceaselessly try to represent it by words that there is a history of literature. That the real is not representable, but only demonstrable, can be said in several ways: either we can define it, with Lacan, as the impossible, that which is unobtainable and escapes discourse, or in topo­ logical terms we observe that a pluri-dimensional order (the real) cannot be made to coincide with a unidimensional order (language). Now it is precisely

this topological impossibility that literature rejects and to which it never sub­ mits. Though there is no parallelism between language and the real, men will not take sides, and it is this refusal, perhaps as old as language itself, which produces, in an incessant commotion, literature. (Barthes 1982:465)

Barthes seems to claim as omnipresent (universal?) the frustrating/exhilarating conditions that make literature and interpretation possible and which motivate the practice of writing. I have raised the possibility that these condi­ tions can instead be historically situated in the postmodern. Perhaps I have been guilty of constructing a narrative which is apocryphal and self-serving (or self-revealing), raiding and appropriating the archive for the convenience of a artful argument (more literature), just as Cunningham Graham or Turner appropriates the Other. The postmodern condition inevitably raises such suspicions. Turner's work documents his own movement toward similar suspicions, at first tacitly in his work on pilgrimage, and at last overtly in the notion of a personal quest. The process and practice of delineating meaning has its ritual­ istic and pilgrimage aspects: a narrative thread, through a labyrinth, library, or archive, to an elusive objective or saint’s shrine. The repetition of the search, the compulsive quest for knowledge (fieldwork?) re-undertaken or obsessively reviewed and reanalyzed, situates the anthropologist’s transit. The perseverative replication of writing—the ironic trying-to-explain the unexplainable—is part and parcel of agonizing over how to interpret and to represent “the real.” Barthes shows us that representation is unequal to that task. As a result, the quest for meaning breaks up and trails off in different directions, seeping into layer below layer and contaminating epistemologies as well narratives. I have suggested how readily narrative “lies” about the simplicity of the story it tells, becoming metanarrative, addressing and sub­ verting its own raison d'être. When Lyotard defines the postmodern condition as an “incredulity toward metanarrative,” he refers to a similar set of circum­ stances; if grounding representation is impossible, then all metanarratives, an objective of which is to establish grounds, are suspect. Other metanarra­ tives are sought to replace those which have come under suspicion, so that the incredulity regarding metanarative produces with grand irony a burgeon­ ing succession of further narratives and metanarratives. There is the faint hope that within this billowing proliferation of discourses a “true” one will be found to override the difficulty of representation to represent. The result­ ing tension drives the infinitesimal production of further representations, further discourses: “Whatever we write conveys meanings we do not or could not possibly intend, and our words cannot say what we mean. It is vain to try and master a text because the perpetual interweaving of texts and meanings is beyond our control. Language works through us. Recognizing that, the . . . impulse is to look inside one text for another, dissolve one text into another, or build one text into another” (Harvey 1989:49-51). Through a series of contorted detours, I return to Borges and his archive,

since an alternative to endless and endlessly unsatisfying interpretation is to become silent. In “The Anthropologist,” Borges (1974:46-51) recounts a brief parable of representation. A young man, casting about for something to occupy him, falls into learning native American languages and goes off to discover the secrets of shamanism. After two years of field research, he re­ turns to the university and announces to his professor that he has learned the secrets which he set out to discover. But he has no intention of revealing them and has burned all his notes. His professor wonders if he has gone native. The young man explains that his decision not to write his monograph does not stem from taking an oath not to disclose his knowledge, but that what he has learned is unstatable. He becomes a librarian in the university library. Given the problematics of representation, he becomes speechless. We see him receding toward the library’s grand facade, entering the heavily carved doorway, and disappearing, to be perpetually surrounded by the ar­ chive’s infinity of discourses. He comes into possession of a certain power, having come into possession of “all knowledge.” Recognizing that there will be no book of books, he refuses to decide about “what is true” or “what is real.” He purveys all the options and has access to all possible systems of representation, past, present, and future. He claims an exemption from hav­ ing to say anything. To write and then to stop writing are phases of interpretation. But when a “method,” a map, or a simple technique for interpretation is unavailable, both writing and becoming silent (knowing when to stop writing and how to conclude) also become problematized. The distance of the postmodern from transparent meaning and from symbolic analysis understandably leaves inter­ pretation between the horns of hypergraphia and silence. The anecdotal and architectonic interpretations which I have given illustrate this “bind,” and suggest that with the problematics of representation come interpretations that of necessity are local, contingent, idiosyncratic, political, convenient, tentative, and temporary, derived as they are from a definable occasion rather than emanating directly from “the real.” The archive is ordered so as to allow access to infinite discourses, but that order in no way tells us what discourses to choose, what books contain the “truth,” or what words convey knowledge or confer power. Representation is subjected to an occasion, a set of practices, and momentary conditions. It circulates through a changeable flux of discursive formulations, historical constraints, rhetorical forces, con­ figurations of power, and presumptions and claims to knowledge. Meaning and truth, an interpretation that “sticks” or “rings true,” depends on how these diverse elements are appropriated and orchestrated in practice. The problematics of postmodern representation demand that that practice be critically examined as a reflexive aspect of the practice itself, since the inter­ pretation of symbolism, “description,” narrative, and other means of styliz­ ing and posing “ the real” no longer allow us to hide behind them. Interpretation is risky; the writer becomes vulnerable, but in the quest for meaning still seeks the scintillating object of his desire.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Barthes, Roland. Elements of Semiology. Trans. Annette Lavers and Colin Smith. Lon­ don: Jonathan Cape, 1967. _______Inaugural Lecture, College de France. In A Barthes Reader. Ed. Susan Sontag. New York: Hill and Wang, 1982. _______“Digressions.” In The Grain of the Voice. Trans. Linda Cloverdale. New York: Hill and Wang, 1985. Boon, James. Other Tribes, Other Scribes. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1982. Borges, Jorges Luis. “The Library of Babel.” In Ficciones. Ed. Anthony Kerrigan. New York: Grove Press, 1962. ______ “The Anthropologist.” In In Praise of Darkness. Trans. Norman Thomas di Giovanni. New York: Dutton, 1974. Clifford, James. “On Ethnographic Surrealism.” Comparative Studies in Society and History 23 (1981), 539-564. Clifford, James, and George Marcus, eds. Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986. Crapanzano, Vincent. Tuhami, Portrait of a Moroccan. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980. Cunningham Graham, R. B. Mogreb el-Acksa, a Journey in Morocco. New York: Viking, 1930. de Certeau, Michael. The Practice of Everyday Life. Trans. Steven F. Rendall. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984. Donato, Eugenio. “The Museum’s Furnace: Notes toward a Contextual Reading of Bouvard and Pecuchet.” In Textual Strategies. Ed. Josué V. Harari. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1979. Favret-Saada, Jeanne. Deadly Words: Witchcraft in the Bocage. Trans. Catherine Cullen. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980. Foster, Stephen William. “The Exotic as a Symbolic System.” Dialectical Anthropology 7 (1982), 21-30. ______ “Deconstructing a Text on North Africa.” Pretext 4 (1983), 295-316. Foucault, Michel. “Fantasia of the Library.” In Language, Counter-memory, Practice. Trans. Donald F. Bouchard and Sherry Simon. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1977. _______ “What Is an Author?” In Textual Strategies. Ed. Josué V. Harari. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1979. Geertz, Clifford. “Blurred Genres.” The American Scholar 29 (1980), 165-179. Hamon, Philippe. “The Rhetorical Status of the Descriptive.” Yale French Studies 671 (1981), 1-26. Hartman, Geoffrey. Saving the Text. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1981. Harvey, David. The Condition of Postmodernity. Cambridge, Mass.: Basil Blackwell, 1989. Lyotard, Jean-Francois. The Postmodern Condition. Trans. Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1979. Marcus, George E., and Dick Cushing. “Ethnographies as Texts.” Annual Review of Anthropology 11 (1982), 25-69. Ortner, Sherry B. “On Key Symbols.” American Anthropologist lb (1973), 1338-1346. Rabinow, Paul. “Discourse and Power: On the Limits of Ethnographic Texts.” Dialec­ tical Anthropology 10 (1985), 1-13. Ricoeur, Paul. Time and Narrative, vol. 2. Trans. Kathleen McLaughlin and David Pellauer. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985. Stewart, Kathleen. “Nostalgia— a Polemic.” Cultural Anthropology 3 (1988), 227-241.

Turner, Victor. The Forest of Symbols. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1967. ________ The RitualProcess, Structure, and Anti-structure. Chicago: Aldine, 1969. ________From Ritual to Theatre. Performance Studies Series, no. 1. New York: Per­ forming Arts Journal Publications, 1982. Turner, Edith, and Victor Turner. Image and Pilgrimage in Christian Culture. New York: Columbia University Press, 1978. Wagner, Roy. The Invention of Culture. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1975.

IL Turner's Theory and Practice

VICTOR TURNER’S DEFINITION, THEORY, AND SENSE OF RITUAL R o n a ld L. G rim es

Understanding Turner on ritual requires an approach from at least three angles. First, one needs to examine his explicit formal definition of it. Sec­ ond, one has to condense his theoretical reflections on it. And finally, one has to infer his image and sense of it.1

The Definition of Ritual Despite the fruitfulness of Victor Turner’s writings for fields far beyond his own and topics much broader than ritual, his definition of ritual is at best conventional and at worst obstructive. Ritual, he says, is “prescribed formal behavior for occasions not given over to technological routine, having refer­ ence to beliefs in mystical beings or powers” (1967:19; cf. 1978:243). The definition is host for a brood of problems. Not only does it limit ritual to religious ritual, that is, liturgy, it limits religion to two of its subtypes, theism and animism (implied by “mystical beings” and “powers” respec­ tively). Moreover, it implies that ritual is by definition related to belief—a distinctly Western preoccupation, one that ignores instances of disjunction and dissonance between ritual and belief. Ritual’s relation to belief is no more automatic than its relation to myth. Because the same rite can be em­ bedded in various eras, cultural settings, and cosmologies, one cannot infer beliefs from it. It is not at all uncommon to find people participating in rites they do not believe in. Or if they do believe in them, they do so in some special way—in a “subjunctive,” or “as i f ’ mode. In addition, they may believe in one part of a rite but not in some other part. In his attack on the utility of the idea of ritual, Jack Goody (1977:33) reminds us that in the Greek city state only participation, not belief, was required. The problem with Turner’s making belief a definitional requirement lies in the Western, rationalist assumptions packed into the notion of belief. The assumption that belief is primary and action a secondary expression of it is

peculiar to certain phases of Western thought and thus ethnocentric if built into a definition. When a dancer dons a lion mask to become a lion god, is “believing” what is going on? Turner would not have subscribed to many of the implications that I am arguing are implied by his definition. Perhaps we should investigate whether the opposite of such implications is true. Is it possible that people participate in ritual in order to avoid the obligation to believe, or that they suspend belief in the midst of an enactment of a rite? There is no inherent connection among religion, belief, and ritual. Each culture has its own way of forging or ignoring links among these cultural phenomena. Since there are rites that have nothing to do with religion (e.g., civil ceremonies) and religions that have little to do with mystical beings or powers (e.g., Zen Buddhism), building such qualifiers into a definition is a mistake. Furthermore, Turner’s differentiating ritual from “occasions not given over to technological routine” is only partly successful. The tactic helps us recognize the noninstrumental quality of festivals, celebrations, and other rites permeated by play. But it obscures the link between ritual and technol­ ogy that develops when “technicians of the sacred” (Eliade’s term for sha­ mans) engage in magical rites aimed at specific empirical results such as making crops grow or healing patients. Surely there is a technology of ritual, and surely modern technology has its ritualistic qualities. And these ought to be understood, not obscured. Ideally, a formal definition is firmly grounded in an anthropologist’s field work and serves as a condensation of his or her theories. But such is not the case with Turner’s definition of ritual. One can either attribute to him con­ siderable wisdom because he ignored it or fault him for failing to make it consistent with either his theory or his sense of ritual.

The Theory of Ritual Turner’s theory differs radically from his definition. Had he abided by the latter, he would have written very little, because it excludes most of what he found interesting. Much more consistent with his theoretical reflections is this characterization: “I consider the term ‘ritual’ to be more fittingly ap­ plied to forms of religious behavior associated with social transitions, while the term ‘ceremony’ has a closer bearing on religious behavior associated with social states, where politico-legal institutions also have greater impor­ tance. Ritual is transformative, ceremony confirmatory” (1967:95). A major preoccupation of Turner’s writing is with social transitions. His tendency was to interpret major cultural phenomena processually rather than statically, hence his emphasis on the liminal phase of rites of passage in traditional cultures and liminoid phenomena in postindustrial ones. He defines myth in a way that parallels his theory of ritual: “Myths treat of

origins but derive from transitions” (1968:576). Just as he splits myth here into content and context in order to be able to associate the former with things static or primordial and the latter with things processual, so he splits ritual into ritual proper (associated with transition) and ceremony (associated with maintenance of the status quo). Turner’s seminal description is provocative but idiosyncratic; it is very much his own. This problem is not a major one as long as one recognizes that few scholars use the terminology in this way. More conventional usage associ­ ates the term “ceremony” with either secular or civil ceremony and “ritual” in the strict sense with religion. If we are to follow Turner’s usage, it is helpful to bear in mind that a given rite is likely to exercise both transforma­ tive and confirmatory force. Therefore, ritual and ceremony are not distinct types of action; they are qualities of action. Consequently, using Turnerian theory and asking, “Is this a ritual or a ceremony?” may confuse rather than clarify. In both his formal definition and his more theoretically informed charac­ terization of ritual, Turner links ritual and religion—a practice inconsis­ tent with his having called attention to the transformative powers of secular ritual as well as his having attended to ritual in contemporary art and drama, both of which may or may not be religious in a given instance. However much one might want to identify religion with the power to trans­ form, anthropologists have no empirical warrant for making such an associ­ ation. When they do, they speak as theologians and thus about what they think ought to be the case. Religion, as a matter of fact, does both things— transform and maintain. Turner was certainly right in insisting that neither religion nor ritual should be identified with mere maintenance of the status system, but sometimes he went too far in treating them as if they evoked only transformation. Most of the time Turner did not confuse aspired-to ritual with actuallypracticed rites. Actually-practiced rites are both liminal and status-systemoriented and, Turner insisted, understandable only in the context of their social field . Consequently, his work on ritual does not lend itself to ap­ proaches that are essentially typological or merely philosophical, although his theorizing operated at a very high level of generalization. One of Turner’s prime theoretical tenets is his dramatism. He both as­ sumes and argues that ritual is inherently dramatic, but precisely what he means by this is not always obvious. On the one hand, it can mean that the internal process by which a rite unfolds is akin to that displayed by a play. On the other, it can mean that the social conflict surrounding a rite resembles, or even generates, dramatic processes. He does not systematically discrimi­ nate between drama as a formal and drama as a functional quality of ritual, but his emphasis falls on the latter. Furthermore, he does not always specify what dramaturgical principle is at work in ritual. Is it the mere fact of overt bodily action? The presence of conflict? The use of roles? The division of labor between performers and spectators? Turner’s dramatism is immensely

fruitful; he has laid the groundwork for a generation of discussion and ex­ periment on the borders between ritual and drama. But he was far from systematic, and what is needed is less clichéd repetition of his terminology and more critical extension of his theories. Another constant of Turner’s theory of ritual was his insistence that rites are constructed of “building blocks” called symbols. Sometimes he treated symbols more dynamically, speaking of them as “agencies” (see, e.g., 1975:150). But in neither case did he take account of some rather severe critiques of the idea of symbolism. For example, Dan Sperber attacked the assumption that symbols “refer” or have “meaning” in either the usual or the Turnerian way of thinking about them. Perhaps, he suggests, symbols work more like smells and less like words: they evoke rather than refer. Sperber is not convinced that the exegetical meaning, that is, the commen­ tary, accompanying a ritual really constitutes an interpretation of it. Rather, it is an evocation of it. “ Exegesis is not an interpretation but rather an extension of the symbol and must itself by in terpreted” (1975:34), he insists. Another difficulty with “comparative symbology”— the name Turner (1974:53) seemed most tempted to give his whole enterprise—is that symbols and their accompanying exegesis may not be all the building blocks of ritual. What do we call the stuff between the big, vortexlike symbols around which there is so much buzz? What about the lulls, pauses, and unprescribed ges­ tures? What about the nonsanctified objects that show up in sacred pre­ cincts? What about the facilitating gestures used to lead into the symbolic ones? Much that is ordinary and nonsymbolic goes on in a rite. Not every action or object is loaded with “multivocal” (his term) symbolism and drama. Some facets of ritualized events are boring, routine, and generally over­ looked by symbol-hunters, and they bear on our sense of ritual. Turner cer­ tainly knew this fact but never made a place for it in his theory. The effect of Turner’s theory of ritual on the field of ritual studies has been to break the stranglehold of conservatism. The vast majority of defini­ tions and theories had been functionalist, emphasizing the extent to which ritual conserves the status quo and resists change. Ritual had been portrayed as the most backward-looking, foot-dragging of cultural forms. It was hardly capable of acting on society; rather, it was a “repository” or “reflection” of it. Always it was passive, inert. Turner painted another picture, that of a cultural “agent,” energetic, subversive, creative, socially critical.

The Sense of Ritual One’s sense of ritual is conveyed by the image one has of it, but it is actually generated by the experience one has of it. Turner was not only a theorist and fieldworker, he was a participant in both traditional and ex-

perimental rites. And he wrote— though in carefully hedged ways— about his involvement in ritual practice. It is not quite so difficult to make sense of the inconsistency between his definition and theory if one knows a little about his bireligiosity and the ambivalence of his participation in ritual. Not only was he a practicing Catholic who venerated the pre-Vatican II Mass, but he was initiated by the Ndembu and participated in ritualized theatrical experiments with Richard Schechner. In workshop contexts Turner actively engaged in borrowing, adapting, and inventing ritual. But his attitude was ambivalent. On the one hand, he favored such experiments because he thought ritual was comprehensible only as lived experience (1979:80). On the other, he feared “a hackwork of contemporaneous im­ provisation” (1976:524) and the possible loss of the individual in “a new totalizing process of reliminalization” (1979a:l 17-120). The traditional side of Turner’s sense of ritual was structured into his formal definition, whereas the playful, experimenting side emerged in his far-flung, interdis­ ciplinary theories. When he tried to reconcile the two tendencies, he some­ times lapsed into treating ritual as if it were all of a piece. But rites vary widely, not just cross-culturally but across types. A festival is not a funeral, nor an inauguration worship. Turner tended to construe all rites as vari­ ants of a few specific types, notably rites of passage, rites of inversion, and celebrative or festive rites. The range of topics to which Turner related ritual was enormous; brain physiology, drama, religion, social processes, art, literature, politics, and a host of others. The corpus of his writing is not limited to religious ritual. His sense of ritual—as opposed to his definition of it—paid little attention to the secular-sacred distinction. Following Durkheim, he was tempted by the idea that the domain of the sacred had “contracted” in modern, secular society (see 1977:36ff.) and that it had become a matter of individual choice for leisure or play time, rather than an obligatory matter of communal work. He knew there were important distinctions between preindustrial, small-scale societies and complex large-scale ones. One of the most important ones, he noted, is that whereas liminality is focused in the former, it is diffused (and thus renamed the “liminoid”) in the latter. Thus, Turner almost inverted Durkheim. No longer is liminality contained, rather it is scattered; its rem­ nants are everywhere—in the arts, politics, advertising, and so on. Turner admitted that liminoid phenomena can be quite secularized (43), but his characterizations of the liminoid often sounded like descriptions of the sa­ cred: intense feeling, a dismantling of hierarchy, etc. In other words, the liminoid is sacred to members of a secular society. I suspect this attitude was as characteristic of Turner as it is of his followers. If so, his defining ritual as essentially religious makes a bit more sense. “Religious” now takes on an expanded meaning. No longer does it mean something like “related to the gods” but rather “evocative of communitas, provocative of change, and nurturant of transition and transformation.”

NOTES 1. I have written more extensively about these aspects of Turner’s thought. See Grimes 1982, chaps. 4 and 9.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Goody, Jack. “Against ‘Ritual’: Loosely Structured Thoughts on a Loosely Defined Topic.” In Secular Ritual. Ed. Sally F. Moore and Barbara G. Myerhoff. Am­ sterdam: Van Gorcum, 1977. Grimes, Ronald L. Beginnings in Ritual Studies. Washington, D.C.: University Press of America, 1982. Sperber, Dan. Rethinking Symbolism. Trans. Alice L. Morton. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975. Turner, Victor. The Forest of Symbols: Aspects of Ndembu Ritual. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1967. ______ “Liminal to Liminoid, in Play, Flow, and Ritual: An Essay in Comparative Symbology.” Rice University Studies 60 (1974), 53-92. _______ Process, Pilgrimage, and Performance: A Study in Comparative Symbology. New Delhi: Concept, 1979. ______ “Ritual, Tribal and Catholic.” Worship 50 (1976), 504-526. ________ “Symbolic Studies.” Annual Review of Anthropology 4 (1975), 145-161. Ed. Bernard J. Siegel. ______ “Variations on a Theme of Liminality.” In Secular Ritual. Ed. Sally F. Moore and Barbara G. Myerhoff. Amsterdam: Van Gorcum, 1977, pp. 36-52. ______ “Dramatic Ritual/Ritual Drama: Performative and Reflexive Anthropol­ ogy.” Kenyon Review N.S. 1 (1979), 80-93. _______ “Myth and Symbol.” In The International Encyclopedia of Social Sciences, vol. 10. Ed. David L. Sill. New York: MacMillan and Free Press, 1968, pp. 576-582. ______, and Edith Turner. Image and Pilgrimage in Christian Culture: Anthropological Perspectives. New York: Columbia University Press, 1978.

“HYPERION TO A SATYR” CRITICISM AND ANTI-STRUCTURE IN THE WORK OF VICTOR TURNER F rederick T u rn er

Victor Turner professed to dread the moment when a volume of essays in his honor would appear; he claimed that it was equivalent to a visit from the death angel. In this case, as he would have said, the damage has already been done. But we owe it to him to undertake this enterprise in his spirit, that is, playfully, with eyes wide open, reflexively, alive to the ironic implications of all possible “meta” perspectives. In fact, an examination of Turner’s peculiar use of the “meta” mode is an excellent way to enter his work. Critics, whether they are historians, sociolo­ gists, philosophers, or of the literary persuasion, normally adopt the “meta” stance when they are engaged in covert ideological struggle, as when they are pushing a revisionist theory and want to avoid having to do battle on their enemy’s ground. In other words, the “meta” perspective is used to distance, alienate, control, and delegitimate. Turner used the “meta” mode for an entirely different purpose. Without ulterior goals or ideological strategy, and without any implication that the revelation of rationale and intention deval­ ued an action, he sought to confront the participants in an argument with their own and each other’s inner motives. The purpose of his questioning would be fulfilled when the debaters met each other’s eyes with a sheepish grin and that dawning affection which comes from the recognition of our common predicament as mortal self-conscious animals. He did this not in any spirit of hostility, manipulation, revision, or debunking, but in a spirit of comic frankness, insight, compassion, epiphany, and the acknowledgment of mutual humanity. He always included himself in the revelation, and never used the “meta” as a way of getting the high ground of a person. For him cultural reality originated in the hot, liquid, protean fertility of communitas, anti-structure, “experience” in Dilthey’s sense, charismatic liminality, “betwixt and between” the settled and solid states of social rou­ tine. This fecund seedbed would be sheltered from any charge of blasphemy

by the plea that all action in this space was “only” subjunctive, only, so to speak, in quotation marks. Stylistically, Turner loved quotation marks and the subjunctive mood. As time went by, the participants in the original timeless moment of revela­ tory experience, or their followers, would seek to enshrine and preserve the original deposit of revelation, and thus its subjective concomitant of joy or insight, by crystallizing or encapsulating it in a husk of ritual, symbol, myth, and exegesis, a husk that would protect the seed or semantic content so that in another time it might blossom forth once more. Turner was fascinated by the way in which a flowering might happen again and again in the great religions, and this partly accounts for his interest in pilgrimages, millenarian cults, and figures such as St. Francis. Culturally universal ways of preserving the deposit of spirit would tend to evolve: the concentric tripartite structure of life crisis and calendrical ritual, for instance, with grated barriers—the rites of separation and reaggregation— guarding the sacred and irreverent liminal period within at its beginning and its end. However, this process carried with it the risk of ossification, fossilization, and deadly routine. The live pores of the original spontaneous structure would be drained of their charismatic content, and the fiery liquid of joy and insight would be re­ placed, so to speak, by the embalming fluid of tradition, which would in turn harden into cold and rigid authority; until what was originally the cure for the petrification of human life would have become the chief symptom of the disease. These were Turner’s metaphors; what do they tell us about our present book? Obviously, that we must beware of taking structure and procedure as legitimate substitutes for spirit and charisma; the essays in this book should be like seeds, holding tightly wound bundles of potential growth, rather than like ossified memorials to the inessentials of method and terminology. In a democratic social structure such as ours, the special danger must be the reduction of Turner’s work to a set of techniques of analysis, tailored to the use of specialists, and systematized so that any citizen without unusual talent or background can be efficiently trained in their use. (There is no intent here to cast aspersions on democracy as such; the ways in which other social systems subvert and defuse charisma are often even less appealing.) Turner would surely approve of the appropriation of his ideas across the disciplinary boundaries that separate the social sciences from the humanities; but we must recognize that he would have been uneasy at the prospect of a system or school of Turnerian literary criticism, especially if it showed signs of turn­ ing into an orthodoxy. What then? Should the enterprise of applying Turner’s ideas to the study of literature be abandoned? Should we at least avoid giving them careful and systematic consideration, and concentrate instead on an impressionistic at­ tempt to reproduce his spirit? Paradoxically, Turner was an exceedingly care­ ful, scholarly, exact, and scientific thinker himself, and to be in his spirit is to follow him as much in this as in his emotional tone. The only way of resolving

this paradox is by positing a whole new conception of the academy itself, one pioneered in Turner’s own pedagogy and already taking root here and there among the universities. It is only in the light of this notion of the academy, and this conception of the proper ends and energies of pedagogy, that a genuinely Turnerian criticism can evolve. Characteristically, Turner seldom made an issue of his interdisciplinary approach in itself, and never promulgated it as an ideology or a crusade. Instead, he quietly and radically got on with his work, without advertising its implications, fatal though they were to established notions of academic study. When he found the disciplinary restrictions of an institution too confining, he either changed the nature of his relationship with it or simply pulled up stakes and left. But a set of assumptions can be inferred from his practice, and they have a crucial bearing on literary criticism. The traditional model of the subject matter of academic research can be visualized as a flat plane extending in all directions, divided by natural boundaries into “fields of study.” The annual intake of students is judiciously distributed over this expanse and individually encouraged to choose a partic­ ular field, on the basis of inclination, need, and receptivity to training. It is expected that a student will give some attention to those fields which immedi­ ately adjoin his or her own, though this interest should not be too great and should be comically self-deprecatory in tone, as a ritual appeasement gesture to the territorial occupiers. In addition, a personally broadening hobby may be chosen, preferably in a field utterly unconnected with the student’s spe­ cialty. Thus a sort of landscape appears, of fenced disciplines occupied by myriads of toiling workers, like ants or termites, individually blind to the big picture but collectively capable of remarkable feats of architecture. Over the plain hover wise and benign administrators, showering financial resources, adjudicating territorial disputes, and reporting the results to society at large. Each field possesses its own characteristic language or jargon, whose secret passwords and signs are jealously guarded by the high priests, and revealed to initiates only after humiliating and protracted ordeals. At the edges of the worked area, heroic groundbreaking scholars hack out new fields from the wilderness, while empire-building department heads seize and temporarily hold neighboring territories. When the work of one field becomes too diffi­ cult for the average trained researcher, the field splits into subfields, which may slowly attain the status of fields in themselves. Over this landscape Turner wandered like some prophet of apocalypse. To the inhabitants of a given field he could demonstrate all the qualifications required of an expert; but then he could be seen, disquietingly, several fields away, conversing with the elders of the temple in their own language; and then again, he was hailed in yet another place as a systematizer or a groundbreaker. Worse than this, he acted as if the divisions between the fields were not essential or indigenous in themselves, and laid bare the uncomfortable implications of the fact that if accepted fields were once subfields, then either their present boundaries are arbitrary or we would have no assurance that

undiscovered rifts might lie below our feet, waiting to swallow us up in de­ struction like the San Andreas fault. Worse still, he showed again and again that the answer to a problem in one field usually lay in plain view in another; he sometimes acted as if one field actually interpenetrated another or even lay superimposed upon it, so that, as it were, one could be in two places at once. A master of jargon, he was often entrusted by the high priests with the most sacred words in their discipline; but then he would turn around and betray their trust by showing that the best and most paradigmatic definition of those words was in the terms of another discipline altogether. (For in­ stance, consider his dramatistic redefinition of social redress procedures, or his political analysis of the ritual of Becket’s martyrdom, or his New Critical treatment of Ndembu ritual symbols, or his resocializing of Freud, or his Blakean/Hegelian/Marxist explanation of traditional rites and ceremonies.) When the territory of a given discipline was human, he refused to acknowl­ edge the distinction between researcher and object of study, and recruited gifted native informants as collaborators, guides, or even research directors (as in his essay on Muchona the Hornet). One of the essential properties of the old model was that the researcher is more conscious and aware than the object of research; Turner often assumed precisely the opposite. But it is important to distinguish Turner’s approach from what is usually considered to be “interdisciplinary.” Oddly enough, the interdisciplinary does have a place in the old model, as a sort of permitted travel, tourism, or diplomacy, with much obeisance to the mutual untranslatability of disciplin­ ary languages, and courtly deference to foreign customs. Interdisciplinary studies are marked as anomalous but as an allowed luxury or even perversion reserved for the expert. Nobel Prize winners are given visas to travel in other fields, but their visits are state visits. Interdisciplinary study by younger re­ searchers can sometimes be the first symptom of fission or of parturition in a field, and is often approved of because the resulting new discipline is even smaller, more jealous of its boundaries, and more supportive of the general disciplinary ideology than an older and more easygoing field. Of course, one can always rise above the disciplinary boundaries by becoming an administra­ tor; but then one is expected to give up any creative work— as it is defined in the model. Turner was in fact often nudged in this direction, but resisted it to the end. In the old model the truth is like an unknown landscape, fully formed and uncontradictory in itself, which when explored is known at first in a fragmen­ tary and apparently contradictory way, but which eventually yields up its secrets and submits to an exact accounting, the contradictions having been ironed out. Turner was content to accept this model for the physical sciences, though indeed his scepticism about its general application might well be confirmed by the extraordinary logic of quantum mechanics; he certainly denied it as appropriate to the study of human beings as persons in society. For him human truth was the characteristic vitality of the growing edge of a system, its living cambium; and the mind of the thinker about human truth

was part of that growth, and vital to it. The growth process—and here he never forgot what he had learned from Marx—was inherently contradictory, and the resolution of its paradoxes was the clearest sign of its death. “With­ out Contraries is no Progression,” from Blake, was one of his favorite quota­ tions, as was Whitman’s “Do I contradict myself? Very well, I contradict myself.” This is not to say that he did not seek consistency and logical coherence; indeed he was quite a formidable reasoner. Rather, he knew that if an idea was strong and vital enough, it would generate a new paradox for every one that it resolved; like Neils Bohr, he felt that the opposite of a profound truth is another profound truth. Our appetite for consistency was the very drive that revealed the richest paradoxes. What he resisted was the tendency to reject an idea or fact the moment it generated a contradiction. Another of his sayings was “beware of premature closure.” But it is important to distinguish Turner’s position from that of the decon­ structionists. Deconstructionist analysis provides every text or cultural cre­ ation with exactly the same content: that all meanings are a dancing over the void, and that the void is fundamental. Turner accepted that we all, civilized or “savage,” know that already, and that since the dancing is so much more substantial than the void, our definition of reality might as well, since we are in linguistic control of it, be tailored to fit the dancing rather than the void. Then we would be ready to study the really interesting things, which are the dance and how to do it ourselves. Where Turner agreed with the deconstruc­ tionists was in their rejection of the structuralist claim to exhaust the content of an object by exhausting its form. If a text is really a script for a ritual, pageant, or drama, we would not know what the full content of it was until it was performed, and then it might be very different the next time. But the contradictions in the script were not secret signs that the script was really meant to discredit itself; rather, they were meat for the actors, to make an effective show, full of conflict and suspense. And the actors must choose, and decide, and limit the meaning and content, and affirm it, if the show is to work. Deconstruction is not prepared to make this sacrifice, and therefore cannot perform. Implicit in Turner’s practice was a different conception of the academic life. Although he was deeply suspicious of morality, he was actually engaged in a profoundly moral enterprise, the life devoted to what he called “ideas” and to personal love—and he did not clearly distinguish between the two. He loved the free, idiosyncratic, creative intelligence in other people, and though he was interested in their other characteristics, he was not especially fond of them. For him it was no longer enough to be expert in a field— though he demanded expertness as a necessary but not sufficient require­ ment for serious thinking. It was not enough to keep abreast of develop­ ments in a field, or even in several fields, if this was done without judgment, question, or imaginative intervention. To be a real thinker one had to actively explore many fields, with a developing core of ideas in search of confirma-

tion or deconfirmation. One had to be prepared to learn new languages or modes of discourse at any stage in one’s life. And the great tool for this research, this exploration, and new learning, was teaching. Turner’s seminars always ventured out into new material, the teacher and the students in the same boat, the students learning by his example how to learn, how to make mistakes, and correct them, and find out why the mistake was made, and achieve original new insight in the field as a result. The classroom was the laboratory. Turner simply did not recognize the disciplinary boundaries. His mode of the interdisciplinary took all human life as its subject, and assumed a total organic relationship between all its aspects, so that information obtained in one disciplinary mode simply could not be understood at all except in the context of all the others. If Turner’s approach were to be translated into institutional organization, it would require the universities to abolish depart­ ments altogether. If his assumptions about education, and those of his col­ laborators and successors, take root, the change in the academy will be as great as that from medieval scholasticism to Renaissance humanism: a mas­ sive alteration in the structure of legitimation, in the conception of what constitutes a subject, in the definitions of information, proof, and investiga­ tion, in the accreditation of academic personnel. Hence the critical legacy of Victor Turner includes the notion that there is no legitimate “literary” criticism as such; literature is part of the spectrum of ritual and “rituoid” human activities (to coin a term), and its investigation may take us at once into neuroanatomy and psychophysics, economics, theol­ ogy, kinship studies, political philosophy, theater, and our own personal lives. Literature is no more one of the humanities than it is one of the social sciences, the arts, or the life sciences. So our original enterprise, which was to examine Turner’s contribution to literary criticism, has led us to a larger critique of the structure of the acad­ emy itself. But if we abandon the traditional departmental boundaries and the model of study which they imply, what will replace them? If we could be assured of a reliable supply of authentic geniuses with a charismatic gift of communication, we could simply sit them down under the trees with some students and leave them to it. Failing this, we need some kind of structure. Since the old disciplinary model clearly does not reflect the actual struc­ ture of reality—an oak tree does not distinguish between physical, chemical, and biological processes; Shakespeare did not keep esthetic, moral, legal, philosophical, literary, scientific, and dramatic elements apart in his plays— perhaps we need to develop a formal structure for academic activity which reproduces the structure of the concrete content of the world. Although there are dangers in second-guessing what kind of real relationships we might find in the world, such an approach would, I believe, be fruitful if we were prepared to change our administrative structures at once according to the implications of new discoveries and new theoretical perspectives. More important still might be the corresponding change in pedagogical

practice. In his later years Turner developed a remarkable method of teach­ ing, which combined his profound knowledge of the dynamics of human rituals of celebration, initiation, and invocation, sophisticated theatrical and performance techniques, a developing theory of human motivation and brain reward, and classical ideas of debate, dialectic, and symposium. His pedagogy took three main forms: the seminar, the ethnodrama, and the dithyrambic speech. “Turner’s midnight seminar,” as it was called by his students, was always held at his home, and his wife and collaborator, Edith Turner, was always involved. It began around 7:45 in the evening, when the first students began to arrive. They would drink coffee—for at this point a keyed-up highconcentration, close-attention mode was called for. Groups of people would gather in the porch, the kitchen, the living room, the garden. It was an explicit part of the ritual that the normal boundaries between the academic and the domestic were broken down; this was no exclusive symposium of males, in refuge from Xanthippe, but a full heir of that mixed company which gathered in the castle at Urbino to hear discourses of love, virtue, and courtiership and be recorded by Castiglione. About 8:15 everyone would be rounded up to hear the paper that was being read that evening. About five minutes into the paper the first interrup­ tion would come; a question, objection, or elaboration by one of the reader’s fellow students. Often the interruption would lead to debate and discussion, given full rein because everyone knew that there would be all the time in the world to talk everything out, and nobody need go home with ideas pent up inside. At last the discussion would circle back to the paper, and so it would go on, in a helical fashion, adding an increment each time the talk returned to the paper. There is something comfortable about the digressive mode; it sweeps up all loose ends in its passing. After a while the audience and the reader would be fully “in synch” ; a state signaled by the fact that interrup­ tions would now elicit from the reader the plea that “I’m coming to that.” The talk would rise to a climax, everyone talking at once, often summed up by Turner himself; a general feeling of high excitement, of insight, connec­ tion, epiphany. Then there would be a beer break, with pretzels and crunchy snacks, be­ cause people would be feeling oral, aggressive, wanting to get their teeth into something. The beer was a mild brain reward for the hard mental work that was being done; the seminar was using the genre of the party or celebra­ tion— to teach, by delighting. Arguments between pairs, trios, or quartets of people would now arise, merge, break into subdisputes, or go to someone else for corroboration, expert advice, or judgment. The mood became more relaxed as the group reconvened to share the results of the individual discus­ sions. Around 11:30 some people would begin to leave, but a hard core of four or five would stay on to around one o’clock, talking by the front door, unwilling to leave, aihd sometimes end up in an all-night bar to continue the conversation.

A major feature of the seminar was the moment when Turner himself would get “fired up” and begin to develop a point raised in the paper or discussion. An extraordinary eloquence possessed him at those times, an exactness of memory for fact and quotation, combined with a candor and directness of manner, an engaging humor, and a willingness to venture into poetic and mystical language—though he never lost the fierce probity of his scientific scepticism. This speech was not so much lecture as the voicing of a collective intelligence that had formed itself during the course of the eve­ ning; there was even something of the shaman, the dionysian priest, or the sacrificial victim in the feel of it, something both solemn and hilarious. Per­ sonal affection and even love were implicit in the generosity of the speech and in the attention of the hearers. In this state of mind, insight was possible that would be inaccessible in a more conventional, “cooler” academic mood; or to put this more strongly, scholarly detachment in the Western tradition, though valuable for many uses, can actually prevent intellectual discovery. The other major element of Turner’s pedagogy was in the ethnodrama. In order to understand—and make his students understand—what was going on in another culture, Turner took the most direct route, which was through firsthand experience of it. In his fieldwork Turner entered into close per­ sonal friendships with the people he studied, and went through exactly the same hermeneutic spiral of mutual attunement of signification that a child does when it achieves the culturally impossible and, starting from utter strangerhood, becomes a fully fledged member of the community. Except ye become as a little child. Turner put his students through the same experi­ ence, by assigning them roles in the alien community, and making them act through some major life crisis, together with its central ritual. His directorial instructions included the rules, taboos, kinship conventions, and actual his­ torical background of the event; and the students had to prepare the ritual garments, decorations, sacred objects, music, food, and gifts required for the occasion. These preparations could take days or weeks, and after a while it simply became easier for the students to stay in their roles, once they got used to them, than to be continuously translating back and forth from the ethnographic, detached mode. Staying in character was sometimes difficult, just as it is in real life; I don’t have a script to tell me what is in character for me, and must make it up as I go along, helped by my fellow actors on this great stage of fools. The fact that a given brain can support dozens of different authentic selves is well known from studies of split personality; sanity consists perhaps in the cooperative choice of one of them, a choice which bears profound resemblances to the actor’s choice of objective, to use the language of performance studies. Turner’s ethnodramas, then, had all the genuine inauthenticity and artificial­ ity of actual human life; except that the commitment to the fiction may have been even greater than in the original because the participants, coming to it fresh and with the enthusiasm of an absorbing game, might have been en­ joying it more.

Another way of expressing the beautiful and profound paradoxes implicit in Turner’s ethnodrama is that for him the natural organ of human social interaction was the imagination, and that the only way of truly experiencing something at first hand is through the imagination. Thus anyone who tells us that they have had experiences which we cannot imagine or experience for ourselves, without going through it, is talking nonsense; for to imagine it is to go through it, and vice versa. Our greatest contemporary problem may not be the limited experience modern people have of other people’s conditions of life, but the fact that they are not taught to imagine, and therefore to feel, even their own experience. All the world’s a stage. Turner’s pedagogical practice is confirmed by new advances in the theory of language teaching. The analytical method, whereby the student learns the grammar and vocabulary before attempting to use the language, and the “language-lab” system, which attempts by a sort of mechanized operant con­ ditioning to program the language into the student, have been shown to contain equal, though different, weaknesses and flaws. The new method which has proved more effective than either generates a high-intensity, highaffect dramatic environment, in which teacher and students create ad hoc dramatic situations, and are forced by the exigencies of conflict and desire to invent effective language on the spot, as a child must growing up in a family. This technique is really a rediscovery, and it has proved remarkably successful. Turner staged African and Dixieland weddings, pilgrimages, curing rituals, even funerals. The last one in which he participated was his. It was a full-scale Ndembu funeral for a chief, with drum music, masked dancers, a seclusion hut for the widow, communal dancing, much drinking, tears, laughter, and reminiscence. It was put on at Turner’s house by his friends, family, students, and colleagues in anthropology, religious studies, and the performing arts, using Turner’s own meticulous field notes on the proper conduct of the ritual. All concerned were deeply moved—many of the participants dreamed about Turner shortly afterwards, and many have felt his presence in their lives since as a creative and energizing influence. The absurdity of this strange event, the curious element of comedy that we all felt in it, was en­ tirely in the spirit of the Ndembu ritual itself, which partly consists of the personification of the deceased’s death as a grotesque and absurd figure, and a comic mocking of it until it is subdued and made familiar. The person who played the role of Turner’s death (in a gorgeous and terrifying feathered mask of red, white, and black), a distinguished professor of anthropology, counts it as one of the most central experiences in his life. The strap for the costume, which was not well adjusted, cut a wound in his skin which he did not feel until the next day. Sceptics might well object that this ritual was inauthentic because it was done consciously and reflexively, in a “meta” mode, so to speak. But Turner’s research had showed that all live human rituals are already “meta” ; reflexivity is not just a feature of the sophisticated postmodernist work of

art— the novel, say, that introduces its author as a character—but is the normal condition, even part of the function, of the major human rituals. This may have been one of Turner's greatest insights: that there never were any innocent unconscious savages, living in a state of unreflective and instinctive harmony. We human beings are all and always sophisticated, conscious, capa­ ble of laughter at our own institutions, inventing our lives collectively as we go on, playing games, performing our own being. This is our specialization as animals, our nature. The true naivety is the naivety of modern or postmodern intellectuals who believe that they are the inventors of social criticism, existential insecurity, and metaperspectives. The mainstream cul­ ture that they attack is actually more self-aware than they are, because its rituals of reflexiveness are older and more finely tuned than theirs. We sim­ ply have to relearn how to do them properly. For precisely this reason, Turner was fascinated by classical and folk genres in literature: epic, liturgy, drama, tales, and jokes. He preferred poetry in traditional meters— the hymn-tunes of Blake, the sonnets of Rilke and Hop­ kins, the tight metrical structures of the French symbolists, the terza rima of Dante, the pentameter of Shakespeare—perhaps because meter is an ancient psychic technology to achieve that quasi-trance state of heightened aware­ ness which he had found in ritual. He loved narrative, plot, character, drama: those elements often abandoned by modernist experimenters as embodying what they took to be the complacency of established society, and ignored by modernist critics as sugar coating on the pill; he saw in them instead the keys to cultural self-examination, self-criticism, and self-transcendence. For him exegesis was part of the ritual, criticism part of the performance of litera­ ture, analysis a practical tool in the invention and construction of cultural reality. The best way of demonstrating Turner's critical legacy is perhaps in prac­ tice. Of course even the idea of what constitutes “practice” changes with the advent of a new paradigm. Practice for the New Critics meant the formal analysis of a text—implicitly, by an individual in the study, free of historical or biographical constraints. Practice for Turner meant a group’s ability to perform a cultural script, with the same unpredictable richness of new con­ tent as in the original performance. O f course Turner’s method did not exclude analysis; but analysis was only one of the means, a rehearsal and directorial technique, not the object of the exercise. Nonetheless, it might be interesting to judge the results of putting Turner’s method to work on a classical literary crux. As my own teaching practice closely resembles Turner’s, it may be a fair translation of Turner’s methods into a literary critical context. The classical crux I have chosen is in Shakespeare’s Hamlet: it is the ques­ tion of the nature of Hamlet’s change after he returns from his aborted trip to England. Many critics are implicitly—and sometimes explicitly—#disappointed by Hamlet’s transformation from the brooding meditative critic of society into the mere man of action, and miss his marvelous soliloquies

(which he gives up making in Act V). Why should the Ghost’s command be such a problem for him at first, and then be so casually accepted and acted upon at the end? Has Hamlet lost his moral sensitivity? Is Shakespeare really a sort of inspired hack, filling out an orthodox Revenge tragedy with wonder­ ful custom-made philosophy, which is forgotten when the time comes for the bloody payoff at the end? Or to put it in Freudian terms, what, at the end, has happened to Hamlet’s interesting Oedipus complex? It doesn’t seem to bother him anymore, but this is not because he has talked it out with an analyst and thus got it out of his system; the issue simply seems to go away. He doesn’t even mention his father in Act V, except for a very detached and offhand reference to him as his former sovereign. Has Hamlet, or worse still, Shakespeare, just swept the matter under the carpet? Part of the problem may be that critics, who are specialists, simply cannot imagine somebody being able both to philosophize and to fight—let alone to take political ac­ tion. But this is an explanation of the critic, not of the text. Recently my Shakespeare in Performance seminar took on this issue, though it arose not in the form of a critical crux, as I have described it here, but, as we shall see, in action. An account of this encounter may clarify some of the strengths of Turner’s approach. The context, significantly enough, is important. My seminar group was made up of American English majors from Kenyon College who were spend­ ing a year at the University of Exeter in England; I was in loco parentis for the group, and there was a more than usually close relationship among us all. Although I have often held seminars at home, this one took place in an ordinary classroom on campus; it was important to domesticate the academy in this case, and we took trouble to make the room our own by rearranging it, by bringing food and drink, and by marking our activity there with a curious combination of comic levity and sacred seriousness. I had explained to the group my own ideas of the relationship between performance and the performative mode in philosophy, wherein a statement can be a speech act and bring its meaning truly about by its utterance; and I had made the connection between drama and ritual, with reference to medi­ eval religious theater, extending the concept to include the classroom itself. The classroom, I claimed, could support an alternate reality, as could any gathering where “two or three are gathered together” in a performative community. I had also related recent research in the brain chemistry of communal ritual trance to Renaissance theories of memory, creativity, the­ ater, art, and reality, referring to Frances Yates’s work on the memory theater and to Shakespeare’s own words about the poet’s pen in A Midsum­ mer Night's Dream. At the end of the term we were to stage the last act of The Winters Tale, in which a queen is apparently brought back from the dead, as the genuine invocation of a spirit—Shakespeare’s own; but this is another story. The class method was as follows. Each student was assigned to direct a scene from Shakespeare, casting it from the class, using me as a dramaturg,

and recording the rehearsal for an essay that would be due later. The rest of the class voted on the performance, and the actors, the director, and miy other personnel would all get the same grade. In other words, the group stood or fell together, and the reward system demanded that it please, move, and inspire a real, experienced, and perceptive audience. As the year went on, the productions became more and more elaborate, daring, polished (and time-consuming in rehearsal). The students were addicted, and some per­ formed many times more than I had required. They began to use costume, scenery, makeup, even lights and special effects, improvising with great inge­ nuity in our drab little classroom, and decorating it festively when appropri­ ate. The grading system was soon forgotten, and we had to remind ourselves to keep it going. Some students even protested their own grade when they thought it too high! There was an electric sense of artistic enterprise and integrity. After each show there was a long discussion, going late into the evening in the Turnerian fashion, and interrupted by food and coffee breaks. The dis­ cussion began on the most practical level, of blocking, staging, movement, props, and so on; but at each point the choices made by the directors and the actors pointed to more and more fundamental issues of interpretation and artistic purpose. We would go back to the text, then return to the perfor­ mance, with each swing around the hermeneutic spiral yielding new insight. The actors’ and directors’ accounts of discoveries made in rehearsal, the little breakthroughs of pace and emphasis, carried us naturally to the personal experience of the participants upon which jthey drew for their interpretation of the parts, and thus to a close discussion of the psychological and moral depths of the play. Various strategies—modern dress, expressionist acting technique, operatic style, even, memorably, one hilarious evening, outra­ geous drag—were tried out and criticized. The criticism, though honest, was always gentle and generous; after all, the actor you were criticizing this wreek might be playing opposite you the next, or directing you, or even judging your performance. The emphasis, though, was always on the work as art; there was none of that philistine professionalism that one sometimes en­ counters in practical drama classes, where the sense of theater as another world is lost, and it has all become just work and procedure like any other job, with a nice smile for the rubes who pay to get in. Our seminar was an end in itself, a sacred and comic space whose rules were those of beauty and ritual validity. One of our principles was that there were always an infinite number of ways that one could play a scene, but that one could play only one of them at a time, and some were more moving, profound, funny, and enlightening than others. We rejected alike the doctrines of objective correctness, relativism, pluralism, and subjectivism. Objective correctness was clearly impossible; rel­ ativism, since it makes no choices, bored the audience; pluralism wouldn’t play; and subjectivism did not last very long in an environment where every­ one had to cooperate to make the show work. What we had to aim for was an

intersubjective attunement that would pay for itself by some act, comic or sacrificial, carrying the community into personal insight. Some time into the year, when we were all comfortable, we took on Act V scene i of Hamlet, the graveyard scene. The performance began with a reading by the lead actor of a telegram from America, to the effect that his father had just died of a coronary thrombosis, and that arrangements were being made to fly him over for the funeral the following day. The audience did not know whether this information was genuine or not; it is a testimony to the nature of our group that it was plausible that a student actor might under such circum­ stances choose to share such news with the rest of us, and elect to go on with the show. (To our own relief the telegram was not genuine; but the actor had, as it were, trusted the sacred “good luck” of the group enough to feel that his pretense would not tempt fate. The students knew the story of Edward Alleyn, the Elizabethan actor who had played Doctor Faustus half a mile away and four hundred years ago in Exeter; how in the damnation scene it was noticed that there was one devil too many, and how Alleyn had worn a crucifix under his shirt thereafter whenever he played that part.) The room then went into total darkness. A candle was lit, revealing Charles, the lead actor, putting on his makeup in a mirror. He did it very slowly and carefully, with a look of extraordinary but restrained grief on his face. The stage was set. Alison, who played the gravedigger, is normally a painfully shy young woman; her voice breaks when she reads a paper aloud. On stage, however, she is utterly transformed, and can muster a queenly dignity or a commanding comic authority, quite capable of a beautiful and outrageous Rosalind, or a devious and innocent Cleopatra. She moved among the audience and selected four of them, with whose bodies she con­ structed a grave in the middle of the room. She did this with a natural and kindly grace which had behind it a rather steely insistence. The director was not afraid of the absurdity of this piece of business; after all, Peter Quince and Bottom had brought in a wall to their play, and been rewarded by a vision of the fairy powers of creation and a royal command to perform. The scenes of gallows humor followed in a manic mood of grotesque com­ edy; the skulls were cabbages. At the moment that Hamlet reveals himself, Charles, who is a gentle and quiet person, blazed with frightening strength and maturity: “This is I, Hamlet the Dane,” he said, and descended into the human grave, the “living monument” of Ophelia. At that moment something odd happened; the scene came to a climax of very intense feeling, the audi­ ence got the idea that the scene was over—directors were allowed to cut as much as they liked—and somebody miscued and turned the lights out. There was to be an ending to the scene and then a postscript in which Charles would divest himself first of Hamlet and then of the actor role he had as­ sumed. The players decided to cut at that point and quit while they were ahead; and the audience’s applause was interrupted by anxious inquiries about Charles’s father. We all had the sense that some important ritual had been achieved.

In discussion, layer after layer of exegesis was revealed. The group as a whole was feeling its strangerhood in England and missing home and America, and Charles’s “telegram” expressed the secret fears of many. In the scene that was performed, Hamlet has been summoned back from college at Wittenberg— Faust’s university—for his father’s funeral, and more recently has just returned from a journey whose original destination was England, and whose original purpose was the betrayal and death of Hamlet. The “common theme” was “death of fathers.” The previous year I had been told, in the middle of a seminar on Dante, of my own father’s heart attack; and the methods we were using to understand Shakespeare were partly fathered by him. Shakespeare’s anxiety about his own various fathers, literal and meta­ phorical, is obvious in the play. John Shakespeare was probably drinking himself to death when the play was written, and he died not long after. (Aubrey’s anecdote gives this as the cause of William’s death as well.) The resemblance of Hamlet’s name to that of Shakespeare’s own recently dead son Hamlet could not have been lost on him. More than this, Shakespeare was competing with various dramatic fathers: the mythical Greek dramatists, as yet unavailable to the Elizabethans; the stoic Roman tragedian Seneca, mentioned in the players’ advertisement in II. ii. (and whose plays were being staged by “the little eyases,” the rival boys’ companies); and Shakespeare’s predecessors in the revenge tragedy genre, including perhaps the author of a lost earlier version of Hamlet. Hamlet himself feels the pressure on him of the great classical heroes and gods, who were never at a loss for suitable heroic action— Hyperion, Mars, Mercury, Orestes, Pyrrhus, Hector, Ajax, Caesar; and of course Hercules and Alexander, both mentioned in V. i. These are the fathers in the face of whom he must find or forge an identity. Eliot’s Prufrock, like Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, thinks that Hamlet finds it easy to be a hero: “No, I am not Prince Hamlet, nor was meant to be” ; but it is no easier for him to deal with his giants than for them to deal with theirs. Perhaps the chief obstacle faced by the student actors was the invisible presence of the great Shakespearean actors that they had seen on tape and would see—in the 1984 Stratford Hamlet—in the flesh a few days later. How to avoid cliché? This was the same question as, How to obey the father while being true to the father’s own spirit of heroic independence? These ques­ tions were not lost on me, either, in my own state of recent bereavement, and the students knew it; one of them had also been in that seminar when I was called to deal with my father’s fatal illness. But there was more yet: here in England especially I was their substitute father, and I had laid upon them this assignment to act the achievement of the prince. My own pedagogy is explicitly one of the handing over of power to my young successors, as Sarastro does in The Magic Flute; an enfranchisement which is also a challenge. Charles and Alison and the director, Steve, were tossing back the challenge with this radical and unorthodox interpretation of a play on which, after all, I had written a long chapter of a book eighteen years ago.

So what was happening when Charles jumped into the grave, claiming a name and title which in combination could belong only to Hamlet’s father? We were coming close to the significance of the catharsis we had felt, and we felt it again as the discussion proceeded: approach to the meaning restores the experience, said T. S. Eliot. Why doesn’t Hamlet have the same feeling of resistance anymore against obeying his father (his Roman and Greek prede­ cessors, the clichéd conventions of revenge tragedy, his creator Shakespeare even)? Because he has become them. He is their grave, where they are buried. This is I, Hamlet the Dane. Hamlet defeats the treacherous mission of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern by sealing his own substitute message with his father’s sealring, taking upon himself his father’s literary person: a forged identity in both senses. By becoming the grave in which our fathers are buried, we eat them up and continue their life in our own bodies. When Charles jumped into the grave, the student became the teacher, the stranger the native, the American the Englishman, the son the father, the anti-play the paradigmatic revenge tragedy, the satyr Hyperion. Hamlet had been “too much i’ th’ son”; now he has become the sun king. At last he is able to make his public declaration of love for the woman he would have made his queen: “I loved Ophelia . . . ”—his leap is not back into his mother’s womb but into his wife’s grave, and they are not the same. “Let Hercules himself do what he may, The cat will mew, and dog will have his day.” Paradoxically, he is ena­ bled to take on an independent identity by accepting his father’s as his own. The price of this change is of course an intimacy with death, a solidarity with it; we must become our fathers’ death even affirm it, and in so doing affirm our own. The secret reason why we fear to take up the position our fathers have left us is that we fear to die ourselves; until our father dies, we are immortal, for he stands between us and death, and shelters us from it with his brave old body. If we take up his identity, then we will die ourselves. To choose to succeed is to choose to die. To inherit is to join the party of the moribund. Death taxes are a magic to ward off death, so that we can hide from death when he comes for us, by claiming that we are not our father. But how do we choose to become “Hamlet the Dane”? When Charles put on his makeup—actually he was miming it—he was taking upon himself his sacred face, his real soul. We become what we are by acting it up to the hilt; we don’t discover what we are by introspection or analysis. The mirror and the candle were not instruments of investigation so much as instruments of creation. Our true selves are our played selves; and as for those who might object to the insincerity of this way of life, let them engage in a little trial of realities, theirs against ours. If we are prepared, as Hamlet is, to stake our lives upon the identity we have taken on, our critics can scarcely “impone,” as Osric puts it, a bigger wager. Let us see which of us survivies—the one who is too sophisticated to choose an identity, the pluralist, the relativist—or the one who has by putting on the costume of the actor promised his body to the grave. This madness might turn out to be sanity in the end. To claim Victor Turner’s critical legacy may, then, be a liberation more

frightening than we bargained for. We may be called upon to deal with the contemporary academy as Hamlet deals with Denmark, that prison where something is rotten, and the times are out of joint and must be set right. We may have to venture into realms of deep embarrassment, and laughter at what we do not wish to laugh at, and seriousness or sacredness that we do not associate with membership in the MLA and the AAUP. We may have to act a part for which we feel unready. But as the two funerals I have described seem to show, we might find our true identity in the process.

THE LITERARY ROOTS OF VICTOR TURNER’S ANTHROPOLOGY E d ith T u rn er

The name Victor Turner is inseparable from anthropology, but we are also seeing his reputation grow in literary studies. That English was his first field of study is generally known; so it would be instructive to follow in greater detail how his earlier studies fed into his theoretical development in anthro­ pology, and how he used literature as comparative material. Anthropology for him was concerned not only with the culture of primitive tribes but with all levels of humankind. On many occasions Turner took the work of a literary figure and analyzed it on the basis of one of the theories he had devised for traditional ritual. These cases show graphically, better than descriptions of ideas and tenden­ cies, the full-scale concreteness of his method. In one of these he likened Melville’s white whale to the white spirit, Kavula, in the Ndembu thunder ritual in which he had taken part in Zambia. Here he analyzed the dominant symbol of whiteness, which indicates in both these “nature spirits” the pres­ ence of the same awesome power—telling of danger, holiness, absence, and at the same time something like Gilson’s “act-of-being.”1 Another passage was on Shakespeare’s Tempest, where Turner associated Gonzalo’s imaginary fecund commonwealth-without-laws—a fantasy which the island environ­ ment had stimulated in the old man—with his own new concepts of communitas and anti-structure and the “I-Thou” experience between total and concrete persons described by Martin Buber.2 These, Turner shows, are rela­ tionships commonly to be found in the liminal phase of rites of passage (1969:134-140). A further piece dealt with Turner’s favorite literature, the Icelandic sagas (1985:71-118), in which he traced “social dramas” (case histories of con­ flict), similar to those he had observed among the Ndembu; and indeed it was from the Icelandic material that he had originally derived what he called his “ preconscious model” of the social drama, a debt he acknowledged (1985:75)—a clear example of the utilization of literary scholarship in his anthropology. He also drew attention to an anthropological (or was it literary

or historiographic) finding of his on the making of a saga, which he called the “epic relation,” because he marked this relation also in the Shahnameh, the Mahabharata, the Iliad and Odyssey, and the Kebra Nagast, and had also con­ sidered in this regard the Tale of the Heike, the Kalevala, the Ramayana, the Bible, and the Gilgamesh Epic. The epic relation refers to three stages in the making of an epic: heroic time, the occasion of the original events, followed by a gap of perhaps hundreds of years until the second stage, narrative time, when the first epic is composed, followed by documentary time, the era of recensions and revisions of the original epic (1985:98-103). A more direct application of anthropological concepts is to be found in Turner’s article on Dante’s Purgatorio where he analyzed Dante’s symbols in the same way that he analyzed African ones, with an eye to their multivocality, unification of disparate significata, and polarization. In 1977 at a later stage of his thought he studied Japanese literature and drama, and wrote a paper “ Liminality” discussing Lady Rokujo’s fate in The Tale of Genji, in relation to the Noh play Princess Hollyhock. Turner demonstrates the re­ enactment of Rokujo’s tragic social drama in two genres: novel and theater, arguing that both are metaperformances constituting strong reflexive com­ mentaries on Japanese values. Turner at this point was looking beyond the liminal realm into the liminoid, the genres that correspond to the liminal in elaborated societies— again his literary self had reached into his anthropo­ logical self, making him conscious of the culture of developed peoples and their arts of a more private kind (the novel), or pertaining to the world of entertainment. One of the last lectures Turner wrote, in 1982, included an extraordinary reading of The Four Zoos of William Blake, in which Turner speculates whether this physically aware poet and mystic, in his personification of the four mighty forms of human consciousness—Tharmas, the lower forces of the body, Luvah, the passions, Urizen, human reason, and Los, the creative artist—might have been foreshadowing the discovery of the functions of the four regions of the brain (the brainstem, limbic system, and left and right hemispheres) as demonstrated by neurobiologists of the 1970s and 1980s (1985:283-289). In these we see Turner’s consciousness as an anthropologist working on material he knew very well. He was quite aware that his anthropological theories had implications for the study of literature in almost every one of their aspects—the study of symbolism, the work on social drama, the con­ sciousness of the rite of passage, and the knowledge of the breakup of the overburdened rituals of the Middle Ages into the liminoid artistic and enter­ tainment genres of today. To explain this, readers would be right in surmis­ ing that he was not raised in a purely scientific or utilitarian home environment; indeed, he was enthralled from his earliest years by literature and the theater (From Ritual to Theatre, 7-9). But the curious fact was that he did not stay in their delightful purlieu working on the analysis of meaning or their verbal and dramatic form and structural components, but turned right

back against them, working against the current, back to the sources of their power. He had to know these sources “on his pulses,” as he often said. He asked the question, what early primitive passions produced the religions, the arts, and so on through the feverish discussions we see in Dostoevsky, Ibsen, and Lawrence? What environments, even, produced egalitarianism and what authoritarianism? Why, really, the Oedipus complex? Let’s go and look at relatively untouched societies and see whether, why, and how the young are detached from their mothers at puberty. He was enormously excited at rites of passage and by the inversions and ludic recombinations within them dur­ ing their in-between period, the liminal phase. Human behavior in the raw, conflict and the healing of it as an evidently natural resultant, fascinated him, and accordingly he drew up the stages of what he termed a “social drama,’’ listing initial breach of the norm, followed by crisis, redress, and rein­ tegration or the recognition of schism. Then later, when he met the perfor­ mance theorist Richard Schechner, they collaborated to create the TurnerSchechner figure 8 diagram, showing the relationship between social (raw) and cultural (performed) drama. He set the wheels in motion, along with many colleagues in the social sciences and the performing arts, to draw ritual and stage performers from all over the world to meet and study each others’ metiers.3 Here was no critic studying the criticisms that critics had made of other critics, here was an experimenter, wading into the most tangled of problems, ritual, human conflict, and theater. This was a new kind of research— or rather a deliber­ ate spilling over from the vessels of both literature and anthropology into a wider vessel encompassing a worldwide reflexivity. Victor Turner was out there in the same world as our new literature giants, Kenzaburo Oe, Gun­ ther Grass, Gabriel Marquez— a baroque collection of culture producers, as odd as the carvers of Gothic cathedrals. They made the oddities, they did not write about them. And in his own way Turner has developed for us an entire new world of ritual; he has not merely analyzed symbolism, he has enriched it. It is possible to trace how Turner’s reading changed at different nodal points of his development. As a schoolboy he read Blake, and Jacob Boehme’s Signatura Rerum. At twelve he taught himself Greek because he wanted to experience the original classics, and indeed his pleasure was great at finding the “real thing.’’ There were so many sources: the classics, reli­ gious works, poets (the French symbolists, nature poets, the “élan vital” poets), then the epics, the works of great storytellers, ludic productions, the mystics, and his favorites, the writers of great “heart” and warmth. The deepest sources were Blake and Boehme, both of whom had the visionary view of all things as a developing oscillating web. Later he devoured the idea of the Kaballah and the Sephirot—and Zen—and the Catholic church, one can go on and on. These continually fired him to poetry and to the making of his own poems, which for him were special productions, which he wrote, not in cursive but in roman, separate, upright script, as if they were dictated:

All death is the occulted gold o f the creature Glimmery, fathomless, as leaves in the autumn Left at least at the ebbing, a fire on the foreshore, Splashed with the menstrual crimson of Meaning In Time— gold o f the climax, Like the sun on a hilltop, A last flare from the waters, Hinting what’s coming, too golden for eyesight, Pure for the hearing, sweeter than touchings— Winter and night, their truest meanings.

What had all this to do with anthropology? Did it feed into his anthropol­ ogy? He took up anthropology in obedience to his call to explore origins, and he therefore obeyed anthropology’s narrow laws of study—social struc­ turalism, the ecological determinism of the time, kinship theory based on Freud, then Hobbes, Marx, and the iron laws of history. He absorbed them all, occasionally spitting something out, such as French entropy-ruled struc­ turalism. He even explored communism, testing its iron bands against his own feelings, looking into the real troubles of the people, whether in the slums of Manchester or under British colonialism in Northern Rhodesia, now Zambia. Somewhat to his surprise, while doing fieldwork among the Ndembu peo­ ples he saw the origins of love, communitas, flowering in the liminal phase of ritual, in no way to be accounted for by Christianity. Much later he realized that what the Ndembu possessed was indeed not what the church conde­ scendingly called “natural religion” but a true religion—because spirits actu­ ally contacted and “caught” their chosen ones, just as in the “great” religions. Among the Ndembu his poems began anew, for the communist bonds began to break. And when he returned from the field an immense new range of reading was in front of him, which opened out eventually toward the Catholic church, one of the few world views as rich in religious impulse as that of the Ndembu—with the reading of Waugh, Chesterton, Louis de Wohl, Graham Greene, Peguy, Gilson, Butterfield, and many others. The breaking of the taboo that bound anthropologists from seeking a religion of their own broke barriers of all kinds in Turner. He threw off the hegemony of Marx, and found himself in the flood of a theoretical advance which included an exposition of the fundamental character of the rite of passage, of liminality and its types, of process theory, the analysis of symbols, their polarization and the like, work on the complexities of social field theory and the concept of arena as the locus of the social drama, ideas about the un­ named god and the sacred, and later understandings of the liminal domain, demonstrating in it the appearance of ritual inversions, communitas, and ludic recombinations (1985:249-289). To illuminate the reading at these various stages, I will provide details of the literature that influenced or was used for each type of exploration. First, there was drama in this literature— tales of social dramas, though

the term had not been used—with which Turner was saturated before he ever recorded the social dramas in Mukanza Village. These were primarily the Icelandic sagas, curiously conscious, drily written, compelling tales of feud. There were the Greek tragedies, Achilles sulking in his tent; there were the stage dramas of the Elizabethan era, Ibsen’s dreadful set-tos, Hardy with his double binds, Flaubert, Conrad and his battles of will; Turner saw these dramas later in Mukanza and noted their stages of progression. Behind his knowledge of traditional ethnic rites of passage, Turner found that he had subconsciously recognized rites of passage in the shipwreck on Caliban’s island, in Rosalind’s sojourn in the forest of Arden, in the quest for the whale, Moby Dick, in the passage from guilt to redemption in Crime and Punishment, in Oedipus at Colonnus—a sacrificial figure waiting for death and apotheosis, in the journey of the Pandava brothers in the Mahabharata, in Sita’s kidnapping and rescue in the Ramayana, in Tolkien’s quest for the Ring, in C. S. Lewis’s Narnia—a liminal world, in Jack Kerouac and his beats in On the Road, in unending passage from one place to another in many of the No plays of Japan, each enacting the passage through violent earthly concerns to Nirvana—let alone Mary Poppins and countless children’s stories with the theme of passage to adulthood. Coming to the theme of symbolism: besides his published analyses of symbols in literature, Turner would take time off to read the French sym­ bolist poets. He saw how Baudelaire’s earthy poetry represented the polar­ ization of symbols; the very filth and banality in them was strongly linked to a kind of bliss—a phenomenon found also in Rimbaud, Lawrence, Proust, and Joyce, where a coarse physical element dynamized the theme of the search for love. Turner recognized many liminal people in his reading, people in a betwixtand-between state—in a state of marginality, people who for some reason had not settled into the static structure of society. Writers were often liminals, because writing itself was a liminal activity. He used to mention the figures of François Villon, the poet of the medieval underworld, Rabelais in his imaginary Abbey of Theleme, Shakespeare’s Lear, Othello, Shylock, Richard of Bordeaux, and others, the poet John Clare, who was mad, Walt Whitman the hobo, Dostoevsky the gambler, Baudelaire the drug addict, Rimbaud the homosexual, Mallarmé, who was so effete that Turner laugh­ ingly called him “deciduous and narcotic,” Lewis Carroll with his dream world, George Borrow with the gypsies, Huck Finn on his raft, Jack London the hobo, Wilfred Owen, a pacifist in the trenches, Thomas Mann and his mountain sanitarium, Kerouac, founder of the beat generation, and Kenzaburo Oe with his handicapped son. These figures he understood well, loved them for their humanity, and identified with them, poet as he was, and anthropologist on the margins of his own society—and that for the sake of exploring all, identifying with all. Then within the liminal phase of rites of passage he saw communitas

which, when it was still an unnamed phenomenon, he had already seen in literature and had experienced in life. He saw it in Robert Burns— “A man’s a man for a’ that,” between Huck Finn, Tom Sawyer, and Jim the slave, in Bakhtin, in Chekhov, Jorge Amado, St. John’s Gospel and the Sermon on the Mount, and above all, Shakespeare. These also exemplified the symbolic in­ versions of status found in liminality that reverse structural values and throw emphasis on the panhuman. In religious literature such inversions stand out as distinctly as icons. And at the center of the rites, he knew well, lay the sacred; and he had come close to the sacred many times, and recognized it in Meister Eckhart’s writings, in Olive Shreiner’s little-known book The Story of a South African Farm, in Patrick White’s The Tree of Man, in von Hugel’s Eternal Life, besides the religious works I have mentioned. It had to be an anthropologist of this sort who could burst out of the cold reductionist analyses of the psycholo­ gists and write Chihamba, the White Spirit Perhaps best of all Turner loved the clowns. There is a release within liminality that is so great that the ludic comes to the fore, as in the Yaqui ritual of the tragic death of the deer, followed immediately by hysterically funny fooling about on the part of the masked jackal figures. Turner noted these and other carnival figures as examples of ludic recombination, the fantastic playing with all sizes and shapes of being, for the sake of sheer flexibility. And he relished Pantagruel and Gargantua, Don Quixote, Dog­ berry and Verges, Bully Bottom, Ubu Roi, and even Bertie Wooster and the decidedly unliterary figure of Benny Hill. There was a group of writers Turner read for their depiction of tradi­ tional or tribal ways: Melville’s Typee, R. L. Stevenson’s sailing ship books, Buchan and his Scots—for Turner was a Scot, Walter Scott himself, Hardy for his Wessexmen, Amado for his Brazilians, Charles Kingsley’s books in many exotic settings, Hemingway, and even Thor Heyerdahl. Was he an ethnic romantic? Probably; one thing is true, however, the whole earth mattered to him. The Smithsonian possesses some video footage of him taken on the Mall on July 4th, with the Capitol behind him, rather drunk, waving his hands at the government dome and the happy crowds and say­ ing, “ Let’s forget all this ridiculous foolishness about war—here are the real people of America. . . . ”

NOTES 1. Turner, Revelation and Divination, pp. 179-203 (includes Chihamba, the White Spirit, first published 1962); Gilson, Christian Philosophy, p. 368. 2. William Shakespeare, The Tempest, Act II, Scene 1, lines 141-163; Buber, I and Thou, p. 72. 3. The Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research generously funded this enterprise in 1982.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Buber, Martin. I and Thou. Edinburgh: Clark, 1958. Gilson, E. H. The Christian Philosophy of St. Thomas Aquinas. New York: Random House, 1956. Turner, Victor. From Ritual to Theatre. New York: Performing Arts Journal Publica­ tions, 1982. _______“Liminality and the Performative Genres.” In Studies in Symbolism and Cul­ tural Communication 14. Ed. F. Allen Hanson. Lawrence, Kan.: University of Kansas Press, 1982. ______On the Edge of the Bush. Tucson: University of America Press, 1985. ______ Revelation and Divination. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1975. ______The Ritual Process. Chicago: Aldine, 1969.

VICTOR TURNER’S CAREER AND PUBLICATIONS F ra n k E. M a n n in g

Victor Turner’s life was an intellectual and human journey of epic propor­ tions. The journey began in Glasgow, where he was born on May 28, 1920, the son of an electronics engineer and an actress. A schoolboy interest in poetry and classics led him at age eighteen to University College, London, where he studied English. His formal education was interrupted by World War II, when he was conscripted into the British army for five years. This period was also what he might later have termed a “liminal” phase in his life. He married Edie, his wife of forty years, had his first two children, and lived in a gypsy caravan near the army base at Rugby, the borough whose famous public school gave birth to the football game. A further transition during his military service—done as a noncombatant—was from literature to anthro­ pology. Returning to University College after the war, he studied under some of the leading social anthropologists of the day: the famous “three Fs”— Firth, Forde, and Fortes—as well as, for a time, Leach, Radcliffe-Brown, and Nadel. With his B.A. Honours degree in hand at the age of twenty-nine, Turner showed the innovative nonconformity that was to characterize much of his career. He left the prestigious academic precincts of London to enter the new department that Max Gluckman had just founded at the University of Manchester. His Ph.D. research, done in association with the RhodesLivingstone Institute, took him to Zambia (then Northern Rhodesia), where he lived for three years among the Ndembu. He concentrated first on de­ mography and economics, but gradually shifted his focus to ritual symbol­ ism—a transition that appears to have coincided with his alienation from Marxism and his growing conviction that the symbolic expression of shared meanings, not the attraction of material interests, lies at the center of human relationships. From this fieldwork he produced two major monographs as well as his Ph.D. thesis, which was published under the title Schism and Continuity in an African Society. Turner held research and teaching positions at the University of Manches-

ter from 1955 until 1963. During this time he wrote voluminously, exploring the dynamic relationship of ritual to such varied phenomena as healing, divi­ nation, kinship, and politics. Recognized for its fresh approach and thorough documentation, his work established him as a leading figure in the burgeon­ ing Manchester School of anthropology. Turner began the American phase of his career in 1963, accepting a post as Professor of Anthropology at Cornell University. In the next several years he made two more trips to Africa and completed three major books on the work he had begun in the previous decade. These were The Forest of Symbols, a collection of his own essays on Ndembu ritual; The Drums of Affliction, a comprehensive ethnography centering on ritual; and The Ritual Process, orig­ inally delivered as the Lewis Henry Morgan lectures and propounding his central theoretical position about the way that normative social structure was symbolically dissolved and reconstituted in ritual dramas. In 1968 Turner moved to the University of Chicago as Professor of An­ thropology and Social Thought. The move coincided with a shift of interest from tribal to world religions, and, more generally, from small-scale to mass societies. He began a long-term study of contemporary Christian pilgrim­ ages, doing active fieldwork in Mexico, Ireland, Britain, and continental Eu­ rope. Two books, Dramas, Fields, and Metaphors and Image and Pilgrimage in Christian Culture (with Edith Turner), explore the social history of these countries in relation both to pilgrimage traditions and to various other genres of literature, folklore, and popular culture. He later extended his study of pilgrimages into Asian religions, an interest that took him to India, Sri Lanka, and Japan. Turner stayed at Chicago for nearly a decade, establishing himself as a major exponent of what was coming to be known as symbolic anthropology, but which he often described in multidisciplinary terms as comparative sym­ bology, a broad social science-humanities approach to the study of symbolic forms and processes. He founded and edited Symbol, Myth, and Ritual, a book series that began in 1973, and published seventeen titles during the next half-dozen years. The distinguished scholars who contributed original work to the series include Sir Raymond Firth (anthropology) and Mircea Eliade (history of religions). Turner’s last regular academic position was at the University of Virginia, where in 1977 he was appointed William R. Kenan Professor of Anthropol­ ogy and Religion and where he was also given membership in the Center for Advanced Studies and the South Asia Program. He continued his work on pilgrimages and comparative religion, but also focused increasingly on per­ formative play. This latter interest led him to studies of theater and festivity. He participated in an experimental drama workshop in New York, writing and enacting scripts based on classic ethnographies. His book From Ritual to Theatre is partly an outgrowth of this experience. He also did fieldwork on the Rio Carnaval, which he examined historically, comparatively, and from perspectives ranging from Huizinga, Bateson, and Caillois through various

literary and philosophical figures. He did not complete his work on festivity, but partial results of it are seen in an edited collection, Celebration, and in a related exhibit that he helped to orchestrate at the Smithsonian Institute. He was also beginning, at the time of his death, to publish articles on the Rio Carnaval. Turner will be remembered for a variety of stimulating ideas and ap­ proaches that recur throughout his varied work. One set of ideas has to do with the nature of ritual symbols, which he saw as highly condensed, dramati­ cally expressed units of significance. They are characteristically both “multi­ vocal,” in that they have many meanings, and “unifying,” in that they associate and analogously relate those meanings. More specifically, ritual symbols have two meaningful poles: an ideological pole, which refers to the moral and social orders; and a sensory pole, which carries emotional and physical (often sexual) appeal. In the action context of ritual the two poles are interchanged; moral and social values are enhanced with sensory attrac­ tion, and sensory drives are given social and moral legitimacy. Turner further outlined a method of symbolic analysis that was suited to his penchant for rigorous field investigation. Symbols, he said, should be examined in terms of three levels of meaning—exegetical, operational, and positional. Exegetical meaning consists of how natives consciously under­ stand a symbol, as well as the symbol’s linguistic derivation, social history, and material substance. Operational meaning centers on how a symbol is used—in what situations, by what groups, and so on. Positional meaning has to do with a symbol’s relationship to other symbols both within a particular ritual and within the framework of a total ritual system. He proposed that these three areas of symbolic analysis coincided respectively with three areas of linguistic analysis: semantics, pragmatics, and syntactics. Turner is perhaps best known for his emphasis on social process—a position that distinguishes him sharply from his own background in British social an­ thropology, which focused primarily on structure and static functionalism. He viewed society as an experience of becoming, not a condition of being. Forms of symbolic action—rituals, pilgrimages, celebrations, theatrical perform­ ances, and so on—were themselves processual and were also integral, and often instigative, phases of broader cultural and historical processes. A great deal of the inspiration for this view came from the Belgian folklorist Arnold van Gennep, who analyzed traditional rites of passage in terms of three succes­ sive stages: separation (from a former social state), Urnen, and reaggregation. Turner highlighted the model’s liminal phase, which he saw as ambiguous, inversive, ludic, and a source of the intense, effervescent camaraderie that he described as “communitas.” With respect to postindustrial societies, Turner spoke of “liminoid” rather than liminal genres, emphasizing their cultural creativity and their potential to foster social and political change. These richly suggestive ideas were ethnographically grounded and theoret­ ically amplified in eighteen books and monographs and nearly seventy pub­ lished articles. A great deal of this corpus has been widely reprinted and

translated. The Ritual Process, for example, is available in (besides English) Portuguese, Italian, Spanish, French, Japanese, and Russian. Other books that have been translated into at least one other language include The Forest of Symbols; The Drums of Affliction; Schism and Continuity in an African Society; Dramas, Fields, and Metaphors; and Image and Pilgrimage in Christian Culture. Turner was a much-sought-after academic visitor. He typically spent at least two months a year lecturing at universities, institutes, and conferences. In one year, 1973-74, he delivered the American Lectures in the History of Religions, a series that involved thirty-two lectures on ten campuses. He liked to extend these visits with colleagues, combining pleasure with academic business. (If ritual was the “work of the gods”—one of his favorite phrases— scholarly sociability was analogously the “play of humans.”) He also held a number of visiting fellowships and professorships. Fittingly, his last full term of teaching was spent in Jerusalem—holy city of three major religions— where in the spring of 1983 he held an Einstein Fellowship from the Israel Academy of Sciences and the Humanities. Turner had an enormous impact on anthropology, religious studies, liter­ ary and drama studies, folklore, and other areas of the humanities. He also sought to open communication with the more “scientific” fields of semiotics, notably psychology and neurophysiology. He contributed articles on ritual to the prestigious periodical Science. In several published papers he related his ideas about play to the psychologist Czikszentmihalyi’s notion of flow, itself similar to Maslow’s earlier concept of peak experience. In his final years he explored play, ritual, drama, and other forms of symbolic expression in the context of the brain’s left and right hemispheres. To those who knew him, Turner’s greatest legacy was his infectious ability to relate scholarship to life. He enthusiastically embraced all that he studied: African ritual, to which he had an extraordinary empathy and which eventu­ ally influenced him to convert to Roman Catholicism; pilgrimages, which he experienced as an ennobling and liberating form of religious communitas; and carnival, which he participated in as the ultimate embodiment of both ludic abandonment and cultural regeneration. He described himself as a liminal figure, played the role of magister ludi on many a social occasion, and openly confessed his desire to run a samba school in Rio.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Books and Monographs (1952) The Lozi Peoples of North-western Rhodesia. London: The International African Institute Press. (1953) Lunda Rites and Ceremonies. Occasional Papers No. 10. Livingstone: RhodesLivingstone Museum. (1957) Schism and Continuity in an African Society: A Study of Ndembu Village Life. Publ. on behalf of the Institute for Social Research, University of Zambia. Manches­ ter: Manchester University Press.

(1961) Ndembu Divination: Its Symbolism and Techniques. Rhodes-Livingstone Paper® No. 31. Manchester: Manchester University Press. (1964) Lunda Medicine and the Treatment of Disease. Occasional Papers No. 15. Living­ stone: Rhodes-Livingstone Museum. (1966) and Marc J. Swartz and Arthur Tuden, eds. Political Anthropology. Chicago: Aldine. (1967) The Forest of Symbols: Aspects of Ndembu Ritual. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. (1968) The Drums of Affliction: A Study of Religious Processes among the Ndembu of Zam­ bia. Oxford: Clarendon Press. (1969) The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-structure. Chicago: Aldine. (1971) Ed. Profiles of Change: African Society and Colonial Rule. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. (1974) Dramas, Fields, and Metaphors: Symbolic Action in Human Society. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. (1975) Revelation and Divination in Ndembu Ritual. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. (1978) and Edith Turner. Image and Pilgrimage in Christian Culture: Anthropological Perspectives. New York: Columbia University Press. (1979) Process, Performance, and Pilgrimage. New Delhi: Concept Publishing Co. (1982) From Ritual to Theatre: The Human Seriousness of Play. New York: Performing Arts Journal Publications. (1982) Ed. Celebration: Studies in Festivity and Ritual. Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press. (1985) Ed. with Edward Brunner. The Anthropology of Experience. Champaign: Univer­ sity of Illinois Press. (1985) On The Edge of the Bush. Tucson: University of Arizona Press. (1986) The Anthropology of Performance. New York: Performing Arts Journal Publication.

ARTICLES (1955) “A Lunda Love Story and Its Consequences: Selected Texts from Traditions Collected by Henrique Dias de Carvalho at the Court of Mwatianvwa in 1887.” The Rhodes-Livingstone foumal 10:1-26. (1955) ‘‘The Spatial Separation of Adjacent Generations in Ndembu Village Struc­ ture.” Africa 25:121-137. (1955) “A Revival in the Study o f African Ritual.” Rhodes-Livingstone Journal 17:51-56. (1955) with E. L. B. Turner. ‘‘Money Economy among the Mwililunga: A Study of Some Individual Cash Budgets.” The Rhodes-Livingstone Journal 18:19-37. (1960) ‘‘Muchona the Hornet, Interpreter of Religion.” In In the Company of Man: Twenty Portraits by Anthropologists. Ed. Joseph B. Casagrande. New York: Harper and Row, pp. 333-355. (1961) ‘‘Ritual Symbolism, Morality, and Social Structure among the Ndembu.” The Rhodes-Livingstone Journal 30:1-10. (1962) ‘‘Themes in the Symbolism o f Ndembu Hunting Ritual.” Anthropological Quar­ terly 35:37-57. (1962) ‘‘Three Symbols of Passage in Ndembu Circumcision Ritual: An Interpreta­ tion.” In Essays on the Ritual of Social Relations. Ed. Max Gluckman. Manches­ ter: Manchester University Press, pp. 124-173. (1964) ‘‘Witchcraft and Sorcery: Taxonomy versus Dynamics.” Africa New York: Per­ forming Arts Journal Publication, 34:314-324.

(1964) “An Ndembu Doctor in Practice.” In Magic, Faith, and Healing: Studies in Primitive Psychiatry Today. Ed. Ari Kiev. Glencoe: Free Press, pp. 230-262. (1964) “Symbols in Ndembu Ritual.” In Closed Systems and Open Minds: The Limits of Naivety in Social Sciences, Ed. Max Gluckman. Edinburgh: Oliver and Boyd, pp. 20-51. (1964) “Betwixt and Between: The Liminal Period in Rites de Passage.” In Symposium on New Approaches to the Study of Religion. Ed. June Helms. Seattle: American Ethnological Society, pp. 4-20. (1965) “Some Current Trends in the Study of Ritual in Africa.” Anthropological Quar­ terly 38:155-166. (1965) “Ritual and Symbolism.” In African Systems of Thought. Ed. M. Fortes and G. Dieterlen. London: Oxford University Press for the International African In­ stitute, pp. 9-15. (1966) “Colour Classification in Ndembu Ritual: A Problem in Primitive Classifica­ tion.” In Anthropological Approaches to the Study of Religion. Ed. Michael Banton. London: Tavistock Publications, pp. 47-84. (1966) “The Syntax o f Symbolism in an African Ritual.” In Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London, Series B, Biological Sciences 251(772):295-303. (1966) “Anthropological Epilogue.” In Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London, Series B, Biological Sciences 251 (772):521-522. (1966) “Ritual Aspects of Conflict Control in African Micropolitics.” In Political Anthropology. Ed. Marc J. Swartz, Victor W. Turner, and Arthur Tuden. Chi­ cago: Aldine, pp. 239-246. (1966) “Sorcery in Its Social Setting: A Review Article (M. G. Marwick).” African Social Research 2:159-164. (1966) and M. Swartz and Arthur Tuden. “Introduction.” In Political Anthropology. Chicago: Aldine, pp. 1-41. (1967) “Aspects of Saora Ritual and Shamanism: An Approach to the Data of Rit­ ual.” In The Craft of Social Anthropology. Ed. Arnold L. Epstein. London: Tavis­ tock Publications, pp. 181-204. (1967) “Mukanda: The Rite of Circumcision.” In The Forest of Symbols: Aspects of Ndembu Ritual. Ed. Victor W. Turner. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, pp. 151-279. (1968) “The Waters of Life: A Study o f Zulu Zionist Water Symbolism.” In Religions in Antiquity. Ed. Jacob Neusner. Leiden: E. J. Brill, pp. 506-520. (1968) “Mukanda: The Politics of a Non-political Ritual.” In Local Level Politics: Social and Cultural Perspectives. Ed. Marc J. Swartz. Chicago: Aldine, pp. 135-150. (1969) “Symbolization and Patterning in the Circumcision Rites o f Two BantuSpeaking Societies.” In Man in Africa. Ed. Mary Douglas and Phyllis M. Kayberry. London: Tavistock Publications, pp. 229-244. (1969) “Forms of Symbolic Action: Introduction.” In Forms of Symbolic Action. Ed. Robert F. Spencer. Seattle and London: University of Washington Press, pp. 3-25. (1971) “An Anthropological Approach to the Icelandic Saga.” In The Translation of Culture. Ed. T. O. Beidelman. London: Tavistock Publications, pp. 349-374. (1971) “Themes and Symbols in an Ndembu Hunter’s Burial.” In Themes in Culture: Essays in Honor of Morris E. Opier. Ed. Mario D. Zamora, J. M. Mahar, and Henry Orenstein. Quezon City: Kayumangil Publishers. (1972) “Passages, Margins, and Poverty: Religious Symbols of Communitas.” Worship 46:390-412, 482-494. (1972) “Foreword.” In Function, Purpose, and Powers: Some Concepts in the Study of Individuals and Societies. Ed. Dorothy Emmet. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, pp. vii-xi.

(1973) “The Center Out There: Pilgrim’s Goal.” History of Religions 12:191-230. (1973) “Symbols in African Ritual.” Science 179(4078):1100-1105. (1973) “Analysis of Ritual: Metaphoric Correspondences as the Elementary Forms: A Reply to James Fernandez.” Science 182(4119). (1974) “Metaphors of Antistructure in Religious Culture.” In Changing Perspectives in the Scientific Study of Religion. Ed. Allan W. Eister. New York: WileyInterscience, pp. 63-84. (1974) “Liminal to Liminoid, in Play, Flow, and Ritual: An Essay in Comparative Symbology.” In Rice University Studies (special number on “The Anthropologi­ cal Study o f Human Play”) 60:53-92. (1974) “Symbols and Social Experience in Religious Ritual.” Studia Missionalia 23:1-21. (1974) “Pilgrimage and Communitas.” Studia Missionalia 23:305-327. (1975) “Ritual as Communication and Potency: An Ndembu Case Study.” In Symbols and Society: Essays on Belief Systems in Action, Proceedings of the Southern Anthropo­ logical Society No. 9. Ed. Carole Hill. Athens, Ga: University of Georgia Press, pp. 58-81. (1975) “Death and the Dead in the Pilgrimage Process.” In Religion and Change in Southern Africa: Anthropological Essays in Honour of Monica Wilson. Ed. M. West and Michael G. Whisson. Capetown: David Philip, pp. 107-127. (1976) “Ritual, Tribal and Catholic.” Worship 50:504-524. (1976) “Religious Paradigms and Political Action: Thomas Becket at the Council of Northampton.” In The Biographical Process. Ed. Frank E. Reynolds and Donald Capps. Utrecht: Mouton, pp. 153-186. (1976) “The Bite of the Hunter’s Ghost.” Parabola 1. (1976) “African Ritual and Western Literature: Is a Comparative Symbology Possi­ ble?” In The Literature of Fact, English Institute Series. Ed. Angus Fletcher. New York: Columbia University Press, 45-81. (1977) “Variations on a Theme of Liminality.” In Secular Ritual. Ed. Sally Moore and Barbara Myerhoff. Leyden: Van Gorcum, pp. 36-52. (1977) “Sacrifice as Quintessential Process: Prophylaxis or Abandonment?” History of Religions 16:189-215. (1977) “Process, System, and Symbol: A new Anthropological Synthesis.” Daedalus 106:61-80. (1977) “Frame, Flow, and Reflection: Ritual and Drama as Public Liminality.” In Performance in Postmodern Culture. Ed. Michel Benamou and Charles Caramello. Madison Wis.: University o f Wisconsin Press. (1977) “Ndembu Divination and Its Symbolism.” In Culture, Disease, and Healing: Studies in Medical Anthropology. Ed. David Landy. New York: Macmillan Pub­ lishing Co., pp. 175-183. (1978) “Encounter with Freud: The Making o f a Comparative Symbologist.” In The Making of Psychological Anthropology. Ed. George and Louise Spindler. Berke­ ley: University of California Press, pp. 538-558. (1978) “Comments and Conclusions.” In The Reversible World: Symbolic Inversion in Art and Society. Ed. Barbara Babcock. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, pp. 276-296. (1978) “ Review o f Ethnopoetics: A First International Symposium.” Boundary 6:583-590. (1978) “Foreword.” In Number Our Days, Barbara Myerhoff. New York: Simon and Schuster, pp. xiii-xvii. (1979) “Dramatic Ritual/Ritual Drama: Performative and Reflexive Anthropology.” Kenyon Review 1:80-93. (1980) “Religion in Current Cultural Anthropology.” Concilium. (1980) “Social Dramas and Stories about Them.” Critical Inquiry 7:141-168.

(1982) “Images of Antitemporality: An Essay in the Anthropology of Experience.” Harvard Theological Review 75:243—265. (1982) “Introduction.” In Celebration: Studies in Festivity and Ritual. Ed. Victor Turner. Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, pp. 11-30. (1982) with Edith Turner. “Postindustrial Marian Pilgrimage.” In Mother Worship. Ed. James Preston. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, pp. 145-173. (1982) with Edith Turner. “Religious Celebrations.” In Celebration: Studies in Festivity and Ritual. Ed. Victor Turner. Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, pp. 201-219. (1982) with Edith Turner. “Performing Ethnography.” The Drama Review 26:33-50. (1983) “Play and Drama: The Homs of a Dilemma.” In The World of Play. Ed. Frank E. Manning. West Point, N.Y.: Leisure Press, pp. 217-224. (1983) “Foreword.” In A Celebration of Demons. Bruce Kapferer. Bloomington: Indi­ ana University Press, pp. ix-xii. (1983) “Carnaval in Rio: Dionysian Drama in an Industrializing Society.” In The Celebration of Society: Perspectives on Contemporary Cultural Performance. Ed. Frank E. Manning. Bowling Green, Ohio: Bowling Green University Press, and London, Ontario: Congress o f Social and Humanistic Studies, pp. 103-124. (1983) “The Spirit o f Celebration.” In The Celebration of Society: Perspectives on Contem­ porary Cultural Performance. Ed. Frank E. Manning. Bowling Green: Bowling Green University Press, and London, Ontario: Congress of Social and Human­ istic Studies, pp. 187-191. /1984) “Liminality and the Performative Genres.” In Rite, Drama, Festival, Spectacle: Rehearsals toward a Theory of Cultural Performance. Ed. John MacAloon. Phila­ delphia: ISHI, pp. 19-41. (1985) “Dewey, Dilthey, and Drama: An Essay in the Anthropology of Experience.” In The Anthropology of Experience. Ed. Victor Turner and Edward Bruner. Champaign: University o f Illinois Press, pp. 3-15.

CONTRIBUTORS

Kathleen M. Ashley, Professor of English at the University of Southern Maine, is coeditor (with Pamela Sheingorn) of St. Anne in Late Medieval Cul­ ture, a study of the saint’s cult from the perspective of interdisciplinary cultural studies (forthcoming from the University of Georgia Press). She is author of numerous articles on medieval literature and culture as well as essays on cultural theory. She is now completing a book which uses models from symbolic anthropology to discuss the place of drama in late medieval urban culture. Barbara A. Babcock, Professor of English at the University of Arizona, com­ bines symbolic anthropology, folklore and feminist theory in her teaching and research. A student of Victor Turner, she has published such works as The Reversible World: Essays in Symbolic Inversion; Signs about Signs: The Semiot­ ics of Self-Reference; The Pueblo Storyteller: Development of a Figurative Ceramic Tradition; and Daughters of the Desert: Women Anthropologists and the Native American Southwest. Mieke Bal, Professor of Comparative Literature and Susan B. Anthony Pro­ fessor of Women’s Studies at the University of Rochester, is also Special Professor of Semiotics at the Rijksuniversiteit, Utrecht, the Netherlands. She is the author of 15 books, including Lethal Love, Murder and Difference and Death and Dissymmetry. She is completing Reading “Rembrandt”: Beyond the Word-Image Opposition. Robert Daly, Professor of English at the State University of New York at Buffalo, is a recipient of Leverhulme and Guggenheim fellowships and the author of God's Altar: The World and the Flesh in Puritan Poetry, a little over a dozen articles on literature, literary theory, and culture, and assorted poems and reviews. He is working on American Visionary History: The Literary Cre­ ation of a Usable Past. C. Clifford Flanigan, Professor of Comparative Literature at Indiana Uni­ versity, has published numerous essays on the medieval Latin and vernacular drama, one of which received the Elliott Prize from the Medieval Academy of America. His main interests are medieval culture, biblical literature, and contemporary literary and social theory. Together with Thomas Binkley he has reconstructed several medieval plays and liturgical events for modern audiences, including the Greater Passion Play from the Carmina Burana manu­ script, which was performed at the Cloisters in New York City in 1981. Stephen William Foster, Associate Director of Psychiatric Nursing at San Francisco General Hospital, is an independent schôlar and anthropologist,

has taught at Smith College and the University of California at Berkeley, and is the author of The Past Is Another Country: Representation, Historical Consciousness, and Resistance in the Blue Ridge. He is currently writing a book on North Africa and the process and politics of cultural dislocation. Ronald L. Grimes, Professor of Religion and Culture at Wilfrid Laurier University, is general editor of the Journal of Ritual Studies. He is author of Beginnings in Ritual Studies and Ritual Criticism (forthcoming from the Uni­ versity of South Carolina Press). Frank E. Manning is professor of Anthropology and Director of the Centre for Social and Humanistic Studies, University of Western Ontario. He is author of Black Clubs in Bermuda, editor of The Celebration of Society, and general editor of the Culture and Performance book series. Thomas Pavel, Professor of Literature at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and Visiting Professor of French and Comparative Literature at Princeton University, is the author of The Feud of Language: A Critical History of Structuralism; Fictional Worlds; and The Poetics of Plot: The Case of English Renaissance Drama. David Raybin, Associate Professor of English at Eastern Illinois University, has published on twelfth-century French literature in Viator and Works and Days, and is currently completing a book on medieval French literature. He is also active in Chaucer studies. Edith Turner, Lecturer in Anthropology at'the University of Virginia, is the author of Image and Pilgrimage (with Victor Turner), The Spirit and the Drum, and many essays on symbolism in ritual, performance, and literature. She is currently working on The Wandering Tooth, an analysis of an African healing ritual, and has material for a book on modern sea hunters and healers in an Eskimo village. Frederick Turner is Founders Professor of Arts and Humanities at the Uni­ versity of Texas at Dallas. A poet, cultural critic, and literary critic, he is author of two epic poems, The New World and Genesis, a collection of essays on literature and science entitled Natural Classicism, and several other books on poetry, fiction, and criticism. He is a regular contributor to Harper's and appears on the Smithsonian World PBS documentary series from time to time.

INDEX

Alcoff, Linda: feminist criticism and poststructuralism, xii-xiii Anthropology: interdisciplinary studies, ix; Turner’s theories of historical change, xivxv; symbolic and role of art in culture, 2122; Derrida and deconstructive discourse, 42-43; interpretation of Corpus Christi play of Kunzelsau, 49-50; culture-function and author-function in criticism, 130; liter­ ary criticism and literature, 131 ; Turner and literary criticism, 163-68; Turner’s defini­ tion of symbolic, 171 Aristocracy: eleventh- and twelfth-century France, 33-34, 37 Art: role in culture and symbolic anthropol­ ogy, 21-22; social expression of ideology, 23; function and crisis, 25; symbolic expres­ sion, 26; cultural development and communitas, 30-31; cultural change, 32-33 Artists: structural roles, 28-29; marginality and ideology, 29-30; antistructural liminality, 30 Auerbach, Erich: style and chivalric romance, 35; class consciousness and chivalric ro­ mance, 37, 38; feudalism and chivalric ideal, 37-38 Austen, Jane: Woolf on silences, 92

Bakhtin, Mikhail: liminality and the carnivalesque, xvii, xviii; theories of otherness, 43; medieval biblical drama, 54-58, 59-62 Balzac, Honoré de. See L a P e a u d e c h a g r in Barthes, Roland: postmodernism, 118-19; postmodern representation, 125; semiotic conditions and history of literature, 133-34 Belief: Turner’s definition of ritual, 141-42 Bell, Clive: Woolfs liminality, 95 Benedict, Ruth: Woolf and concept of culture, 95 B etw een th e A c ts : recent criticism, 88-89; reflexivity, 89-106. See a ls o Woolf, Virginia Bevington, David: Wakefield Annunciation, 59-60 Bewley, Marius: English culture and national­ ism, 77 Blake, William: Turner and truth, 151; Turner and literary analysis, 164 Boling, Robert G.: Sisera and ritual, 12 Borges, Jorges Luis: “The Library of Babel” and power of knowledge, 117-18; Barthes,

118-19; problematics of representation, 135 Bourdieu, Pierre: structuralism and Russian Formalism, xi-xii; society’s d o x a distin­ guished from heterodoxy and orthodoxy, 23; crisis and ideology, 23-24, 25; social class, 75 B ouvard^ et P é c u c h e t : Foucault, 126, 127 Brooks, Peter: desire and narrative deploy­ ment, 65-66 Burridge, Kenelm: prophets and structural roles, 28 Callinicos, Alex: literary criticism and problem of historical change, xiii Carnival: Bakhtin and medieval biblical drama, 54-57 Carroll, Lewis: mirrors and imagery, 92 Cather, Willa: liminality, 81-82 Catholicism: Turner and liminality, 57-58; Turner’s sense of ritual, 145; Turner and Ndembu, 166 Ceremony: Turner’s terminology, 143 C h a n so n d e g e s te : compared to chivalric ro­ mance, 35, 37 Chastaing, Maxine: Woolf s characters as spec­ tators, 109n Cixous, Hélène: women and writing, 98 Clark, Katerina: Bakhtin’s analysis of carnival, 55, 56; Bakhtin and religion, 58 Class: consciousness and chivalric romance in twelfth-century France, 37; T h e L a s t o f the M o h ic a n s , 75 Clifford, James: essays and cultural criticism, viii; problematization of representation, 119 Clowns: Turner and liminality in literature, 168 Colacurcio, Michael: “Roger Malvin’s Burial,” 79 Commager, Henry Steele: American national­ ism and literature, 77 Communitas: art and cultural development, 30-31; chivalric romance, 36; ritual entry into liminal state, 36-37; Durkheim on Turner’s concept, 38; Hawthorne and liminality, 80; reflexivity, 106; Turner and literature, 167-68 Conflict: social drama and ritual, 67 Context: Turner and symbolic analysis, 12324

Cooper, James Fenimore: liminality, 72-75 Corpus Christi play: medieval biblical drama, 49-52 Craig, Hardin: literary criticism and medieval biblical drama, 45-46 Crisis: function of art, 25 Csikszentmihalyi, Mihaly: Turner and studies of flow, 57, 173 Culler, Jonathan: text and ritual, 18 Cult: definition, 46 C u ltu r a l D y n a m ic s : literary criticism and prob­ lem of historical change, xiii Culture: definition, 83n; Benedict’s concept, 95 — popular: Bakhtin’s analysis of carnival, 55 Daiches, Davis: B etw e e n th e A c ts , 102 Dante: Turner and literature, 164 Death: symbolism in chivalric romance, 36; Shakespeare and fathers, 161 de Certeau, Michael: symbolic analysis, 123 Deconstructionism: Turner, 151 de Lauretis, Teresa: Turner’s paradigm of so­ cial drama, xv Delbanco, Andrew: American culture and liminality, 72 Derrida, Jacques: deconstructive discourse and anthropological theory, 42 Desire: narrative deployment, 65-66 Deuteronomy: sexual image related to Sisera/ Yael murder, 16 Dewey, John: readers and art, 105 Dialogism: Bakhtin’s analysis of carnival, 55, 56 DiBattista, Maria: B etw e e n th e A c ts , 90 Difference: anthropological concept and in­ terpretation of Sisera/Yael murder, 7-9 Donadio, Stephen: American literature and liminality, 81 Donoghue, Denis: idea of American exceptionalism, 76 Douglas, Mary: B e tw e e n the A c ts , 91-92 D o x a : Bourdieu’s definition, 23 D r a g o n S la y e r : folktale and ritual, 67 Drama, medieval biblical: twentieth-century scholarship, 43-47; Künzelsau Corpus Christi play, 49-52; anti-structural ele­ ments, 53; performance conditions, 53-54; Wakefield Annunciation, 59-61 Dramatism: Turner and ritual, 143-44 Durkheim, Emile: Turner’s concept of communitas, 38; functionalism, 48; Turner and symbolism, 122; liminality and ritual, 145

Fathers: Shakespeare and relationships, 16061 Faust: desire and narrative, 67 Feminist criticism: post-structuralism, xii-xiii; Woolf scholarship, 88 Feudalism: chivalric ideal, 37-38 Fiction: fact and imagination, 74; Hawthorne and liminality, 76, 79-81 Fitzgerald, F. Scott: liminality, 82-83 Flaubert, Gustave: Foucault on symbol and interpretation, 128. See also B o u v a r d et P ecu ch et; T h e T e m p ta tio n o f St. A n th o n y

Folktales: plot structure and ritual, 67-68 Foucault, Michel: text and historical context, xiii; postmodern representation, 125; on Flaubert, 126-28; author and text, 129-30 France: survival of eleventh- and twelfthcentury literature, 21; eleventh- and twelfth-century society and development of chivalric romance, 33-38 Freud, Sigmund: desire and narrative, 68 Frontier: liminality, 72-75, 76-82 Frow, John: structuralism and Marxism, x; formalism, xi; Bakhtin’s concept of the carnivalesque, xvii Fry, Roger: Woolf s liminality, 95 Functionalism: Turner’s theories, 48 Funeral: Turner’s ethnodramas, 155 Geertz, Clifford: traditional boundaries be­ tween social sciences and humanities, viii; structuralist-functionalist analysis, xiv-xv; “experience-distant” concept, 7; social stress and ideology, 23; ideology and sym­ bolic expression, 25-26; art and cultural change, 26; definition of ideology, 39n; def­ inition of culture, 83n Gender: murders in Judges, 4; honor/shame opposition and ritual in Sisera/Yael mur­ der, 12, 19 Genesis: ritual and sexuality, 10-11 Goody, Jack: ritual and belief, 141 Grabes, Herbert: mirror imagery, 93 Graham, Cunningham: travel literature as nar­ rative, 131-33 Grammars: categories and structuralism, 64 T h e G re a t G atsby: liminality, 82-83 Greenblatt, Stephen: post-structuralism and historical context, xii Grund, Francis: idea of American exceptionalism, 76 L es G u é r r illie r e s : violence in Woolf s texts, 97 Haller, Evelyn: Isis imagery, 100-101 and teaching methods in liter­ ary criticism, 156-62 Hardin, Richard F.: literature as form of rit­ ual, 6; concept of ritual, 19 Hardison, O. B.: late medieval biblical drama, 43

H a m le t : Turner

Eliade, Mircea: folktales and ritual, 67 Eliot, T. S.: meaning and experience, 161 Epics: Turner and literature, 163-64 Ethnodrama: Turner’s teaching methods, 154-56

Harmon, Barbara Leah: Greenblatt and post­ structuralism, xii Harrison, Jane: art and reflexivity, 106; B e ­ tw e en th e A c ts , 108n Hartman, Geoffrey: artist and vision, 96 Hawthorne, Nathaniel: liminality, 76-82 Heterology: late twentieth-century social the­ ory, 42 Historicism: interpretation of symbolism, 120 History: Hawthorne and American, 77, 79-81 Holquist, Michael: Bakhtin’s analysis of carni­ val, 55, 56; Bakhtin and religion, 58 Hospitality: ritual elements of Sisera/Yael text, 5-6 Icelandic sagas: Turner and literature, 163-64 Ideology: social expression of and art, 23; so­ cial stress, 23-24; symbolic expression, 2526; definition, 39n Imagination: Turner’s ethnodramas, 155 Ingarden, Roman: places of indeterminacy, 1lOn Interdisciplinary studies: literary criticism, viii, ix; traditional academic model, 150, 152 Interruptions: Woolf and feminism, 88; B e­ tw e en th e A c ts , 96-97, 98 Intertextuality: Woolf, 11 On Irigaray, Luce: men’s texts and the feminine,

Liminality: Turner’s concept, xvii-xviii; antistructural and planned, 29; artists and antistructural, 30; class consciousness and chivalric romance, 37; Turner and anti­ structure, 53, 102; Turner’s Catholicism, 57-58; attributes of, 70-71; James Fenimore Cooper, 72-75; Turner on frontier, 76; Nathaniel Hawthorne, 76-81; Willa Cather, 81-82; F. Scott Fitzgerald, 82-83; reflexivity, 87; use of term, 109n; ritual, 145; Turner and literature, 167 Literary criticism: interdisciplinary studies, viii, ix; medieval biblical drama and twenti­ eth-century scholarship, 43-47; culturefunction in anthropology and author-func­ tion, 130; anthropology and literature, 131; Turner’s ideas, 148-49; Turner’s contribu­ tions, 152, 156; Turner and anthropology, 163-68 Literature: mediating function and ritual sym­ bol, 6; criticism and anthropology, 131; Turner’s interests, 156 —American: Turner’s theories, 70 —English: B etw een th e A c ts , 101-102 —Japanese: Turner and anthropological con­ cepts, 164 Lyotard, Jean-Francois: definition of post­ modern, 118, 134

88

Irving, Washington: liminality, 75 Iser, Wolfgang: fiction and imagination, 74 Isis: B etw e e n th e A c ts , 100-101 Jameson, Fredric: structuralism and Marxism, x-xi; Marxist view of art and cultural devel­ opment, 31 Japan: Turner and literature, 164 Jauss, Hans Robert: Russian Formalism, xi Jensen, Adolph: definition of cult, 46 Judges, book of: murder and critical reaction, 3-5; explicit elements of ritual, 5; lyric and epic versions of Sisera/Yael murder, 7-8 Kolve, V. A.: literary criticism and medieval biblical drama, 45-46 Kristeva, Julia: Bakhtin and dialogism, 56; subversion of signifying practices, 91; B e­ tw e en th e A c ts , 96, 103, 104; language and the semiotic, 109n-110n Kiinzelsau: medieval biblical drama, 49-52 LaCapra, Dominick: text and social context, x; Bakhtin’s concept of the carnivalesque, xvii Langer, Suzanne: art and symbolic expres­ sion, 26; artists and abstract thought, 29 Language: concept of ritual and Sisera/Yael murder, 9-13; B e tw e e n th e A c t s , 98-99; Turner and theories of teaching, 155 T h e L a s t o f th e M o h ic a n s: liminality, 73, 74-75 Lévi-Strauss, Claude: Derrida on, 42

Macksey, Richard: literary criticism and inter­ disciplinary studies, viii “Main-Street”: liminality, 79-81 Mandelbaum, Maurice: structuralist approach to problem of change, x Marie de France: death and symbolism in chi­ valric romance, 36 Marriage: Wakefield Annunciation, 60, 61 Marxism: cultural analysis of change, ix-xii, xiii; art and functionalist view of structure, 31; Turner and truth, 151; Turner’s alien­ ation, 170 Marx, Leo: idea of American exceptionalism, 76 Melville, Herman: Turner and ritual, 163 A M id s u m m e r N ig h t's D re a m : B e tw e e n th e A c ts , 90 Miller, J. Hillis: discursive practices in B etw een th e A c ts y 97 Mills, David: literary criticism and medieval biblical drama, 47 Mirrors: imagery and B etw een the A c ts , 92-93, 104-106; Woolf and imagery, llOn M o g re b e l-A c k s a : travel literature as narrative, 131-33 Moi, Toril: Woolf and deconstructionism, 108n Monologism: Bakhtin’s analysis of carnival, 55 Mother Goddess: mythology and B etw e e n the A c ts , 100-101, 102-103 M rs . D a llo w a y : reflexivity, 90

M y A n to n i a :

liminality, 81 Myth: Turner’s definition, 142-43 Mythology: reflexivity and B e tw e e n 100-101, 102-103

th e A c ts ,

Narrative: problematics of representation, 131-34 Narratology: grammars and categories, 64 Ndembu: Turner’s fieldwork, 24; milk tree as symbol, 121-22; Turner and religion, 166 New Criticism: Turner’s legacy, 156 Newton, Judith: feminist criticism of post­ structuralism, xiii Nobility: development of in eleventh- and twelfth-century France, 33-34, 37 L a P e a u d e c h a g r in :

desire and narrative de­ ployment, 65-66, 68; Faustian family of plots, 67 Phythian-Adams, Charles: performance condi­ tions and medieval biblical dramas, 54; En­ glish Annunciation and late medieval marriage taboos, 60 Pilgrims: liminality and frontier, 72 Postmodernity: symbols and meaning, 118; Barthes and Borges, 118-19; problematization of representation, 119; Turner and symbolic analysis, 123; interpretation of author-function, 130; narrative, authorfunction, and interpretation of symbolism, 133 Post-structuralism: criticism of historiogra­ phy, xii-xiii Propp, Vladimir: grammars and categories, 64; folktales and ritual, 67

Quixote: desire and narrative, 66-67 Reader: Woolf and reflexivity, 103-104; Woolf and creative, 11 On Realism: representation, 15-17 Reflexivity: Turner’s theories, xviii-xix; liminality, 87; B etw e e n th e A cts, 89-106 Religion: Turner’s definition of ritual, 14142; Turner and Ndembu, 166 Representation: realism, 15-17 Research: Turner and traditional academic model, 149-55 Rites of passage: ritual and social roles, 11; Turner and literature, 167 Ritual: Turner’s analyses, xvi-xvii; concept and interpretation of ancient texts, 3; inter­ pretation of Sisera/Yael murder, 5-7, 9-13, 17-19; medieval biblical drama, 46, 48; in­ terpretation of Corpus Christi play of Künzelsau, 49-50; structure, 52; conflict and social drama, 67; folktales, 67-68; defi­ nition, 141-42; theory, 142-44; sense of, 144-45; Turner’s ethnodramas, 155-56; Turner’s legacy, 172

“Roger Malvin’s Burial’’: liminality, 77-79 Romance, chivalric: Turner and development in eleventh- and twelfth-century France, 33-38 A R o o m o f O n e 's O w n : mirror imagery, 93 Russian Formalism: literature and historical context, xi Russian Orthodoxy: Bakhtin, 58 Said, Edward: Foucault’s theories of power, xii S a ta n s to e : liminality, 72, 73 Schechner, Richard: collaboration with Turner, 165 Seminars: Turner’s teaching methods, 153-54 Semiology: modernism and postmodernism, 119; Barthes, 125 Serpent: B etw e e n th e A c ts , 102-103 Sexism: gender and honor/shame opposition in Sisera/Yael murder, 13; realism and criti­ cal interpretation of Sisera/Yael murder, 15 Sexuality: Sisera/Yael murder, 10-11, 15-16; Wakefield Annunciation, 61 Shakespeare, William: Turner and teaching methods in literary criticism, 156-62; Turner and ritual, 163 Shattuck, Sandra: B etw een th e A c ts , 103, 108n Shelley, Percy Bysshe: role of poet, 22-23 Silences: Woolf and fiction, 92 Silver, Brenda: B etw een th e A c ts, 104, 106 Simpson, David: literary criticism and prob­ lem of historical change, xiii-xiv Sisera: murder and critical reaction, 3-5; rit­ ual language, 10, 12 Sisyphus: desire and narrative, 66 Smyth, Ethel: described by Woolf, 103 Social dramas: Turner’s theories of historical change, xiv-xv; four phases, 24-25, 27; cat­ egories of narrative grammar, 65; conflict and ritual, 67; Turner and literature, 16667 Song of Deborah: lyric and epic versions of Sisera/Yeal murder, 4, 8; gender and honor/shame opposition, 13; ritualistic in­ terpretation, 18-19 Sperber, Dan: symbols and ritual, 144 Structuralism: cultural analysis of change, ixxiii; grammars, 64 Structure: Turner’s concept of ritual, 52 Symbols and symbolism: analyses of ritual, xvi-xvii, 144; ritual and meaning, 7; ide­ ology and expression, 25-26; art and ex­ pression, 26; artistic and ritual, 27; chivalric romance and Western culture, 38; postmodernity and meaning, 118; postmodern problematization of representation, 12021; definition, 121; Turner’s approach to analysis, 123; context, 123-24; interpreta­ tion and postmodernity, 133, 134; Turner and literature, 167; Turner’s legacy, 172

Teaching: Turner’s methods, 152, 153, 155, 156-62 Technology: Turner’s definition of ritual, 142 T h e Tem pest: Turner and ritual, 163 T h e T e m p ta tio n o f S t. A n th o n y : Foucault, 12627 de Tocqueville, Alexis: ritual and narrative,

van Gennep, Arnold: concept of liminality, xvii, 71-72, 109n; ritual and social roles, 11; Turner and social process, 172 Verbal: elements of ritual, 6 Vergil: Cather and liminality, 82 V ie d e S a in t A le x is : survival of eleventh-century French literature, 21

68

Touraine, Alain: literary criticism and problem of historical change, xiii Transitions: B etw e e n th e A c ts , 97-98 Transue, Pamela J.: B etw e e n th e A c ts , 89 Travel literature: as narrative, 131-33 Travis, Peter: literary criticism and medieval biblical drama, 46-47 Truth: traditional model of academic research, 150-51 Turner, Edith: Turner’s first work on liminality, 70; Turner’s seminars, 153 Turner, Victor: structure of group and role of individual, 39n; theories of otherness, 43, 122-23; Catholicism, 57-58, 145, 166; narrative categories, 64-65; Ameri­ can frontier, 73; compared to Barthes and Foucault, 125; “meta” mode, 147; ideas and study of literature, 148-49; tradi­ tional model of academic research, 14955; seminars, 153-54; anthropology and literary criticism, 163-68; social process and Turner’s legacy, 172. S ee a ls o Communitas; Liminality; Reflexivity; Ritual; Social drama; Symbols and symbolism; in­ dividual topics Uncertainty:

B etw e e n th e A c ts ,

94

Wainwright, Elizabeth: Künzelsau Corpus Christi play, 49 Wakefield Annunciation: antistructural ele­ ments, 59-61 Wallace, Anthony F. C.: definition of culture, 83n Watt, Homer A.: literary criticism and medi­ eval biblical drama, 44 Whiteness: Turner and ritual, 163 Whitman, Walt: Turner and truth, 151 Wilkinson, Ann: Woolf and reflexivity, 101 Williams, Raymond: Marxist view of art, 31 Woolf, Virginia: Babcock and reflexivity, xix; feminist criticism, 88; characters as spectators, 109n; multivocality, 109n; intertexuality, 11 On; abjection, 11 On; reader, 11On; mirror imagery, 11 On. See also B etw een the A cts World War II: B etw een th e A c ts , 90 Yael: murder and critical reaction, 3-5; ritual­ istic elements of text, 5-6; language and concept of ritual, 10; female voice and lyric and epic versions of murder, 13-14 Zakovitch, Yair: talmudic criticism and sexual reading of Sisera/Yael murder, 16 Zwerdling, Alex: B etw e e n th e A c ts, 89