Visions and Revisions: Studies in Literature and Culture 3631656297, 9783631656297

Table of contents :
Table of Contents
Editors’ Preface
PART I: POETRY
“Something to act out on a stage”: Theatrum Mundi in John Donne’s Poetry • Agnieszka Romanowska
Alfred Tennyson’s Visions of the Otherworlds and the Vocation of the Poet • Ewa Młynarczyk
Ecocriticism and Romantic Ecology: Gilbert White and John Clare • Jacek Wiśniewski
War as Encounter: The Christmas Truce 1914 • Aleksandra Kędzierska
Trickster Discourse: The Figure of Whittrick in Edwin Morgan’s Writing • Monika Kocot
Art in the Poetry of Elizabeth Jennings • Anna Walczuk
Visual Displacement and Shifts of Tone: On the Transformative Powers of Poetry in Recent Collections by Sinéad Morrissey and Zoë Skoulding • Grzegorz Czemiel
Words, Pictures and Windows: From Alberti to Derek Mahon • Jerzy Jarniewicz
PART II: PROSE
Re-Reading Great Expectations and Re-Thinking Its Genres:The Programmes of Illustration from 1860 through 1910 • Philip V. Allingham
The Bakhtinian Polyphony of Voices in Wilkie Collins’s The Woman in White • Aleksandra Tryniecka
The Vision of Brotherhood of Manin Charles Kingsley’s Novel Alton Locke • Aleksandra Krajewska
The Strange Case of Mr. Paul Ferroll, A Gentleman and Murderer: The Victorian Vision of Gentlemanliness Revised • Marlena Marciniak
The Dionysian in Virginia Woolf ’s Between the Acts • Katarzyna Sokołowska
“Destructive delight”: Conceptual Blending in Charles Williams’s Vision of Satanic Rituals in War in Heaven • Andrzej Sławomir Kowalczyk
Revisiting the Gothic Plot: Past-Oriented Suspensein Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca • Jacek Mydla
The Gothic Space Revisited • Anna Kędra-Kardela
Re-Visioning of the Romance Convention in the Novels by Sarah Waters • Barbara Klonowska
Mother London: Peter Ackroyd’s Three Brothers • Marta Komsta
“Doomed Queens” in a Changing Environment: Andrew Holleran’s and Alan Hollinghurst’s Literary Visions of Gay Clubbing Communities • Marcin Sroczyński
PART III: CULTURE
How It Was, How It Is: Literary Histories across the Decades • Wojciech Nowicki
New Perspectives in the U.S. Space-Oriented Philosophy: Albert Harrison’s American Cosmism as a Variation of the Russian Cosmist Thought • Kornelia Boczkowska
Pirate Neverland: Revisioning Pirates in Geraldine McCaughrean’s Peter Pan in Scarlet • Anna Bugajska
Brushed off Words: On Artists’ Writings • Edyta Frelik
Filming the Experience of Gilead: Volker Schlöndorff’s The Handmaid’s Tale • Justyna Galant
“John Bull and Erin, the first a stout healthy boy and the latter his sister a very promising girl”: Figaro in London and the Depiction of Ireland in the 1830s • Paweł Hamera
The Political Siding of Thomas Hobbes: Revision of Power in Leviathan • Paweł Kaptur
Puppies Sell: A Study of Selected Advertising Campaigns Featuring Animals • Eliza Marków
In the (Neo)Baroque Universe of Looped Voices: Lanford Wilson’s Fugue Spectacle in The Hot l Baltimore • Agnieszka Matysiak
Revising the Traditional Model of Journalismin the Context of Digital Media • Katarzyna Molek-Kozakowska
The Dystopian Grotesque in Enki Bilal’s The Carnival of Immortals • Katarzyna Pisarska
Prospero Re-Imagined: The Character of Prosperoin Modern Science Fiction • Aleksandra Szczypa
Catastrophe in Philosophy (Aristotle), Mathematics (René Thom) and Drama (Tom Stoppard and Samuel Beckett) • Jadwiga Uchman

Citation preview

Visions and Revisions Collected under the theme of Visions and Revisions, the papers included in this volume examine different aspects of literature and culture of the Anglophone world. The first part gathers articles dealing with poetry of such epochs as the seventeenth century, the Victorian era and the modern times. Part two focuses on prose works representing such conventions and modes as the romance, the Gothic novel, the condition of England novel, Victorian and neo-Victorian fiction, the science fiction novel and gay fiction. Part three concerns various aspects of British and American culture, including the new media, drama and journalism, and advertising. In its diversity the volume reflects the dynamics of

ISBN 978-3-631-65629-7

change in literature and culture, enabling the readers to investigate the multifaceted canon.

The Editors Grzegorz Czemiel, Justyna Galant and Marta Komsta are Assistant Professors at the Department of English Studies, Maria Curie-Skłodowska University in Lublin, Poland. Anna Kedra-Kardela ˛ and Aleksandra Kedzierska ˛ are both Associate Professors at the Department of English Studies, Maria Curie-Skłodowska University in Lublin, Poland.

A. Kedzierska / M. ˛ Komsta (eds.)

Grzegorz Czemiel / Justyna Galant / Anna Kedra-Kardela / ˛ Aleksandra Kedzierska / Marta ˛ Komsta (eds.)

4 ˛ Visions and Revisions G. Czemiel / J. Galant / A. Kedra-Kardela /

Silesian Studies in Anglophone Cultures and Liter atures 4

Silesian Studies in Anglophone Cultures and Liter atures 4

Grzegorz Czemiel / Justyna Galant / Anna Kedra-Kardela / Aleksandra ˛ Kedzierska / ˛ Marta Komsta (eds.)

Visions and Revisions Studies in Literature and Culture

Visions and Revisions

SILESIAN STUDIES IN ANGLOPHONE CULTURES AND LITERATURES Edited by Ewa Kębłowska-Ławniczak and Ryszard W. Wolny

VOLUME 4

Grzegorz Czemiel / Justyna Galant / Anna Kędra-Kardela / Aleksandra Kędzierska / Marta Komsta (eds.)

Visions and Revisions Studies in Literature and Culture

Bibliographic Information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data is available in the internet at http://dnb.d-nb.de. This publication was financially supported by the Polish Association for the Study of English and the Department of English at Maria Curie-Skłodowska University in Lublin, Poland. Reviewed by Monika Adamczyk-Garbowska and Grzegorz Maziarczyk. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Visions and revisions : studies in literature and culture / Grzegorz Czemiel, Justyna Galant, Anna Kedra-Kardela, Aleksandra Kedzierska, Marta Komsta, editors. pages cm. – (Silesian studies in Anglophone cultures and literatures ; 4) ISBN 978-3-631-65629-7 1. English literature–History and criticism. 2. Literature and society–Englishspeaking countries. 3. Mass media and literature. 4. Popular culture and literature. I. Czemiel, Grzegorz, editor. II. Galant, Justyna Laura, 1980- editor. III. KedraKardela, Anna, 1957- editor. IV. Kedzierska, Aleksandra, editor. V. Komsta, Marta, 1980- editor. PR99.V56 2015 820.9–dc23 2015028806 ISSN 2197-4438 ISBN 978-3-631-65629-7 (Print) E-ISBN 978-3-653-04873-5 (E-Book) DOI 10.3726/978-3-653-04873-5 © Peter Lang GmbH Internationaler Verlag der Wissenschaften Frankfurt am Main 2015 All rights reserved. Peter Lang Edition is an Imprint of Peter Lang GmbH. Peter Lang – Frankfurt am Main ∙ Bern ∙ Bruxelles ∙ New York ∙ Oxford ∙ Warszawa ∙ Wien All parts of this publication are protected by copyright. Any utilisation outside the strict limits of the copyright law, without the permission of the publisher, is forbidden and liable to prosecution. This applies in particular to reproductions, translations, microfilming, and storage and processing in electronic retrieval systems. This publication has been peer reviewed. www.peterlang.com

Table of Contents Editors’ Preface..............................................................................................................9 PART I – POETRY Agnieszka Romanowska “Something to act out on a stage”: Theatrum Mundi in John Donne’s Poetry................................................................13 Ewa Młynarczyk Alfred Tennyson’s Visions of the Otherworlds and the Vocation of the Poet......................................................................................21 Jacek Wiśniewski Ecocriticism and Romantic Ecology: Gilbert White and John Clare....................................................................................29 Aleksandra Kędzierska War as Encounter: The Christmas Truce 1914........................................................41 Monika Kocot Trickster Discourse: The Figure of Whittrick in Edwin Morgan’s Writing..........49 Anna Walczuk Art in the Poetry of Elizabeth Jennings....................................................................59 Grzegorz Czemiel Visual Displacement and Shifts of Tone: On the Transformative Powers of Poetry in Recent Collections by Sinéad Morrissey and Zoë Skoulding..........69 Jerzy Jarniewicz Words, Pictures and Windows: From Alberti to Derek Mahon............................77

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PART II – PROSE Philip V. Allingham Re-­Reading Great Expectations and Re-­Thinking Its Genres: The Programmes of Illustration from 1860 through 1910.....................................89 Aleksandra Tryniecka The Bakhtinian Polyphony of Voices in Wilkie Collins’s The Woman in White................................................................................................ 115 Aleksandra Krajewska The Vision of Brotherhood of Man in Charles Kingsley’s Novel Alton Locke................................................................ 123 Marlena Marciniak The Strange Case of Mr. Paul Ferroll, A Gentleman and Murderer: The Victorian Vision of Gentlemanliness Revised............................................... 133 Katarzyna Sokołowska The Dionysian in Virginia Woolf ’s Between the Acts........................................... 141 Andrzej Sławomir Kowalczyk “Destructive delight”: Conceptual Blending in Charles Williams’s Vision of Satanic Rituals in War in Heaven....................................................................... 149 Jacek Mydla Revisiting the Gothic Plot: Past-­Oriented Suspense in Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca............................................................................ 159 Anna Kędra-­Kardela The Gothic Space Revisited..................................................................................... 169 Barbara Klonowska Re-Visioning of the Romance Convention in the Novels by Sarah Waters...... 181 Marta Komsta Mother London: Peter Ackroyd’s Three Brothers.................................................. 191

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Marcin Sroczyński “Doomed Queens” in a Changing Environment: Andrew Holleran’s and Alan Hollinghurst’s Literary Visions of Gay Clubbing Communities............................................................................... 199 PART III – CULTURE Wojciech Nowicki How It Was, How It Is: Literary Histories across the Decades........................... 213 Kornelia Boczkowska New Perspectives in the U.S. Space-­Oriented Philosophy: Albert Harrison’s American Cosmism as a Variation of the Russian Cosmist Thought............................................................................ 223 Anna Bugajska Pirate Neverland: Revisioning Pirates in Geraldine McCaughrean’s Peter Pan in Scarlet..................................................... 233 Edyta Frelik Brushed off Words: On Artists’ Writings.............................................................. 241 Justyna Galant Filming the Experience of Gilead: Volker Schlöndorff ’s The Handmaid’s Tale................................................................................................. 249 Paweł Hamera “John Bull and Erin, the first a stout healthy boy and the latter his sister a very promising girl”: Figaro in London and the Depiction of Ireland in the 1830s............................................................. 259 Paweł Kaptur The Political Siding of Thomas Hobbes: Revision of Power in Leviathan........ 271 Eliza Marków Puppies Sell: A Study of Selected Advertising Campaigns Featuring Animals.................................................................................................... 279 Agnieszka Matysiak In the (Neo)Baroque Universe of Looped Voices: Lanford Wilson’s Fugue Spectacle in The Hot l Baltimore............................................................................. 289

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Katarzyna Molek-­Kozakowska Revising the Traditional Model of Journalism in the Context of Digital Media.............................................................................. 299 Katarzyna Pisarska The Dystopian Grotesque in Enki Bilal’s The Carnival of Immortals................. 307 Aleksandra Szczypa Prospero Re-­Imagined: The Character of Prospero in Modern Science Fiction...................................................................................... 317 Jadwiga Uchman Catastrophe in Philosophy (Aristotle), Mathematics (René Thom) and Drama (Tom Stoppard and Samuel Beckett)................................................ 325

Editors’ Preface The papers collected in this volume show a variety of subjects, a wide range of scholarly interests and a broad spectrum of methodological approaches. Collected under the common theme of Visions and Revisions, they examine different aspects of literature and culture of the Anglophone world. The volume is divided into three parts. The first part gathers articles dealing with poetry of such diverse epochs as the seventeenth century, the Victorian era and the modern times. Part II focuses on prose works by such authors as Ch. Dickens, W. Collins, Ch. Kingsley, V. Woolf, D. Du Maurier or P. Ackroyd, S. Waters, E. Bilal, A. Hollinghurst, to mention but a few. Among the literary conventions and modes explored in the ­papers, one finds the romance, the Gothic novel, the condition of England novel, Victorian and neo-­Victorian fiction, the science fiction novel and gay ­fiction. Part III focuses on various aspects of British and American culture, including the new media, drama and journalism, and advertising. In its diversity the volume reflects the dynamics of change both in literature and culture, and in the scholarly work done in these fields, enabling the readers to investigate the multifaceted canon.

Part I Poetry

Agnieszka Romanowska

“Something to act out on a stage”: Theatrum Mundi in John Donne’s Poetry In his seminal edition of Donne’s poetry Herbert Grierson wrote about “dramatic intensity” of the Elegies (1912, xlii) and, in his later comments on the love poems, observed their wide dramatic range and complexity of moods (1948, 145). J.B. Leishman appreciated Donne’s “unusual liking and capacity for what children call ‘dressing up’” and his “dramatisation of actual or imaginary experiences, situations, attitudes” (1951, 145-­147). Helen Gardner, who underlined the impact of the late sixteenth-­century development of dramatic writing on Donne, wrote about the Elegies and Songs and Sonnets that “they are dramatic in the sense that they are single and complete as a play is single and complete” (1965, xviii) and about the Divine Poems she contended: “This dramatic language has a magic that is unanalysable” (1952, xxxii). In her essay “The Metaphysical Poets” Gardner elaborated on the poet’s “strong dramatic imagination” and his “desire to make poems out of particular moments, made imaginatively present rather than remembered” (Keast 1962, 39-­40). Patrick Cruttwell also attributed Donne’s dramatic quality to the flourishing of drama in the 1590s, while Frank J. Warnke perceived this feature of Donne’s poetry in a wider context of the age’s phenomenological scepticism: The dramatic, indeed the theatrical, is perhaps the major constituent of the baroque imagination. […] [T]he baroque lyric is partly defined by its dramatic modus operandi; […] [f]or Donne, as for Shakespeare […] the venerable topos of the world as theater […] had an obsessive status – in life as well as in art. (1987, 10)

While the essentially dramatic quality of John Donne’s poetry is a commonly accepted critical notion, it is worth taking a fresh look at the interpretative potential this notion offers. The approach I apply below proves fruitful in class, where attractive ways of reading poetry with students are always to be sought. But, as evidenced by Margaret Edson’s play Wit that I discuss below, theatrical reading of Donne pursued by creative writers may also render interesting results. A fairly recent study that applies a systematic apparatus for interpreting Donne’s dramatic qualities is David Ralston Watkins’s dissertation Inferring the Dramatic in Donne: A Metacritical Study. Watkins locates his discussion in the

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context determined by the functioning of the world-­stage metaphor in European early modern culture and argues that although the metaphor of the world as a stage was a well-­worn literary cliché by the time Donne was writing, […] in his work Donne both appreciates and incorporates the subtle as well as the more overt and conventional aspects of the topos, which is why it is not traceable to any obvious abundance of dramatic allusion but is, rather, part of a wider field of optical and phenomenological imagery that culminates in the concept […] of the poem-­as-­theatre. (2002, 49-­50)

The theatrum mundi topos, which Ernst Robert Curtius traced back to Plato’s Laws, reached mediaeval England through a combination of pagan antiquity and early Christian writers to be revived and developed by John of Salisbury in his 1159 Policraticus. Curtius related the frequent reappearance of the world-­stage metaphors in Renaissance England to the popularity of Salisbury’s Statesman’s Book that had several editions in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries (1953, 138-­144). Nowadays the best known manifestation of the topos is Jacques’s “All the world’s a stage,” but its ubiquity in Donne’s epoch can easily be demonstrated by a variety of examples that reveal metaphors pertaining to subjects like role-­playing, illusion, deceit, disguise, transformation, maturation, passage of time or transitoriness of life. Sir Walter Raleigh’s poem “On the Life of Man” draws an analogy between human life and comedy in very explicit terms: What is our life? a play of passion; Our mirth the music of division; Our mothers’ wombs the tiring-­houses be Where we are dressed for this short comedy. Heaven the judicious sharp spectator is, That sits and marks still who doth act amiss; Our graves that hide us from the searching sun Are like drawn curtains when the play is done. Thus march we, playing, to our latest rest, Only we die in earnest – that’s no jest. (Abrams 1979, 983)

Equally overt comparisons are used in “De Morte,” a poem attributed to Raleigh, in which the vehicle of the metaphor is a five-­act tragedy and people, having entered on stage from the tiring-­room of their mothers’ wombs, act out their lives from the first cry (the prologue) to death (the epilogue). Another case is Thomas Heywood’s An Apology for Actors (1612), prefixed with a poem the final section of which reads:

Theatrum Mundi in John Donne’s Poetry

15

If then the world a Theater present, As by the roundness it appears most fit, […] He that denies then Theaters should be, He may as well deny a world to me. (Heywood 1841, 13)

There are also numerous examples outside poetry, like the pictorial biography of a sixteenth-­century soldier and diplomat, Henry Unton, now to be seen in the National Portrait Gallery in London. The picture’s aim is commemorative, not satirical, but the emphasis on subsequent stages of life brings to mind Shakespeare’s passage from As You Like It because “the ten ages of Henry Unton are as evocative to the eye as Jaques’s ‘seven ages of man’ are to the ear” (Bate and Thornton 2012, 50). Another case in point, this time pertaining to the life of the whole nation, is the early seventeenth-­century book of maps, John Speed’s Theatre of the Empire of Great Britain, one of the world’s cartographic treasures printed in 1611. The title itself expresses a theatrical sense of British history, while the title page depicts an ancient Briton at the centre of a stage-­like structure (called Britannia), flanked by four other “characters”: a Roman, a Saxon, a Dane, and a Norman (Bate and Thornton 2012, 213). The frequency of the world-­stage metaphor in early modern culture “was a manifestation of the people’s awareness of their own theatricality and of their profound conviction and feeling that the world is a stage, life is a play, men and women are actors” (Mroczkowska-­Brand 1993, 20), an awareness strongly reflected also in the theatralization of monarchy and other aspects of public life. In the remaining part of the article I am presenting a handful of sketches analyzing the theatrum mundi topos that underlies Donne’s love poetry and his Holy Sonnets. My readings draw on Gardner’s comparison between Donne’s poems and plays in relation to the feature that she called “completeness,” as well as on Watkins’s conclusion that Donne is dramatic primarily because his most effective work is presented like little plays, indeed little theatres, to which the reader-­cum-­audience is drawn and upon entrance cast into an active role that is co-­creative as opposed to strictly interpretative. In all of the truly dramatic lyrics this effect is achieved largely through implicature – that which is not explicitly stated within the context of the surrounding poetic utterance – whereby the poetic audience is coerced into imaginative participation in the form of guided inference in the play of words into which it is drawn. […] The great poems, the ones he will always be remembered for […] are rightly to be thought of as performance texts, playing spaces, or “theatres of the mind.” (2002, 162-­163)

A relatively easy example is the song “Sweetest love, I do not go…,” in which the speaker, on abandoning his beloved, manages to hyperbolically deny that they are

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going to be parted at all if only the addressee pretends, during the speaker’s absence, that they are as if “turn’d aside to sleep” (l. 38). Thus, it is argued, the lovers should be growing accustomed to real death (which is inevitable) by undergoing pretended deaths, i.e. absences. The sense of directness and immediacy in this poem is achieved as the reader witnesses the subsequent stages of persuasion undisturbed by any extended metaphors. Pierre Legouis mentioned this poem to illustrate what he saw as the dramatic element in Donne’s Songs and Sonnets: “there are two characters; the second is indeed a mute; or rather his words are not written down; but we are enabled to guess how he acts and what he would say if he were granted utterance” (Gardner 1962, 38). In this song the attention is given to the mute addressee as the speaker’s tone and means of persuasion alter according to the effect exerted on the addressee. Closely related to “Sweetest love…” is another valedictory poem, “Break of Day.” It gives priority, quite untypically, to the lover who is staying, not the one who is leaving and, equally unexpectedly, to the woman. The sense of immediacy and progression is created by the abrupt conversational opening, “‘Tis true, ‘tis day, what though it be? / Oh, wilt thou therefore rise from me?” followed by passionate witty argumentation moved forward by a set of increasingly irritated questions directed at the mute (though by no means passive) addressee. A similar effect of looking at participants involved in a situation enacted in front of the reader’s eyes is achieved in “The Sun Rising,” “The Good Morrow,” “The Flea,” “The Canonisation,” and many other poems. In some of them, significantly, the realisation of the scene occurs both verbally and non-­verbally, like in e.g. “The Dream,” in which a stock Renaissance theme is treated dramatically (Kermode 1974, 38). The particularly intricate stanza contains a carefully processed tripartite argument enacted within a clearly established setting, with the use of aptly chosen metaphorical vehicles that suggest properties: As lightning, or a taper’s light, Thine eyes, and not thy noise, wak’d me; […] Perchance, as torches which must ready be Men light and put on, so thou deal’st with me, Thou cam’st to kindle, goest to come; (Redpath 1987, 177)

Central to “dramatising a progressive action” (Craik 1986, 192) in this poem are what we could call implied stage directions, i.e. phrases that set the scene, control its progress and activate the imagination of the poetic audience1: “Would I have 1 I borrow this term from Watkins, who tends to use theatrical terms to talk about poetic categories. Thus, following the concept of Donne’s poem being a play-­script, the

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broke this happy dream” (l. 2); “thou waked’st me wisely” (l. 5); “Enter these arms” (l. 9); “Thine eyes, and not thy noise wak’d me” (l. 12); “Coming and staying show’d thee, thee, / But rising makes me doubt” (ll. 21-­22). Several other texts illustrate the features of Donne’s poetic craft that allow one, while reading, to enter a little theatre. In “The Sun Rising” the three opening lines establish the conflict between the Sun and the other two participants of the situation, the speaker and his lover. The comparison of the Sun to a semi-­ senile father figure may be seen a reflection of the theatre-­of-­human-­life topos, as would generally be the contrast between the young lovers and the “busy old fool” (l. 1), the Sun. The setting in this early morning scene is hardly sketched as if on a bare stage of the Elizabethan theatre. Centrally located is the curtained bed that forms a rectangular scene on which the lovers-­cum-­actors perform their roles. There are windows in the walls and the walls provide a sense of closeness and completeness as they contain the whole world: all the world’s wealth and all the world’s powers, “All here in one bed lay” (l. 20). As in “The Good Morrow” happiness is to be found in the “world contracted thus” (l. 26), not outside. The lovers create a quasi-­theatrical space for their love, but on the other hand, some theatrical vocabulary used in the poem, as “Princes do but play us; compared to this, / All honour’s mimic” (ll. 23-­24), also suggests that the world outside the bedroom is only an illusion while the true timeless love that knows “no season […] nor clime” (l. 9) is inside. Empowered by the sense of fulfilment and all encompassing energy, the speaker moves from rebellious invectives thrown at the interrupting Sun to an ingenious volta, in which the lovers hope to outwit the puppet-­master to whose “motions lovers’ seasons run” (l. 4). To prevent the Sun from moving, they invite him to their world: “Shine here to us, and thou art everywhere; / This bed thy centre is, these walls thy sphere” (l. 29-­30). Again, as in the “The Good Morrow,” the ideal space for lovers is circular, as is the globe, to symbolise perfect unity. Donne’s love poetry, if read in a way that does justice to its dramatic qualities, reveals energies that draw the reader into the worlds of the poems to make the reading experience lively and creative. The same is true for many of his religious poems. Similar dramatic quality is found in numerous religious poems. It served as inspiration for the author of Wit, in which a middle-­aged university professor of English literature, an expert on the metaphysical poets, is diagnosed with cancer. The play depicts an introspective quest towards self-­awareness that the protagonist

speaker and addressee are often referred to as characters or participants, the line of argumentation as action, and readers as audience (Watkins 2002, 110-­160).

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undertakes when faced with the terminal illness. The central dramatic technique – meta-­theatrical addresses to the audience – is introduced in the opening monologue, in which professor Bearing states, “It is not my intention to give away the plot; but I think I die at the end. They’ve given me less than two hours […] I’ve got less than two hours. Then: curtain” (Edson 2001, 6-­7). This theatrical framework is reinforced by one of Donne’s Holy Sonnets which Bearing recalls at the end of the eight cycles of aggressive chemotherapy, and which is one of the very rare cases of explicit use of the world-­theatre metaphor in Donne: This is my playes last scene, here heavens appoint My pilgrimages last mile; and my race Idly, yet quickly runne, hath this last pace, My spans last inch, my minutes last point, And gluttonous death will instantly unjoynt My body, and soule (Edson 2001, 52)

To perform her last hours professor Bearing is forced to put on the “costume” of the in-­patient of the University Hospital Comprehensive Cancer Centre, and to participate in the ward rounds on which she comments in conspicuously theatrical terms: Grand Rounds. The term is theirs. […] Grand Rounds is not Grand Opera. But compared to lying here, it is positively dramatic. Full of subservience, hierarchy […] sublimated rivalries – I feel right at home. It is just like a graduate seminar. With one important difference: in Grand Rounds, they read me like a book. Once I did the teaching, now I am taught. This is much easier. I just hold still and look cancerous. It requires less acting every time. (Edson 2001, 36-­37)

Convinced that her participation in the experimental treatment will make a significant contribution to scientific research and aware of the seriousness of her case, Bearing finds reassurance in her expertise as a literary historian: “I know all about life and death. I am, after all, a scholar of Donne’s Holy Sonnets, which explore mortality in greater depth than any other body of work in the English language” (Edson 2001, 12). While throughout her academic career Bearing has appreciated Donne for his “hyperactive intellect” and his dramatic monologues in “Death, be not proud…” and “If poisonous minerals…” for their “histrionic outpouring” (Edson 2001, 50), she is now forced to reevaluate the point of this poetry. Bearing’s recollections of her lectures and research allow her to rediscover compassion, acknowledge fear and understand what her mentor had in mind thirty years earlier when she insisted on paying close attention to Donne’s punctuation:

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And death shall be no more, comma, Death thou shalt die. […] Nothing but a breath – a comma – separates life from life everlasting. It is very simple really. With the original punctuation restored, death is no longer something to act out on a stage, with exclamation points. It’s a comma, a pause. (Edson 2001, 14-­15)

Scholars working on John Donne have established a relation between the ubiquity of the world-­theatre topos in his epoch and characteristics of his poetry, such as sudden openings, conversational style, variety of tones, changeability of moods, situational immediacy and argumentative force. The world-­theatre metaphor underlines the construction of the poems in that they present a dynamic situation, rather than describe it, and put the reader in a position of an audience that witnesses the changes of the scene and the progression of argumentation as if it followed events on stage. And this should not surprise us in a poet who dramatised even his own death. During his last illness in 1631 Donne ordered a painter to draw his likeness as he posed in his shroud. Izaak Walton described this scene as follows: Several charcoal fires being first made in his large study, he brought with into that place his winding-­sheet in his hand, and having put off all his clothes, had this sheet put on him, and so tied with knots at his head and feet, and his hands so placed as dead bodies are usually fitted […] he thus stood, with his eyes shut, and with so much of the sheet turned aside as might show his lean, pale, and death-­like face. (Williamson 1958, 14)

Because death – as well as love – is after all “something to act out on a stage.” On the stage of life.

Works Cited Abrams, Meyer Howard, gen. ed. 1979. The Norton Anthology of English Literature. New York: Norton. Bate, Jonathan, and Dora Thornton. 2012. Staging the World. Shakespeare. London: The British Museum Press. Craik, Thomas W., and R.J. Craik, eds. 1986. John Donne. Selected Poetry and Prose. London: Methuen. Cruttwell, Patrick. 1954. The Shakespearean Moment and Its Place in the Poetry of the Seventeenth Century. London: Chatto and Windus. Curtius, Ernst R. 1953. European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages. Translated by Willard R. Trask. New York: Pantheon Books. Edson, Margaret. 2001. Wit. New York: Faber and Faber.

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Gardner, Helen.  1952. Introduction to John Donne: The Divine Poems, xv-­lv. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Gardner, Helen, ed. 1962. John Donne. A Collection of Critical Essays. Prentice-­ Hall: A Spectrum Book. Gardner, Helen. 1965. Introduction to John Donne: The Elegies and Songs and Sonnets, xvii-­lxii. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Grierson, Herbert.  1912. The Poems of John Donne, vol. II Introduction and Commentary, v-­lv. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Grierson, Herbert, ed. 1948. Cross Currents in English Literature of the Seventeenth Century. London: Chatto and Windus. Heywood, Thomas. 1841. An Apology for Actors. London: Shakespeare Society. Web. Keast, William R., ed.  1962. Seventeenth-­Century English Poetry. New York: Oxford University Press. Kermode, Frank, Stephen Fender, and Kenneth Palmer. 1974. English Renaissance Literature. Introductory Lectures. London: Gray Mills. Leishman, James B. 1951. The Monarch of Wit: An Analytical and Comparative Study of the Poetry of John Donne. London: Hutchinson. Mroczkowska-­Brand, Katarzyna. 1993. The Theatrum Mundi Metaphor in Spanish and English Drama 1570-­1640. Kraków: Universitas. Redpath, Theodore. 1987. The Songs and Sonnets of John Donne. London: Methuen. Watkins, David R. 2002. “Inferring the Dramatic in Donne: A Metacritical Study.” PhD diss., University of Canterbury. Web. Warnke, Frank. 1987. John Donne. Boston: Twayne. Williamson, George. 1958. The Donne Tradition. New York: The Noonday Press.

Ewa Młynarczyk

Alfred Tennyson’s Visions of the Otherworlds and the Vocation of the Poet The choice between a life of artistic detachment and one of social involvement seems to have posed an important dilemma for the young Alfred Tennyson. While later on he was strongly critical of the concept of art for art’s sake of the 1860s,1 his own early poetry betrays a partiality for the idea of the poet as a lonely visionary dwelling in his world apart from society. It seems that Tennyson’s stance on this question underwent a considerable revision between the years 1832 and 1842. The aim of this paper is to trace the way in which this change has been reflected in the presentations of the otherworldly spaces in “The Hesperides” (1832) and “The Lotos-­Eaters” (1832, 1842), in which the mythical garden of the Hesperides and the island of the lotos-­eaters may be interpreted as standing for the inner world of imagination as opposed to the outer world of action. Both “The Hesperides” and “The Lotos-­Eaters” may be counted among the earliest examples of Tennyson’s original reworkings of mythological themes. Other similarities between the two poems may be found in their structure and imagery. Both poems open with a brief narrative frame, which is followed by the lyrical Choric Song. Both elaborate on the familiar Tennysonian motif of a fertile valley sheltered by the mountains with its exotic settings, luxuriant vegetation, and the pervading sense of idleness suggestive of oppressive heat. Moreover, in both cases, the questers from the outside world are lured with the sacred fruit, the tasting of which transports one into the higher world of poetic wisdom. However, this enchanted twilight realm may just as well prove fatal for an uninitiated wanderer, which has been particularly stressed in the 1842 version of “The Lotos-­Eaters.” While overtly Greek, the story about the western garden, where the Hesperides, Hesperus and the dragon guard the sacred tree with golden apples, lest their secret wisdom be revealed to the world, bears strong connotations with the Biblical story of the Fall of Man. Just as Adam and Eve upon eating the forbidden apples from 1 The publication of Hallam Tennyson’s Alfred Tennyson. A Memoir in 1897 revealed the following epigram written by the poet in 1869: “Art for Art’s sake! Hail, truest Lord of Hell! / Hail Genius, blaster of the Moral Will! / ‘The filthiest of all paintings painted well / Is mightier than the purest painted ill!’ / Yes, mightier than the purest painted well, / So prone are we toward the broad way to Hell” (II, 92).

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the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil learn of the matters they are not ready to comprehend, so in Tennyson’s poem, “If the golden apple be taken / The world will be overwise” (63-­64).2 The consequences of stealing the golden apples are further elaborated in Part III of the poem: Lest the old wound of the world be healèd, The glory unsealèd, The golden apple stolen away, And the ancient secret revealèd. (Tennyson 1969, 427; 69-­72)

What exactly is the meaning of this “ancient secret”? And why is it not to be “preached abroad” that “Five and three / […] make an awful mystery” (28-­29)? Christine Gallant looks for an explanation in the symbolic numerology of Pythagoreanism of the fifth century B.C.: “The numbers represent the unity of the elements in the garden (the Three Sisters, the dragon, and Hesper) and of the cosmos, symbolizing the elements of the Sisters’ self-­contained universe just as numbers for the Pythagoreans symbolized the orderly harmony of the cosmos” (1976, 157). However, G. Robert Stange provides a different interpretation, which seems to be much more in tune with Tennyson’s views on art at the time of writing the poem. Namely, he sees “The Hesperides” as an allegory of poetic creation and explains the links between the Three Sisters, the golden apples and the root of the tree as “a figure of the connection among the artist, his art, and his inspiration” (1952, 735). Thus, the poem becomes a statement of the aesthetic approach to art, where the artist remains isolated from the external world and guards the source of his poetic inspiration against unwelcome intruders from the East. The opposition between the East and the West, the morning and the evening, is especially underlined in the final parts of the poem. Unlike the Biblical Eden, which has been placed in the East, in accordance with the traditional depictions of the mythological Islands of the Blessed, the island of the Hesperides lies in the West, off the African coast. Moreover, as we learn from the song, “Hesper hateth Phosphor, evening hateth morn” (82). The apple tree has to be sheltered from “the cool east light” (97), and it is twilight that appears to be the most congenial time for the growth of the golden fruit, which then becomes “Holy and bright, round and full, bright and blest” (93). With the motif of a paradisal garden sheltering the sacred poetic wisdom, here embodied by the golden apples, we seem to be back in the secluded realm of “The 2 All quotations from Tennyson’s poems are from The Poems of Tennyson, edited by Christopher Ricks, and are identified by line numbers.

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Poet’s Mind” from Tennyson’s Poems, Chiefly Lyrical (1830). Yet, it appears that the position of the poet has changed. As will also be the case with “The Lotos-­Eaters” and the later “Ulysses,” the poet has now taken on the role of a restless quester and as such may be identified with the adventurous Hanno (cf. Culler 1977, 51). He is no longer the lord, nor even an inmate, of the garden of Hesperides. Instead, he accidentally overhears the song of Sisters three, a privilege he is granted for his boldness to reach out beyond the margins of the familiar world. The introduction of Hanno, a Carthaginian explorer from the fifth century B.C., results in the merging of the mythical and historical dimensions. The garden does not simply appear to the hero in a mythical narrative but seems to be a remnant of a mythical past which intrudes into historical times. While Hanno belongs to the real world, with its natural passing of time, the time in the western abode of the Hesperides seems to be suspended and, at this point, the stealing of the apples by Heracles is only a dim foreboding of future events. As the Sisters emphasize it twice in their song, the wars and conflicts of the real world never affect the quiet of the sacred garden: “The world is wasted with fire and sword, / But the apple of gold hangs over the sea” (104-­5). The suspension of time is matched on the one hand with an unusual stillness and silence, which precede the introduction of the song, as well as the laziness and lack of movement in the magical garden itself on the other. The voices of the Three Sisters come to Hanno “like the voices in a dream” (12), while the other sounds from the shore are suppressed and everything around seems to be extraordinarily peaceful. Peace also pervades the song itself as the Hesperides sing of the tropical evening on their island: Round about all is mute, As the snowfield on the mountain-­peaks, As the sandfield at the mountain-­foot. Crocodiles in briny creeks Sleep and stir not: all is mute. (Tennyson 1969, 425; 18-­22)

Yet, Hanno never reaches this paradisal land. The poem only relays how he has been temporarily hypnotised by the song of the Hesperides on his way to explore unknown lands. A. A. Markley observes that “[a]s Hanno sails away it seems that he is missing the point of the Hesperides’ song, which emphasizes beauty in mystery – art and culture – in contrast to the relentless search for other treasures” (2004, 58). Yet, this accusation appears to be somewhat untenable. Since Hanno’s is not the life of artistic contemplation, he should not venture into the sacred garden of the Hesperides; he may only learn about this realm accidentally, from the echoes of the Sisters’ song. Hence, the role of the Sisters seems to be twofold; on the level of the story, they sing to prevent themselves, Father Hesper and the dragon from

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falling asleep and neglecting their duty, while on the level of the structure, their song is the only means by which the otherwordly place is recreated in the poem. A song about the purpose and nature of singing, it may be considered a pure expression of the self-­referentiality of art, one of the key concepts of the later art for art’s sake aesthetic (cf. McSweeney 1981, 46). The incantatory, enchanting nature of the Sisters’ song has been achieved by means of repetitions: “The golden apple, the golden apple, the hallowed fruit” (14, 112), irregular rhyming patterns: “Guard it well, guard it warily, / Watch it warily, / Singing airily” (113-­15), and sensuous Keatsian imagery: “The luscious fruitage clustereth mellowly, / Goldenkernelled, goldencored, / Sunset-­ripened above on the tree” (101-­3). An even more ambiguous portrayal of an escapist, detached attitude to life can be found in “The Lotos-­Eaters” – another poem about an enchanted island from Greek mythology. Its theme is based on a brief episode from the Odyssey (IX, 82-­104) in which Odysseus and his companions reach the island of the peaceful lotos-­eaters. When three of the mariners taste the flowery food, they fall into a lethargic state and are no longer willing to continue their journey home, so that Odysseus has to bring them back on the ship by force. In its style and metre, however, Tennyson’s poem is also reminiscent of Spenser’s The Faerie Queene and its various images of otherwordly bowers of bliss.3 Moreover, the thrust of the lotos-­eaters’ song may best be summarised by Despaire’s words on the meaninglessness of toil in life: “Sleepe after toyle, port after stormie seas, / Ease after warre, death after life does greatly please” (I.IX.40). In Tennyson’s poem, the lotos-­eaters’ paralysis of will and inanition have been projected onto the portrayal of the island. It is a land where “it seemèd always afternoon” (4). This suspension of time is further underlined by the simultaneous appearance of the setting sun and the full moon: “Full-­faced above the valley stood the moon” (7), while at the same time, “The charmèd sunset lingered low adown / In the red West” (19-­20). Moreover, the flow of the many streams also appears to be affected by the mood of drowsiness as they are “like a downward smoke, / Slow-­dropping veils of thinnest lawn” (10-­11), and the falling water is not a roaring waterfall one might expect but “a slumberous sheet of foam below” (13). Even the air is swooning with languor and “Breathing like one that hath a weary dream” (6). Yet, this stasis is apparently only illusory, which has been implied by the repetition of the verb “seem.” Such a description may be ascribed to the subjective, drug-­induced vision of the mariners who have eaten of the lotos. However, the above-­quoted lines appear in the poem before the actual tasting of

3 For the influence of The Faerie Queene on “The Lotos-­Eaters” see Ricks’s remarks in the headnote to the poem in The Poems of Tennyson (1969, 429).

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the fruit is narrated. Hence, a question arises – whose vision of the island has been presented in the introductory stanzas? Do the mariners see it as an otherwordly land of dreams even before the lotos has influenced their perception? The ontological status of the land becomes even more ambiguous and disconcerting when one realises that, in creating his image of the island of the lotos-­ eaters, Tennyson draws on many details characteristic of the classical descriptions of the underworld. On their arrival, the mariners are approached by the inhabitants of the island: And round about the keel with faces pale, Dark faces pale against that rosy flame, The mild-­eyed melancholy Lotos-­eaters came. (Tennyson 1969, 431; 25-­27)

Their paleness and listlessness are undoubtedly the effects of feeding on the lotos. Yet in this way they also resemble the pale spirits aimlessly wandering the plains of Hades. When the mariners taste of their flowery fruit, the results are reminiscent of drinking of the Lethe, the mythical underground river of forgetfulness. They gradually become convinced that they will never return home. In the 1842 version of the sixth stanza, which skilfully foreshadows the later events from the Odyssey, the mariners sing that “Dear is the memory of our wedded lives, / And dear the last embraces of our wives” (114-­15), but they see their past lives as fading memories and are not willing to “come like ghosts to trouble joy” (119) on their home island where their deeds are but “half-­forgotten things” (123). The only boon they now long for is “long rest or death, dark death, or dreamful ease” (98). This “dreamful ease” in death is also symbolised by the poppy growing on the island (56). The interpretation of “The Lotos-­Eaters” has been the subject of much discussion. Apparently negative in its import, while strangely alluring in its cadences, it seems to be yet another expression of Tennyson’s vacillating views on the role of the poet and his art. Catherine Barnes Stevenson reads the poem as a veiled warning against the consequences of taking opium, which Tennyson could observe in his father and brother, and as the poet’s attempt at fleeing from the problems of real life into the world of sensuous poetry (1982, 122-­23). In fact, a poetic equivalent of the influence of opium on one’s sensory perception may be found in the passages describing the mariners’ growing weariness and the distancing of the voices of their companions, which sound to them as “voices from the grave” (34), while the beating of their hearts is painfully heightened in their ears. As they gradually fall under the spell of the lotos, their state reminds one of that resulting from a long-­term use of the drug, a sense of alienation, leading to the dissolution of social bonds and family ties (Stevenson 1982, 130-­31). Their estrangement from their families has

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been even more emphasized in the sixth stanza added in the revision for the 1842 publication, already quoted above. The mariners forsake the active lives they have been pursuing and succumb to the growing sense of torpor, yearning for death, the end of the natural cycle that will finally release them from their meaningless toil. What is more, in the revised final stanza, the mariners’ decision to remain on the lotos island is no longer justified by mere sensual pleasure they derive from eating the fruit, but is explained as their yearning to become dissociated from human passions just like the cruel, indifferent Epicurean gods above. These gods delight in human suffering because it brings them “a music centred in a doleful song” (162). This passage, which seems to anticipate later claims of the proponents of art for art’s sake that the theme of art should be independent of its moral value, may be seen as the severest criticism of aestheticism in the early Tennyson. Since the ultimate success or failure of the mariners’ quest is solely dependent on the whim of those fickle deities, any further struggle is pointless and it is best to “live and lie reclined / On the hills like Gods together, careless of mankind” (154-­55). Thus, in the 1842 version of the poem, Tennyson apparently tries to stress the point that in their motivation to give in to the illusory, lotos-­induced calm, the mariners are not only selfish and antisocial, but they are also amoral. Still, even though morally questionable, the song of the lotos-­eaters possesses an entrancing charm achieved through its sensuous imagery and its varying metre: Lo! in the middle of the wood, The folded leaf is wooed from out the bud With winds upon the branch, and there Grows green and broad, and takes no care, Sun-­steeped at noon, and in the moon Nightly dew-­fed; and turning yellow Falls, and floats adown the air. Lo! sweetened with the summer light, The full-­juiced apple, waxing over-­mellow, Drops in a silent autumn night. (Tennyson 1969, 432-­3; 70-­79)

as well as repetitions and consonance: Most weary seemed the sea, weary the oar, Weary the wandering fields of barren foam. (Tennyson 1969, 431; 41-­42) All things have rest, and ripen toward the grave In silence; ripen, fall and cease: Give us long rest or death, dark death, or dreamful ease. (Tennyson 1969, 433; 96-­98)

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The Choric Song seems to be lulling the senses with its drowsy melodiousness and thus blunting its message, a feature which was found to be particularly outraging in Swinburne’s poetry some thirty years later. In his seminal study of “The Lotos-­Eaters,” Alan Grob focuses on the paradoxical state of those who have eaten the lotos as “deep asleep […], yet all awake” (35) and compares it to one in which the Romantic artist shuts himself off from external sensations in order to free the imagination and thus allow for the expansion of inner vision (Grob 1964, 123). Yet, the mariners are apparently not predisposed to make creative use of the wisdom of the sacred fruit and turn into true poets; they are overwhelmed and paralysed by the drug-­induced, heightened vision of reality, and thus the enchanted island becomes a dangerous obstacle to their quest. Once again, it seems that the sympathies of the poet lie with the quester figure in the poem, the one who is unaffected by the intoxicating lotos and remains firm in his resolution to pursue his goal. The presence of Odysseus is only briefly signaled in its first two lines: “‘Courage!’ he said, and pointed toward the land, / ‘This mounting wave will roll us shoreward soon’” (1-­2). Yet, those two lines, the hero’s address to his companions, modify the import of the whole poem: We know that when the time comes, that hard voice will ring out again and the mariners will troop back to the oars. Their listless attempt to decide to make no decisions, to will not to will, to renounce all aspiration but the passive search for pleasure, has no chance against the single-­minded determination and iron will for action of their leader. The word ‘Courage’ echoes ironically behind all the languid tones of the chorus. (Priestley 1973, 56)

The quest Odysseus urges his companions to resume is rendered as “climbing up the climbing wave” (95); hence the energy and freedom of the boundless ocean is opposed to the island’s “still waters” (48) and “the long bright river drawing slowly / His waters from the purple hill” (137-­38) representing the lotos-­eaters’ melancholy inertia. All in all, it appears that the antithesis of the two familiar motifs in Tennyson’s early poetry, the otherwordly garden of imagination versus the quest, is once again realised in the two modes of life in “The Lotos Eaters”: an idle existence in the world of illusory, lotos-­induced sense of happiness on the enchanted island, chosen by the mariners, and the life of action represented by the strong-­willed Odysseus (cf. Grob 1964, 119). The conflict between these two attitudes to life may be seen as symbolizing the dilemma concerning the role of the poet: the position of aesthetic detachment and immersion in one’s inner vision is contrasted with one of social and moral commitment. In 1832 this conflict seems to be unresolved. It is only with the revisions for the 1842 edition of Poems, and especially with the

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introduction of the new final stanza, that the purely aesthetic pursuit of sensuous beauty is openly condemned on moral grounds and discarded for a more energetic attitude of Odysseus. Thus, the changing import of the two poems from the 1832 volume clearly shows how Tennyson gradually abandons his solitary otherworlds of art and ventures forward to lend his poetic voice to the major concerns of his times. In this way, the early, Romantic Tennyson turns into the epitome of the Victorian poet. This shift in perspective is further emphasised in his revisions for the Poems (1842). “The Hesperides” – the only poem which, through both its subject and poetic technique, seems to endorse aestheticism – is suppressed by the poet, while other poems undergo alterations aimed at making their moral message even more explicit to the reader.

Works Cited Culler, Arthur Dwight. 1977. The Poetry of Tennyson. New Haven: Yale University Press. Gallant, Christine.  1976. “Tennyson’s Use of the Nature Goddess in ‘The Hesperides,’ ‘Tithonus,’ and ‘Demeter and Persephone’.” Victorian Poetry 14.2: 155-­160. Grob, Alan. 1964. “Tennyson’s ‘The Lotos-­Eaters’: Two Versions of Art.” Modern Philology 62.2: 118-­129. Markley, Arnold Albert. 2004. Stateliest Measures: Tennyson and the Literature of Greece and Rome. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. McSweeney, Kerry.  1981. Tennyson and Swinburne as Romantic Naturalists. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Priestley, F. E. L. 1973. Language and Structure in Tennyson’s Poetry. London: Andre Deutsch. Spenser, Edmund. 1980. The Faerie Queene, edited by A. C. Hamilton. London: Longman. Stange, G. Robert. 1952. “Tennyson’s Garden of Art: A Study of The Hesperides.” PMLA 67.5: 732-­743. Stevenson, Catherine Barnes. 1982. “The Shade of Homer Exorcises the Ghost of De Quincey: Tennyson’s ‘The Lotos-­Eaters’.” Browning Institute Studies 10: 117-­141. Tennyson, Alfred Lord. 1969. The Poems of Tennyson, edited by Christopher Ricks. London: Longmans, Green and Co. Tennyson, Hallam. 1897. Alfred Lord Tennyson. A Memoir. 2 volumes. London: Macmillan.

Jacek Wiśniewski

Ecocriticism and Romantic Ecology: Gilbert White and John Clare In Romantic Ecology, Jonathan Bate’s excellent book on Wordsworth and the environmental tradition, the author reminds us that the notion of ecology is older than the term itself: it was coined in 1866 by the German zoologist and enthusiastic propagator of Darwin’s theory of evolution, Ernst Haeckel. The German scientist relied in his definition on terms borrowed from the science of economy, and also on Darwin’s theory of natural selection. Ecology is called “the economy of nature – the investigation of the total relations of the animal both to its inorganic and to its organic environment” (Bate 1991, 36). But if there is something we call “Romantic ecology,” then clearly ecology existed before it was named. Ecocriticism, or “green” criticism, explores the relationship between us humans as a species, with our art and literature, and the natural environment. As such it is an offshoot of the science of ecology, even if it does not pretend to solve ecological problems, and is more focused on human interactions with nature. Ecology creates a model which stresses the wholeness of the living globe, and the intricate yet infinitely delicate balance of its interconnected working parts. In the opening part of my paper I shall try to explain briefly what literary ecocriticism is, and what it attempts to achieve in the field of literary studies. Literary ecocriticism “seeks to evaluate texts and ideas in terms of their coherence and usefulness as responses to environmental crisis” (Kerridge 1998, 5). In the words of one of its theoreticians, “ecocriticism is the study of the relationship between literature and the physical environment, [it] takes an earth-­centred approach to literary studies” (Glotfelty 1996, xix), while another one claims: Ecocriticism is unique amongst contemporary and cultural theories because of its close relationship with the science of ecology. Ecocritics may not be qualified to debate about problems in ecology, but they must nevertheless transgress disciplinary boundaries and develop their own “ecological literacy.” (Garrard 2004, 5)

Ecocriticism starts from reappraising the age-­old distinction between nature and culture. To make matters a bit more complicated, let me add that until the eighteenth century the word “culture” described precisely the work of an agricultural labourer in the fields, who “cultured” or “cultivated” the soil, and it was only with Matthew Arnold’s Culture and Anarchy essays, published in 1869, that “culture”

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came to mean intellectual work as distinct from physical labour. Nature is primary and culture is often the study of nature through cultural forms, such as art, literature, music or film. Culture is by definition anthropocentric, while ecocriticism, through intellectual, “green” movements like the Association for the Study of Literature and Environment (ASLE), is attempting to re-­educate people to take a more ecocentric point of view. Ecocriticism is interdisciplinary and developed in the late 1990s, though individual works like Raymond Williams’s The Country and the City appeared over forty years ago (1972). Jonathan Bate, in his eye-­opening book The Song of the Earth, published in the year 2000, reminds us that there is a feminist dimension to ecocriticism: Nature is our mother, so “[e]cofeminism is that discourse which addresses the causes and effects, the strengths and the dangers, of the traditional personification of Nature as mother” (75). Critics who admire William Wordsworth’s amazing capacity to see and describe the landscape and the sky should know that the poet’s eye for the detailed observation of nature was opened by the notebooks and journals of his sister Dorothy Wordsworth. A student of Romantic literature might add to these remarks that some of the basic concepts of ecocriticism remain indebted to Romanticism. In his poem The Task, William Cowper made the sharp distinction between the country (standing for nature and the earth, which is warm, feminine and obviously in danger of being violated) and the city (which is unnatural because it is an artificial environment). Cowper famously proclaimed: “God made the country, and man made the town.” Another example is Friedrich Schiller’s essay “On Naïve and Sentimental or ‘Reflective’ Poetry”; it is a prototype of ecocritical theory. He makes a distinction between the naïve poet, so immersed in nature that he feels no need to celebrate or mourn it, and the reflective poet (who is urban, alienated from nature, looking back at it either nostalgically or with regret). John Clare fits the former definition, while John Keats, Clare’s exact contemporary, fits the latter. Why is ecocriticism of interest to me (and others reading English poetry ecocritically)? First of all, English literature has an ancient, complex and special relationship with nature, landscape, life in the countryside, and the sense of place. One could go all the way back to Middle English lyrics and songs of spring like Western Wind or The Cuckoo Song, or to Geoffrey Chaucer, or the pastoral poets of the sixteenth and seventeenth century, to the English pre-­Romantics and Romantics. I shall only add that the tremendous revival of Edward Thomas’s popularity, or, to step back another one hundred years, the staying power of a somewhat neglected poet like John Clare, should be somehow explained and justified. I believe ecocriticism offers some of the answers to the question why these poets remain so close to the sensibility of English readers today. Not all the answers perhaps, but important ones. England today is not an earthly paradise. However, the cult of

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the countryside, hiking, riding bikes or horses, bird-­watching, and on the whole being in nature (in a population which is over eighty per cent urban), finding something mystic or holy in nature, something “more deeply interfused,” is the English specialty. John Fowles wrote thirty years ago: For two centuries now we have become increasingly an urban culture, increasingly in exile from what exists outside our cities. […] The essential passport to all things rural is patience, and patience is not a town virtue. Much urban ingenuity is devoted to artificially concentrating pleasure in time and space. But this is a trick nature never learnt. Rarities never occur there as in a film, one crowding on another, all in perfect close-­up. Very little yields to the passing glance, nothing is displayed and labeled as in a zoo or a museum. The wild will always stay closed to those who cannot learn to wait, and to see the commonplace with fresh eyes. (1980, 7)

“To see the commonplace with fresh eyes”: the phrase captures the spirit of Clare’s poems on flowers, birds’ nests and simple rural activities of the traditional peasant community. Heaney praised the freshness of his vision and said that it is the poet’s “deep-­dreaming in-­placeness and wide-­lens attentiveness” that we cherish today (1995, 67); Ashbery called it “Clare’s nakedness of vision” (2000, 15). In my paper I bring together two writers who belong to that special moment in the development of ecological sensitivity which (for want of a better name) we call Romanticism. The first is a natural historian, ornithologist and pioneer of ecology, Gilbert White, the author of Natural History and Antiquities of Selborne; the second is John Clare, one of the poets of the second generation of English Romantics, known as the Northamptonshire peasant poet. White’s book is the fourth most published book in the English language after the Bible, the works of Shakespeare, and Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress. It was published for the first time in the year of the French Revolution, but still enjoys tremendous popularity not only in Britain, but throughout the English speaking world: at the beginning of the twenty first century the number of different editions of Selborne reached three hundred, and it was reprinted at least a thousand times. Whole generations who left Britain in the nineteenth and twentieth century to settle in Australia, America or Africa would take copies of Selborne with them; for people saying goodbye to their motherland, the book captured and crystallized the quintessence of life in the English countryside. Throughout the world today, from Alaska to KwaZulu-­Natal, one can find villages and little towns, spas and hotels, golf courses and country clubs called Selborne. Gilbert White was a country parson and an amateur naturalist who nonetheless was in close touch with the leading scholars of the Royal Society. He has had his name immortalized in the generic names of several species of English birds. He kept his garden

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diaries for almost forty years, and wrote the many incisive letters about his parish and “observations of various parts of nature,” which make up the body of his Natural History, at a time when botanical science was gradually becoming the main preoccupation of the Royal Society. Its president between 1778 and 1820 was Joseph Banks, a naturalist and botanist who was responsible for popularizing Carl Linnaeus’s ideas in Britain. In Natural History of Selborne White is a most meticulous and attentive observer of the nature close at hand, in his twenty-­acre wild flower garden, the lush hay meadows and groves surrounding his house, and the magnificent beech “Hanger,” or a hanging wood. He studied the weather, geography, geology, the shape of the land, its fossils and antiquities of the Roman past, its plants and creatures, especially his favourite swallows, martins and swifts. His ambition was to contribute to the development of natural history, so he wrote his book not in the traditional shape and form of a shepherd’s calendar, but as a series of letters from one scholar to another: his addressees are two eminent biologists of the time, Thomas Pennant and Daines Barrington. White is the only man of letters who earned himself a chapter in Frank Egerton’s history of ecological sciences, Roots of Ecology. John Clare’s poetry, England’s greatest nature poetry, was neglected and mostly forgotten in the first one hundred years after his death in 1864. He is the first, and perhaps one of very few poets who may be described as poets of ecological protest. The only genuinely rustic poet among the English Romantics, he was born in 1793 in a tiny thatched hovel next door to the Blue Bell public house in the village of Helpston in Northamptonshire, enclosed by the order of Parliament when Clare was sixteen. His parents, landless farm labourers, were illiterate or semiliterate. His publisher, John Taylor, introduced his new author by calling him “a young Peasant, a day-­labourer in husbandry”; of all English poets, Taylor said, Clare was the least advantaged, “the most destitute of friends” (Storey 1973, 43). Clare taught himself reading and writing when he was a little boy: his attendance at the Sunday school in nearby Glinton was patchy and mostly restricted to winter months, because he was often too busy working in the fields, threshing, gleaning, collecting stones in the fields and scaring birds in Lord Milton’s orchard. One of the first books he ever read, and the first he ever bought (for the price of one shilling), was James Thomson’s The Seasons. It was Thomson who inspired him to start composing poems, and he literally composed them in his mind rather than write them, muttering to himself as he walked the three miles from Glinton to Helpston. Known as the “peasant poet,” a natural genius often referred to as the English Burns, Clare achieved fame at the age of twenty seven in 1820 when the first collection of his, Poems Descriptive of Rural Life and Scenery, was published in London by Taylor and Hessey, Keats’s publishers.

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Three more printings of the collection were called for within the first year, selling altogether more copies than the celebrated Lyrical Ballads by Wordsworth and Coleridge. However, Clare never made enough money to free himself from the back-­breaking hard labour in his native Helpston. This landless peasant, who was also without a doubt a natural genius, was forced, even after the success of his first collection, to accept temporary labouring jobs, some of which like ditching, hedging, diverting streams, road building, putting up fences and gates and “no trespassing” signs, were paradoxically part of the job of enclosing the common land of his village and his parish – paradoxically, because Clare was devastated by this violation of his natural and social environment, and whenever possible, he raised his voice in protest. His next three collections of poems were much less successful (the fashion among the sophisticated city dwellers for “heaven-­taught ploughmen” as bards was rather brief). He suffered a mental breakdown and was placed in a private lunatic asylum at High Beach. In 1844, twenty years before his death, he wrote this stunning and famous poem, entitled “I Am”: I am – yet what I am, none cares or knows; My friends forsake me like a memory lost:-­ I am the self-­consumer of my woes;-­ They rise and vanish in oblivion’s host, Like shadows in love’s frenzied stifled throes. (Clare 2003, 361)

He spent the last years of his life in Northampton Asylum, supported by the generosity of friends and admirers, but he never stopped writing poems, ballads, songs, sonnets, bird poems, animal poems, autobiographical prose, letters and even an unfinished project The Natural History and Antiquities of Helpston, clearly inspired by Gilbert White’s book, which Clare knew and admired. He died in 1864 after a confinement that lasted more than a quarter of a century, though his biographers and recent critics writing about his later poetry seriously doubt the diagnosis of incurable insanity. Today, Clare’s complete works are available in a monumental nine-­volume edition in the Oxford Classic Texts, and he is being rediscovered by scholars and critics in Britain and the US, as well as by translators in Poland, in new biographies, critical editions, conference papers and critical studies. In the second part of my paper I shall look more closely at two texts, one taken from White’s book, and the second a typical loco-­descriptive poem by Clare. The purpose of this juxtaposition of texts coming from two successive generations of writers representing the end of the eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth century, the relatively short four decades of English Romanticism, is to prove

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how strongly they are interconnected. Both show their authors’ attentiveness to nature and present “green issues,” whether in a semi-­scholarly text by White, or in the nature poetry by Clare. The first example comes from White’s Letter VIII addressed to Thomas Pennant, Esquire. On the verge of the forest, as it is now circumscribed, are three considerable lakes […], Hogmer, Cranmer, and Wolmer; all of which are stocked with carp, tench, eels, and perch: but the fish do not thrive well, because the water is hungry, and the bottoms are naked sand. A circumstance respecting these ponds, though by no means peculiar to them, I cannot pass over in silence; and that is, that instinct by which in summer all the kine, whether oxen, cows, calves, or heifers, retire constantly to the water during the hotter hours; where, being more exempt from flies, and inhaling the coolness of that element, some belly deep, and some only to mid-­leg, they ruminate and solace themselves from about ten in the morning till four in the afternoon, and then return to their feeding. During that great proportion of the day they drop much dung, in which insects nestle; and so supply food for the fish, which would be poorly subsisted but from this contingency. Thus Nature, who is a great economist, converts the recreation of one animal to the support of another! Thomson, who was a nice observer of natural occurrences, did not let this pleasing circumstance escape him. He says, in his Summer, “A various group the herds and flocks compose: “_______________ on the grassy bank “Some ruminating lie; while others stand “Half in the flood, and, often bending, sip “The circling surface.” (White 1901, 17-­18)

The author of these words, reverend Gilbert White, a clergyman educated at Oxford, spent most of his life in the comfort of his old family house in Selborne, eastern Hampshire. Chawton, Jane Austen’s home, is just a few miles away. Interestingly, these two important writers of the end of the eighteenth century, though White belongs to the older generation, have many things in common: the world they describe in their books is “two inches wide” and seems to be quite timeless, but is described with such loving care, painted with so fine a brush, that it became the archetype of pastoral and parochial England. White was a dutiful parson, a kind master and a friend to the poor. He never married and accepted the assistance of several substitute vicars. Because he believed that a clergyman and a gentleman should not be idle and unemployed, he devoted himself to natural history and biology, in his case mostly ornithology and botany, the study of the weather, the soil, the atmosphere and climate of his parish. His book confronts the reader with a microcosm or archetype of the proper and idyllic relationship between man and his natural environment. As

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White’s biographer puts it, “Selborne, in short, is the landscape of the pastoral dream made flesh: cosseted, balanced, endurable, a condensation into a single parish of almost every type and mood of scenery to be found in lowland England” (Mabey 1977, xi). What are the reasons for the book’s amazingly lasting success? What explains the fascination of this work? What can one find in these letters penned by a country parson with a passion for birds and taxonomic speculations? Is there something about the village perhaps, something extraordinary about its beauty? Or about the language of the book, which is the author’s secret code? There must be hundreds of villages in the south of England which are just as charming, and White’s letters are written in a typical late eighteenth-century style – with lucidity, lightness and conciseness on the one hand, and with erudition and imagination on the other; some of the passages sound attractive today because of their controlled and understated sense of humour. Most importantly, perhaps, White is emotionally involved in his subject and he addresses particular readers (in this case two eminent biologists of his time, Thomas Pennant and Daines Barrington), asking their opinion about his observations and making suggestions about their research. We must remember that most of the earlier eighteenthcentury scientific texts about nature and taxonomy (which is White’s particular hobby horse), books written by Francis Willughby (Ornitologia), John Ray (Historia Planetarum) or Carl Linnaeus (Systema Naturae and Species Planetarum) were written in dry and graceless Latin – there was no other earlier author that White could imitate. After a detailed account of the Wolmer Forest, complete with its expanse, its trees and bogs and animal species in Letter VII, White proceeds in Letter VIII to describe three forest lakes which must be quite ancient: the etymology of their names suggests that one is called “the lake of the wild boar” (Hogmer), the second “the lake of the crane” (Cranmer), and the third “the lake of the gray wolf ” (Wolmer). The names are thus Anglo-­Saxon in origin, and the three species no longer inhabit the forest White is writing about. The lakes are now places for sport and livestock breeding – they are fishing ponds and tranquil watering places for cattle. To White, however, even a tiny spot in his garden where he can observe earthworms mashing and fertilizing the soil is quite enough; even the sky over the spire of his church prompts him to start his ornithological deliberations about the nesting and mating customs of swallows and martins. In the passage quoted above, he notices something which is central to ecology and the protection of the environment: balanced mutual dependence of basic animal groups, mammals, insects and fish. Cattle look for the protection and “solace” of the cool waters, and provide sustenance to fertilized insect eggs, which in turn,

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as larvae, “supply food for the fish,” which is vital in view of the fact (stated at the beginning of the passage) that the water of the lakes is “hungry” because of their naked sandy bottoms. Here White comes to his conclusion, which is logical and persuasive: Nature (understood here in almost human terms as the guardian spirit of life and creation) is seen as “a great economist,” looking after the interests of all species (including human beings), and ministering to their needs. The “economy of nature,” the web of complex relations by which all animals and plants are bound to each other, remote as one species may be from another in the scale of nature, is one of the key ideas expressed by ecologists (a long time before they were called ecologists). The phrase “economy of nature” was coined in 1658 by Sir Kenelm Digby, one of the founding members of the Royal Society. Karl Linnaeus used it in the title of his most famous essay “Oeconomia Naturae,” published in 1749 (English version appeared ten years later). White is following in their footsteps, adding to their theorizing his rigorous and demanding practice of field observation. What one finds surprising in this passage is White’s need to enhance his natural observation by recourse to poetry and by quoting the most influential poet of the picturesque tradition, James Thomson. Though Thomson says nothing in his poem about dung, insect larvae and sustenance for fish, yet the quote smartly concludes White’s argument. The second text is a short, untitled poem by John Clare, a fourteen-­liner in rhyming couplets, which is not quite a sonnet. The version of the poem quoted here comes from the middle period, around 1835, and it is Clare’s original, with his quaint spelling, lack of punctuation and characteristic use of ampersands. As in White’s case, it is a vivid description of a forest lake or rather an old pond: The old pond full of flags & fenced around With trees & bushes trailing to the ground The water weeds are all around the brink & one clear place where cattle go to drink From year to year the schoolboy thither steals & muddys round the place to catch the eels The cowboy often hiding from the flies Lies there & plaits the rushcap as he lies The hissing owl sits moping all the day & hears his song & never flies away The pinks nest hangs upon the branch so thin The young ones caw & seem as tumbling in While round them thrums the purple dragon flye & great white butter flye goes dancing bye. (Clare 2003, 275)

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The visual image created in the mind of the reader is strikingly different from the bucolic landscapes painted for instance by Nicolas Poussin or Claude Lorrain: instead of a pastoral landscape with figures, which usually tells a story (in Poussin’s paintings), or a landscape which in several bands or strata opens out to distant horizons – in seascapes, distant mountain ranges, open skies with dramatic clouds or sunsets (in Lorrain’s paintings), Clare’s old pond is a place of refuge, strictly enclosed within the structure of the “fence” (not a man-­made artificial and harmful enclosure, but one created naturally by trees, bushes, reeds and rushes). Needless to say, it is also refreshingly different from the picturesque set pieces so popular in eighteenth-­century descriptive verse. In its focus on particular, repeated round shapes and monotonous, thrumming sounds of the place, on sharp contrasts of colour and light, it is very distant from the subdued and mellow ideal of the picturesque advocated by William Gilpin, a sort of “Claude” glass or black mirror image. Clare is looking all around him at the scene, noticing everything that is happening and not filtering its bright light and primary colours through the black mirror of the picturesque ideal. The geometry of the space described in the poem is clear and carefully delineated. In the classic study The Idea of Landscape and the Sense of Place, 1730-­1840: An Approach to the Poetry of John Clare (1972), John Barrell managed to convince most readers that Clare’s sense of place, something that is spontaneously created in childhood, was circular, because before enclosures, in the open-­field system, the village of Helpston was quite obviously and quite naturally the centre of a self-­contained little world, confined within the boundaries of the parish. The hopelessly flat landscape of Northamptonshire fenlands, and the flat fields, canals and meadows (reminiscent perhaps of their counterparts on the other side of the English Channel, in Holland around Groningen, and north of Bremen in Germany), produced the impression of a circular reality, with the round horizon defining its bounds, and the needle tower of the Glinton church being its axis. This sense of rootedness in place also explains Clare’s concentration on familiar particulars and little details in his descriptive poems, and the seemingly breathless cataloguing of details; as Barrell puts it, “no sooner does one object enter the poem than it is pushed aside by the next; so that we have the sense always that outside the poem are hundreds of images hammering to be admitted” (Barrell 1972, 151). The critic acknowledges the possibility of chaos, or lack of organization in Clare’s poems of nature; he suggests that we may read Clare’s descriptive poems as successions of images of equal weight, that a poem like the one quoted above can be approached as a continuum of related impressions, but “we understand that we are not to enquire too closely into the particular nature of the relations between them” (155). Not disagreeing with Barrell, I would nevertheless like to point out the careful and deliberate way in which Clare builds up the geometry of the circular space

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described in the poem. First of all, the old pond is itself round, and then the trees and bushes which surround it repeat the shape, and so do the water weeds; in fact, it is possible to see three concentric circles which “fence” the pond: trees, bushes and water weeds. There is just “one clear place” or gap where people and cattle come to the water, clearing the bushes and trampling the water weed, making it an incomplete circle, or a circle with a particular point where ends meet. This is mirrored in the second part of the poem, where the cowboy is weaving or plaiting his cap, using rushes: he is probably using three strands of braided reed to make a circle, and the two ends must meet to complete the shape. Indeed, the very line describing his actions (line eight) –“Lies there and plaits the rushcap as he lies” – is a perfect aural counterpart to the described shape, starting and ending with the repeated sound. Clare is weaving a complex, threefold image of the place by using different strands of memory, his recollection of his own repeated visits to the place: he is the schoolboy coming to the pond “year to year,” he is probably also the cowboy “hiding from the flies” while his cattle go to drink; and finally he is the contemplative and meditative observer and listener, open to all the numerous impulses and poetic impressions of “the old pond.” We see three circles “fencing” the pond; there are probably three strands of braided reed in the cowboy’s rushcap; finally, there are three recollections of the pond, the schoolboy’s, the cowboy’s and the poet’s. We soon notice that the roundness of the pond is underscored by the repetition of words like “around” and “round” (repeated four times in a poem of fourteen lines). Moreover, the images of round objects – the round pond, the cowboy’s cap, the barn owl’s face, the chaffinch nest - are presented in the context of phrases which suggest repetition: “year to year,” “often,” “all the day,” and words which suggest monotonous actions: “thrumming” and “moping.” Another aspect of Clare’s rootedness in one particular natural environment, his “sense of place,” is his use of the local vernacular, the language of his region of England, Northamptonshire, especially in those poems which escaped the censoring and correcting pen of his London publishers and patrons. In the quoted poem we can obviously see the lack of punctuation (not a single full stop or comma or semicolon), freedom from standard spelling (in words like “muddys”), no graphic sign for Saxon genitive (“the pinks nest”), and demotic touches (in phrases like “the young [chaffinches] seem as tumbling in” – emphasis added). Modern readers must be on guard: “flags” in the first line are not flagstones at the bottom of the lake: they are aquatic plants like reeds and rushes; the name “hissing owl” is to John Clare a generic name of the barn owl, Tyto alba, with its characteristic round face. He surely does not mean to say that the bird is making threatening noises to the cowboy, for they seem to be in perfect amity. It sits moping (sulking or grumbling) but does not mind the cowboy’s song since it “never flies away.” The “pinks nest” in line eleven

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is not pink at all: in Clare’s regional dialect “pink” is a chaffinch, a bird with rusty or pink belly and underpants. So, “the pinks nest” is in Clare’s demotic English “the pink’s nest” (Clare often disregarded grammatical correctness, and even treated grammar as a tyrant). So, his “pinks nest” is round like a ball, but in fact green, not pink. The dragonfly “thrums” round the young birds and their nest: the word “thrum” is not even found in the Cambridge Dictionary, but fortunately is there in the unabridged Webster. A careful study of the verb’s six major meanings proves that Clare probably had in mind both the fast, rotating motion of the insect, and the monotonous vibrating sound produced by its wings; today we would compare it to the sound of an engine or a helicopter, but to Clare it probably recalled the sound of his mother’s spinning wheel, which is the aural effect he is comparing to the insect’s aerobatic flight. It is a familiar and reassuring sound to him, often heard in early infancy, summoning a happy, busy time of his mother spinning and weaving, the two domestic occupations which allowed women to look after their babies while working and earning a little. In a letter Clare sent to his London editor in the spring of 1820, the poet explains that he has “measured” a ballad he is writing “wi the thrumming of my mothers wheel” (Letters 1985, 65). The regular noise and repeated movements of the purple dragonfly are contrasted with the completely silent but crazily crooked flight of the cabbage white. The human eye, representing three different vantage points: the schoolboy’s, the cowboy’s, and the poet’s own, certainly dominates the way the image of the old pond is woven in this poem, but it is further supplemented and refined by the possibility that man and other creatures (the owl, the chaffinch chicks, the dragonfly and the butterfly) gaze back and forth at each other, and possibly also at the human gazer – a very green idea, indeed. To sum up: “green” thinking, “green” writing, caring about mother Nature – these are not inventions of late twentieth century, when ecocriticism first formulated its aims. It was certainly in evidence in the scholarly pursuits of late eighteenth-century nature writers like Gilbert White. It colours everything that John Clare has to say about his sense of nature’s beauty in “[a] language that is ever green” (“Pastoral Poesy”; Clare 2003, 581).

Works Cited Ashbery, John. 2000. Other Traditions. Cambridge, Mass. and London: Harvard University Press. Barrell, John. 1972. The Idea of Landscape and the Sense of Place, 1730-­1840: An Approach to the Poetry of John Clare. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Bate, Jonathan.  1991. Romantic Ecology: Wordsworth and the Environmental Tradition. London: Routledge.

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Bate, Jonathan. 2000. The Song of the Earth. London: Picador. Clare, John. 2003. Poems of the Middle Period, 1822-­1837. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Egerton, Frank. 2012. Roots of Ecology: Antiquity to Haeckel. Berkeley: University of California Press. Fowles, John. 1980. Foreword to The Book of the Countryside. London: Book Club Associates. Garrard, Greg. 2004. Ecocriticism. London and New York: Routledge. Glotfelty, Cheryll, and Harold Fromm, eds.  1996. The Ecocriticism Reader: Landmarks in Literary Ecology. London: University of Georgia Press. Heaney, Seamus.  1995. “John Clare’s Prog.” In The Redress of Poetry: Oxford Lectures. London: Faber and Faber. Kerridge, Richard, and Neil Sammells, eds.  1998. Writing the Environment. London: Zed Books. Mabey, Richard. 1977. Introduction to The Natural History and Antiquities of Selborne. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books. Storey, Mark, ed. 1984. The Letters of John Clare. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Storey, Mark. 1973. Clare: The Critical Heritage. Introduction to Poems Descriptive of Rural Life and Scenery, by John Taylor. London and Boston: Routledge. White, Gilbert. 1901. The Natural History and Antiquities of Selborne. London: Methuen.

Aleksandra Kędzierska

War as Encounter: The Christmas Truce 1914 Perceived as the basic category of Emmanuel Levinas’s philosophy of dialogue, the meeting with the Other, which Józef Tischner, the Polish philosopher and Catholic priest, naturally interprets from the Christian standpoint, constitutes an arena in which the drama of man’s freedom and existence is played out (Czekalski 2012, 243). According to Tischner, this “ultimate situation” is an event through which people not only create and fulfil themselves, but learn about their uniqueness as people and the truth of their being (Czekalski 2012, 242). However, since not every meeting is a true encounter, certain conditions must be fulfilled for individuals to meet the Other “face to face”: they must not only find themselves (and each other) in the same space (which is also one of shared values), but, additionally, they must also change their pace, and pause. This results in a readjustment of the focus of perception, which should eventually prepare them to acknowledge the presence of the Other as someone to be approached and looked at, someone with whom a verbal/non-­verbal exchange is possible. Only then can they see each other “face to face” and read from the face of the Other the expression/reflection of this person’s true essence (Tischner 1978, 76). It is in the face that “man’s living presence” (Levinas 1969, 66) reveals itself, exposing its undeniable and irreducible reality (66). “Thus speaking to me,” Levinas argues, and thereby “inviting me to a relation” (198), the face of the Other lends itself as a source from which all meaning appears (297), expressing “his eminence, the dimension of height and divinity from which he descends” (262). Hence, Tischner writes, “a meeting with the Other is an event in the deepest sense of the word, the moment which starts everything anew and leads to a redefinition of all one has defined and known so far” (Pyra 2011, 239). It is also, Jerzy Bukowski suggests, both a chance and a gift: a gift because meeting involves the mutual giving of self to each other, which has the potential to transform, and which allows us to (re)discover something extraordinary in ourselves, and, likewise in the Other who is recognized as a person. It also constitutes a chance to gladly accept the changes that the encounter will result in (1987, 29). Such is the developmental and formative value of a meeting that enables one to become elevated, raised onto a new level of being with others. Could such a liberating, humanizing experience be indeed viewed as part of the reality of the Great War, which is so often and with such relish described as “hell on earth”? As this article intends to prove, the answer to this question is

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yes, its positive message confirmed by ever newer historians and poets who have commented on the Christmas Truce 1914. However, before depicting what, paradoxically, emerges as the blessed dimension of the Great War, we shall first draw on the most militant poems – “The Show” and “Spring Offensive” – by Wilfred Owen (1893-­1918), the best known British poet of World War I, in an attempt to set the stage of the negative metamorphoses that men underwent in the trenches. It is against this confrontational, constricting and oppressive closeness produced by men’s grounding in earth, or by the situation of a battle, that the true humanity of the soldiers will be focused on, captured and preserved by such “truce” authors as Frederick Niven (“A Carol from Flanders,” 1914) and Carol Ann Duffy (“The Christmas Truce,” 2011). These works constitute a unique poetic testament to a precious moment of peace when, rediscovering their humanity, the combatants fighting in the midst of No Man’s Land were reconciled to the values of dignity, love and friendship. Penned by a genuine soldier poet who was both a participant in and witness to many of the incidents described, Owen’s “The Show” and “Spring Offensive” are truly Great War poems. Not only do they record, in a more or less straightforward way, actual fighting between the Germans and British “Tommies” (“show” being slang for action), but they also stress the view of the war as a national conflict and deploy numerous ways of emphasizing the opposition between fighters. The trench apocalypse in “The Show” exposes the war’s dehumanizing potential: forced to regress into animal form, men are not only capable of wounding and killing others, but also – by perceiving the enemy as a brute – they find him all the easier to exterminate. This perception is preventing and blocking any true encounter between fellow men. This lack of fraternisation translates into mutual aggression, which corresponds to the hideousness of the sight: As the speaker gazes upon a desolate, war-­ravaged landscape, it changes gradually to the magnified portion of a dead soldier’s face, infested by thousands of caterpillars. The barbed wire of no-­man’s-­land becomes the scraggly beard on the face; the shell holes become pockmarked skin. […] The putrefying face, the sickening voraciousness of the caterpillars, and the utter desolation of the ruined landscape become symbolic of the lost hopes for humanity. (Owen 2013)

Its decay is further intensified by comparisons to a festering wound, a smelly body oozing pus, as well as by an accumulation of plural forms highlighting its diseased condition: of “scabs,” “pocks” and “warts” (Owen 1974, 50), the surface which is crisscrossed by a net of slimy paths. “Cratered like the moon” (50), this land is further characterised by numerous foul openings, the pockets of “hollow woe” from which crawl forth their writhing inhabitants. As perceived from above, they

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are worms, “long-­strung” caterpillars that creep and “vanish down hidden holes.” On dithering feet, “brown strings” fight “the more abundant spawns of grey, with bristling spines” (50), which, attacking the browns, “ramped on […] and ate them and were eaten” (50). Intent on the mire, they act “like plugs of ditches where they writhe and shrivel and kill,” “push[ing] themselves” (50) as if killing were encoded, programmed into their system. The slow uncoiling of the caterpillars is thus invariably oriented towards inflicting pain and causing death. The cycle of their life is confined to “looping” and “curling,” their backs straightened and lifted only when, sucked dried of their sap, they eventually meet their death. Only the last lines of the poem explain that the agonised movements of the militant centipedes allegorise the battle between the German (gray) and British (brown) troops. That confrontational “encounter” acquires a far more monstrous dimension in “Spring Offensive,” where the human degradation of the combatants reaches its peak, proving them far more horrible than demons in hell. One “little word,” an order to attack, starts another “horror show” with its frantic expression of hate. Having made it to the top of the hill (how little divides hill from hell), “[e]xposed,” the soldiers find that the previously innocent, green slope “chasmed sheer into infinite space” (52), absorbing them “on the hot blast and fury of hell’s upsurge” (53). Waging the war against an enemy, men “rush in body to enter hell” (53), and once there “out-­fiend all its fiends and flames with superhuman inhumanities” (53), an oxymoron grasping the paradox of victors in war. The few who “crawl back” lapse into the solitude of silence and can but try to escape the hell of memories. This crawling back unites the combatants from both poems, ironically defining their “achievement” as the regression from proud human verticality into the horizontality of the beast, doomed to lick the dust and mire, to slither, grovel and creep. Although there is so much they do share – e.g. the same space and fate, as well as the status of anonymous cannon fodder, hideous, deadly, and suffering – they only meet and are united by their hostility and destructiveness. But then, having become masters of insensibility, they hardly have a chance to pause and contemplate their actions. Thus, most often they die knowing nothing about their opponents. Not even the absence of national distinctions seems to heal their perception of the Other as a fellow man. Hence the uniqueness of the Christmas Truce 1914, one of the most remarkable incidents of WWI, and perhaps of all military history (Gill 2004), which spontaneously happened “at a multitude of locations all along the 600 miles of trenches that stretched across Belgium and France” (Kohls 2014). Described as “perhaps the best and most heartening Christmas story of modern times” (Brown and Seaton 1914, xxv), this “legendary ceasefire” (De Mott 2013) has

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come “to epitomize a symbolic moment of peace in war” (Kohls 2014) and “an enduring image of the triumph of man’s spirit over adversity amidst one of the most violent events of human history” (“The Christmas Truce” 2013). On that day “sworn enemies crept out into No Man’s Land to exchange food, sing carols, tell jokes and [according to some sources] even play football” (“The Christmas Truce 2013”). And even though a day later savage warfare recommenced, this “extraordinary moment of human kinship” (“The Christmas Truce” 2013) enabled by fraternisation with the “enemy” in the spirit of goodwill, made it possible for many soldiers involved to see through the propagandistic lies and learn a lesson about their own humanity. One of the earliest renditions of that bittersweet Christmas of 1914, as well as its gift of a true encounter, is “A Carol from Flanders” by Frederick Niven (1878-­1844), “a minor Scottish poet of Great War Vintage” (Denson 2006, 194). His “truthful rime” (Niven 2014), from “fields accursed” opens with a “graveyard” scene of No Man’s Land, where “enemy bodies” (Niven) lie strewn, united through death, regardless of their nationality. The inescapable context of what was described as the holiest of holy holidays for the Germans and the English soldiers alike points to a very different “headquarters,” the High Command in heaven which, unlike the military officers, does actually treasure life. Christmas restores the fighters to the values they once cherished, creating a common ground – one of forgiveness, on which it becomes possible to rebuild their relations. Once Christmas Day dawns on the soldiers and the grey fog flees, they realize that no matter which country they represent (“the German or the Briton born”), there are “just the men on either side, / Just men” (Niven). As a sign of their spiritual rebirth, this awareness of their humanity allows them to see themselves and each other in a new light, which inspires the spirit of togetherness and the willingness to transcend the artificial boundary defined by military functions. From now on, this heritage will determine the sameness of their thinking and actions. Hence, their rifles set aside, they obey “one impulse,” expressing a general desire for peace. Humanised by this deliberate “disarmament,” the soldiers regain the ability to act together, to create and appreciate harmony. Peace, goodwill and profound silence are the blessings of the day. Once the dead are buried (almost like a ritual burying of the hatchet), and prayers are said over their graves, which in itself marks a return to a Christian rather than a military ethos, the soldiers can truly fraternise. For once the trenches can be deserted so that the people, liberated from their degradation, could meet half-­way, transforming No Man’s into All Man’s Land, where they are free from the constraints of their ideologies and national politics. Having silenced the guns, men can communicate despite linguistic

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differences: human voices are finally heard calling “from each to each” (Niven). The soldiers hear and respond to the call; they see and accept each other, pleased with this gift of unique revelation, when they no longer need their khaki camouflage and when masks and covers do not obstruct the true vision of the mysterious dwellers of the underground: Between the trenches then they met, Shook hands, and e’en did play At games on which their hearts were set On happy Christmas Day. (Niven)

The pleasantness of the encounter is enhanced by the friendliness of contact – shaking hands and even playing games. The soldiers’ armistice sealed with a handshake is marred only by their awareness that, precious as it is for the newborn King, peace is not welcome by the emperors and financiers who rule the world and who are determined to prevent it. Fraternisation is also central to Duffy’s rendering of the truce. Like Niven’s, her work opens with a panoramic view of the frozen “acres of pain,” (Duffy, 20) and the dead, lying “still” between the trenches of France. However, her narrative begins on Christmas Eve – a night potent with mystery (“believe; belief thrilled the […] air,” 20), the stars conjuring up visions of home, and the eerie silence which “spread and touched each man like a hand.” Under the fairy tale moon even the dead “glittered with rime,” ruled now by “silver frost,” “the strange tinsel” that “sparkled and winked” on the barbed wire, the sameness of their fate emphasised by their alliterating names “Freddie, Franz, Friedrich, Frank” (20). Neither the ghostly presence of night predators (“an owl swooped on a rat on the glove of the corpse”) nor their ominous, symbolic hunt mars the aura of magic which eventually enables men to hear their hearts, awakening a desire for a Stille and Heilige Nacht. Thus, the stage is set for a German surprise which will soon warm up the sharp midwinter air: a pantomime of “flickering flames from the other side,” the lights of Christmas trees “candlelit on parapets” (Duffy, 20). Those who started the war now bring Lumen Christi to the trenches, the presence through which the triumph of the Incarnation elevates and nobilitates man’s humanity, and which will soon transform the enemies, making them participants in a unique communion. All of a sudden the men “started to sing, all down the German lines” and “[w]hen it was done, the British soldiers cheered”: and all joined in, till the Germans stood, seeing across the divide (Duffy, 20)

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The power of the carols – “a sudden bridge / from man to man” (20) across No Man’s Land – manifests itself not only in restoring the soldiers to their human posture, lost when squatting in the trenches, but also in restoring their moral sight, helping them to realize the horrors they have been manipulated into making: All night, along the Western Front, they sang the enemies – carols, hymns, folk songs, anthems in German, English, French; each battalion choired in its grim trench. (Duffy, 20)

Moreover, the singing, a deed done for the Other, no longer against Him, nurtures forgiveness and reconciliation, which will lead the soldiers into Christmas Day, towards the gift of a true encounter. When it finally unwraps itself “for Harry, Hugo, Herman, Henry [and], Heinz,” (20) the spirit of celebration and togetherness will impregnate all their actions, thus enhancing the presence of Christ the Shepherd, also evoked by the words of the prayer (“Der Herr ist mein Hert, my shepherd… I shall not want,” 20). Finally, the Christmas dawn enables the soldiers to transcend their separateness, “look across the divide” (20) of their military positions and embrace the day that offered itself like a gift “with whistles, waves, cheers, shouts, laughs” (20). This holiday cheer reduces the distance between the soldiers, encouraging them to enter into a dialogic interaction and exchange wishes: “Frohe Weinachten, Tommy! Merry Christmas, Fritz!” (Duffy, 20) This, in turn, creates a context for greater intimacy of contact, and when eventually “a young Berliner’s climbed from his ditch,” it is treated like an invitation to action, a signal for others to follow. This time going “over the top” does not escalate the enmity; the German’s “call” is immediately responded to by a Shropshire lad who “ran at him like a rhyme” (Duffy, 20): Then it was up and over, every man, To shake the hand Of a foe as a friend, Or slap his back like a brother would; Exchanging gifts […] Or chase six hares, […] or find a ball And make of a battle ground a football pitch. (Duffy, 20)

The encounter – close, physical and personal – reveals the readiness of the men to continue the relationship thus started, which results in a striking metamorphosis of the fighters. Cut off from the constraint of the trenches, they all embody

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generosity, tolerance and curiosity about those from “the other side.” More importantly, the “enemies” reveal a striking resemblance to one another and mirror one another’s humanness, reflected in the repetition of the same words and gestures, and caring about the same values: pride, love, and aesthetic sensibility. The authenticity of this portrayal is highlighted by the comments of the eye-­witnesses, themselves participants, in which, despite the language difference, they “meet” and learn intimate facts about each other’s families. I showed him a picture of my wife. Ich zeigte ihm Ein Foto meiner Frau. Sie sei schon, sagte er. He thought her beautiful, he said. (Duffy, 20)

Although not actual quotations, these utterances suggest such talks did take place and that the soldiers involved in this dialogic relationship, cast, as Tischner would have it, as askers and answerers, have become conscious of each other as people. In Duffy, too, the asker makes the Other a participant in the given situation, creating a space of togetherness, where they find they share the same values. Thus, they enter into an “agathological relationship” (i.e. based on goodness) in which One, exposing oneself before the Other, in his full defencelessness, pleads “do not kill.” Although not articulated in the poem, the plea is communicated through the soldiers’ conduct, demonstrating that men can rise above and successfully overcome the chasm of national divides. As the story of the truce unfolds, this verbal communion is followed by a togetherness of actions, which sadly ends with the closure of the “marvelous and festive” day. It comes to a close symbolically, when “the enemies,” still together, pay their last respects to their dead. The “yawn of History” threatens the kindly, “shy stars” which, shivering, will soon find themselves transformed into “high bright bullets” (Duffy, 20). Deprived of the human face it still had in Niven’s poem (the rulers and bankers), Duffy’s History dwarfs the significance of the truce and reduces it to a controversial memory which allows the readers to understand why the next day, instead of firing at those “on the other side,” the soldiers, entrenched again, aimed their bullets at the sky.

Works Cited Brown, Malcolm Johnston and Shirley Seaton. 1999. Christmas Truce: The Western Front December 1914. London: Pan Books. Bukowski, Józef. 1987. Zarys filozofii spotkania. Kraków: Znak.

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Czekalski, Rafał. 2012. “Od filozofii spotkania do filozofii dialogu.” Warszawskie Studia Teologiczne 22: 239-­48. Denson, J.V. 2006. A Century of War -­Lincoln, Wilson, & Roosevelt. Auburn, Alabama: Ludvig von Misses Institute. De Mott, Craig. 2013. “The German Christmas Truce of World War I.” Web. Duffy, Carol Ann. 2011. “The Christmas Truce.” The Guardian, November 11. Gill, Allan. 2004. “Short outbreak of sanity; war the only casualty.” The Sydney Morning Herald, December 15. Kohls, Gary. 2014. “World War I: Lessons from the Christmas Truce of 1914.” Web. Levinas, Emmanuel. 1969. Totality and Infinity. Translated by Alphonso Lingis. Duquesne: University Press Pittsburgh. Niven, Frederick. 2014. “A Carol from Flanders.” Web. Owen, Wilfred. 1974. The Collected Poems. London: Chatto and Windus. Pyra, Leszek. 2011. “Man’s Destiny in Tischner’s Philosophy of Drama.” In Destiny, The Inward Quest, Temporality and Life, edited by Anna Tymieniecka, 235-­241. Heidleberg: Springer. Tischner, Józef. 1978. “Fenomenologia spotkania.” In Analecta Cracoviensia 10: 73-­98. “The Christmas Truce.” 2013. The Week, December 21. Web. “Wilfred Owen (1893-­1918).” Poetry Foundation. Web.

Monika Kocot

Trickster Discourse: The Figure of Whittrick in Edwin Morgan’s Writing The Scottish tradition of “zestful topsyturvydom,” embodied in the figure of the trickster1 as an uncatchable essence, appears in a number of Morgan’s poems, for instance in “Adventures of the Anti-­sage,” in “Cinquevalli” (with its speaker’s fluid identity), in “The Vision of Cathkin Braes” and in the early sequence of poems The Whittrick: a Poem in Eight Dialogues (1961, first published as a whole in 1973). Our attention will turn to The Whittrick as a trickster poem, both in the sense of containing a figure of trickster, and as an example of trickster discourse. But what does whittrick stand for? Morgan recalls that in his childhood he would often hear the Scottish phrase “as quick as a whittrick,” in which whittrick stands for a weasel, a weasel moving so quickly you cannot be sure whether you have seen it or not (McGonigal 2012, 16). Morgan was so fond of the word “whittrick” and its connotations that he used it to name The Whittrick sequence (Morgan 1996, 79-­116). In a long letter to Erica Marx, Morgan attempts to explain the meaning of that sequence: The Whittrick in general stands for truth or reality, but seen especially under its fleeting or revolutionary aspect, which is in any case how it impresses itself in most people’s

1 Anthropologists agree that trickster embodies all contradictions; s/he is ambivalent in character and difficult to pin down. S/he is a creator, shaman, mediator and a destructive demiurge (Ricketts 1965/1966, 327). In Victor Turner’s opinion, the figure of trickster is the embodiment of liminality in myth (Turner 1974, 71). S/he dwells in a liminal situation, between two events, on the border of two worlds, or at a moment where one has to make a conscious decision. As Jeanne Rosier Smith points out, the trickster’s identity is neither reductive nor static; rather, s/he embodies an expansive, dynamic cultural identity (1997, 156). In “Mapping the Characteristics of Mythic Tricksters: a Heuristic Guide,” William Hynes offers six characteristic features common among the tricksters; the most important of these is a fundamentally ambiguous and anomalous personality of the trickster. Flowing from this are the following functions s/he can perform: a) deceiver / trick-­player, b) shape-­shifter, c) situation inventor, d) messenger / imitator of the gods, e) sacred / lewd bricoleur (1993, 34).

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Monika Kocot mind (say when they fall in love or have something happen to them which they cannot forget), and also how it tends to appear in the arts, each work of art being like a “flash” of something passing. (after McGonigal 2012, 120-­121)

Morgan then goes on to show how each dialogue of his sequence depicts different aspects of this central idea; he points to the opening dialogue of James Joyce and Hugh MacDiarmid and to the Zen dialogue (between Hakuin and Chikamatsu) as its most vivid expression. In The Whittrick, the trickster manifests itself on three levels: as a character endowed with fluid identity, as a narrative structure (trickster-­relation, trickster-­ timespace), and as an incessant movement / process (or processuality, both on the level of plot and narration). Those three areas of the trickster’s actualisation are mutually conditioned, creating “trickster aesthetics” or “trickster discourse” (Vizenor 1993, 187-­212), which manifests itself by merging fictional worlds and exploring their boundaries, by jumps in time, by disruptions, multivocality or dialogicality, multiperspectivity, intertextuality, intratextuality, fluidity of meaning and unfinished or undefined story lines. The lack of linear links between subsequent threads of narration is substituted with an arrangement based on associative thinking, which allows for and even promotes alternative interpretations. The role of the reader of the “trickster story” is to actively co-­create the meaning of the text. In Crawford’s view, The Whittrick celebrates “an elusive, mercurial essence imagined in Scots as the ‘whittrick’ or the weasel – the spirit of creativity” (Crawford 1990, 13). For him, each of the poem’s dialogues can be seen as a temporal and geographical translation of the preceding dialogue (Crawford 1990, 13). However, one might equally see the subsequent dialogues as peculiar examples of palimpsests, where the spaces of other texts merge and where their original meanings or structures become transformed. As he executes his polysemous poem, Morgan engages in projections and materialisations of his own, foregrounding both structures of self-­presentation and systems of cultural representation. The Whittrick, with its eight dialogues, relates strange encounters from the history of culture, literature and history (in the order of appearance): MacDiarmid and Joyce, Bosch and Faust, King Shahriyar and Queen Shahrazad, Emily and Charlotte Brontë, Marilyn Monroe and Galina Ulanova, Lady Seaforth and The Brahan Seer (Conneach Odhar), Hakuin (the Japanese Master of Zen Buddhism) and (his contemporary) Chikamatsu (a puppeteer known as the “Japanese Shakespeare”), and finally Dr. Grey Walter (the author of the 1953 The Living Brain) and Jean Cocteau.

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James Joyce and Hugh MacDiarmid The first dialogue, a symposium (both literal and metaphorical) for Joyce and MacDiarmid, imitates their idiosyncratic language to a point where they become grotesque, also due to the fact that they do not listen to each other and focus solely on their own narrations. When MacDiarmid and Joyce meet over a bottle of whisky, which seems significant here, MacDiarmid proposes a toast to the creator of Stephen Daedalus: Fill yir gless, Icarus! Thae nichts’ll nor revert! The warld, for aa that it’s gruppen wi sair decreets O physics, stound and steid, will preeve to you and me Yon auld camsterie ghaistlie place Lucretie thocht He had exilit fae the nature o things. Nicht Will dwine and flee and leave anither you and me Happit in relativitie’s raggit yestreen. Let aa we were and aa we sall be ming and mell In this ae lowe o the fremmit hours, my freen!2 (Morgan 1996, 79)

The first dialogue plays games with the notion of miscomprehension and mishearing, which results from the clash of languages and clearly divergent poetics.3 It also stems from the fact that both writers are too self-­centred to be capable of true colloquy (Edgecombe 2003, 96). MacDiarmid’s elevated address on the nature of things is juxtaposed with Joyce’s mellifluous speech on shadows, time, history and its mysterious jinn: Friendly and propitious be the salutation, Happily lachrymary the candelabra, Thick the crepuscular phantasmagoria. .................................. Pookahauntus! Nevertiti! Brahan Boru! A toast to the guthering shadies. Toast the host. The elements have crossed the Alphs, and Kubla can. —A thousand banners, a broken prince, the time-­stream. A thousand princes by the breaking stream, banners Broken by time. Galahad sees the Golden Horde.

2 Revert=return; gruppen=in the grip of; sair=difficult; stoud and steid=time and space; camsterie=perverse; dwine=fade; happit=wrapped; ming and mell=blend and mingle; ae lowe=single flame; unfremmit=familiar. 3 For more information on the divergent poetics of Joyce and MacDiarmid, see Nicholson 2002, 49-­50.

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Monika Kocot Boadicea shouts at Balaclava’s gates. —Well may the candle gutter! It’s the wind of time That blows into this room from beyond the great grave Of the dead; its bugle is desolating but Incomparable are the old caparisons. The jinn are out of the candles, flicker-­flacker Up the walls and across the ceiling, Finn MacCool Fifing on a bollard, Arthur at his truffle, Diving Grendel and gun-­grey dragon. Bottles Have jinn as well as candles, and as I uncork This gentle johnny, watch the shadows—How they jumped! Something we hardly saw leaped out—animal or Vegetable lamb or mineral spring: what sprang? A drink to all the unknown jinn of history. Whisky always makes me think about history. (Morgan 1996, 79-­80)

Nicholson notices that “in full tilt at the ghosts of a cultural past, Morgan’s Joyce rolls a space-­time continuum into vivid simultaneity where surreal stream of consciousness connects discursive difference” (2002, 50). The “rolling of space-­time continuum” into this peculiar simultaneity could be seen as trickster timespace or trickster relation, where the lack of linear links between images and subsequent threads of narration is substituted with an arrangement based on associative thinking: Hannibal’s legendary triumph is linked here with mathematics (“elements have crossed the Alphs”); Coleridge’s imagined Kubla with the Khanate established by a Tatar “Golden Horde”; Arthurian legend and Celtic myth meet with Boadicea and the Crimean War. It is Joyce who introduces the motifs of the sequence: flickering candlelight, the jinn of Arabian demonology and the weasel-­like whittrick that moves too quickly to be noticed (Nicholson 2002, 50). While “the jinn are out of the candles, [to] flicker-­flacker / Up the walls and across the ceiling,” Joyce opens a bottle of blended whisky, and the “guthering shadies” of spirits of the past are manifested as both legendary and historical figures (Nicholson 2002, 51). The jinn of history, as Joyce calls them, are the workings of the whittrick, the one who crosses the borders of the plot, the one who challenges the linearity of narration. According to W. N. Herbert, the whittrick is “the symbol of Morgan’s interface, that point between languages at which new possibilities emerge” (1990, 72). He borrows William Burroughs’s concept of the third mind to suggest that “the whittrick speaks here in a language formed when a Standard English collides with spoken Scots” (1990, 72); that collision, he concludes, is part of the poem’s point. Undeniably, the first dialogue plays games with two “radically unlike protagonists”

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(Nicholson 2002, 50); Morgan himself has noted that “two men could hardly be more different in fundamental outlook than Joyce and MacDiarmid” and that “all they have in common is [that] they are virtuosos of language” (after Nicholson 2002, 50). When Morgan employs Scots, he displays an original and idealistic vision, W. N. Herbert notes. “The tale of the whittricks’ wake certainly suggests a formula: as Henryson’s Cresseid was to Chaucer’s, so should we see MacDiarmid’s wake to Joyce’s. Except the language belongs to Morgan” (Herbert 1990, 71): Whiskery? D’ye ken what it was that loupit? Yon wes a whittrick, a rictum-­tictum whittrick, Auld putty-­humphie, wi an egg in its plaidie And a jouk in its jumper. Aye, and it minds me O a ferlie I saw langsyne, or thocht I saw In Glesca toun. It wes the Schipka Pass, the gas Wes peeferin-­pufferin in and oot, blue licht That gied a dwaible warsle wi the grey greekin O fowr o’clock i the morning. Sheddas flauchtert Skairlike ower the stanes. I heard an unco fuffin But wisna fae the gaslicht, and it wisna Fae my ain breast; it wes a whittrick-­fuffin. Hoot-­ Toot and hadna my steps stummelt here on a wake, A whittrick’s wake, for yonder I saw the cratur Ligg on a peever-­scartit stane as stiff ’s as a rake! (Morgan 1996, 80)

Nicholson aptly points out that “if Joyce comes to play with ghosts as he buries them, MacDiarmid both praises them and raises them”; the Scot mishears Joyce’s final line (“Whisky always makes me think about history”), and plunges into a whittrick’s wake “as gothic as anything Tam o’Shanter stumbled across on his way home” (Nicholson 2002, 51). Here the great Grieve is no longer looking at a thistle, but is surrounded by ten mourning whittricks. MacDiarmid says “Pass me a drink for these mischievous snouts!” and asks Joyce if he wants to hear their names. Indeed, he gives the names of all ten whittricks, which makes one think not only of “Rabelaisian inclusiveness” (Edgecombe 2003, 96) or Joyce’s aleatoric blends of words, but also MacDiarmid’s view of poetry, which – in Morgan’s opinion – “could lead to a completely aleatory conception of art” (Morgan 1974, 216): Collicider, Sproopshch, Plintskong, Zumberquib, Ragatchkle, Ibidemblem, Waverfolla, Trnosploss, Boljugstoy, Fazmattrex:

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Monika Kocot Ten o the friskiest dustifit shennachies This side o Ardnamurchan: and bonnie on them! (Morgan 1996, 81)

It should be mentioned that shennachie stands for a teller of traditional Gaelic tales, which makes whittricks not only characters in the tale, but also potential storytellers. “Surely no Christian tongue,” says the listening Joyce, “Choctaw, Chukchaw? Glescaw?” (Morgan 1996, 81). Nothing daunted, MacDiarmid dramatises a wake in the animal kingdom by introducing the theme of resurrection, waking up from the sleep of death, as well as the theme of metamorphosis that seems and yet does not seem to relate to Finnegans Wake. Eventually, he passes out and everything disappears like a broken spell. Joyce continues his speech on “history,” the word with which he had finished earlier, as though nothing happened; thus, mutual incomprehension is signalled again: History, like hell, Is murky, but these flashes are never murdered, For they explode the gloom into divine questions. The whittrick on the wall, the whittrick in the street ........................................ —All whisky is a little historical, but This whisky is mystical! I am wide awake, Golden, and smooth. My name is MacCool. I’m a Finn, And I swim in the wake of Cybele. Midnight With all its suns is dead, and the dawn is chilly. See: the frost’s keen. A wake it is. A glass to day. (Morgan 1996, 82)

The night of the whittricks and drinking passes into dawn, as “wake” shifts from noun to eye-­opening verb: Joyce metamorphoses into Finn McCool and swims in the wake of Cybele, Magna Mater of gods and the dead, and whereas MacDiarmid sees the grave still “green [longing] for the gleg [quick] whittrick that loups by the whins [gorse],” Joyce aptly describes their drinking session as “our nocturnal circumcolloquy” (Nicholson 2003, 52).

Hieronymus Bosch and Johann Faust One of the most implicit and explicit axioms of the Finnegans Wake, Umberto Eco notes, is “that of the infinity of worlds, unified by the metamorphic nature of each word” (1989, 73). Morgan seems to share Joyce’s penchant for poetic metamorphosis and anamorphosis. In the second dialogue of Johann Faust and Hieronymus Bosch, the poet deals with the issue of waking and dreaming, as well

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as mimesis and simulacra of the real. The dialogue opens with Faust’s story on how he had sold his soul in Krakow and how he dreads to think what the future would bring. Bosch listens very attentively and voices his reservations concerning the truth of Faust’s damnation. Faust’s response is very emotional, as he exclaims: “You have not been damned by a dream more real than—,” at which point he suspends his voice, while Bosch finishes the sentence: “Life? Well, there are dreams and dreams, and some men say / That I in my imagination have dreamed / What only a devil-­elect could gaze on / Sane, and paint as a tale that is told!” (Morgan 1996, 84). And he begins to describe his painting, which, he says, is called “God Creating the World of Hell,” though it will be obvious to the reader that he talks about “The Garden of Earthly Delights.” This, in turn, takes us back to Faust’s dream of “all earthly delights” and the idea of waking up “to a sort of death” (Morgan 1996, 83). It is one of many instances of intratextuality, where the reader notices that the composition of the poem seems to resemble a whirlwind. The metaphor of whirlwind is not accidental here, as the whittrick crosses the borders of time and space. However, regardless of the games of illynx Morgan plays with the readers, one can see that particular bits of narration become interconnected in a whirlwind-­like, centrifugal movement which incessantly opens up new metaphoric fields, new contexts.4 Coming back to Bosch’s story, the narrative of dream-­like representation continues thus: Bosch if you bring the candle nearer—and just look down Into this world that I have given life to, Tell me if I have given life to a dream, Have I made myself see, or have I seen? Here Are the darkening angels falling burning, And what they fall down into is being made Hell. It is their land and sea and fire to come. (Morgan 1996, 84)

4 For instance, at the end of the whole sequence, following the dialogue between Jean Cocteau and Dr. Grey Walter, the whittrick, transmuted into a genetically engineered evolution of machine intelligence (here, as Nicholson notes, Morgan’s “metaphor of movement is associated with ‘the flash of imagination’ whose ‘logic allows the leap of thought’” [53]) delivers the line “Now, Faustus, what wouldst thou have me to do?” which comes from the third scene of The Tragical History of Doctor Faustus, where Mephistopheles materialises dressed as a Franciscan friar in order to trick Faustus (who, in his naivety, thinks that he controls the game with the devil).

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He describes the painted figures: angels in their anguish, and numerous monsters such as a winged snout, or a lamprey-­headed beagle. Then he adds: In the very midst of these creatures—polecats, Dogfish, dogs, catfish, sea-­dogs, lap-­slugs, wombats— I once had a whittrick, now painted over, A tiny whittrick, very lithe and smiling. No, you won’t find him anywhere now, he’s gone. Yet he became the focus of this picture, I built the turbulence round his irony, I saw the monstrous place fixed by his bright eye. And then my brush had covered him up as if He had played his part only to disappear. The painting was complete. And now fantasy And reality, the energies of imagination Swirl in me so hauntingly, so mockingly That I wonder, was the whittrick ever there? (Morgan 1996, 85)

Edgecombe sees this passage as an expression of liminality of the grotesque, which we could just as well call trickster discourse: “Taken by themselves, dogfish and catfish are familiar enough to escape its taint, but thrown into a catalogue with polecats and dogs, they are alienated into something else again, something benthic and abysmal. And into this disordered universe, Morgan admits the whittrick.” The fact of the trickster’s normality calls the Boschian surreal into question, Edgecombe concludes: “On the hypnogogic threshold between waking and dreaming, the painter senses that the weasel, being itself, has compromised a vision so determinedly based on distortion” (2003, 98). However, it is not only the surreal that is challenged here, since one might ask whether the whittrick is actually represented in the painting. Yes, he was “the focus of this picture,” and the turbulence was built “round his irony,” but he was covered by the painter’s brush. Does it mean he disappeared? Perhaps we should “see” the whittrick as a simulacrum, but then – which stage of a simulacrum? Or perhaps we should abandon the rational duality of being and non-­being, as only then can we hope to grasp the elusive nature of the whittrick. Bosch concludes his speech on the presence and absence of the whittrick thus: Wandering figments of my seventy years Walk these unkempt floors, pucks, kobolds, pumpkin-­men Whistle and gesture to the easels, easels As I doze in my chair collapse, snap, go pop Like pods of broom, my broom will swish at midnight (Morgan 1996, 85)

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to which Faust replies: “Perhaps the whittrick went pop with the easel?” While the whole sequence is a mischievous allusion to the weasel that pops in the nursery rhyme, it follows a Joycean flow of association: Morgan “elides the creak and pop of contracting wood (the easels in a cold studio) with the fertilising pop of a broom flower” and the floral broom turns into a domestic broom which sweeps away “in mockery of the paint brush that swept the surreal images on to the canvas” (Edgecombe 2003, 98). Interestingly, Edgecombe’s analysis points to all three aspects of the trickster’s manifestation: first of all as an elusive, present or absent, visible or invisible character, as a trickster-­relation between words and images of the story (Joycean flow of association), which quite naturally leads to trickster processuality at the level of narration, with de-­or re-­semantisation of words and phrases. And if in Joyce’s Ulysses Umberto Eco sees a “radical conversion from ‘meaning’ as a content of an expression, to the form of the expression as meaning” (1989, 37), then Morgan’s experiments can be seen as a convergence of these two forms of meaning: the content of an expression seems as important as the form of the expression (in trickster aesthetics, the philosophy of structure). It could be argued that Morgan’s Whittrick belongs, as a trickster poem, to the post-­Wake group of literary works. Recurrent reference to jinn released from bottles, to candle-­flame flickering and to whittricks, introduces a floating or liquid signifier across the sequence, where the trickster (whether as a character, relation, timespace, or processuality) appears as the agent of dissidence, of resistance to monolithic modes of discourse. The whittrick’s liquid identity seems to emphasise its elusive nature throughout the poem, which can be better grasped when seen in relation to the Jacques Hadamard epigraph that opens the trickster poem: “the shortest and best way between two truths of the real domain often passes through the imaginary one” (Morgan 1996, 79).

Work Cited Crawford, Robert. 1990. “to change / the unchangeable—The Whole Morgan.” In About Edwin Morgan, edited by Robert Crawford and Hamish White, 10-­24. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Eco, Umberto. 1989. The Middle Ages of James Joyce. The Aesthetic of Chaosmos. Translated by Ellen Esrock. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Edgecombe, Rodney Stenning. 2003. Aspects of Form and Genre in the Poetry of Edwin Morgan. Amersham: Cambridge Scholars Press. Herbert, W. N. 1990. “Morgan’s Words.” In About Edwin Morgan, edited by Robert Crawford and Hamish White, 65-­74. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.

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Hynes, William.  1993. “Mapping the Characteristics of Mythic Tricksters: a Heuristic Guide.” In Mythical Trickster Figures: Contours, Contexts and Criticisms, edited by William J. Hynes and William Doty, 33-­65. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press. Hayman, David and Elliott Anderson. 1978. In the Wake of the Wake. Wisconsin: University of Wisconsin Press. McGonigal, James.  2012. Beyond the Last Dragon: A Life of Edwin Morgan. Dingwall: Sandstone Press. Morgan, Edwin. 1996. Collected Poems. Manchester: Carcanet. Morgan, Edwin. 1974. Essays. Cheadle: Carcanet. Nicholson, Colin.  2002. Inventions of Modernity. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Ricketts, Linscott Mac.  1965/1966. “The North American Indian Trickster.” History of Religions 5: 327-­350. Smith, Jeanne Rosier. 1997. Writing Tricksters: Mythic Gambols in American Ethnic Literature. Berkeley: University of California Press. Turner, Victor. 1974. “Liminal to Liminoid In Play, Flow, and Ritual: An Essay in Comparative Symbology.” Rice University Studies 60.3: 53-­92. Vizenor, Gerald. 1993. “Trickster Discourse: Comic Holotropes and Language Games.” In Narrative Chance: Postmodern Discourse on Native American Indian Literatures, edited by Gerald Vizenor, 187-­212. New York: University of Oklahoma Press.

Anna Walczuk

Art in the Poetry of Elizabeth Jennings When Elizabeth Jennings was briefly associated with the so-­called Movement in the 1950s, she was acclaimed by her fellow poets as a great talent and a most promising artist of the new generation. Kingsley Amis enthusiastically referred to her in his memoirs as “[t]he star of the show, our discovery” (after Leader 2009, 293). Later, when Jennings detached herself from The Movement and spoke with her own distinct voice, combining feminine lyricism and intense religious faith, she sustained her reputation as one of the most remarkable poetic personalities of the twentieth century, “a profoundly devotional, thoughtful and emotionally observant poet, one engaged in exploring love, joy, friendship, loneliness, depression, faith and poetics” (Mason 2012, xii). To this list of themes compiled by Emma Mason one could add one more issue which absorbed the poet throughout all her creative life, and was inextricably connected with her poetics, i.e. her preoccupation with art in general, its ontological status and epistemological potential. In one of her poems, “Moving Together” (1989),1 Elizabeth Jennings speaks of a quasi-­mystical kinship of all arts for “the arts converge”; in consequence, she declares: “Poets must learn from paintings. Painters keep / An eye on words” (603). The aim of this paper is to look upon Elizabeth Jennings’s impressive poetic oeuvre from the vantage point that she herself postulates, and to trace the convergence of her poetry with visual arts. Jennings evokes a great number of artists, especially painters, who figure in her poems either as an overt reference or implicit allusion. Let it suffice to mention some titles which are most explicitly relevant: “Mondrian,” “Klee’s Last Years,” “Cézanne,” “Van Gogh,” “In Praise of Giotto,” “Tribute to Turner,” “Caravaggio,” “Goya,” “Chardin.” It is noteworthy that although Jennings’s art poems are scattered throughout her entire work, many of them appear in the volume bearing the significant title Tributes, which patently voices the poet’s acknowledgement of indebtedness. In Jennings’s poetic vision both arts, music and painting, become two equally important art branches to be

1 All throughout the article the year in the parenthesis indicates the poetry volume where the poem discussed was published. The respective titles of poetry books are provided with bibliographic references at the end of the article. Page numbers refer to Emma Mason’s edition of Elizabeth Jennings. The Collected Poems (Carcanet, 2012).

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embedded in the body of a poem for they both inspire and enlarge artistic perception or, as she puts it in “Moving Together,” they enable “the leap of spirit in us” and assist in listening to “the world [which] whispers for a hiding God” (603). Though the subsequent discussion addresses the general significance of art for Jennings’s poetics, it shall concentrate in particular on visual arts. In painting and sculpture images are present in the most palpable way, and so when they are used as a frame of reference in poetry they become a potent means to corroborate the sensuous component which is a distinctive feature of Jennings’s poetic imagination. Both in form and content, Jennings’s poetry does not only point to the bond which unites diverse branches of art, but also, in a sonorous poetic idiom, it proclaims a metaphysical affinity of all artists. Accordingly, regardless of differences in the medium of expression, Jennings is convinced that a deep-­seated spiritual proximity lies at the foundation of the unity between the poet and the painter when in a much appreciated form of prose poem she speaks of her own personal experience of a close relationship with Georges Rouault:2 Out of shadows, your colours come, and they illumine, they illumine. I feel very close to you; I feel you understood our present predicaments. I know also that you knew much about God. (“Rouault” 1970, 275)

In her own poems Jennings often employs various strategies of ekphrasis, which represents to her a semiotic union between poetry and visual arts, for since it is based on an inclusion within the verbal space of poetry of art objects belonging to the sister art of literature. The reflection on the place and role of art in Jennings’s poetry is closely connected with her religious faith, and in particular with the sacramental dimension of the Roman Catholic Christianity, which she adhered to throughout all her life. Furthermore, it is linked with Jennings’s sublime sensitivity and her deep-­ seated reverence for the potency of the Word, which the poet views as a bridge spanning the gap between the natural world of human affairs and the realm of transcendence, inhabited by the divine Logos (see Edwards 1984). Last but not least, incorporating art into the discourse of her poetry gives Jennings a useful vantage point to define the unique status of ars poetica as well as the terms of the special relationship between the artist and the work of art. In Jennings’s poems works of art clearly bespeak transcendence and hence they are treated as agents carrying and communicating the metaphysical dimension

2 Georges Rouault (1871-­1958), a French expressionist regarded by many as one of the most committed Christian painters of the twentieth century.

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of reality. That motif appears very early in Jennings’s poetry and it runs uninterruptedly through all her works. The collection entitled Song for a Birth or a Death (1961), which significantly alludes to T.S. Eliot and his “Journey of the Magi,” may be read as a direct repercussion of Jennings’s prolonged stay in Italy and her travels in the south of Europe, and, like T. S. Eliot’s poem, it also contains numerous poetic allusions to the poet’s spiritual journey of discovery. Thus, Song for a Birth or a Death becomes a personal register of the pilgrimage to the fountainhead of reality, which Jennings commenced in her initial volumes of poetry and continued through the rest of her creative life. At the beginning of her poetic path of a pilgrim Jennings stops to contemplate ancient monuments of Greek art, and she records her experience in the poem “Greek Statues” (1961). Interestingly, it is not sufficient for the pilgrim-­persona merely to look at the crumbling stone blocks and figures worn out-­of-­shape by the passage of time. She feels an urgent need to touch their bodies in order to enter into another dimension and experience the transcendence they harbour: Odd how one wants to touch not simply stare, To run one’s fingers over the flanks and arms, Not to possess, rather to be possessed. (108)

Allowing to be steeped in the space of the spirit, which is paradoxically produced by the physicality of the contemplated art objects, and stirred into aesthetic responsiveness to art, Jennings adopts the perspective of her Christian faith and ventures a startling claim that by analogy the Greek statues may be viewed as “other” incarnations: Incarnations are elsewhere and more human, Something concerning us; but these are other, It is as if something infinite, remote Permitted intrusion. It is as if these blind eyes Exposed a landscape precious with grapes and olives: And our probing hands move not to grasp but praise. (108)

Hence within the frames of Jennings’s poetic discourse it is not surprising that the poet wandering amidst the ruined forum romanum asserts with unswerving certainty: “These ruins now are more than monument” (“The Roman Forum,” 1958, 74). To Jennings’s poetic perception the Roman Forum is an emblematic artifice of human design and as such it becomes a vehicle for spiritual reality transcending visible shapes and tangible substance, which constitutes its proper material mould available for aesthetic appraisal or historical assessment.

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Undoubtedly in Jennings’s work the love of art and subtle artistic sensibility go together with religious thinking which permeates most of her poetry. “Greek Statues” shows that when art objects are viewed in the metaphysical perspective, they disclose their potential to become “other” incarnations. Jennings goes even further in the poem “Visit to an Artist” (1961), dedicated to David Jones, where she recalls the words of the painter-­poet:3 Of art as gesture and as sacrament, A mountain under the calm form of paint Much like the Presence under wine and bread – Art with its largesse and its own restraint. (101)

Thus, in the poet’s imagination art becomes explicitly bound with sacrament. In consequence, a sacramental value is conferred upon the art object, and hence we are justified to speak of Elizabeth Jennings’s sacramental poetics (see McInery 2010). It should be stressed that for the poet who, like Elizabeth Jennings, is a practising Roman Catholic, sacrament is much more than a sign or symbol of that “largesse” represented by the form’s “own restraint,” for first and foremost it embodies the reality represented. From the sacramental perspective, it is not surprising that all art, including painting (“A mountain under the calm form of paint”), is likened to the Eucharist, “the Presence under wine and bread.” Jennings never abandoned her strong conviction of the sacramental value inherent in art. In “Questions to Other Artists” (1977), published sixteen years after “Visit to an Artist,” she brings together musicians, painters and poets in order to express the same belief, and she does so with a great force derived from the directness of the poetic statement. “Questions to Other Artists” reaffirms her view that all artists, regardless of the medium in which they work, participate in a spiritual communion analogous to that which is experienced by the poet “when words are offered / Like a Host upon the tongue” (397). Consequently, the conception of the sacramental nature of art leads Elizabeth Jennings to its consideration in terms of prayer. In a short poem “Michelangelo’s First Pietà” (1977) Jennings reflects on the famous masterpiece, wherein she sees the sculptor carving “God in the grip of our humanity” (391) and furthermore muses on the significance for the artist himself of the grand vision enclosed in his sculpture: 3 David Jones, like Jennings herself, voiced distinctly Christian, and Roman Catholic, beliefs.

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[…] It is a prayer that he is saying Wordless, except that written on her breast He writes his name. This girl he is displaying Has also brought him rest. (392)

Jennings’s poetic insight into art spans the centuries between the humanism of the Renaissance and surrealist expression of modernity. In the poem with the dedicatory title “For Paul Klee” (1996) the poet pays tribute to the “painter of quick patterns, colourist / Whose palette knows no lack” (735). Jennings praises here the artist whose “work began / And ended where imagination’s glow / Enchanted everything.” As in the case of Michelangelo’s Pietà, she looks upon Klee’s abstract painting, with its bold use of colour, through the prism of prayer, which is perceived as an encounter and communion with the ineffable: A brush can be a wand Which can be potent even over sun And, like a prayer, can reach beyond, beyond. (735)

Jennings is perfectly aware that while the sculptor’s and the painter’s prayer is wordless, the poet is bound to communicate through the medium of words, which are made to cross the boundary between the real and its representation in language. Acutely sensitive to both the potency as well as limitation of words, Jennings knows that if poetic discourse is to embrace the complexity of experience and the multifarious structure of reality, it must become engaged in a dialogue with silence. Silence plays an important role in her poetry. Notably, Jennings does not regard silence in opposition to words; on the contrary, she recognizes its function in enhancing the resonance of poetic diction. However, the rendition of silence in a literary work, which is by definition founded upon verbal expression, presents a great challenge for the poet. She can do it by stretching the space of a word, as in repetitions frequently appearing in her poetry, e.g. “beyond, beyond” in the poem “For Paul Klee.” However, working on the assumption that all arts converge, and having established an especially fruitful relationship between poetry and visual arts, Jennings turns to painting to assist her in understanding the function of silence in constructing paradigms of meaning. Her poem “Rembrandt” (1972), for instance, implicitly postulates a parallel between the use of darkness in painting and the use of silence in poetry. Looking at Rembrandt’s paintings, Jennings makes an observation about the paradoxical nature of darkness:

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Anna Walczuk The darkness is not like night. It has a different purpose, a different meaning. Within it portraits flare their faces at you; that is what the dark is for. (290)

The poet is fascinated by the way in which the painter’s “darkness allows the massive light to reveal” (290) something important in the painted figures. Accordingly, she perceives the poem’s silence as a corollary of darkness in the art of painting. Therefore, silence in poetry, if skilfully handled, may bring into high relief everything that transcends the verbal message and cannot be simply conveyed in words. Rembrandt provides Elizabeth Jennings with many insights into the structure of art and the exclusive nature of the relationship between the maker and the object of art crafted with the maker’s skill and vision. “Rembrandt’s Late Self-­ Portraits” (1975) is her poetic meditation on art’s unique power to transcend narrowly egocentric personality and help one to see beyond the stifling constrictions of matter and time. Contemplating Rembrandt’s late self-­portraits, the poet shares her thoughts with the long-­dead painter: You are confronted with yourself. Each year The pouches fill, the skin is uglier. You give it all unflinchingly. You stare Into yourself, beyond. Your brush’s care Runs with self-­knowledge. Here Is a humility at one with craft.4 (324)

The artist painting his self-­portrait stares not only into himself, but also “beyond,” and Jennings knows perfectly well that this little adverb makes a great difference between a mere reflection in the mirror and a self-­portrait as a work of art. This observation validates for her the attaching of the sacramental dimension to art because works of art, like sacraments, while showing the given and the obvious, simultaneously illuminate the truth and take one “beyond,” i.e. open the gates to transcendence. Moreover, it provides for Elizabeth Jennings a convincing basis for equating poets and seers, which is frequently posited in her poems, e.g. “Seers and Makers” (1996) and “Hermits and Poets” (1996), as well as in her critical and

4 The phrase “humility at one with craft” has been used as title of Erwin Stürzl’s study of the poetry of Elizabeth Jennings “Here is a humility at one with craft”: The Thematic Content of the Poetry of Elizabeth Jennings.

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appreciative prose, e.g. Every Changing Shape: Mystical Experience and the Making of Poems and Seven Men of Vision: An Appreciation. Jennings’s poetry addresses, in a remarkable degree, the issue of the overlapping of the material and the spiritual. The poet is so fascinated with the ontology of this encounter that she looks upon poetry as an imaginative faculty participating in the incarnation of the eternal Logos. That is why pictorial arts become a mine of precious insights for the literary artist. The poem devoted to the art of Goya extols the Spanish painter for catching “That vigour out of reach / To lesser painters who make violence / A proper end” (“Goya” 1989, 553). Looking at Goya’s war scenes, the poet who struggles to extract image and power from the realm of words finds “the soul at work within the rich / Muscle and sinew” (553). Accordingly, in Jennings’s view Goya’s greatness lies in his exceptional ability to incarnate the spirit in shape and colour. Jennings calls it “the true connection,” and in this phrase stress falls on the word “true,” which – due to the rhythmic pattern used here – receives main focus. It is the presence of such truth in the artist’s vision that makes the work of art emerge as a unified whole, for poets and painters alike: […] the true connection Of flesh and spirit is united by Goya’s pure vision. […] Unity governs clearer than we know When Goya lends his eye. (553)

Visual arts teach the poet some important truths regarding the mysterious coexistence of spirit and matter. That is why many of Jennings’s art poems, apart from expressing delight induced by aesthetic appreciation of art, also convey moral and metaphysical insights gained from its contemplation. For instance, in “Landscapes and Figures” (1982), which contains an implicit allusion to a painting by Claude Monet, Jennings reflects on landscape as a popular theme in painting and focuses her attention on the place and function of human figures presented against a broad stretch of scenery. The poetic meditation on the artistic composition of landscapes in painting brings about a realisation that human figures, contrary to what might be expected, are of secondary importance for they only belong to the margin of the picture: “they will step / Out of the picture, play no part in what / The trees discourse about, the winds supply” (476). When Jennings says in a poetic voice: “We ought to be taught / The selflessness of figures in a Claude” (476), she puts forward a proposition which is as radical in ethical terms as it was in the impressionistic aesthetics, to which she alludes in her reference to “Claude

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[Monet].” With the claim that “[t]hey [human figures] are to hills and sky what a prelude / Is to dramatic music” (476), Jennings undermines the established hierarchy sanctioned by the classical canon and articulates a “moral” for art viewers: […] From art we learn To step back and be self-­effacing where Dawn enters, sunsets burn. (476)

In Jennings’s poetic vision, strongly influenced by her propensity for mysticism (see Every Changing Shape), art always highlights pivotal truths of human life, which in her case are firmly rooted in Christianity. With its slow moving pace, “Painter from Life” (1982) is a prolonged observation of a painter at work with his model, “the youth,” who is obediently following the artist’s directions. The poem describes how the painter “has set his model,” who will “keep his pose / Though sea-­sounds mock his stance” (487); furthermore, it underscores the silence of the painting: “The silent art of paint / Is now surrounded by the tempting sea” (487). In the poetic perception of transcendent wholeness, the artist and his model become one being, as they simultaneously derive from and participate in the ongoing act of divine creation: “Here is true / Creation shared” (487). In the poetic transposition of the painting – which probably underlies the poem5 – the artist and his model are naturally framed with the sea scenery, while the title reasserts that painting is always “from life,” i.e. from the immense opus Dei in which the artist as well as the objects of artistic rendition are immersed. Thus, departing from the aesthetic plane the poem finishes with a philosophical observation which stems from Elizabeth Jennings’s religious creed and is at the same time the guiding principle of her ars poetica: “Nature and art show here, / Briefly, all things as they were meant to be.”

Works Cited Edwards, Michael. 1984. Towards a Christian Poetics. London: Macmillan Press. Jennings, Elizabeth. 1958. A Sense of the Word. London: Andre Deutsch. Jennings, Elizabeth. 1961. Song for a Birth or a Death. London: Andre Deutsch.

5 Although it is not indicated directly, it seems that the painting which inspired Jennings’s poem “Painter from Life” is “Jeune homme nu assis au bord de la mer” (“The Naked Young Man Seated by the Sea”), the most celebrated work by the nineteenth-­century French painter Hippolyte Flandrin (1809-­1864).

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Jennings, Elizabeth. 1961a. Every Changing Shape: Mystical Experience and the Making of Poems. London: Andre Deutsch. Jennings, Elizabeth. 1970. Lucidities: Poems. London: Macmillan. Jennings, Elizabeth. 1972. Relationships. London: Macmillan. Jennings, Elizabeth. 1975. Growing Points. Manchester: Carcanet. Jennings, Elizabeth. 1976. Seven Men of Vision: An Appreciation. London: Vision Press. Jennings, Elizabeth. 1977. Consequently I Rejoice. Manchester: Carcanet. Jennings, Elizabeth. 1982. Celebrations and Elegies. Manchester: Carcanet. Jennings, Elizabeth. 1989. Tributes. Manchester: Carcanet. Jennings, Elizabeth. 1996. In the Meantime. Manchester: Carcanet. Leader, Zachary, ed. 2009. The Movement Reconsidered. Oxford: University Press. Mason, Emma. 2012. Preface to Elizabeth Jennings. The Collected Poems, edited by Emma Mason. Manchester: Carcanet. McInery, Stephan. 2010. “The Sacramental Poetics of Elizabeth Jennings and Les Murray.” In Between Human and Divine. The Catholic Vision in Contemporary Literature, edited by Mary R. Reichardt, 207-­225. Washington, D.C.: The Catholic University of America Press. Stürzl, Edwin. 1983.“Here is a humility at one with craft”: The Thematic Content of the Poetry of Elizabeth Jennings. Salzburg Studies in English Literature. Salzburg: Institut für Anglistik und Amerikanistik, Universität Salzburg.

Grzegorz Czemiel

Visual Displacement and Shifts of Tone: On the Transformative Powers of Poetry in Recent Collections by Sinéad Morrissey and Zoë Skoulding It seems like a safe bet to assume that an average discussion on the subject of memory or “lost time” should reference, at one point or another, the work of Marcel Proust. Indeed, it comes as no surprise to find a poem titled “In Search of Lost Time” in Zoë Skoulding’s 2013 poetry collection The Museum of Disappearing Sounds, which clearly displays its preoccupation with losing and reclaiming. What makes the poem more original than a run-­of-­the-­mill Madelaine-­lyric, however, is the fact that – as we learn from the “Notes” at the end of the book – it “makes use of search engine results for Proust’s title” (Skoulding 2013, 71). A collage of apparently disjointed fragments, this mini-­cycle of three poems introduces a series of questions that I would argue to be of primary concern for the humanities today. “Imagine having permanent jetlag” (25), the poem entreats, asking two crucial questions: “Who can you turn to when times are flying out of joint?” (26); and, “How can one hold joy and grief in the mind at the same time” (27). These anxieties, I venture to claim, suggest that there exists a fundamental problem with our relationship with time. Moreover, the use of search engine results as a means of expressing this issue emphasises the important role that the medium plays in reclaiming lost pasts and futures. Skoulding’s found poetry reveals that, indeed, “Between accident and absence / the world had changed into something unrecognizable” (27). The outstanding challenge is to account for this phenomenon. In order to do so, I will juxtapose The Museum of Disappearing Sounds with another poetry book published in 2013: Parallax by Sinéad Morrissey. The reasons for coupling those two collections are diverse. Firstly, I would claim that the books complement each other by foregrounding two crucial dimensions of poetry. The former is more preoccupied with the acoustics of poetry, whereas the latter focuses rather on the visual aspect of verse. In a sense, they take us back to the very roots of what poetry is, investigating the fulcrum of the debate between the primacy of orality or textuality. Ultimately, it seems, the unique status of poetry is indicated to be the product of interaction between written and spoken language. Secondly, the two collections take the opportunity – opened by

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the said dialectic – to reassert what poetry can actually do. This pertains both to the formal boundaries of poetry – i.e. the development of verse structures and stanzaic forms – and to the thematic layer, since the two books tackle some of the crucial topics that are being widely discussed in the humanities today. These include the question of post-­humanism, gender-­related problems and, primarily, the issue of the future – our ability to conceive of it and fathom our potentiality. This last subject is also related to the aforementioned question of our relationship with the past and the paralysing effect of its haunting, ghost-­like presence revealed in both collections (and noted in blurb-­reviews), Skoulding’s being “orphic” and “haunted,” while Morrissey’s – recording “what is caught, and what is lost.” Parallax by Sinéad Morrissey begins with a short definition of the eponymous term, quoted from the Oxford English Dictionary: “apparent displacement, or difference in the apparent position, of an object, caused by the actual change (or difference) of position of the point of observation” (Morrissey 2013, 9). Indeed, the book focuses on points of observation, investigating how poetry frames its subject and displaces what it captures in its verbal lens. The book discusses, for example, how photography (another medium) contributes – as Fran Brearton puts it in a review for The Guardian – to the “progressive creation of a lie,” revealing at the same time “the dark side of an artistic process, the crafting and shaping of a language with its own ‘power to transform’.” In this sense, the reviewer suggests, Parallax draws attention to the procedures according to which poetry negotiates the scope of its own frame, striking a compromise regarding what parts of truths to leave out of the picture. This goal is achieved, I would claim, through a meditation on a number of seemingly unrelated phenomena, which nevertheless all send us back to the question of mediation, which has been already indicated as important in the case of Skoulding’s employment of Internet search engine as one possible frame. For example, Morrissey looks at how autobiographical writing functions, which is visible in the way she frames the entire collection, beginning with the poem “1801,” inspired by Dorothy Wordsworth’s The Grasmere Journal, and ending with the poem “Blog,” which emulates the style of modern digital diaries. Moreover, in poems like “Photographs of Belfast by Alexander Robert Hogg” or “Photographing Lowry’s House,” she takes up the genre of ekphrasis to discuss how poetry can capture a ghostly, visual world (the genre being “the cornerstone” of this collection, according to Joanne O’Leary). Finally, in “A Matter of Life and Death” and “The Mutoscope” she moves from still pictures to movies and television. There are also poems about paintings (notably on the anamorphosis-­driven “Ambassadors” by Hans Holbein), jigsaws, puzzles, and musical keys, to name only the clearest instances of notation, translation and transformation, which the collection foregrounds and ultimately turns into its main subject.

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In short, Morrissey seems to be obsessed with the various relationships that we are capable of establishing with reality – both naturally, through senses, and through technology, as appendages enhancing our ability to observe and record. However, taking cue from the aforementioned definition of parallax, Morrissey does not probe how those systems of mediation limit our perception (as in traditional criticism of technology), but carefully scrutinizes what kinds of gaps they produce, offering us – as critics note – “meditation on skewed perspectives” (Joanne O’Leary) and “prompt reflections on perception and deception” (Fran Brearton). The point she seems to be making is that those gaps are both productive and dangerous. In this, she does not advocate a Kantian, anthropocentric universe, in which the human being is the sole judge of the world, who relegates the things-­in-­themselves into the realm of the indecipherable. On the contrary, Morrissey opens us to the world “beyond” – one that can be both liberating, since it bursts with possibilities, but is also an unsafe territory; more than that, it is haunted and super-­natural in the sense of exceeding our limited notions of what is “natural” in terms of representing reality. The concept of haunting could be said to hold keynote character here. There are numerous, recurring images that prove this. In “Baltimore,” Morrissey writes that “[i]n other noises, I hear my children crying” (2013, 12). In “Shadows” she contemplates how all objects are “casting vast apparitions / of themselves” (13). In “Photographs of Belfast by Alexander Robert Hogg,” “a man by the railings / ghosts himself / by turning his head too soon” (17). In “A Day’s Blindness” we learn about the haunting idea of losing sight, which plagues the protagonist into a relapse of trauma, thinking about “horses set loose from the Bond Yard / where his father worked / in the Hungry Thirties” (20). The poem “Fur,” in turn, meditates on the imminent death, as found in Hans Holbein’s famous painting, looming over the ambassadors “like an improbable boomerang” (23). Finally, in “The Doctors” she discusses Soviet dignitaries who fell out of favour and had to be erased (“doctored”) from archived photographs, launching a historical vicious circle, whose recent beneficiaries are “a nation’s girls and boys, all trained / in proper parlance, their fingers stained with soot” (47). In order to gather those threads, it would be quite illuminating to draw on the insights offered by hauntology – an original theoretical framework inspired by Jacques Derrida’s Spectres of Marx. In this book, the French philosopher makes the argument that the spectre of Marxism will only now – after the fall of major communist regimes – begin to exert its true influence, making it especially worthwhile to return to some of the questions raised by Marx; namely, questions of horrid political inequality and strife. His ghost, Derrida suggests, has turned into Europe’s conscience, and cannot be banished:

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Grzegorz Czemiel He [Marx] belongs to a time of disjunction, to that “time out of joint” in which is inaugurated, laboriously, painfully, tragically, a new thinking of borders, a new experience of the house, the home, and the economy. Between earth and sky. (2006, 219)

One of those questions, apparently, is connected with our inability to draw up an agenda for the future, to think in inspired, positively Messianic, utopian terms. Why is that? Because we are too much immersed in the present, which actually repeats patterns from the past (“retromania” or “archive fever”). Stuck inside the “jetlag effect” – as Skoulding puts it – we are searching desperately for “lost time,” but are in fact doomed to repeat the past ad nauseam, basically dispossessed of the virtuality that would guarantee a safe space in which possible futures can be fashioned. We seem to have lost “the capacity to conceive of a world radically different from the one in which we currently live” (Fisher 2012, 16) as “the past has a way of using us to repeat itself ” (19). Derrida advocates a necessity to deal with ghosts of the past not by banishing them – that would mean simply repressing them and thus producing more ghosts – but by taking them more seriously and entering a fruitful dialogue with them “in order to watch over the future” (Derrida 2006, 221). This approach calls for a renewal in ethics, because it entails accounting for the return of the repressed and drafting a possible future in dialogue with the past. What Morrissey’s poems are doing is they introduce gaps where technology and ideology have built countless bridges (whose existence we often no longer perceive), joining various elements of our experience into a personally globalised, homogenous reality that is always fully present to us in televised, mediated form, via broadcasting, Internet, smartphones, photography, print, ready-­made forms, etc. These gaps are necessary to put the past behind us and complete – as Fisher argues – the work of mourning for the virtual, potential futures, and overcome our profound inability to “fashion representations of our own current experience” (2012, 17). Finally, the said gaps ought to be pursued, like wonderful rabbit-­ wormholes, since they indicate a sense of wider reality where a broader spectrum of possibility is conceivable. Every means of representation is haunted by the idea or myth of “full” representation, but leaves avenues accessible through parallax-­or anamorphosis-­like procedures. Turning now to Zoë Skoulding, I would like to emphasise right away the kind of work of mourning that her collection performs. Its title – The Museum of Disappearing Sounds – refers to the question posed by Murray Schafer in his book The Soundscape: “Where are the museums for disappearing sounds?” Indeed, transience and elusiveness seem to be the fundamental characteristics of sounds. However, human ingenuity has provided us with means to overcome this fallacy. First, we have writing and second – audio recording. Nevertheless, neither of

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them seems to render the reality of experience in a truthful manner since parallax always occurs in the process, shifting and dislocating meaning (in the case of writing) or alienating and detuning the relationship between body and voice (in the case of recording). Both phenomena ultimately have an uncanny effect. As Andrzej Marzec points out, the irreducible polysemy of literary works can be understood in terms of their “haunted” status; they speak in many voices, some of them unwanted, habitually exorcised. Taking cue from works by Abraham and Torok, we can speak of cryptonimie – a process of sedimentation, which leaves impenetrable layers of meaning in every work, turning every story into a possible vehicle for haunting ghosts ventriloquising from inside within (Marzec 2013, 256-­7). Human voice, on the other hand, can be mummified in audio recordings, which contributes to a multiplication of ghosts that now surround us on a daily basis, at the same time feeding our neurotic desire to cleanse the acoustic realm and banish them (Repucha 2013, 67-­69). Skoulding constructs powerful images to convey this: “a detuned radio in one lung,” “coughing in wave forms,” “vanishing in lossy compression” (“The Museum For Disappearing Sounds” 2013, 7-­8), or “voice returning un-­/ like itself heavier and thicker in rustles and clicks / of words outside the head where / a life may be erased with / its own sound” (“tape recorder,” 14). What does this haunting suggest? It can be argued that within ourselves we find lodged a fundamental alienation, since we are not exactly overlapping with our own voice. When literature or music draws our attention to its status as medium, we start observing that alienation effect. In a sense, we may feel dispossessed or cut off from our own speech and thoughts, which turn out to belong to a world beyond ourselves – a world of sounds and meanings that we cannot fully control and need to accept as the environment that we inhabit and share (not govern and manage!). This seems to be the kind of impulse standing behind Schafer’s resolution “to treat the world as a macrocosmic musical composition (1994, 5). In a nutshell, this goes in line with the kind of ecological post-­humanism that has become more and more influential in the humanities, paving the way not for the elimination of subjectivity as such but rather for broadening our horizon through considering an entire universe around and beyond us. Incidentally, poetry is the kind of art that lies at the crossroads of writing and sound, since it broaches script and breath. This tension is greatly emphasised in both collections, which employ many different stanzaic forms and strategies of versification – elements that are specifically not expressed in acoustic terms. The Gate House Press review of Skoulding’s book contains an important observation that “sound is present in some form in every poem […] requiring the reader to

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make a commitment to seeking out the sounds alluded to in the title,” which is not unlike Schafer’s “clairaudience” – sifting through aural “sludge” for “sounds that matter” (2014, 11-­12). As for Morrissey, Fran Brearton notes that through a careful selection of line-­lengths and shapes, Parallax “enacts the theme it propounds, craftily shifting both the point of observation and the shape of the object/poem itself.” In this way, both Morrissey and Skoulding demonstrate how a particular graphic form is also a way of framing the subject, creating spatial “rooms” which act as resonating chambers. Skoulding’s collection, for that matter, is concluded with a poetic cycle titled The Rooms. Notably, the word stanza means “room” in Italian, so the notion of walking through poems and measuring the footsteps (i.e. metrical feet) can be compared to reading and/or writing. These rooms are very gothic in terms of their stylisation, which only enhances the sense of imminent haunting and having to encounter resounding ghosts – dispossessed meanings, entombed yet disturbed: “no longer / a voice but the room itself repeating” (Skoulding 2013, 68). In “Room 321,” for example, “you are overcome by / your love of mirrors” (57). In “Room 201” we read that “[e]very different room / becomes the same in every sameness changed” (58), while in “Room 117” we encounter “ghost of a ghost of / a ghost out of reach” (59). In short, we are lost in an unsettling maze of reflections, haunted nooks and crannies in a never-­ending sound-­labyrinth. “Any direction of / language,” we learn in room No. 117, “is uncertain in this breeze that / reverberates through my chest / shaking lace / curtains and their skeleton tracery” (59). What Skoulding presents here could be associated with a museum-­cum-­cemetery reminiscent of Pirandello’s prisons or Escher’s infinite loop-­castles. What haunts then? From the perspective offered in this article, these may be the lost futures – the unrealised potentials hiding in meanings, or the virtuality that had been formatted and cut according to a limited agenda of human pragmatism, leading to stasis. This point is made clearest in “Room 35,” where “nothing holds up.” “You are lost,” we learn, “in a basement where there’s no / exchange only repetition.” To free oneself from that deathly room, where “the light’s not coming,” we have to try to speak “in a language / you only partly understand // Begin / the beautiful sentence you have chosen / without seeing how it will ever” (Skoulding 2013, 64). This abrupt ending is not at all disturbing. On the contrary, it seems utterly liberating, since it attempts to convey exactly what the hauntological ethics tries to point out – the necessity to reinstate the virtue of potentiality, befriending the ghosts (another form of otherness), which is the only way to emerge successfully from the lockdown of eternal presence and traumatic past. What this boils down to, I would argue, is an attempt to renegotiate the past and the future, i.e. reconcile death with life. This is the ultimate stake here, since

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both books inspect the idea of haunting. Although they closely examine various media, their critical edge is oriented at poetry’s own potential to help carve out life from the present (for the two do not seem to be synonymous anymore). If there is one poem that could conveniently sum this up, it is Sinéad Morrissey’s “A Matter of Life and Death.” In this longer narrative piece, the lyrical subject recalls the afternoon when she went to labour, waiting and watching at home the 1946 film under that very title, starring David Niven. The WWII film about a RAF pilot, now available in Technicolor, contains “otherworldly scenes” featuring a literal stairway to heaven, which appears after switching into monochrome, as Morrissey puts it: “an anachronistic afterlife in grey in which dead airmen sign in under name and rank” (2013, 42). This “invoicing of the dead” sparks a meditation on such “checks and balances.” Morrissey is inspired in this by her deceased grandmother, who used to say that “when a new life comes into a family, an old life goes out” (43). This bookkeeping, however, does not seem to make Morrissey comfortable. Instead, she stubbornly “imagines” her grandma “not dumb and stricken and hollowed out with cancer // but young, glamorous, childless, free, in her 1940s’ shoes and sticky lipstick, clicking about the office of new arrivals as though she owns it, flicking open the leather-­bound ledger” (43). To sum up, I would claim that such poetry makes the effort to negotiate between life and death. In a sense, we can locate this willingness in the very gesture of the poem, which is brought to life – with bodily breath – from its status of potentiality. This power is reasserted from a future-­oriented perspective by both Zoë Skoulding and Sinéad Morrissey. As a result, these authors in fact reassert what poetry can do, confirming that it can be a true medium of communication – not a magical spell used to entomb ghosts, binding them to the repressive function they perform in our culture. To recapitulate the road taken here: by probing the extent to which verse is able to record image and sound, the two collections ultimately offer a meditation on the limits of literature and guide us towards new, potential futures.

Works Cited Brearton, Fran. 2013. “Parallax by Sinéad Morrissey – review.” The Guardian, September 6. Derrida, Jacques. 2006. Spectres of Marx, the State of the Debt. Translated by Peggy Knauf. New York: Routledge. Fisher, Mark. 2012. “What Is Hauntology?” Film Quarterly, 66.1: 16-­24. Marzec, Andrzej.  2013. “Widma, zjawy i nawiedzone teksty – hauntologia Jacques’a Derridy, czyli o pośmiertnym życiu literatury.” In Wymiary powrotu

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w literaturze, edited by M. Garbacik, P. Kawulok, A. Nowakowski, N. Palich and T. Surdykowski, 255-­262. Kraków: Libron. Morrissey, Sinéad. 2013. Parallax. Manchester: Carcanet. O’Leary, Joanne. “Parallax by Sinéad Morrissey” (review). Web. Repucha, Adam. 2013. “Odwiedziny poltergeista. Od egzorcyzmu do etyki nagrania.” Czas Kultury 173.2: 66-­73. “Review: The Museum of Disappearing Sounds (Zoë Skoulding).” Web. Schaffer, Murray R. 1994. The Soundscape: Our Sonic Environment and the Tuning of the World. Rochester: Destiny Books. Skoulding, Zoë. 2013. The Museum of Disappearing Sounds. Bridgend: Seren.

Jerzy Jarniewicz

Words, Pictures and Windows: From Alberti to Derek Mahon In 1435 in his treatise on the art of painting, De pictura, the Italian painter, architect and theoretician, Leon Battista Alberti, defined painting as an open window, finestra aperta. In the often quoted passage from his treatise he stated: First of all about where I draw. I inscribe a quadrangle of right angles, as large as I wish, which is considered to be an open window through which I see what I want to paint. (Alberti 2004, 7)

Alberti instructed artists to look at the rectangular frame of a painting as if it were a window leading from the flat surface of its pane to the three-­dimensional space beyond, or, in a more technical sense, enabling the painter to reproduce the three-­ dimensional space on the flat surface. Alberti’s metaphor was in fact an instruction of how to produce a satisfying linear perspective, but it soon came to stand for the transparent surface and the illusionistic power of visual representation. Ever since the two have become interchangeable: the painting (with its frame which delimits it) is like a window, and the window (which frames the opening unto the world) is like the painting. Carl Gustav Carus’s painting Studio Window (1823-­24), which juxtaposes an inverted canvas and a window against which the canvas is placed, is clearly an ironic comment on their traditionally acknowledged similarity: the painting obscures the view. In Stretcher with Cross Bars (1968) Roy Lichtenstein tackles the same issue even more ironically, producing a painting with a grid of horizontal and vertical lines, which can be both a stretcher frame and a window, but shows nothing. The theme of the painting as an open window has a long history in western art, with many modern artists contesting Alberti’s dictum, including Rene Magritte, who in The Human Condition (1933) painted a view from a window within a window which is also a picture within a picture, to show that a painted window obscures more than it opens, or Marcel Duchamp, who in Fresh Widow (1920) ridiculed Alberti’s metaphor by depicting a window which is anything but transparent, leading to no space beyond. Though Alberti’s concept of finestra aperta comments on the nature of visual representation, one can wonder if it can be applied also to verbal arts; not only to pictures, but also to poems. Can we say that a poem is like an open window?

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Can we think of words as windows? This might have been the point the Irish poet Derek Mahon made, when he decided to reproduce a painting with a window on the cover of one of his books, Collected Poems (1999). It is by no means Mahon’s only book cover that bears a reproduction of a painting, but for a variety of reasons it is perhaps his most significant: it shows an oil painting by Sir John Lavery (1856-­ 1941), a celebrated Belfast-­born painter, associated with the Glasgow School, influenced by James Whistler and serving as Britain’s Official War Artist. Lavery’s painting, from the collection of Ulster Museum in Belfast, shows the artist’s studio in London, though the city is identified neither in the work’s title, nor in the painting itself. Most of the painting’s space is taken by an enormous window, painted frontally, which nearly dwarfs the female figure in the lower part of the canvas, with her knees on a large sofa, as if she were kneeling; her hands spread and extended, her head raised and turned upward to the sky behind the window pane. The woman is turned away from the viewers, just as the framed inverted canvas placed against a cupboard, bottom left, which hints upon an image the viewers will not be able to see. The two faces, that of the woman and that of the canvas, remain inverted, suggesting the parts of the scene depicted by the artist, which we will never be able to confront unless we stand behind the painting and try to look at it from the other side. But who could do it? Is there another side of the window? In fact, the woman’s face, if turned to us, should be familiar to many viewers. She is Hazel Lavery, the artist’s second wife, who served as a model for the symbolic figure of Ireland when it gained independence. Her likeness as Cathleen ni Chuillenan was reproduced on Irish banknotes until the introduction of euro. The woman’s elongated figure shows her as being elated, as if she were trying to take off and fly out of the studio. The high window seems to attract her with what lies beyond it – the Larkinian “deep blue air.” It is only after a while that we notice high up, behind the window, numerous tiny marks, which at first may be taken for birds, but are in fact German bombers that have come to destroy London. The moment is ripe to reveal the title of Lavery’s painting: Daylight Raid from My Studio Window, 7 July 1917. It is the time of the First World War, one year after the Easter Rising. The visual insignificance of the bombers stands in direct contrast to the concrete danger they embody. The contrast is even greater when one remembers that the big window is looking out onto the sky over the city full of light; sunrays fall into the studio and paint the walls white. The window in Lavery’s painting offers a look outside onto the vastness of the sky, to “the elsewhere,” but it is also a source of light.

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It is this source of light that the woman seems to be attracted to. The studio, in contrast, with its looming dark and cold interior that overwhelms her, looks like a cage. Her raised head and the delicate figure, dressed in near transparent white, suggest that she may be trying to escape the confinement of the place, or, more generally, the limits of art, and to move towards the realm that she sees beyond the window pane. The irony being that the external world, promising her liberation, is the world at war. However, there is another type of irony at work here: what seems to lead beyond is but an illusory opening, a surface as flat as that of the canvas we are looking at. Let us notice that the rectangular frame of the window repeats the rectangular frame of the painting itself. There is an ambiguity in the manner the window is painted: though it seems to lead beyond the canvas, into the deep blue air, it repeats the rectangular shape of the painting, visually echoing it and revealing itself to be – not a window – but a painting within a painting. If, as suggested, the studio is a cage, then it is a cage of a two-­dimensional, illusionistic space that only pretends to have depth. It is a space of unsurpassable materiality, enclosed by the painting’s framing and condensed by its flatness. Though the viewer is invited to follow the woman’s gaze up towards the sky, his or her gaze can only wander on the flat surface of the painter’s work. There is no beyond that the window seems to lead to. The depth of the picture is the space of an illusory opening, drawing the viewers’ attention to what is far beyond, but at the same time revealing its constraints by repeating the framing of the picture-­within-­the-­picture as the window frame. Space is intensified in terms of depth, while at the same time it is constrained by the vertical and horizontal lines which double the horizontals and the verticals of the canvas. In 1971 in Tunis Michel Foucault gave a series of lectures on Edouard Manet. Foucault’s comments on the art of Manet can be applied to Lavery’s painting, despite the obvious differences between the French impressionist and the Irish realist. In his study of Manet, Foucault claims that the painter “far from wishing to make the viewer forget the rectangle on which he paints, does nothing but reproduce it, insist on it, double it and multiply it in the very interior of his picture” (2009, 67). In Foucault’s reading of Manet’s paintings, the French artist closes the depth that his paintings seem to have created and signals that “there is nothing to see behind” (35). In The Execution of Maximilian there is a wall behind the soldiers which closes the depth of the painting, foregrounding the two-­dimensional character of the picture. In The Masked Ball at the Opera two vertical pillars and a horizontal bar

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Jerzy Jarniewicz frame the picture, which in a way doubles inside the picture the vertical and the horizontal of the canvas. This large rectangle of the canvas is repeated inside and it closes the depth of the picture, preventing, consequently, the effect of depth. (35-­36)

In Argenteuil the vertical axis of the mast repeats the edge of the picture, while the horizontal lines of the walking stick and the board on which the two figures sit double the horizontals of the canvas. In his painting Lavery makes use of the grid of verticals and horizontals in a manner surprisingly similar to Manet. The painterly character of Lavery’s painting is further emphasized by the framed inverted canvas in the left bottom corner. This canvas, which we see only from behind, fits only partially within the frame of Lavery’s painting, suggesting that it extends beyond the frame, leading our eyes further to the left in anticipation of seeing the rest of the canvas, and thus disrupting the closed space of the painting, revealing its incompleteness. This is the object which the observer will never be able to see fully. The canvas on the stretchers, standing so close to us, obscures a fragment of Lavery’s painting, indicating the continuity of the scene beyond the frame. However, let us return to the big bay window. What makes it so powerful in visual terms is not only its unusual size and the light it lets in, but also its lower part, which is a patch of utter black forming the darkest space of the whole composition. The black rectangle, possibly shutters or wooden boards, occupy almost the very centre of the painting, putting an abrupt end to the progression of the painting deeper into its illusory space, and reminding the viewers that wherever their gaze may still wander, it will eventually come across an obstacle of this kind, a patch of black paint, which emphasizes the painting’s impervious materiality and flatness. The black patch, like Manet’s wall in his Execution of Maximilian, signals that despite the painting’s illusionism there is nothing beyond it. The picture ends here, though immediately over this black patch is the bluish brightness of the window occupying the rest of the painting’s centre and extending upwards toward the top frame. Lavery’s painting is reproduced on the cover of one of Derek Mahon’s poetry collections. The horizontals and the verticals, which close the painting and stand in sharp contrast to its optical depth, find further reinforcement in the white lines which frame the reproduction and which are subsequently repeated by the rectangular lines of the cover of the book itself. Thus, a procession of rectangles is formed: the rectangular shape of the book includes the white rectangle which frames the reproduction of Lavery’s rectangular painting, which includes the rectangular frame of the window. Lavery’s painting, despite its obvious traditionalism, is thus riddled with ambiguities of confinement and open space, imprisonment and liberation, creation and destruction, seeing and knowing.

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I have decided to look closer at the reproduction of Lavery’s painting on the cover of Mahon’s Collected Poems as I believe that this painting may be seen as a work that interestingly problematizes Alberti’s concept of finestra aperta; but it also can be treated as a visual introduction to the bulk of the poet’s work. The paintings on the covers of his books, though by no means illustrating Mahon’s poems, engage in an intersemiotic dialogue with the poet’s words, foreshadowing his main concerns and announcing his techniques or modes of representation. Visual arts have always been of great interest to Derek Mahon. His ekphrastic poems, which he has continued to write since his first collection, Night-­Crossing (1968), can be placed in the very centre of the poet’s work, defining and reflecting his aesthetic and ideological choices. They reveal the poet’s highly individual pictorial imagination, his appetite for the visible world, but more specifically they also testify to his fascination with the visual arts – not as “sister arts,” which share the same (dubious) parentage with poetry, but as the poetry’s challenging Other. Encountering the Other, as he does in many of his ekphrastic poems, Mahon tests the limits of language, examines its capability for expressing what lies beyond it and is often deemed inexpressible. His interest in ekphrasis is linked with his awareness of the increasingly mediated character of experience. His nostalgic search for the real, his need to access “the mute phenomena” existing independently of our cognition, is supplemented by an equally strong sense of the ubiquity of images. Hence his poems abound with references to all kinds of representations: paintings, photographs, postcards, prints, posters, as well as images from films and television. In Mahon’s poetry, this vicariousness of today’s visual world problematizes the issue of representation in a way which may be seen as parallel to what happens in the paintings of Manet or Lavery: his poems often turn towards themselves, become self-­reflexive, foreground their own artificiality, loosening ties with their ostensible referents. To Mahon, painting and photography have remained the Other, which the verbal art could supplement. The concept of light, which informs so many of Mahon’s poems, is often the light coming to them via the paintings and photos he is describing, as if images were capable of opening for poetry the possibilities that it has been denied. Mahon looks for the extensions of his art in painting as often as he extends his experience of the visual arts by translating them into the verbal arts. In his approaches to painting Mahon has never come close enough to deconstructing the very foundations on which poetry is built, to making it “be” rather than “mean,” as Archibald MacLeish postulated in his “Ars Poetica.” However, he would open his poetry to the visual elements, as for example in his “letter poems,” which advertise their own textuality: in “The Yaddo Letter” he reproduces

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a letterhead, complete with the logo of the hotel, its name and address, on the top right side of the poem (Mahon 1995, 27). He would pay special care to the graphic arrangement of his poems on the page, using graphically charged stanzaic forms or visible rhyming patterns. Such practices help us perceive his poems as objects, almost physical and tangible, not as works consisting of transparent signs directing our attention elsewhere, to the realm of mental concepts and images. Paintings, two-­dimensional compositions, open up the spatial world; they seem to extend smoothly to what is beyond them; they exist in a contiguous relationship with the external reality. They are like gaps, crevices, or Alberti’s windows, through which one can have a glimpse of the real. Words cannot boast of such an affinity with the external world – they clearly belong to a different order than the physical objects that constitute paintings. They are so different from what encircles them that, in contrast to pictures, they do not need frames to differentiate themselves from what is outside. It has been the ambition of many poets to produce poems that would be like paintings, windows on the world, enabling the reader to see things and not only read about them. Yet Mahon shares this ambition only partly: he would like to make use of the capabilities of words rather than disavow them. The world onto which he would like to open his verbal windows is not the world available solely to the sensuous eye (which is the realm of painting), but also the world of the seemingly invisible, perceived only by the inner eye. In one of his early books, Mahon made a one-­off radical departure from his poetics and moved towards concrete poetry in its visual variant. Concrete poetry was an international movement, flourishing in the 1950s and 1960s, which seemed to answer MacLeish’s call for the poems to “be” rather than “mean.” “Oh, poet, give me something I may see and touch, and not what I can only hear” – these words of Leonardo da Vinci were quoted by the Italian concrete poet, Carlo Belloli, to define the kind of poetry he and his fellow travellers were aiming at (Solt 1970, 44). The concrete poets tried to create, as Edwin Morgan put it, “the future universal, common language” (Nicholson 2002, 92), not a system of arbitrary signs, but a mode of communication by means of material, graphic forms. Their goal was to “make an object to be perceived rather than read” (Solt 1970, 7). This made the concrete poems of Pierre Garnier, Eugen Gomringer, Emmett Williams, Jiři Kolář, or Ian Hamilton Finlay, aspire to the condition of visual arts, with their simultaneity, immediacy and spatial articulation. The graphic space of the poem, usually neglected or ignored, became an element of structural importance. In consequence, the poems that made use of spatiality questioned Lessing’s definition of poetry as a primarily non-­spatial, temporal art. In their numerous anthologies and manifestos, the international concrete poets seemed to be implementing the vision from Saint-­John Perse’s poem, i.e. one of birds which are “of no abstract

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origin, strangers to myth and legend, resisting with every fibre of their being the decadence of symbolism,” birds which are “far from ‘literary’” and “unreferential” (Perse 2002, 30-­31). Mahon’s foray into the territory of concrete poetry resulted in a poem called “The Window,” which was published in Poems 1962-­1978 and has never been reprinted since. The poem is so different from other examples of Mahon’s poetry that Hugh Haughton leaves it out of his study of Mahon’s work. Though it is indeed unusual, it nevertheless fits well in the context of the poet’s interests in the visual arts, bridging the gap between images and words. woodwoodwoodwoodwoodwoodwoodwood io oo n o o  w d   d w    i o   w o    n w  o o    d i    o d    o n   d w  w d   w o     i o    o o    n w   o d    d i     d w   o n   w wind o   w d    o o  i o    o d    n w   d w   d i    w o    o n  d w  w d  o o   i oo on woodwoodwoodwoodwoodwoodwoodwood dwoodwoodwoodwoodwoodwoodwoodwoodw odwoodwoodwoodwoodwoodwoodwoodwoodwo

“The Window” is a poem that can be seen and not only read, a visual work which graphically represents the object named in the title: the window. The frames of the window are made of two repeated words “wood” and “window,” the latter appearing only in the vertical columns. Inside the window thus created, within the poem’s frames, one finds the word “wind” standing on its own and not repeated. All of the words used in the poem, and there are only three of them (“wood,” “window,” “wind”), are phonetically related, all of them include the two consonants “w” and “d.” The word “wind,” which appears inside the figure, is literally in the window: “wind” is inside the word “window.” This observation is shown graphically

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by placing the shorter word, “wind,” inside the figure which the longer word, “window,” denotes. The poem seems not to be saying, but showing that there is wind in the window. The statement can be understood literally, as a report on the state of things, a remark about the draught caused by the open window. But it is also a metalinguistic statement saying something about words (“wind” and “window”), not about the non-­verbal, external reality. The referent of the sentence “There is wind in the window” may be the words themselves (in which case the sentence would be regarded as metalinguistic), or the natural phenomenon. By interweaving the three words and making one develop into another, Mahon materializes the language of the poem: the words foreground their form and become material, non-­referential elements out of which the object named in the title is built. The window, as if painted by words, is an open window with two sashes. They are foreshortened, represented in a linear perspective, which suggests depth in what is otherwise a two-­dimensional typographical picture. The words that make up the sashes create an illusion of leading deep beyond the flat surface of the page, just as the window in John Lavery’s painting. The reader is invited to look outside, out of the window, yet what he or she notices is only a word – “wind.” I suggest seeing this word as performing the same function as the black patch which obliterates the lower part of the window in Lavery’s painting or as the wall that stops the depth of Matisse’s Execution of Maximilian. The word “wind” is the only element of the poem that does not imitate what it means; it is the most “verbal” (i.e. arbitrary and conventional) of the three words. It breaks the illusion and foregrounds the artificiality of verbal representation in the same way that the black patch broke the illusion of depth and revealed the artificiality of visual representation in Lavery’s painting. In this visual poem, which is so unusual for him, Mahon seems to be opening the window of language in order to show that what we see outside and beyond it can only be a word. Beyond the poem there is nothing but words. Ironically then, his concrete poem uses the means of concrete poetry to show that perfect concreteness (visuality) is impossible, since there is always a word underlying even the most graphic and formal usages of words. Paradoxically, Mahon’s most visual poem reveals the inescapably verbal character of any kind of poetry, no matter how hard the poet would try to approach the condition of visual arts and find in them inspiration for his poems. Words need other words as their frame in which and thanks to which they acquire meaning. Poems may open windows as pictures do, but their windows, though often testifying to the insufficiency of language, lead only to other words.

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Works Cited Alberti, Leon Battista. 2004. On Painting. Translated by Cecil Grayson. London: Penguin Books. Foucault, Michel. 2009. Manet and the Object of Painting. Translated by Matthew Barr. London: Tate Publishing. Haughton, Hugh. 2007. The Poetry of Derek Mahon. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Mahon, Derek. 1995. The Hudson Letter. Loughcrew: Gallery Press. Mahon, Derek. 1999. Collected Poems. Loughcrew: Gallery Press. Masters, Christopher. 2011. Windows in Art. London: Merrell. Nicholson, Colin. 2002. Edwin Morgan. Inventions of Modernity. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Perse, Saint-­John. 2002. Birds. A Version by Derek Mahon. Loughcrew: Gallery Press. Solt, Mary Ellen, ed. 1970. Concrete Poetry. A World View. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

Part II Prose

Philip V. Allingham

Re-­Reading Great Expectations and Re-­Thinking Its Genres: The Programmes of Illustration from 1860 through 1910 Figure 1. John McLenan: Uncaptioned Headnote Vignette, 9.5 x 6 cm. Harper’s Weekly, 24 November, 1860. 740.

Although Dickens’s 1861 novel, written as a weekly serial out of desperation to save the circulation of his weekly journal All the Year Round from the adverse

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effects of Charles Lever’s A Day’s Ride, is acknowledged as a classic of English literature and is widely purchased and read, both in English-­and non-­English-­ speaking countries​(sometimes even inspiring imitation and lampoon in such vehicles of popular culture as South Park), Great Expectations remains a novel not easily categorised, and not even acknowledged generally as a species of serial or illustrated fiction. Among other positions that Great Expectations occupied, even at the outset, was that of an unillustrated serial in All the Year Round, an illustrated serial in Harper’s Weekly: A Journal of Civilization, an illustrated volume published by T. B. Peterson of Philadelphia (1861, again featuring the wood-­engravings of John McLenan), an unillustrated Chapman and Hall first edition, and an Illustrated Library Edition (1862 and 1864, with a series of large-­scale wood-­engravings produced by Marcus Stone in collaboration with Dickens himself). Confusingly, many references simply assert that it appeared without illustration. And, of course, since those initial appearances Great Expectations have been illustrated in volume editions of Dickens’s works by such nineteenth-­century artists as Sol Eytinge, Jr. (The Diamond Edition, 1867), F. A. Fraser (The Household Edition, 1876), Frederic W. Pailthorpe (The Kerslake Edition, 1885), Charles Green (The Gadshill Edition, 1897), H. M. Brock (Imperial Edition, 1903), A. A. Dixon (Collins Pocket Edition, 1905), and Harry Furniss (The Charles Dickens Edition, 1910). These editions demonstrate the changing perceptions of the novel in America and Britain over a fifty-­year period. While it is true that monthly part-­publication, initiated in The Pickwick Papers, was becoming a thing of the past, the new illustrated magazines, including such high-­circulation quality periodicals as Good Words (1860), Belgravia (1866), and The Graphic (1869), would bring some of the Victorian period’s greatest writers cheaply into British homes, accompanied by plates produced by such notable graphic artists as Arthur Hopkins, Hubert Von Herkomer, and Robert Barnes. The United States already had Harper’s Weekly (1857), a large-­format illustrated weekly based on such British illustrated periodicals as The Illustrated London News (1842); and in the mid-­1860s readers of Harper’s appreciated the work of such talented countrymen as E. A. Abbey, Sol Eytinge, Felix Octavius Carr Darley, and John McLenan, among a host of American illustrators for books and periodicals. Accordingly, it would be more accurate to assert that, after the publication of A Tale of Two Cities (1859) – unillustrated and therefore quite inexpensive at tuppence as opposed to sixpence per issue for Good Words, for example – Dickens failed to grasp the new direction that illustrated fiction was taking in All the Year Round’s latest rivals: Once a Week, founded in 1859, and The Cornhill and Good Words, both founded in 1860.

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Although several possible explanations may account for the “falling-­off ” in quality, which Michael Steig, among others, detects in the Phiz sequence for the 1859 novel (1978, 131), he speculates that, owing to the novelist’s growing lack of interest in illustration, Dickens provided “Browne less interesting subjects and relatively little guidance. Perhaps another factor was that A Tale of Two Cities was written for weekly part-publication (in All the Year Round), and it is thus unusually compressed in its bulk and schematic in its plan and development” (312). Much of Browne’s work involves contemporary settings and characters in nineteenth-­ century costume, so that, as Percy Muir uncharitably remarks of his work for A Tale of Two Cities, “[t]he figures look like characters in a masquerade and not very convincing ones at that” (1971, 96). Muir and Steig seem to concur in their explanation for this inferior narrative series: “[t]he sad fact is that the poor man’s powers were declining” (Muir, 97). Like Alan S. Watts in “Why Wasn’t Great Expectations Illustrated?”, Steig attributes Dickens’s abandonment of his long-­time illustrator Phiz as symptomatic of Dickens’s changing attitudes towards pictorial accompaniment by the end of the 1850s: “[t]he fact is that Dickens no longer felt the need for illustrations” (2000, 8) because “the days of illustrated novels were drawing to an end, and possibly Dickens foresaw this” (9). In fact, part-­publication continued to be a vehicle for new novels right up to the end of the century, and illustrated books for adult consumption continued to be produced in great numbers until the First World War. Moreover, magazine fiction for adults was often illustrated, as was the case, for example, with the short stories of George Gissing. After severing his connection with Browne in 1859, had Dickens wanted illustrations, he would have had to seek out a new collaborator, a search made difficult by the marked change in style and use of book illustrations in the late fifties. The familiarity of the subject matter in the new realistic fiction and the growing sophistication of the reading public made illustrators less essential to the novels of the 1860s than they had been to the novels of the forties and fifties. (Davis 1984, 139)

On the other hand, Muir, like A. J. Hammerton, suggests that “Dickens felt the need of new blood” (1971, 97) in illustrating Great Expectations. Certainly on the eve of his second American reading tour Dickens seems to have been quite interested in the numerous Sol Eytinge illustrations in the Diamond Edition, and in the Eytinge and Sir John Gilbert illustrations intended to accompany A Holiday Romance in the Ticknor-­Fields illustrated juvenile monthly magazine Our Young Folks: “[t]hey are remarkable for a most agreeable absence of exaggeration, a pleasant sense of beauty, and a general modesty and propriety which I greatly like” (“To

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J. T. Fields, 2 April 1867”). Although this letter to the novelist’s American publisher may suggest Dickens’s desire to remain current with popular taste, the Eytinge vignettes for A Holiday Romance are hardly the “austere” (Steig 1978, 11) and serious productions that Michael Steig asserts are characteristic of 1860s illustrators. In any event, issuing monthly illustrated parts of a novel simultaneously with weekly instalments in a periodical Dickens himself did not attempt, even if Great Expectations, as it appeared in Harper’s Weekly, was the first “illustrated edition.” But Dickens evidently had not abandoned the notion of having Great Expectations illustrated; rather, he postponed what Joanna Robinson terms the “remediation” (2014, 46) of his most recent novel until he could find a suitable young artist attuned to the new style of the sixties: realistic, three dimensional, and freer in its interpretation of the material realised. That artist proved to be none other than the son of his old friend and fellow amateur thespian Frank Stone. Other significant illustrators of the novel include F. A. Fraser, Frederick W. Pailthorpe, Sol Eytinge, Jr., Charles Green, and Harry Furniss. But, in essence, each of these talented nineteenth-­century illustrators was interpreting the novel in a different way because they regarded Great Expectations as conforming to the conventions of different subgenres of the Victorian novel: the Bildungsroman, the novel of crime and detection, the silver fork novel, the Newgate novel, the Gothic novel, the novel-­ with-­a-­purpose, the historical novel, the serial fiction, and, of course, the romance. How did nineteenth-­century readers, from initial American serial publication to Furniss’s reading of the novel, receive Great Expectations? This “short” Dickens novel, one of just three he wrote for weekly serialisation, fits within a number of subgenres of the Victorian novel, but various programmes of illustration suggest the following constructions of the book are or would have been viable. One may attempt to position Great Expectations within the context of the Victorian novel (1837-­1901), or within the history of Dickens’s artistic output (1834-­1870). A novel serialised in weekly format, it is also his third major work to employ the first-­person narrative point of view, the other two being the quasi-­ autobiographical David Copperfield (1849) and (at least, in part) Bleak House (1852). The modern reader sees this novel as a retrospective, first-­person confessional. Alternatively, one may attempt to classify Great Expectations in terms of the various subgenres of the Victorian novel, for, unlike his earlier attempt at pseudo-­ autobiography, David Copperfield, Great Expectations does not fit so neatly into the German-­inspired Bildungsroman (novel of development, or growing up) or Künstlerroman (the novel of the apprenticeship of an artist, a form exemplified by Dickens’s supposed autobiography of writer David Copperfield, but not unsuited as a classification for the later first-­person novel since Pip in his early sixties is constantly present in the narrative).

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It is the premise of this discussion that Great Expectations is both a non-­ illustrated and an illustrated novel. Although the eight Marcus Stone wood-­ engravings may be taken as an expression of authorial intention, there are other equally attractive and informed illustrations from the nineteenth century, which did not enjoy Dickens’s imprimatur, but which should be considered as part of the nineteenth-­century reception of the novel: […] illustration provides not only a revealing insight into the artists who produce it but into the minds of the public that absorbed it. The illustrator’s picture is not always a delineation of how things actually looked or how they might have looked — but how a mass audience expected things to look. The visual image is an important index to the expectations and satisfactions of its audience. (Pitz 1968, 238)

To read a nineteenth-­century text which was originally illustrated in a format devoid of those original illustrations is to read a different novel, for the pictures (whether sanctioned by the writer, or merely provided by the publisher) offer cues to reading and clues as to how the book was received by contemporary readers. With the exception of Marcus Stone, no illustrator of Great Expectations operated under Dickens’s control, although after initial publication both Sol Eytinge, Junior, and F. O. C. Darley seem to have won Dickens’s approval. He scrupulously supervised the work of Browne and the Christmas Book illustrators – evidence of his “desire to retain control over his texts and readers” (Robinson 2014, 47) through his four decades as a novelist. With the exception of Stone’s short programme, “remediation,” transforming Great Expectations into something entirely new, was accomplished outside his supervision – and largely after his death. Great Expectations was initially received as a romance. An older form than the novel, this genre continued to flourish well into the nineteenth century with works such as Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter. Romance subordinates realism to emotion, and offers intensely personal rather than rational or objective responses. Pip’s hopeless obsession with Estella ripples all the way through Great Expectations, and is in fact his chief motivation for becoming a “gentleman.” In Great Expectations, the second novel Dickens wrote during his furtive double life, romance elements include Pip’s miraculous transformation, an archetypal “wise woman” (a crusty fairy godmother), a princess under the curse of a broken heart, and a mansion frozen in time, all of which contribute to the book’s atmosphere of romance. Certainly, in his revised ending Dickens was at pains to show the tension between realism (the original ending, preferred by so great a critic as George Bernard Shaw) and the sentimental ending, which novelist Edward G. D. Bulwer-­Lytton and Dickens’s own “love interest,” Ellen Ternan, both requested.

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The revised ending reflects the fulfillment of an unrealistic, romantic wish of a forty-­nine year-­old-­man in a liaison with a twenty-­two-­year-­old actress. Figure 2. Marcus Stone: “Pip waits on Miss Havisham.” 13.2 x 8.8 cm. The Illustrated Library Edition, 1862. 65.

As is the case with such novels as Hard Times (1854), Dickens often relied on fairy-­tale patterns and archetypes, which appear again in Great Expectations. The patterns of the traditional fairy-­tale, whether of Grimm or Perrault, that Dickens exploited, have often been noted, as in Michael Kotzin’s Dickens and the Fairy Tale (1972). Here, at one level, fairy-­tale elements serve to underscore the theme of the inadvisability of trying to understand life in terms of the simplistic characters and situations of fairy-­tales. Dickens integrates elements of “fantasy – in a controlled and productive way – to enrich reality” (Campbell 2014, 39). Hence, Stone’s illustration “Pip Waits on Miss Havisham” (fig. 2) is not to be taken literally: it represents not what Pip’s senses tell him, but what psychologically he wishes her

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to be – a fairy godmother who will release him from his sister’s tyranny – and subsequently a mentor who is grooming him to be Estella’s husband. But one may argue that, like A Tale of Two Cities (1859), Great Expectations is framed as an historical novel, recalling the days of transportation. The pattern of a story’s originating in the past and moving forward to the year of publication is not uncommon in Victorian fiction; for example, Great Expectations begins just after the Napoleonic Wars and proceeds to recount events in detail until approximately 1832, before jumping ahead eleven years (1840-­5, the major period of England’s railway construction) to close the story. As is typical of such great Victorian historical novels as George Eliot’s Middlemarch, we begin a generation back and proceed to the present through the lives of developing characters. History unfolds at the national and personal level, until the reader comes to realize that we are history. The historical novel reconstructs the past in terms of the present. Sir Walter Scott made the form vastly popular at the beginning of the century, and Dickens’s twelfth novel, A Tale of Two Cities, is definitely of this genre as it transports the reader back to the French Revolution. In the Waverly Novels (1814-­1831), two cultures collide – the progressive, English and traditional, Scottish. Into this conflict Scott introduces fictional personages who become involved in actual events of the period and interact with well-­known historical personages. Jay Clayton notes that among the competing cultural periods the book encompasses is the Gothic revival of Wemmick’s make-­believe castle, suggesting the Romantic era’s yearning for a simpler, nobler past embodied in the poetry of the previous literary epoch, as well as in Sir Walter Scott’s Abbotsford (1811-­25) and the Waverly Novels. Clayton sees other eras as “competing” with this in the novel, in particular “the preindustrial capitalism of Joe’s forge” (1996, 623), Pip’s increasingly earnest Victorian values of duty and hard work, “with their clear connections to the fortunes of empire” (623), and the late Victorian “alienation” that affects Jaggers and produces the divided identity of his clerk, Wemmick – and as it caused Dickens to project the illusion of utmost propriety (the ideal Victorian identity of the philanthropist and family man) even as he arranged a separate maintenance for his wife of three decades and led a buried life with a blonde beauty twenty-­seven years his junior. Whereas other illustrators (such as Marcus Stone) have entirely overlooked the escaped convicts, or have focused instead on Magwitch’s dramatic encounter with Pip in the churchyard in the early chapters, as is the case with Furniss’s illustration “Pip’s Struggle with the Escaped Convict,” with only the benefit of McLenan’s illustrations as a reference, Darley has realised the dramatic moment when the party of soldiers comes across the two escapees, wrestling in the mud of the marshes. The tangle of arms, the expressions on the faces of Magwitch, Pip, and Joe, and the composition of the plate generally make it a highly effective realisation of a

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textual moment rarely dealt with by illustrators. In contrast to the central position accorded to Pip and his brother-­in-­law and surrogate parent in the Darley photogravure, note Fraser’s emphasis on the wrestling convicts and the absence of Pip as observer in “The sergeant ran in first” (fig. 3). Darley’s precision in the depiction of the military uniforms suggests that he researched the matter in order to make the illustration convincing historically. The most apt point of comparison for Darley’s dynamic handling of the convicts remains, however, John McLenan’s serial illustration “Three soldiers carry away Magwitch in shackles,” the uncaptioned headpiece for the 8 December 1860 issue of Harper’s Weekly: A Journal of Civilization. The 1861 frontispiece for the first volume by a renowned American illustrator, Felix Octavius Carr Darley (then thirty-­nine and well established as a professional artist), taken in conjunction with the frontispiece for the second volume (the return of Magwitch from Australia), suggests that, according to Darley’s reading of the novel just concluded in serial, this is a story of fathers (and surrogate parents) and sons, as Pip watches from Joe’s shoulder the apprehension of “his” convict, the man whose hard labour abroad will fund his great expectations. Neither plate significantly points to the influential females of the story, Mrs. Joe, Miss Havisham, and Estella, the latter two, however, appearing prominently in Marcus Stone’s wood-­ engravings for the Illustrated Library Edition. Whereas Stone’s series, by omitting Magwitch, withholds the plot secret of the source of Pip’s expectations, Darley’s second frontispiece must have created suspicions in the minds of alert readers. Figure 3. F. A. Fraser: “The sergeant ran in first.” 9.4 x 13.7 cm. The Household Edition, 1876. 16.

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The frontispiece for the second volume by Darley, taken in conjunction with that for the first (the apprehension of ragged convicts Magwitch and Compeyson after their escape from the hulks), reinforces the motif of fathers-­and-­sons, as the convict returns to see the London “gentleman” whom his hard labour abroad has created out of the poor orphan from the Medway marshes as vengeance on the gentlemanly class in general and Compeyson in particular. Darley’s handling of the revelation scene that so palpably provides the solution to secret of the source of Pip’s expectations – that the proletarian ex-­convict and not the brewery heiress is his secret benefactor, and that therefore Miss Havisham has not been grooming Pip to be Estella’s husband – is sensitive. As the slender, fashionably dressed youth in his early twenties brushes off Magwitch’s attentions, as if his mere touch would bring the contamination of the prison house, the balding convict in travelling great-­coat and boots (as if fresh from landing) pathetically reaches out to embrace the handsome gentleman that his years of labour in the Outback have created. Darley leaves it to the reader to determine the expression on Pip’s face, compelling the reader to identify with the smiling, open-­handed visitor from antipodean shores for whom return means death. In the background, Darley has placed details that bespeak Pip’s class, taste, and education: the framed miniature silhouette portrait (left), the painting of a rustic scene in the manner of John Constable (again, fashionable in the 1820s), the book-­lined shelf, the elegant Regency divan and chair, and the modern desk-­lamp that illuminates the interior scene, which is itself an enlightenment. Pip’s gentlemanly status is confirmed by the servant’s bell-­pull on the wall. Such detailing bespeaks a careful attempt to recreate the book as an historical document. Darley’s treatment of both the convict and his adopted son is far more subtle than that of A. A. Dixon in the 1905 Collins Pocket Edition, in which the illustrator depicts both the youth’s revulsion at having physical contact with the convict and the hearty older man’s beseeching look of devotion. However, despite the melodramatic overtones, Dixon’s modelling of the figures and detailing of Pip’s somewhat cluttered study is as convincing as Darley’s, although the 1905 lithograph lacks the sharpness and selectivity of the 1861 photogravure plate. David Paroissien speculates in the Companion to Great Expectations that, according to the logic of the novel, Estella was born about two years after the common-­law marriage of Molly and Abel Magwitch, about 1798, or about a year after the births of Pip, Herbert, and Biddy. Dickens, born in 1812, seems to be almost a generation younger, but Pip’s visits to Satis House begin about that year, reinforcing Dickens’s identifying himself with his protagonist. The guinea (Chapter Thirteen) went out of circulation in 1817, yet young Charles Dickens arrived in London by coach from Chatham, the marsh country of the tale, at the age of ten (1822). Pip is about twenty-­three in the middle of the book, and about thirty-­four at the end (in 1832, the year of the Great Reform Bill, which

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Dickens covered as a reporter for the True Sun). Dickens, who turned thirty-­four in February, 1846, seems to be inviting his readers to connect author and narrator, even though Magwitch makes his reappearance in Pip’s life on the young man’s twenty-­third birthday, a turning point in the life of the narrator which occurs in 1820 rather than 1835, when Dickens, turning twenty-­three, was hoping to abandon shorthand-­writing and journalism in order to embark on a career as a professional writer. Thus, a New Historical approach endeavours to rediscover the original meaning of the novel for its readers in 1860-­61 when it ran in weekly serialisation, and in 1862-­64 when it came out as a triple decker for W. H. Smith’s lending libraries and then as the single-­volume Illustrated Library Edition. The biographical approach does not entirely square with the New Historicist agenda since readers on neither side of the Atlantic (with a few notable exceptions, including Dickens’s confidants: the Fields, W. H. Wills and John Forster) knew anything about Dickens’s affair with the young, blonde-­haired actress. Figure 4. Charles Green: “‘With you — Hob and Nob,’ returned the Sergeant.” 13 x 20.4 cm. The Gadshill Edition, 1898. Frontispiece.

So how did the various illustrators, beginning with Harper’s house artist, John McLenan (working entirely without the writer’s advice and guidance) and Dickens’s collaborator, young Marcus Stone, shape the popular reception of the novel that remains one of the most taught and best-­selling in the Dickens canon? Neither space nor time will permit an exhaustive comparison of the two illustrators’ treatments of

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Dickens’s transatlantic novel, but a detailed discussion of several of Marcus Stone’s plates, which parallel those in John McLenan’s series, is possible within a small space. The logical place to begin, given the eccentricity of her dress and her prominence in both the plot and the British editions of 1862 and 1864, is Miss Havisham. Marcus Stone’s “Pip Waits on Miss Havisham” (fig. 2) from the 1862 Cheap edition and the 1864 Library edition (Chapman and Hall) involves a degree of naturalism and modeling barely evident in John McLenan’s three early Miss Havisham plates, pages 49, 63, and 70 in the 1861 T. B. Peterson edition. The specific letter-­press illustrated is this, as Pip carefully observes, bizarre figure: In an arm-­chair, with an elbow resting on the table and her head leaning on that hand, sat the strangest lady I have ever seen, or shall ever see. She was dressed in rich materials — satins, and lace, and silks — all of white. Her shoes were white. And she had a long white veil dependent from her hair, and she had bridal flowers in her hair, but her hair was white. Some bright jewels sparkled on her neck and on her hands, and some other jewels lay sparkling on the table. Dresses, less splendid than the dress she wore, and half-­packed trunks, were scattered about. She had not quite finished dressing, for she had but one shoe on — the other was on the table near her hand — her veil was but half-­arranged, her watch and chain were not put on, and some lace for her bosom lay with those trinkets, and with her handkerchief, and gloves, and some flowers, and a prayer-­book, all confusedly heaped about the looking glass. […] I saw that the bride within the bridal dress had withered like the dress, and the flowers, and had no brightness left but the brightness of her sunken eyes. I saw that the dress had been put upon the rounded figure of a young woman, and that the figure upon which it now hung loose had shrunk to skin and bone. (Great Expectations, Peterson edition, 49)

This description is hardly consistent with Marcus Stone’s initial realisation of the reclusive brewery heiress. In his eight full-­page wood-­engravings, he presents the mysterious chatelaine of Satis House in only two (“Pip Waits on Miss Havisham” and “A Rubber at Miss Havisham’s”), whereas all of Stone’s plates graph Pip’s journey from childhood to maturity, indicating that the Bildungsroman aspect of the novel was uppermost in the British illustrator’s mind. Of John McLenan’s thirty-­four full-­size wood-­engravings (in other words, those reprinted from the Harper’s serial in the T. B. Peterson single-­volume edition), four depict Miss Havisham in her boudoir, one shows her candle in hand in a corridor, and one depicts her ablaze in the dining-­ room. Thus, Miss Havisham is featured prominently in five of McLenan’s plates while, for example, Magwitch occurs in five, Joe in seven, and Pip in twenty nine. In “Pip Waits on Miss Havisham” (fig. 2) in contradiction to the letter-­press, Stone depicts her as youthful and attractive – a fairy princess rather than a wizened crone. Cap in hand, Pip slightly bends at the knees, while the large-­eyed, imperious woman with the elaborately arranged blonde hair and bare-­shouldered, voluminous wedding dress (apparently no worse for a number of years of wear),

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is sitting with her mirror just disappearing off the right-­hand margin. Commanding in presence, she is illuminated by candelabra, enthroned as it were before her humble supplicant, the blacksmith’s boy. This glowing image from Pip’s memory stands in contrast with the despondent, introverted, somewhat elderly and angular bride in front of her mirror given us by McLenan, who has responded more accurately (if less delightfully) to the letter-­press. As we turn page 48 in the 1861 Philadelphia volume we encounter the vignetted illustration “‘Who is it?’ said the lady at the table. ‘Pip, ma’ am.’— Page 49” before we actually find the same moment in the letter-­press. Whereas Stone had filled the frame with the enchanting fairy godmother, McLenan sets his crone in the midst of her furnishings and belongings. As in the text, open trunks (left and right) covered with clothing frame the scene, and an inward-­gazing Miss Havisham in an attitude of despondency, hand supporting her head, sits before an oval mirror which has four candelabra attached. Faithful to his copy, the illustrator has included such details as the white shoe on the dressing table (Pip indicates that he can see the other white shoe on her foot, which McLenan conceals beneath her skirts). Although neither artist has depicted the faded flowers, the watch and chain are evident just to the right of Miss Havisham’s left elbow in Stone’s version, important symbols of her rejecting the passage of time. An interesting if minor detail which varies in the two plates is Pip’s hat: in Stone’s illustration, Pip carries a cloth cap such as was worn by the British working class, whereas in McLenan’s plate he has a brimmed felt hat, which the American artist supplied from his own experience and period. Whereas the American artist has depicted the jewels that the letter-­press mentions twice, they are not present in Stone’s plate, which nevertheless glimmers by the light of four candles, in contrast to the faint glare of the four tapers in McLenan’s. Without unnecessarily dwelling upon such minutiae, one may simply note that the overall effect of the American periodical illustration is awkward and stilted, although technically accurate, whereas that of the English illustration is dramatic and powerful because Stone has reduced the scene to its essentials, and placed the contrasting figures in close proximity, balancing the difference in their heights by placing three candles above Pip and creating a sense of the numinous that the American plate entirely lacks. Miss Havisham remains a static, almost blind figure in McLenan’s “‘It’s a great cake. A bride-­cake. Mine!’—Page 63” (fig. 5) and “‘Which I meantersay, Pip.’—Page 70,” both of which are nevertheless accurate in the details of each scene, the dining room and the boudoir, although Pip is perhaps too well dressed for a mere labouring boy and one wonders how the latter scene is lit, considering that the windows are covered but the candles above Estella are unlit.

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Figure 5. John McLenan: “‘It’s a great cake. A bride-­cake. Mine!’” 11.1 x 8.9 cm. Harper’s Weekly, 5 January 1861. 5 (in the T. B. Peterson edition, facing 64).

Interestingly, in all three Havisham plates mirrors are central features, though none of these mirrors actually reflects anything. These “blind” mirrors may reflect the psychological blindness of Miss Havisham to her true condition; in David Lean’s 1946 film, Miss Havisham is, as Regina Barreca notes, “framed next to mirrors in a number of scenes, making visual the way the spinster wishes to multiply her image through Estella” (2003, 41). However, McLenan’s mirrors return no image, suggesting the sterility of lifelessness in Satis House, which accords well with the static, rigid depiction of the figures, rotund Joe furnishing in his darkly clad amplitude a sharp contrast to Miss Havisham’s severe whiteness, stark thinness, and pronounced angularity.

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The desiccated figure, who serves as a chronometer for the mature Pip, Herbert and Estella in Stone’s “A Rubber at Miss Havisham’s,” is still not quite the fairytale crone who becomes her own candle in fig. 4, McLenan’s plate opposite page 224 in the Peterson edition (also Harper’s, 4 May 1861, 286). However, one has the distinct sense that she has aged and shrunk considerably since Pip first encountered her in Stone’s narrative-­pictorial sequence, although she is still associated in Stone’s plate with lighted tapers, our view of Miss Havisham is blocked by the youthful figure of Estella, who is now the real power over Pip. As the smoke billows (right) and flames engulf her skirts in McLenan’s plate, we are still struck by the awkward rigidity of the figures. Although Miss Havisham’s look of horror is utterly convincing, her waist is not. In contrast, real bodies seem to have sat as the originals for all of Stone’s plates, which convey a pronounced tendency towards realistic portraiture: “Stone worked from models, and his naturalistic portrayals of characters suited the academic tastes of the times” (Cohen 1980, 204). Perhaps nowhere else in his series of plates for Great Expectations is Stone’s departure from what Cohen terms the outmoded “Hogarth-­Cruikshank-­Browne tradition” (204) of the steel etching more evident and effective than his last, with the mature Pip and Estella in the ruined garden at Satis House. The year after their principal author’s death, the Chapman and Hall commissioned new wood-­engravings for a series that would eventually amount to twenty-­ two volumes. The firm, desiring a new “sixties” look for the illustrations, recruited members of a new generation of artists that had moved away from the symbolic detailism and caricature of Phiz and Cruikshank. Although Fred Barnard received the commissions for a number of the new volumes, F. A. Fraser received the contract for Great Expectations (circa 1875). Including the frontispiece, Fraser’s series includes twenty-­eight plates for Great Expectations. Although the illustrations are generally of indifferent quality, Fraser excels in two wood-­engravings which feature the upwardly mobile Pip, the first in his apotheosis as a socialite, waiting upon Estella in an upper-­class reception, and the other the final scene in the ruined garden of Satis House when the protagonist returns to England after years of working abroad in middle management for the import-­export firm of Clarriker and Company. In Marcus Stone’s series of eight illustrations he does not realise either any of the novel’s great comic moments or any of Pip’s moments of anguish at losing Estella to Bentley Drummle, “The Spider.” Rather, Stone (probably in conjunction with Dickens) has chosen a moment that establishes a Collinsian atmosphere of watchful suspicion that envelops the last part of the book as the romantic plot yields for a time to the plot involving Provis and Compeyson. Despite Dickens’s protestations to his confidant John Forster that the new novel would contain a great deal of his old humour, especially in the character of the

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“good-­natured foolish man [Joe Gargery], in relations that seem to me very funny” (Letters, vol. 9, 325, “To John Forster, [early October 1860]”), the eight Marcus Stone illustrations and the thirty F. A. Fraser illustrations contain little humour, either situational or character related, and none of the book’s social satire as embodied in Pumblechook. Figure 6. F. A. Fraser: “‘Why should I look at him?’ returned Estella.” 13.2 x 18.1 cm. The Household Edition (1876). Frontispiece.

However, as F. A. Fraser implies by his full-­page realisation of the scene in Richmond (fig. 6) that apparently marks the beginning of Estella’s intention to marry the brutal and boorish (but aristocratic) Bentley Drummle, this is in part a silver-­ fork novel that juxtaposes the regional and working-­class existence of Pip as a child on the Marshes in the opening scenes with the London society scenes which Pip enters as an adult before losing his “expectations.” Since Pip as the narrator himself describes the scene (depicted in the Household Edition frontispiece), which occurs after the assembly-­room ball at Richmond, as “the one chapter to the theme that so filled my heart, and so often made it ache and ache again” (Chapter 38, Household Edition, 145), Fraser’s choice of subject for the frontispiece reflects a careful reading of the novel as a romance.

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Among Fraser’s thirty wood-­engravings there is but one occasion depicted when Pip is not present (this being fig. 3, “The sergeant ran in first” [Chapter 5, Household Edition, 16], in which the party of soldiers accompanied by Joe and Pip apprehends Magwitch and Compeyson fighting in the marsh), usually an interlocutor and observer rather than an actor or agent of the plot – and often a victim or receiver of action, both in such early illustrations as the uncaptioned plate in the first chapter (“And you know what wittles is?”, p. 2) and late in the novel, when Orlick had made Pip his captive in the hut by the lime-­kiln, “‘Do you know what this?’ said he” (illustration, Chapter 53, Houehold Edition, 200). In most of Fraser’s series, Pip appears at or near the centre of the composition, and is often depicted as interacting with just one other character. Even in the apprenticeship interview at Satis House, “Well, Pip, you know, […] you yourself see me put ‘em in my ‘at” (Chapter 13, Household Edition, 46), Pip responds to just one other character (in this case, Joe) even though others are present and listening to the conversation. He appears on four occasions by himself: initially, in the title-­page vignette, when in Chapter 53 Pip, unaccompanied, approaches the lime-­kiln on the Marshes and his fateful meeting with a lifelong adversary, Old Orlick; in Chapter 35, upon his return to the village for Mrs. Joe’s funeral, in “It was fine summer weather again”; in “Gradually, I slipped from the chair and lay on the floor” (illustration on page 152 in Chapter 39 of the Household Edition, when exhaustion overwhelms Pip after Magwitch’s reappearance in the character of his “uncle” from overseas), and again in Chapter 47, after Estella’s marriage, when Pip fights his restlessness by rowing on the lower reaches of the Thames, “I had had to feel my way back among the shipping” (Household Edition, 180). In short, from the number of occasions in which he appears in the visual text of the Household Edition there is no doubt as to his being the story’s central character in a “rags-­to-­riches” narrative. The number of times that other characters appear in the thirty illustrations, then, shapes the nature of the narrative as it would have been received by many readers on both sides of the Atlantic in the last quarter of the nineteenth century. Often, for example in the first part of the novel, Fraser has Pip appear with other children, with Estella, Biddy, and once with Herbert in “He said, ‘Aha! Would you?’ and began dancing backwards and forwards” in Chapter 11, thus reifying the Bildungsroman nature of that part of the narrative in a manner consistent with Wordsworth’s adage that “The child is father of the man.” Abel Magwitch, who appears in none of the original Marcus Stone illustrations, is, however, a significant presence in Fraser’s narrative-­pictorial sequence, appearing a total of five times, twice at the beginning and three times towards the end, realising the “Newgate” aspect of the novel. In terms of their appearances in the novel, four supporting

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characters stand out in the Household Edition: Miss Havisham, Herbert Pocket, Joe Gargery, and (most significantly) Estella. Admittedly, Harper’s illustrator John McLenan was merely guessing, as he read the serial instalments in proof, as to what directions the plot would take and which characters would assume greater prominence as the narrative developed, but clearly he regarded the three parental figures as second in importance only to Pip, for while over the course of forty illustrations Pip appears as child, youth, and adult some thirty-­four times (including one solo appearance), or in 85% of the weekly illustrations, Magwitch occurs in six (15%), Miss Havisham in the same proportion, and Joe in ten (25%). By contrast, perhaps because McLenan failed initially to anticipate her importance, Estella appears only five times (12.5%). However, with a great many spaces to fill week by week, McLenan has depicted in excess of twenty characters, although perhaps he misjudged the significance of such figures as Trabb’s boy, Molly, the Avenger, the Aged P., Wemmick, and especially Orlick (one appearance each). Appreciating the crime-­and-­detection and Newgate plots, however, McLenan has included four appearances by Jaggers, but, oddly, never depicts the shadowy criminal Compeyson. In contrast, Stone includes only nine significant characters, although of course he includes Pip in every illustration. On the other hand, Eytinge in the Diamond Edition’s eight small-­scale wood-­engravings treats all thirteen characters equally, even going so far as to devote one illustration each to such idiosyncratic characters as Jaggers, Trabb’s boy and Old Orlick, although his illustrations tend to be character studies rather than realisations of particular moments in the text. However, with thirty illustrations (for the most part, half-­page wood-­engravings) in his program, F. A. Fraser includes thirteen significant characters, as well as a few minor ones in an edition that reached thousands of readers on both sides of the Atlantic in the last quarter of the nineteenth century, numbers only exceeded by the weekly instalments published in Harper’s Weekly (1860-­61). Understandably, F. A. Fraser’s focal character, like McLenan’s and Stone’s, is Pip, who appears in all but two of the Household Edition illustrations, and is conspicuous by his presence in the first three illustrations and the last three. As is typical for a Household Edition volume, there is but one full-­page illustration, the frontispiece (fig. 6), which accords prominence to Pip’s beloved and Pip’s romantic rival, thereby establishing the importance of this romantic triangle from the outset. Although the ranking of the importance of characters by virtue of the number of times that Fraser has represented them is not altogether surprising, with Estella appearing a total of six times, the surrogate parent Magwitch five times and the other surrogates less often (Joe just four, Miss Havisham three, and Mrs. Joe not at all), it suggests that in selecting scenes for illustration Fraser had the romantic

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rather than the Newgate plot uppermost in his thoughts as his choice of scene for the large-­scale frontispiece confirms. Fraser also minimizes or entirely leaves out many of the comic supporting characters that are so typically Dickensian in their peculiarities and eccentricities (Pumblechook and Wopsle, for example), while giving supporting characters who stand in contrast to Pip (Biddy, Trabb’s boy, Orlick, and Drummle) a minimum of two appearances. Given the very different lengths of the various narrative-­pictorial programs produced over the fifty years of major illustrated versions of Great Expectations by nineteenth-­century illustrators, comparing simply the number of appearances of any given character is pointless, but percentages are informative. As one would expect, Pip is the dominant figure in all editions, appearing in 93% of McLenan’s forty illustrations, 100% of Stone’s eight, and 93% of Fraser’s thirty, for example. Estella appears in about 20% of the illustrations in these editions, Magwitch 17%, Joe 11%, and (surprisingly) Herbert and Miss Havisham 10% each. In the 1910 Charles Dickens Library Edition Furniss emphasizes Jaggers’s role by including him in 11% of the twenty-­seven illustrations, versus just 7% in the Household Edition. These longer programmes, however, provide emphases on particular characters that in turn relate the story to particular genres and themes. McLenan’s series is different from the others, not so much by virtue of its length as by its being the product of a strictly serial reading. Furthermore, whereas McLenan had no models from which to work, all the later illustrators were able to study the work of their predecessors, although the British illustrators were not likely aware of the illustrations of their American colleagues. In particular, F. A. Fraser, working in the new medium of the wood-­engraving a decade after Marcus Stone, had several advantages over Dickens’s chosen illustrator in that he had read and re-­read the text and studied at least one other artist’s illustrations of the novel. Fraser did not, however, have the considerable advantage of being able to consult the author himself. In the last of his illustrations, Fraser reveals to the reader unfamiliar with the novel’s plot that Pip and Estella do indeed meet again in the closing pages. However, like Dickens, the illustrator gives the reader an ambivalent closure rather than what we have come to recognise as the “happy” ending of “Boy Gets Girl” that the Victorian reading public demanded. The illustration, centrally positioned on the page which describes Pip’s return to the forge after eleven years abroad, alerts the reader to the final scene in the ruined garden – but not to its outcome. The twilight hour is admirably conveyed by the dark shading that sweeps across the entire picture. Fraser suggests Pip’s hopefulness in the look he gives Estella, and Estella’s pensiveness in the downcast turn of her head and her averted glance. The viewer finds it difficult to “read” her attitude towards Pip. He has aged

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very little if at all since the deathbed scene with Magwitch, “He had spoken his last words” (the twenty-­ninth plate in the sequence); indeed, his hair and features are unchanged, and he still wears the same clothes and carries the same cane! Despite the December setting, a rosebush flourishes to the left of the figures, perhaps emblematic of their continued affection for one another and inspired by Dickens’s reference to the old ivy that “had struck root anew, and was growing green on the low quiet mounds of ruin” (Household Edition, 224). Through his caption Fraser indicates the precise moment realised. The bench is of wood rather than wrought-­iron or stone, and is, therefore, like the lovers, surprisingly well preserved. The general tidiness of the background is hardly suggestive of a “ruin” at all. Figure 7. Marcus Stone: “With Estella After All.” 13.1 x 8.7 cm. The Illustrated Library Edition, 1864 and 1868. Frontispiece.

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Although the shading makes assessment of the colour of Estella’s clothing difficult, she appears to be in mourning, despite the fact that two years have passed since Drummle’s death. Although Pip describes himself to her as one who “work[s] pretty hard for a sufficient living” (Household Edition, 224), he is as fashionably and soberly dressed as she. Unlike Marcus Stone (1862) and Harry Furniss (1910), F. A. Fraser has chosen to depict the lovers seated and still exploring their feelings for one another, rather than showing them leaving the ruined garden together and towards (the reader hopes) a new life together. Thus, the reader unfamiliar with the entire plot of the novel is caught in a moment of indecision, and does not find closure in this illustration until he or she has turned the page and read the accompanying letter-­press. The plate in itself does not afford closure, only the fragile possibility of closure. As opposed to Fraser’s and Furniss’s prosaic handling of the highly emotional “revised” ending of the novel, a scene that is also not particularly memorable in McLenan’s forty-­plate sequence, Marcus Stone’s is masterful in the new sixties idiom of an illustration that is not so much a realisation as an elaboration of the text. Paul Schlicke in “Illustrations and Book Illustration” in The Oxford Companion to Dickens is charitable in describing Stone’s work as “wholly undistinguished” (1999, 254) since, despite the solidity of his figures, the young artist often chooses scenes lacking in dramatic possibilities and offers so little of the telling background detail that is characteristic of most of Dickens’s chosen illustrators. In the Chapman and Hall Library Edition of 1862, “Stone works within the sentimental-­realist tradition of the black-­and-­white graphic artists of the 1860s” (291). The only one of his eight pictures for Great Expectations that has been frequently reproduced is the frontispiece “With Estella After All,” an ingenious title devised by Dickens to complement the solid figure of the very adult lovers as they seem to support one another both physically and emotionally in what must be (despite a total lack of background detail) the ruined garden of Satis House in the ultimate chapter’s revised ending. W. A. Fraser (1912) singled this plate out for praise as a fitting companion to Dickens’s letter-­press. Stone’s illustrations for Great Expectations were reprinted in the Charles Dickens Edition, the Illustrated Library Edition (1864), and the Gadshill Edition (1897-­8, 34 volumes): Stone’s couple fills the space with their ample, vital presences: a bearded, handsome, undeniably mature Pip has removed his silk hat (indicative of his success in the struggle to remain a member of the rising middle class) in perhaps a courteous gesture, or as a sign of reverence, and a still most fetching Estella gently supports herself on Pip’s left arm with both hands, thoroughly committing herself to his love and protection. […] The five stars shining above the reunited lovers in Stone’s plate seem less intended to suggest the twilight setting than to imply the providential nature of their meeting again, in the ruined

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garden, across time and space reunited “after all.” Eleven years before, Stone’s Pip was a slender, beardless youth when last seen reading the monitory note in “Don’t Go Home.” However, in this final illustration Pip and Estella are substantial figures, respectable, middle-­class Victorians seemingly approaching their mid-­thirties. Pip’s beard and general bulk (besides heavy outer garments suitable for a chilly December evening on the Thames Marshes) suggest at least a physical maturity; however, his hair bears no hint of grey, and is precisely the same as in “A Rubber at Miss Havisham’s” (the sixth plate in Stone’s series). Estella clings to Pip’s arm and gloved left hand with her hands. The background only barely suggests the ruined garden’s vegetation, and a patch of grass in the paving (bottom center) is all we are given of the rank ground and the decayed garden-­walk. (Allingham 2009, 132-­133)

In contrast to Marcus Stone’s “magical realism” and intense romanticism in this final scene and F. A. Fraser’s faithful if not particularly striking realisation, in the 1910 Charles Dickens Library Edition Harry Furniss deviates considerably from Dickens’s letter-­press in the new license of the modern illustrator to complement and comment upon the text rather than merely realise it. Earlier in the ultimate day of the action of Great Expectations (which Jerome Meckier dates to December, 1840, making Pip about 42), Pip, just returned from the Egyptian offices of Clarriker and Company, takes his nephew, little Pip, to visit the old cemetery where the narrative began, among the tombstones of the Pirrip family. The narrator specifically mentions reliving the opening scene by setting the child of Biddy and Joe “on a certain tombstone” (Charles Dickens Library Edition, Chapter 59, 458) in the churchyard. However, in Harry Furniss’s final plate for the 1910 Charles Dickens Library Edition of the novel, “Estella and Pip: I saw no shadow of another parting from her. – Great Expect., P. 461” (facing p. 456), we are not in the garden of the former Satis House at all, but once again in the churchyard, a scene which Furniss is using to provide bookends to the narrative-­pictorial program. Thus, perhaps to provide a neat complement to the opening scene, the illustrator has conflated the churchyard and the garden into a single setting. Since this thirtieth plate has been placed some five pages prior to the moment realised, the reader may not notice the incongruous elements: the willow tree (right), the tomb (left rear), and the tombstone (right). Symbolically, since the scene between Pip and Estella lays to rest the vengeful spirit of Miss Havisham, that it has been re-­set in the graveyard may be appropriate, even if in doing so Furniss has challenged the authority of Dickens’s text as no previous illustrator before him had done. Almost as incongruous as the properties in the background is the sour expression of the protagonist, hardly that of an ardent lover who has just completed his lifetime quest. Estella (downstage centre, so to speak) dominates the ultimate scene, as proud, haughty, unbowed, and poised as ever as she gently lifts her voluminous skirt with her right hand while lightly resting her left on Pip’s arm.

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Lightly sketched in the background are an area railing (right) and the leaded panes of a church window (left). Although Dickens specifies that the scene occurs on a misty December evening, Furniss suggests neither the twilight hour nor the season, for the scene is well lit and the willow in full leaf, details suggestive of the fulfillment of the fertility cycle rather than of a literal attempt at the realisation of the letter-­press. Such a departure from the letter-­press is rare among Victorian illustrated editions because the illustrator was aware of the constraints placed upon artistic license by the received readings of the text, and therefore produced plates that complemented the written text (as experienced by several generations of readers) rather than undermined it. Whereas the original Illustrated Library Edition and Household Edition illustrations do not reference the aforementioned awkward moment in Pip’s tense home-­life, as he anticipates that at any moment he will be arrested for the theft of the pork pie and the file, Harry Furniss realises most effectively this supremely comic passage which builds up to the consumption of the tar-­water. Dickens’s character comedy and social satire of the overreaching bourgeois Pumblechook and his theatrical companion, the village clerk and aspiring Shakespearean actor, Wopsle, appear in action, so to speak, rather than in a static portrait, as in Eytinge’s illustration for the Diamond Edition. Other illustrators have focused on the character comedy and social satire, which the pompous, self-­aggrandising seed merchant Pumblechook presents throughout the early chapters, with McLenan and Pailthorpe both exaggerating his corpulence and complacency to contrast the lean, insecure Pip and his shrewish sister so effectively drawn by F. O. C. Darley in an early American piracy of the novel. Whereas other illustrators seem to have preferred scenes involving just a few characters, particularly interchanges between Pip and Magwitch as well as between Pip and Joe, in these opening chapters Furniss depicts the oppressive social milieu in which Pip has grown up. Dickens’s chosen illustrator, Marcus Stone, depicts this environment just twice, once when Pip as a youth is still “under the government” of Mrs. Joe – “Old Orlick among the cinders” – and again when, freed from Mrs. Joe’s domestic tyranny by Orlick’s assault, Pip bids farewell to Biddy and Joe in “Taking leave of Joe” in Chapter 35. Although the combat between the journeyman and the burly blacksmith, as Stone visualises it in the forge, is highly dramatic, Marcus Stone never deals effectively with one of the novel’s strengths, its wonderful sense of fun, which H. M. Brock’s stolid realism also fails to capture. Thus, across the half-­century from the initial periodical illustrations of John McLenan and the sanctioned, realistic illustrations of Marcus Stone through to the caricature of Pailthorpe and the kinetic energy of the impressionistic studies

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of Furniss, the book conveyed very different impressions to each successive generation of readers, with the original Stone sequence minimising Magwitch and the other Newgate elements and the final, much-­expanded sequence by Furniss emphasising the elements of character comedy and anti-­bourgeois satire, reflecting Furniss’s strengths as an impressionist and visual satirist.

Works Cited Allingham, Philip V. 2009. “The Illustrations for Great Expectations in Harper’s Weekly (1860-­1861) and in the Illustrated Library Edition (1862) – ‘Reading by the Light of Illustration’.” Dickens Studies Annual 40: 113-­169. Barnard, J. “Fred”, illus. 1872. The Personal History of David Copperfield, with sixty-­one illustrations. In The Works of Charles Dickens. The Household Edition. London: Chapman and Hall; New York: Harper and Brothers. Barreca, Regina. 2003. “David Lean’s Great Expectations.” In Dickens on Screen, edited by John Glavin, 39-­44. Cambridge: Cambridge Uuniversity Press. Campbell, Jessica A. 2014. “‘Beauty and the Beast’ and Great Expectations.” Dickens Quarterly 31.1: 32-­41. Clayton, Jay. 1996. “Is Pip Postmodern? Or, Dickens at the End of the Twentieth Century.” In Case Studies in Contemporary Criticism: Charles Dickens Great Expectations, edited by Janice Carlisle, 606-­623. Boston and New York: Bedford, St. Martin’s, and Macmillan. Cohen, Jane Rabb.  1980. “Marcus Stone.” Charles Dickens and His Original Illustrators. Columbus: University of Ohio Press. Darley, Felix O. C., illus.  1861. Great Expectations by Charles Dickens. The Household Edition. New York: James G. Gregory. Davis, Paul B.  1984. “Dickens, Hogarth, and the Illustrations for Great Expectations.” Dickensian 80. 3: 130-­143. Dickens, Charles. 1860-­1861. Great Expectations. All the Year Round. Vols. IV and V. Dixon. A.A., illus.  1905. Great Expectations by Charles Dickens. The Collins Pocket Edition. London and Glasgow: Collins Clear-­Type Press. Eytinge, Sol Jr., illus. 1867. Great Expectations by Charles Dickens. The Diamond Edition. Boston: Ticknor and Fields. Fraser. F.A., illus.  1876. Great Expectations by Charles Dickens. Household Edition. London: Chapman and Hall. Furniss, Harry, illus. 1910. Great Expectations by Charles Dickens, and Reprinted Pieces. Edited by J. A. Hammerton. The Charles Dickens Library Edition. London: Educational Book, Vol. 14.

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Green, Charles, illus. 1897-­1908. Great Expectations by Charles Dickens. The Gadshill Edition. London: Chapman and Hall. Hackett, Nan.  1988. “Smiles, Samuel (1812-­1904).” In Victorian Britain, An Encyclopedia, edited by Sally Mitchell, 726-­727. New York & London: Garland.. Hammerton, J. A. 1910. The Dickens Picture-­Book. London: Educational Book. Harmon, William, and C. Hugh Holman. 2000. “Picaresque Novel.” In A Handbook to Literature, 389-­390. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice-­Hall.. House, Madeline, Graham Storey, and Kathleen Tillotson, eds. 1999. The Letters of Charles Dickens: 1820-­1870. Vols. 9 and 11. Oxford: Clarendon. McLenan, John, illus. 1860-­1. Great Expectations by Charles Dickens [the First American Edition]. Harper’s Weekly: A Journal of Civilization, Vols. IV: 740 through V: 495. Philadelphia: T. B. Peterson. McLenan, John, illus. 1861. Great Expectations by Charles Dickens, With thirty-­ four illustrations from original designs by John McLenan. Philadelphia: T. B. Peterson. Meckier, Jerome. 2013. “Estella, Dead or Alive? Considerations and Incrimination in Great Expectations.” Paper presented at the Dickens Symposium. Dickens Society of America, Victoria College, University of Toronto, July 5. Muir, Percy. 1971. Victorian Illustrated Books. London: B. T. Batsford. Nicklin, J. A. 1911. Dickens-­land. Il. E. W. Haslehust. Beautiful England series. Glasgow & London: Blackie & Son. Pailthorpe, Frederick W., illus.  1885. Great Expectations by Charles Dickens. London: Robson & Kerslake. Paroissien, David. 2000. The Companion to Great Expectations. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood. Pitz, Henry C. 1968. The Brandywine Tradition. New York: Weathervane. Robinson, Joanna.  2014. “Digitizing Dickens: Adapting Dickens for the Bicentenary.” Dickens Quarterly 31.1: 42-­61. Schlicke, Paul.  1999. “Illustrations and Book Illustration.” In The Oxford Companion to Dickens, edited by Paul Schlicke, 288-­293. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press. Steig, Michael. 1978. Dickens and Phiz. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Stone, Marcus, illus. 1868. Great Expectations by Charles Dickens. The Illustrated Library Edition. London: Chapman and Hall. Stone, Marcus and Fred Walker. Illus. 1937. Great Expectations and Hard Times by Charles Dickens. London: Nonesuch.

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Sussman, Herbert L. 1988. “Novel.” In Victorian Britain, An Encyclopedia, edited by Sally Mitchell, 549-­551. New York & London: Garland. Sutherland, John. 1989. The Stanford Companion to Victorian Fiction. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Tomalin, Claire. 1990. The Invisible Woman: The Story of Charles Dickens and Nelly Ternan. Harmondsworth and New York: Penguin and Vintage (Random House). Watts, Alan S. 2000. “Why Wasn’t Great Expectations Illustrated?” The Dickens Magazine 1.2: 8-­9.

Aleksandra Tryniecka

The Bakhtinian Polyphony of Voices in Wilkie Collins’s The Woman in White The novel […] is determined by experience, knowledge and practice (the future). M.M. Bakhtin (2011, 15)

Introduction: the polyphony of voices Polyphony, the term introduced by Mikhail Mikhailovich Bakhtin (1895-­1975) means, according to Graham Allen, “the simultaneous combination of parts or elements or […] voices” (2000, 22). Bakhtin’s theory re-­enters literary discourse in the times celebrating diversity and plurality. While propounding the novel as an ideal genre and a “consciously structured hybrid of languages” (2011, xxix), Bakhtin argues for the relevance of dialogue underpinning the novelistic structure. He highlights the importance of the dialogic tradition and traces it back to antiquity, to the Socratic dialogues in particular. In the essay entitled “Epic and Novel” (1970), Bakhtin stresses the relevance of the Socratic dialogues, pointing to them as to the critical documents preluding the modern novelistic genre (2011, 24). What draws Bakhtin’s attention to the Socratic dialogues is their responsivity and interaction with the real world, as well as their rejection of the absolute past (Goethe’s and Schiller’s term) associated with the high genres. For instance, the epic, as a high genre, offers a monologic perspective on the presented events, at the same time hindering the reader’s investment in a dialogue with the text (17, 31). Moreover, what characterises the epic is its closed structure and inevitable conclusiveness. Consequently, the texts belonging to this genre (such as the French narrative poem The Song of Roland) idealise its protagonists and locate their faultless lives within a hermetic structure usually marked by the final heroic death (34). Thus, Bakhtin notices the shortcomings of the high genres on the one hand and the advantages offered by the novel, on the other: The epic, as the specific genre known to us today, has been from the beginning a poem about the past, and the authorial position immanent in the epic and constitutive for it […] is the environment of a man speaking about a past that is to him inaccessible, the reverent point of view of a descendent. (2011, 13)

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Prophecy is characteristic for the epic, prediction for the novel. Epic prophecy is realized wholly within the limits of the absolute past […]; it does not touch the reader and his real time. (2011, 31) [T]he novel has a new and quite specific problematicalness: characteristic for it is an eternal re-­thinking and re-­evaluating. That center of activity that ponders and justifies the past is transferred to the future. [The novel] is a genre that is ever questioning, ever examining itself and subjecting its established forms to review. (2011, 39)

Bakhtin readily recognises the potential misgivings of the high genres, accusing them of mono-­perspectivism and ideological rhetoric. In contrast, he maintains, “[t]he polyphonic novel presents a world in which no individual discourse can stand objectively above any other discourse” (Allen 2000, 23). The aim of polyphony in the novel lies in equally privileging the speaking voices, so that each voice can be found “in relation to the other” (Allen 2000, 20). As noticed by Michael Holquist, “Bakhtin’s metaphor for the unity of the two elements constituting the relation of self and other is dialogue, the simultaneous unity of differences in the event of utterance” (2002, 34). “[…] Bakhtin’s notion of polyphony is a process of creating and testing ideas, a process that engages the author and the readers as well as the characters in the polyphonic novel,” observes Zappen (2004, 51). By the same token, it is the process that unveils “the dialogic sense of truth as a creating and testing of […] persons” (53). Thus, the task of the subsequent narrators lies in the structuring of ideas that are checked against the beliefs of other characters. In effect, the reader becomes an active participant in the interplay of discourses and only on the basis of this interdependency is he/ she capable of reconstructing the whole plot. The author’s task appears equally substantial, as he or she is obliged to maintain equilibrium between the speaking voices, so as to sustain the objective overtone of the story. Quoted in Zappen’s The Rebirth of Dialogue, Natasha Alexandrovna Reed argues that “the polyphonic novel as Bakhtin conceives it is entirely a conversation within the author’s own mind, a dialogue of self without other” (2004, 52). Consequently, Zappen observes that Bakhtin’s notion of polyphony, in this view, is not so much theory of dialogue as a theory of romantic self-­expression that substitutes the mental conversation that one conducts with oneself for dialogues between individuals, treats one’s own ideas as equivalent to real, objectively existing others, and expels the real other […] thus creating the dialogue of self without other. (52)

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While Bakhtin demonstrates that Rabelais’s, Swift’s and Dostoyevsky’s literary output constitute the marked examples of polyphony in literature, Julia Kristeva propounds other cases of polyphonic texts: “We might also add the ‘modern’ novel of the twentieth century – Joyce, Proust, Kafka […],” she indicates (1980, 71). Morson and Emerson similarly acknowledge that “Bakhtin clearly states that Dostoyevsky invented polyphony, but that it is not limited to his works” (1990, 231).

The synchrony of “truths” Wilkie Collins’s The Woman in White (1859), a budding example of nineteenth-­ century detective fiction, comprises a compelling view on the polyphonic text. The novel begins with a story of Walter Hartright, a teacher hired as a drawing master in Limmeridge House inhabited by Frederick Fairlie, his niece – Laura Fairlie, and Laura’s half-­sister – Marian Halcombe. What immediately strikes the reader confronting the text is the mode of narration offered by the characters from this epistolary novel. Thus, the storyline of The Woman in White is offered to the reader in parts delivered by the different narrators. The narrators in Collins’s work come from numerous social backgrounds and represent not only distinct viewpoints but also varied personal characteristics. They are divided by age, gender, occupation and even nationality (for example, Count Fosco is Italian). Moreover, the narrating individuals form observations built upon their subjective experience. In this sense, Wilkie Collins appears to be engaged in a self-­contained, creative process of juxtaposing his characters’ ideas and opinions in order to achieve the whole picture of the storyline. Similarly, “Morson and Emerson argue that Bakhtin’s concept of polyphony is ‘in essence a theory of creativity’ and that two characteristics – a dialogic sense of truth and the new position of the author – are constitutive to polyphony” (Zappen 2004, 53). Thus, Wilkie Collins’s The Woman in White is essentially filled with numerous “truths” validated by the characters’ utterances. Therefore, Collins’s work is the novel of enunciation, offering more than one perspective on the ongoing events.

The moonlight mystery Although William Hartright and Laura Fairlie’s theme is of paramount importance in the narrative, it is Anne Catherick, the eponymous “woman in white,” who stands for the driving force of the text. The riddle concerning Anne Catherick’s identity is developed in a way allowing one to arrive at the final conclusion only after the critical examination of the viewpoints presented by the voices “inhabiting” the text. The first critical voice concerning Anne is offered by William

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Hartright during his encounter with the white-­clothed woman. Before taking up his job of the drawing master in Limmeridge House, Hartright wanders at night through the streets of London. However, he suddenly becomes alarmed by the touch on his shoulder. Turning around, he perceives that [t]here, in the middle of the broad, bright high-­road – there, as if it had that moment sprung out of the earth or dropped from the heaven – stood the figure of a solitary Woman, dressed from head to foot in white garments, her face bent in grave inquiry on mine, her hand pointing to the dark cloud over London, as I faced her. (Collins 1994, 14)

What follows, Hartright depicts the physiognomy of the startling lady. He pays attention to Anne’s “colourless, youthful face, meagre and sharp to look at about the cheeks and chin; large, grave, wistfully attentive eyes; nervous, uncertain lips; and light hair of a pale, brownish-­yellow hue” (Collins 1994, 15). Hartright constructs Anne Catherick’s unearthly image by means of an emotional and evaluative language. Appearing during the nighttime in the middle of a desolate road, Anne Catherick seems to acquire the status of an otherworldly and uncanny creature. Paradoxically, Hartright completes his description by asserting that “there was nothing wild, nothing immodest in her manner” (Collins 1994, 15). However, he particularly pays attention to the lady’s garments: to “[…] her dress – bonnet, shawl, and gown all of white” (Collins 1994, 15). Anne’s extraordinary type of clothing awakens Hartright’s confusion, leaving him both disturbed and willing to solve the mystery of the unattended lady who asked the way to London. Hartright’s bewilderment is even greater on learning that the white-­clothed woman is a fugitive from Asylum (Collins 1994, 21). Importantly, during the conversation with Mr Hartright, Anne Catherick reveals a thread of connection between herself and William’s future employers: “[…] I can’t say who lives at Limmeridge now. If any more are left there of that name, I only know I love them for Mrs. Fairlie’s sake,” Anne indicates (Collins 1994, 19). The sudden reference to Mr Fairlie’s surname adds to Hartright’s perplexity that does not abandon him in Limmeridge House. He eagerly relates the adventure of the night to a trustworthy inhabitant of the house –­Marion Halcombe. Interestingly enough, the mystery is solved in “the full radiance of the moon” again, re-­establishing the connection between Anne Catherick’s persona and the lunar scenery. The moon constitutes the background for the reading of a cryptic letter (discovered by Marian Halcombe in the Limmeridge House, once sent by Mrs Fairlie to her husband) (Collins 1994, 46). While the reading is performed by Miss Halcombe, she asks Hartright whether the letter “throw[s] any light upon [his] strange adventure on the road to London” (Collins 1994, 46), using

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an idiomatic expression (“to throw light upon something”) that in the novel can be associated with the dominance of the glowing moon. The letter serves as the source of another voice entering into a dialogue with Walter Hartright’s observations. It is Marian Halcombe who reads the letter, yet it is still Hartright’s voice that narrates the act of reading. While the content of the letter is influenced by Marian’s subjective interpretation, it is William Hartright’s voice that portrays and shapes the overall overtone and impression of the letter. This multilayered structure fully confirms James Zappen’s claim that “Bakhtin’s notion of polyphony is […] a process that engages […] the characters in the polyphonic novel” (2004, 51). The speaking voice in the letter belongs to Mrs Fairlie. Importantly, the letter contains a reference to Laura – Miss Halcombe’s half-­sister. In the letter, Mrs Fairlie reveals that Anne Catherick bears a striking resemblance to Laura. Consequently, she writes: “I have taken a violent fancy, Philip, to my new scholar, for a reason which I mean to keep till the last for the sake of surprising you” (Collins 1994, 49-­50). While the information may not have been surprising to Mr Fairlie (as Mrs Fairlie does not know that Anne is his illegitimate child), the revelation has a striking effect on Walter Hartright, who immediately recognises the likeness between Laura and the white-­clothed woman. When reading the letter, he observes, “Miss Fairlie, a white figure, alone in the moonlight; in her attitude, in the turn of her head, in her complexion, in the shape of her face, the living image […] of the woman in white!” (Collins 1994, 50). Hartright relates his experience in an idiosyncratic fashion, endowing the scene with a tinge of dread and the resulting suspense. His disturbing vision appeals to the reader’s senses: “[a] thrill of the same feeling which ran through me when the touch was laid upon my shoulder on the lonely high-­road chilled me again” (50). Likewise, the reading scene, as depicted by Hartright, retains growing emotionality. For instance, Hartright intersperses the scene with several descriptions of Laura, who ominously appears on the terrace in the full moonlight (47-­50). At the end of the letter, when the similarity between Anne and Laura is explained, Walter excitedly pleads: “[c]all her in, out of the dreary moonlight – pray call her in!” (50). What is more, Hartright’s depiction of Marian’s behaviour proves excessively emotional, as he relates that “[s]he dropped the useless letter, and her eyes flashed” (50). Walter’s narration is filled with other emotionally marked utterances, such as: “the white gleam of her muslin gown” (49), or “a sensation that quickened my pulse” (49). Even Hartright’s portrait of Laura Fairlie appears immoderately and romantically idealised, as he states that “[i]t might be possible to note […] blemishes in another woman’s face, but it is not easy to dwell on them in hers” (40).

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Without a doubt, Walter Hartright constitutes the most emotional voice of the novel. As a drawing master and an art lover, he depicts reality by means of the sensual images. His romantic perception of the world needs to be validated against the testimony of other voices residing in the text. For example, Marian Halcombe appears to be more practical. While reading out the letter, she instructs Walter to pay attention to the most essential part: “[l]isten to the last sentences of the letter,” she states (Collins 1994, 49). Furthermore, Marian is capable of rational thinking, as she strives to solve the mystery contained in the intricate letter. While reading, she compares the information from the letter with that provided by Hartright: Miss Halcombe paused, and looked at me across the piano. “Did the forlorn woman whom you met in the high-­road seem young?” she asked. “Young enough to be two-­or three-­and-­twenty?” “Yes, Miss Halcombe, as young as that.” “And she was strangely dressed, from head to foot, all in white?” “All in white.” (Collins 1994, 49)

What is more, Marian Halcombe strives to discover the relation between Anne Catherick as presented in the letter and the woman described by Hartright: “I can’t help dwelling a little upon the coincidence of the white costume of the woman you met, and the white frocks which produced that strange answer from my mother’s little scholar” (Collins 1994, 49). Marian Halcombe stands for the voice ordering the plot and making substantial decisions. For instance, it is Marian who summons Laura after reading the letter and pleasantly arranges the subsequent part of the evening so that Mr Hartright can recover from the initial shock. While Hartright’s voice introduces into the text a sentimental overtone awakening the reader’s emotions, Marian Halcombe endeavours to structure the events into a reasonable unity. Walter’s and Marian’s voices are equally important, as they contribute to the distinct qualities of the same text. Hartright’s vision remains romantic, while Marian’s voice proves practical. While Hartright “paints” mental pictures, Marian sticks to the “facts.” When combined together, their voices act as separate perspectives offering a greater “whole” – the polyphonic unity in which each voice is studied in relation to another.

Conclusion: the author and the reader shaking hands Wilkie Collins’s The Woman in White is a novel that neither misses, nor openly reveals the author’s intentions in the sense that while the authorial voice appears “invisible” in the text, it is still infuencing the fictional reality. As indicated by the authors of Mikhail Bakhtin: Creation of a Prosaics:

The Bakhtinian Polyphony of Voices in W. Collins’s The Woman in White 121 [p]olyphony is often criticized as a theory that posits the absence of authorial point of view, but Bakhtin explicitly states that the polyphonic author neither lacks nor fails to express his ideas and values. Time and again, Bakhtin speaks of the commitment and “activity” of the polyphonic author. He also maintains that a work without “an authorial position” […] is in general impossible […]. (Morson and Emerson 1990, 232-­233)

In the selected analysis of William Hartright’s, Marion Halcombe’s and Mrs Catherick’s voices, it has been demonstrated that the essence of polyphonic novel resides in the mutual coexistence of the speakers. This interdependency does not privilege a particular voice over the remaining ones but, rather, awards each voice with the meaning while occurring in relation to the other. Thus, it can be concluded that the meaning resides between the speaking voices and not in the speech of a particular character. Finally, the concept of the polyphony of voices in Wilkie Collins’s novel can be summarised by Michael Holquist general dialogic assumption that “simultaneity is found in the dialogue between an author, his characters, and his audience, as well as in the dialogue of readers with the characters and their author” (2002, 67). Consequently, both the author, the characters and the readers are responsible for the creation of the integral, dialogic vision of the text. Dialogism constitutes an active process that requires not only the authorial thought, but also the readers’ willing participance. Hence, while reading a polyphonic text, one becomes submerged in the world where the characters, the author and the reader meet each other on equal terms.

Works Cited Allen, Graham. 2000. Intertextuality. London: Routledge. Bakhtin, Mikhail M. 2011. Dialogic Imagination. Edited by Michael Holquist. Texas: University of Texas. Collins, Wilkie. 1994. The Woman in White. London: Penguin Popular Classics. Emerson, Caryl, and Gary S. Morson.  1990. Mikhail Bakhtin: Creation of a Prosaics. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Holquist, Michael. 2002. Dialogism: Bakhtin and his World. New York: Routledge. Kristeva, Julia. 1980. Desire in Language. Edited by Leon S. Roudiez. New York: Columbia University. Zappen, James P. 2004. The Rebirth of Dialogue: Bakhtin, Socrates and the Rhetorical Tradition. Albany: State University of New York Press.

Aleksandra Krajewska

The Vision of Brotherhood of Man in Charles Kingsley’s Novel Alton Locke A true polymath, clergyman, scholar, poet, novelist, essayist, social activist and natural historian –­not every Victorian man of letters was as farseeing and open-­ minded as Charles Kingsley. He was shaped by two sources: faith and knowledge. As a clergyman he strongly believed in the righteousness of God’s laws and as an academic he admired the achievements in the world of science and technology. As Alan Rauch argues, Kingsley did not perceive those disciplines as antithetical, on the contrary, for him they were “the evidence not only of the existence of God but of a man’s special place in the ‘creation’” (Rauch 1993, 197) and in the world. What characterized this talented man was his faith in human beings, in their abilities, skills and above all, their capability to do good. He was able to see that the times he was living in were revolutionary in many different fields and aspects of life, the academic disciplines were expanding, the standards of life, health and hygiene were rising and that the pace of life was increasing. Simultaneously, new opportunities arose for entrepreneurial individuals who sought fortune in new industries. However, during that era of change and progress, there was also a large group of underprivileged British citizens whose financial and professional situation was unstable – the working class. Kingsley, who was famous for his sympathy towards the poor, could not stay silent in the face of human misery; hence, to express his concern, in 1850 he published a novel entitled Alton Locke: Tailor and Poet. An Autobiography, which, although not particularly innovative or challenging in terms of the plot, articulates all his concerns and worries regarding the current situation in the country. In this paper, I will focus on the problems that Kingsley defines as the main evil that afflicts his nation and present a solution that he offers to improve the condition of his country, namely, the brotherhood of man. “British industrial existence seems fast becoming one huge poison-­swamp of reeking pestilence physical and moral; a hideous living Golgotha of souls and bodies buried alive” (Carlyle 1870, 33). In these words Thomas Carlyle yet again showed his concern for and dissatisfaction with the current situation of the working class in Britain. Although at that time the United Kingdom was one of the wealthiest and most powerful countries in the world, it was not a supportive and welcoming place for its poorest citizens. The dehumanizing and exploitative effects of the continuously developing industrialization were not being challenged

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properly. Despite the 1819 Cotton Mills Act, 1831 Labour in Cotton Mills Act, 1833 Factory Act and finally, 1844 and 1847 Factories Acts, in many areas children of all ages were still employed for more than twelve hours a day, girls and women had little protection against abuse and were paid lower wages, moreover, the working, housing and living conditions were harsh and pitiful. The main reasons for the ineffectiveness of legal regulations were the lack of proper control and financial penalties for those who did not observe the law. Although in 1833 the British Parliament succeeded in passing the Slavery Abolition Act, in fact, the middle and upper classes did not or did not want to see that the so-­called “white slavery” was in their neighbourhoods. Those whom Carlyle called “buried alive,” the workers, were still waiting and hoping for a change in both the laws and social prejudices. In 1840s the entire Kingdom was shaken by the Chartists’ loud cry for the Cause of the People, and its eventual failure deprived the workers of their hopes and dreams for liberty, equality and fraternity. As a consequence of numerous political and social upheavals, the first half of the nineteenth century is frequently referred to as “the Time of Trouble.” Charles Kingsley shared and fully agreed with Carlyle’s opinions concerning the condition of the country and the situation of the poor, and in his own writing, which included poetry, novels, sermons, religious tracts and critical treatises on political and social issues, he tried to educate, preach and give support to the oppressed, while reminding the rich of their duties as Christians. In his writing he tried to illustrate that in the current world the notions of rationality, practicality and utilitarianism were vital and highly valued. As John Stuart Mill and the Evangelicals claimed, only those were worth trusting and capable of wielding authority and positions of power who were useful to society and able to prove their righteousness through their actions. Furthermore, those who could master self-­control and govern themselves were fit to govern others. James Adams stresses that “self discipline thus became a crucial engine of social progress and individual stature” (2012, 6) and accordingly, even those who came from lower social classes were able to make decisions, to sit in the Parliament and represent others. This redefinition of a citizen in nineteenth-century England was the first step towards accepting the equality of men, which inspired Kingsley to spread his idea of brotherhood. Alton Locke: Tailor and Poet. An Autobiography is a story about a working class intellectual who due to his talent and determination manages to escape poverty. His genius is recognized not only by his own class but also by the rich who eventually offer to help him in achieving prosperity. His sincere concern for the plight of his class, however, impels him to fight for their rights even if it requires self-­ abnegation. He is moved by the exploitative working conditions and deplorable

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living standards, which, in his view, lead to the demoralization of the workers. He soon becomes an active member of the Chartist movement and believes that once the Charter is passed, the opportunities for the working class will extend. Unfortunately, this idealized vision is crushed firstly, when he sees people rioting in a wild rage and secondly, when the movement turns into a subject of mockery after its failure. Eventually, he sails to America to look for true values and a purer nature of man, but he dies just before reaching the shore. Although the story is fictional, the context is based on the nineteenth-century reality. Kingsley depicts the actual events from the 1830s and 40s and tries to illustrate the moods and opinions that prevailed at the time. He mentions and quotes actual people, like Thomas Carlyle and Queen Victoria, he uses real dates, for instance the 10th April 1848 and existing places, like London and Cambridge. As a clergyman, he had contact with the poor and at the same time he belonged to the world of the upper class; therefore, he knew the opinions and anxiety coming from both worlds. The majority of ideas expressed within the text reflect his point of view and protest against the indifference to human adversity and suffering. Although certain descriptions are exaggerated, they fulfil Kingsley’s intended aim of activating sympathy and interest from the upper class audience. The letters Kingsley received and the clarification which he included in the later publications of his book show that the open accusations of idleness and insensitivity directed at the readers were heard. Kingsley devotes a part of the novel to the effects of industrialization. He shows that its development, in spite of offering workplaces to a significant number of unskilled labourers, increased competition and division between people with the same background. The rivalry led to the atomization of the society in which individualism, self-­development and private success mattered more than the community (Adams 2012, 7). Kingsley observed that in everyday life human relations resembled a contract, as people gathered but only to maximize their own interests and profit. In Alton Locke the main character realizes that capitalism drives people apart and leads to greed, exploitation, abuse and satisfying one’s selfish desires. Alton makes a comment that “the master-­manufacturers themselves give the signal for the plug-­riots by stopping their mills. Their vanity, ferocity, sense of latent and fettered power, pride of numbers, and physical strength, had been flattered and pampered” (Kingsley 1890, 114), but their worship of Mammon only leads to general dissatisfaction. He warns that if the situation continues, common people will rebel “against Mammon – against that accursed system of competition, slavery of labour, absorption of the small capitalists by the large ones” (Kingsley 1890, 114). Those practices lead to the separation and isolation of classes, which have different interests and goals, as well as of individuals from the same neighbourhoods, and as

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Carlyle stresses, it results in a situation where “our life is not a mutual helpfulness; […] it is a mutual hostility” (1872, 126). Kingsley tries to show these fracturing forces and at the same time stresses that they can only be confronted with unity and cooperation. He points out that thanks to Chartism, the established order and relations between the Englishmen have been questioned. The author agrees with Thomas Carlyle that the country, despite being powerful worldwide, is not actually strong within its own borders. The United Kingdom is not united, as divisions between its people hinder efficient coexistence. The gap between the rich and the poor is well depicted in the novel. Kingsley blames both groups saying that the poor themselves refuse to instigate any kind of dialogue and instead prefer to stay within their own notion of whom the rich are. For instance, Alton has a chance to attend a party in the Dean’s house, after which he observes: They treated me as an equal; they welcomed me – the young viscount and the learned dean – on the broad ground of a common humanity; as I believe hundreds more of their class would do, if we did not ourselves take a pride in estranging them from us – telling them that fraternisation between our classes is impossible, and then cursing them for not fraternising with us. (Kingsley 1890, 61)

And vice versa, the rich are afraid of the imaginary vermin which they associate with the poor, hence, they disassociate from the unknown mass and consequently, deprive them of certain privileges such as education, a right to vote and decent remuneration. Alton calls it a “Babel tower,” where the society cannot understand the other side’s arguments. Alton says: To understand the maddening allurement of that dream (for social reform, sanitary reform, aedile reform, cheap food, interchange of free labour, liberty, equality, and brotherhood forever!), you must have lain, like us, for years in darkness and the pit. You must have struggled for bread, for lodging, for cleanliness, for water, for education – all that makes life worth living for – and found them becoming, year by year, more hopelessly impossible. (Kingsley 1890, 115-­116)

The accusations do not solve the problem and Alton’s story illustrates that well. Despite being able to get decent education (thanks to his strong determination and readiness to sacrifice his night rest for reading) and working over twelve hours a day to gain financial independence, he is still not able to fully cross the social gap. He manages to gain recognition and impresses the rich, but in the end, he remains a poor tailor. It is aptly illustrated in Alton’s platonic love of Miss Lillian, the Dean’s niece, whom he never attempts to seduce because he realizes

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that due to his background he is not able to win her favour. He can see that in terms of intellect and skills, they are all equal but prejudice and ignorance lead to “an everlasting gulf between man and man” (Kingsley 1890, 29). It is that gulf which in the end leads to the failure of the Chartist movement both in the novel and in reality, and results in emigration from and disappointment with Britain of some more educated and active working men. However, despite criticising the situation in the country, Kingsley’s book also offers a solution and tries to infuse the disappointed hearts of the working class with faith and hope. Alton Locke, which is categorized either as a social-­problem novel, a condition-­ of-­England novel or a chartist novel, was, among other reasons, written to comfort the working class after the unsuccessful activity. The range of characters that appear in the novel is wide, but their involvement and interest in the cause of the workers unite them. Due to the failure of the Chartist movement the main character loses his position and recognition but, more importantly, his purpose in life, ambition, hope and motivation. For him, it is a symbol of a lost chance for equality that motivated the working class to unite; Alton says that there were men – […] – who suffered not only imprisonment, but loss of health and loss of fortune; men […] whose temptations were therefore all the greater, who manfully and righteously kept themselves aloof from all those frantic schemes, and now reap their reward. (Kingsley 1890, 113)

He cannot see that Chartism has its ideological dimension and goes beyond what he envisaged as a Parliamentary Act. At that difficult moment he finds a new friend, Lady Eleanor, who, after abandoning her aristocratic life, opens a workplace for poor women and devotes her wealth and life to helping others. Her devotion and sacrifice move Alton so much that right before his death he writes a poem that expresses some faith: Up, up, up, and up Face your game, and play it! The night is past – behold the sun!-­ The cup is full, the web is spun, The Judge is set, the doom begun; Who shall stay it? (Kingsley 1890, 148)

The final question in the poem “Who shall stay it?” can be answered: those who still keep their hope and faith. Despite the death of the main character, which symbolizes the end of Chartism and the old vision of equality and freedom, the final message of the novel is

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positive. In the closing chapters of the book Kingsley tries to stress that all workers should look favourably into the future because what they struggled for can still be obtained. Lady Eleanor, who towards the end of the novel plays the role of a sage, says: “Freedom, Equality and Brotherhood are come; but not as you expected […] Freedom, Equality and Brotherhood are here. Realise them in thine own self, and so alone thou helpest to make them realities for all” (Kingsley 1890, 147). In these words Eleanor stresses that to reform the country first there needs to be a change in people’s minds. If all actions aim only at altering the law on paper, then the new regulations will be ineffective. However, if the reform takes place primarily in the people, then the improvements will eventually materialize. In that sense Chartism in its revolutionary version was doomed to fail, despite the news and inspiration coming from the European Revolutions of 1848. On the continent the motto “Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité” was a justification for violence and military conflicts, however, in England that approach was strongly disapproved of. Kingsley stresses that point in the words of Sandy Mackaye, the embodiment of Thomas Carlyle, who right before his death refuses to sign the Charter saying that those “that think to bring about the reign o’ love an’ brotherhood wi’ pikes an’ vitriol bottles, murther an’ blasphemy” (Kingsley 1890, 119) will never succeed. The author has a different answer to the ills of the nation, namely, the brotherhood of man. Kingsley believes that for the situation in the country to improve and for the relations between men to change it is vital to look at other men in a different manner. He proposes the Christian approach, according to which each person is treated as a brother and an equal, despite his background, financial status, political beliefs or a place on the social ladder. He wittily exemplifies his idea by saying that the only reason why a Roman lady and a Negro slave have ever dined at the same table was God (Kingsley 1890, 137). He asks: “Whose name was the bond of unity for that brotherhood?” and instantly answers that there is only one Master and “in Him we are all brothers” (Kingsley 1890, 137). Kingsley tries to persuade his readers that such a change in thinking is essential as without it the hostility between people will eventually lead to a national revolt. Due to competition, men distrust and treat each other without respect; he notices that “each race, each individual of mankind, stands separate and alone, owing no more brotherhood to each other than a wolf to wolf, or pike to pike” (Kingsley 1890, 138). The solution to this situation can come through an act of acceptance of God’s superiority to man and acknowledging that He is the only Master. If people accept God’s law and strive for salvation, then their actions will not aim to harm and they will “look for a state founded on better things than Acts of Parliament, social contracts, and abstract rights – a city whose foundations are in the eternal promises, whose builder and maker is God” (Kingsley 1890, 138). The superiority of such a state is that it is based on

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justice, equality and fairness, therefore, if people accept the new order, they will all have the right to “once again penetrate, to convert, to reorganize, the political and social life of England, perhaps of the world” (Kingsley 1890, 138). On that basis, by referring to God’s laws people will have the right to claim their share in national life, universal suffrage, “disenfranchisement of every man, rich or poor, who break the laws of God,” “denounce the effete idol of property-­qualification” and demand “annual parliaments” (Kingsley 1890, 139). This utopian vision of men united in God’s name and joined in fraternal love is the only alternative in the quickly changing and expanding world. With these strong bonds, the United Kingdom can set an exemplar not only in terms of the military but primarily, in the unity of the nation. The final question that Kingsley answers in the novel is how to establish the brotherhood of man. He believes that the responsibility lies with clergymen, poets, and philosophers. All of these groups are conjoined in their access to a wide range of people, in influence on the public, in ability to use words precisely and clearly and finally, in devotion to beauty and truth. Throughout the book Kingsley criticises each group by highlighting their idleness, lack of initiative and passiveness. He thinks they should develop interest in the country’s welfare and a utilitarian approach to become actively involved in social issues which serve the common good and just causes. In addition, Kingsley points out that they should teach about the beauty of the world that God has created and that men should conserve and protect. Kingsley was a great supporter of the development of science and technology, and he believed that if they were combined with religious values, they might benefit humanity. He maintained that thanks to brotherhood and cooperation men could progress and eventually save their souls, but, due to a rapidly developing world and competition, they tend to forget about their real nature God created in his own image. The role of poets, clergymen and philosophers is to remind everyone about their responsibilities and duties as God’s children. He suggests in Eleanor’s words that the poet should forsake the old understanding of beauty and greatness of civilisation and must learn to be “the finger-­mark of God” (Kingsley 1890, 147) that points to justice and righteousness. He should see beauty as God sees it, namely, as everything that is pure, good and just. Rauch notices that “the poet becomes the perfect vehicle for this program because he is committed to the beauty of the material world and, through his poetry, advocates a love for and a belief in beauty and truth” (1993, 204). However, there also exists a danger that is connected with devotion to material benefits. Alton asks the question whether it is possible to serve God and Mammon at the same time, and after a long internal battle he realizes that the only true duty of a poet is to serve the people by educating, warning and instructing them how to live in order to

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achieve the highest reward – their salvation. He states that in his life he had a chance to try both the poor and the rich people’s lives and he sees that both groups need his poetic works. He says: “I have learnt – to be a poet – a poet of the people” (Kingsley 1890, 1) and he replaces his understanding of who the writer should be with what his duty is. From now onwards, the focus should be on finding beauty in cooperation, love and brotherhood. At the time of the publication of Alton Locke, Larry K. Uffelman observes, Kingsley was involved in the Christian Socialist movement which supported the utilitarian approach and which, among others, rejected the social order that was governed by competition and laissez-­faire policies, for they were perceived as a source of social and financial inequality which eventually led to the fracturing of the Society (1979, 40-­53). Kingsley published numerous texts in which he tried to present a vision of a society where divisions between people did not hinder the general progress and where the enslavement and dehumanization of certain groups were strictly forbidden. He found an inspiration and an answer in the Bible which, as a clergyman, he frequently cited in his publications. For Kingsley, the vision of brotherhood offered means to overcome the general divisions and prejudice, for he defined it as the equality of all men, cooperation, empathy, dialogue between them as well as care and responsibility for the common good. According to the Bible, everyone is equal in the eyes of God, hence, in one of his sermons he preached: Remember that this church is the sign that you are one town, one parish, one body; that century after century, this church had stood to witness to your fathers, and your fathers’ fathers, that all who kneel within these walls are brothers, rich or poor, that all are children of one Father […][,] that you are one body, members one of another, and that God’s blessing is on your union and fellow-­feeling. (Kingsley 1855, 356-­57)

Kingsley strongly believed that by achieving unity, the Englishmen could progress, but that cooperation was only possible if the breach between the classes was healed and replaced with the sense of fraternity. In Alton Locke Kingsley indicates that the agreement concerning the Charter would have been reached if the sense of brotherhood was present between the people. Summing up, Alan Rauch noticed that the vision presented in Alton Locke was idealistic and aimed at making “all things work for all people” (1993, 196). However, Kingsley truly believed that to improve the situation in the country people would have to eradicate selfishness and egoism, and replace them with care for common good and other compatriots. Just like the fields of science, technology and religion can be combined, so all man can unite in Kingsley’s vision of the new

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country. Rauch stressed that for this great man of the time, there was “no true science without religion, no true industry without the fear of God and love to your fellow – citizens” (1993, 197). The particular role is ascribed to poets, clergymen and philosophers, who, through their ability to influence and access wide range of people, ought to spread the message of the brotherhood of man. Although the vision was highly criticised for being utopian and disapproved of for its harsh criticism of the idleness and egoism of the upper class, nevertheless, towards the end of the nineteenth century, thanks to publications like Alton Locke, social awareness and sensitivity to the plight of the poor as well as the sense of national unity were significantly higher.

Works Cited Adams, James Eli.  2012. A History of Victorian Literature. Chichester: Wiley­Blackwell. Carlyle, Thomas. 1872. Past and Present and Chartism. London: Chapman and Hall. Carlyle, Thomas. 1870. Thomas Carlyle’s Collected Works. London: Chapman and Hall. Kingsley, Charles. 1890. Alton Locke, Tailor and Poet. An Autobiography. London: Macmillan and Co. Kingsley, Charles. 1855. Sermons for the Times. London: John W. Parker and Son. Norman, Vance. 1975. “Kingsley’s Christian Manliness.” Theology 655: 30-­38. Web. Rauch, Alan.  1993. “The Tailor Transformed: Kingsley’s Alton Locke and the Notion of Change.” Studies in the Novel 25.2: 196-­213. “The Reverend Charles Kingsley.” 2007. Victorian Web. Web. Uffelman, Larry K. 1979. Charles Kingsley. Boston: Twayne Publishers.

Marlena Marciniak

The Strange Case of Mr. Paul Ferroll, A Gentleman and Murderer: The Victorian Vision of Gentlemanliness Revised Caroline Clive’s debut as a novelist in 1855 was nothing if not spectacular. Contemporary reviewers praised almost in unison the power and originality of the story featuring a man endowed with manifold gentlemanly virtues, literary talents and intellectual superiority who murders his first wife in cold blood to marry his beloved. A critical commentary from the Saturday Review (January 12, 1856) encapsulates best the enthusiastic reception of the text: This idea is a capital hit. The novel is in its third edition. ‘Strikingly original’ – ‘a phenomenon in literature’ – ‘never to be forgotten’ – ‘grand and fearful force of contrast’ – ‘marvellous’ – ‘powerful effect’ – ‘faultless work of art’ – ‘admirable and almost awful power’ – such are the praises of an applauding press. We beg to add the humble tribute of our homage. (192)

Notwithstanding such compliments, Paul Ferroll caused great controversy among both critics and readers, who expressed not only great astonishment, but also intense embarrassment at the dubious morality of the novel. A Victorian journalist, George Augustus Sala, describes the book as “remarkable and eminently disagreeable fiction” (1874, 304), probably verbalising in this way the feelings of his contemporaries puzzled by the equivocal, and yet fascinating portrayal of a man capable of committing acts of utmost bravery and generosity as well as acts of hideous cruelty and utter selfishness, frequently blended in one deed. Thus, the writer “produced the most unusual criminal hero of the Victorian period” (Sutherland 1989, 133), tarnishing the image of the perfect gentleman and putting into question the moral credibility of virtues endorsed in codes of manly conduct. Indeed, the fact that Paul Ferroll might be regarded as a dim foreshadowing of the iconic figure of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, depicted more than thirty years later by Robert Louis Stevenson, is one of the most bewildering elements of his nature. The narrator indicates that “[i]t was as if he were two men” (Clive 2008, 224), meaning that he does not deny being a killer, but a killer whose subsequent deportment externally still complies with the nineteenth-­century concept of respectability. Adrienne Gavin interprets this literary case of a supposed split

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personality as “a fusion of the most attractive and most abhorrent qualities in an English gentleman” (2008, viii). It might as well be argued that the fictional figure exemplifies a perverted version of the gentlemanly ideal, i.e. a man able to develop qualities considered as manly virtues to such an extreme point that they become monstrous aberrations of moral principles. The present examination of Ferroll’s conduct will demonstrate that internalisation of gentlemanly qualities was by no means a guarantee of becoming a man of impeccable character, and further, that even virtues, when understood incorrectly and ulitised erroneously, might become instrumental in turning a man into an atrocious villain instead of a perfect gentleman. At first glance, Paul Ferroll’s demeanour fits the nineteenth-­century definitions of gentlemanliness. Among his personal qualities there are merits highlighted by “The English Gentleman” article published in The Spectator (1845): “The English gentleman is brave – physically and morally. The English gentleman is veracious […] decorous […] humane. The English gentleman has a taste for literature and science. The English gentleman abhors ostentation” (13). The eponymous character is a highly esteemed member of the landed gentry, whose intelligence and generosity are admired and sought after by both peers and common villagers. Lord Ewyas, an influential nobleman, praises his fellow man in the following manner: “There is not so useful a man, so accomplished a man in the county” (Clive 2008, 60). Additionally, he is a talented and successful writer of a favourable repute in the literary circles of London. After the particularly tragic death of his first wife, when the identity of the murderer still remains a mystery, Ferroll evinces another commendable feature, i.e. independence, by delivering all her possessions to the victim’s brother. In fact, his sense of honour and self-­reliance prevail in interpersonal relations. He does not want to owe a debt of gratitude to anyone, determined to depend only on his own resources. No matter if it is a polite request for a neighbourly visit, an invitation for a lavish London ball, a proposal of a bail or a promise of obtaining a full pardon for him after being found guilty of manslaughter, he declines all offers of favour. He may exemplify a typical independent Victorian, outlined by Geoffrey Best as a man who pays his own way, looks after himself, tries to keep out of troubles and bears them manfully if they occur (1985, 280). Furthermore, it seems that Mr. Ferroll attests his moral courage when he surrenders himself to the judge and confesses to his first wife’s homicide rescuing in this way an innocent suspect from being charged with the crime. Given the consequences of such a bold act, namely social disgrace, loss of his beloved woman and, ultimately, the death penalty, his determination should be viewed as an unquestionable proof of his gentlemanly character; nevertheless, the decision provides evidence of his excessive self-­will and anomalous understanding

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of self-­sufficiency. His submission results from a resolution taken eighteen years earlier that only he could take away Anne’s life and later take responsibility for the scheme as its sole operator. He plainly cannot bear the thought of showing vulnerability or dependence. The events that supposedly manifest pride or heroism actually cover his phobia of being “alone, helpless, defenceless” (Clive 2008, 116). It becomes evident that the protagonist is haunted by the will for absolute power over his life. He deliberately avoids intimate contacts with his acquaintances in order to prevent their saying that he was a guest in their houses under false pretences; he saves money for his family in case he is executed; he even signs the knife with which he stabbed his wife so that there is no doubt about his guilt when he decides to tell the truth. His methodical planning of every step and pedantic precision in anticipating future happenings amount to neurosis. Instead of cultivating independence and honour, he fosters an overwhelming desire for dominance and a sick need to have his own way in every situation. Those deviant inclinations push him to murder when his marriage falls short of his carefully designed life scenario. Paul Ferroll’s urge for unrestrained control entails also a persistent practice of self-­control, one of the fundamental characteristics of the Victorian gentleman. Samuel Smiles, a popular Victorian moralist, argues that self-­control “forms the chief distinction between man and the mere animal; and, indeed, there can be no true manhood without it” (1889, 177). Self-­discipline is also advocated by Frederick Temple, a prominent Victorian educational reformer, who maintains that “[a] man is never allowed, even on the very greatest occasions, to lose his self-­ control, if he is to be worthy the name of a man. [...] He loses true gentlemanliness the moment he loses his own self-­mastery” (after Smythe-­Palmer 1908, 288). In his diachronic study of the image of the English gentleman, Philip Mason points out that during the reign of Queen Victoria there was a growing insistence on repressing all signs of emotion (1993, 147), hence handling life’s highs and lows with a stoic face could be recognised as a significant moral strength. Paul Ferroll’s behaviour may serve as an illustrative example of the attitude. He prefers sound judgement and peaceful mind to overreactions or hasty decisions in both personal and public matters. Neither human misery nor deadly peril seem to move him deeply. There is not a trace of stress, fear, or suffering in his deportment when he is arrested and then accused of murdering James Skenfirth, a working-­class riot leader. What is more, he accepts the unexpected verdict of guilty with great composure, and the subsequent act of mercy in the likewise manner. Even the devastating news of his beloved Elinor’s sudden death is received with “absolute silence” (Clive 2008, 209). However, it is the plan to murder his first wife that provides irrefutable evidence of his formidable power of self-­control.

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He knifes Mrs. Ferroll to death without a qualm, in her own chamber, in the early-­morning hours, when she is still asleep. Afterwards he leaves the mansion, mounts a horse and enjoys the ride, chatting with peasants along the way. He arrives at the cottage of Mr. Aston in an amiable mood and with an increased appetite, which he readily satisfies with a huge portion of bread. There is no sign of alarm, emotional agitation or uneasiness in his manner whatsoever. The farmer’s wife is even astonished that the message about his wife’s untimely death hardly makes any impression on him: “‘How quiet he takes it,’ said the woman” (Clive 2008, 6). The fact that the protagonist has his first wife’s blood on his hands does not affect his mental condition or emotional state. He manages to keep his words and gestures under strict control, remaining beyond a shadow of doubt in people’s estimation. Furthermore, Ferroll’s invariable dutifulness and kind assistance lull his neighbours into thinking highly of him. Apart from that, he displays no remorse for the crime, soon afterwards commencing a new chapter of life with his second wife, building a love nest in the very same house where he ruthlessly stabbed his previous spouse. Paul Ferroll seems to trust his intelligence and self-­ discipline, believing that his fiendish plot will be successful as long as he does not make any false move. The practice of self-­control, so frequently recommended as a gentlemanly virtue, allows him to sail under false colours and conceal his true, perverted mind for eighteen years. As soon as Paul Ferroll’s murder of his first wife is divulged, members of the local community are thunderstruck at the news. It is no wonder they express horror and disbelief, since the profile of the culprit is so radically different from the stereotypical representations of barbaric killers. Mr. Ferroll is the benefactor of many families in the neighbourhood. His wit and wisdom, as well as pragmatic measures, have proven invaluable in various emergencies. Moreover, despite preferring a rather reclusive, domestic lifestyle, he does not withdraw from public affairs and is willing to lend a helping hand on request. In The English Gentleman David Castronovo points out that a gentleman’s duty was to “remain actively involved with the other members of society [...] not permit[ting] the privileges of rank to alienate him from those below” (1987, 76), and Ferroll matches this expectation perfectly. His services to those in need and danger seem innumerable. He helps his tenants with their accounts when they run into debts; he advises a widow, Lady Lucy Bartlett, how to discipline her rebellious son; he prevents a mad butler from burning down her house; he saves many lives and alleviates much pain during the outbreak of cholera; he acts as a counsellor and protector of public authorities in working-­class riots, and he works as a magistrate, which, according to an anonymous author of a nineteenth-­century manual entitled The English Gentleman, is a position that allows a gentleman to “diffuse a great good

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around” (Anonymous 1849, 131). It is generally acknowledged that he spares no effort or expense to rescue people from oppression, whenever his intervention is required. However, a careful analysis of his conduct leads to the conclusion that he derives pleasure and satisfaction not from other people’s safety and well-­being, but from the thrill and risk that life-­threatening situations involve. After studying his journal, it becomes obvious that he volunteers to inspect the houses stricken by cholera to enjoy the morbid picture of sufferers dying in spasms of pain. In other citizens’ eyes he is an angel of mercy, who takes a heroic decision to cater to the needs of the ill. The horrid truth, though, is that under cover of noble intentions he gratifies his sick fixation with pain and hazard, as the following passage reveals: I ran from lane to lane, for the work to do was enough for twenty men, and most of the committee were frightened, and passed a vote that everything would be best done by me. Amusement at their simple artifice, which deceived them and made them quite happy, and the excitement of rushing about with a human spectacle everywhere, so kindled my spirits, that I stopped at the end of a by-­way, and indulged in one quiet laugh. (Clive 2008, 40)

It is noticeable that under the mask of charity and self-­sacrifice there lurks a wish to indulge his gruesome desires. Analogously, other instances of Ferroll’s apparent helpfulness and benevolence hide egoistic aims. During a working-­class tumult he unhesitatingly shoots dead a man armed only with a club, whom he befriended during the cholera outbreak. According to the official version, he acts as a defender of the local mayor and judge. Nevertheless, the protagonist feels inwardly “happy in the past excitement” (Clive 2008, 78), and honestly admits to his wife that “it was willing violence” (80). What is more, the assistance he offers to indebted villagers is connected with the plan of murdering his first wife. He chooses to visit farmer Aston and to calculate his bills on the morning of her death so as to obtain an alibi. There is little doubt that the character is a proficient actor who knows how to deceive people and keep up an appearance of respectability. He plays with the conventions of gentlemanliness and unscrupulously uses them to his own advantage. As Anne-­Marie Beller observes, the novel poses a challenging question of “the potential lack of congruity between outward semblance and ulterior criminality” (2013, 14), which caused great anxiety among Victorian readers. Ferroll discovers an effective method of manoeuvring moral values to reach his self-­serving ends. Feigning sympathy and goodwill comes easy to such an unwavering and self-­restrained man, who can effortlessly delude people accustomed to trusting their first impressions. A superficial reading of the story may suggest that Ferroll kills for love. He explains to one of his neighbours that the late Mrs. Ferroll once separated him from

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the only woman he has ever loved and tricked him into a most unfortunate marriage. A similar reason is provided by the novelist in a prequel Why Paul Ferroll Killed his Wife published in 1860. The protagonist bitterly regrets having believed his wife’s wicked lies, which blackened and hurt an innocent woman, a woman that he still sincerely desires. Driven by an unbreakable and genuine affection for Elinor, he removes the only obstacle on his path to happiness, and feels that the prospect of reuniting with the beloved sanctions any method, however atrocious it may be. Indeed, the relationship with his second wife seems to exemplify the Victorian notion of a companionate marriage. Apparently, the Ferrolls create a union “of mind as well as of heart, and based on mutual esteem as well as mutual affection” (Smiles 1889, 333). Their joint diary reveals how close and strong the bond between the spouses is, how perfectly they understand and complement each other: Paul enjoys life intensely; and when he comes home so do I. What a delightful companion he is – everything he has seen and done is reproduced for me, so that I and he become one as to the events and feelings of the day he has passed. All I have done, and am doing, is equally interesting to him. What I write, and what I read, what I sing, and whom I see; what I think, will all come before us two again this happy evening. (Clive 2008, 43)

Furthermore, their home could epitomise the sentimentalised images of “the place of Peace; […] a sacred place […] a temple of the hearth watched over by Household Gods” (1916, 93) popularised by John Ruskin. Their blissful family life is completed by a sweet and pleasing daughter, described by her father as “a picture of beauty” (Clive 2008, 48). However, this wonderful portrait of Victorian domestic felicity contains a serious defect – it is simply fake, just like its creator. Under the mask of a devoted and loving husband there hides an egoistic, treacherous impostor, obsessed with the will to possess Elinor at his disposal. He declares openly: “I want Elinor most. I will fall ill to get Elinor” (Clive 2008, 48). He abhors the thought of her absence and forbids her to leave home without his consent: “‘You shall not leave me’, he exclaimed; […] Nothing should make you leave me now’” (174-­175). Mrs. Ferroll obediently attends to her spouse’s needs and succumbs to his threatening will power. Even when their only child, Janet, falls dangerously ill, she fears going away to visit her: “I can’t do that. I can’t have him come home, and find me gone, without his saying go, to my going” (46). Her short stay at Lady Lucy’s, where she nurses the little sufferer, almost drives him mad. In addition, when he does not find any letter from her the next morning, he flies into temper and rushes to the Cholera Town, as the smell and sight of death “was so like poison, that it took off

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[his] thoughts from the constant feeling of the want of a letter” (50). The abnormal attachment to his wife exhibits symptoms similar to addiction. Lack of the drug that appeases his senses reveals the darkest secrets of his soul: egoism, cruelty and demonic instincts. Even his own child appears detestable to him, because he fancies that she is his rival for Elinor’s love. His visibly narcissist understanding of the concept of love involves having a person that deserves loving him. Although the eponymous character of Clive’s novel does not use violence or force, he exerts the power of his brilliant, yet heinous, mind devoid of deep feelings for anyone except himself. The conclusion seems inescapable that such an image of a husband and father does not correspond to the Victorian standards of manhood. Caroline Clive’s venture to delineate a wife-­slayer disguised as a virtual epitome of the Victorian gentleman created great stir among her contemporaries; however, the nervous tension increased when she added “the Concluding Notice” to the third edition of the book, where the protagonist peacefully dies in Boston, forgiven by his daughter and left unpunished by the law. As Adeline Sergeant states, the author exposes human nature in action “neither diagnosing it like a physician, nor analysing it like a priest” (1897, 172). She deliberately allows readers to decide whether such a bizarre hybrid of admirable features and monstrous drives could possibly exist and to pass their own verdicts. The strange case of Paul Ferroll illustrates how inconsistent and superficial understanding of the gentlemanly ideal could be and how easy it was to manipulate the moral concepts in order to obtain general trust, employed to conceal anomalous desires and animalistic instincts. It seems justifiable to state that Clive may have suggested a more critical examination of the Victorian ideal as well as the people who aspired to personify it.

Works Cited Anonymous.  1849. The English Gentleman: His Principles. His Feelings. His Manners. His Pursuits. London: George Bell. Web. Beller, Anne-­Marie.  2013. “Sensation fiction in the 1850.” In The Cambridge Companion to Sensation Fiction, edited by Andrew Mangham, 7-­20. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Best, Geoffrey. 1985. Mid-­Victorian Britain 1851-­75. London: Fontana Press. Castronovo, David. 1987. The English Gentleman: Images and Ideals in Literature and Society. New York: Ungar. Clive, Caroline. 2008. Paul Ferroll. Kansas City: Valancourt Books. Gavin, Adrienne E. 2008. Introduction to Paul Ferroll, by Caroline Clive, vii-­xxxii. Kansas City: Valancourt Books.

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Mason, Philip. 1993. The English Gentleman: The Rise and Fall of an Ideal. London: Random House. Smythe-­Palmer, Abram. 1908. The Ideal of a Gentleman or a Mirror for Gentlefolks. London: George Routledge and Sons. “Review of Third Edition of Paul Ferroll.” 1856. Saturday Review, January 12. Ruskin, John. 1916. “Lilies. Of Queen’s Gardens.” In Ruskin’s Sesame and Lilies, edited by C. R. Rounds, 81-­113. New York: American Book Company. Web. Sala, George Augustus. 1874. “How I went to Court: A Proud Confession.” In Belgravia: A London Magazine, vol. 3, May: 294-­304. Sergeant, Adeline.  1897. “Mrs. Archer Clive.” In Women Novelists of Queen Victoria’s Reign: A Book of Appreciation, 161-­173. London: Hurst & Blackett, Limited. Web. Smiles, Samuel. 1889. Character. The Pioneer Press. Web. Sutherland, John. 1989. The Stanford Companion to Victorian Fiction. Stanford: Stanford University Press. “The English Gentleman.” 1845. The Spectator, February 22. Web.

Katarzyna Sokołowska

The Dionysian in Virginia Woolf ’s Between the Acts Woolf ’s vision of reality and of art is marked by the tension of two opposing categories, which can be summed up as the complete, the stable, and the coherent vs the variable, the fluid and the fragmentary. Woolf ’s protagonists are usually preoccupied with looking for a refuge from reality, which is caught up in constant change; they are eager to create the world of perfection and unity as Mrs. Ramsay in To the Lighthouse, Clarissa in Mrs. Dalloway, Bernard in The Waves, to mention a few. At the same time, Woolf opts for the world in flux, not determined by clearly defined reference points. In her fiction she embraces the modernist formula of questioning all widely shared values and cognitive strategies in the areas of culture, religion, philosophy and psychology. In her famous, somewhat provocative statement, she placed the experience of the radical transformation of reality at around the year 1910. This experience made her focus on the search for original, revolutionary forms that would match the era of fundamental change, but also inspired her to seek a new understanding of the relationship between art and reality in order to convey deeper insights in her literary works. Her fiction registers the conflict between the need to design rules for structuring chaos and the rejection of obsolete forms rooted in the metaphysical absolutes. This conflict also informs Woolf ’s last novel, Between the Acts. Recently more and more critics opt for the interpretation of the novel which ignores the theme of art as a source of coherence and stability and emphasizes the affinity of the novel with the postmodernist aesthetics of fragmentation, giving a radically dark and at moments almost nihilistic presentation of society on the verge of disintegration.1 Woolf had a tendency to disrupt the coherent representation of reality, to challenge the plausibility of the idea of art as representation and to invent new formal narrative devices which establish fragmentation as the core of her aesthetics. This stands in a new light if you consider it in the context of Nietzsche’s Dionysian philosophy which shows its anti-­metaphysical edge in the concept of perspectivism and in the pivotal role of interpretation in dethroning 1 See Guiguet 1965, 326; Beja 1970, 229; DiBattista 1980, 218, 227; Zwerdling 1986, 312, 315-­16; Narenmore, 1973, 224 and Caughie 1991, 52-­53, among others.

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metaphysics and eradicating the metaphysical categories of subject, truth and the essence of things. In a simplified account of Nietzsche’s oeuvre, two main phases can be discerned. In The Birth of Tragedy Nietzsche formulates the dichotomy of Apollo and Dionysus, representing the opposite domains of beauty and intoxication, of logos and music. The insight into the tension between the Apollonian and the Dionysian enabled him to define the role of art in contemporary society, which was ravaged by nihilism, decadence and sterile rationalism. Later Nietzsche shifts the focus to the figure of Dionysus and works out his Dionysian philosophy, which is based on anti-­metaphysical discourse and which undermines the claims of the so-called metaphysics of presence to ensure a life-­affirming response to reality. In the face of radical scepticism about the metaphysical explanation of the world Nietzsche comes up with perspectivism, which Nehamas defines as a new approach to the problem of cognition involving an infinite number of points of view or interpretations, and construing reality as a collection of fragments, which will not form a whole or lead to the revelation of truth (1985, 49). Perspectivism, which calls for inventing a countless number of points of view, equally valid, even if mutually contradictory, dismisses the claims of the logos to the absolute truth. Nehamas argues that Nietzsche’s perspectivism challenges the concept of autonomous, objectively existing reality independent of interpretation. As he points out, autonomous external reality defies any attempt to determine its essential features, which makes its representation impossible (1985, 45). Nietzsche’s redefinition of knowledge as the process of creating and then imposing the grid of concepts on reality leads him to assert its status of a rhetorical construction and to seek its origin not in the direct contact between mind and reality but rather in our interpretations, and our tendency to simplify ineffable experience in order to find adequate linguistic articulation. Nietzsche rejects the will to truth which runs counter to the project of getting as many points of view as possible, preferably revealing some new, unforeseen aspects and undermining a previously accepted worldview, so that the number of available perspectives might grow into infinity and expand our understanding (1985, 72). As Nietzsche argues in On the Genealogy of Morality, no point of view can aspire to the exclusive status and hegemony over others and become the source of a complete, accurate and comprehensive knowledge:2 “There is only a perspectival seeing, only a perspectival ‘knowing’;

2 It is no wonder that Nietzsche’s favourite literary form which he invariably uses in his philosophical texts is aphorism. It highlights the fragmentary nature of knowledge based on an infinite number of perspectives, dismisses the vision of a homogenous

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the more affects we are able to put into words about a thing, the more eyes, various eyes we are able to use for the same thing, the more complete will be our ‘concept’ of the thing, our ‘objectivity’” (Nietzsche 2006, 87). Woolf ’s last novel Between the Acts revolves around an amateur play directed by a self-­appointed artist, Miss La Trobe, and staged for the local community with the intention of collecting money for charitable purposes. The play becomes the epitome of Dionysian art with its emphasis on the plurality of perspectives, a play of contradictions and an affirmation of art as a domain of appearance which cancels the metaphysical dichotomy of surface and a hidden foundation of being. Miss La Trobe’s vision of art as a unifying experience disintegrates. Her pageant becomes a piece of art which celebrates a dispersal of meaning, defies any attempt to recover its ultimate sense and refuses to be merely a faithful image of the dilemmas which threaten to throw the society into turmoil at that time of the impending war. This status of La Trobe’s play marks the presence of the Dionysian perspectivist vision that invalidates mimesis with its unequivocal relationship between reality and representation and affirms the power of appearance. In terms of the Dionysian philosophy, art is not a supplement to the world but rather it constitutes the only conceivable reality. Reality, one of the elements of the mimetic relation, recedes into nothingness losing its autonomy and objectivity. The only possible mode of its existence requires interpretation and creation of a variety of perspectives or appearances. Representation is dismantled and replaced by the Dionysian fusion of differences, which involves the erasure of the subject/object dichotomy. The iconoclastic revolt against image which asserts rather the poietic than the mimetic function of art, provides a framework for understanding the relationship between art and life. Imitation of reality is no longer the primary task of art. In fact, outside the world of appearance, no objective reality is accessible to the artist. Image – or appearance to use the Nietzschean terminology – functions on its own, with no reference to anything external that might legitimise its aesthetic role. Appearance, within the mimetic paradigm, is construed as a veil or a mask hiding the essence of things to be captured by a work of art. If removed, in Nietzsche’s interpretation, it reveals merely the presence of other veils and masks instead of some ultimate, stable point of reference, such as truth. Woolf places the theatrical play at the very centre of her novel to suggest this new kind of relationship between art and life, which assumes that it is art that

reality and stresses the need to cultivate the art of interpretation in order to face uncertainties informing perception.

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offers a paradigm for life, and not the reverse. Frequent pauses and ellipses interrupting the smooth flow of the pageant are the devices which Woolf employs to call into question the stable hierarchy of life and art.3 As soon as the pageant begins, it is plagued with interruptions from the outside world in the shape of sounds of nature, of the viewers coming late and moving the chairs. Theatre no longer relies on a clear separation of the stage and the audience; the gap disappears between the illusion of art and the truth of reality (Ruotolo 1986, 219). The break with theatrical illusion repeats the gesture of dropping Dionysian masks which hide nothing but other masks and point out that theatre is the only reality. Pauses prevent envisaging the text as a coherent whole and turn the pageant into a play of contradictions such as plurality and unity, the homogeneous and the heterogeneous, authority and the dispersal of power, the construction of meaning and its dissemination, yet none of these terms gains the upper hand. Recurrent pauses disrupt the Apollonian illusion, making the viewers aware of watching a poor imitation of life, its low-­quality picture on the one hand, but on the other suggesting that what we call life can function only within the bounds of art. They get a fundamental Nietzschean insight that life as art manifests itself as inexhaustible creative activity that entails both overcoming obsolete forms and constructing the new ones. The pageant confronts the viewers with the necessity to redefine their understanding of a work of art as a replica of external reality and brings this recognition to dramatic extremes, suggesting that all are caught up in the illusion, trapped in a maze full of mirrors, where they face nothing but their own reflections. Woolf annuls the promise of getting back to the true reality beyond words and images and negates the possibility of direct experience which could gain legitimacy by way of its undeniable obviousness. Thus, the mimetic pact between mind and reality, art and life has been broken and the central role of representation in art has come to its end. This “true reality” is not only unknowable, but there is no certainty that it exists at all. Woolf goes even further than Nietzsche, who challenged the duality of the real world and visual phenomena, and she seems to suggest, though not always consistently, that offstage there is nothing but void behind the veil. Mimetic art loses its validity in favour of the perspectivist paradigm in the crucial scene of the novel, when the actors step down from the stage covered with mirrors of various sizes and stand in front of the viewers so that they can see their own reflections: “Out they leapt, jerked, skipped. Flashing, dazzling, dancing,

3 In her Diary entry for the 16th of September 1929 Woolf indicates that pauses are the most fertile moments in the creative process.

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jumping. Now old Bart […] he was caught. Now Manresa. Here a nose… There a skirt… […] To snap us as we are, before we’ve had time to assume… And only, too, in parts…” (Woolf 1992, 109). A combination of body parts and pieces of clothing involves blurring the boundary between man and nature, and moving away from a hierarchical vision of reality as a chain of entities arranged by the degree of their excellence: “the jangle and the din! The very cows joined in. […] [T]he barriers that should divide Man the Master from the Brute were dissolved” (109). Different types of mirrors, even those made of cans, indicate the presence of multiple points of view which enjoy an equal status: “hand glasses, tin cans, scraps of scullery glass, harness room glass, and heavily embossed silver mirrors – all stopped. And the audience saw themselves, not whole by any means, but at any rate sitting still” (110). The narrator captures the viewers’ reactions, which reflect the need for the sense of completion fostered by the closure of the plot, as well as their quest for the author whose dominant presence cancels the plurality of viewpoints. This attitude is implied in the viewers’ desire to find someone to assign responsibility to and thank for the text: “How to make an end? Whom to thank? […] Whom could they make responsible?” (115). This need to secure an unequivocal elucidation of the play and pinpoint its ultimate meaning remains unfulfilled. The mirror scene reverses the traditional relationship between art and reality, inviting the viewers to assume the role of the actors and to perceive theatrical representation as the only reality. It announces the understanding of art in terms of Nietzschean appearance, which relies on nothing more but the endless chain of appearances, and whose relation to anything real and objective is denied. The mirror image which has ceased to function as an illusion and has risen to the status of the only reality undercuts the deeply rooted hierarchy of external reality as the original and the image as a copy. Now it is the reflection produced by the looking glass that asserts its hegemony over reality. Accordingly, the conceptualization of the mirror image as a simulacrum seems adequate. Within the framework of Nietzsche’s Dionysian philosophy it is no longer a copy reproducing the original, but the original itself, for which Nietzsche employs a term “Schein” or appearance and which cannot be defined in opposition to the truth, but which should be located within the network of mutually interdependent perspectives. The mirror scene invokes the metaphor of wandering in the labyrinth of reflections which recur ad infinitum, suggesting the multiplicity of perspectives and resisting any closure of meaning in the text (Ruotolo 1986, 227). If the mirror functions as a symbol of mimetic representation, a smashed mirror undermines the harmony and coherence of the Apollonian image. The picture of the world reflected in a cracked mirror becomes fragmentary or dissolves altogether, turning representation into simulacrum. Thus, the pageant, inscribed within the Dionysian paradigm of perspectivism, dismisses

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the idea that art amounts to an ultimate formula encoded in a text. La Trobe’s mysterious disappearance after the pageant’s finale correlates with a strategy of decentering a text through destabilizing the author’s position as a demiurge who might establish a coherent structure. The Dionysian aspect of the pageant prevails when everybody, the viewers, the actors and the villagers, join in the common dance. The Dionysian experience which blurs the boundary between theatrical illusion and the world cancels the fixed meanings of words and gives priority to the nonverbal reality of music: “It didn’t matter what the words were; or who sang what. Round and round they whirled, intoxicated by the music” (Woolf 1992, 58). Woolf dramatises the dissolution of hierarchy through dance, the Nietzschean symbol of the Dionysian spirit of lightness,4 and she celebrates the equivalence of all possible perspectives, since everyone is involved in the dance regardless of their status, both those at the very top, princes and priests, and those at the bottom, the shepherds, the peasants, the local fool. They all dance around Mrs. Clark, who has assumed the mask of a “majestic figure of the Elizabethan age” and stands on the podium, actually a soap box. Such a spatial configuration of the scene annuls the difference between the sublime and the trivial: “The gramophone blared. Dukes, priests, shepherds, pilgrims and serving men took hands and danced” (Woolf 1992, 7). William Dodge’s response confirms the presence of Dionysus, the embodiment of intoxication, ecstasy, the loss of “I,” and immersion in sensual impressions. He perceives depersonalised people, whose faces are blurred, and whose bodies have been disintegrated and reduced to moving arms and legs, as a play of “dappled light and shade,” devoid of substance and individuality: “It was a mellay; a medley; an entrancing spectacle (to William) of dappled light and shade on […] swinging legs and arms” (57-­58). Another variation on the metaphor of dancing invokes the sense of lightness and freedom which overwhelms the viewers during the pageant: “Yet somehow they felt […] a little not quite here or there. […] as if what I call myself was still floating unattached, and didn’t settle” (90). The phrase “not quite here and not quite there” places the viewers in the liminal space, outside of any limiting structures, sets them free from reductive definitions, and indicates the presence of contradictory, and yet equally valuable, perspectives. The end of the novel suggests that the play, though formally completed, continues in a different shape, resonating with the viewers’ consciousness, and thus cannot be simplified to a fixed formula once and for all, but assumes new meanings in

4 Nietzsche juxtaposed the spirit of lightness against the spirit of gravity, i.e. dogmatic belief in the absolutes.

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the interaction with others: “Still the play hung in the sky of the mind – moving, diminishing, but still there” (126). The viewers’ reception of the pageant relates them to the paradigm of realistic mimetic art that rests on the assumption that it should provide a diagnosis of reality, offer clear explanations and unveil the causes of psychological and social phenomena. Hence the audience’s disappointment when the pageant leaves them in the state of hermeneutic uncertainty conveyed in the fundamental question “What did it mean?” (126). Hence their negative assessment of the play as a failure and the hope that they can reach a full understanding of all they saw on the stage: “And if we’re left asking questions, isn’t it a failure, as a play? I must say I like to feel sure if I go to the theater, that I’ve grasped the meaning […] Or was that, perhaps, what she meant?” (118). Woolf disrupts the closed structure of the novel, which no longer requires the sequences of events logically tied up into a whole, making the text a vehicle for an idea or a moral message. Isa Oliver, unable to keep track of the excessively complicated plot twists in the play, comes to the conclusion that it is a minor or even redundant element of the pageant: “Don’t bother about the plot: the plot’s nothing” (56). Isa’s comment reflects Woolf ’s strategy of degrading the plotlines to a mosaic consisting of few significant events, which, however, can expand into infinity. Its symbol is the sound of the church bells, which always remains open to a follow-­up, and which, even though fading away into silence, still carries the potential to initiate the next sound: “The church bells always stopped, leaving you to ask: Won’t there be another note? […] Ding, dong, ding… There was not going to be another note. The congregation was assembled, on their knees, in the church. The service was beginning. The play was over […]” (123). The flow of notes which resolves into the streams of successive notes recurring in an infinite number of configurations forms an analogy to the pageant. This, within the paradigm of perspectivism, is the outcome of the viewers’ multiple interpretations, in no way restricted by the widely accepted procedures of perception and thinking: “They all looked at the play; Isa, Giles and Mr. Oliver. Each of course saw something different” (126). The sound of the bells contrasts with the holy mass celebrated at the local church, which symbolises faith subordinated to the dogmas and social custom, fulfillment and closure, as well as compliance with the dominant authority and with the absolutes, whereas the bells are associated with perspectivism, which opens up the possibility of reinventing and reinterpreting words and images into infinity. Snippets of speech, unfinished sounds and fragmented images which solicit the viewers’ attention during the pageant not only thwart any expectation of some ultimate meaning to be articulated, but also invite the plurality of perspectives and interpretations with none of them occupying the central position of unquestionable dogma. The pageant follows the Dionysian strategy of a child described

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in one of Nietzsche’s aphorisms. The child is absorbed in building and demolishing sand castles on the beach over and over again, and thus becomes a figure for rejecting the totalising categories which deny the status of art as a creative play of meanings never to reach an end.

Works Cited Beja, Morris. 1970. “Matches Struck in the Dark: Virginia Woolf ’s Moments of Vision.” In Virginia Woolf. To the Lighthouse. A Casebook, edited by Morris Beja, 210-­230. London: Macmillan. Caughie, Pamela L. 1991. Virginia Woolf and Postmodernism. Literature in Quest and Question of Itself. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press. DiBattista, Maria. 1980. Virginia Woolf ’s Major Novels: The Fables of Anon. New Haven: Yale University Press. Guiguet, Jean. 1965. Virginia Woolf and Her Works. Translated by Jean Stewart. London: Hogarth Press. Narenmore, James. 1973. The World Without a Self: Virginia Woolf and the Novel. New Haven: Yale University Press. Nehamas, Alexander. 1985. Nietzsche. Life as Literature. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press. Nietzsche, Friedrich. 2006. On the Genealogy of Morality. Edited by Keith Ansell-­ Pearson. Translated by Carol Diethe. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Ruotolo, Lucio. 1986. The Interrupted Moment. A View of Virginia Woolf ’s Novels. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Woolf, Virginia. 1992. Between the Acts. London: Penguin. Zwerdling, Alex. 1986. Virginia Woolf and the Real World. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Andrzej Sławomir Kowalczyk

“Destructive delight”: Conceptual Blending in Charles Williams’s Vision of Satanic Rituals in War in Heaven Friedrich Nietzsche’s notable proclamation of the death of God can be interpreted as a harbinger of the ensuing secularization of Western society and its growing existential doubt, fully expressed by the Modernists. As one critic observes, Nietzsche’s idea inaugurates a new era for the philosophy of religion and more generally for all aspects of culture. […] A new prospect arises that this world must somehow ground values immanently within itself. […] Finally free from alienation of its essence into unworldly and otherworldly abstractions, humanity can recognize itself as its own master and realize its nature and destiny fully, unhampered by any superior instance such as a divinity standing over it. (Franke 2007, 215)

Such an intellectual ambience, combined with overwhelming left-­wing sentiments, dominated the England of the 1930s – a period referred to as “the red decade” (Daiches 1958, 11). Paradoxically enough, it was at the outset of the decade, in 1930, that War in Heaven, the debut novel of Charles Williams (1886-­1945), was published,1 initiating the series of his “supernatural thrillers.” Contrary to mainstream trends, these works explore the spiritual dimension of the world, their plots being organized around the metaphysical conflict of good and evil understood as real spiritual entities. As T. S. Eliot puts it, “[f]or [Williams] there was no frontier between the material and the spiritual world. […] To him the supernatural was perfectly natural, and the natural was also supernatural” (2003, xiii-­xiv). In this study I intend to revisit War in Heaven, focusing not so much on the novel’s structural and thematic coherence2 but rather on mechanisms through which the reader becomes involved in Williams’s story-­world. I will argue that the reader’s cognitive and emotional engagement in Williams’s portrayal of the supernatural makes the question of the story’s “probability” less relevant. It seems

1 Williams’s first novel, The Black Bastard, was rejected by several publishers; thoroughly revised, it came out as Shadows of Ecstasy in 1933 [1934] (Hadfield 1983, 92). 2 This has been done e.g. by Urang 1971, Howard 1983, and Spencer 1986.

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that cognitive poetics, defined by Stockwell as “not the study of texts alone […] [but] the study of literary reading” (2002, 165), offers useful analytical tools to deal with the literary phenomenon of Williams’s fictions – the texts which, in Urang’s words, “are not about the vision; they want to be the vision” (1971, 80). Accordingly, I intend to explore how the reader conceptualizes certain images activated by virtue of textual signals and thereby how s/he builds a relevant interpretation. As my illustrative material, I will use the scene of satanic rituals described in War in Heaven, considering them in light of the conceptual integration/blending theory proposed by Turner and Fauconnier (2002). Mental spaces are “small conceptual packets constructed as we think and talk, for purposes of local understanding and action” (2002, 40); in an earlier study Fauconnier defines them as “constructs distinct from linguistic structures but built up in any discourse according to guidelines provided by the linguistic expressions” (1994, 16). Since the publication of the above-mentioned authors’ seminal study, The Way We Think (2002), there has been “an eruption of modifications” the theory has undergone (Libura 2010, 9). However, what is most important from a literary scholar’s perspective is that the application of this theory to the analysis of narratives has proved fruitful (e.g. Dancygier 2008; Kędra-­Kardela 2012). Essentially, conceptual integration is a subconscious cognitive mechanism in which two (or more) mental spaces, known as input ones, blend to form a new, emergent space, in which certain elements of both inputs are placed (Turner and Fauconnier 2002, 41). The process is theorized as gradual, although it occurs at an infinitesimal moment. First, there must be certain analogies between the inputs, which allows for “a partial cross-­space mapping” to connect the equivalents (41). Next, the so-­called generic space “maps onto each of the inputs and contains what the inputs have in common” (41). Finally, a selective projection takes place, forming the blend, which, significantly, is not an overlap of the two; rather, it “develops emergent structure that is not in the inputs” (42). The blend may be developed by virtue of three processes: (i) composition, in which new relationships between the elements are created; (ii) completion, in which different frames of knowledge or cultural models are evoked to complete the “missing” components; and (iii) elaboration, or the “dynamic running of the blend” (43). The model being introduced, I will now apply it to a vital scene from War in Heaven. The story begins in a London publisher’s office where a corpse is discovered in one of the rooms; a police investigation follows, but the key questions remain unanswered. Soon, the mystery plot becomes overshadowed by the supernatural one. The retired owner of the office and devout satanist, Gregory Persimmons, admits to committing the murder and blackmails his son, the present owner, into publishing his recent book on the occult. The reader’s attention

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is successively drawn to the archetypal Holy Graal (Williams’s spelling variant), discovered by Persimmon’s befriended author, Sir Giles Tumulty, to be kept in the parish of Fardles, ministered by Julian Davenant, an Archdeacon. Persimmons hatches a plot to intercept the Chalice so as to possess its extraordinary power. What follows is a sui generis war between the evildoers (Persimmons and his aides) and the Graal’s defenders: the Archdeacon, a Roman Catholic Duke, and an editor, Kenneth Mornington. Apart from “natural” events, resulting in reclaiming the Graal and bringing it into the Duke’s residence in London, there is a persistent metaphysical conflict between those who intend to destroy the Cup by means of demonic powers and those who protect it through spiritual vigilance and prayer. With a view to achieving perfect communion with Satan, Persimmons intends to sacrifice to his master the soul of Adrian Rackstraw, the son of his employee. To achieve this, Persimmons intensifies his contacts with the Rackstraw family, offers them a holiday rest in his country estate in Fardles, makes friends with the boy, and insidiously poisons his mother, who seems to have lost her sanity. Next, he pressurizes the Archdeacon into exchanging the Graal for the woman’s well-­being. In the meantime, another supernatural agent enters the stage: Prester John, a legendary keeper of the Graal, in a series of prophetic meetings reminds the characters (and the reader) that there is the Cup’s true Owner, who controls the situation. Yet, Persimmons manages to lure the Archdeacon into the evildoers’ den and attempts to destroy his soul by means of black magic. Prester John – just in time – miraculously interrupts the perverse ritual, sets the Archdeacon free, and greatly affects Persimmons’s understanding of spiritual matters. As a result of this transformation Gregory surrenders to the police, while Adrian is rescued and brought back to his mother, relieved from her illness. The book ends with the mystical celebration of the Eucharist, Prester John conducting the ceremony in the Archdeacon’s church, and with the ensuing, meritorious death of the priest. The bulk of the chapter entitled “The Sabbath” is devoted to Persimmons’s spiritual attempt to unite himself with Satan. The actual rite in which the man participates is reminiscent of Mikhail Bulgakhov’s The Master and Margarita but is more “intimate” and not so spectacular, also lacking the (bitter) irony of the Russian version. Williams’s villain gets undressed, applies a magic ointment to his nude body with a set of ritualistic gestures accompanied by incantations, and lies down in the anticipation of Satan, referred to as “That beyond” (71).3 Unlike

3 This and all subsequent quotations from War in Heaven come from the 2004 reprint of the novel and will be referenced parenthetically in the text.

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Margarita, who literally becomes a flying witch, Persimmons sets out on his “journey” in a spiritual rather than physical sense. The dark ritual might be disregarded as mumbo jumbo (and Williams’s supernatural has frequently been classified as such by hostile reviewers), but it does elicit the reader’s cognitive and emotional response, affecting her/his interpretation of the events. In her/his conceptualization of the episode, the reader creates two mental input spaces: 1) the Persimmons space (I1), in which a mental representation of the villain performing his occult ritual is constructed; and 2) what I propose to call the bride space (I2), coded by virtue of certain linguistic units associated with the “wedding night” script recalled from the reader’s cognitive experience.4 Thus, I1 is evoked through the comments of the third-­person narrator which indicate the ritual’s time and place, as well as Gregory’s actions: –– “ To-­night, to-­night, something else was to happen. To-­night he would know what it all was of which he had read in his books” (71); –– “Persimmons stood up alone in his room” (71); –– “it was a little after midnight” (71); –– “he saw a clear sky with a few stars and the full moon” (71); –– “Slowly, very slowly, he undressed, looking forward to he knew not what” (71); –– “Gregory smiled, and touched the ointment with his fingers” (72). The anointing itself is pictured in ample detail: Persimmons performs it “in prolonged and rhythmic movements,” “from feet upwards,” touching the knees, the hips, and the breast (72). Next, he touches “his temples and his forehead with both hands” and lets the magic work (72). In the second round he applies the ointment only to selected parts of his body: “the soles of the feet, the palms of the hands, the inner side of the fingers, the ears and eyelids, the environs of nose and mouth, the secret organs” (72-­73). The third anointing, the narrator explains, is “purely ritual” (73). Persimmons produces the signs of a cross, a cross inverted, as well as “the pentagon reversed of magic” (73). Simultaneously, his voice gains in power and the man begins to experience peculiar synesthetic sensations (“Light and sound were married,” 73). This part of his private ceremony is summarized as follows: “Silent and grotesque he lay, and the secret processes of the night began” (73). The latter result in an out-­of-­body journey, which can be experienced only from the “inner” perspective the narrator attempts to delineate:

4 As Stockwell explains, scripts are dynamic “conceptual structure[s] drawn from memory to assist in understanding utterances”; they can also be understood as “socioculturally defined mental protocol[s] for negotiating a situation” (2002, 77).

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By no broomstick flight over the lanes of England did Gregory Persimmons attend the Witches’ Sabbath, nor did he dance with other sorcerers upon some blasted heath before a goat-­headed manifestation of the Accursed. But scattered far over the face of the earth […] those abandoned spirits answered one another that night; and […] [t]hat beyond them [i.e. Satan] felt them and shook and replied, sustained and nourished and controlled. (73)

Such a union of evil-­oriented souls is presented as a climactic event (note “a deep sigh of pleasure,” 74), after which Persimmons’s ego begins its approach towards the ultimate communion with Satan. However, what prevents the villain from fulfilling his spiritual craving is the lack of human sacrifice. In his vision, Persimmons sees little Adrian and offers him, vicariously, “to the secret and infernal powers” (76). The scene ends with a travesty of the mystical crucifixion, Gregory’s hands and feet and genitals being “[n]ailed, as it were” (76), leading him to experience “an ecstasy beyond his dreams” (76). Finally, the impression of chaos and multisensory sensations intensify, and Persimmons accomplishes his return. The markers of the bride space, or I2, appear in the text relatively late, when Persimmons’s spiritual travelling is, in a manner of speaking, in full swing. His flying self becomes a part of the greater “flow” of spirits (75), characterized as one “palpitating with desire” (75). The narrator presents the experience in the following manner: “He desired […] to give himself out, to be one with something that should submit to him […]; but something beyond imagination, stupendous” (75). This sexual allusion leads to the direct statement that he “longed to be married to the whole universe for a bride” (75). Gregory and other participants of the diabolical Sabbath keep moving in “the bridal dance” (75). Later on, as Persimmons approaches pure Evil, the reader is made to adopt the villain’s perspective: “It came, it came, ecstasy of perfect mastery, marriage in hell, he who was Satan wedded to that beside which was Satan” (76). The wedding-­night imagery used by Williams’s narrator in the culminating passages of the scene prompts the reader to complete the bride space (I2) with some elements which have so far been classified in relation to the Persimmons space (I1). To put it differently, I2 becomes augmented with the reader’s script of the “wedding night,” in whose context the already acquired information is reconsidered. Among such “re-­scanned” components one can list the wedding night anticipation, the beating of the bride’s heart, being alone in the room, getting undressed, making the body more attractive with cosmetics (an ointment), and the voice which “kept up a slow crooning” (72). Furthermore, the aforementioned body parts correspond with erogenous zones (72-­73). In the scene, the narrator uses words and expressions with obvious erotic/sexual connotations, such as “approach a climax” (74), “a deep sigh of pleasure” (74), “exquisite […] delight” (74), “lovely

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voices” (74), “palpitating with desire” (75), “an ecstasy beyond […] dreams” (76), which enriches the description with some powerful emotional quality. In the emerging blend, the black-­magic rites of the Sabbath are mentally superimposed on the wedding-­night experience, with the effect of expressing the spiritual via the carnal; as a result Persimmons becomes one of Satan’s brides savouring the moment of “destructive delight” (74). In this manner, the reader is prompted to conceptualize Williams’s supernatural as “naturalized” (or, better still, “embodied”), which is possible exactly due to the underlying cognitive mechanisms. Still, there arises the problem of Williams’s/the implied author’s control over the scene’s interpretation. It seems that there must be some “instructions” which would prevent the reader from his/her identifying with Persimmons’s satanic/ black-­magic perspective; otherwise, s/he might end up with the rather undesired conclusion5 that the intended spiritual union with Satan is overall an advantageous and pleasurable experience, an “ecstasy of perfect mastery” (76). And indeed, there are several instructions of this kind. For instance, as Persimmons engages himself in the rites, he alludes to a number of immoral acts he has committed, including the mental torturing of his senile father, the placing of his wife in an asylum, and the manipulating of his son, Stephen, whom he despises. By and large, Persimmons delights in executing his power over the lives of people around him so as to “twist them out of their security into a sliding destruction” (71). Perhaps the cruellest deed is the sacrificing of an innocent boy to Satan: “Adrian was the desirable sacrifice, an unknowing initiate, a fated candidate” (76). Such elements evoke with the reader the frame of knowledge related to the rules of moral/ethical/social conduct, which must create a sense of distance, if not repulsion. This detachment is augmented by the narrator, who, in spite of attempting to render Persimmons’s fascination with evil, at times puts himself beyond it, as it were. For example, consider again the sentence: “Silent and grotesque he [Persimmons] lay” (73). Here, the word “grotesque” may reflect the villain’s odd feeling concerning the whole situation (a nude, ointment-­covered elderly man, awaiting his metamorphosis), but it may as well be read as the reader-­oriented indicator of attitude. While referring to the Sabbath rituals, the narrator calls Satan “the Accursed” (73), using a tinged term. A few lines later, Satan’s ontological status is commented upon: “[him] some have held to be but the precipitation and tendency of their

5 From the Christian standpoint, that is. Even if Wiliams’s long-­standing engagement in Rosicrucian esoterism is taken into account, he cannot be associated with any goetic practices, i.e. ones related to evoking demons (cf. Ashenden 2008, 120-­21).

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own natures, and others for the equal and perpetual co-­inheritor of power and immortality with Good” (73). This “distancing” remark, I will argue, prevents the reader from identifying with Persimmons’s standpoint. Were it not so, why should the villain, or the narrator “on his behalf,” offer such comments? For what reason would a “satanic” interpretation involve an elucidation of this sort? A Christian reader is likely to complete the blend through reference to his/ her frame knowledge; as Turner and Fauconnier put it, “[w]e see some parts of a familiar frame of meaning, and much more of the frame is recruited silently but effectively to the blend” (2002, 48). Accordingly, the bridal imagery used by Williams in the scene evokes the biblical rendering of the Church as Christ’s bride. Such a “Christian” reading is further justified not only by the conversation of the two Anglican priests with which the chapter opens and through which a counterpoint for Persimmon’s rites is established, but also by the narrator’s direct allusions to such religious practices as meditative prayer: As to the mind of a man in prayer might come sudden reminders of great sanctities in other places and other periods, so now to him [Persimmons] came the consciousness, not in detail, but as achievements, of far-­off masteries of things, multitudinous dedications consummating themselves in That which was already on its way. (74, emphasis added)

The villain’s remembrance of conversations with his father on religious topics also implies the spiritual polarity between satanism and Christianity, the tone of the narrator’s account suggesting deliberate cruelty on Persimmons’s side: He [Persimmons] had – it had been his first real experiment – he had suggested very carefully and delicately, to that senile and uneasy mind, that there probably was a God, but a God of terrible jealousy; […] yes, no doubt Peter was forgiven, unless God had taken a terrible revenge and used Peter to set up all that mystery of evil which was Antichrist and Torquemada and Smithfield6 and the Roman See. (72, emphasis added)

In turn, the description of Persimmons’s pleasurable recollection of the assault on the Archdeacon is countered with a vision of the villain’s “being utterly and finally betrayed” (71) in an unspecified enclosed space – clearly, a premonition of Hell. Under closer scrutiny also the scene of the Sabbath rites – though undeniably “delightful” from Persimmons’s perspective – involves such emotions as fear and panic (75, 77), which may indicate the Christian interpretation of Satan as master-­liar and prefigure Gregory’s end (note an allusion to “a man that’s been 6 For centuries Smithfield was the central site for the executions of heretics, both Catholics and Protestants.

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hung” [247]). Elsewhere, Persimmons’s spiritual death is foreshadowed in the following manner: But Gregory was curiously shaken […]; he found himself in a state for which he had not been prepared and at which he trembled in horror. A sickness crept within him; was this the end of victory and lordship and the Sabbath, and this the consummation of the promises and of desire? The sudden action had precipitated him down a thousand spirals of the slow descent, and he hung above the everlasting void. (217, emphasis added)

The textual instructions above, combined with the Christian reader’s cognitive frames concerning the faith, make it possible to conceptualize Persimmons’s Sabbath rite as a blasphemous, devilish parody of the biblical message. The opposing qualities can briefly be presented as follows:

Bridegroom: Bride:

the biblical message Christ the Church (i.e. the community of believers)

Relationship: Craving: “Method”: Offering: Mystical image: Result:

love eternal communion humbling oneself Christ’s self-­sacrifice Crucifixion eternal life

the parody Satan Persimmons (and other worshippers of the devil) (self-­)pleasure, hate, and fear ultimate power exalting oneself sacrificing others crucifixion “sexualized” (76) “immortal life decay” (76)

The final interpretation of the Sabbath scene consists in the combining of two strategies: first, Williams makes the reader engaged, both intellectually and emotionally, in Persimmons’s experience; second, he leads him/her towards the rejection of the satanic evil, portrayed, as T. S. Eliot’s puts it, “not [as] the Evil of conventional morality and ordinary manifestations by which we recognize it, but [as] the essence of Evil” (2003, xvi). Having said that, it must be admitted that at the end of the novel Williams does mention a possibility of salvation for Persimmons, who pays for his sins with his life but may save his soul.7 In this manner his misguided spiritual zeal – similar, perhaps, to that of Saul of Tarsus in the

7 As Prester John puts it, “Die, then […] and there shall be agreement with you also in the end, for you have sought me and no other” (246).

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Bible – could be regarded as a redeeming feature.8 Be that as it may, in the world where God is dead and Satan is (at best) a threadbare metaphor, Williams’s fiction may extend an invitation for the reader to encounter – even though indirectly – the reality beyond the material universe: “a real world in which he [Williams] [was] at home” (Eliot 2003, xvi).

Works Cited Ashenden, Gavin. 2008. Charles Williams: Alchemy and Integration. Kent, Ohio: The Kent State University Press. Daiches, David. 1958. The Present Age in British Literature. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Dancygier, Barbara. 2008. “The text and the story: levels of blending in fictional narratives.” In Mental Spaces in Discourse and Interaction, edited by Todd Oakley and Anders Houggard, 51-­78. Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing. Eliot, T. S. 2003 (1948). Introduction to All Hallows’ Eve, by Charles Williams, ix-­xviii. Vancouver, British Columbia: Regent College Publishing. Franke, William. 2007. “The Deaths of God in Hegel and Nietzsche and the Crisis of Values in Secular Modernity and Post-­Secular Postmodernity.” Religion and the Arts 11.2: 214-­41. Hadfield, Alice Mary. 1983. Charles Williams: An Exploration of His Life and Work. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Heath-­Stubbs, John. 1998 (1955). “Charles Williams.” In The Literary Essays of John Heath-­Stubbs, edited by A. T. Tolley, 138-­64. Manchester: Carcanet Press. Howard, Thomas. 1983. The Novels of Charles Williams. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press. Kędra-­Kardela, Anna. 2012. “Words as Narrative Anchors. Meaning Construction and Conceptual Blending in Short Story Analysis: A Study in ‘Guests of the Nation’ by Frank O’Connor.” In Words in Context: from Linguistic Forms to Literary Functions, edited by Przemysław Łozowski and Anna Włodarczyk-­ Stachurska, 202-­12. Radom: Technical University of Radom Publishing. Libura, Agnieszka. 2010. Teoria przestrzeni mentalnych i integracji pojęciowej: Struktura modelu i jego funkcjonalność. Wrocław: Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Wrocławskiego.

8 Within the confines of the present study, it is not possible to discuss this apparent paradox in detail; suffice it to say that the inconsistency is often interpreted as a reflection of Williams’s hermetic beliefs (cf. Ashenden 2008, 104-­10).

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Spencer, Kathleen. 1986. Charles Williams. Mercer Island, Washington: Starmont House. Stockwell, Peter. 2002. Cognitive Poetics: An Introduction. London and New York: Routledge. Turner, Mark and Gilles Fauconnier. 2002. The Way We Think: Conceptual Blending and the Mind’s Hidden Complexities. New York: Basic Books. Urang, Gunnar. 1971. Shadows of Heaven: Religion and Fantasy in the Writing of C. S. Lewis, Charles Williams, and J. R. R. Tolkien. Philadelphia: Pilgrim Press. Williams, Charles.  2004 (1930). War in Heaven. Grand Rapids, Michigan: Eerdmans Printing.

Jacek Mydla

Revisiting the Gothic Plot: Past-­Oriented Suspense in Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca In this article, I construct the notion of past-­oriented suspense. As a point of departure, I review the basic features of suspense “proper,” i.e. future-­oriented, referring to chosen studies in the area of narrative theory. Next, I apply this extended definition to a classic mystery-­and-­terror narrative, Daphne du Maurier’s “modern Gothic” novel Rebecca (1938). I submit that narratives of mystery and terror (i.e. narratives traditionally regarded as “Gothic”) deploy their mysteries with the goal to produce suspenseful episodes. Their formula stipulates that past-­orientedness on the plane of story (fabula) should combine with future-­ orientedness on the plane of discourse (sjuzet). Past-­oriented narrative suspense is generated by the processes of discovering past secrets and the cognitive, emotional, and moral involvements these processes entail on the part of both the principal characters and readers.

The idea of “suspense proper” “No suspense, no narrative,” states Gary Saul Morson (2003, 68). In his book on the philosophy of horror, however, Noël Carroll makes a comment that does not sound encouraging, but one that many other scholars would agree with: Characterizing suspense, however, will prove a complicated project. For though it is a concept that we constantly use to discuss narrative art, it has not been subject to precise enough theorizing. That is, though frequently employed, suspense is a pretty amorphous concept in narratology. (1990, 129)

The situation may look even less promising in the case of narratives which, though palpably suspenseful – and a good mystery story never fails in this respect – are somehow less evidently so than an action thriller of the James Bond type. Suspense is usually defined in psychological terms, namely as a state of restless anticipation. Typically, in Gerald Prince’s Dictionary of Narratology, we read that suspense is “[a]n emotion or state of mind arising from a partial and anxious uncertainty about the progression or outcome of an action, especially one involving a positive character” (2003, 96). This entry contains the salient points that define future-­oriented, or proper, suspense. This peculiar “state of mind” is directed

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towards the future and is caused by insufficient knowledge (“uncertainty”) as to what the current state of affairs will bring. The suggestion about “a positive character” indicates that empathy, or – more broadly – identification of the reader with a liked character, is another crucial feature, especially in a situation of danger. The term “action” indicates that this liked character is personally involved in the events that shape the dynamically – and unfavourably – developing state of affairs. Let us examine a model example in order to list the basic parameters of future-­ oriented suspense. In a scene of the 1973 James Bond film Live and Let Die, known as the “crocodile farm scene,” the hero finds himself trapped on a tiny islet surrounded on all sides by hungry crocodiles. Below is a review of the basic features of a suspenseful narrative. (1) Danger. The possibility of the hero ending up torn to pieces and devoured by some carnivores is very real. The crocodiles may not be as lethal as the killer shark in Jaws, studied in its monster-­qualities by Noël Carroll (1990, 99 ff), yet they are clearly cast as single-­mindedly anti-­human. The ritual of feeding whole chickens to them, which immediately precedes Bond’s entrapment, whets the viewer’s appetite as well by making her think up gruesome scenarios (“anticipative hypotheses,” as in Pfister 1991) for the human victim. (2) Identification. The viewer is expected to identify with the protagonist, the general rule in the Bond films being that the villains are made particularly repulsive, thus bringing into sharp relief the many-­sided attractiveness of the hero. Identification has several sides to it; it may be cognitive, emotional, and moral.1 In most cases, fellow-­feeling with the protagonist (empathy) and our approbation of his or her actions go hand in hand. In our example, the reader’s intellectual involvement is equally important (“Is Bond bright enough to survive?”). As in countless other scenes of this kind, here the identification is – ideally at least – complete, which of course intensifies suspense. (3) Dynamic. The crocodile farm scene has a palpable dynamic to it. Having spotted Bond, the beasts are now making their way towards the islet, preventing his escape. They may be moving slowly, but time is running out all the same. We see Bond make attempts at rescue and fail. Finally, he performs a desperate but successful feat and reaches safety. The scene has thus a unifying theme: “yet another failed attempt to get rid of Bond.” It is an episode whose suspenseful dynamic has the typical arching trajectory, to use Manfred Pfister’s term (1991,

1 Scholars have tended to concentrate on empathy (e.g. Zillmann 1996, 214), which narrows the idea. In many cases, only a broadly understood and flexible notion of identification is useful.

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101). Tension is on the rise as the likelihood of Bond’s successful escape is rapidly diminishing until it reaches peak value. This part of the trajectory is characteristically negative in the moral sense, because the situation is developing in an unfavourable direction, with the odds against the hero. Then, on his last-­second race to safety across the necks of the reptiles, suspense rapidly comes down to level 0.2 Let us stress what for us is of special importance: in this episode the past has no relevance. Nothing in the back-­story affects the episode’s suspenseful dynamic. All the anticipative questions that the mind of the viewer generates are future-­ oriented. It would be difficult to imagine how a sudden revelation of a past secret could change the course of events.

The notion of past-­oriented suspense, or the suspense potential of mysteries Our extended definition of suspense proper suggests that suspenseful tensions can be generated by one narrative orientation, namely, future-­ward, and thus that the past (and the past of the positive character in particular) never comes into play. However, as I proceed to argue, a comprehensive theory of suspense must create room for narratives that combine mystery and terror. Such narratives are occupied with the past rather than the future and, for their attention-­gripping terrors, they must depend on a past-­related type of suspense (see Mydla 2009, 189 ff). There is indeed a variety of narrative terrors that have to do with the past and are generated by the processes of bringing it to light, or – to use forensic terminology – by inquest. Scholars who have dealt with suspense have either consistently concentrated on the future or have pointed out difficulties in applying the existing body of knowledge to mystery narratives (Knobloch 2003). But these ought not to discourage new attempts. In Narrative Fiction. Contemporary Poetics (2005), Shlomith Rimmon-­Kenan submits that we need to distinguish between two types of narrative interest or movement and argues that orientation towards the future is not the only possible manner of generating suspense. This certainly is a noteworthy distinction, and it encourages attempts, such as the present one, to make past-­ orientedness part of comprehensive theory of narrative suspense. 2 Applying the “erotetic” approach (Carroll 1990, 130 ff), we can say that, at the end of the episode, the question that initially arises in the mind of the receiver, has been answered: “Yes, once more Bond has been able to survive.” The narrative trajectory, besides the emotive and the moral, has also a significant cognitive dimension: the episode is also about task-­performing, i.e. finding a solution to a problem while working towards a deadline (Pfister 1991, 100, on the importance of deadline).

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Rimmon-­Kenan defines suspense as delay caused by the withholding of information and distinguishes two distinct narrative orientations, and hence two types of suspense: Delay consists in not imparting information where it is ‘due’ in the text, but leaving it for a later stage. Depending on the temporal dimension to which the withheld information belongs, delay can create suspense of two different types: future-­oriented and past-­oriented (i.e. oriented toward the future or the past of the story).

Commenting on past-­orientedness, the scholar explains: The past-­oriented delay consists in keeping alive questions like ‘what happened?’ ‘who did it?’, ‘why?’, ‘what is the meaning of all this?’ Here story-­time may go on, but the reader’s comprehension of the narrated events is impeded by the omission of information (i.e. the creation of a gap) about the past or the present. (2005, 129-­130)

To refine the above distinction we can combine it with the common one between the two planes of narrative: story and discourse. While fabula (or the plane of content) is arrangement of events according to chronology and causality, sjuzet (or plot, or the plane of expression) is the actual arrangement of events in a narrative that recounts those events (see, for instance, Prince 2003, 21 and 93). In mystery narratives, with their dominant orientation towards the past, suspense is generated, as we have seen, by insufficient knowledge about the past.3 Such narratives whet the reader’s curiosity by skilfully planting cognitive gaps, thus preventing her from constructing a coherent version of the past (deemed significant). The main characteristic of mystery narratives of the Gothic type then is that they prioritise fabula over discourse. This means that the future-­ward orientation essential to discourse is here made subservient to the past; the reader is impelled to fill out the cognitive gaps in renewed attempts to make sense of what has happened and consequently also of what is going on. It is only towards the close of the narrative that the reader arrives at a temporally and causally consistent fabula.4 This sustained state of cognitive deprivation is usually also acutely felt by at least one of the protagonists. The anguish of a hapless heroine imprisoned in a desolate edifice and oppressed by suspicions of the place’s foul secrets provides the ready illustration. 3 The is the basic pattern of Oedipus. 4 It must be noted that causality must not be understood here in a narrow and strictly physical sense (balls moving across a plane and colliding with one another); in narrative, the primary type of causality is that of human agency and as such entails interactions between free, goal-­pursuing individuals.

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At least two things need to be taken into account. First, the primacy of the fabula means the primacy of the so-­called back-­story: discourse consists in the progressive revelation of events that do not belong to its (discourse’s) dynamically evolving plane. Yet, as we have observed, in “Gothic” narratives, work of detection must itself generate suspense. For this reason, we can speak of a twofold narrative interest here. The what-­questions concerning the past (events prior to the commencement of the narrating and the detection; e.g. “Who committed what crime?”) must and typically do elicit as much curiosity as the how-­questions concerning detection. In the latter case, it is not simply about “How is the puzzle to be solved?” but also, and more importantly, “How is the principal character, or ‘detective’ involved going to be affected?” As a consummate Gothic mystery, du Maurier’s Rebecca also contains the two movements. On the plane of discourse, it is about the nameless protagonist’s marriage to Maxim de Winter, her social superior, and a wealthy and fetching widower. After the wedding, her situation becomes more and more difficult. She embarks upon an informal investigation of sorts, which leads her to the discovery of secrets Maxim has every reason to wish to remain dead and buried. These concern his previous wife Rebecca and the circumstances of her death, the alleged suicide. Though dead, Rebecca “haunts” both the soul of Maxim and the castle-­ like mansion of Manderley, her memory uncannily kept alive by the mourning and vengeful housekeeper, Mrs Danvers. On the plane of fabula, the novel – as the title already suggests – actually is about Rebecca, the spectrally present femme fatale. Thus, in a typically inverted manner, it is the back-­story that drives onward and animates the plane of discourse. Also, only the last-­page revelations fill the gaps, thus final lying to rest the carefully sustained cognitive frustration. These delayed gratifications allow the readers (and the heroine) to make sense of many puzzling goings-­on, such as the antics of Maxim and Mrs Danvers. Moreover, we realise that we should have expected the unexpected: the “whole truth” consists, not only of Maxim’s responsibility for Rebecca’s death, but also, and more importantly, of Rebecca’s immoral conduct prior to the incident, which, in the eyes of the heroine, exculpates the murderer.

The suspenseful features of the plot of Rebecca It is now our task briefly to examine whether and in what way the plot of Rebecca fulfils the “conditions” that we have stipulated for suspense proper.5 5 Analysis of this type could be carried out on the filmic material, especially the immensely popular 1940 adaptation of the novel by Alfred Hitchcock.

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1. Danger Typically of mystery narratives, in Rebecca, the past rather than the present is the primary source of threat to the heroine. Like Hamlet, she is doomed to search for and eventually discover truths about the past, and both the process and the result put her entire existence in peril. With the rising awareness that the past is not quite dead, the realisation of how much is at stake becomes more and more acute. Du Maurier skillfully uses the spectre-­like character of the housekeeper, Mrs. Danvers, to render the danger sinister. A climax in this respect comes when the heroine nearly commits suicide after a misconceived attempt to impersonate the dead Rebecca as a surprise gift for Maxim. If Rebecca is about how the past haunts the present and imperils future well-­ being, we must not understand danger only in literal terms (although scenes of serious physical threats are recounted). What is at stake is not the mundane staying out of harm’s way but personal integrity as well as the cohesion of the relationship between the two protagonists. After all, the story is a romance. Indeed, the two aspects can hardly be separated: Will the past leave unimpaired the psyche of the heroine? Will the marriage survive?6 For, if “Rebecca” succeeds in driving them apart, they will be forever doomed, doomed, that is, to live and suffer separately, even though they may stay married for many years to come. In this romantic fashion, the novel’s suspense potential, as attached to the heroine’s inquiries into the past, is closely bound with her love of Maxim. The fact that his life is at stake at the crucial point (the literal resurfacing of Rebecca’s body and the reopening of inquest) means that hers is too.

2.  Identification and empathy Mystery narratives usually throw upon us the perspective of the principal character. This limited point of view and the cognitive deprivation consequent upon it are obvious assets in the hands of a skilful storyteller. For one thing, they justify situations in which ignorance is a source of oppression (mental, of course, rather than physical) and thus of suspense. Led by the narrator-­heroine, the readers of Rebecca have little choice but to share her narrow perspective and limited knowledge. As we accompany her, often gropingly, in her “progress” from ignorance to illumination, our involvement steadily grows in intensity. At the beginning, she only knows that “her rival” is dead, but little about her “record” when alive (except

6 The past comes back when the boat with the body of Rebecca is recovered and presented as evidence that could incriminate Maxim.

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what she is told about Rebecca’s public image, almost entirely positive), and still less about her personality. Crucial in this respect is what we could label the Jane Eyre syndrome. For the heroine du Maurier chose a virtual nonentity. Her marriage to Maxim and her induction into Manderley create an opportunity for her, almost literally to become someone. Given the circumstances, this means becoming like, or even a perfect impersonation of, Rebecca; the prospect of becoming someone like the last Mrs de Winter is just too tempting. The anticlimax to this little plot comes, as we have mentioned, during the dress-­up ball, at the moment when the horrified Maxim recognises in his new wife precisely this – another Rebecca.7 A shock for the reader too, if not as serious as for the misguided “Jane”: like her, we have also believed that Maxim must have wanted his Rebecca back. This scene in particular, but also scenes in which the heroine allows the spirit of Rebecca to take possession of her, as it were, are effective in drawing a limit to the reader’s identification. We have the right to be confused in moral terms: she is being the silly goose too much. And yet, I would argue, she does not become emotionally alien to us. Her unconditional love for Maxim is her redeeming feature, as well as being precisely that which makes her, emotionally, vulnerable to the point of self-­annihilation.

3.  Narrative dynamic In Rebecca, as in countless suspenseful narratives, the probability that the “bad party” will come out victorious is greater than the success of the liked figure, that of the heroine, to whom we remain emphatically attached. Although Rebecca is far removed from monster narratives of the type conceptualised by Carroll, du Maurier makes use of the supernatural opportunities that the physical absence of Rebecca has opened. This breathes fresh life into the ancient and stale formula of the “explained supernatural.” In a number of scenes, the heroine virtually comes into immediate sensory contact with the rival to the love and soul of Maxim: when she finds and feels Rebecca’s handkerchief (with a monogram and smears of lipstick on it) in a mackintosh that used to be Rebecca’s (du Maurier 2003, end of chapter 10); when the blind old dog lifts its head to welcome its mistress only to discover to its disappointment that she is not Rebecca (du Maurier 2003, 92);

7 The heroine is not dressed up here as Rebecca, but like Rebecca; she is wearing the same impersonation, so to speak, that Rebecca wore on the night when she was last seen (the night when she was killed by Maxim).

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when, in a similar fashion, Maxim’s ailing and senile grandmother has a fit on finding out that she has mistakenly taken her for the darling Rebecca. These scenes are suffused with what we might call the “psychological supernatural.” One might also insist in seeing in Rebecca a ghost or even a monster. What matters, however, is that du Maurier’s managed to capture and render convincing moments of the other woman’s spectral presence. As Mrs Danvers puts it with a great deal of cruel persuasiveness: it is difficult, if not altogether impossible, for a human being to combat a ghost (du Maurier 2003, 275 – 276). In our novel, the chances are small, not because the ghost is a fire-­breathing demon, but because it draws its life-­sustaining energies from the memory and even the five senses of the living.

Concluding note Our brief analysis of Rebecca has shown, convincingly, we hope, not only that mystery narrative may contain suspensefully viable features, but also that there is no reason to ignore the type of suspense, past-­oriented or Gothic, that mystery narrative can produce. It may not be suspense sui generis, yet it ought not to be confused with the future-­oriented variety. On the other hand, further research ought to concentrate on suspenseful aspects of mystery narrative that are genre specific. In our opinion, the popularity of Rebecca, both in book form and as an adaptation, is sufficient evidence of du Maurier’s success in re-­animating the Gothic narrative formula by, paradoxically, infusing it with the presence of the dead title protagonist. The primacy of the back-­story is consistently and unceasingly sustained through this spectral presence and is a viable source of terrors. The famous opening, in which the narrator tells us of her dreams of Manderley, hauntingly evokes recollections of a paradise that was destined to be lost. At the beginning of the book, Manderley is already a heap of ashes, but it will take the reader many long hours to rake through the debris in the hope of eventually seeing in it the vague shapes of what has been.

Works Cited Beecher, Donald. 2007. “Suspense.” Philosophy and Literature 31.2: 255-­279. Carroll, Noël. 1990. The Philosophy of Horror or Paradoxes of the Heart. London and New York: Routledge. du Maurier, Daphne. 2003. Rebecca. London and New York: Virago.

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Knobloch, Silvia. 2003. “Suspense and Mystery.” In Communication and Emotion. Essays in Honor of Dolf Zillmann, edited by Jennnings Bryant, David Roskos-­ Ewaldsen and Joanne Cantor, 392-­409. London: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. Morson, Gary Saul. 2003. “Narrativeness.” New Literary History 34.1: 59-­73. Mydla, Jacek. 2009. Spectres of Shakespeare. Appropriations of Shakespeare in the Early English Gothic. Katowice: Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Śląskiego. Pfister, Manfred. 1991. The Theory and Analysis of Drama. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Prince, Gerald. 2003. A Dictionary of Narratology. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. Rimmon-­Kenan, Shlomith. 2005. Narrative Fiction. Contemporary Poetics. 2nd edition. London and New York: Routledge. Zillmann, Dolf. 1996. “The Psychology of Suspense in Dramatic Exposition.” In Suspense. Conceptualizations, Theoretical Analyses, and Empirical Explorations, edited by Mike Friedrichsen, Peter Vorderer and Hans J. Wulff, 199-231. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Publishers.

Anna Kędra-­Kardela

The Gothic Space Revisited There is no denying that ever since its creation by Horace Walpole in 1764, the Gothic novel has invariably been defined in terms of its setting. Whether it is a medieval castle, steep mountains, a Victorian house, a city or some twentieth-­ century location, the setting of the novel determines, to a great extent, its generic classification as a Gothic novel. I shall argue that the Gothic quality of the spatial arrangement in the novel is not a constant feature of a text written in this genre but is subject to change. There are two basic mechanisms of this change: either the familiar space becomes unfamiliar and thus acquires a Gothic quality, or a reverse process can take place, when Gothic space loses its quality as a result of being “appropriated” by the characters (by a woman, in particular) and thus becomes “domesticated.”1 Based on three novels written over a period of two centuries: The Castle of Otranto (1764), Wuthering Heights (1847), Rebecca (1938), and a short story The Bloody Chamber (1979), I claim that both these processes – which I call gothicisation and degothicisation of the space respectively, are characteristic of this generic convention determining the plot patterns in novels labelled as Gothic. In his study on space in Gothic fiction, Manuel Aguirre (2002, 2008) argues that the Gothic universe of the novel can be perceived in geometrical terms as a two-­part space embracing two domains: the rational domain of the understandable and the domain of the numinosum, of another world, which is beyond human grasp and understanding. These two spheres, Aguirre posits, are separated by a

1 These processes, it seems, can be looked at in terms of the Freudian notion of the uncanny (i.e. das Unheimliche). Freud explains that the word heimlich (which can be translated as ‘familiar’, ‘native’, ‘belonging to the home’) “is not unambiguous, but belongs to two sets of ideas, which without being contradictory are yet very different.” Freud’s analysis indicates that “‘heimlich’ is a word, the meaning of which develops towards an ambivalence, until it finally coincides with its opposite, unheimlich. Unheimlich is in some way or other a sub-­species of heimlich” (Freud 1990, 76-­78). Thus, fear may stem from the experience of the heimlich, i.e. familiar, and the unheimlich, i.e. unfamiliar or uncanny. According to Freud, Olena Lytovka posits, “the uncanny must have an element of danger in it. It may be something domestic but at the same time unfriendly, dangerous, something that sets the sense of insecurity within the four walls of one’s house” (2014, 13).

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threshold: the plot in a Gothic novel reflects the transgressive movement in the direction of either of these domains (2002, 16-­17). The “otherness” of the Gothic space, Aguirre holds, is often indicated by titles of works such as The Castle of Otranto, The Mysteries of Udolpho, which highlight the importance of the place, i.e. the “other place.” In horror stories, he further argues, the “otherness” is more explicitly expressed by the adjectives such as, for example, “lost” in The Lost Continent, and “forbidden” in Forbidden Planet (2002, 16-­18; cf. Aguirre 2008). The perspective on the presentation of the setting in the Gothic novel offered here is slightly different, although related to Aguirre’s. It draws on the ideas put forward by Marie-­Laure Ryan, especially on the notions of spatial frames – “the immediate surroundings of actual events, the various locations shown by the narrative discourse” and story space seen as “the space relevant to the plot, as mapped by the actions and thoughts of the characters” (2009, 422). In the first chapter of Horace Walpole’s Gothic novel, The Castle of Otranto, the narrator presents Isabella’s (“half-­dead with horror” [Walpole 1990, 23]) escape through the castle from Manfred, her would-­be father-­in-­law. Angered by her refusal to marry him, he pursued Isabella through the intricate corridors of the castle in order to force her to become his wife. She ran through the principal staircase. […] [S]he recollected a subterraneous passage which led from the vaults of the castle to the church of saint Nicholas. […] The lower part of the castle was hollowed into several intricate cloisters; and it was not easy for one under so much anxiety to find the door that opened into the cavern. An awful silence reigned throughout those subterraneous regions, except now and then some blasts of wind that shook the doors she had passed, and which, grating on the rusty hinges, were re-­echoed through that long labyrinth of darkness. (Walpole 1990, 24-­25; emphasis added)

This passage contains several elements (italicised), all of which contribute to creating the sense of spatial entrapment, the motif which was to become a staple feature of the genre initiated by Walpole. The setting to all kinds of strange supernatural occurrences, the Castle of Otranto soon acquires a symbolic dimension as a place where its residents cannot feel entirely safe. Although at the beginning of Walpole’s story the castle is not ruined or dilapidated (unlike buildings in many Gothic stories written after Otranto), its stability is soon undermined. First the solidity is impaired metaphorically, when it turns out that Otranto’s ownership is questionable (cf. Frank 2003, 19),2 then the castle “literally” loses its stability as it collapses

2 Introduced by Walpole in Otranto, the theme of usurpation remains one of the chief motifs in the Gothic novel. Dark family secrets, including usurpation, tend to be

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and falls into ruin at the end of the novel. As put succinctly by Frederick S. Frank in the Introduction to Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto and The Mysterious Mother, “[o]nce the goal of grail knights as well as the sanctum of high religious mystery, the castle now becomes a place of supernatural danger no longer associated with refuge and redemption but a type of hell where ‘nobody is entirely safe; nothing is secure’” (Frank 2003, 20). And elsewhere, he posits, “[m]arked for a fall, Walpole’s castle would become Gothic literature’s first unstable and unsafe world in which irrational forces are in control” (19; emphasis added). Ironically, the castle – by definition a “strong building, built in the past as a safe place that could be easily defended against attack” (Longman), “a fortified building, a stronghold” (NOED) in Otranto becomes a place of danger, and the danger comes from its main ruler, not from the outside. Aguirre (1990, 92; 2008, 6) takes the castle to be the most important symbol of spatial arrangement in the Gothic novel. The castle, this “unstable and unsafe” space, is the focus of the Gothic genre, regardless whether the events of the plot take place in the Middle Ages or in modern times. The different elements of the castle as listed in the passage above, including intricate cloisters, caverns, subterraneous regions, and long labyrinths of darkness, though transformed to suit the changing context of different literary epochs, will appear in Gothic novels for centuries to come, contributing to the theme of imprisonment, central to this genre, as a spatial metonymy of social, mental and psychological entrapment. What epitomizes the Gothic quality in The Castle of Otranto is the process of transition of the familiar spaces into unfamiliar (i.e. hostile) ones, which underlies the plot construction in the novel.3 Isabella knows the topography of the castle: at the beginning of her escape from Manfred she “recollected a subterraneous passage which led from the vaults of the castle to the church of Saint Nicholas” (Walpole 1990, 25; emphasis added). This knowledge is important, as she knows where to look for shelter: “she seized the lamp that burned at the foot of the staircase, and hurried towards the secret passage” (25). Knowing the edifice well, she recognizes “the mouth of the subterraneous cavern” (26) and in spite of fear and despair, when her lamp has been extinguished by the wind, she is able to grope for the door in the dark. Also she knows where to look for the trap door: “Help me to find a trap-­door that must be hereabout” (27), Isabella asks Theodore. She concealed in the changing intricate settings, with the castle replaced by labyrinthine houses or urban landscapes. 3 According to Aguirre, the sublimity of the place in Otranto is augmented by the fact that the tale takes place in medieval Italy. The place is perceived as “not-­here, not-­now, an Other place, an Other time” (1990, 92).

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is thus familiar with the place: she knows that there is “a smooth piece of brass enclosed in one of the stones” – “a lock which opens with a spring, of which I know the secret” (27). Yet, although she knows the topography of the castle and its secret locks, this does not prevent her from feeling fear. The castle becomes strange and hostile as soon as Manfred’s chase of her commences: the “familiar” edifice in which she could move freely, becomes “unfamiliar,” nightmarish, in other words, Gothic. It turns into a space of entrapment through which she has to flee to evade being forced to marry her persecutor. Steeped in darkness, the castle of Otranto becomes a scene of supernatural occurrences, hauntings which change it into mysterious space. As Aguirre (1990, 92) argues, “[the] haunted house is by definition a not-­home, an unheimlich centre.” It is noteworthy that supernatural events happen only when injustice concerning the questionable ownership of Otranto is about to be perpetuated. First, when Conrad is about to be wedded to Isabella to prevent a mysterious ancient prophecy from coming true, an enormous helmet from the black marble statue of Alfonso the Good in the nearby church of St. Nicholas descends from the sky, killing the bridegroom. As soon as Manfred decides to marry Isabella to be able to have male offspring and thus keep the lineage, other supernatural phenomena occur, including a sighing portrait or the moving plumes of the helmet, “which rose to the height of the windows, waving backwards and forwards in a tempestuous manner, and accompanied with a hollow and rustling sound” (Walpole 1990, 23). Manfred’s terrifying actions, his scheming and plotting along with the supernatural phenomena change the castle into a trap, thus gothicising it. In Otranto little is known of what goes on outside the castle, almost all events in the novel happen within its walls. Apparently it is easier to enter the castle than leave it. Described through reference to its various elements, the internal space of the castle seems to be broader than the space outside (Aguirre 2002, 23; 2008, 6). An important zone in the castle is its labyrinthine underground region, a typical attribute of the Gothic space. For Isabella, the castle becomes uncanny (unheimlich): the place she knows turns into unknown space as a result of what happens within its walls. The remark made by Summers, and referred to by Aguirre (1990, 92) that “the real protagonist of the Gothic novel is the castle” thus seems to foreground the architectural aspect of Gothic fiction.4

4 Although Walpole’s interest in the Gothic manifested itself first in his fascination with medieval architecture, which found its implementation in his Strawberry Hill estate, a villa converted into a “fullblown medieval fortress,” “when he came to write Otranto,” Frank argues, “his Gothicising was no longer ‘merely architecture’ but an attitude of

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A similar process of gothicising of space takes place in Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights. The Earnshaws’ house gradually turns into a Gothic abode, the process initiated by Heathcliff ’s arrival. Interestingly, the first encounter the reader has with Wuthering Heights shows the estate as a common place, built to shelter its inhabitants from the wind and rain. Lockwood’s description at the beginning of the novel highlights the protective quality of the house, well adjusted by its architect to withstand the severe weather conditions typical of the area: Wuthering Heights is the name of Mr Heathcliff ’s dwelling. ‘Wuthering’ being a significant provincial adjective, descriptive of the atmospheric tumult to which its station is exposed in stormy weather. Pure, bracing ventilation they must have up there at all times, indeed: one may guess the power of the north wind blowing over the edge, by the excessive slant of a few stunted firs at the end of the house; and by a range of gaunt thorns all stretching their limbs one way, as if craving alms of the sun. Happily, the architect had foresight to build it strong: the narrow windows are deeply set in the wall, and the corners defended with large jutting stones. […] Before passing the threshold, I paused to admire a quantity of grotesque carving lavished over the front, and especially about the principal door; above which, among a wilderness of crumbling griffins and shameless little boys, I detected the date ‘1500,’ and the name ‘Hareton Earnshaw.’ I would have made a few comments, and requested a short history of the place from the surly owner; but his attitude at the door appeared to demand my speedy entrance, or complete departure, and I had no desire to aggravate his impatience previous to inspecting the penetralium. (Brontë 1984, 46; emphasis added)

The narrow windows, the thick wall, are seen here as protective elements, safeguarding against surly weather conditions and not “typically Gothic” features. The interior of the house does not appear to be “suspicious” to Lockwood, whose impression of the place is favourable. Heathcliff, however, seems not to match this environment, though: The apartment and furniture would have been nothing extraordinary as belonging to a homely, northern farmer, with a stubborn countenance, and stalwart limbs set out to advantage in knee-­breeches and gaiters. Such an individual seated in his arm-­chair, his mug of ale frothing on the round table before him, is to be seen in any circuit of five or six miles among these hills, if you go at the right time after dinner. But Mr. Heathcliff forms a singular contrast to his abode and style of living. (Brontë 1984, 47; emphasis added)

discontent reflecting the subconscious fears and desires of an age grown too fond of reason and beginning to question its own empirical assumptions” (2003, 13).

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Although Mr Lockwood errs in his judgement of Heathcliff, his remark concerning Heathcliff ’s being ill-­suited to this environment is correct. While the first impression Lockwood gets of the house is that the place is nothing out of the ordinary, he soon discovers a discrepancy between the appearance of the house and its ambience: the essence of its Gothic quality – the quality “acquired” by the place and not inherent to it. Heathcliff ’s arrival involves the change of the “familiar” space of the household into an “unfamiliar” one as a result of the impact he has, as he grows, on the relations among the inhabitants, on both children and adults. Thus, Heathcliff embodies the Gothic character of Wuthering Heights as a place by gothicising it. The place retains its Gothic quality to the moment of his death (cf. Botting, 2007, 129-­130). An opposite process – that of degothicising the space – takes place, for example, in Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca (1938). The novel is described in the blurb on the back cover of its 2003 edition as “the haunting story of a young girl consumed by love and the struggle to find identity.” It is precisely this “struggle to find identity” that is most closely related to the Gothic character of the novel. The search for identity is also inseparable from the protagonist’s experience of Manderley, the central setting in the novel, which is from the start presented in Gothic terms. The narrator tells her dream (a typically Gothic device) in which she “went to Manderley again” (du Maurier 2008, 1): It seemed to me I stood by the iron gate leading to the drive, and for a while I could not enter, for the way was barred to me. There was a chain upon the gate. I called in my dream to the lodge-­keeper, and had no answer, and peering closer through the rusted spokes of the gate I saw the lodge was uninhabited. No smoke came from the chimney, and the little lattice windows gaped forlorn. Then, like all dreamers, I was possessed of a sudden with supernatural powers and passed like a spirit through the barrier before me. (du Maurier 2008, 1)

This dream vision depicts a Manderley that no longer exists: completely burnt down, the estate “lies like an empty shell amidst the tangle of the deep woods” (du Maurier 2008, 9). Such a beginning to the novel determines the flow of narration – the story of Manderley and its inhabitants has to be told to account for the dream. It is narrated in flashback by Mrs de Winter, whose first name, unlike Rebecca’s, will never be mentioned. She is introduced to Manderley (incidentally, she knows the place from a postcard she bought as a teenaged girl) seven weeks after her wedding to Maxim de Winter, a much older man, a widower, whose former wife, Rebecca is assumed to have died as a result of a sailing accident. The first detail of the ancient residence of Manderley which Mrs de Winter notices upon arrival are its windows; the mansion is surrounded by a rose garden.

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However, the Manderley of her imagination, triggered by the postcard, was different. When Mrs de Winter arrives at the estate, she has a feeling of getting entrapped as soon as she passes the gate to the estate: The gates had shut to with a crash behind us, the dusty road was out of sight, and I became aware that this was not the drive I had imagined would be the Manderley’s, this was not a broad and spacious thing of gravel, flanked with neat turf at either side, kept smooth with rake and brush. (du Maurier 2008, 71)

Indeed, Mrs de Winter is unable to adjust to the new environment, to her new position as a wife to Mr de Winter, whose former aristocratic wife, Rebecca, was considered to be an exceptional person in many ways. The narrator’s account of her daily experience in Manderley abounds in Gothic details: the place, although modernized, is mysterious to her; one wing of it, the one with Rebecca’s bedroom, is locked.5 Rebecca’s haunting presence is felt everywhere, rendering Manderley Gothic: “you would not think she had just gone out for a little while and would back in the evening. […] It’s not only this room, she [Mrs Danvers] said. ‘It’s in many rooms in the house. […] I feel her everywhere. You do too, don’t you?’” (du Maurier 2008, 194). In these surroundings Mrs de Winter feels uncomfortable, threatened and scared. The presence of Mrs Danvers, whose appearance has strong Gothic features, enhances the sense of horror she experiences. Mrs de Winter’s first encounter with her makes her notice the housekeeper’s “lifeless” voice and hands, “a little smile of scorn upon her lips” (du Maurier 2008, 74). As she says, “Something in the expression of her face, gave me a feeling of unrest” (75). Mr de Winter’s abode does not become a real home to his wife: it is a haunted Gothic place, with a secret room and a network of corridors and staircases. However, this space loses its Gothic quality once de Winter, alarmed by the discovery that he had murdered Rebecca, reveals the terrifying truth to his present wife and confides in her, treating her, for the first time, as a partner and a person capable of supporting him. The previous hierarchy in the family which underprivileged Mrs de Winter is now subverted. In chapter 19, when the boat with Rebecca’s

5 This Gothic convention of a closed wing was established by Walpole (“Does anybody lie in the chamber beneath? […] Nobody has dared to lie there, said Bianca, since the great astrologer that was your brother’s tutor drowned himself.” [Walpole 1990, 40]) and Reeve, who in her Old English Baron introduces “a vacant wing” (Spector 1990, 1047). It later appeared in Ch. Brontë’s Jane Eyre or in “The Old Nurse’s Story” by E. Gaskell.

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body is discovered at the bottom of the bay, Mrs de Winter’s reaction shows her as a mature woman capable of facing a truly critical situation: ‘I’m sorry,’ I whispered, ‘so terribly sorry.’ He did not answer. His hand was icy cold. I kissed the back of it, and then the fingers, one by one. ‘I don’t want you to bear this alone,’ I said. ‘I want to share it with you. I’ve grown up, Maxim, in twenty four hours. I’ll never be a child again.’ (du Maurier 2008, 296; emphasis added)

The discovery of the truth about Rebecca, of her corruption, disloyalty and marital infidelity, has a profound impact on Mrs de Winter: [S]omething new had come upon me that had not been before. My heart, for all its anxiety and doubt, was light and free. I knew then that I was no longer afraid of Rebecca. I did not hate her any more. Now that I knew her to have been evil and vicious and rotten I did not hate her any more. […] I could go to the morning-­room and sit down at her desk and touch her pen […]. I could go to her room in the west wing, […] and I should not be afraid. […] She would never haunt me again. […] I would never be a child again. (du Maurier 2008, 319-­320)

It is precisely at this moment that the process of degothicising Manderley begins. Although the novel continues to tell the story of infidelity and murder by drowning, it loses its Gothic quality. The relationship between de Winters and his wife becomes natural and intimate. The heroine is no longer afraid of Rebecca’s “ghost” or of her “spokesperson” in the shape of Mrs Danvers. She turns out to be strong enough to speak on her own behalf, to support Maxim and to give orders to Mrs Danvers. She has succeeded in building her identity and overcoming the sense of Gothic entrapment; Mrs de Winter’s search for identity has thus been completed: she becomes a mature woman, who takes decisions and starts giving orders to Mrs Danvers and to all other servants in the household. Once she discovers that she is not afraid to do whatever she considered appropriate, Manderley loses its Gothic quality: the haunted abode has been degothicised. There are no longer mysterious sections in Manderley that Mrs de Winter dreads to enter: the distressed damsel of Gothic provenance becomes an independent woman in full control of the circumstances that confront her. The first two chapters of the novel, reread in the light of its ending confirm that this painful process has been completed. As the protagonist-­narrator in the novel she may face the task of re-­telling the story: We have come through our crisis, not unscathed, of course. […] I might say that we have paid for freedom. But I have had enough melodrama in this life, and would willingly give my five senses if they could ensure us our present peace and security. Happiness is not a possession to be prized, it is a quality of thought, a state of mind. (du Maurier 2008, 5-­6)

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Another example of a story which records the process of degothicising of the novel’s Gothic space is Angela Carter’s “The Bloody Chamber,” a modern re-­write of the Bluebeard fairy tale. Narrated by the protagonist in retrospect, the story features a seventeen-­year-­old girl who gets married to a much older Marquis, three times a widower, whose last wife died in “a boating accident, at his home, in Brittany” (Carter) only three months prior to his current marriage. The story opens with the narrator’s account of her train journey from Paris to the Marquis’s castle: “the train bore [her] through the night into the unguessable country of marriage,” “into exile” (Carter), as she adds elsewhere in the story. No doubt the marriage is an opportunity for her to abandon her meagre life with her mother, to be a wife of “the richest man in France” (Carter). The castle the Marquis inhabits has been a family property for generations, “a legendary habitation in which he had been born” (Carter), very much in the manner of Gothic stories, situated in a remote place, solitary and mysterious, temporarily isolated from the rest of the world by the high tide of the ocean. The narrator’s description of the castle follows the Gothic convention: The faery solitude of the place; with its turrets of misty blue, its courtyard, its spiked gate, his castle that lay on the very bosom of the sea with seabirds mewing about its attics, the casements opening on to the green and purple, evanescent departures of the ocean, cut off by the tide from land for half a day […] that castle, at home neither on the land nor on the water, a mysterious, amphibious place, contravening the materiality of both earth and the waves, with the melancholy of a mermaiden who perches on her rock and waits, endlessly, for a lover who had drowned far away, long ago. That lovely, sad, sea-­siren of a place! (Carter)

The narrator’s description of the edifice from the outside is supplemented by the images if its interior, decorated with portraits of “his ancestors in the stern regalia of rank” (Carter), the multiple mirrors in the bridal bedroom, the library, winding staircases and numerous rooms, with one, as befits a Bluebeard story, she is not supposed to enter. Contrary to the Marquis’s admonition, however, the protagonist enters the room, which he had described in a truly Gothic manner as: a little room at the foot of the west tower, behind the still-­room, at the end of a dark little corridor full of horrid cobwebs that would get into your hair and frighten you if you ventured there. Oh, and you’d find it such a dull little room! But you must promise me, if you love me, to leave it well alone. (Carter)

When the protagonist goes into the dimly-­lit room, opening it with the forbidden key she had received from her husband upon his departure, she does not

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discover “horrid cobwebs” but “the instruments of mutilation” (Carter) and the dead bodies of the three former wives, all of whom have been murdered by the Marquis. This Bluebeard-­style discovery depicted at length by the narrator has its consequences: upon his return the Marquis finds out that his wife entered “the torture chamber” (which, actually he expected she would do). She knows now what happened to the Marquis’s former wives and immediately realizes that she is going to become his next victim. It is obvious to her that she can expect no mercy: “My virgin of the arpeggios, prepare yourself for martyrdom,” the Marquis says (Carter). However, as befitting a fairy tale, the story has a happy ending: at the last moment the Marquis’s wife is saved from decapitation by her mother, while her tormentor, the Gothic villain, is shot dead by his mother-­in law, who, driven by “some internal urgency” (Carter), arrives to her daughter’s rescue.6 “The Bloody Chamber,” with its Gothic setting, characters and episodes, has a non-­Gothic epilogue: after the Marquise’s death most of his property was donated for charities. The castle – a place of entrapment and female oppression – is completely degothicised: given away by the Marquise’s wife and turned into a school for blind children. On the outskirts of Paris, where she returns with the money she inherited as the Marquise’s wife, she establishes (together with the piano-­tuner, in a sense her rescuer, too) a music school. Thus the story, as a result of female and not male action, has lost its Gothic quality. The protagonist escapes victimization and is transformed from a naïve girl into a woman capable of taking steps to achieve independence.7 The wrongdoer is eliminated and the protagonist returns to the world of order familiar to her. In conclusion, the above discussion points to the importance of the gothicisation and degothicisation processes in establishing close links between the spaces, the characters and the actions in Gothic novels. However, the above processes do not, of course, exhaust the range of possibilities related to the space-­dependent plot construction mechanisms at work in Gothic fiction.

6 The important innovation here is, Hermansson notes, the fact that the Marquis is defeated by the narrator’s mother, and not by her brothers, as was the case in Perrault’s Bluebeard tale. “It is a decisive comment on the original, and one that revises not only Perrault’s story, but the rules of the fairy tale genre, which dictate that mothers abandon their daughters either actively or by default when they die or are ‘disappeared’ from the tale” (Hermansson 2009, 174). 7 In this way the role of women in the story is highlighted. The feminist point of view adopted in the text influences the treatment of its artistic space.

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Works Cited Aguirre, Manuel. 1990. The Closed Space: Horror Literature and Western Symbolism. Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press. Aguirre, Manuel. 2002. “Geometria strachu. Wykorzystanie przestrzeni w literaturze gotyckiej.” Translated by Agnieszka Izdebska. In Wokół gotycyzmów Wyobraźnia, groza, okrucieństwo, edited by Grzegorz Gazda, Agnieszka Izdebska, Jarosław Płuciennik, 15-­32. Kraków: Universitas. Aguirre, Manuel.  2008. “Geometries of Terror: Numinous Spaces in Gothic, Horror and Science Fiction.” Gothic Studies 10.2: 1-17. Beauman, Sally. 2003. Introduction to Rebecca, by Daphne du Maurier, v-xvii. London: Virago. Botting, Fred. 2007 (1996). Gothic. London and New York: Routledge. Brontë, Emily. 1984 (1847). Wuthering Heights. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books. Carter, Angela. 1993 (1978). “The Bloody Chamber.” In The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories. New York: Penguin Books. PDF. Du Maurier, Daphne. 2003 (1938). Rebecca. London: Virago. Frank, Frederick S. 2003. Introduction to The Castle of Otranto and The Mysterious Mother, by Horace Walpole, 11-­34. Peterborough, Canada: Broadview Press Limited. Freud, Sigmund. 1990 (1919). “The ‘Uncanny’.” In The Gothick Novel, edited by Victor Sage, 76-­87. London: Macmillan. Hermansson, Casie E. 2009. Bluebeard. A Reader’s Guide to the English Tradition. Jackson: The University Press of Mississippi. Lytovka, Olena. 2014. “The Uncanny House in Elizabeth Bowen’s Fiction.” PhD diss., Maria Curie-­Skłodowska University, Lublin. Ryan, Marie-­Laure. 2009. “Space.” In Handbook of Narratology, edited by Peter Hühn, John Pier, Wolf Schmid, Jörg Schönert, 420-­434. Berlin, New York: Walter de Gruyter. Spector, Robert D., 1990. “The Gothic.” In Encyclopedia of Literature and Criticism, edited by Martin Coyle, Peter Garside, Malcolm Kelsall and John Peck, 1044-­ 1054. London: Routledge. Walpole, Horace. 1990 (1765). The Castle of Otranto. A Gothic Story. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Barbara Klonowska

Re-­Visioning of the Romance Convention in the Novels by Sarah Waters Introduction: the romance and its incarnations Sarah Waters’s writing, most frequently analysed in terms of the politics of gender, attracts also the attention of genre critics, who discuss her works as examples of generic polyphony and innovation (cf. de Groot 2013, 58, or Terentowicz 2014, 175). Indeed, the generic repertoire of forms employed in her novels ranges from the historical novel, the novel of manners, to the picaresque or the Gothic; the overriding novelistic convention, however, lying behind all of Waters’s novels, seems to be the romance in its various forms. This essay argues that the romance convention on the one hand constitutes the stable backbone of Waters’s texts, yet that on the other it is constantly re-­visited and revised, i.e. modified and “queered” by the author, in order to stretch its limits and include into it themes and aspects hitherto remote from the artistic and political interests of this form. Thus, Waters’s fiction demonstrates both the flexibility of the romance as a genre, and the quite unsentimental uses to which it may be employed, inscribing itself into a larger trend of contemporary political and aesthetic revisions of older genres and a critical return to the historical past. The romance seems a perfect convention for such returns: one of the oldest literary genres, it has been constantly in use since the antiquity and its Greek romances till the present day and its unquestionable success of popular romances, never experiencing in the meantime a period of decline or oblivion. This spectacular triumph of a relatively simple literary form has been possible, among other factors, due to the romance’s ability to change constantly together with the changing sensibilities and to devise new forms and techniques to suit the changing demands of the public. As a result, each literary epoch defines the romance in a different way and one stable, unchanging definition of this literary convention is virtually impossible. Greek romances presenting the adventures of separated lovers, medieval and Renaissance chivalric romances based on courtly love and quest, post-­Pamela romances which reorient and feminise the genre, the Gothic romance with its turn to the subconscious, historical romances with their focus on history, scientific romances taking the adventure into the farthest limits of space and time, or the popular romance of the Harlequin type based on a stereotypical vision of love – to mention the most

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recognised historical variants of the romance – might seem too far removed to belong to one literary convention. Thus, while numerous critics try to see continuity behind the variety of romance forms (e.g. Hansson 1998, 12), interpreting it as an inevitable effect of an evolution of a long-­lived genre, others tend to see them as separate genres, too far apart to be related to the others, with the name “romance” a misnomer rather than a mark of relatedness (cf. Strehle and Paniccia Carden 2003, xiv, or Engler 2005, 7). Following Hansson, this paper sees the romance, however, as a form with certain constant features, which remain relatively stable. While the spacio-­temporal setting, characterisation or the problems presented in romances do indeed change drastically with time and shifts in culture, what remains a constant feature of this convention is the plot constructed around the variously defined quest and preoccupied with, likewise differently understood and stressed, love and adventure, and the problematic attitude to reality. As Hansson observes, about the only safe thing to say by way of constructing a genre-­definition is that the association between the romance and reality will be a problematic one, because too simplified view of reality is taken, as in the popular romances, or because the work is predominantly unrealistic, as in the gothic romances, or because it deals with the extraordinary, as in chivalric romance. (1998, 12)

Thus, despite the surface variety of kinds of the romance, it seems possible to interpret them as different historical and contextual variants of the same form with relatively stable organising principles, produced via a reconfiguration and reinterpretation of its constituting aspects. Following McHale’s concept of the shifting dominant (1991, 6), which he uses to explain the transition from modernist to postmodernist fiction, one may perhaps analogically conceptualise the romance as a genre which shifts its dominant in a pendulum motion from the masculine to the feminine, from adventure to love, from the past to the future, or from the official to the subconscious, thus generating forms of the romance which, though related, differently stress their various generic components. Thus defined, the romance emerges as a form extremely flexible and accommodating, suitable to express various interests in various times. The recent reinvention of this convention, then, and its postmodernist flourishing marked by the success of A. S. Byatt’s Possession (1990), boldly subtitled “A Romance,” though earlier already introduced in the works by Jeanette Winterson, e.g. in The Passion (1987) or even John Fowles’s The French Lieutenant’s Woman (1969), may be seen as yet another incarnation of the genre which is a notorious shape-­shifter. The postmodernist revival of interest in the seemingly “low” and formulaic genre, relegated in the twentieth-­century imagination to popular culture rather than literature and studied by specialists of pulp fiction or

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anthropologists, marks the breach of the formula and shows the employing of the romance, similar to other revaluated genres like the Gothic, the detective story or the fantasy, to artistically and ideologically quite complex matters. The fiction of Sarah Waters may be seen as a part of this larger trend of the postmodernist revival and revisiting of the romance which produces its yet another, political and rebellious variant. The essay will analyse three novels by Sarah Waters, Affinity (1999), Fingersmith (2002) and The Little Stranger (2009), treating them as convenient examples of characteristic tendencies which, to different degrees and in different combinations, characterise all her novels. It will point out how the discussed texts modify the romance formula, and to which political ends these modifications are employed. It is the contention of this chapter that in all of these cases one witnesses interesting twists introduced into the venerable romance, both into its poetics and into its – usually quite conservative – politics which turn it into a form of social criticism and an active intervention into the stabilised, yet exclusive versions of the past.

Affinity, or “queering” the romance Published in 1999 Waters’s second novel, Affinity, consists of two interlocking mock-­Victorian diaries kept a-­chronologically by the two protagonists of the novel: Margaret Prior, an upper-­middle-­class educated spinster of subconscious homoerotic inclinations, and Selina Dawes, an imprisoned working-­class spirit-­ medium who wants to set herself free. In a brilliant pastiche of a Victorian diary form, the novel tells the story of infatuation and manipulation, of deception and illusions. True to the romance formula, the text focuses on the process of falling in love and the progressive infatuation of the two protagonists, seemingly reciprocated and mutual, yet which in the end turns out merely a ploy to help Selina escape from prison and go abroad with her entirely different true lover and the master-­mind of the whole plot. Thus, the novel might be read as developing a romance of the popular type, a typical “boy-­meets-­girl” variant of popular romance with its obligatory stages distinguished by Jadwiga Węgrodzka as “(1) the meeting; (2) falling in love; (3) testing (learning to trust each other); and (4) the decision to be together” (2005, 121). This popular romance plot is, however, seriously modified in several respects: the boy is a girl, love is unrequited, the lover turns out a fraud, and the ending is tragic, bringing instead of reunion, separation and probable suicide. More properly, then, one might speak here of a melodrama, which in contrast to popular romance, shows love more frequently losing and defeated rather than triumphant (cf. Stachówna 2001, 37), yet which simultaneously reveals profound truths about reality and the rules operating in it (cf. Cawelti 1976, 46).

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More importantly, still, the novel is a queer melodrama, in several senses of the term. The contemporary usage equals the word “queer” with “homosexual” and in keeping with this reading, the novel shows homoerotic rather than heterosexual infatuation, by far more typical of romances. The term “queer,” however, as David Halperin reminds us, designates “whatever is at odds with the normal, the legitimate, the dominant” (after de Groot 2013, 61; original emphasis) and so does not have to refer to sexuality only. More importantly, it becomes an emblem of every kind of difference or otherness, of subverting or rebelling against the dominating order. In Affinity both Margaret and Selina are other and queer: Margaret due to her inclinations and education, both excessive and exceeding Victorian standards, Selina due to her criminal background and suspicious occupation. None of them fits the Freudian “family romance” that underlies most of the romances of the Western World, especially in their popular version, i.e. the romance oriented at reproduction and social usefulness. In the Victorian context, where such society-­ oriented vision of romance dominates, both characters are queer and it is perhaps unsurprising that both deal with ghosts: their status is similarly ghost-­like, invisible and marginal among the “normal” Victorian characters. Their story, then, is queer by virtue of being the story of misfits, of characters whose eponymous affinity is, in the last reading, neither that of spiritual communication, nor that of the amorous liaison, but rather that of their shared social position of outcasts and misfits. Queerness becomes a sign of marginality, of the ghost-­like lack of substance and, together with homoeroticism, draws attention to the silenced margins of Victorian history. Such “queering” of the romance is a more general feature of Waters’s fiction, in different degrees present in most of her novels, save perhaps for The Little Stranger that tells a story of an altogether different kind of romance in which sexuality plays no part, and so is only hinted at rather than explored and dramatised. Queerness as an emblem of difference, misfitting and otherness appears very strongly in Night Watch, Fingersmith and Tipping the Velvet, too. In all these texts its use is clearly political and consists in drawing attention to the untold stories and experience of “queer” and thus omitted protagonists of the past such as lesbians or spirit-­media. In so doing, Waters’s novels perform a corrective and completing function, becoming an active intervention into the predominating official versions of the past.

Fingersmith, or the adventures of a Victorian working-­class pícaro Waters’s third novel, Fingersmith published in 2002, illustrates another tendency of re-­visioning the romance, namely its reversal. Apart from the features quite expected from a Waters’s novel, for example the presence of homoerotic love,

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this text extends and transforms the romance formula in two more directions. Primarily, this transformation takes place at the level of genre as Fingersmith (just as Tipping the Velvet before it) is a picaresque, which may be defined as a genre derived from and antithetical to the romance. Writing about transformations of genre, Alastair Fowler observes that, picaresque is itself an antigenre to romance. It is perhaps particularly antithetic to pastoral romance, whose sensitive hero is fond of contemplating love in retired solitude, and traverses much emotional experience before the final reconciliation. By contrast, picaresque knows no reconciliation of any depth. The pícaro is a tough outsider, who learns only the worldly wisdom needed for social adjustment and satiric observation. […] An antigenre, unlike a burlesque, is not directed against a particular original. Moreover, it has a life of its own that continues collaterally with the contrasting genre. So picaresque and romance proceed in parallel, and may even be interlaced together in the same work. (2000, 238)

Thus, employing the picaresque frame, by the very choice of the genre Fingersmith constitutes a counterpart to and a comment on the romance, constructing a different kind of protagonist (a girl and a thief rather than a noble male hero) and a different kind of plot (falling in love across class, regaining money and status rather than seeking adventures). In a Dickensian vain, Waters represents the Victorian “low life” of thieves and petty criminals, of characters who unromantically and unsentimentally want to survive and prosper in a society which relegates them to the gutters and slums. The very genre, then, is an antithesis of the romance, though the novel interweaves it with a more typical romance story of falling in love, separation and the final reunion of lovers. Yet, except for “queering” the romance, just as in Affinity, Fingersmith additionally emphasises the aspect of class and class antagonism. The class conflict is also implied in Affinity, embodied in the figure of Ruth Vigers, the servant who orchestrates the whole plot of liberating Selina and turns out to control all the actions of both Selina and Margaret. In Fingersmith, however, it acquires a much more emphatic dramatisation. Portraying the divided Victorian society with the poor (e.g. Mrs Sucksby) taking revenge on the rich and the quite open hatred of the “low life” towards the “high,” the novel equips the romance with class awareness in a much more politically conscious way than is the case with traditional romances. Many popular romances and melodramas feature the class conflict, yet its function is strictly pragmatic as that of an impediment in the progress and ultimate triumph of love; class difference appears as one of the obstacles produced at the stage of testing (a rich boy falls in love with a poor girl) which is to be overcome in due time by the all-­conquering love, in keeping with the “Cinderella”-­plot of numerous popular romances. By contrast, in Fingersmith class antagonism

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becomes a theme in itself, presenting the hostility of the working class and the poor towards the rich, with both classes shown with no sentimentality: the rich are portrayed as degenerate and perverse, both sexually and morally, while the poor are simplistic, revengeful and merciless. Class, then, becomes one of the protagonists of the novel which, as Louisa Hadley remarks, “adopts a Marxist perspective by drawing attention to the position of the lower classes” (2010, 89). Unlike in Affinity, there is no tragedy in this novel: love and female affinity ultimately triumph over the class divide, yet the rendering of the class difference and showing its implications not merely for the progress of romance but primarily for the condition of society and the presence of the poor in literary imagination is a manifestly political gesture. This political awareness is, again, one of the ways to extend the thematic repertoire of the romance and provides a critical intervention into the standardised romance portrayals of the past; it is also a feature of more Waters’s novels than just Fingersmith, clearly linked with socialism in Tipping the Velvet and coming most unusually to the fore in The Little Stranger.

The Little Stranger, or the revenge of the working class The Little Stranger published in 2009 illustrates the unusual turn taken on the Gothic romance and the country-­house novel of manners. As Urszula Terentowicz observes, The Little Stranger initially installs the convention of the novel of manners connected with the nostalgic portrayal of Hundreds Hall, its past glory and splendid history contrasted with its present-­day (mid-­1950s) dilapidation and decay (2014, 175). Soon, however, the novel of manners breaks down and is superseded by the Gothic novel with its standard imagery of a haunted house, ghosts, insanity, unexplained death and suicide. The splendid though ruined country house takes on a malevolent aspect turning against its own inhabitants and eliminating them one by one, starting with the dog and ending with the heiress, Caroline Ayres. The novel of manners, then, switches into the fully-­fledged Gothic romance, with the most unusual love plot. The only character that remains unscathed, survives and is never haunted by the malignant house is Dr. Faraday – not the member of the family, but the son of a former maid, later on educated and refined, and now coming back to the house of his dreams. Falling in love with the house in his childhood, when it represented everything he aspired to, status, class and sophistication, at the novel’s ending he finally takes possession of it. Thus, in a twist on both the novel of manners and the Gothic, it is Faraday who seems to triumph in the end and the romance developing in the novel is not that between human characters (e.g. the slightly masculine and implicitly lesbian Caroline and Faraday) but that between a man and a country

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house. Starting in childhood with the infantile enchantment and the first attempt at possession (i.e. the vandalisation of a fragment of an ornament), after the removal of all the existing obstacles, the novel ends with the final reunion of the “lovers,” the doctor and the house, and their happy coexistence. Thus twisted, the romance formula draws attention not so much to the human characters and their tribulations but to the house and its symbolic status. In keeping with the Gothic romance convention, thus conceptualised love needs a supernatural intervention: in The Little Stranger it takes the shape not of some revealed and haunting secrets from the past, but of a Poltergeist, accumulated anger that literally becomes a negative lethal energy. The anger of Faraday, frustrated by his class inferiority, his social invisibility and his status of a second-­ class citizen, adopts the guise of a Poltergeist, a concentrated though subconscious hatred towards all those who ignored or despised him and his family. The hatred materialises as a malignant force wreaking havoc on the house and its inhabitants and aims at taking possession of the most precious thing that used to make them superior: the country house. Thus, the ghosts and the Gothic revenge which the house seems to take on its owners may be interpreted as a much more focused and class-­motivated revenge of the underprivileged, of the social justice coming late, yet effectively. In a twist on the conventions of the novel of manners, the Gothic and the romance, The Little Stranger reveals its political agenda, showing the point of view of the working class (unusual in all of them) and making its members actors rather than mere statists on the stage of the splendid history represented by the English country house. Yet again, then, Sarah Waters’s fiction bends the romance to accommodate class issues and discuss the long-­lasting effects of class inequality.

Conclusion As the examples above demonstrate, Waters’s fiction systematically transforms the convention of the romance in various ways. Firstly, it “queers” it to accommodate themes rarely included or celebrated in genuine Victorian or more broadly historical novels, such as non-­normative individuals, misfits or lesbians, or non-­ heteropatriarchal relationships. Secondly, it politicises the romance to speak not only about adventure, love or emotions, but also about gender, sexuality, or more traditionally political problems such as class inequality and its consequences, or the position of women in society (e.g. in The Night Watch). Finally, Waters’s novels play with the convention itself via the modifications introduced to the romance formula, turning it into a melodrama or a picaresque, translating love into love for a house, and mixing the romance with its related genres and variants. They test,

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stretch and broaden the limits of the romance, which turns out, unsurprisingly, an immensely spacious form. As a postscript one may add that all these features appear abundantly in Waters’s latest novel The Paying Guests (2014), published already after the completion of this chapter. In keeping with the author’s strategy, her latest novel is also a queer romance, which shows the progress of female infatuation. It is also a novel about class difference in which the concept of class and the social gap it generates becomes an important theme. Finally, just as the previous texts, The Paying Guests interweaves the romance formula with the elements of thriller and court drama, thus extending once again the possibilities of the romance as a genre. All of Waters’s novels are historical novels, set in and recreating the past, either Victorian or that connected with WWI and WWII. Thus, one more consequence of the revisions of the romance is also the necessary revision of history understood as a narrative about the past. Writing onto its official and generally accepted versions aspects little celebrated and reluctantly represented, for instance in the literature and novels of the period, Waters’s fiction imaginatively recovers the lives and experience of lesbians, prostitutes, music-­hall singers, petty thieves, criminals or other marginal figures, supplanting official versions of literary history with margins often ignored. “Queering” and re-­visioning the romance, then, these novels “queer,” that is open up to otherness, history itself.

Works Cited Cawelti, John G. 1976. Adventure, Mystery and Romance. Formula Stories as Art and Popular Culture. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. De Groot, Jerome. 2013. “‘Something New and a Bit Startling’: Sarah Waters and the Historical Novel.” In Sarah Waters. Contemporary Critical Perspectives, edited by Kaye Mitchell, 56-­69. London: Bloomsbury. Engler, Sandra. 2005.“A Career’s Wonderful, but Love Is More Wonderful Still.” Femininity and Masculinity in the Fiction of Mills and Boon. Tübingen: Francke Verlag. Fowler, Alastair. 2000. “Transformations of Genre.” In Modern Genre Theory, edited by David Duff, 232-­249. London: Longman. Hadley, Louisa.  2010. Neo-­ Victorian Fiction and Historical Narrative. The Victorians and Us. Houndmills: Palgrave. Hansson, Heidi. 1998. Romance Revived. Postmodern Romances and the Tradition. Uppsala: Swedish Science Press. McHale, Brian. 1991. Postmodernist Fiction. London: Routledge.

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Stachówna, Grażyna. 2001. Niedole miłowania. Ideologia i perswazja w melodramatach filmowych. Kraków: Rabid. Strehle, Susan and Mary Paniccia Carden, eds. 2003. Doubled Plots: Romance and History. Jackson: University of Mississippi Press. Terentowicz-­Fotyga, Urszula. 2014. “Competing Genres in the English Country House: The Little Stranger by Sarah Waters.” In Expanding the Gothic Canon. Studies in Literature, Film and New Media, edited by Anna Kędra-­Kardela and Andrzej S. Kowalczyk, 173-­192. Frankfurt-­am-­Main: Peter Lang. Węgrodzka, Jadwiga. 2005. “The Art of Love Story: Mechanisms of Popular Fiction and Artistic Communication.” In Texts of Literature, Texts of Culture, edited by Ludmiła Gruszewska Blaim and Artur Blaim, 119-­133. Lublin: Wydawnictwo UMCS. Waters, Sarah. 1999. Affinity. London: Virago. Waters, Sarah. 2002. Fingersmith. London: Virago. Waters, Sarah. 2009. The Little Stranger. London: Virago. Waters, Sarah. 2014. The Paying Guests. London: Virago.

Marta Komsta

Mother London: Peter Ackroyd’s Three Brothers1 [A]nd now he returned to that time when he wept for his mother under the cover of London fog and darkness. He sat by the window all that afternoon, looking into the street, caught between fear and indecision. To whom could he turn? Peter Ackroyd, Three Brothers

1. Ackroyd’s latest novel, Three Brothers (2013), is an urban journey through the contemporary Londonscape which becomes a powerful presence in the lives of the narrative’s protagonists. The eponymous siblings, Harry, Daniel and Sam Hanway, born in Camden at the same hour, on the same day and month in three successive years, remain connected with one another through a series of events that reveals a distinct spatiotemporal pattern in Ackroyd’s narrative. Subsequently, the three lives delineated in the intertwining chapters are rooted in three distinct visions of the capital as the novel follows the Hanway brothers from childhood until death (with the exception of Sam, the youngest of siblings) against the multilayered background of the great city.2 Owing to his innate ruthlessness and unwavering ambition, Harry Hanway, the eldest of the siblings, becomes a successful London journalist and managing editor of an influential London newspaper, The Morning Chronicle.3 A born opportunist, Harry rises to the top of his profession by means of manipulation and hypocrisy as well as personal connections – he marries Guinevere Flaxman, the daughter of Martin Flaxman, the owner of The Morning Chronicle. Daniel Hanway, the middle of the three brothers, chooses a life in academia, first as a student and later as a tutor in Cambridge. Daniel, a closeted homosexual ridden by anxiety and guilt, starts a relationship with Sparkler, Ackroyd’s quasi-­Dickensian character, who is a thief, male prostitute and the epitome 1 The study’s title has been inspired by the title of Michael Moorcock’s 1988 novel Mother London. 2 For a more detailed analysis of the spatiotemporal relations in Three Brothers, see Komsta 2015, 183-­197. 3 The Morning Chronicle was a London newspaper in which Charles Dickens worked as a journalist.

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of London’s innate ambivalence. Finally, Sam, the youngest brother, is a familiar figure of an Ackroydian wanderer, an urban flâneur, whose seemingly unfocused existence becomes paramount in his developing relationship with the capital. Eventually, the tragic deaths of both Harry and Daniel (the former commits suicide, whereas the latter suffers a debilitating heart attack) are counterbalanced by Sam’s ultimate triumph as the protagonist is re-­united with his mother and learns to recognise his own role in the mystical urban community, open to those who are able to see beyond the here and now. As it happens, Ackroyd’s novel highlights the writer’s trademark “London sensibility” that encompasses “pathos and comedy, high tragedy and low farce” in a uniquely carnivalesque amalgam of the high and the low (Ackroyd 2001, 345). However, what makes Three Brothers a particularly stimulating response to Ackroyd’s earlier narratives is the insistence on the maternal element in the literary urban mosaic. At its core, the novel postulates a link between the image of the city and that of motherhood, the latter represented by the narrative’s main female protagonists. The characters of Sally Hanway, the siblings’ estranged mother, Mother Placentia, the prioress of the convent at the Church of Our Lady of Sorrows, Lady Flaxman, Harry Hanway’s mother-­in-­law, and finally, the figure of Mater Dolorosa, the Lady of the Seven Sorrows, account for a varied perspective on the capital itself.4 In the study to follow, I want to outline the representations of motherhood in Ackroyd’s text as yet another strategy of deciphering the city, in which the figure of the mother functions as a metaphor of the intrinsic ambiguity of the capital. Foregrounded here is the aforementioned concept of the spiritual urban community, imposed upon the turbulent familial relationships of the Hanways. The apparent discord between the notions of family and maternity is hence a confirmation of Ackroyd’s multifaceted approach to the concept of the city, which in turn accounts for the central tension in the discussed narrative.

2. One of the dominants in Ackroyd’s narrative is the trope of maternal presence and absence, with Sally Hanway’s sudden disappearance constituting the turning point in the lives of her sons, whose later existence becomes marred with the trauma of maternal abandonment. For Harry, who discovers that his mother was arrested and imprisoned for soliciting, the experience debilitates all important relationships in his life: he severs ties with his father and brothers, abandons his 4 For further information on the feminist context of Mater Dolorosa (Our Lady of Sorrows), one of the key Marian images, see, for instance, Werner 2013.

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girlfriend, Hilda Nugent, in favour of an opportunistic marriage to Guinevere Flaxman, which lacks any genuine emotional and physical intimacy, and finally commences a disastrous affair with Lady Flaxman, his own mother-­in-­law. Similarly, Daniel Hanway, the middle son, struggles to cope with the abandonment by deliberate detachment from his early life – he leaves Camden for Cambridge and, like Harry, lives in the all-­consuming present which only seemingly liberates the protagonist from the traumatic event from his childhood. At the same time, the character of Sally Hanway is purposefully developed in connection with the figure of Mater Dolorosa, a potent symbol of suffering motherhood. Mater Dolorosa appears in the novel during Sam Hanway’s first visit to the Camden Church of Our Lady of Sorrows, which culminates with a moment of hierophany on the part of the young man. The hierophany entails a vision of the statue of Mater Dolorosa coming to life in front of the youngest Hanway sibling as the Lady Chapel “regarded him with pity, and put her finger to her lips” (Ackroyd 2013, 673-­674).5 A moment later, a nun brings an armful of lilies and puts them into a vase at the feet of the statue; the lilies signify the newly acquired motherly presence in the protagonist’s lonely life. Immediately after that, Sam makes a pledge to the Virgin Mary, which simultaneously becomes a promise of help to the very city he inhabits, the capital symbolised by a homeless man whom Sam encounters during his daily strolls: ‘I have nothing to give you. Do you need anything from me?’ She did not reply. ‘Probably not. But I promise you this. When I see a person in trouble, I will try to help.’ [Sam] thought of the young vagrant on the park bench. ‘That will be helping you, I hope.’ (679-­681)

It is therefore only in relation with her youngest and most sensitive child, Sam, that the character of Sally Hanway reveals a more nuanced symbolism. When Sam becomes reunited with Sally after an unexpected encounter in the Church of Our Lady of Sorrows, he discovers that his mother has become a madam in a luxurious call house, which may be interpreted as a very Ackroydian allusion to the character of Mother Placentia, the head of the convent at the Camden Church (Sally Hanway also becomes a head of a female congregation, in this case, however, devoted to the matters of the flesh). Consequently, a set of similarities is established between Sally Hanway and the figure of Our Lady of Sorrows: both women are mothers whose children were taken away from them – a symbolic link emphasised by the fact that the lilies, associated with Mater Dolorosa, are replaced by tulips in Sally’s villa. Another 5 All quotations in this chapter come from the Kindle edition of the novel.

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interesting affinity regards Sam’s vision in the chapel where, as mentioned before, he sees Lady Chapel put her finger to her lips. Harry witnesses the very same gesture as he discovers the truth about his mother’s absence upon seeing “a sudden image of [Sally], standing on the steps of the magistrates’ court, with her finger to her lips” (Ackroyd 2013, 292-­295). Likewise, when talking to his elderly sibling, Daniel Hanway has a preternatural impression that he can see in his brother’s eyes “the image of a woman with her finger to her lips” (530). Implied here is a mystical bond between the mother and her sons, who are endowed with preternatural sensibility to the urban environment.6 The restored connection between Sally and Sam becomes a turning point in the protagonist’s development, enabling him to reformulate his own identity: So began the series of their strange meetings. On the same day each week, at the same time, [Sam] would ring the doorbell and would be admitted. He looked forward to the pot of tea brought in by Mary; he looked forward to the fresh flowers in the blue vase. He looked forward to hearing his mother’s voice. It was nothing she said in particular, but the soothing syllables of her conversation induced in him a feeling of repose. ‘I see faces before I go to sleep,’ she said to him one afternoon. ‘I don’t know them, but I think somehow I recognise them.’ ‘Ancestors?’ ‘Do you think so? That is a nice idea. One of them did look a bit like you. He had your smile.’ ‘Sometimes,’ she said on another occasion, ‘I smell the strangest things. The smell of burning rags, where there is nothing burning. Sometimes I smell the perfume of roses on a busy street.’ (Ackroyd 2013, 1253-­1260)

Significantly, Sam’s reunion with his mother culminates in a creation of a new family that includes Andrew, Sally’s son from her relationship with Asher Ruppta, a local landlord, who, as chance would have it, is also Sam’s employer.7 Another important female character in the novel is Mother Placentia, the aforementioned prioress in the convent next to the Church of Our Lady of Sorrows. The convent and the church are a unique locus in the novel’s presented world as it is imbued with the sacred time that enables the place to transcend linear temporality.8 As a haven for the forlorn and the dispossessed, the church is a gateway

6 As it happens, Daniel and Harry also experience visions, which, however, they cannot understand due to their decision to separate themselves from their individual and communal heritage. 7 It is an example of one of the numerous Dickens-­like “coincidences” in Ackroyd’s novel. 8 Ackroyd actually mentions “the visions of Our Lady in the church of St Bartholomew, or the miracles surrounding the shrine of Our Lady of Willesden,” which constitute

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to Eternal London, Ackroyd’s “mystical city universal” (Ackroyd 1994, 277). Described in the novel as a figure of “brutal amiability,” Mother Placentia functions in the text as an apparent opposite to Sally Hanway. The nun is a spiritual mother whose stern methods are bent on evoking humility in the prideful (unruly nuns are ordered to creep through the chapel and prostrate themselves in front of the cross) since “Mother Placentia ruled over them with the same forceful amiability she had displayed to [Sam]. She was massively calm, she was dispassionate, she was obdurate” (Ackroyd 2013, 722-­723).9 Mother Placentia and the nuns from the mysterious convent are thus the envoys of Mater Dolorosa who overcome the limitations of time and space in order to bring comfort to those who need their help, such as Sally and Sam Hanway as well as the other characters in Ackroyd’s novel. As the antithesis to Sally Hanway and Mother Placentia, Lady Flaxman, Harry’s mother-­in-­law, exerts a debilitating influence on her family, in particular her own daughter, Guinevere. In the course of the novel, she purposefully seduces Harry and later threatens him that she will expose their affair. Eventually, she is murdered by her lover. It could be also argued that Lady Flaxman reveals archetypal traits of “the monstrous mother […] whose perversity is almost always grounded in possessive, dominant behaviour towards her offspring, particularly the male child” (Creed 2007, 139). During a family dinner at Flaxman’s residence, the lady of the house is depicted as controlling and manipulative, especially with regard to both Guinevere and Harry: ‘I am very feminine, you see, Mr Hanway. I am my own worst enemy. I am easily led.’ [Lady Flaxman] glared at her husband. ‘Not that anyone considers my feelings any more. I might as well be deaf and dumb. I might as well be blind. Like those poor mice.’ Guinevere looked towards her father and raised her eyebrows. ‘Of course,’ Lady Flaxman announced to Harry, ‘there’s no question of children.’ ‘Mummy!’ ‘Guinevere is too frail. Too weak. It would kill her.’ (Ackroyd 2013, 1996-­1999)

The femme fatale angle of this particular protagonist is clearly associated with the repressed hostility towards her own daughter (whom she wants to prevent from emulating her own role as a mother) and with the heightened sexual interest in her future son-­in-­law, Harry. Unlike Sally Hanway and Mother Placentia, Lady examples of “sacred time invoked by [the church] bells,” implying that “London was also the harbour of eternity” (Ackroyd, 2001a, 661). 9 Her stern spiritual values are countered by physical frailty (“her head was shaken by a slight but continual tremor” [Ackroyd 2013, 710]), which seems to stem from the same illness that tormented the characters from Ackroyd’s English Music.

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Flaxman has an undeniably comic element: despite her upper-­class pretensions (having “a voice of the purest diction and a black dress of the most elegant cut” and wearing “her jewels as if she had inherited them” [Ackroyd 2013, 1979-­1980]), she is of humble origins (“she came from a family of small traders in Enfield” [1980]), which is highlighted by her frequent malapropisms.10 Lady Flaxman is therefore the epitome of motherhood gone astray, as emphasised in her own mocking attitude towards the very idea of maternity: Lady Flaxman was always capable of surprising Harry. ‘That day is coming,’ she said to him at the beginning of March, ‘the holy day.’ ‘What day is that?’ ‘Mother’s Day. It has always been a sacred day in my book.’ She had in fact consigned her ailing mother to an inexpensive care home in Bromley, and had never visited her there. ‘Is it for you, Harry? Is your mother that special person in your heart?’ ‘I have told you that my mother is dead.’ He looked back at her impassively. ‘Oh yes. Sorry. I forgot.’ She put her hands upon her hips and began to sing. ‘Sally. Sally. Pride of our alley. You’re more than the whole world to me.’ Lovely old song, isn’t it? Wartime. Gracie Fields. Our Gracie.’ He looked away. (Ackroyd 2013, 3127-­3133)

The derisive remark about Sally is an important indication of the tension between the two motherly figures in Ackroyd’s narrative: Sally Hanway, the repentant mother, is opposed to the aggressive and ruthless Lady Flaxman, who, in contrast to Harry’s mother, refuses to fulfil her role of a nurturer and protector.11 Her sneering attitude towards Guinevere’s decision to become a social worker (“She’s practically brain-­dead” [Ackroyd 2013, 3083-­3084]) fully reveals her indifference to her daughter’s efforts to escape from the abusive household. “I used to get very tense in this house,” Guinevere recalls (2889): I would become so anxious that I used to lie down. I would imagine the most terrible things. If I had a headache, I thought that I was suffering from a brain tumour. If my eyes ached, I was sure that I was going blind. Whenever I come back here, I feel a sense of panic. (2890-­2891)

10 Feminine sexuality in Ackroyd’s novel is either non-­existent or severely repressed (as is the case with Mother Placentia as well as Guinevere Hanway, who asks her husband to abstain from any sexual relations in their relationship), or associated with prostitution and/or manipulation (Sally Hanway, Lady Flaxman). Guinevere’s implied asexuality is reminiscent of an earlier abusive mother-­daughter relationship in Ackroyd’s Dan Leno and the Limehouse Golem, in which Elizabeth Cree’s traumatic childhood experiences leave her unable to sustain any intimate relationships. 11 Similar mockery can be found later in the text when Lady Flaxman tells her daughter that she is “tiptoeing […] through the tulips” (Ackroyd 2013, 3078-­3079), a reference not only to a popular song, but also to the flower associated with Sally Hanway.

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The Hanway and the Flaxman households are therefore sites where the mother figure is either absent (in the former case) or deprived of her nurturing powers (Lady Flaxman is described as exuding “artificial warmth” [Ackroyd 2013, 2728]) due to the perversion of the implied maternal features (in the latter case). In consequence, both homes become prisons for the families inhabiting them, which are either ultimately destroyed (the Flaxmans) or perish due to abandonment and neglect (the Hanways).

3. As Ackroyd’s novel strongly suggests, the three female protagonists – Sally Hanway, Mother Placentia and Lady Flaxman – are connected to the figure of Mater Dolorosa as diverse responses to the notions of motherhood, which is at the same time a representation of the city.12 The maternal powers of sustenance and comfort are made evident in the narrative’s final scene, which depicts a moment of communion between the mother and her children. In the last chapter, entitled appropriately “Anything is Possible,” Sam Hanway has a culminating vision upon London Bridge, where he could feel the forgetfulness of the city rising within him. It was as if individual fear had no place in this concourse, where the great general drama of the human spirit was being displayed in the light of the street lamps. (Ackroyd 2013, 3262-­3264)

When the protagonist returns home after his search for Sally Hanway (in what seems a reprise of his experience of childhood abandonment), his mother welcomes him with a message from the nuns at the Church of Our Lady of Sorrows, which turns out to be an invitation to join the transcendental urban family: “‘Dear Sam,” the note reads, “[w]e appreciate all the work you have done for us. Come back at any time. We have been waiting for you” (3314-­3315). Thus, the ending confirms the maternal nature of the great city as Mother London herself provides protection to her dwellers.

12 Another example of maternal devotion appears in a story told by Asher Ruppta, Sam Hanway’s employer and Andrew’s father, which is about a young man who slowly transforms into a tree and is ultimately abandoned by everyone except his mother, who “visited the forest every day, and sat beside what was now no more than a fallen log” (Ackroyd 2013, 1748-­1751).

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Works Cited Ackroyd, Peter. 1994. The House of Doctor Dee. London, New York: Penguin Books. Ackroyd, Peter. 2001. “London Luminaries and Cockney Visionaries.” In The Collection, edited by Thomas Wright, 341-­351. London: Chatto and Windus. Ackroyd, Peter. 2001a. London: The Biography. London: Vintage. Ackroyd, Peter. 2013. Three Brothers. London: Chatto and Windus. Kindle edition. Creed, Barbara. 2007. The Monstrous-­Feminine. Film, Feminism, Psychoanalysis. New York: Routledge. Komsta, Marta. 2015. Welcome to the Chemical Theatre. The Urban Chronotope in Peter Ackroyd’s Fiction. Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang. Werner, Marina. 2013. Alone of All Her Sex: the Myth and the Cult of Virgin Mary. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Marcin Sroczyński

“Doomed Queens” in a Changing Environment: Andrew Holleran’s and Alan Hollinghurst’s Literary Visions of Gay Clubbing Communities The aim of this article is to analyse two novels which focus eminently on gay nightlife: Andrew Holleran’s 1978 Dancer from the Dance, and Alan Hollinghurst’s The Spell written in 1998. Upon initial consideration, the books seem to have little in common. Dancer from the Dance belongs to the post-­Stonewall literary canon, prior to the AIDS epidemic, while The Spell is set in the 1990s when the epidemic has largely been contained. Dancer… is a novel written by an American author describing life in NYC and its surroundings, whereas The Spell is a British novel set in London. However, both books offer insights into the mores of gay people compulsively attending night bars and discos. A comparative study allows to discover interesting regularities and striking resemblances between those communities. Such results may be contrasted with Henning Bech’s analysis of “the homosexual form of existence,” contained in his book When Men Meet. Homosexuality and Modernity. This reveals intrinsic, ahistorical characteristics of gay clubbing communities, and provides narratives bearing more intimate and psychological traits, which enhance Bech’s sociocultural argument, revealing a darker, grimmer side to the seemingly carefree lives of disco-­goers.

The Gay Bar The centrality of bars to community life has been truer for gay men than for any other social group. Bars and discos have provided opportunities to socialize and meet potential partners. However, more importantly, they “have offered members of a stigmatized social minority, often isolated from one another, an opportunity to inhabit space with like-­minded folk. Until recently, they were often the only venues in which LGBT people could feel free to be openly gay” (Johnson & Summers 2005, 1). Gay meeting places in European and North American urban centres have flourished since the end of the nineteenth century, and it can be argued that in-­group solidarity in the face of social hostility encouraged the formation of a political consciousness around sexual difference during the 1950s and 1960s. This led to a series of violent demonstrations against a police raid on the Stonewall Inn gay bar in 1969. The Stonewall riots are widely considered to constitute the

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single most important event starting the gay liberation movement. In the 1970s, gay bars in particular, reached their zenith of popularity and visibility. Johnson and Summers describe how [a]t this period, the stereotype of gay men as obsessed with dance and with recreational drugs appeared. On weekends, in huge clubs in the major cities of North America and Europe, gay men danced the early mornings away to music that itself seemed to be inextricably connected with the gay experience. (2005, 4)

This “gay experience” possesses a set of unique characteristics, which are brought into prominence at the discotheque. These include the exclusiveness of the community, its hierarchy, the superficiality of relationships, focusing on physical appearance, and finally – the occurrence of specific psychological ailments (loneliness, alienation, addictions), which partly result from the above-­mentioned essential qualities of the clubbing lifestyle and may be reinforced by the attitudes of the non-­homosexual world. These features will be examined in subsequent sections.

The Gay Enclaves Gay clubbing communities can only be formed in the city. Bech calls the city “the social world proper of the homosexual.” It is a unique universe which unites within itself distance and closeness, anonymity and involvement: you can drown in the crowd and remain yourself; you can be together with others yet free of them, and free to them. Here, the homosexual can be; here, his peculiarity can vanish in the blanket of anonymity, his strangeness in the general strangeness; and here, he can make contact. (Bech 1997, 98)

In the city, a homosexual can come together with others, especially in places which “concentrate the social space of the city,” condensing all its elements such as “the crowd, the constant flux of new people, the mutual strangeness and indifference; the feeling of motion, option, sexual excitement […]; the possibilities for moving and following” (159). As examples of such places Bech mentions railway stations, parks, cafes and, not surprisingly, the disco, which he describes as “one of the homosexual life-­world’s most typical spaces” (123). This may explain why Holleran and Hollinghurst concentrate their plots around the discotheque. Dancer from the Dance describes the 1970s when disco music was at the peak of its popularity. The plot is set in a predominantly white, cosmopolitan social milieu and concerns the lives of gay men who live in an exclusively gay neighbourhood, have exclusively gay associates, spend their afternoons at the gym and their nights either at the bath houses or dance bars, and who

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manage somehow through marginal jobs, trust funds, or the kindness of strangers to live lives of drugs, dancing, physical beauty, and sex. (Bergman 2002, 2)

The novel begins with a series of letters exchanged between two gay men: the narrator, a member of the clubbing community, and his friend who used to share the narrator’s lifestyle but then left NYC and retired to a rural neighbourhood with his partner. Each letter is signed with a different, extravagant pseudonym (such as Madeleine de Rothschild, Hélène de Sévigné, le Duc de Saint-­Simon, or Victor Hugo), reflecting the protagonists’ flamboyance and propensity for masquerade. The life of the community is described as an interminable sequence of theme parties, with the participants dressing up in eccentric outfits and engaging in ever more sophisticated sexual practices. They refer to each other using nicknames and everyone knows everyone else, even if they have never spoken to one another. The core of people who attend nightclubs and “seem to have no existence outside this,” are described as follows: “They seldom looked happy. They passed one another without a word […] like shades in hell. […] They acquired a haggard look of deadly seriousness” (Holleran 1979, 38-­9). Any newcomer to the disco is immediately spotted and commented upon, since the appearance of a new face is an injection of hope and freshness into this otherwise joyless community. The narrator describes “the thrill of newness, and the thrill of exclusivity” (38), which accompanies the first period of going to the disco, before routine and disillusionment set in. A new person may be introduced to the community by an insider, like the main character of the novel, Malone, who was found sitting on a pavement (beaten up by his ex-­lover and having literally no place to go) by a disco regular called Sutherland. Several years later, Malone himself becomes a regular. Towards the end of the novel, he takes on the task of introducing newcomers to the clubbing community, conveying to them the bitter truth about the clubbing life, the fruit of his several years of experience. Similar features of the clubbers’ world can be discovered in The Spell. Hollinghurst’s novel is set in 1990s London, where gay clubs and bars occupy the whole district of Soho and the atmosphere is that of freedom and relief, since the AIDS epidemic is no longer a lethal threat. It tells the story of four gay men: Robin, in his late forties, his younger boyfriend Justin, Justin’s former lover Alex, and Danny, Robin’s twenty-­two-­year-­old son from his one-­time relationship. When Alex falls in love with Danny, a “party animal,” he is introduced to London nightlife and the city’s clubbing scene. Alex, a public servant in his thirties, undergoes a metamorphosis when he becomes absorbed by the clubbing world.

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Similarly to the community described in Dancer…, the London clubbers form a specific subculture, in which everyone knows everyone else and which accepts new members according to certain rules and rituals. Alex is clearly an outsider, so his clumsiness is quite funny and pitiful at the same time. When Alex and Danny walk down the Old Compton Street in Soho, he is shocked to discover how “Danny knew every beautiful or interesting-­looking person who came towards them” (Hollinghurst 1998, 74). He cannot tell if Danny is a star or a mascot and feels somehow “provincial” and ill at ease when confronted with this closed circuit of people who “barely found the time to say ‘Hello,’ or at least ‘Hi,’ and give him a cursory upward glance, before getting on with their chat” (74). His rite of passage consists in the first visit to a nightclub and his first dose of drugs. The exclusivity of the clubbing community is apparent from the very beginning, since Danny and Alex are allowed by the bouncers to skip the long queue, “to signal their exemption and desirability” (81). What follows seems to Alex an “endless parade of half-­naked men, faces glowing with happiness and lust” (81). Like the narrator of Dancer from the Dance, Alex is thrilled after his first clubbing experience. He relishes his rediscovered youth, “feeling suddenly in the inside of life rather than the outside” as if he “has been set free” (108). In his car, instead of the usual classical music, he listens exclusively to house music. He starts envying the barmen and shop-­assistants who live with the club’s “promise of pleasure all week long,” and also finds that he has contracted “an aversion to his own past” (113). Only later will he discover that the disco world cannot bring him the satisfaction and fulfilment it promises. Instead, he will eventually find happiness once he ceases going to clubs and after having been left by Danny, who turns out incapable of having a stable relationship. Through Danny’s eyes, the reader further discovers the disco. Like in the Dancer…, the crowd can be divided into “regulars,” who exchange nods and smiles but not really talk to each other, and “tourists” – young strangers who are likely to be picked up for casual sex and thus “gave off such a heady mood of temporary trashiness” (147). Danny represents promiscuity and lack of emotional engagement proper to the clubbing world. However, the reader is informed that the story of his life follows the same pattern as Malone’s in the Dancer from the Dance. It turns out that when Danny was younger and inexperienced, he met and immediately fell in love with a much older George, who was already an unemotional, sexual predator. They had a brief relationship and after the affair George insisted on them “staying friends,” which was hard for Danny because they had never been friends, but merely lovers. Eventually, George became Danny’s “teacher,” a guide who “had given him fluent access to the many-­roomed edifice of London gay life, from the cellars to the salons” (99). Danny was his protégé, sometimes surprised

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at how friendly the people were to him, the friendliness resulting from Danny’s being incredibly good-­looking. He had yet to learn that attractiveness was the key to success in the gay clubbing community.

The terror of physical beauty The narrator of the Dancer from the Dance notices that the clubbers “lived only to bathe in the music, and each other’s desire, in a strange democracy whose only ticket of admission was physical beauty” (Holleran 1979, 40). The disco culture is obsessed with the visual and its members spend their lives pursuing a volatile ideal of style and attractiveness. They are constantly looking for the perfect love and a perfect lover. However, their interest in other people is solely superficial. Malone explains it to one of the newcomers: all these people are primarily a visual people. They are designers, window dressers, models, photographers, graphic artists. […] And being people who live on the surface of the eye, they cannot be expected to have minds or hearts. […] Everything is beautiful here, and that is all it is: beautiful. Do not expect anything else, do not expect nourishment for anything but your eye – and you will handle it beautifully. (228)

When Alex meets Danny, his idea of what Danny’s world looks like is “an impression of life as a party, as a parade of flash-­lit hugs and kisses, in a magic zone where everyone was young and found to be beautiful” (Hollinghurst 1998, 71). This magic zone, where the cult of beauty can be fully practised, is epitomised in the discotheque. Bech describes the disco as an artificial space that moves and has no fixed boundaries due to mirrors, projected images, lasers etc. All the light and sound form a stage on which the clubbers perform their identities. Bech notices how every aspect of going to a club is, in fact, a staging: You dress up to go to the disco. You choose a style. […] You strike up a pose when at the disco. You assume a “masculine” position, for example, standing with your legs apart, holding the cigarette between the tip of your thumb and your forefinger, the glow hidden by your fist […]. You communicate, as rehearsed, perform a greeting scene with those you know […] you act, if you have succeeded in learning it, that you are a sex object dancing. (1997, 120-­121)

Bech also notes how the room reduplicates itself, since the dance-­floor can be seen from raised platforms or from the balcony, and the participants double as actors and audience. Needless to say, such “body language” is the only way to communicate as loud music and huge amounts of consumed drugs and alcohol hinder the possibility of conversation.

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Bech acknowledges how the homosexual’s focus on surfaces corresponds with a more general trend of surface fetishism, closely related to the aestheticization of reality. The surface, the form, and the style of phenomena “have detached themselves from the essence, content, message and gained their independence” (Bech 1997, 127). Such surfaces are consciously designed and the development of visual media has made it literally possible to detach surfaces from persons. On the other hand, as a result of urbanisation, individuals encounter on a daily basis masses of people they do not know and can never know. Thus, one encounters only “that which can be seen, in passing; in other words: one encounters them as surfaces” (Bech 1997, 164). Bech concludes that homosexuals have had a special basis for developing the modern sense of surface, mainly due to their particular form of existence, which includes living in the city, role awareness, and the need to signal in order to recognize one another in a crowd (169). Superficiality brings about a new aesthetic creativity and new forms of pleasure. However, it also generates a number of pathologies, to which the homosexual seems particularly vulnerable, including different forms of alienation.

Loneliness and exclusion Bech claims that loneliness is the state proper to the homosexual. The very act of assuming one’s homosexuality is usually accompanied by leaving one’s safe and self-­evident world, as the homosexual steps out of his fellowship (family, workplace etc.) and comes out in the city: In the city, the homosexual’s loneliness is dissolved while at the same time preserved. He dissolves it himself, if and when he makes […] friends and acquaintances. […] With them he can share his sorrows and his joys and live his life as a homosexual; and to them he can confide even his most intimate homosexual secrets, if he wishes. Yet he can never be one with these friendships. He carries around the basic experience that togetherness can come to an end, that it is not covered by a guarantee. […] To this extent, he is doomed to be alone. (1997, 98-­99)

The superficiality of homosexual relationships is most prominent within the clubbing community. Holleran describes the clubbers as “a group of people who had danced with each other over the years, gone to the same parties, the same beaches on the same trains, yet, in some cases, never even nodded at each other” (1979, 38) or “never said a word” (117). They also have sex with each other, but this does not make their relations more intimate or profound. Over the years spent in the disco, the clubbers become weary of sex. In one of the opening letters, the narrator states: “sex has no meaning for me anymore; it’s too pointless” (21). Indifference

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and numbness gradually invade the protagonists’ lives. Malone admits that he can “no longer deal with people in that way – the way that used to thrill him (the beauty of the body, the communion of flesh) now […] repelled him slightly and could not warm his heart” (241). In The Spell, when Alex and Danny eventually break up, Hollinghurst talks about the impossibility of a relationship and emotional engagement among disco addicts. Young clubbers admit that “they don’t fall in love” (Hollinghurst 1998, 153) and Danny’s friends doubt if he will ever be ready to settle down. It also turns out that Danny has had affairs with most of his friends, which is standard in the community.1 Hollinghurst mocks the clubbers by making them utter compromising statements such as: “I’ve known Danny for a long time. Five or six months” (131). Their lives, as seen in the Dancer…, are a never-­ending pursuit of pleasure and new sensations, which eventually burns them out and leaves them hollow. In this respect, disco-­ goers perpetuate the two-­centuries old tradition of libertinism and dandyism. A libertine values sensual pleasures and ignores or even spurns commonly accepted morality and forms of behaviour. A dandy places particular importance upon physical appearance, often striving to imitate an aristocratic lifestyle despite coming from a more humble background.2 The clubbers’ superficiality, flamboyance and hedonism make them similar in some respects to the nineteenth-century decadents. It is important to emphasize that, despite the civil rights movement’s successes, gay people in the 1970s were still ostracised by the mainstream society. The hedonistic lifestyle described in Dancer from the Dance may be seen as a tragic, escapist attempt to lose oneself in partying because of the lack of hope for a better life, showing how trapped those people actually feel. In a passage describing taxi trips 1 In Dancer…, Malone claims that “over a long enough period of time, everyone goes to bed with everyone else” (33). 2 Richard Dellamora argues: “Although some aristocrats were dandies, the ‘dandy’ as a popular phenomenon is middle class. […] Dandyism was associated with middle-­class uppityism” (Dellamora 1990, 198). Similarly, Catherine Spooner notes that “while dandies identified themselves thoroughly with the aristocracy, this more often than not belied their actual social origins. […] [D]andyism emerged through a variety of social configurations, from genuine aristocrats […] to the upper-­working-­and lower-­ middle-­class “gents” of the 1830s and 1840s who dressed in cheap, ready-­made, gaudy imitations of the Count d’Orsay. […] Membership of the Regency elite depended not upon breeding but rather upon an obscure internal code known as ton, which operated according to a complex series of manners and whims […]. The Regency dandies therefore formed a new social group, based on aristocratic manners and privilege, but operating to new codes of prestige whereby appearance was more important than inheritance” (Spooner 2004, 91-­92).

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between the city and the beach, the narrator of Dancer… wonders whether one of the small towns on their way “might be that perfect town he was always searching for, where elms and lawns would be combined with the people he loved” (24). However, the dreamy tone of this description changes abruptly: But those summer taxis drove inevitably through it like vans bearing prisoners who are being transferred from one prison to another – from Manhattan to Fire Island – when all we dreamed of, really, in our deepest dreams, was just such a town as this, quiet, green, untroubled by the snobberies and ambition of the larger world; the world we could not quit. (24, emphasis added)

Other characters express their despair at the fact that they are doomed to live a life of wandering, like Jews or Gypsies, once this routine is “in their blood” (249). Homosexuality seems to be a curse for those who claim “I hate being gay, its like cancer” (51), or “I would LIKE to be a happily married attorney with a house in the suburbs, 2.6 kids, and a station wagon, in which we would drive every summer to see the Grand Canyon, but I’m not! I am completely, hopelessly gay!” (17). This hopelessness echoes the fact that homosexuals are virtually outcasts from the American society of the 1970s. This marginalisation is reflected in their actual displacement within the city. Because of their economic and social status, the protagonists are forced to move to decrepit neighbourhoods, like the Lower East Side, where they dwell in flats with no heating or hot water, one of the characters referring to this as “moving to oblivion” (122). The Spell provides evidence that marginalization or discrimination in the 1990s is less oppressive and less obvious than in the times of Holleran’s début. Unlike the characters of Dancer from the Dance, Danny is not living on the margins of society, he participates in family life, studies and has a job. However, by means of subtle irony, Hollinghurst progressively reveals the derisory nature of Danny’s “serious” adult life.3 Through Danny, Hollinghurst portrays the clubbing society whose main characteristics are: being vain, focusing on immediate gratification, and adhering to a certain childishness combined with a feeling of a lack of purpose or perspectives. For such people, dancing and drugs offer an escape from reality and the responsibilities of adult life. In both novels, their lifestyle becomes an addiction and, along with the huge amounts of drugs they take, it further alienates them from the outside world and from each other, gradually leading to their decline.

3 “Danny’s extremely bright and adaptable but he really doesn’t know anything. […] He’s got a degree in something called cultural studies, which apparently doesn’t quite involve reading a book. […] He does know all about dance-­music, though” (Hollinghurst 1998, 105).

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Conclusion The communities described in Dancer from the Dance and The Spell share many characteristics which suggest the existence of a universal, ahistorical model of gay clubbing lifestyle. Certainly, gay life changed in the time between the 1970s and the 1990s. It advanced from shadows to the spotlight, as the clubs and the apartments moved from run-­down areas to central locations, while the market offer for gay consumers shifted from niche to commercial mainstream. The clubbers’ escapism, therefore, seems to have different motivations in the two periods: in the 1970s it was more political, with gay men refusing to live in a society that does not acknowledge homosexuals, and looking for a space where they could live openly. In the 1990s escapism seems to be closer to childishness, characterised by a refusal to take on responsibilities and engagements, both professional and emotional. However, the quintessence of this lifestyle remains unaltered: it is centred on music, drugs, chasing sexual pleasure and the volatile, ephemeral, ideal beauty. It is characterised by engaging in superficial relationships, having multiple partners, and generally failing to achieve stability. As a closing remark, it is important to underline that the clubbing circuit is by no means representative of the overall gay community. It is a minority within a minority, a fact denounced on the final pages of Dancer from the Dance: Do you realize what a tiny fraction of the mass of homosexuals we were? That day we marched to Central Park and found ourselves in a sea of humanity, how stunned I was to recognize no more than four or five faces? […] [T]here were tons of men in that city who weren’t on the circuit, who didn’t dance, didn’t cruise […]. We never saw them. We were addicted to something else. (249)

Holleran’s choice to bring the clubbing community into the spotlight has met with a backlash from contemporary gay critics. David Leavitt objects to Dancer from the Dance, because it “romanticized – even exalted – what is to many of us the dreariest aspect of gay experience” (Leavitt 1994, xx). Leavitt claims that the book has caused double damage: on the one hand, it perpetuates the stereotype of the promiscuous, vain homosexual driven by lust, while contrary to popular opinion, most gay men do want more from their lives than a few decades spent panting after unattainable perfection; indeed, most want relationships based on spiritual as well as physical attraction, which grow more solid as the years go on. (xx)

Moreover, the novel may compel younger gay men to think that the whole homosexual world amounts to a voyeuristic fixation on beauty, with the imperfect ones being relegated to some marginal role and suffering from rejection, while

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only the most exceptionally beautiful are entitled to erotic fulfilment.4 The Spell met with similar criticism, founded on the principle that the author devotes too much attention to the kinds of subject matter5 that simply do not deserve it. Daniel Mendelsohn calls the characters a gloomy, unappealing and depressing bunch (1999). P. H. Davies goes further by saying: Hollinghurst appears to thrive creatively on depicting people who are loathsome, the sort he would probably never like to meet at a dinner party. No one in The Spell is particularly likeable. (Davies 2012)

These negative reviews illuminate the obvious fact that the gay community is by no means homogeneous; moreover, some individuals or certain lifestyles may be ostracised within it as well. Political efforts to forge a positive, socially acceptable image of the homosexual, including campaigns for same-­sex marriage and full assimilation of LGBT people into mainstream society, as well as the personal aspirations of many gays and lesbians, whose primary goal has been to live a life not so different from their straight counterparts, have resulted in a new type of marginalisation of gay clubbers.6 However, it is important to keep in mind that, apart from being a mere meeting place, gay bars and discos have served yet another role: new fashions and styles have been born there as gay clubbing culture often creates new aesthetic trends in music and clothing, as well as produces numerous pop icons.

Works Cited Bech, Henning. 1997. When Men Meet. Homosexuality and Modernity. Cambridge: Polity Press. Bergman, David. 2002. “American Literature: Gay Male, Post-­Stonewall.” glbtq: An Encyclopedia of Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, Transgender, and Queer Culture, edited by Claude J. Summers. Web. Davies, P. H. 2012. “‘Alan Hollinghurst – The Spell, Review.’ P.H. Davies, 5 August. Web. Dellamora, Richard.  1990. Masculine Desire: The Sexual Politics of Victorian Aestheticism. Chapel Hill: UNC Press Books. 4 Leavitt refers to his experience of reading Dancer… as a teenager, which horrified him and made him “fear his future” (1994, xvi-­xviii). 5 Mendelsohn refers to it as an “ostensibly ‘gay’ subject matter” with the characters “fall[ing] into and out of one another’s beds” (Mendelsohn 1999). 6 Lisa Duggan refers to this phenomenon as “homonormativity” (Duggan 2002, 179).

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Duggan, Lisa.  2002. “The New Homonormativity. The Sexual Politics of Neoliberalism.” In Materializing Democracy: Toward a Revitalized Cultural Politics, edited by Russ Castronovo and Dana D. Nelson, 175-­192. Durham: Duke University Press. Holleran, Andrew. 1979. Dancer from the Dance. London: Jonathan Cape. Hollinghurst, Alan. 1998. The Spell. London: Viking. Jagose, Annamarie. 1996. Queer Theory. An Introduction. New York: New York University Press. Johnson, Matthew D., and Summers, Claude J. 2005. “Gay and Lesbian Bars.” glbtq: An Encyclopedia of Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, Transgender, and Queer Culture, edited by Claude J. Summers. Web. Leavitt, David. 1994. Introduction to The Penguin Book of Gay Short Stories, edited by David Leavitt, xv-­xxviii. London: Viking. Mendelsohn, Daniel.  1999. “Country Life.” Review of The Spell by Alan Hollinghurst. New York Times, 25 April. Web. Spooner, Catherine. 2004. Fashioning Gothic Bodies. Manchester: Manchester University Press.

Part III Culture

Wojciech Nowicki

How It Was, How It Is: Literary Histories across the Decades The paper examines the histories of English/British literature published over the last fifty years or so. Because the size of the material under inspection is forbiddingly vast and thus hardly manageable, we propose to examine only changes recorded in the paratexts of the various histories, leaving the texts themselves to future investigators.1

Observation one: Scope Three words have notably, and rather obviously, defined the scope and purpose of contemporary literary histories: “English” (less often “British”), “History” and “Literature.”

English? Within just a few decades the meaning of “English” has changed from that denoting “of England” to that meaning “in the English language.” The monumental Oxford History of English Literature, whose volumes continued to be published from World War II to almost the end of the last millennium, concentrated prevalently on English writers (with a glance at Scotland, though never Ireland), and so did David Daiches’s A Critical History of English Literature (1960). This situation began to change in the 1970s and 1980s when first The Sphere History of Literature in the English Language made its way to the bookshops, with two volumes about American literature, followed by the Longman Literature in English Series. The latter has now been taken over by Routledge and houses the literatures of America, India, Africa, the Caribbean as well as criticism and context, thus testifying to the changed idea of what “English” and even of what “literature” mean. Titular declarations can sometimes 1 Considerable work in this respect has already been done by Herbert Grabes and Margit Sichert at Justus Liebig University in Giessen, Germany. They cast their net wide, examining literary histories from the Renaissance onwards and are particularly committed to the idea that literary historiography’s important role is to sustain national identity. From a different perspective but on a broader scale the functions of literary history are theorized by David Perkins. See Works Cited.

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be tricky and will need annotations, as in John Peck and Martin Coyle’s A Brief History of English Literature (2002), in which Englishness stands for Britishness: By “English” we mean, for the purposes of this book, works written in Britain rather than works written in English; “English” is therefore stretched to include works written in Scotland, Wales and Ireland (as well as a number of texts from America and the Commonwealth that have been influential in Britain). (2002, xi)

Such comprehensiveness immediately raises the ghost of political correctness: naturally, say the authors, the Irish deserve to be treated separately and it is arrogant to adopt the works of Irish authors into British cultural heritage (Peck and Coyle 2002, xi). Why only Irish, we might ask? Why not extract Scottish and Welsh literatures from the common stock? Peck and Coyle readily admit that the whole question of Englishness is a minefield. Similarly, Alastair Fowler in his celebrated Kinds of Literature (1982), practically, the only generic history of English literature, focuses on England, but slides easily into Scottish, Irish, American and Commonwealth repositories whenever his taxonomies need further exemplification (Fowler 1987, v-­vii).

History? The word “history” still exists in the titles, but gradually “pure” literary historiography metamorphoses into all sorts of “handbooks,” “guides” or “companions.” “A publishing surge of the last twenty years has filled our shelves with ‘companions,’ volumes designed to equip their readers with up-­to-­date and convenient surveys of the current state of knowledge about literary periods and major authors” (Strohm 2001, 1). Each major imprint, Oxford, Cambridge, Blackwell, Routledge or Continuum (now taken over by Bloomsbury), boasts a series of such literary compendia, sometimes of very high standards (“Blackwell Companions to Literature and Culture,” “Cambridge Companions”). Is that a sign of the times? Is “history” in the title too high-­sounding, too ambitious and so misguided? Perhaps a national literary history should be replaced by a more modest undertaking whose title would promise practicality and user-­friendliness? Ironies apart, the issue cannot be treated lightly at a time when, in some radical approaches history is shown as having forfeited its greatest asset, factuality, to the extent that the entire discipline can be invalidated.

Literature? The word “literature” is now often supplemented with “culture.” A brief glance at the Wiley-­Blackwell “Companion” series will confirm this: whenever an epoch

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is involved rather than a genre or an author, the two notions are combined, this being the effect of deeply ingrained usage rather than logic (does not “culture” include “literature”?). Thus within the series we get, among others, A Companion to Medieval English Literature and Culture, c.1350–c.1500 and A Companion to English Renaissance Literature and Culture. On the other hand, when the title contains only “literature” and not “culture,” the sense of the former may be broader than usual, for instance as a result of the politicisation of critical methodology: James Simpson, introducing volume 2 of The Oxford English Literary History, strikes a Foucauldian note by declaring that “literary” first of all means “discursive,” indicating thereby literature’s dependence on institutions which operate specialized discourses for their own ends. In this case Simpson is all too conscious of where literature belongs, making it part of writing, writing in its turn being part of culture (Simpson 2004, 4-­5).

Observation two: Depersonalization Histories of English literature have clearly veered towards depersonalization: authors and contributors in their majority stay aloof from what they write about; the choice of material, risky judgement and aesthetic satisfaction are infrequent guests on the pages of histories of English literature nowadays. By contrast, C. S. Lewis made his 1944 Clark Lectures, turned into volume III of the Oxford History of English Literature, rather personal in all these respects. In the Foreword he says: When I began this book I had the idea […] of giving each author space in proportion to the value I set on him; but I found it would not do. Things need to be treated at length not in so far as they are great but in so far as they are complicated. Good books which are remote from modern sympathy need to be treated at greater length than good books which everyone knows and loves. (1954, v)

As an educator I have the choice, Lewis seems to be saying. He often resorts to first-­ person pronouns (“I have read […],” “In my view […],” etc., 169) and uses words like “sweet[est]” or “delightful.” David Daiches in A Critical History of English Literature (1960) likewise offers bold assessments: “Eliot’s poetry lacks scope and sympathy […]” (1135). Such boldness is out of the question half a century later. In the foreword to The Routledge History of Literature in English: Britain and Ireland, edited by Ronald Carter and John McRae (1997; 2001), Malcolm Bradbury wrote: “[…] what today’s reader is most likely to need is not a narrow, judgemental study, but an expansive, generous and varied textbook of British literary history, based on a wide reading and a firm sense of cultural history” (2001, xii). “Judgemental” is the suspect word in this and in other studies of our time. Personal choice based

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on long experience in teaching literature is dismissed as undesirable favouritism. Carter and McRae target audiences for whom English is an international language and who are steeped in the new media and not just print. “Cultural” is of course another signal cliché, confirming the irreversible drive towards replacing literary studies with cultural studies. The bottom line seems to be that literature is no longer an art but an institution in which extraliterary mechanisms are almost on a par with literary processes. To this effect Carter and McRae equip their book with three lists: Winners of the Booker Prize, Winners of the Whitbread Prize plus British and Irish winners of the Nobel Prize for Literature.

Observation three: Disappearance of authors’ names This is an irregular occurrence. Sometimes names vanish from titles of volumes in multi-­volume histories, sometimes (more often?) from tables of contents. In The (New) Pelican Guide to English Literature (1955; 1982), consisting of eight-­ volumes, each book carried the name of an author in the title, sometimes two – The Age of Shakespeare, From Blake to Byron, From James to Eliot, etc.; only the last, volume eight, was called The Present. Volume I of David Daiches’s A Critical History bore the subtitle From the Beginnings to Milton. Naturally, such onomastic titles did not prevail; often the division was according to period, as in the celebrated twelve-­volume Oxford History of English Literature or the ten-­volume Sphere History of Literature in the English Language. But even in those some tribute to the giants was paid: the Oxford had Chaucer mentioned in volume II, part 1, and the Sphere’s volume 4 was titled Dryden to Johnson, almost like the same number in Boris Ford’s Pelican (From Dryden to Johnson). Nothing of the sort is in evidence in the new histories, from the late twentieth or twenty-­first centuries. Among its thirteen volumes The Oxford English Literary History has no name in the title. Likewise the magisterial New Cambridge History of English Literature. The nine-­volume Blackwell Histories of Literature series studiously avoids going into personal specifics. Says Bradbury: In the globalising age of the World Wide Web and the Internet we have moved away from familiar nineteenth-­century notions – that literature is the instinctive, celebratory product of the tradition, nation, place and people. That and the disjunctive and radical nature of modern writing have led us to distrust those graceful, linear “great traditions,” which assume that great geniuses effortlessly hand the torch of literature on from one to the other: Chaucer to Shakespeare, Shakespeare to Milton, Milton to Wordsworth, Wordsworth to Tennyson, and so on […]. (2001, ix)

As far as tables of contents are concerned, names of writers crop up nowadays rather infrequently. Among multi-­volume histories, they featured in the Pelican

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volumes, in the Sphere and the Longman Literature in English Series. Not a single name adorns the contents of The Oxford English Literary History. Very few names exist in the New Cambridge History of English Literature. Names in single-­volume histories also tend to go. In Daiches half the chapter headings were supplied with names. Even the 1985 Everyman History of English Literature by Peter Conrad, much underrated, possibly because of the surfeit of erudition, was strongly onomastic, with many names and titles in the contents list. Just a few years later, Andrew Sanders and Alastair Fowler have none. Paul Strohm puts it bluntly: “My object in proposing topics was to avoid settled areas of discussion and ‘bounded’ subjects. Hence, this collection contains no ‘major author’ essays […]” (2007, 2).

Observation four: Unstable periodization Inclusion of names from the “great traditions,” much denigrated as they are at present, used to serve two functions: mapping the periods and establishing the canon. In Daiches the great watershed was Milton and small chunks of literary history were also ticked off with names, for example in chapter 11, “Poetry after Spenser,” or chapter 17, “From Thomson to Crabbe.” The same could be found in The (New) Pelican Guide. Quite obviously, names of periods are still used. These are deeply ensconced in public consciousness, although they always surprise by the variety of criteria for naming them: Old and Middle English refer to the stage of the English language; the Elizabethan Age, the Restoration and the Victorian Age to politics; Renaissance, Romanticism and Modernism to art movements. At the risk of adopting too conservative an attitude than the occasion merits, one wonders whether “The Age of Dryden” does not sound more consistent, because it ties the 40 years, 1660-­1700, to a literary figure. But new winds are now blowing and old boundaries are swept away. The Oxford English Literary History slices the Middle Ages at a curious date, volume 1 taking up the whole time until 1350, and volume 2 the years 1350-­1547. Subsequent parts cover periods with at least a slight overlap, this being perhaps a deliberate editorial policy of the General Editor of the series or perhaps the result of the free hand individual authors were given in the matter of periodization. So volume 3 starts at the year 1533 (the closing date of the previous one being 1547) and the last two tackle nearly the same time span: namely, volume 12, Randall Stevenson’s apocalyptically sounding The Last of England?, discusses the years 1960-­2000, whereas volume 13, Bruce King’s Marxist sounding The Internationalization of English Literature, explores the time between 1948 and 2000. Ironically but tellingly, King’s volume bears a different title on the spine, probably from the printer’s oversight: The Internationalization of English Translation. Of course an overlap like this can be justified

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by the proliferation of non-­native English writers, Indian, West Indian, African, etc. But volume 2 of the same history, studying the years 1350-­1547, offers a rather mysterious justification of its bounds: James Simpson, the editor, writes that “they have been chosen not primarily for the significance of their beginning and end, but rather for what they traverse” (2004, 2). Obviously 1547 is the year of the death of Henry VIII, but Simpson seems to emphasize the nebulousness of all historical demarcation; there are no boundaries, he seems to suggest, just processes. This is much in line with the policies of the entire series, not a fault at all, but something typical these days. Sometimes a radical redrawing of temporal divisions can be found, as in the Cambridge Companions. This is a big series – one that accommodates not merely periods but entire world literature, with names, genres and even cities on the covers (for instance the literature of London). Some parcelling, though, can be surprising. In Steven Zwicker’s English Literature 1650-­1740 (1998) neither of the two dates, 1650 or 1740, seems to make sense. It surprises us until we realize that the objective set out in the title is tentative and the real agenda is culture and politics. The editor of the volume thus argues his case: The aim of this volume is to introduce students to English literary culture in one of its most volatile and politically engaged moments. The literature created between the years of Republican ferment in the 1650s and the coalescence of a Georgian state in the early eighteenth century reflects the instability and partisanship of rebellious and factious times. But literature in these years was more than a mirror of the age. Literary texts were central to the celebration of civic persons and institutions, to polemic and party formation, to the shaping of public opinion, indeed to the creation of political consciousness itself. (1998, xi)

Whither literary history? No easy conclusions emerge from these random observations. We can merely outline certain tendencies and hazard a few guesses about their causes. One cause may be the loss of the semiotic and technological distinctiveness of literature. Literature is no longer a language-­based, print-­based medium. New media are on the march and that affects the scope and character of literary histories. Another is the lure of multidisciplinarity: publishers, editors, critics, representatives of cultural institutions insist on redefining areas of study in the hope that a concerted attack on stale models will be more enticing, more productive, and more cost-­effective. Attendant upon this is the dubious conviction that new material must regularly replace the old, that sanctities must inevitably fall under suspicion and canonicities sooner or later become old hat.

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While surveying the current tendencies, quite often one gets the impression of “intellectual commercialism” at play, a state in which literary historiography’s chief raison d’être is its saleability. With this target in mind, the publishers must certainly fear the stigma of being out of step. Paul Strohm, as editor of the Middle English volume in the “Oxford Twenty First Century Approaches to Literature” series, claims that for his book he sought out contributors who are “innovative and independent-­minded” (2007, 1). The result is nothing short of delightful, says the editor glibly: One essay reads romances as scripts for the “performance” of feelings, while another reads dramas not as performances at all but as instances of literate practice. […] Another solicited on the subject of orality finds that medieval culture was less “oral” than commonly supposed, but “aural” through and though. […] “Episodic” structure is seen not as happenstance but as design. The far-­from-­stable category of authorship is found lurking in the undiscovered space between manual and intellectual labour, as a by-­product of other vocations, as an epiphenomenon of socio-­political conflict. “Literature” is discovered in camouflage, in apparently “nonliterary” surroundings, or as an incidental effect of writing practice, or dramatic convention, or even of manuscript arrangement or mise-­en-­page. Contrary to the dutifully learned lessons of a half-­century, the “I” of a text might end up having something autobiographical about it after all. And so on; readers will find these essays astir with new prospects and fresh research agendas. (2007, 1-­2)

This is a far cry from what Boris Ford, the editor of the Pelican, once claimed: in his series the contributors had “common assumptions” and observed “the need for rigorous standards,” which ensured cohesion in the Guide (1983-­1984, Volume 1, Part One, 11). At the cost of overemphasis and exaggeration, we might ask at the end whether the tyranny of novelty and originality will not lead to the obliteration of the object of literary history, literature itself? But possibly the fear is unfounded and all Cassandric outcries should be muted. All-­inclusiveness can be irritating but it does bring a breath of fresh air, and the effort of many experts is no worse than the enthusiasm of a single erudite man. What really matters is the usability of literary historiography for teaching purposes, for it is in schools and universities that the largest readership for these texts will be found and their merits verified.

Works Cited Daiches, David.  1969 (1960). A Critical History of English Literature. Second Edition. London: Secker & Warburg. Bate, Jonathan, General Editor. 2001-­2006. The Oxford English Literary History. 13 vols. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

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Bolton, W. F., et al., eds. 1970-­1975. Sphere History of Literature in the English Language. 10 vols. London: Sphere Books Ltd. Bradbury, Malcolm. 2001. Foreword to The Routledge History of Literature in English: Britain and Ireland, edited by Ronald Carter and John McRae, ix-­xii. London and New York: Routledge. Brown, Peter, ed. 2007. A Companion to Medieval English Literature and Culture, c.1350–c.1500. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers Ltd. Carroll, David, et al., eds. 1985-­2004. Longman Literature in English Series. 36 vols. London: Longman/Routledge. Carter, Ronald, and John McRae, eds.  2001 (1997). The Routledge History of Literature in English: Britain and Ireland. Chandler, James, et al., eds. 1999-­2012. The New Cambridge History of English Literature. 7 vols. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Conrad, Peter. 1985. The Everyman History of English Literature. London and Melbourne: J.M. Dent & Sons Ltd. Ford, Boris, ed.  1983-­ 1984 (1955). The New Pelican Guide to English Literature. 8 vols. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books. Fowler, Alastair. 1987. A History of English Literature. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. Grabes, Herbert. 2003. “Cultivating a Common Literary Heritage: British Histories of English Literature since World War II.” Modern Language Quarterly 64: 239-­254. Hattaway, Michael, ed. 2000. A Companion to English Renaissance Literature and Culture. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers Ltd. Lewis, C. S. 1954. English Literature in the Sixteenth Century: Excluding Drama. “Oxford History of English Literature Series.” Oxford: Oxford University Press. Peck, John, and Martin Coyle. 2002. A Brief History of English Literature. New York: Palgrave. Perkins, David. 1992. Is Literary History Possible? Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press. Sanders, Andrew. 1994. The Short Oxford History of English Literature. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Sichert, Margit. 2003. “Functionalizing Cultural Memory: Foundational British Literary History and the Construction of Identity.” Modern Language Quarterly 64: 199-­217. Sichert, Margit. 2008. “The Old and the New: British Concepts of Writing the History of English Literature after Postmodernism.” In Postmodernism and After: Visions and Revisions, edited by Regina Rudaityté, 121-­135. Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing.

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Simpson, James, ed. 2004. The Oxford English Literary History. Volume 2: 1350-­ 1547: Reform and Cultural Revolution. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Strohm, Paul, ed. 2007. Middle English. “Oxford Twenty First Century Approaches to Literature.” Oxford: Oxford University Press. Zwicker, Steven N. 1998. Preface to The Cambridge Companion to English Literature 1650-­1740, xi-­xiii. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Kornelia Boczkowska

New Perspectives in the U.S. Space-­Oriented Philosophy: Albert Harrison’s American Cosmism as a Variation of the Russian Cosmist Thought In this paper I present the chief assumptions and propose my own extension of a newly-­emergent concept of American Cosmism, defined as “a product of science, religion, and national culture, reflected in academic and popular views about our place in the universe, space exploration, and human destiny” (Harrison 2013, 25). The study is premised on a hypothesis proposed by Albert Harrison (2013) which assumes the existence of American Cosmism as parallel to Russian Cosmism, a space-­oriented philosophical and cultural movement which emerged in the late nineteenth-century Russia and aimed to explore the origins, evolution and future prospects of an intrinsic relationship between humans and the universe (Semenova and Gacheva 1993; Young 2012). Having been founded on the core principles of Eastern Orthodoxy, aero-­and cosmonautics, transhumanism as well as mysticism and panpsychism, it developed into a nationwide rationale which often served as a spiritual explanation of the Soviet pursuit of space efforts (Siddiqi 2008, 260-­288; Thomas 2011, 9; Trotsky 1975, 211). The study finally argues that while the two variations of Cosmism vitally differ in terms of their generic characteristics, they also tend to share many common themes, having both assimilated utopian, prophetic, religious and national influences. Space exploration, one of the most significant human endeavours in the history of human civilization, has always occupied a special place in the U.S. culture. Various activities performed within the final frontier have been subject to both empirical and materialistic space science as well as space humanities which exposed the public to mystical, spiritual, esoteric and transcendent experiences beyond earth. A cultural and philosophical vision of the U.S. space efforts, also known as space ethos or American Cosmism, which stands for its more elaborate variation, has been continuously shaped by the forces of culture, such as national myths, beliefs or the space programme’s achievements and failures. Harrison argues that “non-­scientific, populist, religious, and quasi-­religious attitudes affect people’s interpretations of scientific achievements and motivate their interests in space exploration” (2013, 41). In the U.S., this includes the phenomenon of White’s

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Overview Effect (1987) which encompasses religious, mystic, spiritually profound and perspective-­altering experiences reported by astronauts in space, the newly-­ emergent concept of a higher global consciousness or the widespread interest in esoteric and occult aspects of space exploration, such as SETI and UFO. These and other related views and notions accompanying the public attitudes toward outer space constitute the American Cosmism which has helped form space visions, set agendas for space as well as determine humanity’s tasks performed in the final frontier throughout the twentieth century. What is more, Harrison (2013) points out that the notion tends to capture a deeper and more complex interplay between ideology, religion, philosophy and technology when defining the national visions of the cosmos than the term space ethos (Harris 1992), often seen as one of the first modern and full-­fledged concepts standing for the fundamental spirit of a culture supporting the vision of outer space. In particular, Harrison asserts that “space ethos fails to convey the breadth and depth of thinking, the early origins, and the occasional blurring of ideology, religion, and technology that permeate thinking about humans and space” (2013, 42). Perhaps somehow surprisingly, Harrison maintains that ideas parallel to those proposed by the Russian Cosmists can be also found in the U.S. culture: Historically and specifically, cosmism is associated with Russians, but parallel elements in American space philosophy hint that cosmism is an overwhelming phenomenon, anchored in the distant past, but with Russian and American versions moving along different tracks. […] We find similar or analogous ideas in America. Even Fedorov’s idea of reassembling the dust of all the people who ever lived has a Western counterpart: Frank Tipler’s proposal to achieve resurrection and eternal life through computer emulations. (26; 41)

The central premise of the Russian Cosmism, Fedorov’s “Common Task,” advanced establishing a universal utopia of the resurrected both on earth and in the entire cosmos, seen as a spiritual and scientific-­technological mission to be accomplished by human beings. Some other themes common to Fedorov’s fellow Cosmists include i) the pursuit of active rather than passive knowledge and a sense of wholeness; ii) the belief in an intrinsic, mutual interconnection between man and the cosmos; iii) the presence of a supreme spirit guiding the universe in the form of God or other divine entity; iv) seeking an ultimate truth and complete integration of knowledge, the present state of which is inadequate; v) the search for the hidden wisdom across space and time by means of pseudo-­and parascientific methods which draw on esoteric, and occult sources (Djordjević 1999, 105-­106; Scalan 1994, 26-­28; Young 2012, 4). Furthermore, the spirit of “Russianness” and “Russian soul” seem to permeate their numerous ideas and theories; otechestvennyi, denoting a homegrown, native quality, is thought to be one of the most

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appealing characteristics of Cosmism and can be read as an alternative to Western European and American rationalist, empiricist and positivist values (Young 2012, 235-­236). On the other hand, however, the Cosmist worldview seems to have a twofold nature; clearly Slavophile influences, including the adherence to tradition, mysticism and spiritualism, are often combined with Western dialectical materialism, technological utopianism and spiritual immortalism or futurism (Siddiqi 2010, 78-­79). Also, although remaining a largely disregarded intellectual tradition of the pre-­and Soviet-­period, many scholars argue that it gave rise and continued to shape the national space age ideology, particularly its technological utopian, mystical and occult dimensions, often reflected in contemporary media, literature, arts, film and other realms of popular culture (Djordjević 1999; Rogatchevski 2011; Schwartz 2011; Siddiqi 2008; Thomas 2011). Similarly to the Russian Cosmism, its American variation is often credited with defining and continuously shaping the nationwide rendering of space exploration activities carried out since the dawn of the space age era. However, as opposed to the chief tenets of the Russian thinkers, Harrison’s idea of Cosmism has its roots in the U.S. Christian and frontier experience tradition, the ideology of Americanism as well as early space research and exploration (Harrison 2013, 25). The scholar elaborates further on the phenomenon, describing it as “a constellation of attitudes and beliefs, anchored in religion and culture, that help nations define themselves and their place in the universe, motivate activities in space, and proclaim national values to the world” (26). More specifically, the main characteristics of American Cosmism, to a large extent parallel to its Russian variation, lie in the nations’ distinct i) human spaceflight experiences regarded as a religious system; ii) visionaries of space-­oriented philosophy1 and space programme; iii) national 1 Although the definition of a space-­oriented philosophy has not been officially formulated yet, there have been certain academic attempts to elaborate on the issue from the point of view of a number of humanistic and interdisciplinary approaches. One of the most prominent examples of this kind is the recently established Journal of Space Philosophy edited by Bob Krone and published regularly under the auspices of Kepler Space Institute, which continues a never-­ending mission of cosmological pursuits among scientists and scholars. It seems that Putnam’s formulation of the journal’s main imperative included in introductory remarks to the first volume might well serve as the definition of space philosophy seen as a fully fledged research subject and field of academic enquiry. The scholar states that the journal “will explore the spirituality and ethics, the cultural imperatives and moral values of the human quest for the stars” (2012, 5). Hence, it can be implied that the very term denotes the search for knowledge, truth, understanding, and meaning of space-­related matters considering primarily the relationship between humans and the cosmos. Such a definition would embrace

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mythologies underlying both countries’ interest in space research and exploration; iv) the interplay between science, imagination and the occult accompanying the evolution of the cosmic thought. On the other hand, however, there are also differences. In contrast to the Russian Cosmism, which originated at the turn of the twentieth century, peaked in Bolshevik Russia of the 1920s, and then continued its evolution into the space age, its U.S. counterpart began to emerge about four decades later, in the post-­war America. However, contrary to space ethos which commenced developing in response to the Soviet launch of Sputnik in 1957, the spirit of Cosmism may be traced back to the emergence of observational cosmology in the early twentieth century as well as the beginnings of the U.S. space programme whose ideals were spread by newly established and influential space advocacy groups, such as the American Interplanetary Society, founded in 1930 and later known as the American Rocket Society, or individual “rocketry romanticists” (Winter 1980). Also, although both Russians and Americans put an almost unquestioned faith in highly advanced technology which would enable humans to achieve perfection and unity in outer space, they proposed various means to accomplish it; while the Russian Cosmists advanced social solidarity as well as combining science with characteristically Russian forms of Orthodox spirituality, mysticism and occult practices, American space advocates placed the emphasis on liberal democracy and individual initiative, one of the chief ideals connected with the frontier myth and westward expansion across the U.S. (McCurdy 2011, 308). Except for such crucial discrepancies, both Russian and American Cosmist movement seem to have developed a set of common characteristics. For instance, one of the major roles in the evolution of both forms of Cosmism was played by visionary rocket scientists who both inspired and spread the idea of space travel and extraterrestrial life in popular culture. In the post-­war America, such themes evolved under a strong influence of German rocket scientists, including Wernher von Braun, Robert Goddard, Willy Ley and Krafft Arnold Ehricke, whose ideas of space travel and extraterrestrial life were widely spread in popular science books and film industry, thus defining the nationwide vision of long-­term space research and exploration (Launius 1998, 6; McCurdy 2011, 25). Harrison calls it the “von Braun paradigm” which initiated in the 1950s and was founded on the premise that the U.S. space programme would follow subsequent stages, ranging from suborbital and orbital flights to the Moon and Mars landings. Meanwhile,

both humanistic and interdisciplinary character of the concept as well as emphasize the importance of the study of cultural, psychological, religious, mystical or spiritual implications of space exploration.

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Russians had their own space-­oriented thinkers and rocket engineers, such as Nikolai Fedorov, Konstantin Tsiolkovsky or Sergei Korolev, whose pioneering research greatly inspired the public imagination and triggered the nationwide space fad which began in the 1920s, about three decades earlier than in America. Siddiqi suggests it was both the popularity of, and threat posed by, American rocket scientists which led Russians to rediscover their own space visionaries and found one of the world’s first pro-­space groups, such as GIRD (Group for the Study of Reactive Motion), the Society for the Study of Interplanetary Communications, a Section on Reactive Motion formed by the Science Society of the prestigious Zhukovskii Military Air Engineering Academy, which engaged in organizing various public events promoting early space research and exploration, including a 1925 small exhibition of artifacts related to human spaceflight in Kiev or a 1927 world’s first international exhibition on space travel in Moscow. As noted by Siddiqi (2008, 272), in the years 1923-­1932, nearly 250 space-­related articles and over 30 nonfiction books on the subject were published in the Soviet Union; in contrast, merely two such works appeared on the U.S market during the same period. Perhaps one of the most striking differences between American and Russian leading visionaries of space exploration lies in the fact that while the former scientists concentrated more on realistic and technologically credible achievements in the field, the latter inclined to muse upon utopian, mystical and spiritual aspects of spaceflight as well as incorporate them into their mainstream scientific theories. Moreover, both Russian and American variations of Cosmism appear to have certain nationalistic overtones. For example, the former drew much on the ideology of the Russian imperialism and Eastern Orthodox Church which helped reinforce early Cosmists’ imperative to solve the ongoing global problems, inhabit distant planets, unite the human race in all time and space dimensions or ensure both its spiritual and technological development. Since the late nineteenth century until the Stalinist era, there was an immense enthusiasm for space among the masses; in Khrushchev’s times, cosmonautics played a particularly iconic role symbolizing the greatest achievements of the Soviet socio-­political system and the dawn of the space age promised the “storming of heaven” (shturm neba) which could ensure material prosperity and thus increase social solidarity (Richers and Maurer 2011, 23-­26). In this respect, Cosmism provided a convincing justification for an expansionist socialist ideology which intended to spread the Bolshevik Revolution around the world and further into space. Meanwhile, American Cosmism to a large extent stems from Manifest Destiny and Turner’s frontier thesis which have successfully served as a potent myth in constructing the nationwide culture of outer space (McCurdy 2011, 6; Launius 2005, 130). Exploring the universe

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offers abundant prospects of finding new economic resources, wealth and freedom as well as unlimited possibilities for individual initiative and self-­development in both physical and spiritual sense. Also, the idea of American exceptionalism clearly manifests itself here and has been often incorporated in the popular space imagery encouraged by NASA in the form of awe-­inspiring and sublime visions portraying the U.S. pioneering space efforts (Rosenberg 2008, 177; Sage 2008, 27). What is more, in the context of spaceflight, both schools of space-­oriented thought are frequently perceived as a form of secular religion. In his recent interview given for a 2012 issue of The Atlantic, Harrison elaborates on the way Russian Cosmism resembles a religious belief system: There are […] different ways that you see the religious aspects of Cosmism. One place you see it is in the tremendous faith that both Russians and Americans have in technology; specifically, the idea that technology can solve the problems of humanity, and that we need to leave Earth to create a better society, to find, in some sense, perfection in space. You see this idea over and over when space exploration is discussed, the idea that we can leave behind the problems that plague society here on Earth and we create these wonderful new societies in space. There’s a general resemblance in this thinking to religious views of heaven, and in particular notions of salvation. (Andersen 2012)

Perhaps, however, religious aspects of space exploration seem to be more prevalent in American Cosmism; Launius argues that the national space efforts have developed at least five crucial components that allow to classify it as the belief system, namely i) the ideology of salvation pursued by means of advanced technology; ii) the representation of astronauts seen as revered heroes; iii) sacred scripture-­like texts conveying spaceflight experiences; iv) a set of rules and rituals; v) a group identity among space advocates (2013, 48). These trends can be mostly found in popular culture manifestations of the Apollo myth and post-­Apollo nostalgia, astronauts’ reports and public statements indicating that their profound experience of religious epiphany in space or pro-­space movements’ activities which popularize the idea of space travel and its immense impact on increasing the individual, global and cosmic consciousness. Representations of Spaceship Earth, Brand’s Whole Earth Catalog or White’s Overview Effect remain other important symbols of New Age thinking, globalism, environmentalism and outer space religion, particularly widespread in the U.S. culture since the 1960s (Cosgrove 1994; Holy and Taylor 2009). In contrast, the Russian Cosmism has not evolved such an elaborate and prevailing set of religious assumptions largely due to restrictive attempts of the Soviet government to instill the masses with scientific-­materialistic atheism, the policy officially implemented by Khrushchev (see e.g. Rockwell 2006). Instead, Cosmists

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chose to incline more toward esoteric and occult dimensions of human space endeavours centered around the concepts of Fedorov’s Common Task and resurrection project, Vernadsky’s noosphere or Tsiolkovsky’s universal monism (Hagemeister 1997; Scanlan 1994, 27; Young 2011). Meanwhile, mystic, esoteric and occult ideas also seem to have played a vital role in the development of American Cosmism. The SETI and UFO culture have evidently displayed such tendencies; so has White’s Overview Effect which offers a novel perspective on human spaceflight experience seen as a genuinely transformative, profound and transcendent personal event crucial for one’s spiritual and psychological growth. What is more, the concept, present in the U.S. popular culture of the 1980s, has developed its own distinct theory of salvation which, read partly in line with that of Fedorov, could be realized by use of computer emulations, artificial intelligence or quantum physics (White 1987). Such discussions underwent a major revival also due to the New Age movement whose core ideological principles centered around seeking personal enlightenment, self-­awareness, spiritual growth as well as evolving higher forms of cosmic consciousness. The New Age adherents promoted mystic and metaphysical experiences as well as occult practices, including spiritual, holistic and quantum healing, hypnotism, astrology, magnetism, channeling or magical and neopagan rituals (Albanese 1988; Bednarowski 1989; Melton 1992; Spangler 1976). It seems that Harrison’s proposal of American Cosmism, despite having a considerably shorter tradition than its Russian counterpart, has evolved its own distinctive set of characteristics that may be analyzed parallel to those of the Russian Cosmist thought, such as religion of spaceflight, including a salvation narrative, the national mythologies and prophets of space exploration as well as the interplay between the occult, esotericism and science. Undoubtedly, the origins of Cosmism as the world’s first space-­oriented cultural and philosophical movement go back to the late nineteenth-century Russia, yet, as argued by Harrison (2013), its variation can be also found in the U.S. culture and serve as the fundamental vision of the national space efforts. Andersen (2012) even suggests that the U.S. has recently taken turns with Russia with respect to developing their own space-­oriented philosophy and claims that “today Americans are the most fervent Cosmists on the planet, even if manned space exploration seems to have stalled for the time being.” The statement might seem true if one takes into account an increasing number of events as well as academic publications dealing with the subject of outer space and astroculture2 from the perspective of 2 The term coined by Geppert denoting “a heterogeneous array of images and artifacts, media and practices that all aim to ascribe meaning to outer space while stirring both the individual and the collective imagination” (2012, 8).

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humanities rather than science and technology. Additionally, popular culture and digital representations of space endeavours tend to reinforce and promulgate the recently re-­emergent and re-­discovered spirit of Cosmism, particularly due to the efforts of a number of space advocacy groups, such as the National Space Society or the Planetary Society, which successfully deliver various pro-­space messages to the American public. If such a trend continues, Harrison’s idea of American Cosmism has the potential to become nationwide and globally recognized as one of the mainstream space-­oriented philosophical and cultural movements of the new millennium.

Works Cited Albanese, Catherine L. 1988. “Religion and the American Experience: A Century After.” Church History: Studies in Christianity and Culture 57: 337-­351. Andersen, Ross. 2012. “The Holy Cosmos: The New Religion of Space Exploration.” Web. Bednarowski, Marry F. 1989. New Religions and the Theological Imagination in America. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Cosgrove, Denis. 1994. “Contested Global Visions: One World, Whole Earth and the Apollo Space Photographs.” Annals of the Association of American Geographers 84: 270-­94. Dick, Stephen J., ed. 2008. Remembering the Space Age. Washington D.C.: History Division. Djordjević, R. 1999. “Russian Cosmism (with the Selective Bibliography) and its Uprising Effect on the Development of Space Research.” Serbian Astronomical Journal 159: 105-­109. Geppert, Alexander C. T. 2012. “European Astrofuturism, Cosmic Provincialism: Historicizing the Space Age.” In Imagining Outer Space: European Astroculture in the Twentieth Century, edited by Alexander C. T. Geppert, 3-­26. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Hagemeister, Michael. 1997. “Russian Cosmism in the 1920s and Today.” In The Occult in Russian and Soviet Culture, edited by Bernice G. Rosenthal, 185-­202. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Harris, Phillip. 1992. Living and Working in Space: Human Behavior, Culture and Organization. New York: Ellis Horwood. Harrison, Albert. 2013. “Russian and American Cosmism: Religion, National Psyche, and Spaceflight.” Astropolitics: The International Journal of Space Politics & Policy 11, 1-­2: 25-­44.

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Holly, Henry and Amanda Taylor.  2009. “Re-­thinking Apollo: Envisioning Environmentalism in Space.” In Space Travel and Culture: From Apollo to Space Tourism, edited by Martin Parker and David Bell, 190-­203. Malden: Wiley-­Blackwell. Launius, Roger D. 1998. Frontiers of Space Exploration. Westport: Greenwood Press. Launius, Roger D. 2005. “Perceptions of Apollo: Myth, Nostalgia, Memory or All of the Above?” Space Policy 21: 129-­139. Launius, Roger.  2013. “Escaping Earth: Human Spaceflight as Religion.” Astropolitics: The International Journal of Space Politics & Policy 11: 45-­64. Lewis, R. and J. Gordon Melton, eds. 1992. Perspectives on the New Age. New York: State University of New York Press. Mauer, Eva, Julia Richers, Monika Rüthers and Carmen Scheide, eds. 2011. Soviet Space Culture. Cosmic Enthusiasm in Socialist Societies. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. McCurdy, Howard. 2011. Space and the American Imagination. Baltimore: JHU Press. Melton, Gordon J. 1992. “New Thought and the New Age.” In Perspectives on the New Age, edited by James R. Lewis and J. Gordon Melton, 15-­29. Albany: State University of New York. Bell, David and Martin Parker, eds. 2009. Space Travel & Culture: From Apollo to Space Tourism. Oxford: Blackwell. Putnam, Walt. 2012. “Journal Press Release.” Journal of Space Philosophy 1. Web. Richers, Julia and Eva Maurer. 2011. “Introduction to Part I.” In Soviet Space Culture. Cosmic Enthusiasm in Socialist Societies, edited by Eva Mauer, Julia Richers, Monika Rüthers, and Carmen Scheide, 23-­26. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Rockwell, Trevor. 2006. “The Molding of the Rising Generation: Soviet Propaganda and the Hero-­Myth of Iurii Gagarin.” Past Imperfect 12: 1-­34. Rogatchevski, Andrei. 2011. “Space Exploration in Russian and Western Popular Culture: Wishful Thinking, Conspiracy Theories and Other Related Issues.” In Soviet Space Culture. Cosmic Enthusiasm in Socialist Societies, edited by Eva Mauer, Julia Richers, Monika Rüthers, and Carmen Scheide, 251-­265. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Rosenberg, Emily S. 2008. “Far Out: The Space Age in American Culture.” In Remembering the Space Age, edited by Stephen J. Dick, 157-­184. Washington D.C.: History Division.

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Rosenthal, Bernice G., ed. 1997. The Occult in Russian and Soviet Culture. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Sage, Daniel. 2008. “Framing Space: A Popular Geopolitics of American Manifest Destiny in Outer Space.” Geopolitics 13: 27-­53. Scanlan, P. James, ed. 1994. Russian Thought After Communism. The Recovery of a Philosophical Heritage. Armonk: M.E. Sharpe. Scanlan, P. James. 1994. “The Nineteenth Century Revisited.” In Russian Thought after Communism. The Recovery of a Philosophical Heritage, edited by James P. Scalan, 23-­31. Armonk: M.E. Sharpe. Schwartz, Matthias. 2011. “Dream Come True: Close Encounters with Outer Space in Soviet Popular Scientific Journals of the 1950s and 1960s.” In Soviet Space Culture. Cosmic Enthusiasm in Socialist Societes, edited by Eva Mauer, Julia Richers, Monika Rüthers, and Carmen Scheide, 232-­250. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Semenova, S. G., and A. G. Gacheva. 1993. Russkiii Kosmizm: Antologiia Filosofskoi Mysli. Moscow: Pedagogika-­Press. Siddiqi, Asif. 2008. “Imagining the Cosmos: Utopians, Mystics, and the Popular Culture of Spaceflight in Revolutionary Russia.” Osiris 23: 260-­288. Siddiqi, Asif A.  2010. The Red Rockets’ Glare: Spaceflight and the Russian Imagination, 1857-­1957. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Spangler, David. 1976. Revelation: The Birth of a New Age. San Francisco: Rainbow Bridge. Thomas, Andrew. 2011. Kul’tura Kosmosa: The Russian Popular Culture of Space Exploration. Boca Raton: Dissertation.Com. Trotsky, Leon. 1975. Literature and Revolution. Translated by Rose Strunsky. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Winter, Frank H. 1980. “The American Rocket Society Story.” Journal of the British Interplanetary Society 33: 303-­311. White, Frank. 1987. The Overview Effect: Space Exploration and Human Evolution. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. White, Frank. 1998. The Overview Effect: Space Exploration and Human Evolution. Revised edition. Reston: American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics. Young, George M. 2011. “Esoteric Elements in Russian Cosmism.” Rose+Croix Journal 8: 127-­139. Young, George M. 2012. The Russian Cosmists: The Esoteric Futurism of Nikolai Fedorov and His Followers. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Anna Bugajska

Pirate Neverland: Revisioning Pirates in Geraldine McCaughrean’s Peter Pan in Scarlet Nowadays in popular culture we witness an established interest in pirates. Although the original bandits that haunted the seven seas had more in common with our present-­day terrorists and were hardly romantic figures, the swashbuckling adventures of such captains as Teach (Blackbeard), Roberts or Kidd provoke general excitement. The vision that is dominant in our modern imagination was formed chiefly by the works of two Scottish friends: Robert Lewis Stevenson (1850-­1894) and James M. Barrie (1860-­1937) (Rennie 2013; Westfahl 2005, 600). They laid the foundations for two popular pirate types, modelled on Long John Silver and Captain Jas. Hook. Such an inspiration is clearly visible in the Pirates of the Caribbean, a Gore Verbinsky movie from 2003. Captain Barbossa is a Silver-­ like type, uncouth and fearless, whereas Jack Sparrow is a rather theatrical figure, comic and cowardly, in whom Westfahl sees a reworking of Hook (Westfahl 2005, 600; Friedman 2008, 201). However, the modern tastes are somewhat different from those of the Victorians and Edwardians, requiring an adjustment of the traditional elements of the maritime stories. To understand more fully the extent and the direction of these tendencies, in the present paper I propose to take an opportunity that presents itself thanks to the initiative of the Great Ormond Street Hospital. In 2004 it announced a contest for the official sequel to Barrie’s Peter Pan, which was won by Geraldine McCaughrean (1951-­), an awarded British children’s author. Her research into Barrie’s oeuvre resulted in the publication of Peter Pan in Scarlet (2006), drawing heavily on the clues Barrie left in his early versions of Peter’s adventures, especially the play from 1904. The original stage image of Hook was rather foppish. The Captain was dressed as a gentleman from the Caroline period, wearing a red coat and a black wig (Barrie 2003). As a boy he attended Eton, hence his polished manners and civility. Just like Long John Silver, he was mutilated: his hand had been snapped off by a crocodile and in its place he wore a hook, inspiring fear in his crew. Yet, this very same crew, composed of “bloodthirstiest pirates,” followed the convention of silly and cowardly minions, blindly pursuing their leader, as proved for example in the adventure with Tiger Lily (Barrie 2008, 55-­57). It is worthwhile to look at the description Barrie gives in the stage directions for his play:

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The pirates appear upon the frozen river dragging a raft, on which reclines among cushions that dark and fearful man, CAPTAIN JAS. HOOK. A more villainous-­looking brotherhood of men never hung in a row on Execution dock. Here, his great arms bare, pieces of eight in his ears as ornaments, is the handsome CECCO, who cut his name on the back of the governor of the prison at Gao. Heavier in the pull is the gigantic black who has had many names since the first one terrified dusky children on the banks of the Guidjo-­ mo. BILL JUKES comes next, every inch of him tattooed, the same JUKES who got six dozen on the Walrus from FLINT. Following these are COOKSON, said to be BLACK. MURPHY’S brother (but this was never proved); and GENTLEMAN STARKEY, once an usher in a school; and SKYLIGHTS (Morgan’s Skylights); and NOODLER, whose hands are fixed on backwards; and the spectacled boatswain, SMEE, the only Nonconformist in HOOK’S crew; and other ruffians long known and feared on the Spanish main. (33-­34)

It is obvious that Barrie subverts the typical image of a pirate, firmly established in the popular imagination of his times. Through exaggeration the playwright achieves the effect of thrilling excitement, not even tinged with horror, which should be inspired by the descriptions of the cruelties the pirates committed. He uses them as an element of stage decoration, which makes Neverland more attractive to the young viewer. Among them James Hook stands out and proves to be so essential to the collective imagination that he “couldn’t take deadness” (McCaughrean 2006, 189). This last phrase from McCaughrean’s novel remains in direct compliance with the rules for the sequel, set up by the Great Ormond Street Hospital (Ardagh 2006).The requirement to bring Hook back to life, after Barrie had him eaten by the Crocodile, necessitated a pirate-­oriented plot. It also called for redefining pirates in relation to the modern culture and deciding on the role they should play in the sequel. The chief question, the one of the rebirth of Hook, is solved by McCaughrean in two ways. The first is already suggested by the title itself. Peter Pan in Scarlet refers to the scarlet coat, the symbol of captaincy, whose original owner was James Hook. What is worth noting, the colour is in itself very much “piratical”: the name of the skull-­and-­crossbones, Jolly Roger, is hypothesized to be derived from “jolie rouge” – a red pirate flag – and it was common practice among “sea dogs” in the Golden Age of Piracy to sport a scarlet sash (Cordingly 2006, 150-­153; May 2006, 70). At the beginning of McCaughrean’s book the rejuvenated Lost Boys (and Girls) meet Peter, who is dressed in the leaves of autumn: somebody let Time into Neverland, and for this reason the Wonderful Boy had to adjust his garment. The children play the imaginary game of a sea voyage, which becomes an opportunity for the author to implant a vision of pirates that is going to recur in the novel. The Never Tree becomes the mast of a ship, which is curiously at the

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same time a Trans-­Sigobian Express, imaginatively linking the world of wooden brigs to the one of industrial revolution and technological development. This half-­ship, half-­train is attacked by an imaginary pirate, Baabaa-­Rossa. The name is an obvious allusion to a fifteenth-­century Turkish privateer, Barbarossa (Skrok 1998, 81-­82). Besides the comical effect, desired by the author, she signals with it several other issues. “Baa” is a bleating sound made by sheep, which is further confirmed in the authorial addition: “Baabaa-­Rossa, the sheepish Privateer.” By replacing “beard,” which is a sign of a full-­grown man, with the bleating of a lamb McCaughrean shows how cutting the real pirates down to shape to fit them into Neverland results in a ridiculous effect. What is more, the consciously invoked whiteness of the lamb, its innocence and its association with Christ, is clearly juxtaposed with the colour scarlet, which is connected in the Western culture with sin and the Devil. It is vital to devote attention to this seemingly minor episode from the very beginning of the novel to understand the manner in which McCaughrean proceeds in the rest of the text. Her fiction rests on violent contrasts, while the comical elements are at the same time disquieting or even morbid. The visit to the “Circus Ravello, Beast, Bravado and Brou-­ha-­ha!” results in being almost eaten by famished great cats. The quest to kill the dragon ends with the discovery of a rotting carcass of a crocodile. The Twins are blamed for setting fire to Neverland – much like Samneric in William Golding’s Lord of the Flies – and while naming the places on their journey, they come up with a “Twin Peaks.”1 The tone is maintained as the League of Pan with their captain board the Jolly Roger, which arrives just in time to save them from the burning Neverland. The ship has nothing of the romance that usually surrounds pirate vessels. It resembles a phantom ship, suggesting that those on board are set on a cursed cruise (McCaughrean 2006, 66). This impression is deepened by the actions of Peter. First, he finds a scarlet chest with Hook’s second-­best coat in it, which he promptly dons. Considering that at the beginning the Lost Boys (and Girls) came back to their childish selves by dressing in children’s clothes, Peter runs the danger of changing into Hook. In fact, he instantly displays advanced sea lore and spouts pirate lingo, which his crew do not pretend to understand. His assuming captaincy is accompanied by a bad omen: “ ‘I shall be Captain Peter Pan, and sail the seven oceans!’ he shouted, and dislodged an albatross roosting on the mizzenmast”(McCaughrean 2006, 71).

1 A cult TV series by Mark Frost and David Lynch, airing 1990-­1991. It combined a psychological thriller and a crime story with supernatural elements.

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Replacing the name “Jolly Roger” with “Jolly Peter” also sounds ominous. At first glance, Peter seems to take possession of the domain of his enemy, but looking deeper, it turns out he is playing a dangerous game. “Roger” was a familiar name for the devil, known in the seventeenth and the eighteenth centuries, and – besides “jolie rouge” – is seen as another possibility for the creation of the pirate flag’s name (Cordingly 2006, 150-­153). Peter shows some ambiguity about the colours he flies: sometimes he claims it is rainbow, sometimes skull-­and-­ crossbones, but Jolly Peter flies a ridiculous sunflower-­and-­two-­rabbits, made using Wendy’s dress. Another collision of the contending visions of pirates occurs when SS Starkey rams into Jolly Peter. The very fact that a traditional pirate ship is replaced with a steamboat is telling with regard to the fate of sea robbers in the modern world. The age of technology wins over the age of chivalry. On the prow of the ship the jaws of a shark are painted, which contributes to the scary effect and makes the League of Pan misread the name as SS Shark. This suggests a connection with the names borne by US warships (Crawford, 2008, 105) and complements the author’s other implications that it was war (here: World War I) that wrecked Neverland and made it hostile and disjointed. SS Starkey is captained, naturally, by Starkey – the unlikeliest pirate from Hook’s crew. After the dissolution of Hook’s pirates, as McCaughrean explains (81), he was put in charge of the “redskins” and – as a “gentleman” – he taught them manners: They were not all boys, by any means. Half were girls, with long silken hair and cleaner buckskin tunics. But they were all armed. Drawing back their bowstrings to full stretch, they bowed (or curtsied), blinked their large dark eyes at the crew of the Jolly Peter and shouted, ‘Hello. Thank you very much. How do you do. Delighted I’m sure. Kindly shed your loot in our direction then lie face down on the deck or, sadly, we will have to slit your gizzards and feed you to the fishes. Deep regrets. Please do not ask for mercy as refusal can give offence. Thank you very much. Nice weather we are having.’ (80)

These polite children pose a real threat, and the League of Pan are saved only by the arrival of Ravello – the circus master – and his animals. The saviour is employed by Peter as a servant and from this point on the story seems to change the focus in his favour. It is through the “ravelling man,” not only Peter, that McCaughrean brings Hook back to life. The moral tale she constructs necessitates a real villain – not a template pirate, but a supernatural tempter, the Devil. And indeed, such a role is fulfilled by the resurrected captain of the Jolly Roger, which is plainly stated in the text (185). The former Hook cannot sleep, and thus cannot dream. In Neverland he has hidden

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his treasure filled with one’s heart’s desire, but since he is no longer Hook, he has to raise himself a proxy to dream his dreams. He coaxes Peter into becoming more and more Hook, to the point that the Boy – looking at his reflection in a mountain lake – recognizes the change he has undergone. Ravello becomes a real pirate, hijacking Peter’s imagination and moulding him in his own likeness. The interactions between the two, especially with the treasure in the background, bear strong resemblance to the schizophrenic relations between Gollum and Smèagol shown by Tolkien in The Lord of the Rings, presenting them essentially as two sides of the same coin. McCaughrean picks up and develops the ideas scattered throughout Barrie’s fiction, adding her own imaginative reworking of the famous captain. Hook, almost digested by the crocodile, returns to the world as a “pirate in sheep’s clothing”: Wendy, as she stepped closer to the lion tamer, could see how every hem and seam and raglan of the shapeless cardigan was unravelling. Moth holes peppered the fabric, and every moth hole had also begun to unravel. He was a wooly miasma of trailing ends. […] The shoulders folded forward, the head dipped. A dead sheep would have looked arrogant in comparison with the Great Ravello… (52 and 88)

His original blue eyes turn brownish and the firm sharpness of the hook is replaced by the softness of wool. He does become a “sheepish Privateer,” like “Baabaa-­Rossa.” Losing his scarlet attire, as if involuntarily, he starts unravelling memories about his past. He discloses what pushed him into piracy: But mothers are mothers. And mothers must pay their dressmakers before paying out for such trifles as school fees. So James Hook’s dreams were ended by a vain rustle of taffeta. […] [I]f mothers will be mothers, then boys will be boys. Or pirates, in my case. (187)

The author of the sequel, though, does not fully embrace the vision of a motherless world. As she admits in the 2013 interview for Gobblefunked: “I did however take issue with Barrie over some of his philosophies in life – like mothers being rubbish and forgetting about their children and life being downhill after three.” Trying to meander her way between her own convictions and the desire to stay true to the spirit of the original, she arrives at a curious triangle of mothers-­nursemaids-­pirates. Wendy, the “mother” of the Lost Boys, is dressed up in skull-­and-­crossbones. It is she who is responsible for Peter’s near-­fatal disease (by bringing with herself London fog) and almost choking him to death (by tying on his throat Hook’s Eton collar). She gives a kiss to Hook, lulling him to sleep. Hook, on his part, acts as a faithful “nursemaid” to Peter on their journey to Neverpeak. McCaughrean underlines his being a perfect butler by giving the Captain

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the second name: Crichton, after Barrie’s “admirable” butler (McCaughrean 2006, 89; Barrie, 2013). Starkey takes care of the redskins, teaching them manners. Lastly, SS Starkey is compared to a nursemaid, pushing Jolly Peter forward “like a pram” (McCaughrean 2006, 79). This combination shows the extent to which pirates have been reduced to the nursery. Despite their historical origins, nowadays they occupy the place next to fairies, circus beasts and puppies, which – as appears from McCaughrean’s book – is near ridiculous. By making Hook a tatterdemalion, she deconstructs in front of our eyes the image of pirate we are accustomed to. In the course of the story, Ravello keeps darning his trailing garment, as if trying to mend his image, shifting it from a fop, easily defeated by a child, to a great pirate captain. The author is continuously drawing on Golding’s dystopia to hint that reality is grittier than conventional fiction. Hook claims to have arrived in Neverland on an airship, which crashed on Neverpeak, bringing to mind the first “Beast” from Lord of the Flies. Moreover, McCaughrean’s Circus Master is much more threatening than the original Captain of the Jolly Roger. What emerges from the above discussion of some aspects of pirates in Peter Pan in Scarlet is the need to reconsider piracy as a part of cultural experience. The models established over a century ago, although firmly rooted in the popular imagination, seem more and more like cardboard figures, unsatisfying for the modern reader. The experience of two World Wars, the deconstruction of the British Empire, rapid technological development and the emergence of the fantasy convention influence the modern perception of the Neverland. McCaughrean seeks a way to revision pirates with respect to these factors, and inscribes the sea-­robbers more in the tradition of supernatural ballad, fantasy epic, dystopia and even horror rather than in the genre of adventure and exploration novels. Conscious of their traditional place in culture, she makes use of stock elements, like Lodestone Rock and treasure map, but they are of minor importance to the story. In the end, though, the revision she attempts comes full circle, giving prevalence to the original fictionalization. Hook is not reborn as an actual sadistic criminal, but as a “shining” and “smooth” fairytale pirate: “The ravelled, colourless wool resolved itself into flesh and cloth and hair. The shining ringlets returned. Scars smoothed. Even the colour of his eyes shifted along the spectrum, from earth-­brown towards the brightness of blue” (McCaughrean 2006, 269). The “brightness of blue” evokes the enduring dream to “sail the seas forever,” as expressed by Jack Sparrow in The Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End (2007). It finds its perfect equivalent in Peter’s eternal childhood: at least in Neverland, boys will remain pirates.

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Works Cited 1. Primary sources Barrie, James M. 2003 (1904). Peter Pan or The Boy Who Would Not Grow Up. Web. Barrie, James M. 2008 (1911). Peter Pan and Wendy. Web. Barrie, James M. 2009 (1902). The Admirable Crichton.Web. Golding, William. 1982. Lord of the Flies. New York: Pedigree Books. McCaughrean, Geraldine. 2006. Peter Pan in Scarlet. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Stevenson, Robert Louis. 1883. Treasure Island. Web. Tolkien, J.R.R. 1991. The Lord of the Rings. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. Verbinsky, Gore, dir. 2003. The Pirates of the Caribbean. DisneyFilm.

2. Secondary sources Ardagh, Philip. 2006. “Return to Neverland.” The Guardian, 7 October. Web. British Council. 2011. “Geraldine McCaughrean.” Web. Cordingly, David. 2006. Życie i zwyczaje piratów. Warszawa: Bellona. Crawford, Dean. 2008. Shark. London: Reaktion Books. Web. Dudgeon, Piers. 2011. Neverland. J.M. Barrie, the Du Mauriers, and the Dark Side of Peter Pan. New York: Pegasus Books. Feuerhahn, Nelly. 1998. “Astérixet les pirates: Uneesthétique du naufrage pour rire.” Ethnologiefrançaise, nouvelle serie 28.3: 337-­349. Friedman, Lester D. 2008. “Hooked on Pan. Barrie’s immortal pirate in fiction and film.” In Second Star to the Right, edited by Allison B. Kavey and Lester D. Friedman, 188-­218. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press. Gobblefunked. 2013. “Interview with Geraldine McCaughrean.” 6 November. Web. Johnson, Charles. 1968. Historia najsłynniejszych piratów, ich wyczyny i rabunki. Warszawa: Czytelnik. May, Jill P. 2006. “James Barrie’s Pirates: Peter Pan’s Place in Pirate History and Lore.” In J.M. Barrie’s Peter Pan in and Out of Time, edited by Donna R. White and C. Anita Tarr, 69-­78. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield. McCaughrean, Geraldine. 2006. “Boy wonder.” The Guardian, 30 September. Web. Moore, Grace. 2011. Pirates and Mutineers of the Nineteenth Century: Swashbucklers and Swindlers. Farnham: Ashgate Publishing. Web.

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Newton, Michael. 2011. “Loitering in Neverland: the Strangeness of Peter Pan.” The Guardian, 7 October. Web. Rennie, Neil.  2013. Treasure Neverland: Real and Imaginary Pirates. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Web. Skrok, Zdzisław. 1998. Świat dawnych piratów.Warszawa: Rytm. Westfahl, Gary. 2005. The Greenwood Encyclopedia of Science Fiction and Fantasy: Themes, Works, and Wonders, Volume II. Portsmouth: Greenwood Publishing Group. Web.

Edyta Frelik

Brushed off Words: On Artists’ Writings In 1934, Gertrude Stein visited the U.S. to give a series of lectures. In one of them, titled “Pictures” and sponsored by the Museum of Modern Art, she states: It is natural that I should tell about pictures, that is, about paintings. Everybody must like something and I like seeing painted pictures. Once the Little Review had a questionnaire, it was for their farewell number, and they asked everybody whose work they had printed to answer a number of questions. One of the questions was, what do you feel about modern art. I answered, I like to look at it. That was my real answer because I do, I do like to look at it, that is at the picture part of modern art. The other parts of it interest me much less. (1975, 59)

It is very easy to miss the important point here even though Stein makes it explicit in the very first sentence of the lecture. What is really natural is not that, like everybody, she must like something, and so she likes seeing painted pictures, but rather that she should tell about it. Consciously or not, she lies when she says that it is “the picture part of modern art” that interests her the most and that “the other parts” interest her “much less.” What makes Stein a quintessential figure of Modernism is not that she understood the idea of the avant-­garde so well, and was its most enthusiastic promoter, but that she was able to capture that idea in words better than almost anyone else. This is not to deny that Stein’s interest in art stemmed from the ocular and intellectual pleasure that looking at paintings must have given her, but quite clearly the consummation of the aesthetic experience required its verbalization. That is why she became a writer, after all, and was not alone in assuming that giving an account of the experience of art is a crucial part of that experience. This is an assumption made first of all by so many artists themselves. Always the first to experience their own works, as Stephen Spender contends in “Painters and Writers,” artists “are greatly concerned with explaining their art to themselves and others” (1988, 143). He also notes: Although artists have long ceased to be regarded as manual laborers, I do not think that the archetype has changed very greatly, at any rate not until the present century, when the sophisticatedness of some painters – for example, the Surrealists, and Picasso in his Dadaist effusions – shows how very closely the artistic consciousness has grown to the literary. (1988, 144)

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Spender’s mention of Picasso is particularly interesting because of the reaction of Stein to that painter’s attempt at writing poetry. In Everybody’s Autobiography, she recorded the following: When I first heard that he was writing poetry I had a funny feeling. It was Henry Kahnweiler the dealer who first told me about it. What kind of poetry is it I said, why just poetry he said you know poetry like everybody writes. Oh I just said. Well as I say when I first heard he was writing I had a funny feeling one does you know. Things belong to you and writing belonged to me, there is no doubt about it writing belonged to me. (1971, 15)

What caused her vehement response was Picasso’s encroachment into what she considered as her territory, and she did not mince her words in reproaching him: You see I said continuing to Pablo you can’t stand looking at Jean Cocteau’s drawings, it does something to you, they are more offensive than drawings that are just bad drawings now that’s the way it is with your poetry it is more offensive than just bad poetry I do not know why but it just is. (Stein 1971, 37)

Of course, Stein knew very well why. She continued: “you never had any feelings about any words, words annoy you more than they do anything else so how can you write you know better you yourself know better” (37). Picasso cleverly defended himself by throwing her own words back at her: “well he said getting truculent, you yourself always said I was an extraordinary person well then an extraordinary person can do anything” (37). But that did not throw her off balance at all, especially given that she had something to hold on to, literally: ah I said catching him by the lapels of his coat and shaking him, you are extraordinary within your limits but your limits are extraordinarily there and I said shaking him hard, you know it, you know it as well as I know it, it is all right you are doing this to get rid of everything that has been too much for you all right all right go on doing it but don’t go on trying to make me tell you it is poetry and I shook him again. (37)

The way she recorded the exchange suggests that the painter finally agreed with her and the two of them reconciled: well he said supposing I do know it, what will I do, what will you do said I and I kissed him, you will go on until your are more cheerful or less dismal and then you will, yes he said, and then you will paint a very beautiful picture and then more of them, and I kissed him again, yes said he. (37)

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What Stein was referring to was the “painter’s block” Picasso had been experiencing, which was what prompted him to temporarily exchange the paintbrush for the pen. As is well known, he would soon overcome his block and reach the heights of creativity with Guernica, arguably his most famous work, painted in 1937. And as if to prove Stein wrong in assuming that he only needed the pen for therapeutic reasons, he continued to write, making further encroachments into writers’ exclusive domain – for instance, in 1940 he wrote his first play, Desire Caught by the Tail. Also, having taken offence, as Marjorie Perloff points out in “Gertrude Stein’s Differential Syntax,” he did not speak to Stein for years after the exchange recounted above (2002, 51). In another essay, “A Cessation of Resemblances: Stein / Picasso / Duchamp,” Perloff offers a revisionist view of the relationship between Stein and Picasso, previously assumed to be predicated on the impact of Cubism on her writing. As the debacle over the painter’s insolent belief that he could also write demonstrated, their quarrel was not really about egotism – even though Stein openly acknowledged it in Everybody’s Autobiography1– but rather about what Perloff calls “her surprisingly traditional insistence on the separation of the arts” (2012), which in fact was not as unconditional as it looked. There is no way to tell if Picasso realized that, but he might have. Stein recorded that she answered his “What do you mean” by reading, or rather translating, to him her “lecture on painting.” If the lecture were “Pictures,” he would have heard this ambiguous statement: Of course the best writers that is the writers who feel writing the most as well as the best painters that is the painters who feel painting the most do not have literary ideas. But then a great many writers and a great many painters do have literary ideas. The thing that has often interested me is that the painter’s literary idea is not the same kind of an idea as the writer’s literary idea although they call it the same thing. (Stein 1975, 89)

Did Stein mean that painters and writers alike could be divided into two categories: “the best” and all the rest? Did she mean that Picasso as a writer belonged with the latter? Which group did she identify with, then? Or did she mean something else? First of all, as Perloff points out, Stein was critical of Picasso’s poetic efforts not because she really denied painters the right to write, but because his “Surrealist poetic mode [was] antithetical to Stein’s own, with its avoidance of concrete

1 The record of her exchange with Picasso includes the following: “And then we talked some more. And you Gertrude he said you do not say much of anything. Well you see Pablo I said you see the egotism of a painter is an entirely different egotism than the egotism of a writer” (Stein 1971, 18).

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nouns, its syntactic ambiguity, and its reliance on indeterminate pronouns, articles, and prepositions to produce a poetic construct she took to be appropriate to the twentieth century” (2012). By the same token, she was willing to acknowledge the possibility that a painter might have worthwhile literary ideas and still count as one of the best if his ideas were of the kind she approved. Ideally, of course, they should echo her ideas. That, she knew, could never be the case with Picasso because, as Perloff explains, for him, Gertrude was a wonderful patron and copain – he loved coming to her salon and gossiping with her on a daily basis – but her writing, especially given that it was in English – a language he couldn’t, after all, read – was hardly within the radius of his discourse. (2012)

But there was among the Modernists an artist whose “wholesale rejection of the mimetic contract” she found congenial. That artist was Marcel Duchamp. Although, as Perloff points out, their poetic/aesthetic affinity has not been generally recognized, the Frenchman’s attack on “retinal art” (2012) made him a perfect ally in Stein’s own all-­out war with the representational in literature, which she fought with what John Cage classified as “empty words” (1981) and what John Ashbery called “colorless connecting words” (1957, 250). Perloff brilliantly analyzes several of Stein’s texts to show resemblances between Duchamp’s “anti-­retinal” works, which rely on the play of verbal associations and puns and her use of “differential syntax,” but what is significant in the present context is Stein’s de facto acknowledgement that painters not only have literary ideas, but that what kind of painter one is affects how he uses language. Plain common sense dictates that how a painter sees, thinks and paints reflects how s/he verbalizes feelings and ideas and how s/he handles language as material. The development of the ut pictura poesis discourse and the history of artists’ writings indicate that until the twentieth century the “comparative arts” followed several, essentially parallel strains, evolving around the ability of verbal and visual media to give mimetic expression to thoughts, feelings, and perceptions. With the rise of Modernism the comparative or competitive lens was refocused to include within the critical perimeter the medium which makes possible visual and verbal depiction alike. And yet, although the appearance of abstract painting logically equilibrated the hitherto incomplete, and thus unbalanced, gamut of styles – now ranging from representational to non-­representational – it did not result in resolving conceptual and methodological inconsistencies and contradictions that have impaired critical debates and artists’ self-­investigation. Stein’s “Pictures” and Everybody’s Autobiography seem to be quite representative in this respect – the quirkiness of her discursive style and syntax notwithstanding – in that the writer’s

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view of the relation between painting and literature is full of self-­confuting pronouncements, as the closing of her lecture demonstrates: The painter has an idea which he calls a literary idea and it is to him that is he thinks it is the same kind of an idea as a writer has but it is not. And its being not makes the essential thing that makes an oil painting. A painter’s literary idea always consists not in the action but in the distortion of the form. That could never be a writer’s literary idea. Then a painter’s idea of action always has to do with something else moving rather than the center of the picture. This is just the opposite of the writer’s idea, everything else can be quiet, except the central thing which has to move. And because of all this a painter cannot really write and a writer cannot really paint, even fairly badly. (Stein 1975, 89-­90)

Stein’s axiologically charged statements are as constrained and obfuscatory as those of Spender, a would-­be painter turned poet, autobiographer, novelist and essayist, who as an aspiring artist “envied the painter’s life […] the way in which he is surrounded by the material of his art”; however, he stopped painting having discovered that “it is possible entirely to lack talent in an art where one believes oneself to have creative feeling” (after McClatchy 1988, 139). The question of talent and self-­perception aside, Spender’s elucidation of what he calls “a relationship of love and envy between the arts” (1988, 142) acquires a surprisingly Steinian tinge when he states, on the one hand, that “when they paint, painters are exercising some of the qualities essential to good writing,” but, on the other, when they write they do so “out of an envy of writers, because they would prefer to be interpreters of experience and not commentators on them” (1988, 144). Such categorical statements and categorical confusion abound both in critical literature and in artists’ texts. They make questions and anxieties about creativity and interartistic correspondences particularly worth addressing in situations where the peripheral or borderline character of a phenomenon causes that it is all too easily disregarded or classified as a secondary subcategory of what is well known and understood. Many writings by artists represent a level of craft on a par with literary masterpieces of writers, but even works of lesser literary value are important because all testify to the uniqueness of artistic sensibility. The ways in which this sensibility manifests itself when visual artists resort to verbal expression are worth examining for the insight they offer about the intricate and paradoxical nature both of interartistic exchanges and communication. The following statement by Robert Smithson, arguably the most important writer among American artists of the 1960s, reveals that a visual artist may not only have a profound understanding of the nature of cognition but also be able to articulate it in a language that is surprisingly fresh and accurate:

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Language operates between literal and metaphorical signification. The power of a word lies in the very inadequacy of the context it is placed, in the unresolved or partially resolved tension of disparates. A word fixed or a statement isolated without any decorative or “cubist” visual format, becomes a perception of similarity in dissimilars – in short a paradox. Congruity could be disrupted by a metaphorical complexity within a literal system. Literal usage becomes incantory when all metaphors are suppressed. Here language is built, not written. Yet, discursive literalness is apt to be a container for a radical metaphor. Literal statements often conceal violent analogies. The mind resists the false identity of such circumambient suggestions, only to accept an equally false logical surface. Banal words function as a feeble phenomena that fall into their own mental bogs of meaning. An emotion is suggested and demolished in one glance by certain words. Other words constantly shift or invert themselves without ending, these could be called “suspended words.” Simple statements are often based on language fears, and sometimes result in dogma or non-­sense. Words for mental processes are all derived from physical things. References are often reversed so that the “object” takes the place of the “word.” (Smithson 1996, 61)

It is this type of language-­based self-­awareness (today identified as the defining trait of postmodern consciousness) that is in my opinion the hallmark of great artists’ writings irrespective of time and place. To fully validate this claim more studies are needed – both of the theoretical and monographic groundwork-­type – as the field is as rich as it is uncharted. The history of American art has been written, pen-­in-­hand, by many artists whose literary achievements are outstanding and exceptional. Initiated by the nineteenth-­century precursors of landscape painting Thomas Cole and Washington Allston, the tradition of writing was cultivated in the twentieth century by several generations of artists, from the “Ashcan” Realists Robert Henri and John Sloan and the Modernists Marsden Hartley, Max Weber, Arthur G. Dove, John Marin, Charles Sheeler, and Stuart Davis to the New York School’s Barnett Newman, Robert Motherwell, Mark Rothko, and Ad Reinhardt, culminating in the 1960s with the explosion of both writing compulsion and talent among the conceptualists. The movement’s leading figures – Robert Smithson, Donald Judd, Carl Andre, Joseph Kosuth, and Robert Morris – were not just visual artists who also wrote. Writing was for them one of the essential art-­ making procedures, indispensable and inseparable from other creative practices. The growing corpus of relevant writings by painters, sculptors, mixed-­media, and language artists promises to keep busy those art historians and literary scholars who agree with Sara Burns that the adage “[o]ne picture is worth ten thousand words” justifies taking a closer look at those tens of thousand words that have been written by artists (Burns 2009, 2). There certainly are among them many precious word-­gems that are art works in their own right.

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Works Cited Ashbery, John. 1957. “The Impossible.” Poetry 90.4: 250–51, 253–54. Burns, Sarah. 2009. “How Words Matter.” American Art 23.1: 2–4. Cage, John.  1981. “Empty Words.” In Empty Words: Writings ’73-­’78, 11–77. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press. McClatchy, J. D., ed. 1988. Poets on Painters: Essays on the Art of Painting by Twentieth-­Century Poets. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Perloff, Marjorie. 2002. 21st-­Century Modernism: The “New” Poetics. Boston, MA: Blackwell. Web. Perloff, Marjorie. 2012. “‘A Cessation of Resemblances’: Stein, Duchamp, Picasso.” Battersea Review 1.1. Web. Smithson, Robert. 1996. “Language to Be Looked at and/or Things to Be Read.” In Robert Smithson: The Collected Writings, edited by Jack Flam. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Spender, Stephen. 1988. “Painters and Writers.” In Poets on Painters: Essays on the Art of Painitng by Twentieth-­Century Poets, edited by J.D. McClatchy, 139-­49. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Stein, Gertrude.  1971. Everybody’s Autobiography. New York: Cooper Square Publishers. Stein, Gertrude.  1975. “Pictures.” In Lectures in America, 59–90. New York: Vintage Books.

Justyna Galant

Filming the Experience of Gilead: Volker Schlöndorff ’s The Handmaid’s Tale “The best and the most successful SF novel written by a Canadian” (Ketterer 209), The Handmaid’s Tale has enjoyed increasing critical attention from its creation. As an account of a life after a global crisis of fertility it was prominent for the “topicality of its theme and the wealth of supporting detail” (Domville 2006, 869). The 1990 adaptation of Margaret Atwood’s canonical work has been persistently castigated for what the critics recognised as cardinal failures. As a deeply personal tale of a woman’s suppression written by a female author, it invited deriding comments when translated into film by a male director aided by a male screenwriter – Harold Pinter. For justifiable reasons gender-­centred studies pointed to the work as an unfortunate “contradiction in terms” (Cooper 1995, 57) where the viewers, guided by the intrusive patriarchal gaze of the camera participate in the “acting out […] of the political oppression” (Cooper 1995, 58). Read in such terms, the film may appear as a major artistic misunderstanding guilty of concurring with the misogynistic cultural practice. In line with the negative critical responses, significant changes to the story’s ending and several alterations of plot development have been recognised as inexpedient departures from the original, which reduced it to a “commonplace thriller” (Domville 2006, 876). Perhaps most importantly, the rebelliously connotated “vitality of the creative (particularly linguistic) imagination” (Domville 2005, 872),1 so conspicuous in the novel, failed to find an equivalent in the cinematic version of the tale. The absence of the rich first-­person narration linking Offred’s account to the tradition of slave narrative and the inheritance of oral story-­telling (Kaufmann 1989, 234) has been generally considered as an irreplaceable loss for the artistic value of the adaptation. While it is relatively easy to understand the criticism of Schlöndorff and Pinter’s rendering of the story, the film has its undeniable merits – many ingeniously directed scenes and modifications of details of the original work elaborate on the experience of a totalitarian state by careful construction of the visual layer. Far from making the mistake of “drawing the teeth out of [Atwood’s] satire” (Cooper 1 The rebelliousness of Offred is of course recognised as flawed by a number of critics. Danita J. Dodson in her article of female resistance in the novel examines the character’s gradual realisation of the scale and meaning of the oppression in her country.

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1995, 60), the cinematic vision of the dystopia offers an approachable and intelligently designed depiction of the regime. The problematic major change pertains to the manner of story-­telling. In the book Offred is both an unreliable narrator and a character in her tale, in the film she is only a character, retaining, perhaps, the less important of her two functions from the original text. Contrary to Atwood’s heroine, Schlöndorff ’s Kate lives not partly within the excessive space of her imagination, but fully in the developing reality of Gilead. In the intensely personal account of her survival in Gilead, the narrator of The Handmaid’s Tale treats physical spaces as narrative springboards which lead to the construction of intricate criss-­crossing spatio-­temporal levels of past realities. In the opening paragraphs, the narrative “I” shares with us her memories and associations evoked by her presence in the once-­gymnasium and currently a trainee centre for future Handmaids. Through her recollections we see the space as a sports centre, then a dance floor with a “revolving ball of mirrors, powdering the dancers with a snow of light” (Atwood 1985, 3). Next, the narrator looks back on the succession of “girls, felt-­skirted […], later in miniskirts, then pants, then in one earring, spiky green-­streaked hair” (3), who in the present reality are replaced by the Handmaids of Gilead. The rich vision of times-­gone-­by is then followed by a description of the transformed gymnasium; rows of beds, the silence of the guarded space, lights dimmed for night-­time. Remnants of the past are still palpable – visible in the U.S. army issue blankets recalling the former name of what is now Gilead, and sensed “as an afterthought” (4) in the air, a lingering sensation which now keeps the imprisoned women awake. The passage quoted above is an example of many similar descriptions of spaces in the novel which come into existence through the heroine’s associative flow of memories and evoke palimpsest layers of the past underneath the present Gileadean reality.2 As various traces of history constantly come to our attention, the novel’s theocracy is a remarkably apt illustration of Henri Lefebvre’s claim that “no space ever vanishes completely, leaving no trace” (2007, 86). In his film version of The Handmaid’s Tale Volker Schlöndorff applies a parallel strategy of cumulative presentation, but moves from the subjective palimpsests of spaces to objective layered constructions of political developments in the state of Gilead. As the film loses the narrative depth offered by the immersion in the un-­chronological, free-­flowing first-­person account, it compresses strata of

2 Lefebvre describes urban space as “a structure far more reminiscent of flaky mille-­ feuille pastry” (2007, 86).

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background political events while constructing the story in an unbrokenly linear fashion. Consequently, the genesis of the state, in the book presented through spatial paradigmatic substitutions of the present by flashbacks of the past, in the film is demonstrated through a dynamic, syntagmatic progression of simultaneous occurrences depicted in short sequences or even single shots. The scenes immediately following the initial unsuccessful escape attempt of Kate and her family show the state’s actions of segregation, grouping, regrouping and transportation, interrupted periodically by outbreaks of panic-­induced chaos. This expository progression of images corresponds to the “cleaning up” process of removing the biologically defunct “Unwomen” and other undesirable individuals to prepare ground for the new order. The dense initial sequences recreate an experience of an overbearing suddenness and ungraspable totality of the changes introduced by the state. The speed and simultaneity of the layered events mirror the sweeping scale of the revolution. The dynamic succession of images contrasts significantly with the next complex scene which introduces the action of indoctrination of the women, as the next step of Gilead’s formation. The pandemonium of the initial scenes gives way to the subdued atmosphere, as in the foreground of the multi-­layered spatial arrangement Aunt Lydia is giving the first instructions to the future Handmaids. Behind her the police force – the Guardians of Faith – are securing the area separated by a mesh from the background of colony workers sweeping toxic wastes, as a train is leaving from the station. The clashes of rebellious panic and violence-­induced chaos from the previous sequence of the state’s purging have been replaced by the comparatively static arrangement of visual layers which simultaneously show the successful completion of the “cleaning up” process. Already we are offered glimpses of a society conveniently divided – both spatially and functionally – the surrounded Handmaids being taught, in front of them an Aunt teaching, around them Guardians guarding, behind the mesh colony workers working, on the furthest plane, Undesirables being transported in trains. In the novel, the recollected past has the double function of keeping the history and people from oblivion and of creating an alternative to the oppressive reality. The heroine’s paradigmatic multiplication of spatio-­temporal strata is a survival strategy which distances her from the present events and serves in most cases the purpose of utopic escapism, and in each case escapism. As an effect of this narrative strategy, spaces in the book are overexposed, overemphasised, partly physical – partly mental. Having the escapist-­defensive function they serve as a protective construct enveloping the passive, subdued heroine. In contrast, Kate exists on the same ontological level as the events which occur around her. Estranged as she is through the sense of awe and subordination, the

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heroine’s experience is of the reality immediately surrounding her. Indeed, in the film, the past is reduced to four very brief flashbacks when Kate remembers her daughter Jill and, on one occasion, her husband. Significantly, the heroine reaches back in time only as far as the beginning of the film – that is to her unsuccessful attempt to cross the state’s border with her family. With the absence of the reminiscences of the formative stages of Gilead, which constitute a significant part of the novel, in Schlöndorff ’s adaptation we are consistently in the immediate present, leaving Gilead only on one occasion. Through the consistent erasure of the past which acts as a buffer between the state and the heroine’s “I” Schlöndorff draws the viewers’ attention to the construction of the state’s present which becomes the only known reality. The major change, so easily susceptible to criticism, does force upon the viewers the awareness that the heroine’s main concern will indeed be her survival in the present. In the circumstances as depicted in the film, any memory of the past would constitute a harmful, counterproductive distraction. The alteration is in line with Schlöndorff ’s portrayal of the central character, changed from the book’s anonymous, intimidated Offred to an active heroine with a smirk and a name. Kate is no so longer antithetical to Moira – the openly rebellious and brave risk-­taker who made the other, more submissive girls feel “like an elevator with open sides” (Atwood 1985, 172). Instead of trying to survive on the peripheries of the threatening political system and indulging in derivative dreams of action and violence inspired by her friend’s audacious character, Kate actively helps Moira in her escape attempt and later assassinates the Commander who in the adaptation is a top official in charge of security. Having replaced a passive story-­teller with the character of Kate, Schlöndorff has decided on a controversial departure from the original idea, yet has managed to create a heroine who may have originated in one of Angela Carter’s feminised, modified fairy tales. In effect, the director is offering us an unlikely combination of a grisly totalitarian reality and a spunky character who opposes it effectively, her resistance and survival a brazen affirmation of feminine strength. Discussing the organisation of a state Henri Lefebvre points to the mutually dependent layers of forces of production, structures of property and relation, and superstructures of state authorities and institutions (2003, 86). As children are the sole commodity Gilead is determined to produce, the basis of its political structure is dependent exclusively on the unpredictable biological mechanism of chance. At the heart of the Republic of Gilead is the randomness of nature’s “decisions” contrasting sharply with the strictness of human-­made laws which attempt to control it. While the novel, through its concentration on the personal experience of the intimidated and victimised heroine does not explore this aspect

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of the state’s functioning, Schlöndorff ’s adaptation magnifies the paradoxical and inherently unstable nature of the theocracy which relies on the regulation of its only life-­force and national treasure – the Handmaids. The carefully constructed “Consecration” ceremony shown in the film marks the official incorporation of the Handmaids into the order of Gilead. As the red-­ dressed women enter the chapel-­like building, their procession is filmed diagonally, the camera showing their ordered rows from the perspective of the “altar,” our vision being narrowed down towards the open doorway where the black vans and armed guards are waiting. This visual arrangement places the Handmaids in the centre of a triangular structure, their procession forming a line from the apex - the doorway where Gileadean police are standing armed – to the centre of the chapel, evoking the theocratic axis of power – state power-­religion, as well as the totalitarian-­theocratic duality of sanctioned violence and the word of God. The spatial arrangement may be read as a visual reference to the Republic’s symbol of a pyramid,3 and an indication of its vital life-­force constituted by the Handmaids. The ceremony resembles a wedding but, at the same time, due to the socio-­historical as well as visual context, it evokes the idea of a sacrificial offering.4 As the gathered faithful listen to the priest recounting the sins of the world before Gilead, the Handmaids pray for fertility. The women approach in pairs, kneeling at the foot of the altar where blood-­red veils are placed over their heads. The veils, which form a triangle covering their faces, once again evoke the image of the pyramid, focusing our attention on the Handmaids’ faces enveloped in the triangular shape, referring back to the state’s symbol of the revolving pyramid with, significantly, a woman’s eye in the middle. With this symbolic change, the original connotations of the eye–triangle image with the Big Brother’s message “I am watching you,” are visually replaced by the symbol of containment of the female element, at the same time emphasising the pivotal function of the entrapped female for the state. Being the only fertile women in the country, the Handmaids are the life-­giving bloodstream in the socio-­political pyramid of Gilead, the blood-­ flow of the state organism whose survival depends on their bodies’ cooperation.

3 Henri Lefebvre describes the social space in terms of a pyramid within which information is transferred between the hierarchically arranged institutions, “this political monumentality is the state itself, a pyramid that carries at its apex the political leader” (2003, 84). 4 This may be read as an ironic post-­feminist version of a pagan sacrifice whose preferred choice of a sacrifice was a virgin. In a population endangered with extinction, fertility wins over purity.

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Accordingly, in the film all other state-­orchestrated official rites – the birth ceremony, salvaging and particicution – rely on the spatial arrangement of the Handmaids in the middle, flanked by the other, dependent social strata of the system – the Wives, Aunts and Brides, as well as the Angels of the Apocalypse and the Guardians of Faith. The only long scene which departs from the immediate present as the dominant narrative mode of the film is the depiction of Jezebel’s – a secret gentlemen’s club/ house of prostitution where the Commander takes Offred for their night out and where the heroine meets again her friend Moira. A space where promiscuous clothes, alcoholic drinks, music, free laughter and casual intimate contacts with women are all allowed, Jezebel’s is a boys’ playroom geared to the male sexual imagination. By introducing several meaningful changes in his visualisation of Jezebel’s, the director offers an intriguing view of the space, which amplifies and enriches Atwood’s original creation. Moira’s tattered Playboy bunny suit from the novel has been replaced by a semi-­transparent mini-­skirt version of the Handmaids’ red outfit, tailored to suit the titillating atmosphere of the place. Similarly, seated on one of the club’s sofas we find a woman wearing a blue sequined dress and a pearl necklace – clothes suggestive of the Wives’ costumes in Gilead. The introduction of these elements in Jezebel’s draws the viewers’ attention to the semiotic construction of the space in question. The original prescribed colour-­coded outfits created in response to the increasingly promiscuous clothing of the “sinful” times before Gilead are in themselves an expression of the denial of the past with all its faults, and an affirmation of the new order, by which and for which they were created. In service to the theocratic state’s rhetoric, their meaning is puristically refined to the expression of hierarchy, function, and uniformity within a group. In Jezebel’s, the signs created by Gilead “feed off ” the permissiveness of the space and respond with a creation of new meanings, their strictly limited semiotic scope is here expanded through the merging of present theocratic symbolism with timeless associative mechanisms of sexual connotation. In the new context, the Handmaids and Wives are introduced into the paradigm of male fantasy of “good-­girls-­gone-­bad,” joining the ranks of cheerleaders, misbehaving schoolgirls, and bored housewives. Effectively, the wholesome symbols of the new order are thus linked to the past, creating elements which belong in neither of the two orders. In Schlöndorff ’s vision, the club both mocks and mirrors the efforts at state formation undertaken by the authorities of Gilead. The place, which the male elite created to produce an experience of “walking into the past,” is in fact a chronotope, “linked to slices in time” (Foucault 1986,

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24).5 As a post-­democratic version of “freedom to,” an oxymoronic place of freedom created by a totalitarian regime, Jezebel’s derives from the past as much as from the present, resembling an interactive museum of elements selectively chosen from the past, as well as a space where transformations of the present occur. The complex space is also a heterotopia, defined by Foucault as an unreal space “that ha[s] a general relation of direct or inverted analogy with the real space of Society” (1986, 24). In its confusing ontological status, the locus is in direct correspondence to the past society, as well as in inverse analogy to the people of Gilead – a fact which determines its condition as a no-­place, positioned in the semiotic gap between the simulacrum of the past and the present. Appropriately, the film’s Jezebel’s has an unreal, trance-­like atmosphere. In the neither-­nor hyperreality of the club, the Commander introduces the protagonist as Mary Lou, a name belonging neither to the pre-­Gileadean past, in which she was Kate, nor to the theocratic present reality, in which she is Offred. The oneiric quality of the setting is further strengthened in the memorable scene of the meeting between Moira and Kate. The reflection of the heroine’s friend is multiplied in the lavatory mirror, estranging Moira, who now exists in the form of a static palimpsest of identical spaces stretching forward indefinitely, an image evocative of the hopelessness of her position. Additionally, during the conversation the camera focuses on Moira’s reflection in the mirror significantly more frequently than on her physical person. The filming technique results in the viewers observing the image of Moira informing Kate of her unsuccessful escape attempt and her present situation at Jezebel’s. The ambience of a “dream factory” of the film’s Jezebel’s enhances the novel’s depiction of Gileadean high society as thoroughly frustrated and escapist. Due to Schlöndorff ’s visualisation of the space as suspended between the past and the present, the club becomes a commentary on the futile efforts of the authorities to create any satisfying place in reality. Inspired by the austerity of Gilead, existing in direct denial of the official state, the film’s Jezebel’s exists as a mockery and a likeness of the theocratic state. Appropriately, we learn that the great success of the club is that “[e]verybody has fun here. Everybody really has fun here.” Through the emphasis on freedom and entertainment, the space suggests a Baudrillardian simulacrum rather than a compromising fissure in a totalitarian order. As an amalgam of past and present, it has no referent in the real world, nor ever has had. With the overseeing Aunts and guards still present in the club, this overly liberal

5 Bignell describes it as “a kind of interactive museum to which only elite men are admitted” (1986, 16).

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space within Gilead is a simulacrum of freedom which, through its very existence, confirms the impossibility of freedom in the world outside. Admittedly, the cinematic Gilead is a place much more hopeful than Atwood’s original creation. The rumours of active violent insurgence from the novel are substantiated and developed in the film, which places much more emphasis on the weakness of the state than Atwood’s work. We are left with the impression that the regime is not so much threatened with the extinction of the population, as it is in danger of collapsing due to the strong forces of resistance. Gilead’s figures of power – the Commander and Aunt Lydia – are punished and dethroned in acts of humiliation or death. Aunt Lydia is derided and disgraced, left stripped and gagged, tied to a urinal. The state’s promises are mocked and discounted in the contrast between the Commander’s feisty speech on victory broadcast on TV and his assassination by a Handmaid in his own office hours later. What is more, there is also no doubt that the heroine becomes pregnant as a result of a passionate and apparently lasting love affair with Nick. In the end, she is living a secluded but safe and free life in her mountain retreat, helped by the rebels, accompanied by a pet dog, hopeful of finding her daughter, Jill, and awaiting a reunion with the father of the baby who is to be born “into a different world.” Detached from the voice of its narrator, the film gives Kate a voice only towards its end, where she speaks of her hope for the future. The adaptation which starts with a phrase “Once upon a time” takes us through a violent reality of the theocratic state only to leave us with a reassurance of its failure. The murder of the Commander by a Handmaid indicates the assailability of the regime by its internalised life-­force, an inevitable implosion of the system which relies so fully on the suppressed Other. Significantly different from the original in narrative tone, character-­presentation and elements of plot, the 1990 adaptation offers an intelligent visualisation of the state of Gilead as a flawed regime. Concerned with showing the weakness of the theocracy, Schlöndorff ’s film manages to successfully elaborate what accounts for the originality of Atwood’s novel: a combination of a particularly gloomy dystopian vision and a fairy-­tale in the feminist tradition, with neither of the two genres dominating the other.

Works Cited Atwood, Margaret. 1985. The Handmaid’s Tale. New York: Fawcett Crest Book, Ballantine. Bignell, Jonathan. 1998. “Territories, Boundaries, Identities.” In Margaret Atwood. The Shape-­shifter, edited by C.S. Vevaina, C.A. Howells, 9-­25. New Delhi: Creative Books.

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Cooper, Pamela.  1995. “Sexual Surveillance and Medical Authority in Two Versions of The Handmaid’s Tale.” Journal of Popular Culture 28.4: 49–66. Dodson, Danita J. 1997. “We lived in the blank white spaces”: Rewriting the Paradigm of Denial in Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale.” Utopian Studies 8.2: 66-­86.  Domville, Eric. 2006. “The Handmaid’s Detail: Notes on the Novel and Opera.” University of Toronto Quarterly 75.3: 869-­882. Foucault, Michel. 1986. “Of Other Spaces.” Diacritics 16.1: 22-­27. Kauffman, Linda. 1989. “Special Delivery: Twenty-­first Century Epistolarity in The Handmaid’s Tale.” In Writing the Female Voice: Essays on Epistolary Literature, edited by Elizabeth Goldsmith, 221-­44. Boston: Northeastern University Press. Ketterer, David. 1989. “Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale: A Contextual Dystopia.” Science Fiction Studies 16.2: 209-­217. Lefebvre, Henri. 2007. The Production of Space. Translated by Donald Nicholson-­ Smith. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing. Lefebvre, Henri. 2003. “Space and the State.” In State/Space. A Reader, edited by Neil Brenner, Bob Jessop, Martin Jones, 84-­100. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing. Schlöndorff, Volker, dir. 1990. The Handmaid’s Tale. MGM Home Entertainment. Film.

Paweł Hamera

“John Bull and Erin, the first a stout healthy boy, and the latter his sister, a very promising girl”: Figaro in London and the Depiction of Ireland in the 1830s The pictorial press is one of the significant facets of the Victorian period, and the most recognisable and iconic Victorian illustrated periodical is the satirical weekly Punch. Apart from its political cartoons that adorn many publications on the Victorian era, the magazine is known for its denigrating portrayals of the Irish (Curtis 1971; De Nie 2004; Williams 2003). Punch was not the first illustrated magazine that entertained Victorians. It was preceded by such periodicals as The Penny Magazine and Figaro in London. The introduction of these magazines with woodblock engravings opened the floodgates and a large number of illustrated periodicals were published and devoured by visually-­starved Victorians. Figaro was one of the first successful illustrated satirical magazines that paved the way for Punch. The periodical, however, has been overlooked in studies devoted to visual representations of Ireland. The first number of Figaro was published in 1831 and the last one in 1839. The periodical is considered the forerunner to Punch. To begin with, both editors of Figaro, Gilbert Abbot á Beckett and Henry Mayhew, were later on prominent staff members of Punch. Arthur William á Beckett, the son of the first editor of Figaro, Gilbert Abbot á Beckett, states that in Figaro “we can trace the germs of the coming Punch” (Á Beckett 1903, 27). In addition, Arthur á Beckett posits that because there are so many similarities between the two periodicals it was his father who created Punch. Richard D. Altick states, on the other hand, that in “Figaro cuts there was not foretaste of Punch’s brilliance in the caricature line” (Altick 1997, 121). The main difference between the two periodicals was that Punch’s cartoons were more polite and Figaro’s more grotesque and more in the vein of earlier caricaturists such as James Gillray (1756-­1815) or Thomas Rowlandson (1756-­1827). Despite the fact that there were differences regarding the style of the cartoons in both periodicals, Punch’s cartoonists probably drew inspiration from caricatures published in Figaro.

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Figaro featured front-­page, single-­panel cartoons and additional smaller cuts. The front-­page caricatures commented on political events and pilloried as well as mocked the government, the monarch, and the clergy. It was a radical magazine; hence the Tories were its favorite target. At the beginning the main caricaturist of Figaro was Robert Seymour. His cartoons were the mainstay of the magazine and emblazoned its front pages. From his early days Seymour exhibited a propensity for drawing and, therefore, at a young age became an apprentice to a pattern-­ draughtsman in London. He dreamed about becoming a highbrow painter and, despite initial success and having one of his paintings accepted by the Royal Academy, he turned to more profitable woodblock illustrations. He contributed to such periodicals as The Looking-­Glass, or McLean’s Monthly and Bell’s Life in London, and authored Humorous Sketches, a collection of his humorous drawings. Seymour is particularly known as one of Charles Dickens’ illustrators. He was the first artist who contributed cartoons for The Pickwick Papers and is also considered the person who actually came up with the idea for the book (Kitton 1972, 20-­30; Cohen 1980, 39-­40). In one of the editorials in Figaro it is stated that Seymour, whose pencil is like the lancet, which when once applied to the fungus of the aristocracy never lets it rest. Seymour, we say, has given a god-­like growl at the whole Irish system, and has fallen with a pliant pounce upon the state of that unhappy country. There is but little doubt that he will have the effect of calling the attention of the government to the conduct it is pursuing, and if any thing can be a balm to the sorrows of Erin, it will certainly be the caricaturing genius of the ripe Seymour. (12 December 1835, 203)

The article indicates that Seymour’s caricatures were sympathetic towards Ireland, which is only true to some extent. The majority of caricatures and articles regarding Ireland focused on the person of Daniel O’Connell, an Irish politician and the most recognisable Irishman at that time. Initially, O’Connell was depicted by Figaro in a positive light. As it was a radical magazine, O’Connell was often contrasted with Conservative politicians, who were lambasted by Figaro. For instance, in the cartoon The Irish Artist O’Connell is depicted as a painter who provided true pictures of the Duke of Cumberland and the Duke of Wellington. In the corresponding article Figaro says that the country should thank O’Connell for exposing their true colours. In addition, O’Connell pours paint on the figure that represents the newspaper The Times, which was Figaro’s arch enemy (Figaro 17 October 1835, 171).

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Figure 1.

In the cartoon The Irish Traitor (fig. 1) Seymour depicted O’Connell as Fluellen, the character from Shakespeare’s Henry V, forcing a British MP, Hill, portrayed as Pistol, to eat a leek. The caricature refers to the fact that Hill voted for the Irish Coercive Bill because one of the Irish MPs had told him that it had been a necessary move in order to ameliorate the situation in Ireland. O’Connell was supposed to make Hill eat his own words (Figaro 7 December 1833, 193). Even though the cartoon depicts O’Connell as a sort of a hero, he is portrayed with a shillelagh, a club typical for the Irish. In the nineteenth century British caricaturists almost always depicted the Irish with this attribute, which was a symbol of violence. Irishmen were commonly stereotyped as violent and this cartoon only propagated this view. The periodical highlights the fact the Irish were associated with violence, stating that “[o]n account of the recent murders in Ireland, supposed to have been committed by a portion of the peasantry, it is the fashion to declare the whole Irish peasantry to consist of nothing but assassins” (Figaro 28 January 1839, 27). Lewis Perry Curtis points out that even though reports about crimes committed in Ireland were in general true, the ubiquity of reports regarding offences and violence in the Irish countryside only convinced subsequent British ministers that Ireland was in a dire need of coercive measures, which included the suspension of habeas corpus (Curtis 1968, 59-­61).

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In the cartoon A Fable for Ireland, in order to castigate the conduct of British ministers towards Ireland, Seymour used Aesop’s fable “The Wind and the Sun,” in which the sun and the wind compete which each other over who will be able to force the traveller to shed his cloak. In the article it is stated that [t]he wind (Lord Grey), and the sun (Lord Althorpe), contended which possessed the greater power over the traveller (O’Connell) and one determined to try to cause him to take off his cloak (repeal) by violence (the coercive bill) while the other tried to atchieve [sic!] the same end by showing a warm disposition towards him, (the redress of his grievances). (Figaro 9 March 1833, 37)

The cartoon highlights that there were two approaches towards Ireland: coercion and conciliation. Figaro favored the policy of redressing the grievances of the Irish as “[h]arshness never was yet known to succeed so well as kindness” (Figaro 9 March 1833, 37). Despite the fact that the periodical sympathised with Ireland, the cartoon depicts O’Connell once again wielding a shillelagh, and thus shows that the Irish were prone to violence. Figure 2.

An earlier cartoon from 1832 referring to the Reform Bill points out the dishonesty of British politicians towards O’Connell and his supporters. Seymour used the story

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about The Cat and the Monkey (fig. 2) and depicted Lord Grey as a monkey which uses the cat’s paw, i.e. O’Connell’s, to remove one chestnut from the flames. The flames represent the Tories. The chestnut with an “A” represents the Reform Act. “A” stands for an Act and shows that the Reform Bill became an Act thanks to the help of O’Connell and his supporters. The chestnut with a “B” symbolises the Irish Reform Bill and, of course, “B” indicates that it was not passed and remained a bill (Figaro 23 June 1832, 113). In the corresponding commentary Figaro points out that “Earl Grey having gained the support of the Irish members to his own bill, now turns round, and refuses to make the return which is naturally required” (Figaro 23 June 1832, 113). The cartoon is critical of the Whigs and sympathises with the Irish demands to improve the condition of their country. As pointed out by Altick, it was common for British caricaturists to depict O’Connell and British politicians as animals and this tradition dates back to medieval manuscripts (Altick 1997, 134). Figure 3.

Figaro devoted a few of its main cartoons to portraying the feud between O’Connell and The Times. One cartoon shows O’Connell being attacked by William IV, the Conservatives and “the establishment of a Tory newspaper” (Figaro 19 December

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1835, 297). The cartoon A Sign of the Times (fig. 3) depicts the conflict between The Times and O’Connell in the most blatant manner. The cartoon portrays O’Connell throwing a stone at the office of The Times. Leaning out of the broken window, the editor, Thomas Barnes, and the deputy editor, Francis Bacon, are pouring malice, slander and lies on O’Connell. The periodical states that maligning O’Connell “is more stupid and dastardly on the part of Barnes and Bacon than we can find excuse for” (Figaro 1 October 1836, 161). This time O’Connell is portrayed with a stone, which was commonly used by caricaturists as a crude weapon of the Irish. In the cartoon Beggar Bull Helping Beggar Pat the periodical criticises Irish landlords, stating that “[…] the cruelty of the Aristocracy of Ireland is beyond that of the rich English. They suck the last drop of blood from the veins of their country, and leave her famishing, to be supported by the chance charity of those who hate her [the English]” (Figaro 20 June 1835, 103). The cartoon depicts an Irish landlord who is begging John Bull for money for his poor tenants. The cartoon also portrays O’Connell, who is furtively looking at a sack that says “rent.” The caricature is a jibe at O’Connell, who was very often criticised for collecting money for his political campaign to repeal the union between Ireland and Britain. In the 1840s Punch was known for upbraiding O’Connell for collecting rent. Based on the monogram in the caricature, the author of this cartoon was not Seymour but William Newman, who was later one of the artists of Punch. Newman made a few famous cartoons for Punch denigrating O’Connell (Punch July-­December 1845, 255). Figure 4.

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“John Bull and Erin, the first a stout healthy boy, and the latter his sister, a very promising girl” refers to the cartoon and article A Tale of Grown Children (fig. 4). This time Figaro refers to the misconduct of the British ministers towards both the English and the Irish. The periodical describes Ireland as “a very promising girl if sufficient pains had been bestowed on her, to render her that which she was by nature capable of becoming” (Figaro 2 November 1833, 173). As a result, Figaro implies that in order to improve the situation of Ireland she has to be “anglicized.” This solution to the Irish question was very common in the nineteenth century. The British establishment tried to implement it, however, it only bred resentment among the Irish and aggravated Anglo-­Irish relations (De Nie 1997, 63-­85). The caricature and article portray the Emerald Isle as a female. Ireland was often depicted as a female named Erin or Hibernia. A woman as a symbol of Ireland was used for the first time during the reign of James I, and the symbol was employed by English colonisers to show that the Irish were impotent and Ireland needed a manly Englishman who would take her as his wife with her consent or not (Curtis 1998-­1999, 70, 72-­73). Figaro was published in the 1830s when Ireland was in the grips of the Tithe War, a nationwide campaign against the payment of tithes for the established church. The Times blamed Irish clergy and Daniel O’Connell for the unrest (The Times 24 May 1836, 2). Figaro, on the other hand, was more sympathetic towards Irish Catholics and pointed out that poor peasants in Ireland had to pay for the upkeep of the church that they did not belong to. In one of the articles the magazine states that “[t]here are some things, which are so absurd in themselves, that merely require stating plainly, to be hooted off at once. Such is this Irish Church - as filthy a nest of abominable vermin, as ever disgraced the corners of any country” (Figaro 4 April 1835, 56). The periodical also criticised the existence of the established church in Ireland visually. In the cartoon Tithes for the Irish Parsons (fig. 5) Hibernia is portrayed lying, felled by the burden of tithes. In addition, there are two boisterous peasants driven to desperation by the tyranny that they have to live under (Figaro 6 October 1831, 173). Again, although the magazine highlights the cruelty of demanding tithes from poor Irishmen, the Irish are portrayed stereotypically as violent, uncouth rustics. Additionally, the Irish peasants are dressed in rags, which was commonly emphasised by travellers who visited Ireland (see Allan 1897, 54). The way the Irish dressed was a symbol of their primitiveness or even barbarity. In the cartoon one can also see two piglets protruding from a sheaf of corn. Irish peasants very often kept pigs that they had to sell to pay their rent. James S. Donnelly points out that substantial pig exports from Ireland in the early nineteenth century “firmly fixed the almost automatic connection between the

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Irishman and his pig in the eyes of the outside world” (1975, 40). This dependence on pigs was very often ridiculed by English travellers or the English press, and referred to as a symbol of backwardness of the Irish. For instance, The Penny Magazine highlights in one article that “[i]n Ireland the pig is a joint-­tenant and fellow-­lodger with the peasant, feeding almost at the same board with him” (The Penny Magazine 7 July 1843, 277). Figure 5.

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In May 1836 Figaro published Seymour’s last Sketch (Figaro 7 May 1836, 73). The author of the caricature, who suffered from depression and was a very insecure person, had already been dead. He took his own life several days before, on the 20th of April. He shot himself to be granted peace in death, as he stated in the suicide note. In the article that was published with the cartoon Figaro says: Poor Seymour always threw the proper light upon everything, and if his colours were unusually bold, they were always remarkable for their broad and manly fidelity. In this instance the colours are rather rough, though they are for the most part nearly all black, and being shown in the blackest colours, the proceedings of the Irish tithe collector are truly and forcibly, if not very flatteringly, painted. (7 May 1836, 74)

The cartoon censured the brutal enforcement of tithe payment through the police and soldiers which led to scuffles with Irish peasants and casualties. Figure 6.

Soon after the death of Seymour, Figaro quickly turned against O’Connell. This is explicitly depicted in the cartoon O’Connell Unmasked (fig. 6). The cartoon portrays

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O’Connell being unmasked by the British MP, John Arthur Roebuck, and John Bull while he is trying to rape Erin (Figaro 11 February 1837, 21). The periodical maligned the Irish leader, claiming that he had abandoned the fight for “justice for Ireland” only to obtain a post in the government. He was particularly pilloried for not supporting the introduction of the poor laws in Ireland. In the cartoon O’Connell and the Poor, the magazine directly attacked O’Connell for his unwillingness to support the Irish Poor Law. In the cartoon O’Connell prevents his emaciated countrymen from enjoying the supposed benefits of the government’s measure. The law is depicted as a pig, which implies that with the introduction of the legislation the Irish could finally enjoy their pigs (Figaro 24 February 1838, 30). It is worth noticing that the Irish Poor Law was introduced in Ireland in 1838 and proved unsuitable and even disastrous, especially during the Irish Famine in the 1840s (Charlesworth 2010, 180). In another article Figaro upbraids O’Connell for hampering the amelioration of the condition of his country. The magazine states that [h]is conduct is that of a physician, who, from sordid motives, contrives to keep his patient perpetually ill, never killing him, for there would be an end to his job; making him occasionally better, to shew [sic!] his medical skill, but administering tremendous doses of medicine (agitation), to keep himself continually employed. (Figaro 25 February 1837, 29)

In the last issue of Figaro that was ever published, again the front page and the main cartoon were devoted to the mischiefs of O’Connell. This time O’Connell is depicted as the agent of Rome who has allegedly undue influence on the Prime Minister and, as a result, on Queen Victoria. O’Connell is shown as a papist threat, which could have only increased anti-­Catholic sentiment towards the Irish (Figaro 17 August 1839). Although Figaro initially sympathised with the Irish, the visual content of the periodical was suffused with negative stereotypes about the inhabitants of the Emerald Isle. Furthermore, it seems that the concern with the problems of Ireland and in general positive attitude towards O’Connell can be attributed only to the first caricaturist, Seymour. After the death of Seymour, O’Connell fell in disfavour with the periodical and was denigrated visually until Figaro ceased to exist. In 1841, two years after the last issue of Figaro was published, Victorians welcomed a new illustrated satirical periodical, Punch. As far as the depiction of Ireland and the Irish is concerned, Punch took up the tradition of denigrating O’Connell that Figaro initiated.

Works Cited 1. Periodicals 1831. “Tithes for the Irish Parsons.” Figaro in London, October 6: 173. 1832. “The Grey Monkey and the Irish Cat.” Figaro in London, June 23: 113.

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1832. “The Irish Bill.” Figaro in London, June 23: 113. 1833. “A Fable for Ireland.” Figaro in London, March 9: 37. 1833. “A Tale for Grown Children.” Figaro in London, November 2: 173. 1833. “The Irish Traitor.” Figaro in London, December 7: 193. 1835. “Baiting the Hedge-­Hog.” Figaro in London, December 19: 207. 1835. “Beggar Bull Helping Beggar Pat.” Figaro in London, June 20: 103. 1835. “Protestant Tree.” Figaro in London, December 12: 203. 1835. “The Interpreter: The Tithe Question.” Figaro in London, April 4: 56. 1835. “The Irish Artist.” Figaro in London, October 17: 171. 1836. “A Sign of the ‘Times’.” Figaro in London, October 1: 161. 1836. “Seymour’s last Sketch.” Figaro in London, May 7: 73. 1836. “Tithes in Ireland.” Figaro in London, May 7: 74. 1836. The Times, May 24: 2. 1837. “Justice for Ireland.” Figaro in London, February 25: 29. 1837. “O’Connell Unmasked.” Figaro in London, February 11: 21. 1838. “O’Connell and the Poor.” Figaro in London, February 24: 30. 1839. “Summary Conviction.” Figaro in London, January 28: 27. 1839. “The Government Rulers.” Figaro in London, August 17: 249. 1843. “Pigs and Pig-­drovers.” The Penny Magazine, July 7: 277. 1845. “The Real Potato Blight of Ireland.” Punch, 9: 255.

2.  Books and articles Á Beckett, Arthur William. 1903. The Á Becketts of “Punch”: Memories of Father and Son. Westminster: Archibald Constable. Allan, Robert. 1897. The Sportsman in Ireland. London: Henry Colburn. Altick, Richard Daniel. 1997. Punch: the Lively Youth of a British Institution, 1841-­ 1851. Columbus: Ohio State University Press. Charlesworth, Lorie. 2010. Welfare’s Forgotten Past: A Socio-­Legal History of the Poor Law. New York: Routledge. Cohen, Jane R. 1980. Charles Dickens and His Original Illustrators. Columbus: The Ohio State University Press. Curtis, Lewis Perry. 1998-­1999. “The Four Erins: Feminine Images of Ireland, 1780-­1900.” Éire-­Ireland 23-­4.3-­1: 70-­102. Curtis, Lewis Perry. 1968. Anglo-­Saxons and Celts: a Study of Anti-­Irish Prejudice in Victorian England. New York: New York University Press.

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Curtis, Lewis Perry. 1971. Apes and Angels: The Irishman in Victorian Caricature. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press. De Nie, Michael. 1997. “Curing ‘The Irish Moral Plague’.” Éire-­Ireland 32.1: 63-­85. De Nie, Michael. 2004. The Eternal Paddy: Irish Identity and the British Press, 1798–1882. Madison, Wisconsin: The University of Wisconsin Press. Donnelly, James S. Jr. 1975. The Land and the People of Nineteenth-­Century Cork. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Kitton, Frederic G. 1972. Dickens and His Illustrators. Amsterdam: S. Emmering. Williams, Leslie. 2003. Daniel O’Connell, the British Press, and the Irish Famine: Killing Remarks. Aldershot: Ashgate.

Paweł Kaptur

The Political Siding of Thomas Hobbes: Revision of Power in Leviathan Written in the turmoil of the Civil War, Hobbes’s Leviathan still remains one of the most crucial political works ever written. Although the work offers a high level of complexity and ambiguity, its perception has been largely simplified throughout centuries. As it is generally believed, Hobbes’s idea of sovereign power was meant to support royalty and reinforce the position of the banished Prince Charles. Others claim that Hobbes’s masterpiece is deprived of any political bias as it only exemplifies the seventeenth-century political thought whose goal was to theorize about perfect social systems and perfect governments. It is quite difficult, though, to believe that such a highly politicized work written during one of the most turbulent periods in the history of England could remain fully objective and stand outside the political background of the time. The aim of the present article is to demonstrate that Leviathan cannot be read at a shallow level of interpretation and that the question of Hobbes’s allegiance is not as easy to answer as it might be expected. Hobbes was connected with the Devonshires – one of the most influential royalist families in England. For over thirty years he was a servant to the Cavendish family being a tutor to William Cavendish, later Earl of Devonshire. As he was generally known a loyal royalist defending the divine rights of King Charles I, the prospect of the political crisis made him leave England and stay in Paris until 1652. One of the reasons for his escape was his early political work titled De Corpore Politico (The Elements of Law) written in 1640 but published only in 1650. Macpherson claims that “The Elements of Law was presented as a scientific treatise, but in its immediate application it supported the King against Parliament. Considering the growing strength of Parliament Hobbes feared for his safety” (1985, 20). When the King’s closest advisor Stratford was executed, Hobbes was ultimately determined to flee. This suggests that he undoubtedly regarded himself a royalist. Now being a royalist refugee he got engaged in expanding his political thought initiated in England in De Cive published in Latin in 1642 and in English (Philosophical Rudiments concerning Government and Society) in 1651. At the time of his stay in Paris, Hobbes also worked as a mathematical tutor to the exiled Prince Charles, which clearly shows that he was reckoned trustworthy among royalists. This brought him profits after the Restoration as King Charles II granted him a pension of 100 pounds.

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When in 1651 Hobbes’s masterpiece Leviathan had been completed, he returned to England. The contemporary as well as modern reception indicates that the work was considered controversial and was not as unilateral and straightforward in its message as it was the case with Hobbes’s previous political treatises. Hill suggests that “Hobbes was universally condemned, and this was because his views were idiosyncratic, acceptable neither to divine right monarchy nor to liberal republic, deplorable in the eyes of Catholic, Anglican and Puritan alike” (1988, 186). What had changed since the publication of The Elements of Law and De Cive was that in Leviathan the author’s support for Cromwell began to be discernible or even conspicuous. Margaret Drabble argues that the publication of Leviathan “brought him into general disfavour on both political and religious grounds; and, indeed, the royalists had some reason to regard Leviathan as designed to induce Cromwell to take the crown” (1995, 463). The view that Leviathan reveals Hobbes’s inclinations to accept Cromwell as a sovereign is shared by other critics such as Eleanor Curran, who claims that at the time of its publication Leviathan was interpreted variously as an example of extreme royalist thought, as theoretical support for Cromwell’s rebellion and as a justification for a switch of allegiance from the king to the new ruling ‘rump’ after the Civil War. (2002, 168)

Christopher Hill admits that Hobbes “had a grudging admiration for the achievements of the Revolution” (1984, 37). Even his contemporaries did not fail to notice that there was something controversial and ambiguous about Hobbes’s masterpiece. The staunch royalist Clarendon directly accused Hobbes of supporting Cromwell saying that he published some “false and evil Doctrines” which were “pernicious to the Soveraign Power of Kings, and destructive to the affection and allegiance of Subjects” (1676, Epistle Dedicatory). Bishop Bramhall explicitly calls Leviathan “a Rebells catechism” (1995, 145). The opinions of the most leading royalists of that time prove that the suggestion placing Hobbes among parliamentarians might be true, at least partially. The statement that Hobbes turned his political views to advocate Cromwell may seem preposterous to some of Hobbes’s modern researchers, but the opinion of the two seventeenth-­century royalists must be taken into consideration or it should, at least, encourage the revision of Hobbes’s masterpiece. On the other hand, Hobbes himself rejects all the accusation of political bias emphasizing his allegiance to monarchy or his neutrality of the political tenets he put forward in his masterpiece. At the end of Leviathan, where the author placed his “A Review and Conclusion,” he strongly denies partiality but admits that his work was affected by the current political events happening in England:

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And thus I have brought to an end my Discourse of Civill and Ecclesiasticall Government, occasioned by the disorders of the present time, without partiality, without application, and without other designe, than to set before mens eyes the mutuall Relation between protection and Obedience; of which the condition of Humane Nature, and the Laws Divine, […] require an inviolable observation. (Hobbes 1985, 728)

Although the author’s carefulness in tackling the fragile subject of political power in the times of political mayhem may seem quite reasonable, his admittance that the work was “occasioned by the disorders of the present time” might be quite risky. Obviously, the line can be read as a simple justification of the author’s reaching for the subject of political power provoked by the Civil War, the regicide, and the making of the Commonwealth, all of which were new to the people of England. This could suggest that Hobbes chose to talk about the systems of authority because it was required by the unique circumstance in which he and his countrymen found themselves in the half of the seventeenth century. Nevertheless, the line may also be interpreted as Hobbes’s explanation of the shift he made publishing Leviathan which, not being acceptable as a whole by either side of the conflict, reveals some support for Cromwell as a sovereign. In this way, Hobbes justifies his move to his readers making them aware that the “disorders of the present time” changed the way he had perceived the issue of political authority. The theory that Leviathan is favourable to Cromwell is confirmed by the simple fact of Hobbes’s return to England in 1652. He feared the Revolution because of his generally known royalist views which made him escape to France and, for some reason, he lost his fear after he had published Leviathan and decided to go back to England. Taking his escape into account, one can assume that he must have felt safe enough now to return to England “accepting the authority of the republican government” (Hill 1988, 186). The main reason for which Hobbes’s Leviathan became supportive for Cromwell and the Commonwealth was that it clearly stressed the acceptance of the de facto sovereign. The doctrine is particularly tangible when Hobbes defines the phenomenon of a conquest in his “A Review and Conclusion”: “Conquest (to define it) is the Acquiring of the Right of Soveraignty by Victory. Which Right, is acquired, in the peoples Submission, by which they contract with the Victor, promising Obedience, for Life and Liberty” (1985, 721). Here, Hobbes clearly states the necessity to accept the conqueror as a rightful and legal sovereign, and to give up obedience to the conquered, who, having been defeated, lost his power and hence the capability to protect his subjects. This is an obvious message calling for acknowledging Cromwell as a new, legitimate ruler, who became a de facto sovereign having conquered the king. The fact that he decided to emphasize the

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existence of the de facto sovereign in Leviathan, which is after the Commonwealth had already been established, may indeed suggest Hobbes’s shift of allegiance. He did not accentuate it in his previous political works, which proves the development of Hobbes’s thought in a direction that might be justifiably called a political shift. Actually, as Hill puts it, “The Leviathan got Hobbes, a royalist refugee, into embarrassing difficulty, for it involved the acceptance of a de facto sovereign, and thus drove him back to England” (1988, 195). Hill implies that it was this de facto tenet of Leviathan that actually let Hobbes return to England after the revolution, which could mean that it was the element that was created in order to make the philosopher’s return to England justifiable and safe. The other feature which builds up the theory of the de facto sovereign in Leviathan and reinforces Cromwell’s political fundaments is the monarch’s inability to protect his subjects. The element was strongly highlighted by Hobbes, whose theory allowed the people to abandon their duties towards the sovereign once he ceased to be able to protect them: The Obligation of Subjects to the Soveraign, is understood to last as long, and no longer, than the power lasteth, by which he is able to protect them. For the right men have by Nature to protect them, can by no Covenant be relinquished. The Soveraignty is the Soule of the Common-­wealth; which once departed from the Body, the members doe no more receive their motion from it. (Hobbes 1985, 272)

It is quite obvious that, since Charles I had been dead for two years when Leviathan was published, monarchy could not exemplify the institution of authority which might be able to provide protection to the citizens of England. Moreover, monarchy embodied in the person of the banished Prince Charles did not secure any protection either. Hence, the encouragement to accept the sovereign who guarantees and confirms protection to his people is tantamount to the calling for the acceptance of any sovereign who wields power at a present moment (de facto sovereign), which, in fact, means compliance with Cromwell and his republic. For many critics, actually, the central point of Hobbes’s political considerations was the “overriding theme of obedience to government de facto rather than de jure” (Haley 1997, 112). What is more, Haley notices that it was the Engagement (the de facto theory) that “generated” Leviathan. Macpherson, the author of the introduction to the famous Penguin edition of Leviathan, who does not share the view that Hobbes supported Cromwell, admits that the author “preached obedience to whatever political authority actually exercised power at the time” (1985, 13). If this reasoning is accepted as appropriate, then in 1651 Hobbes preached obedience to Oliver Cromwell.

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The other element of Hobbes’s political tenets embraced in Leviathan which might cause ambiguity and controversy is his model of the sovereign power represented either by a single person or an assembly. […] there can be but Three kinds of Common-­wealth. For the Representative must needs be One man, or More: and if more, then it is Assembly of All, or but of a Part. When the Representative is One man, then is the Commonwealth a MONARCHY: when an Assembly of All that will come together, then it is a DEMOCRACY, or Popular Common-­ wealth: when an Assembly of a Part onely, then it is called an ARISTOCRACY. Other kind of Common-­wealth there can be none: for either One, or More, or All must have the Soveraign Power (which I have shewn to be indivisible) entire. (Hobbes 1985, 238)

The above scheme of power that Hobbes so meticulously drew before his readers shows clearly that monarchy is indeed one of the acceptable systems of power that could function if it was possible. Since the king had been decapitated and his son banished, the reinstitution of monarchy in 1651 was absolutely out of the question. The occurrence of an Assembly as a potential or factual sovereign authority evokes direct associations with the collective power of the parliament. Since the pivotal point of the Civil War was the conflict concerning the division of power between the king and the parliament, Hobbes’s affirmation of a sovereign Assembly may be read as recognition of the superiority of English parliament over monarchy, which was overthrown two years prior. The passage may also be read as the author’s encouragement for Cromwell to take the crown. If Hobbes equalizes all of the above-mentioned political systems, claiming that the only condition that they have to fulfill is the sovereign, indivisible power, then Cromwell’s potential aspirations to become the king of England could be justified, at least according to Hobbes’s political theory. The acceptance of any political system might also suggest Hobbes’s self-­preservative instinct which made him publish a politically ambiguous but safe doctrines in the politically insecure and unstable times of the post-­revolutionary England. On the other hand, when an attempt is made to read Leviathan outside its 1651 historical context, then the author’s compromising approval of each model of power appears as his unequivocal desire to support the authority that secures peace and guarantees social order regardless of its political provenance. In this sense, Hobbes would occur as an advocate of that de facto authority which is capable of hampering any forms of anarchy. The question is whether Leviathan is meant to be read outside its political context or not. Hobbes’s masterpiece embraces yet another issue which raised controversies among his contemporaries and could be interpreted as a bow towards parliament rather than monarchy. Macpherson claims that “as soon as he had demonstrated

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the need for a single sovereign power, no one, from the Levellers, to Harrington, to Lock, disputed it. All they disputed was whether it need be a self-­perpetuating sovereign body” (1985, 24). This self-­perpetuity clearly refers to the elective system of the Rump Parliament which in 1651 was still firmly functioning. Actually, when Hobbes tackles the subject of perpetuity of power he focuses on the Assembly rather than the individual sovereign: In an Aristocracy, when any of the Assembly dyeth, the election of another into his room belongeth to the Assembly, as the Soveraign, to whom belongeth the choosing of all Counsellours, and Officers. […] And though the Soveraign Assembly” may give Power to others, to elect new men, for supply of their Court; yet it is still by their Authority, that the Election is made; and by the same it may (when the publique shall require it) be recalled. (Hobbes 1985, 248)

The passage demonstrates that Hobbes advocated the idea of “sovereign assembly” supporting the model of the Rump Parliament, which was based upon an elective system. Hobbes, however, accentuated the fact that the Parliament should have the power to name its successors. Macpherson underlines that “although it might be originally an elective assembly, it could not continue to be dependent on an electorate but must have the power to perpetuate itself by filling vacancies in its own membership” (1985, 54). Hence, Hobbes’s proposal to give Parliament a right to name its successors may be interpreted as the acceptance of equipping the Parliament with the rights that were exercised by Kings. So far, and Hobbes must have known about it, the right to name its successors was one of the crucial dogmas of the divine rights of kings. Curran notices that Hobbes was accused by his contemporaries of “failing to provide a thoroughly convincing argument for absolute sovereignty by mixing his arguments with contradictory principles, such as placing the origin of sovereignty in the people rather than in God” (2007, 14). The fact that Hobbes dared to violate the sacred rule of the divine right of kings in Leviathan could not have pleased royalists, and certainly puts Hobbes’s royalism in question. Although Hobbes indeed supported Charles I, he never spoke openly of his partisanship. Moreover, critics commonly agree, that since Hobbes’s previous works like De Cive or The Elements of Law undoubtedly promoted absolutism, Leviathan is filled with a dose of free thinking, ambiguities, and contradictions, and, most importantly, it reveals the author’s loss of faith in the divine rights of kings. The masterpiece indeed involves the doctrines strongly supporting a king, which makes Hobbes a royalist, but his support is equal for any authority that would prevent the country from chaos. Therefore, one might recognize Hobbes as an unconventional royalist as well as an unconventional parliamentarian.

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Conclusion Hobbes denied having supported Cromwell during the Civil War and the Commonwealth. Critics, however, argue that such denials stated after the Restoration are to be treated with a distance or even a pinch of skepticism. Hence, these demonstrations of support and loyalty made some of Hobbes’s enemies give him a label of a political turncoat. Today’s researchers, however, firmly underline the fact that Hobbes only “set out the rational grounds for obedience to whatever political authority actually exercised power at the time” and that “he had been thinking all along as a scientist not as a partisan” (Macpherson 1985, 13-­14). Indeed, it is hard to reject all of the royalist elements of Leviathan which, when applied to monarchy, glorify and strengthen its existence. It is also difficult to deny that he had some royalist attitude towards the notion of authority but, on the other hand, as it has been proved, the masterpiece “undermined some central tenets of the royalist political thought” (Curran 2002, 177) and therefore its one-­sided attribution to royalty is nothing but a misuse. If Hobbes was a royalist, he was an unconventional royalist, or, as Curran calls him, a very peculiar kind of a royalist. The major thesis shown in the present article was that Hobbes’s work is “both too subtle and too complex to be categorized with the same simplicity as the more typical pamphlets and treatises of the Civil War” (Curran 2002, 168). The author’s idiosyncratic views on the issue of power and his opposing and often incoherent arguments tell us little of his real political beliefs. This might prove that Leviathan was indeed deprived of any personal demonstrations of political allegiance but written with the intention to present a meticulously and conscientiously drawn picture of a perfect sovereign who is mighty enough to prevent the country from unremitting chaos and ubiquitous anarchy. Therefore, the masterpiece might be perceived and analyzed only in terms of political theoretics. This approach is indeed shared by a vast majority of critics nowadays, who rightly place Hobbes’s work among the finest treatises of political philosophy, since it offers a profound insight into the nature of authority conferred by people in order to enforce peace and law. Nevertheless, one must bear it in mind that Leviathan was published in 1651, in the middle of the revolutionary turmoil, and reading the treatise only within its theoretical frames would have been impossible then. The political background of Hobbes’s masterpiece is crucial to those who read it at the time of its publication and who have some doubts as to the author’s political siding, but it is of no use to those who read Leviathan as one of the greatest works theorizing about the nature of power in the modern world.

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Works Cited Bramhall, J. 1995 (1658). “The Catching of Leviathan.” In Leviathan Contemporary Responses to the Political Theory of Thomas Hobbes, edited by G.A.J. Rogers, 115-180. Bristol: Thoemmes Press. Curran, Eleanor. 2002. “A very peculiar Royalist. Hobbes in the context of his political contemporaries.” British Journal for the History of Philosophy 10.2: 167-­202. Curran, Eleanor. 2007. Reclaiming the Rights of the Hobbesian Subject. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Clarendon, Earl of. 1676. A brief view and survey of the dangerous and pernicious errors to church and state, in Mr. Hobbes’s book, entitled Leviathan by Edward Earl of Clarendon. Oxon: printed at the Theatre. Web. Drabble, Margaret.  1995. Oxford Companion to English Literature. London: Oxford University Press. Haley, David B.  1997. Dryden and the Problem of Freedom, the Republican Aftermath 1649-­1680. New Haven and London: Yale University Press. Hill, C.P. 1988. Who’s Who in Stuart Britain. London: Shepheard-­Walwyn. Hill, Christopher. 1984. The World Turned Upside Down, Radical Ideas During the English Revolution, Harmondsworth: Peregrine Books. Hobbes, Thomas. 1985. Leviathan. Edited by C.B. Macpherson. London: Penguin Books. Macpherson, C.B. 1985. Introduction to Leviathan, by Thomas Hobbes, 9-­63. London: Penguin Books.

Eliza Marków

Puppies Sell: A Study of Selected Advertising Campaigns Featuring Animals Countless advertisements involve animals and surely plenty more will follow. Who is not familiar with characters such as the merry Guinness Toucan, the happy Dulux Dog or the adorable Andrex Puppy? Advertisements involving animals tend to be associated with the promotion of pet products such as dog and cat food. However, this article focuses on advertisements in which likeable animal characters, anthropomorphic or not, are used to advertise products for humans only. On the basis of selected advertisements, this paper intends to investigate the reasons for these animals’ continuous and growing appeal to the human audience. It appears to be obvious that the use of animals by advertisers relates to people’s emotions, persuading them to purchase the advertised products. Yet the question is: What is the advertisers’ motivation behind such practices? In particular I would like to look into three case studies of recent British and American advertising campaigns that have successfully employed man’s closest animal friends, namely dogs and cats. I will start with two British campaigns, the O2 Be more dog and McVitie’s Sweeet campaigns and then I will discuss the Subaru Dog tested. Dog approved commercials for the United States-­based distributor of Subaru cars. In his 1963 book Confessions of an Advertising man, David Ogilvy, referred to as the father of advertising by The New York Times, provided a concise definition of a good advertisement, which is “one which sells the product without drawing attention to itself” (2004, 118). How true is it today, half a century later, for the advertisements I am about to present, which are far from the ideal mentioned by Ogilvy? On the contrary, one of the objectives of the current advertising industry seems to be the desire to attract as much publicity and attention to its work as possible in order to display new and original creative ideas. Nonetheless, the increasing number of advertisements featuring animals in recent years supports the claim that there is a growing demand for such a genre, which I could easily nickname “petvertising.” Since this genre has become more and more common in British and American advertising, one may infer that the public as well as advertisers themselves see these practices as beneficial and desirable, if not necessary. My goal here is to identify the reasons for such occurrences. A good example of my point is the case of Aleksandr Orlov, the hero of the highly successful campaign of Compare the Market, a British price comparison website.

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Since its launch in 2009, the campaign has had a staggering rise in popularity, which, apart from increased sales, is reflected in the social media following of over 800,000 Facebook fans and 66,000 Twitter followers so far. In his article on anthropomorphic marketing, Stephen Brown indicates that the campaign proved to be so effective that “envious brand managers around the country were telling their advertising agencies to ‘get off their butts and find them a meerkat’” (2010, 209-­224). The first campaign I would like to present is the Be More Dog series by O2. One spot begins with a close-­up of a serious-­looking ginger Maine Coon cat and the first words of the voice over create a mood of confession. The use of this particular camera shot is used to show the cat character’s disposition and emotions, which results in “intensifying the intimacy of star and spectator” (Giles 2000, 24). The following scenes show the cat sitting or lying in different positions around the house. It is sprawled lifelessly on the sofa, carpet or kitchen table. The cat looks bored, deeply depressed and listless or, as it is described, “aloof ” or “coldly indifferent.” The cat’s facial expression makes the impression of an ultimately miserable creature and it makes the viewer almost feel sorry for it. Then, it suddenly experiences some kind of an epiphany and says “Why be so cat, why not be a bit more… dog?” Then there is a build-­up of music and next we see the cat vigorously flying out of the house through a cat flap to the accompaniment of Queen’s Flash Gordon song (1980). The cat has just become “more dog” and is now acting like it, as we see it catch a ball, chase its tail, tear up paper, dig a hole, chase cars and even swim only to spectacularly catch a Frisbee, which, as we learn, represents the “seize-­the-­day philosophy,” which the cat translates as “grab the Frisbee.” Another advert of the series shows a perky West Highland White Terrier sitting next to a smartphone on a sofa. We hear the voice-­over say “Get off the sofa with the new Google Nexus 7” and the dog joyfully complies, landing right in the middle of a grassy field. The voice-­over continues the description of the new mobile phone, yet the adjectives unmistakably describe the dog itself. It is therefore “compact, fast” as well as “amazing indoors, awesome outdoors.” At that moment, the terrier leaps high and then plunges into a muddy puddle only to roll in it joyfully. The ad concludes with the words “Be more dog. Experience the new Google Nexus 7, unleashed.” The image of a beautiful snow-­white dog all covered in mud brings associations of unrestrained freedom, fun, and natural instincts. The new product therefore aims to enable the consumers’ enjoyment and uninhibited access to what the mobile digital world has to offer. “Advertising invented a hundred and one ways of making the consumer connect with a brand – through humour or affection, prose or poetry, information or appeal, by whispering or shouting and even with fireworks” (Pincas & Loiseau

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2008, 118-­119). In the case of the campaign in question, the advertiser is trying to convince the viewers that they “should all be a bit more dog,” which translates into being more open and enthusiastic about the new services the advertiser is promoting. The metaphor of being “cat” stands for people who are set in their ways and, more specifically, customers that are rather reluctant to change the way they usually use their mobile phones by experimenting with novel services. By means of “this campaign, which is ‘bright and brave’” (Campaign 2013), O2 is encouraging its current or potential clients to “be bold” and, most importantly, “be more dog” (O2 2014). “The use of cats and dogs in advertising has always touched a nerve with animal-­loving Britons” (The Guardian 2013). Although pet keeping had been practiced by the wealthy as early as in the Middle Ages, “it was in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries that pets seemed to have really established themselves as a normal feature of the middle-­class functional necessities and where an increasing number of people could afford to support creatures lacking any productive value” (Thomas 1983, 110). Moreover, “love of animals, particularly horses and dogs, is accepted as the natural way of things among royalty. They regard anyone who does not share their devotion to all four-­legged creatures as being not quite normal” (Hoey 2013, 15). Interestingly enough, there is definitely a hint at the Royals’ favourites in the McVitie’s Original Digestives commercial in which we see some “crumbly cuddles” in the form of lovely little Corgi puppies slowly emerging from a packet of biscuits. There are two more of the Sweeet series, the Jaffa Cakes tarsier standing for “zesty mischief,” and British shorthair kittens playing the role of “chocolatey snuggles.” The use of real animals as a metaphor for food products is generally thought to be odd if not risky, yet this particular example seems to be purely beneficial for the biscuit producer. Still, considering the saying “You are so sweet that I could just eat you,” such a connection may not seem so awkward. All the animals used in the ad actually resemble the products they advertise; thus, the puppies’ fur is of the golden biscuit colour, the kittens’ thick dark coat can be associated with the chocolate-­covered Digestives, and the exotic tarsier does offer a strange feeling of exciting otherness to anyone who is looking for more than a traditional (namely, predictable) and reassuring biscuit experience. In recent years Subaru of America has featured dogs in their advertising. The humorous situations imitating human leisure activities, such as going to the beach, have proved successful enough to continue this way of communication. Though the funny canines may be seen as copying their masters’ behaviour in daily life, it is worth remembering that dogs actually accompany people in these activities. “A dog and its owner live in the same house, visit the same park together for exercise, travel in the

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same car” (Bradshaw 2012, xxiv). In this particular case the only difference is that dogs still do the same things, but without the owner. They actually have a life and, as the advertiser is trying to say, it is a lifestyle to be desired by many. Dogs’ qualities that could be associated with cars are reliability, faithfulness, fun and love of the outdoors; however, Subaru’s justification for using dogs in their commercials is known to be the fact that they simply understand their dog-­owning customers. The dogs “aren’t especially groundbreaking, but they have a sort of low-­key humor that’s hard not to find at least a bit appealing” (Adweek 2014). At the end of the day, “who doesn’t want to see a few more cute pups in their commercial breaks?” (Adweek 2014).

Classification It is an interesting fact to observe that animal characters in the selected advertisements undeniably hold centre stage, while human presence is only auxiliary or non-­existent. Following my study of selected material, I would like to propose a taxonomy of the discussed adverts, consisting of five distinct categories, which are as follows:

1.  Animal celebrity endorsement In this case animals, having become famous due to their presence in the media or show business, are now “milking the market opportunities available to them” through their celebrity status (Turner 2004, 8) by endorsing various companies and organisations. Such stars include Uggie, the canine actor of the award-­winning silent film The Artist (2011) showing off his versatile talents in a cider commercial and even becoming a spokesdog of the Nintendogs product line of Nintendo. He also supported one of PETA’s animal-­rescue campaigns, as did Pudsey and trainer Ashleigh, the winners of Britain’s Got Talent 2012. Another example is Denver, who appeared in a Doritos commercial. The YouTube sensation known as the Guilty Dog, who shamelessly ate a bag of forbidden cat treats when the owners were out, and the video showing his allegedly “guilty” look has so far scored over 34 million views. Another example of a bright Internet star is Boo, known as the cutest dog on the planet, with eleven million fans on Facebook, who became a “spokesdog” for Virgin America airline.

2.  Dogs in cars This category covers dogs travelling in cars as passengers. There are plenty of examples of brands featuring dogs, among which there are Volkswagen’s dogs driving about simply enjoying themselves, Subaru’s dogs actively using the wide

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range of the cars for leisure purposes, Suzuki’s funny commercial with sled dogs adopting the role of passengers for a change and, last but not least, one of Cadbury’s A Glass and a Half Full Productions campaign featuring a group of dogs cruising joyfully in a Lamborghini Diablo on a sunny day. Dogs driving cars may seem to be quite an odd idea; nevertheless, as the Royal New Zealand Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals has proven, it is not an impossible one. As a matter of fact, three rescue dogs were trained to autonomously drive a car following a trainer’s commands. The initiative’s objective was to show that rescue dogs “may be a mixed up motley bunch, but they’re all smart and they’re all lovable” (quoted from Facebook).

3.  Dancing or singing animals Another category includes animals that are advertising products by dancing their animal souls away. These include the Tap-­dancing Cadbury cows, the Moonwalking Shetland pony or the Singing Kitty introduced by a broadband provider Three, as well as the Danish orange juice brand advert showing an orangutan who likes to “move it, move it,” to name just a few.

4.  Cute animals This category is dominated by the intense visual appeal of the presented subjects. Usually it is baby animals, such as puppies and kittens, that are used in order to create a positive reaction of the viewers to the ad. McVitie’s Sweeet campaign conveys the feelings of joy and happiness through the comforting power of delicious biscuits. The cuddly Andrex Puppy connotes playfulness, innocence, soft touch and gentleness, whereas the Budweiser Puppy Love commercial presents friendship against all odds. Here the impression of the Labrador puppy’s cuteness is strengthened by the surprising juxtaposition of the beautiful Clydesdale horse, which is one of the largest and most powerful horse breeds in the world, with a tiny yet determined pup.

5.  Animal tales The final category presents cats’ or dogs’ own life stories that unfold alongside or totally outside the human world. Some of the examples show pets as life companions of humans, whereas in other cases animals appear to have lives of their own, wholly independent of people. Here is an outline of one such story: in one of Lotto commercials a faithful dog risks his life to save a lottery ticket for his master only to find out later that he had been betrayed. After he gets a new life

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with a homeless person, they collect the huge winnings and soon become rich to the original master’s great surprise. Another interesting example is Thinkbox’s humorous advertisement presenting Harvey, a good-­natured cross-­breed terrier who has a strong bond with his stuffed toy rabbit. The cases of the O2 cat-­dog hybrid and the Subaru dogs, especially the Barkley family, also fall into this category.

Animals’ advertising appeal All in all, there is no simple and decisive answer to the question about the motives behind the current trend of employing animals in advertising. One possible reason is definitely animals’ undeniable cuteness, which was already mentioned above. Gary Sherman of the Harvard Kennedy School has observed that “the perception of something as cute activates the idea of something delicate and breakable […] valuable and worth caring for” (“Business English Magazine” 2012). John Bradshaw has made an interesting observation regarding the tradition of keeping dingoes by Aboriginal Australians, which “suggests that, in the absence of (or sometimes in spite of) practical considerations, humans will keep puppies purely for their cuteness” and not “to serve as hunting companions” as scientists had first thought, simply because the dogs tend to “interfere with hunting.” Therefore, “the habit of keeping young dingoes must surely have started as an exaggerated susceptibility to the cuteness of puppies” (2012, 50). Another reason may be that cute animals combine well with humour, to which advertisers turn “in the hopes of achieving various communication objectives – to gain attention, guide consumer comprehension of product claims, influence attitudes, enhance recall of advertised claims, and, ultimately, create customer action” (Pincas & Loiseau 2008, 301-­302). Moreover, the use of humour in advertising has been found “especially effective for attracting attention and creating brand awareness” (303). In the difficult time of recession, humour offers a possible source of consolation for the depressed, weary and insecure society, helping people to relax and feel happy, even if just momentarily. By the same token, people tend to resort to confectionery products, which tend to relieve stress, uncertainty and dejection. “Unlike a lot of other foodstuffs chocolate is somewhat recession-­resistant,” which is why “chocolate-­makers around the world are reporting buoyant sales despite the economic gloom” (BBC News 2011). Additionally, “it is widely believed that interaction with dogs is a good stress-­buster for humans” (Bradshaw 2012, 170). Considering the dark cloud of recession, hovering in the air for the last few years, McVitie’s strategy seems to capture the idea of the public’s search for joy provided by pets and chocolate, combined.

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This natural desire to fight stress leads us to another attempt at explaining the use of animals in advertising, namely humans’ strong bond with their pets, especially dogs, which possess the “ability to bond with us and understand us, to an extent that no other animal can match” (Bradshaw 2012, 4). What is more, dogs’ “unparalleled ability to communicate with humans” (2012, xix) is without question the decisive argument supporting the view that people have no reason to fake emotions when they are around pets, because it would be of no avail. Thus, they expect their pets to be equally truthful and sincere, which is best illustrated by the following quotation: It has often been mooted as a vexed question why all men of genius or greatness are so fond of dogs. The reason is not far to seek. Those who are great or eminent in any way find the world full of parasites, toadies, liars, fawners, hypocrites: the incorruptible candor, loyalty, and honor of the dog are to such like water in a barren place to the thirsty traveller. The sympathy of your dog is unfailing and unobtrusive. If you are sad, so is he; and if you are merry, none is so willing to leap and laugh with you as he. For your dog you are never poor; for your dog you are never old; whether you are in a palace or a cottage he does not care; and fall you as low as you may, you are his providence and his idol still. (Ouida 1891, 312-­321)

The next reason is the effectiveness of likeable characters employed in advertising communication strategy. The “cutest thing ever put on television” and the rest of the happy pack of animal characters seem to find it easy to attract the public’s attention. Their effect on increasing brand awareness has been mentioned above, yet there is one more interesting reason proving the pets’ effectiveness in advertising. “People’s endless fascination” with innumerable “YouTube videos featuring cats and dogs” (in a 2014 campaign) is also the sign of the times we live in. It seems that animals are much in fashion these days. As McVitie’s marketing director Sarah Heynen admits, her company wants to “make sure McVitie’s is modern and up to date” (“Marketing Week” 2014). To sum up, it may be stated that there has been a cultural change throughout the recent decades in the way Western culture perceives the role of animals in advertising. From being seen as mere mascots or simply companions of human characters, animals, having individual features and personalities, have come to be the main characters in numerous advertising narratives. Luke Tipping, who represents the agency that made SingItKitty, holds an interesting claim: “Animals are popular because they’re aspirational. We wish we could be more like them. They live for the moment, are true in their affections and they don’t worry about having a bad hair day. Difficult standards for us people to live up to” (“The Drum” 2014). In the face of the arguments presented above, David Ogilvy’s steadfast beliefs, such as “the purpose of a commercial is not to entertain the viewer, but to sell

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him” (Ogilvy 2004, 159) are no longer valid, because entertainment, in this case provided by animals, is becoming one of the conditions of sales. Ogilvy continues, “you should try to charm the consumer into buying your product. This doesn’t mean that your advertisements should be cute or comic. People don’t buy from clowns” (2004, 125). Maybe they do not, but it appears that they seem to be buying from animals, especially dogs.

Works Cited Abbott, Melanie. 2011. “Chocolate firms find life is sweet amid economic gloom.” BBC News, 6 December. Bazilian, Emma. 2014. “Ad of the Day: Subaru’s Road-­Tripping Dogs Are Cute, Funny and Almost Human. Meet the Barkleys.” Adweek, 16 January. Bradshaw, John. 2012. In Defence Of Dogs. London: Penguin Books. Brown, Stephen.  2010. “Where the Wild Brands Are: Some Thoughts on Anthropomorphic Marketing.” The Marketing Review 10: 209-­224. Web. Crisel, Andrew. 1997. An Introductory History of British Broadcasting. London: Routledge. Giles, David. 2000. Illusions of immortality, a psychology of fame and celebrity. London: Macmillan Press. Hays, Constance L. 1999. “David Ogilvy, 88, Father of Soft Sell In Advertising, Dies.” The New York Times, 22 July. Hoey, Brian. 2013. Pets by Royal Appointment. London: The Robson Press. Ogilvy, David.  2004. Confessions of an Advertising Man. London: Southbank Publishing. Ouida [Maria Louise Ramé].  1891. “Dogs and Their Affections.” The North American Review 418: 312-­321. Weinstein, Joshua I. 2009. “The Market in Plato’s Republic.” Classical Philology 104: 439-­58. Parsons, Russell. 2014. “United Biscuits pumps £12m into McVitie’s brand to ‘awaken sleeping giant’.” Marketing Week, 3 February. Peck, Mel. 2014. “Singing cats, dancing ponies and screaming goats – why are animals so popular in viral advertising?” The Drum, 18 March. Pincas, Stéphane, and Marc Loiseau. 2008. A History of Advertising. Taschen. “Puppies and Productivity.” 2012. Business English Magazine 32. Shimp, Terrence A.  2003. Advertising, Promotion & Supplemental Aspects of Integrated Marketing Communications. Mason: Thomson South-­Western.

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Sweney, Mark. 2013. “O2 aims to be mobile top dog with animal ad campaign.” The Guardian, 4 July. Thomas, Keith. 1983. Man and the natural world. Changing attitudes in England 1500-­1800. London: Penguin Books. Turner, Graeme. 2004. Understanding Celebrity. London: Sage Publications. Vella, Matt.  2014. “This British Biscuits Ad Is the Cutest Thing Ever Put on Television.” Time, 6 February.

Agnieszka Matysiak

In the (Neo)Baroque Universe of Looped Voices: Lanford Wilson’s Fugue Spectacle in The Hot l Baltimore While discussing his theory of “attraction” [gravitación],1 Eugenio d’Ors explicates that it works by positing that in the series of art forms – music, poetry, painting, sculpture, architecture – each medium occupies an unfixed position and, depending on the times, trends and artists, tends to adopt the characteristics of the neighboring art form. Thus, in classical periods, music becomes poetic, poetry graphic, painting sculptural, and sculpture architectural. In Baroque periods,2 the attraction works in the opposite direction; the architect sculpts, sculpture paints, and painting and poetry take on music’s dynamic tones. Since all Baroque style tends toward pantheism,3 all Baroque calligraphy4 tends toward music. (2010, 85)

That confluence of scholarly discourses and their mutual pervasiveness seem to make any endeavors to separate the respective art forms utterly impossible. Therefore, being one of the most significant components of the Baroque aesthetics that

1 Apart from the explicit denotative sense of the “gravitational attraction,” the Spanish word gravitación also connotes the idea of both physically-­and spiritually-­oriented magnetism. 2 d’Ors’ concept of the Baroque does not confine itself to the late sixteenth-­and seventeenth-­century aesthetics, but, to invoke Gregg Lambert’s succinct formulation, it dislocates the Baroque from its historical period (2004, 31). While conceiving the idea of the “Baroque Eon,” that is, “a universal constant of culture” (Lambert 2004, 34), and recognizing it as the dominant archetypal category, which can be discerned in any historical epoch, d’Ors thus also participates in the process of re-­defining modernity itself. 3 d’Ors identifies “pantheism” with dynamism and the inclination towards movement, designating it as “the blessing, legitimization, and canonization of movement, as opposed to the parallel tendency toward stasis, rest, reversibility that characterizes rationality and everything classical” (83). 4 The notion of “the Baroque calligraphy” is already marked, d’Ors intimates, with the Faustian yearning for knowledge and thus immediately connotes the persona of the Baroque polyhistor.

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encompasses the objectives of both science and art, it is music, d’Ors asserts, that is to be considered the phenomenon “of time in which the role of movement is of utmost importance, [since] it obeys gravity in its own way, [whereas] architecture can only depart so much from its necessarily static mode of visual representation” (2010, 85). That mutual pervasiveness of time and movement endows music with distinctive cohesion and coherence, which thus make it an absolutely unique form of art. Since Baroque architecture is embedded in the monumental, yet dramatic, stillness, thus it is music that is able to transcend the borders of the score paper and set in motion the dramatic potential of architecture.5 The Baroque exceptional favouring of music and musical projects also manifested itself in the seventeenth-­century belief in the divine inspiration which was to descend miraculously upon a composer. What is more, as Bogusław Schaeffer accentuates, the insight permeating a creative act of the prodigious art contributed significantly to the “individualization of both the artistic expression and technical renditions6 of the initial musical ideas” (139, translation mine). Equally, the liberation from traditional Renaissance musical forms,7 as well as the aforementioned technical innovations, were inextricably connected, still following Schaeffer’s argument, with an analogous “process of individualization in the sphere of spirit and emotions” (140, translation mine). Johann Joseph Fux’s astounding development of the punctus contra punctum technique presented in his seminal work Gradus ad Parnassum (1725), made the very construction of a musical composition the most exquisite form of artistic expression. However, in the seventeenth and early eighteenth century it was the 5 As any piece of music is preceded invariably by the manual act of writing down the notes, and any performance of the piece of music is inextricably linked with the use of hands in various gestures, once again it seems to prove that music is the art, which transgresses the limitations of time and space as “nothing contributes more to the expression of life and motion than the action of the hands” (Lessing 2005, 37). However, it must be noted that what might be designated as the phenomenon of the Baroque art also included the designs of grandiose festive performances during which technology, for instance, the moving machines, merged with the exquisite artistry of their use and production. Moreover, as Aercke clarifies, the underlying purpose of such artistically oriented technology “was the paradoxical obsession with the visual confusion of what [was] static and what [was] not, and the representation of that confusion” (1994, 77). 6 The representative Renaissance forms included motet, madrigal, caccia, mass (ordinarium missae), and villanelle. 7 Those include notably: the chord style, the principles of connection between chord progressions, as well as the technique of basso continuo, which established the foundation for the major-­minor harmonic constructions.

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model of the fugue8 that was considered the form of the highest subtlety and sophistication. That transhistorical indispensability of a composer’s command of fugal technique, that is, the mastery of precise theoretical principles pertaining to the science of music, is also vividly illustrated by Ernst Robert Curtius, who maintains that [e]ver since music has been taught, there has been a science of music. The child learns the rudiments of it (tonalities, rhythms, and so on) when he takes his first piano lessons. The study of musical forms is indispensable to the understanding of a sonata, a symphony. The study of music is incomplete without the study of composition, and demands practical exercises in the strict style. Whoever aspires to become a musician must learn to write a fugue. In the Middle Ages, whoever aspired to become a poet (dictator) had to learn poetics (the ars dictandi). (1990, 247)

Moreover, while discussing his original theory of the Baroque during the 1931 seminar at the Abbey of Pontigny in France,9 d’Ors also declared that “Baroque forms preferr[ed] the pattern of the fugue [since it was] an open form that follow[ed] an attraction to an external point” (89). The remark on the open character of the fugue is not, however, to invoke the twentieth-­century infinite principle of structuring a musical composition, but emphasize its truly gravitational lead towards the logical contrapuntal10 development based on the established mathematical calculations and meticulously determined harmonical combinations. That musical gravitation seems to correlate with the physical idea of gravity and gravitational pull, which thus links a natural science to the artistic sphere of music. However, as a representative of the “flying forms” (d’Ors 2010, 89), the fugue attraction is directed unvaryingly towards an external point, hence the term “centrifugal.” In the Baroque variant, when it “abandons itself to multipolarity that allows the rich and turbulent sources of the unconscious to overflow” (d’Ors

8 The analysis of the form of the Baroque fugue will be based on its unrivalled model established by Johann Sebastian Bach. 9 The scholar’s presentation evolved into the landmark work, Lo barocco [The Baroque], which was initially published in French (1935) and, subsequently, in Spanish (1944). 10 It might be interesting to note that the nineteenth-­century theoreticians of music searched out the early forms of harmonics and counterpoint already in the ancient Greece. While presenting and analyzing carefully that dilemma in The Rise of Music in the Ancient World [Muzyka w świecie starożytnym], Curt Sachs concluded that the existence of any possible forms of polyphony in the ancient Greece was most probably limited to the singer cantillating to the accompaniment of aulos.

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2010, 89), the fugue also seems to articulate those ubiquitous, though restrained, instincts and sentiments. An exciting intellectual challenge to the artistry of a Baroque composer, the fugue appeared simultaneously as a true determinant of his musicality since the form was to embody the process of the fundamental transformation in the contemporarily comprehended polyphony. Thus the ensuing diversity in unity and unity in diversity unmistakably invoke the concept of the fold, which is to serve here as a tool for literary analysis. Although many a time the fugue construction demanded from the composer unusual technical virtuosity, that component was not of utmost importance. It was the intricately woven chords inducing the crystalline melodic line that were considered the most significant and desirable constituent of the composition. A similar objective seems to lie behind Lanford Wilson’s play, The Hot l Baltimore (1973), the construction of which truly mirrors, I would claim, the principles of the fugue structure. Having said that, as well as bearing in mind the idea of the Deleuzean fold, the following analysis will attempt to confirm the hypothesis that the drama, a modern realization of, I would claim, the Jacobean convention, is therefore a perfect embodiment of the (Neo)Baroque aesthetics. As Wilson himself recalled, the very concept of the play occurred to him while listening to Arlo Guthrie performing a folk song, “The City of New Orleans” (written originally by Steve Goodman), which narrated in a melancholy manner the tale of sorrow upon the vanishing railroads. Those intertwined railway tracks and the once magnificent Louis Sullivan buildings that are being passed by during the journey seem to serve as Wilson’s thematic foundation for the construction of the play. Like a Baroque composer, the dramatist contrives his composition to materialize and literally embody the formal principles of the fugue’s polyphonic structure. I shall thus suggest that the characters’ reflections and all their afterthoughts seem to form a part of the subject (dux/proposta) already introduced in the exposition, that is, Act One of the drama set in the once gracious, five-­story hotel, the history of which “has mirrored the rails’ decline” (1998, 8).11 Built “in the late nineteenth century [and] remodeled during the Art Deco last stand of the railroads” (8), the hotel now hosts an array of individuals who seem to accidentally find themselves in the same haven.

11 References are indicated by the page number of the 1998 edition of The Hot l Baltimore. The quotation delineating the model of the scene is taken from the introductory note to the play.

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The leading motif12 of the first subject is introduced by the opening conversation between two outcasts, the unnamed call girl and Bill Lewis, un unsuccessful night clerk, who recall with great fondness and nostalgia the past exclusivity of that establishment. The subject thus arises out of the reflections on the ruined symbol of the bygone glory. By giving prominence to and concentrating on the fragments of, for instance, the plaster coming off the walls, numerous breakages, and interruptions to the once smooth structure of the building, the text seems to share close affinity with the concept of the Benjaminian ruins. Furthermore, Benjamin’s emphasis on the mutual pervasiveness of the past and the present, which the hotel does embody, seems to corroborate Jeanette Malkin’s succinct observation, indicating that what in fact Benjamin proposes is “a view of history that would imitate memory” (2002, 26-­27) and, hence, “overcome this historicist hold in the past, and […] open [it] to those excluded” (26). I would claim that the application of Benjamin’s fragmentary vision of history allows to notice and eventually acknowledge those outcasts in his play that Wilson only seemingly marginalizes. Indeed, the confirmation of such a hypothesis seems to emerge together with the first notes/words of the fugue answer (comes/riposte) introduced in the second voice thinly whispered by Mrs. Bellotti, who visits the hotel while seeking for her son, a former tenant: “Excuse me, is Mr. Katz in? I’m Mrs. Bellotti. Horse Bellotti’s mother. Mr. Katz is gonna give him another chance, aint’ he? He ain’t gonna kick him out, is he?”13 (I:11). Mrs. Bellotti’s voice clearly imitates the leading motif of the first subject. She also cannot confront the present condition, this time of her son, who, “a nice boy” (I:12) in the past, might be suffering from a serious nervous breakdown, which seems to be analogous to the ruined shape and reputation of the hotel itself: He’s just different. He’s been to a psychiatrist and he gave him a complete examination and he said there wasn’t anything wrong with David mentally; he’s just shy. I tell him – Horse… you should meet someone. He’s too adult to live with us. He’s thirty-­six. He and

12 It is worth emphasizing here the dissimilitude between the concepts of the motif and the leitmotif [Leitmotiv] in the context of the seventeenth-­and eighteenth-­century music. The motif is to be understood as the smallest formal and structural unit within a subject of a fugue, composed of several sounds. The leitmotif, on the other hand, has its roots in the late eighteenth-­century orchestral compositions and its purpose is to evoke an immediate association with a particular character, place or idea of a musical story created by a composer in an instrumental piece. 13 From now on a reference such as (I:11) will refer to the act followed by the page number of the 1998 edition of The Hot l Baltimore. 

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his dad don’t get along. I tell him he has to try to meet people – to meet a girl, and he says how would I do that? And I don’t know what to tell him […] (I: 13)

Imitating the subject, the metaphorically apprehended melodic line of this tonal answer14 refers unambiguously to the initial idea introduced by Bill and the call girl, that is, the brooding over the dilapidated condition of the present in comparison with the glorious past. Simultaneously with Mrs. Bellotti’s speech sound the contrapuntal voices verbalized by other residents or visitors to the hotel. April Green, a prostitute over thirty, is indefatigably fighting for the hot water: “All right, all right, what’s the story this time? Last week it was a plumber in the basement; two weeks before that he said the boiler was busted; the time before that, the coldest fuckin’ day of the year, he’s got some excuses so stupid I can’t even remember them” (I:14). Her voice is accompanied by the lovely motif of Millie, a retired waitress, who recalls the haunting times of her affluent childhood and adolescence spent in a huge old Victorian house outside Baton Rouge; an amazing old house, really, with – when you ask about spirits – oh, well, you couldn’t keep track of them all. Banging doors, throwing silverware, breaking windows. They were all over the house. There was a black maid – slave girl, I suppose, and a revolutionary soldier and his girl, and a Yankee carpetbagger, and a saucy little imp of a girl who sashayed about very mischievously. She’s been pushed out of a window and was furious about it. Storming through the upstairs, slamming windows shut all over the house. It was quite an active place.15 (II: 44)

Traditionally associated with the problems unresolved while being alive, the apparitions and spirits from the past which are prevalent in Millie’s story and, as the Southern literary tradition holds, still exist in the present, seem to propel the fugue continuity and, in consequence, are to lead logically to the final coda in Act Three of the play.

14 A tonal answer is to strictly follow the established harmonic ratios of the subject to the answer itself, thus beginning with a prominent dominant or subdominant note and then imitating the melody of the subject. Notwithstanding the obvious impossibility of determining the harmonic function of the first note, the answer initiated by Mrs. Bellotti’s voice might be considered “tonal” as it seems to commence analogously with the idea of the quest for the bygone balance and harmony. 15 The omnipresence of ghosts in the Southern literary tradition is not only an indication of the writers’ interest in the supernatural, but also, as Patricia Yaeger points out, it is an expression of “coping with metaphysical conundrums” (2000, 57).

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For the time being, however, the structural uniformity of the fugue motivic work is still in progress and further enhanced by the voice of Mr. Morse, a seventy-­ year-­old gentleman past his age of splendor, who fiercely protests against dampness in his room: I have a complaint. Who’s here? I have a complaint. […] Listen to me. […] Listen to my voice. […] My window won’t close. It’s swelled tight and there is an inch crack that won’t close all the way. […] I put a towel into the crack and I wrapped up my chest and neck, and it still didn’t help. And I – I am going to hold the hotel responsible, I got very little sleep. You’re responsible if something isn’t done. Because there’s dampness in my room. And if I’m taken to the hospital, I’m going to hold the hotel responsible for the bill! (I: 17)

That condensation of accompanying voices seems to constitute the play’s first episodic material, which also consists of simultaneously sounding and overlapping dialogues between April and Millie, the call girl and Bill, Jackie and April, Jackie and Mr. Morse, or Mr. Katz16 and Suzy. The premises of the music theory state that the transition from the exposition to the transposition, that is, a subsequent part of the fugue, is to be conducted through the modulation of the first subject’s melodic line and its succeeding occurrence in each voice. The playwright seems to meticulously follow these objectives as he begins Act Two, which clearly demonstrates the characteristics of the transposition, with a literal fight between two characters/voices, during a little game of checkers. Therefore, the very argument might determine the proper modulation of the initial subject as Mr. Morse and Jamie, a young rebel, also seem to battle with each other over the concepts of memory and the past: Morse takes Jamie’s checker from the board and throws it to the floor. Glares at him. […] Jamie takes a checker of Mr. Morse’s and throws it on the floor. They glare [Beat]. Mr. Morse takes a checker and throws it on the floor. Each further move is an affront. They glare. Jamie getting hurt and belligerent, Mr. Morse angry and belligerent – Jamie takes a checker and throws it to the floor [Beat]. Mr. Morse takes the candy stick from Jamie’s mouth and throws it to the floor [Beat]. Jamie takes a pencil from Mr. Morse’s pocket, breaks it in his hands, throws it on the floor. Mr. Morse stands. Jamie stands. Mr. Morse takes up the board, spilling the checkers, and with difficulty tears it in two along the spine and throws it on the floor. Jamie glares. Takes up the checkers box, tears it in two, and throws it to the floor [Beat]. Mr. Morse overturns Jamie’s chair. Now they grapple,

16 The character of Mr. Katz, the hotel manager, seems to bear an uncanny resemblance to one of the iconic figures in the American literature, James Gatz, alias Jay Gatsby. Similarly to his predecessor, Mr. Katz also strives for re-­establishing the magnificence, however illusory, of the once prestigious and respected human settlement.

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slapping weakly at each other and making incoherent noises and grunts, two very weak individuals trying to do injury to each other. Injury would be impossible. (II: 36-­37)

While Mr. Morse maintains that the dilapidated condition of the Baltimore modern society is a consequence of the mendacious propaganda of the young, Jamie rejects flatly Mr. Morse’s claims and accuses him of inertia and intellectual stasis. The coda, or Act Three, does not, however, provide a final resolution to the argument. The hotel cannot be saved from demolition and the cadence, the very end of the work, repeats introductory dilemmas. Aptly, it is even the very writing process of the play that seems to invoke the compositional structure of the fugue.17 In the Introduction to the drama Wilson revealed that the design of each of the characters was anticipated by the idea that occurred to him while observing the actors of the Circle Repertory Company18 during one of the workshops (1998, 3). The actors’ physical forms composed of intricately intertwined muscles, veins, and bones, constituted the practical essence of the work as well as disclosed the very technical acting abilities of the performers. That, in turn, might instantly evoke the image of the sixteenth-­century anatomist who, in the course of dissection, endeavored to unveil, procure, and master the most unattainable enigmas of the human body’s functioning. Therefore, since the “[a]natomical truth” in the Renaissance times, once again to invoke Devon L. Hodges’ reflection, “was not based simply on the observation and enumeration of parts of a dissected body [as] an anatomist also claimed the ability to see how each part of the body revealed the divine purpose of its creation” (1985, 4), Wilson’s writing method seems to correspond with the objectives motivating the then scientist. If thus the latter’s “pursuit of the final cause of structure, and his frequent ability to find it, made him seem both a metaphysician of godlike powers and a skilled investigator of sensible phenomena” (Hodges 1985, 4), it might be proposed that Wilson, a twentieth-­century playwright, does also follow the same premises. Judging the actors’ physical and emotional predispositions to best embody the specific 17 It is worth noting that the characters’ voices and their overlapping conversations might be recognized, I would suggest, as the overtones projecting in the spatial construct of the dramatic text. 18 The Circle Repertory Company (initially designated the Circle Theatre Company) was a New York theatre company established, rumour has it, during an informal meeting of the Café Cino’s former members, on the 14th of July, 1969, with the playwright Lanford Wilson, the directors Marshal W. Mason and Rob Thirkield, and the actress Tanya Berezin, who played the roles of the troupe’s founding fathers.

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personae as well as admitting that the very idea of writing in that manner was a scientifically fascinating process to him, Wilson seems to become, I believe, the twentieth-­century incarnation of the Barber-­Surgeons’ member who begins his endeavor with investigating the physical properties of particular human beings and only then decides upon their practical use in the work. What is more, aside from developing the characters in the play for particular performers, Wilson did reveal that their subsequent appearance in the drama was supposed to be led rhythmically. That, once more, invokes the principles of the Baroque fugue. The drama ceases to be just an entertaining lexical composition on the life in Baltimore, although neither is the statement supposed to divest the play of its entertaining qualities, nor should it suggest that the examination of the twentieth-­century theatrical works might be reduced to deciphering the word structures only. What it does indicate, however, is the play’s metamorphosis into a (Neo)Baroque spectacle which, to invoke William Egginton’s general comment about the Baroque aesthetics, “makes a theatre out of [the] truth, by incessantly demonstrating that truth can only ever be an effect of the appearances from which we seek to free it” (2010, 2). Being “a recurrent inspiration,” as Bukhdal designates it, that twentieth-­and twenty-­first century Baroque spirit prevailing in the arts and letters gains now a new dimension determined exactly by the differentiation between the major and minor strategies introduced by Egginton in his canonical The Theatre of Truth: the Ideology of (Neo)Baroque Aesthetics (2010). That re-­consideration of terminological matrix only proves the (Neo)Baroque “disruptive potential” (Egginton 2010, 82), which turns out to be remarkably creative. Appositely, the Deleuzean fold, which propels the system’s creative destabilization, again enables that transition from the seventeenth-­century art to the modern American theatre. However, such use of the fold precludes categorical statements on such liminal categories as “old” (represented by Jamie’s viewpoint) and “new” (which is connected with Mr. Morse’s accusations), favouring instead a “trans-­historic” (Bukdahl 1998, 37) approach. Hence, there is no finality, both temporal and ontological, as well as no clear-­cut divisions between the twilight of “bygone” and the dawn of “novelty.” This seems justified since the foundation of the foregoing claim lies in the (Neo)Baroque fold that “unfurls all the way to infinity” (Deleuze 1993, 3). Therefore, even if in a state of ruin, the Baltimore hotel signifies, I would suggest, creative Baroque potentiality that allows a return to the moment of possibilities. It also triggers the emergence of a new category, that is, of the (Neo) Baroque theatre, one of whose most prominent representatives is, I believe, Lanford Wilson.

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Works Cited Aercke, Kristiaan P. 1994. Gods of Play: Baroque Festive Performances as Rhetorical Discourse. Albany: State University of New York Press. Bukdahl, Else Marie. 1998. The Baroque: A Recurrent Inspiration. Translated by Stacey M. Cozart. Copenhagen: The Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts. Curtius, Ernst Robert.  1990. European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages. Translated by Willard R. Trask. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Deleuze, Gilles. 1993. The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque. Translated by Tom Coley. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. d’Ors, Eugenio.  2010. ”The Debate on the Baroque in Pontigny.” In Baroque New Worlds: Representation, Transculturation, Counterconquest, edited by Monika Kaup and Lois Parkinson Zamora, 87-­92. Durham and London: Duke University Press. Egginton, William. 2010. The Theatre of Truth: The Ideology of (Neo)Baroque Aesthetics. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Hodges, Devon L. 1985. Renaissance Fictions of Anatomy. Amherst: The University of Massachusetts Press. Lambert, Gregg. 2004. The Return of the Baroque in Modern Culture. London, New York: Continuum. Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim. 2005. “Laocoon: An Essay upon the Limits of Painting and Poetry.” Translated by Ellen Frothingham. Mineola: Dover. Malkin, Jeanatte R. 2002. Memory-­Theatre and Postmodern Drama. Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press. Sachs, Curt. 1988. Muzyka w świecie starożytnym. Translated by Zofia Chechlińska. Warszawa: Polskie Wydawnictwo Muzyczne. Schaeffer, Bogusław. 1983. Dzieje muzyki. Warszawa: WSiP. Wilson, Lanford. 1998. The Hot l Baltimore. Collected Works. Volume II: 1970-­ 1983, 1-­66. Smith and Kraus: Lyme. Yaeger, Patricia. 2000. Dirt and Desire: Reconstructing Southern Women’s Writing 1930-­1990. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press.

Katarzyna Molek-­Kozakowska

Revising the Traditional Model of Journalism in the Context of Digital Media With the advent of new media, the question what constitutes legitimate journalism has been hotly debated. In fact, the controversy was raised more than three decades ago as a reaction to the intensifying commercialization of news industry and the subsequent tabloidization of news. In media scholarship there are various competing delineations of journalism: as a cultural artifact, an occupational practice, an ethical orientation in reporting, or a set of stylistic properties in writing (Jones and Salter 2012). This critical review article acknowledges this diversity and validates standards that distinguish professional reporters, whose role in a democracy cannot be overrated. However, it argues that since journalistic practices have been transformed, if not revolutionized, so should the conceptual bases of media scholarship and the general understanding of the nature of journalism. It posits embracing the model of remediation rather than intermediation for a more appropriate representation of the current state of journalism. In the subsequent sections the essay outlines the problems related to the traditional, normative model of journalism, which is set around the notion of objectivity. It also revisits research that demonstrates how actual journalistic practices diverge from this idealistic model. For example, sociological studies of editorial decision-­making routines show that editors follow the principles of newsworthiness rather than objectivity. Meanwhile, discourse analysts point that the prescribed neutrality and transparency of journalistic style has been displaced by a more emotion-­laden and sensationalist rhetoric. Given the rise of new media technologies, this article also attempts to delineate various dimensions of digital journalism (e.g. blogging, citizen journalism, crowd-­sourcing, advocacy journalism and news customization), trying to ascertain the advantages and disadvantages of these new formats.

The traditional model of journalism The traditional model of journalism originated in the theory of social contractualism, and the idea that informed citizens in a democracy need the free press to provide reliable accounts on the issues of governance, law and economy and to hold the political elites accountable. This thinking is best encapsulated within

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the concept of journalism as “the fourth estate” with a public mission exercised on behalf of the citizens. It has proved to be so persistent that it still transpires in some of the contemporary accounts of journalism (Allan 2004). For example, McQuail defines journalism as “the construction and publication of accounts of contemporary events, persons and circumstances, of public significance or interest, based on information acquired from reliable sources” (2013, 14). Journalism is seen here as a relatively unproblematic procedure of gathering information from “credible” sources, selection of that information in accordance with the criterion of “significance,” and publication of “accounts” that include such information, which makes reporting seem to be quite circumscribed, if not mechanical. Within the traditional model of journalism, the following characteristics of news are postulated: 1. Timeliness: having novelty and reference to or relevance for current events. 2.  Truthfulness: factual accuracy and completeness in essentials, plus verifiability. 3. Objectivity: neutrality of perspective and lack of conscious bias. 4. Independence: from sources, the objects of reporting, or vested interests. 5. Reflective, in a proportional way, of “reality” as far as possible. 6. Relevance to expected audience interests and believed relative significance. 7.  Predictability (consistency): in respect of type of event regarded as newsworthy. 8. “Narrativity”: taking a story-­telling form and structure. (McQuail 2013, 16) Besides being idealistic, this characterization of news may strike one as internally inconsistent and thus not fully applicable. For example, how to reconcile the expected neutrality of perspective and completeness of information (3, 2) with the requirement that news must be relevant to audiences and thus journalists are invited to make judgments as to its possible significance (6)? How is news to be independent from sources and interests (4), if it is to be predictable and newsworthy (7)? It is obvious that such information mostly originates with elite sources, institutions and individuals. As to the formal side of news mediation, how to superimpose a narrative structure (8) on issues that are not essentially stories, without distortions that make it impossible to reflect reality in an accurate way (5)? The traditional model of journalistic standards can also be demonstrated as fairly detached from the actual practice. Using American data, Schudson points out that the claim that journalism is supposed to be objective is “a peculiar one” (1981, 5). As a historian and sociologist, he notes that, since most news companies

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in the US have always been privately owned, and their main function is to bring profits to their owners or shareholders, it is naïve to expect that they are going to be devoted to some public mission. In fact, the notions of objectivity and neutrality are a twentieth-­century invention, as after WWI editors of news started to champion a new era of independent, unbiased journalism only to appeal to the broadest possible consumer bases (Schudson 1981, 4–5). To seal that, the codes of journalistic ethics and standards of reporting were devised and adopted by the journalistic community. As the mainstay of the traditional model of journalism, these codes are still taught in journalism courses and used by news organizations’ ombudsmen who are assigned to monitor the news for fairness.

Criticism of the traditional model Even a cursory look at any day’s newspaper headlines, broadcast news bulletins, and online news updates will reveal that much of the information prioritized there is not very useful. On reflection, the news media can be said to fail citizens in providing important and valuable issues for the public debate. Postman (1986) notes that the advent of electronic media refocused public attention from news to entertainment, which has had grave consequences for citizens’ political awareness. In addition, the everyday intake of quick-­paced, superficial and unrelated soundbites has a desensitizing effect. It produces an impression of being well-­informed, despite the fact that viewers are not being given a chance to analyze and assimilate the incoming information (Capella and Jamieson 1997). The observation that contemporary news companies have abdicated their public duty was first made within the field of the political economy of the media (Herman and Chomsky 1988, McManus 1994). Researchers predict that the growing conglomeration of news companies, orientation towards profit-­maximization, increased advertisers’ influence, and a symbiotic relationship between media and power elites will have resulted in the eventual demise of responsible reporting and investigative journalism. Indeed, costly coverage that requires time, resources and expertise is being replaced by lighter soft-­news and sensational topics (Conboy, 2002). News companies executives pressure editors, who, in turn, pressure reporters, to produce more stories at lower costs and at the same time to keep up readership figures, as journalism is still financed from advertising, whose rates depend on the range of audiences delivered by the outlet. Meanwhile, sociological studies of journalism help to understand how exactly news is produced within the increasingly corporate culture of news making. To reduce costs, news production is largely routinized and conventionalized (Tuchman 1978, Hoynes and Croteau 2002) and takes advantage of newswire materials,

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press releases and PR materials. “Churnalism” and “lazy journalism” of repeating old information garnered from the competition are widespread (McChesney and Nichols 2011). Studies of news content and agenda-­setting reveal that some demanding issues may well go uncovered, because editors’ decisions as to what to publish are guided by the principle of newsworthiness (Bell 1991). Research on news values – institutional criteria for the choice of topics that are deemed likely to attract audiences – is extensive and proves how selectivity trumps objectivity (Galtung and Ruge 1965, Harcup and O’Neill 2002). For example, priority is given to news items that are recent, intense, and wide in scope and scale. Issues that involve conflict or negativity and concern elite persons and powerful organizations are more likely to be covered. News that attracts attention should be unexpected, and yet timely and clearly delimited. It should fit in with audience’s experience, have consonance with standard schemas of coverage and some kind of cultural relevance (Bell 1991, 53–57). A good story is “exclusive” and uses predicable patterns of information arrangement offering a mixture of thematic threads. In terms of textual composition, the story is not to be too lengthy, too complicated or too time-­consuming for the reporter to prepare. The so-­called “writing objectives” also include: balance, accuracy, precision and colour (Bednarek and Caple 2012). In view of the fact that much mainstream news coverage is guided by the above routines, despite editors officially clinging to the normative notions of journalistic objectivity, the result is the loss of credibility of many news outlets. To cite some recent surveys, news credibility has plunged to unprecedented lows, with only 22% of the public in the UK, and 29% in the US “trusting the mainstream media” (Jones and Salter 2012, 114). Yet another perspective from which the traditional model of journalism is to be critically reviewed is that of discourse studies, where analysts have taken a keen interest in how reports are “constructed” with various linguistic and rhetorical means (Conboy 2002, Montgomery 2007, Richardson 2007). The discursive approach to news texts allows analyzing how newsworthiness is construed with the linguistic and, increasingly, visual resources. According to Bednarek and Caple, “such a discursive perspective allows researchers to systematically examine how particular events are construed as newsworthy, what values are emphasized in news stories, and how language and image establish events as more or less newsworthy” (2012, 80). Discourse-­oriented studies of news have shown that there is a need to redefine news, adopting a more realistic perspective: news is a construction to fit the media agenda and not the standards of objectivity. Ekstrom claims that nowadays news is largely the process of “constructing extraordinary events” and that “many of the events related by news organizations are of journalists’ own making” (2002, 266). This perspective also accounts for the increase in the level

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of sensationalism in news reporting. Journalists are aware of the fact that not all items are of equal importance or relevance, even as regards their specific target audiences, but are determined to keep readers attending to the outlet through emotional rhetoric.

Digital journalism Digital journalism, initially a competitor to mainstream journalism, has been around long enough for scholars to be able to start assessing its impact and significance. According to King, it is sustained by the emergence of a collaborative, networked social medium where access to information is free, and where “information is user-­generated, searchable, and amendable” (2010, 6). Online technological affordances enable connectivity and interactivity that displaces the traditional norms of credibility and objectivity, and brings in the new standards of transparency and depth. The rapid rise of the blogosphere can be treated as the first sign that established journalism has failed to provide the types of content and the ways of news expression wanted by the public. There is a nuanced, even if confrontational, interplay between blogging and journalism, with many successful bloggers behaving as professional journalists with many-­sided outlooks on public affairs, meticulous documentation of sources and captivating writing styles (Lowrey 2006). Well-­maintained political and economic blogs, data-­mining sites and activist accuracy-­verifying groups must be credited with filling in the functions that news companies have abandoned: fact-­checking official and PR materials, widening news agendas, spotlighting issues beyond elite-­related themes, crowd-­ sourcing information, and providing venues for activism and counter-­hegemonic discourses (Jones and Salter 2012). However, the popularity of blogs has also brought some less positive consequences: blogging displaces important practices of fieldwork journalism; it may foster partisanship and confrontation; it repackages old stories and skews the public agenda; it draws on gossip and speculation, and may carry narrowly specialized or autobiographical content. In general, blogging may have succeeded in boosting democratic participation and mobilizing citizens, but, according to Reese et al. (2007), so far it may have failed to foster critical deliberation, reciprocity and negotiation needed for consensus-­seeking within the polity. It has also contributed to the speedier decline of institutional journalism (McChesney and Nichols 2011). The advent of new media technologies has been lauded by some as a breakthrough point in the process of countering the crisis of professional journalism, and criticized by others as a failure of society to recognize that the crisis has

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been aggravated. In fact, the rise of quality citizen journalism is an indication that some elements lacking in institutional journalism needed to be corrected through deeper engagements with some topics, more transparency of sources, and multiplicity of perspectives. This can be exemplified with such successful collaborative reporting projects as Wikinews and Indymedia, whose main advantage is that they offer space for issues, voices and perspectives excluded from corporate news (Lievrouw 2011). Such projects are run by media-­savvy, highly-­skilled and committed citizen journalists. Although some local news and blog services are likely to be up to professional journalistic standards (with media monitoring organizations, such as MediaLens, or FactCheck, being a case in point), it must also be noted that citizen journalism has a strong educated middle-­class bias, as it is taken up by those who have the means and expertise to do it (Jones and Salter 2012). Not all scholars see digital journalism as a panacea for the decline of professional standards of traditional journalism. McChesney and Nichols (2011) cite some worrying data with respect to the type of newscasting practices fostered by the digital media. Firstly, it occurs that 8 out of 10 news items in digital news outlets involve “repackaged” old information repeated from old-­media sources. It appears that many online news providers are mostly aggregators, not producers, of information. Secondly, 86% of that information still originated with official sources, and did not represent independent or user-­generated perspectives, which is not that surprising if we consider that there are now 4 PR specialists for each working journalist in the US (McChesney and Nichols 2011, xi). These figures suggest that online journalism may not be that different from the “lazy journalism” and “churnalism” of some news companies. What is more, since citizen journalism is based on self-­appointed, volunteer or underpaid labor, there is slight chance of its being able to substitute for professional, accredited and paid reporters who are able to attend to and keep track of the proceedings of political, legal and economic decision-­making bodies. Last but not least, even though the internet gives citizen journalists the ability to speak, it does not guarantee their being heard. The Google search mechanism, for example, is designed to direct users to the most visited sites (with top ten popular websites attracting 75% of page-­views), thus effectively rendering the less popular sites invisible (McChesney and Nichols 2011, xii–xiii). As popularity is the main measure of success, digital journalism is prone to follow in the sensationalist footsteps of popular journalism. Additionally, through the tools of news customization (personalization of news consumption), content can be selected, reframed and modified to match an individual consumer’s demands. Unfortunately, customization limits consumers’ exposure only to issues that were chosen by themselves,

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which could ultimately lead to greater social fragmentation and de-­politicization (Jones and Salter 2012).

Conclusion Journalism tended traditionally to be reduced to inter-­mediation, which mostly included creating the channels for the flow of information between the source and the recipient. Media organizations envisioned news as a commodity that can be manufactured by some and sold to many. However, according to Lievrouw, news mediation now needs to be reconsidered as an interpersonal process of participation or intervention in the making and sharing of meaning (2011, 4–5). Users (not only reporters) expand the universe of materials and interactions. This “re-­mediation” is a hallmark of new media communications, where content, form and structure can be borrowed, adapted or mixed. Innovation, negotiation and manipulation of information become the norm rather than the exception. Also, in a “link” economy, we consume more “link-­journalism”: information that is not linked, shared, tagged or googled ceases to exist (King 2010, 13). Since journalism has been partly de-­institutionalized and news companies struggle to reinvent themselves, the traditional model of journalism requires to be redefined. The media revolution has put the old model up to a challenge, even though we do not know the long-­term consequences of the structural decline of professional journalism. Some scholars see it as a threat to a democratic public sphere, some as a chance to correct the balance of news being largely irrelevant and/or biased towards the interests of the elites. The concept of remediation has been brought to journalism studies as an attempt to more appropriately model current journalistic practices in their variety.

Works Cited Allan, Stuart. 2004. News Culture. Maidenhead: Open University Press. Bednarek, Monika, and Helen Caple. 2012. News Discourse. London: Continuum. Bell, Allan. 1991. The Language of News Media. Oxford: Blackwell. Cappella, Joseph, and Kathleen H. Jamieson. 1997. Spiral of Cynicism: The Press and the Public Good. New York: Oxford University Press. Conboy, Martin. 2002. The Press and Popular Culture. London: Sage. Ekstrom, Mats. 2002. “Epistemologies of TV Journalism.” Journalism 3.3: 259–282. Galtung, Johan, and Mari Ruge. 1965. “The Structure of Foreign News.” Journal of International Peace Research 1: 64–90.

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Harcup, Tony, and Deirdre O’Neill. 2002. “What is News? Galtung and Ruge Revisited.” Journalism Studies 2.2: 261–280. Herman, Edward, and Noam Chomsky.  1988. Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media. New York: Pantheon Books. Hoynes, William, and David Croteau. 2002. Media/Society: Industries, Images, and Audiences. London: Sage. Jones, Janet, and Lee Salter. 2012. Digital Journalism. London: Sage. King, Elliot.  2010. Free for All: The Internet’s Transformation of Journalism. Evanston: Northwestern University Press. Lievrouw, Leah. 2011. Alternative and Activist New Media. Cambridge: Polity Press. Lowrey, Wilson.  2006. “Mapping the Journalism-­ blogging Relationship.” Journalism: Theory, Practice and Criticism 7.4: 477–500. McChesney, Robert, and John Nichols. 2011. The Death and Life of American Journalism. New York: Nation Books. McManus, John. 1994. Market-­driven Journalism. Thousand Oaks: Sage. McQuail, Dennis. 2013. Journalism and Society. London: Sage. Montgomery, Martin.  2007. The Discourse of Broadcast News. A Linguistic Approach. London: Routledge. Postman, Neil. 1986. Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business. London: Methuen. Reese, Stephen, Rutigliano, Lou, Hyun Kideuk, and Jaekwan Jeong.  2007. “Mapping the Blogosphere: Professional and Citizen-­based Media in the Global News Arena.” Journalism 8.3: 235–261. Richardson, John. 2007. Analysing Newspapers. Basingstoke: Palgrave. Schudson, Michael. 1981. Discovering the News: A Social History of American Newspapers. New York: Basic Books. Tuchman, Gaye. 1978. Making News: A Study in the Construction of Reality. New York: Free Press.

Katarzyna Pisarska

The Dystopian Grotesque in Enki Bilal’s The Carnival of Immortals In his seminal work Rabelais and His World (1965), Mikhail Bakhtin discusses the grotesque in connection with medieval festive laughter, whose ultimate social manifestation was carnival. In contrast to official celebrations, which reaffirmed the existing laws, values and power relationships, carnival aroused in man a sense of victory over fear, as it temporarily suspended “all hierarchical rank, privileges, norms, and prohibitions” (1984, 10). The subversive force of the carnivalistic grotesque, which highlighted the material bodily element (18-­19) and relied on the logic of upside-­down and inside-­out, i.e. the logic of debasement, subversion and travesty (11, 81), made the serious and the terrifying appear ludicrous, the official and the “high” become “low” and degraded. Bakhtin’s optimistic concept of the grotesque (cf. Janus-­Sitarz 1997, 42), a regenerative principle which brings together the affirmation of the body and the levelling universal laughter, can be juxtaposed with that of Wolfgang Kayser, for whom the grotesque – inherently horrifying and bizarre – offers an estrangement of the audience’s own world, foregrounding its “progressive dissolution” (1966, 184-­185). The grotesque break-­up of the reader’s/observer’s familiar reality manifests itself in the “fusion of realms” we have considered to be stable and distinct, in “the abolition of the law of statics, the loss of identity, the distortion of ‘natural’ size and shape,” as well as in “the suspension of the category of objects, the destruction of personality [and] the fragmentation of the historical order” (185). Whereas the Bakhtinian grotesque helps materialise “a utopian belief in a future time in which fear and authority are vanquished” (Morris 1994, 207), Kayser’s grotesque seems to offer a good underpinning for the dystopia, as it questions the reliability of our own reality so that we “feel that we would be unable to live in this changed world” (185).1

1 A similar point is made by Philip Thompson, according to whom the grotesque world always remains ours, “real and immediate,” regardless of the impossibility of presented events or the bizarreness of its characters and settings (1972, 23). In Kayser’s definition of the grotesque, the yardstick lies in the reader’s/audience’s view of the world in light of which the “reality” presented in the text is crooked, bizarre, negative, worse – in a word, abnormal in relation to our normative standpoint. A similar perspective is essential to

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This essay explores the uses of the grotesque within the dystopian framework in The Carnival of Immortals (Fr. La Foire aux Immortels, 1980), a science fiction graphic novel by Enki Bilal. Set in 2023, the novel depicts Paris under a Fascist regime headed by Governor Jean-­Ferdinand Choublanc, with the population divided into the privileged and the oppressed, living in isolation in their respective sectors of the city. The official status quo is disturbed by the arrival of a spaceship with Egyptian gods, who need fuel from earth for their space travel. In the meantime, a space capsule falls down in the city with the hibernated body of Alcide Nikopol, who has spent thirty years in outer space as punishment for his conscientious objection. As the immortals of ancient myths negotiate with the human authorities of future Paris, the rebel god Horus allies himself with the former convict, Nikopol, and takes control of the latter’s body in order to overthrow the degenerate totalitarian system and exact his own cosmic revenge on the other gods. It is my contention that in Bilal’s work the dystopian grotesqueness (sensu Kayser) of the Parisian regime is continually undermined by the carnivalistic grotesque deployed through the collaboration of images and text. Due to the playful juxtaposition of the serious and the comic on the diegetic and extradiegetic levels, which disturbs the logic of binary opposites such as earthly/divine, human/ animal, high/low, serious/humorous, etc., the seemingly grim representation loses its edge, and the normative character of the official culture as regards values, discourse and physical appearance is shown as unnatural, absurdly distorted and thus ridiculous. The world depicted in The Carnival of Immortals is at the same time familiar and strange to the reader: the novel presents the city of Paris in the year 2023, renamed Greater Paris in the aftermath of two nuclear wars which have affected its cityscape, political system and social tissue. The city’s dystopian characteristics emerge through a combination of visual and verbal signifiers, the latter operating on the level of both dialogues and narratorial comment. The grim Greater-­Parisian reality is communicated as early as the exposition to the novel, which informs us that Fascism is the city’s ruling system and all signals of democracy (e.g. elections) are mere masquerade. We learn, moreover, that Greater Paris has become a place of prejudice and exclusion reflected in its internal subdivision into “the Central City (inhabited by a social elite, a massive standing army and the ruling class) Lyman Tower Sargent’s definition of the dystopia, i.e. “a non-­existent society described in considerable detail and normally located in time and space that the author intended a contemporaneous reader to view as considerably worse than the society in which that reader lived” (1994, 9; emphasis added).

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and the Second Sector, surrounding the first and extending as far as the eye can see,” which the narrator describes as “this world of degeneracy, poverty and filth” where security is difficult to maintain (Bilal 2002, 1). In his study, Philip Thompson notes that “the term grotesque has always been applied to the visual rather than purely verbal”; it is not surprising, therefore, that the grotesque is usually concerned with the physical and the bodily aspects which are shown as exaggerated, outlandish and bizarre (1972, 57). In The Carnival of Immortals, an example of the genre of the graphic novel, which relies more on the pictorial than verbal modes of representation, the physical grotesqueness is accordingly brought to the fore as a prominent element of the new dystopian reality. The Second Sector absorbs the population who is mutated, mutilated and deformed after the two nuclear wars – it is home to outcasts of all descriptions, opposing the racial and anthropological unity of the Central City. In this post-­ apocalyptic dystopian space, the human body becomes alienated (cf. Kayser 1966, 183-­184); first, it undergoes hybridization (the district is full of people with catlike/animal-­like faces), and second, it is diseased and afflicted by sores, crippled and lacking limbs and fingers. Worse still, it is often shown in a state of fragmentation which is both horrifying and ludicrous. The above observations call to mind Thompson’s claim that the grotesque thrives on disharmony, both in its own structure and the response it elicits, while the conflict invariably involves “a mixture in some way or other of both the comic and the terrifying (or the disgusting, repulsive, etc.) in a problematical (i.e. not readily resolvable) way” (1972, 20-­21). The seedy district in the Second Sector constitutes a spatial reflection of its diseased population. The streets are littered with huge Menkar eggs (or the shells left after hatching), there are drunkards (or, perhaps, the homeless) lying around, and strange animals come out of the ground or fly overhead. One of the places Nikopol finds himself in is the cemetery supermarket in Alesia Quarter, a macabre combination of a graveyard and a shopping precinct, in which tombstones are adjacent to seedy cafés, reincarnation centres, hard-­boiled Menkar eggs stores and the pulpits of street preachers. However, even this abhorrent and morbid place is finally shown through the prism of carnivalistic humour connected with the acts of disguise and dialogues between Horus and Nikopol, who first appropriate a stranger’s clothes and leave him naked in the cold and then kill a militiaman guarding the passage to the First Sector in order to get his uniform. The repulsive and horrifying images of the victims of the travesty – the poor stranger’s trembling body covered in red sores, and the militiaman’s face with the burnt-­out bleeding eyes – are juxtaposed with the farcical bickering between the man and the god inhabiting his body, which makes the reader continually oscillate between shock and amusement.

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Accordingly, throughout The Carnival of Immortals, the scenes of horror, atrocity, violence, as well as the moments of solemnity or the sublime are often accompanied by irreverent dialogues between Nikopol and Horus, or tongue-­in-­ cheek comments from the narrator, which add, using Edwards and Graulund’s phrase, “touches of humour through an ironic treatment of the characters and the development of a bathetic contrast between drama and absurdity” (2013, 5). The protagonist duo is often subject to ironic extradiegetic observations, which happens, for example, at the dramatic moment in a disused underground station, when Horus, after fitting Nikopol with a prosthetic leg made of a piece of a railway track, takes possession of the man’s body. The picture shows Nikopol suspended in the air, twisted in a grotesque pose and surrounded by a glow which stands for Horus. The narrator takes this opportunity to mock his two protagonists and the union of human and divine by means of text-­balloons which communicate the following: “Horus of Hierakonopolis, god, dematerialized” – “Alcide Nikopol, human, completely overcome” – “Passersby” (to draw attention to the bizarre creatures in red robes witnessing Horus’s incarnation) (21). The grotesque logic, which juxtaposes the serious with the humorous, operates also through the authorial juxtaposition of voices representative, respectively, of the regime and the opposition in the form of newspaper clippings. The first of the three black and white panels incorporated in the colour panels of the main narrative shows the excerpts from three regime newspapers and one short note from a resistance bulletin. The newspapers loyal to Choublanc relate the alleged “takeover” of Nikopol’s capsule and the latter’s arrest by the Militia forces, as well as the Governor’s negotiations with “the mysterious occupants of the pyramid” to the alleged benefit of all Parisians. When juxtaposed with the reader’s knowledge of the events and of Choublanc’s true self-­serving intentions, the discourse of the state propaganda appears as sycophantic and mendacious, and reveals the ugly face of the regime and its manipulation techniques. The single note written on a typewriter in a style reminiscent of the speech of the inhabitants of the Second Sector mocks the lies of the regime in a derisive laughter of the rejected lower stratum of the society, which is foregrounded by the onomatopoeic “ha ha ha” (15). The grotesque which thrives on the distorted and the sinister while simultaneously fostering a sense of the ridiculous, can also be observed in the Parisian political system and its elites, representing if not the fragmentation – as Kayser would have it (1966, 185) – then a reversal of the historical order to the 1920s, 30s and 40s. In terms of symbolism and discourse, the Choublanquist regime draws on the ideology of Italian Fascism and German Nazism. The Governor looks like Il Duce – bald, overweight, and dressed in a uniform which resembles black uniforms of the SS with breeches broadened at the thighs and black boots. The

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soldiers and militiamen wear green-­grey coats and helmets reminiscent of those worn by the German Wehrmacht. The main symbol of the regime is a black cross, either one with a white lining or displayed against the white background, which brings to mind the image of the Nazi swastika. The terrifying aesthetics of Fascism and Nazism described above is complemented by the make-­up comprising the official colours of the state – white, black and red – worn by the Governor and his clique, as well as by the privileged of the First Sector. On the one hand, the make-­up highlights the alienation of the human face (and thus also of the human face of the system) in the post-­apocalyptic dystopia in much the same way as the mutations alienate the human features of the inhabitants of the Second Sector.2 The “masques” of individual representatives of the state reflect the grotesque abnormality of the regime at large, with its mendacity and criminal activities cloaked by the propagandist discourse. On the other hand, the make-­up also foregrounds the grotesquely exaggerated features of the Choublanquist humanity – prominent heads and napes, fleshy faces, chubby cheeks, bags under the eyes, while the red pouting lips, artificial eyelashes and long red-­varnished nails compromise the avowedly phallocratic regime by giving it a touch of effeminacy. Moreover, the make-­up enhances the theatricality and ludicrousness of the system, which earns its representatives the name of “the decadent painted clowns of Fascism” (59) from their revolutionary adversaries.3 The official system, grotesque as it is, reveals the tendency to perpetuate itself in an unchanged form, which is reflected in Governor Choublanc’s desire for immortality (or even two-­three hundred more years on earth), for which he is ready to secretly trade the city’s dwindling fuel resources to the Egyptian gods. While meting out death to its political adversaries, the regime itself must stay alive. As much is conveyed in the Governor’s speech delivered before a hockey match between the Black Arrows, a Parisian team, and the Red Bullets, a Czecho-­Soviet team from Bratislava. The sport not only serves the state’s objective of promoting the physical health and stamina among its people (in line with the Nazi or Fascist ideology); it is also a tangible representation of the unwavering strength and vigour of the regime itself – “the robust health of Fascist ideology” and “the strength and vitality of the new Parisian race” (24). 2 As such, Paris as a social body is a grotesque city, as it contains in itself the poles of the normative and the abnormal, which are, however, in a constant flux, challenging and redefining each other. 3 Interestingly, the tyrant is given the surname Choublanc, which literally means “white cabbage” and constitutes a humorous clash with the posh double-­barrelled name Jean-­Ferdinand.

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Moreover, the hockey match presided by the Governor conforms to Bakhtin’s ideas regarding the official feasts of the state, which asserted all that was “stable, unchanging, perennial: the existing hierarchy, the existing religious, political, and moral values, norms, and prohibitions” (1984, 9). Bakhtin further claims that official feasts promoted the truth which was “already established,” “predominant,” “eternal” and “indisputable,” while “the tone of the official feast was monolithically serious” and excluded laughter (1984, 9). When the Horus-­Nikopol hybrid gets involved in the game on the side of the Red Bullets, who have been getting a beating from the Black Arrows, they introduce into the official feast an element of carnivalistic mayhem, based on travesty and the logic of upside-­down and inside-­out. By means of ritualistic violence (embodied in bloody sports) inflicted upon the bodies of the regime players, which recalls the mockery and physical thrashing of the carnival tradition, the two protagonists bring their adversaries down, and also, metaphorically, they mock and degrade the official body of the state and its propaganda. They lower, using Bakhtin’s phrase, “all that is high, spiritual, ideal, abstract […] to the material level, to the sphere of earth and body in their indissoluble unity” (1984, 19-­20). The protean quality of carnival laughter, with its “continual shifting from top to bottom, from front to rear,” with “parodies, travesties, humiliations, profanations, crownings and uncrownings” (Bakhtin 1984, 11), can be noticed in the further antics of Horus-­Nikopol, in whose union the individual human body becomes a universal body as the temporal meets the eternal. Having won the victory for the Communist team, Horus decides to change colours and through Nikopol asks for political asylum in Greater Paris. Choublanc intends to use this opportunity to strengthen his position and the authority of his office; however, Nikopol, who was going to be used as the regime’s fool, turns the tables on the Governor (thanks to Horus superpowers) and makes Choublanc abdicate in his favour in front of the cameras. The deposition of the ruler is accompanied by the exchange of the positions between the king and the fool, as the Governor is not only mocked but also, eventually, certified as insane, ending up in a madhouse. Despite their apparent differences, the earthly and divine regimes seem to be equally reactionary. Horus’s plan is to seize total power in Paris and, consequently, to assume control over its fuel resources; this will give him the upper hand in his dealings with the divine government, whose authority he challenges, reducing the Egyptian gods to the position of his suppliants. Paradoxically, while challenging the authority of “Anubis and his clique of sluggish homebodies,” whose council nonetheless retains some appearance of democracy, Horus reveals his own egotism, “unbridled ambition” and “a savage hatred of [his] race” (40), the qualities which coupled with his supernatural powers make him a perfect candidate for

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another tyrant and manipulator. Nikopol becomes painfully aware of Horus’s despotic inclinations when the god appropriates his body to ask for an asylum in the Fascist regime: You turn me off and on like some damn light bulb, you use and abuse my body like some robot toy and, worse still, you make me act politically in total contradiction to my beliefs […]. You’re worse than all the Mussolinis, Hitlers, Stalins and Choublancs put together… You’re nothing but a totalitarian, ambitious, paranoid, bloodthirsty, inhuman egomaniac. (39)

The above-mentioned situation not only highlights the loss of Nikopol’s identity through Horus’s treatment of his body as a mechanical device (cf. Kayser 1966, 183) but it points again to the fact that the grotesque in Bilal relies on the ambiguous nature of the abnormal (cf. Edwards and Graulund 2013, 8). Horus is equally abnormal in his intentions as Choublanc: one would like to rule Paris, the other – the entire universe. Significantly, mirroring Horus’s actions in relation to Nikopol, the other gods choose a real robot, Chief Sergeant XB2, as their figurehead in the forthcoming elections. If successful and chosen Governor, the robot can give them access to the much needed fuel. XB2 was launched into space in the same shuttle as Nikopol and returned to earth around the same time as his fellow human convict. In a playful twist, the human and the mechanical become the twin objects of the same divine comedy, which is foregrounded by Nikopol and XB2’s shared predicament as former exiles in space. In this way, the “electoral masquerade” anticipated by the narrator at the beginning of the novel truly takes place, its authors, however, being the gods, who manipulate the gullible or helpless lower forms into playing out the divine scenario. In this light, the fact that Nikopol’s face has been modelled by Enki Bilal on the face of the German actor Bruno Ganz (see Birek 1991, 54) acquires a new significance, as Nikopol becomes a performer in the carnival of the immortals, his Bruno Ganz face working as yet another “mask,” foregrounding the grotesqueness of the human in a world shaped by divine powers. At one point, Nikopol anticipates the turn of events following the Governor’s elections that Horus intends to win: “The voters don’t give a damn about our moves, just like in 1940… And the powers that be, the real ones, will use our little diversion to make their dictatorship even more brutal and put new men forward who will push us aside, then wipe us out…” (50). Although the antics of the Horus-­Nikopol duo expose to ridicule and shake the foundations of the hateful Fascist regime of Greater Paris, its eventual downfall and establishment of a new and allegedly more egalitarian system takes place through the agency of the other Egyptian gods, who represent “the universal order and holy eternity” (4). Having Horus imprisoned, Anubis and his cronies use Nikopol in the same way as Horus

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has intended before – they get unrestricted access to the city’s fuel resources, in exchange for their “benevolent and discreet protection” and “the establishment of a new political regime” of Nikopol’s choosing (58). The new regime, effected by Egyptian deities through their mock-­governor, obliterates the boundary between the two previously divided sectors, in this way uniting the lower and the upper strata of the body politic, and opening, if only theoretically, “a new era of equality and revolutionary hope for all Parisians” (58). The new power, installed in the Élysée Palace in place of the Fascist Governor, imposes its own colour fashion – red for the hair and green for the lips, which makes the Comrades look almost as grotesque as their Choublanquist predecessors. Again the loyal newspapers are helping the authorities (this time from the Left) to consolidate their power challenged by political adversaries (i.e. the Fascist underground press and terrorist forces, a reverse situation with regard to the beginning of the novel), which gives the reader a disturbing feeling of the repetitiveness of historical processes. However, in the midst of the new masquerade, Alcide Nikopol, the “liberator of Paris” (58), its “hero and saviour” (60), loses his wits – he spends whole days reciting Baudelaire and laughing for no apparent reason (60).4 Interestingly, Nikopol, the vanquisher of Fascism, is placed in a psychiatric hospital next to Governor Choublanc, with whom he once swapped places. As the pyramid of the Egyptians leaves the astroport with the fresh load of fuel and the rebel Horus imprisoned for “seven long fractions of eternity” (57), the two madmen, clowns of history, bide their time away from the stage on which they played the role of kings. The carnival of immortals ends and so does its regenerative utopian mayhem. The status quo is restored and men are left to struggle in their imperfect fallen world. As “the unfortunate, the luckless, the pitiful Alcide Nikopol” (62), laughing like crazy, raises his prayers to Satan in Baudelaire’s litany, the narrator recounts the concerns of the new state: limping economy, insufficient energy resources, the danger of wars with other cities, terrorist actions by the Fascist resistance, the troubled co-­existence with quickly reproducing winged creatures from the extra-­terrestrial Dipha colony, as well as the social, biological and sanitary consequences of the fusion of the two Sectors (62). The final reunion of the two political enemies, who virtually match each other in the state of grotesque insanity, is the apparent expression of a far-­reaching scepticism which ultimately subjects the story to a mode of universal irony.

4 The impression of masquerade is augmented by the fact that the insane Nikopol is impersonated for the public benefit by his son, Alcide Jr, who is a spitting image of his father.

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Works Cited Bakhtin, Mikhail. 1984. Rabelais and His World. Translated by Helene Iswolsky. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Bilal, Enki. 2002. The Carnival of Immortals. Translated by Taras Otus. In The Nikopol Trilogy, 1-­62. Hollywood, CA: Humanoids Publishing. Birek, Wojciech. 1991. “Galeria: Enki Bilal.” Nowa Fantastyka 3: 17-­20, 53-­56. Edwards, Justin, and Rune Graulund.  2013. Grotesque (New Critical Idiom). London and New York: Routledge. Janus-­Sitarz, Anna. 1997. Groteska literacka: od Diabła w Damaszku po Becketta i Mrożka. Kraków: Universitas. Kayser, Wolfgang. 1966. The Grotesque in Art and Literature. Translated by Ulrich Weisstein. New York: McGraw Hill. Morris, Pam, ed. 1994. The Bakhtin Reader: Selected Writings of Bakhtin, Medvedev and Voloshinov. London: Arnold. Sargent, Lyman Tower. 1994. “The Three Faces of Utopianism Revisited.” Utopian Studies 5.1: 1-­37. Thompson, Philip. 1972. The Grotesque (Critical Idiom). London: Methuen.

Aleksandra Szczypa

Prospero Re-­Imagined: The Character of Prospero in Modern Science Fiction If a play by Shakespeare was to be set in space, The Tempest would be the perfect candidate. Its themes of dangerous sea voyages and geographic discoveries are easily transferred into the science fiction context. Whereas practically every tiny bit of our home planet has been meticulously described, mapped and photographed, and its large areas are under constant surveillance by satellites hovering over our heads, the vast expanses of space are still a mystery. When technological developments allow humans to set out in search of intelligent life forms or life-­supporting planets, the emotions accompanying the adventurers leaving the Earth and the narrations which will arise around their feat are likely to mirror those which surrounded fifteenth-­or sixteenth-­century mariners leaving the familiar shores. Even the vocabulary of space travels, both scientific and popular, is mainly derived from the nautical context: we hear about space-­ships and vessels, navigating, fleets, captains and admirals. And what a better metaphor for a newly discovered planet than a desert island, situated far away from the safety of the mainland, equally promising and threatening? For all those reasons, the plot of The Tempest fits neatly into the science fiction context, and it is probably the most frequently referenced Shakespearian play in this genre. It has even been referred to as “proto-­science-­fiction, a response to the utopian possibility of literally finding/founding new worlds in America, of using accumulated human knowledge to start anew” (Howard 2007, 315). Two works of science fiction have been selected for the purposes of the present article: the 1956 Fred M. Wilcox’s film Forbidden Planet and Dan Simmons’s two-­novel cycle Ilium/Olympos. The latter is constructed around Homer’s Iliad as well as The Tempest and abounds in references to various literary works spanning from the antiquity to the present. The allusions to Shakespeare’s play it includes are quite direct – among the characters of the cycle we find Prospero, Sycorax, Setebos, Caliban, Ariel and Miranda. Shakespearian protagonists are obviously “updated” to suit the high-­tech context of the distant future, but their mutual relationships and frequent use of quotations from the play in their speech leave no doubt that The Tempest was an important source for the cycle. On the other hand, Forbidden Planet is a much more complicated case. The film contains no direct allusions to Shakespeare’s play in character names or place names; no quotations

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appear in the dialogues, neither is there any mention of The Tempest as the film’s inspiration in its credit sequence. As Judith Buchanan notes, the contemporary reviews of Forbidden Planet tried looked for its sources in the King Kong movie or in Dr Jekyll and Mr. Hyde story (2001, 149). It was not until 1961 when Kingsley Amis in his New Maps of Hell made the first vague suggestion about the play having an “indirect influence on science fiction,” and on Forbidden Planet in particular (after Buchanan 2001, 150). Subsequently, the critical trend of connecting Wilcox’s film and The Tempest had become so inveterate by the 1970s that later reviewers discussed the relationship between the two as if it had been the point of departure for analyzing Forbidden Planet since the very day of its premiere. Buchanan (152–153) also points out that the claim about the film’s connection with Shakespeare’s play was made by one of the people indirectly involved in making it; namely, by Irving Block, the co-­writer of the story upon which it was based. However, the interview for the magazine Cinéfantastique, in which the statement was made, was conducted in 1975, and by that time, the filmmakers who could confirm or disprove Block’s testimony had already died. It is difficult to assess, therefore, to what extent the film’s connection with The Tempest was a conscious artistic decision; finding the answer to this question is not, however, the point of this article. Buchanan argues that the intentionality of the filmmakers in making a reference to Shakespeare’s play is not a prerequisite to interpreting Forbidden Planet in the light of its relationship with The Tempest, which offers a much richer reading of the issues the film presents. As she claims, “an interpretative reading of a work of art should not be limited by consciously acknowledged authorial intentions since that work may legitimately live beyond these in ways not anticipated at its moment of composition yet still entirely consistent with the original artistic vision” (154). Still, I shall begin my discussion of the two works with Simmons’s duology, whose intertextual links to Shakespeare and other authors function as the foundation on which the cycle is constructed. Ilium/Olympos is a highly complex structure with three main storylines, very distant in terms of their setting, protagonists and plot, which converge only near the end of the cycle. The one which is of interest for this article takes place on Earth in an unspecified distant future, where humans protected and cared for by robots lead shallow, carefree lives. They have no practical skills or knowledge about the world they live in or their past. They feel no fear of aging, death or disease, as any injury is instantly treated in a place called “the firmary.” Everybody lives until they are a hundred years old, when, as it is believed, they join the so-­called post-­ humans, a more developed human race, in their cities in the orbit of the planet. It takes one man who is able to think outside the box to change the course of things. Harman, nearing the end of his earthly life, wants to find the post-­humans and

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ask them about the order they imposed on the humankind. To do that, he travels to the orbital city. This is where he learns that the post-­humans have been long dead. More importantly, this is also where he meets Prospero. Prospero of Ilium/Olympos is an artificial intelligence entity appearing in the form of a hologram. It is the personification of the post-­Internet information network called logosphere, endowed with self-­awareness and identity. The form of Prospero was in no way imposed on it; it was its conscious and independent choice. Its identity as Prospero is highlighted not only by frequent use of quotations from The Tempest, but also by its peculiar appearance: Prospero sat there in a long, royal-­blue robe covered with brightly colored embroidery showing galaxies, suns, comets, and planets. He held a carved staff in one age-­mottled right hand and there was a foot-­thick book under the palm of his left hand. The carved chair with the broad armrests was not quite a throne, but close enough to impart a sense of magisterial authority reinforced by the magus’s cool stare. The man was mostly bald, but a mane of vestigial white hair poured back over his ears and fell in curls to the blue of his robe. The once-­grand head was now perched on an old man’s withered neck, but the face was iron-­firm with character, showing […] a sorcerer’s thin lips turned up in ancient habits of irony. (Simmons 2003, 491)

Shakespeare’s play offers almost no clues regarding Prospero’s appearance, apart from the presence of the attributes of his involvement in magic – the book and the staff. When faced with the decision concerning the construction of its identity, the avatar of the logosphere chose among multiple identities of his Shakespearian predecessor – a father, an exiled ruler, a betrayed brother, a coloniser – and focused solely on Prospero, the magus, building up this association almost to the point of ridicule. This image may indeed seem obsolete in a world in which the development of technology allowed to connect the entire planet in one advanced network of information. However, it points to two aspects of magic which make it a suitable allegory of what Simmons’s Prospero personifies: that it proceeds from or even equals knowledge, and that it endows one with power both over other people and the material reality. Indeed, the humans devoid of any kind of knowledge or acquired skill – even the ability to read – are completely helpless when the robots which used to protect them suddenly turn against them. It is only when Prospero and the last of the post-­humans, a woman the magus refers to as Miranda, decide to transfer the knowledge they have collected to Harman, that humankind is saved from extinction. Another interesting detail is that even though the technology on the Earth of Ilium/Olympos allows one to access the network of information directly by means of one’s mind, the knowledge is stored in the form of books in enormous, well-­guarded libraries. This approach, totally impractical from the point of view of the represented world of the novel, echoes

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the beloved books of the Shakespearian Prospero, the books that trusty Gonzalo placed in the boat carrying the duke and his daughter into exile; the books the magus prized “above [his] dukedom” (Shakespeare 1994, 1.2.168) and without which, according to Caliban, “he’s but a sot” (3.2.91). All things considered, however obsolete the carved staff and the star-­embroidered robe may seem, they represent the power of knowledge and signal the advent of a new protagonist that would frequently appear in science-­fiction works – the scientist. Prospero in The Tempest is interpreted as a figure of the director of the play – he puts all the events in motion by creating the eponymous tempest, separating the passengers of the ship and then putting them in situations which shape their attitude according to his expectations before reuniting them. Prospero in Simmons’s novel initially appears to be one of the background characters who help Harman and his friends, the people who really move the action forward. However, it is later revealed that it was Prospero who secretly pushed the main protagonist onto his road. In Harman’s dream, the magus revealed to him a function of his brain that enabled him to make use of the books, previously useless and meaningless to the illiterate human race. In fact, it was also Prospero’s actions that triggered the course of events which led to the humankind living the lives of ignorant herd animals. As in The Tempest, Prospero in Ilium/Olympos employs his knowledge and powers to restore the status quo preceding the plot of the novel. However, I believe that in this context the metaphor of a director is not entirely suitable. Shakespearian Prospero sets the scene by orchestrating the storm and then places all the actors in the right locations on the island so that his play can develop through unexpected meetings and reunions, subtly steered by Ariel’s magic. What the avatar in Simmons’s novels does is to equip his characters with certain skills or necessary knowledge and to direct them in their journeys, sometimes even openly forcing them to follow a path they would not choose themselves. In my view, a more fitting metaphor in this context is that of a video game player who decides for the characters existing in the virtual reality in order to reach a specific goal; in this case – to save the planet and the human race. The resemblance is striking in the case of computer role-­playing games, in which the player develops the characters so that they are suited to complete a certain mission and guides them through the represented world of the game just as Prospero does with Harman. This simile takes a peculiar twist once we consider the identity of the characters of Simmons’s novel cycle – it is a virtual reality entity exerting actual influence on the fate of the real world. In comparison to the carefully constructed network of intertextual references in Ilium/Olympos, Forbidden Planet may seem to be a pulp movie aimed at undemanding audiences. It was, however, a milestone in the history of the

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science-­fiction genre, due to its groundbreaking special effects, the figure of a likeable talking robot it introduced, and its discussion of the dangers of both technology and human nature. The action of the film takes place on the planet Altair IV, the destination of a cruiser on a mission to discover what happened to an expedition sent there 20 years before. Commander John J. Adams (Leslie Nielsen) and his crew find out that the only inhabitants of the planet are Dr. Edward Morbius (Walter Pidgeon) and his daughter Altaira (Anne Francis), as the remaining humans succumbed to an unexplained “planetary force” which also destroyed their starship. Dr. Morbius studies the native race of the planet, the Krell, who were wiped out thousands of years before, and he shows Adams a device they constructed which he calls the “plastic educator.” Though deadly to some people who tried using it, it doubled Morbius’s intelligence, allowed him to understand some of the Krell technology and to build, among other machines, an intelligent robot called Robby. Morbius refuses to fulfill Adams’s request to share the Krell knowledge with the people of the Earth, as he fears it could fall into the wrong hands. In the meantime, something attacks the ship and kills one member of the crew. The expedition’s doctor who tries using the “plastic educator” discovers that the great machine built by the Krell and located underground was constructed to enable them to materialise whatever they imagined, anywhere on the planet. However, they disregarded “the monsters from the Id.” Commander Adams deduces that it is Dr. Morbius’s enhanced mind that recreates the Id monster responsible for killing the members of the first expedition. The creature soon attacks Adams, Altaira and Morbius and vanishes only when the latter admits he is responsible for its appearance, dying soon after. The Commander and his crew leave the planet, doomed to be destroyed, taking Altaira and Robby the Robot with them back to Earth. The parallels between Forbidden Planet and The Tempest are quite explicit – a man of learning stranded in a place far away from home with his innocent daughter, who is fascinated by and instantly drawn to the newcomers from her father’s homeland. As in Ilium/Olympos, the most important feature of the character who is the equivalent of Prospero is his link to the domain of knowledge. Shakespearian Prospero was a scholar, a man so engrossed in his books that it cost him his dukedom. Morbius’s occupation reflects that of Prospero in the science fiction context – he is a scientist even more devoted to his studies than his literary predecessor, as the research he conducts on Altaira IV is so important to him that he never intends to leave the planet. Although there is no direct reference to magic, there may be a connection between Dr. Morbius’s achievements and the Shakespearian character’s powers. Morbius came to Altair as the expedition’s linguistic expert and was able to benefit from the knowledge of the Krell by deciphering their language.

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Similarly, the core of magic lies in pronouncing the right words, often in an ancient or secret language. Moreover, what the Great Machine of the Krell does is the very essence of magical powers – turning one’s thoughts into material reality, which can prove extremely dangerous if one cannot control their desires. The allusions to magic in a futuristic context might appear somewhat contradictory – magic is, after all, associated with superstition and – in certain contexts – backwardness. However, The Tempest presents two different forms of magic. The magic of Sycorax is described by Frank Kermode as “the natural power […] to exploit for evil purposes the universal sympathies” (1994, xlviii). He contrasts it with Prospero’s “Art,” which is “the disciplined exercise of virtuous knowledge. […] It is […] the practical application of a discipline of which the primary requirements are learning and temperance, and of which the mode is contemplation” (xlvii–xlviii). The dark, demonic magic of Sycorax, stemming from the powers of nature, obviously did not make its way into the science fiction genre, though one researcher finds its traces in the irrationality represented in the film by the subconscious (Caroti 2004, 10). On the other hand, Prospero’s noble Art seems to have evolved into proper science, rational and based on logic and research. Prospero’s servant spirit, Ariel, prepares a feast on the orders of his master; Dr. Morbius’s robot is able to synthesise any substance or product, including a meal for Doctor’s guests. The miracles which in Shakespeare’s play can only be achieved through magic are made possible in science fiction thanks to equally mysterious science which, as the readers and audiences want to believe, will become reality one day. The colonial context of Shakespeare’s The Tempest raises one more significant question which remains a pressing issue as the imagination of science-­fiction authors pushes the limits of human exploration into space. As Robin Kirkpatrick notes, “Shakespeare’s portrayal of Caliban and Ariel invites us to test our own tolerance of life-­forms other than our own” (2000, 96). A great number of science fiction works deal exactly with that matter. Will the beings encountered by space explorers on alien planets be more or less technologically advanced, friendly or hostile to our civilisation? Will humans exploit them as Prospero did Ariel? Will they treat them with a patronising attitude and try to fashion them according to their worldview, as, in turn, the magus did with Caliban? Will the intelligent life forms be offered a status and rights equal to that of humans, or will their dissimilar appearance and customs cause them to be always treated as lower beings, as in the case of Caliban, whose description in The Tempest makes it difficult to decide whether he is a man or a monstrous human-­animal hybrid? Dr. Morbius does not exactly have to resolve such issues himself, as the planet on which he finds himself is deserted, its original inhabitants long gone. However, his creation and

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companion, Robby the Robot, an artificial intelligence entity, gives rise to similar reflections: if humans manage to construct thinking, self-­conscious machines, will they at some point begin to reminisce people so much that we will have to consider treating them on an equal footing? This issue, tackled by such science fiction films as Blade Runner (1982) or A.I. Artificial Intelligence (2001), may have well had its origins when Stephano and Trinculo debated over the nature of a mysterious creature, “a man or a fish?” (Shakespeare 1994, 2.2.25), encountered on the shore of an unknown island. This article began with a claim that of all Shakespeare’s plays, The Tempest is the most suitable to be translated into the science fiction context due to its setting and the theme of geographical discoveries. However, I would not go so far as to maintain that the figure of a scientist, a popular protagonist of the science fiction genre, finds its direct predecessor in Prospero. Nevertheless, keeping in mind the statement by Peter Nicholls (1979) that “[t]he quest for knowledge remains sf ’s central vision” (after Broderick 1995, 135), it needs to be pointed out that it is exactly the quest for knowledge that defines Prospero as a person; it was the quest for knowledge that brought him into an unknown environment and it was the way he was able to employ his knowledge that allowed him to return home. In this respect, Prospero may be seen as an older relative of science fiction’s scientists setting out to explore unfamiliar areas of the universe in search for new discoveries.

Works Cited Amis, Kingsley. 1961. New Maps of Hell. London: Gollancz, quoted in Buchanan, Judith.  2001. “Forbidden Planet and the Retrospective Attribution of Intentions.” In Retrovisions. Reinventing the Past In Film and Fiction, edited by Deborah Cartmell, I. Q. Hunter, and Imelda Whelehan, 148–62. London and Sterling, Virginia: Pluto Press. Buchanan, Judith. 2001. “Forbidden Planet and the Retrospective Attribution of Intentions.” In Retrovisions. Reinventing the Past In Film and Fiction, edited by Deborah Cartmell, I. Q. Hunter, and Imelda Whelehan, 148–62. London and Sterling, Virginia: Pluto Press. Caroti, Simone. 2004. “Science Fiction Forbidden Planet and Shakespeare’s The Tempest.” Web. Forbidden Planet. 1999. Directed by Fred M. Wilcox. 1956. Burbank, CA: Warner Home Video. DVD. Howard, Tony. 2007. “Shakespeare’s Cinematic Offshoots.” In The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare on Film, edited by Russell Jackson, 303–23. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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Kermode, Frank. 1994. Introduction to The Tempest, by William Shakespeare, xi-xciii. The Arden Edition of the Works of William Shakespeare. London and New York: Routledge. Kirkpatrick, Robin. 2000. “The Italy of The Tempest.” In “The Tempest” and Its Travels, edited by Peter Hulme and William H. Sherman, 78–96. London: Reaktion Books. Nicholls, Peter. 1979. “Conceptual Breakthrough.” In The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction: An Illustrated A to Z. London and New York: Granada, quoted in Broderick, Damien. 1995. Reading by Starlight: Postmodern Science Fiction. Popular Fictions Series. London and New York: Routledge. Shakespeare, William. 1994. The Tempest. The Arden Edition of the Works of William Shakespeare. London and New York: Routledge. Simmons, Dan. 2003. Ilium. New York: EOS. Simmons, Dan. 2006. Olympos. London: Gollancz.

Jadwiga Uchman

Catastrophe in Philosophy (Aristotle), Mathematics (René Thom) and Drama (Tom Stoppard and Samuel Beckett) The aim of the paper is to analyse two plays – Tom Stoppard’s Professional Foul and Samuel Beckett’s Catastrophe – in reference to two theories concerning catastrophe: the one propagated in ancient times by Aristotle1 and that publicized by the French mathematician, René Thom and his follower Christopher Zeeman. The choice of the two plays is by no means accidental for a number of reasons. Firstly, both playwrights are associated with the Theatre of the Absurd. This classification is undoubtedly valid for the entire output of Beckett as all of his works are grounded in the existentialist vision and employ the grotesque which is understood as an inseparable combination of tragic and comic elements. It is certainly less so in the case of Stoppard who, early in his career, departed from the assumptions of this philosophical trend, yet goes on using the grotesque by mixing the tragic with the comic. One of his aims, as he himself stated in reference to the coin tossing game in Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, is to represent the “two sides of [his] own personality, which can be described as seriousness compromised by [his] frivolity, or […] frivolity redeemed by [his] seriousness” (Gussow 1995, 14). He also conceded: “What I try to do, is to end up by contriving the perfect marriage between the play of ideas and farce or perhaps even high comedy” (Hudson 1974, 8). Secondly, on numerous occasions, both artists demonstrated their engagement in the opposition to all kinds of restrictions of human rights.2 Thirdly, both Beckett and Stoppard started writing explicitly political plays in the 1970s and 1980s, thus expressing their opinions about what was happening in the Eastern, Soviet-­ dominated countries. Some qualifiers should be added here. As far as Beckett is concerned, as Leslie Hill argues, “[t]he question of politics, or the political, has rarely loomed large as a topic for debate in the world of Beckett studies” (909), 1 As a matter of fact, it was not Aristotle who introduced the term “catastrophe.” For the discussion of this issue see: Rosen 1994, 327-­329. 2 For the discussion of this issue see, among others: for Beckett -­Libera 1995, xxixxii; Knowlson 1996, 563-­565; and Ackerley and Gontarski 2006, 448-­449. And, for Stoppard – Uchman 1998, 221-­222.

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there is yet quite a lot of criticism concerning this issue.3 Furthermore, taking into account Catastrophe and What Where, a political reading is not the only possible interpretation. On the other hand, Stoppard’s dramas written at that time, Dogg’s Hamlet/Cahoot’s Macbeth (1979), Every Good Boy Deserves Favour (1977) and Professional Foul (1977), are explicitly political. As a result some critics have noticed that “history has lately been forcing Stoppard into the areas of commitment” (Tynan 1981, 22), that “he has gradually moved from stylish apolitical disengagement towards an active involvement with current issues,” becoming “an entertainer with a definable ideal” (Billington 1987, 180), so much so that “lately Tom’s work seems to have modulated away from the glitter of Wildean disengagement, biting into the more meaty domains of freedom of expression in Czechoslovakia and freedom of the press” and that “Stoppard has moved from withdrawal into involvement” (Tynan 1981, 41). These opinions, even though seemingly true, need to be commented upon. Stoppard himself says: There was no sudden conversion on the road to Damascus. I know human rights have been around for a long time and I have always been concerned with the daily horrors that I read in the daily newspapers. But it was really a coincidence that both the plays about human rights should have been written about the same time. (Delaney 1990, 109)

The playwright added that even in his earlier plays an emphasis on the ethical always had political implications and that he was “always morally, if not politically involved” (Shulman 1978, 3). He also denies any fundamental transformation within his plays: “Jumpers has got the same subject as Professional Foul” (Berkvist 1979, 5). He insists: “[b]oth are about the way human beings are supposed to behave towards each other” (Hebert 1979). Until 1977 Stoppard expressed his political involvement in his activities with organisations and letters to the editor. His plays, as he argued, were “about certain obvious situations” which declared themselves “very openly” (Kuurman 1980, 50), yet were not political. The situation in Professional Foul, like those in Every Good Boy Deserves Favour and Dogg’s Hamlet, Cahoot’s Macbeth and Squaring the Circle (a film script) is very specific and the declaration they offer is strictly anti-­totalitarian. Finally, Stoppard’s drama uses Thom’s theory, while Beckett’s drama takes the Aristotelian concept of catastrophe for his play’s title and both dramas are dedicated

3 For a survey of the most important criticism see, among others: Birkett and Ince 2000, 10-­22; Watt 2000; Abbott 1996, 127-­148; Boxall 2000 and Buning, Engelberts and Kosters 2000.

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to Václav Havel, the Czech dissident and then, after the Velvet Revolution, the first President of Czechoslovakia following independence from the Soviet Union. Before scrutinising the two plays more closely it seems necessary to indicate briefly (it is not possible to do this otherwise within the word limit of this article) how the term “catastrophe” is understood in criticism, pertaining to drama, and in physics and natural sciences. In drama, catastrophe, as Patrice Pavis argues, is “the last of the four parts of the Greek tragedy. This concept designates the movement at which the action comes to an end, when the hero perishes and pays for the tragic flaw or error (hamartia) by sacrificing his life and recognizing his guilt” (1998, 44). The definition provided in a dictionary of literary terms seems more satisfactory because it states that catastrophe denotes “the defeat of the tragic hero resulting from the course of dramatic events, which is an unavoidable necessity” (Głowiński 1976, 184; translation mine) as, in some cases, the defeat of the protagonist may be due to some external forces (for instance, Sophocles’ drama), in others, it results from “the characteristic deeds” of the main tragic hero, as Bradley argues in reference to Shakespearean tragedy (1966, 8). In mathematics, catastrophe theory originated with the work of the French mathematician René Thom in the 1960s, and became very popular in the 1970s due to the efforts of Christopher Zeeman. It states that small changes in certain parameters of a nonlinear system can cause equilibria to appear or disappear, or to change from attracting to repelling and vice versa, leading to large and sudden changes of behaviour in the system. Catastrophe theory is a device for explaining how discontinuities can arise as a result of continuously changing causes. Thom argues: Man’s influence in nature is not […] limited by the abrupt barrier in Epictetus’ formulation, but rather by a thick and fluctuating strip, a string of black boxes whose input can be modified, but whose outputs are not immediately foreseeable. This “no man’s land,” the boundary of human action, is the domain of the player. […] [E]ach strategy in an incompletely understood situation obviously implies risk. At this point the ethical side of risk appears, notably from the point of view of responsibility. If someone acts with good intentions but unleashes a real catastrophe, should he be cited for stupidity or for bad luck? Such considerations reveal a primordial interest in techniques of risk evaluation. An explorative strategy, initially prudent, then more daring, can do a lot to uncover, to localize the “catastrophic” entries of the system, those for which a slight variation at the input leads to an abrupt and disproportionate variation of the output. (1979, 12)

Thus, according to modern mathematics a catastrophe is “any discontinuous transition that occurs when a system can have more than one stable state, or can

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follow more than one stable pathway of change. The catastrophe is ‘the jump’ from one state or pathway to another” (Woodcock and Davies 1978, 42). Thom’s theory was further developed by his pupil, E. C. Zeeman, who, in his article “Catastrophe Theory” published in Scientific American 234, April 1976 (Cobley 1984, 56), discussed the cusp-­catastrophe4 in reference to the behaviour of dogs. The behaviour of a dog can be foreseen as long as either its fear or rage is dominant. In certain instances, however, as Woodcock and Davies point out, “transitions between aggressive and submissive behaviour are discontinuous”: When a dog is losing a fight with another, it does not fight less fiercely, then become less neutral, then show increasing submission. Instead, it breaks off the fight suddenly or flees or rolls onto its back (a submissive display that acts to dampen its opponent’s aggression). (1978, 101)

Zeeman’s observations concerning the dog’s behaviour have led the psychotherapist, Denis Postle, to suggest their application in psychology – he wrote a book entitled Catastrophe Theory. Predict and Avoid Personal Disasters. As becomes clear from further scrutiny, the theory is useful and helpful not only in diagnosing and helping real people but also in interpreting the behaviour of fictional characters. Professional Foul was a venture which Stoppard undertook to mark 1977 – Amnesty International’s “Prisoner-­of-­Conscience Year.” He did not have any idea, however, what the play would be about. Then, in January 1977, three men were arrested for trying to deliver the document “Charter 77” (Stoppard 1978, 8-­9). The play, which was finally written, is dedicated to Václav Havel “not just the Chartist but […] a fellow writer” (Shulman 1978, 3).5 While the play is characterised by the inclusion of factual data coming from the most recent past, it is, at the same time, a return to Stoppard’s earlier interests – the questions concerning both the adequacy of language for describing reality and the basic issues of morality. Speaking on the latter aspect of the play, Stoppard has indicated the similarities between Professional Foul and Jumpers: each of them can be “described as a play about a moral philosopher preoccupied with the true nature of absolute morality, trying to separate absolute values from local ones and local situations.” However, whereas George in the former play is not able to act on his principles, Anderson starts acting and thus the play depicts “a man being educated by experience beyond the education he’s received from thinking” (Gollop 1981, 7 and 8). 4 In mathematics, cusp denotes a point where two curves meet. 5 On another occasion, Stoppard remarked: “I’m as Czech as Czech can be. So you can see that my desire to write something about human rights, the combination of my birth, my trips to Russia, my interest in Havel and his arrest, the appearance of Charter 77 were the linking threads that gave me the idea for Professional Foul” (Shulman 1978, 3).

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Being an outstanding modern English farceur, Stoppard differs from other comedy writers in that his “focus is consistently metaphysical” (Innes 1992, 325). Stoppard’s pieces are, as he calls them, “argument plays” (Gussow 1995, 35) and he writes them “because writing dialogue is the only respectable way of contradicting yourself. I’m the kind of person who embarks on an endless leapfrog down the great moral issues. I put a position, rebut it, refute the rebuttal, and rebut the refutation” (Gussow 1995, 3). Stoppard has once spoken about “a certain kind of intellectual or verbal humour” which, according to him, is characteristic of Beckett and “appears in various forms but it consists of a confident statement followed by an immediate refutation by the same voice. It’s a constant process of elaborate structure and sudden – and total dismantlement” (Hayman 1974, 19). The playwright conceded the same in reference to his own dramas, arguing “that there is very often no single, clear statement in [his] plays” (Hudson 1974, 6-­7). On another occasion, he argued, “What I am always trying to say is ‘Firstly, A. Secondly, minus A’” (Hayman 1979, 10). Stoppard contends: “What I think of as being my distinguishing mark is an absolute lack of certainty about almost anything” (after Hayman 1974, 40). By the way, “absolute lack of certainty” is not only an opinion referring to using contradictions, but also an opposition in itself. It was Clive James who first noticed the parallels between Stoppardian theatrics and Einsteinian physics. He argued that Stoppard’s plays reflect the new, post-­ Newtonian outlook based on the proposition voiced by Einstein, who “found himself obliged to rule out the possibility of a viewpoint at rest” (1975, 71). In an interview Stoppard said that he considered James’ article to be brilliant and added: What he said was that you get into trouble with my plays if you think that there’s a static viewpoint on the events. There is no observer. There is no safe point around which everything takes its proper place, so that you see things flat and see how they relate to each other. Although the Einsteinian versus Copernican image sounds pretentious, I can’t think of a better one to explain what he meant – that there is no point of rest. (Hayman 1979, 144)

Already George Moore in Jumpers complained about the uncertainty resulting from the development of science: “Copernicus cracked our confidence, and Einstein smashed it” (1973, 75). Science and its discoveries form the background for several of Stoppard’s plays – Hapgood makes references to Richard Feynman’s experiments in quantum mechanics and Karl Heisenberg’s “uncertainty principle,” while Arcadia uses chaos theory as its backdrop. In the case of these two plays Stoppard’s familiarity with the scientific theories is testified by the motto of the first play taken from Feynman’s lecture and correspondence between the playwright and a theoretical physicist, J. C. Polkinghorne, included in the Aldwych Theatre programme (Delaney 1990, 128). Roger Highfield’s article “The Day Art

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Met Science,” describing the meeting between Stoppard and Professor Robert May (a mathematical scientist), shows the playwright’s interest in chaos theory as well as the collaboration between the scientist and the cast during the rehearsals of the play, which is found in the case of the second drama too. As far as Professional Foul is concerned, there is no evidence that the playwright knew René Thom’s theory. In his stimulating article “Catastrophe Theory in Tom Stoppard’s Professional Foul” Evelyn Cobley contends that there is no proof that the playwright read Thom’s writings, yet he may have been familiar with E. C. Zeeman’s article “Catastrophe Theory” published in Scientific American, 234, two years before the play. The critic concludes: “[c]ircumstantial evidence and the text of Professional Foul itself thus support the conjecture that Stoppard has studied Catastrophe Theory in some detail” (1984, 56, note 9). One must accept this assumption yet at the same time reject this critic’s opinion concerning the explanation of Catastrophe Theory provided in the play: McKendrick’s explanation is not particularly clear, and Stoppard is no doubt poking fun at academics who pontificate on undigested ideas. Stoppard’s parodic intention is in fact so strong that we are tempted to doubt the very existence of Catastrophe Theory and to dismiss it as pure invention on Stoppard’s part. But although Catastrophe Theory is proposed by the pretentious and fumbling McKendrick, Professional Foul exemplifies on several levels the process the theory describes. (1984, 56)

McKendrick, just like Anderson, the main character of Professional Foul, is a participant of Colloquium Philosophicum, Prague 77. They meet on a plane taking them to the Czechoslovakian capital and we learn that the title of Anderson’s paper which he will give at the conference is “Ethical Fictions as Ethical Foundations” (46). McKendrick’s “field is the philosophical assumptions of social science” (47) and the title of his speech is “Philosophy and the Catastrophe Theory” (72). In the course of the drama, Anderson postulates the idea that, even though ethical principles are merely fictions, they are practicable because they make people behave in a proper way. McKendrick expresses the opposite opinion, arguing that moral principles are relative and explains the issue by means of the Catastrophe Theory: MCKENDRICK: It’s like a reverse gear – no – it’s like a breaking point. The mistake that people make is, they think a moral principle is indefinitely extendible, that it holds good for any situation, a straight line cutting across the graph of our actual situation – here you are, you see – (He uses a knife to score a line in front of him straight across the table cloth, left to right in front of him.) ‘Morality’ down there; running parallel to ‘Immorality’ up here – (He scores a parallel line.) – and never the twain shall meet. They think that is what a principle means. ANDERSON: And isn’t it?

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MCKENDRICK: No. The two lines are on the same plane. (He holds out his flat hand, palm down, above the scored lines.) They’re the edges of the same plane – it’s in three dimensions, you see – and if you twist the plane in a certain way, into what we call the catastrophe curve, you get a model of the sort of behaviour we find in the real world. There’s a point – the catastrophe point – where your progress along the line of behaviour jumps you into the opposite line; the principle reverses itself at the point where a rational man would abandon it. CHETWYN: Then it’s not a principle. MCKENDRICK: There aren’t any principles in your sense. There are only a lot of principled people trying to behave as if there were. (77-­78)

While McKendrick propagates a view perceiving morality as relative, Anderson argues that things are either moral or immoral. At the same time, however, he realizes that sometimes people forget about principles and act against them. Such is the case with himself because, to be precise, he is going to Prague not because of the conference, but because he wants to attend a football match between the English and the Czechs (47). Anderson’s excuse for participating in the symposium to watch the football match is a case of extending a moral principle because, after all, he does deliver his paper, but he may also miss some lectures and do whatever he pleases during that time. In the conversation with McKendrick, commenting on the situation, he notices that he is “being a tiny bit naughty,” “unethical” (46-­ 47). He has deviated from ethical principles, extending them on other occasions as well, as he says that he has seen the footballer, Broadbent, twice earlier: “In the UEFA Cup a few seasons ago. […] I happened to be in Berlin for the Hegel Colloquium, er, bunfight. And then last season I was in Bratislava to receive an honorary degree” (59). What comes later, however, is a breaking point, as McKendrick describes the catastrophe. At the beginning of the play, on the plane, talking to McKendrick, Anderson says: “There are some rather dubious things happening in Czechoslovakia. Ethically” (46). On arriving in Prague, however, for quite a long time he does not seem to perceive, even less to understand, the brutal reality of life in a totalitarian state. In the hotel he is visited by his ex-­student, Pavel Hollar, a dissident, at present a cleaner at a bus station. Even though the situation speaks for itself for all those familiar with life in the Soviet bloc, Anderson does not seem to understand anything and asks Hollar in extreme astonishment: “You don’t seriously suggest that my room is bugged?” to which his ex-­student replies: “It is better to assume it” (53). It soon transpires that Hollar has written a doctoral thesis and now he asks Anderson to take it to England and hand to Peter Volkansky who will translate and publish it. The still uncomprehending Anderson asks Hollar if he cannot have it published in Czechoslovakia and then “(This suddenly catches up

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on him and he shakes his head.) Oh, Hollar […] now, you know, really, I’m a guest of the government here. […] It would be bad manners, wouldn’t it?” (54). Hollar answers that his dissertation is about “correct behaviour” (54), its thesis being that [t]he ethics of the State must be judged against the fundamental ethics of the individual. The human being, not the citizen. I conclude there is an obligation, a human responsibility, to fight against the State’s correctness. Unfortunately that is not a safe conclusion. (55)

Anderson is not convinced by the young man and, again, argues “having accepted their hospitality I cannot in all conscience start smuggling. […] It’s just not ethical” (56). However, on being told by Hollar that he might be searched on his way home and might lose the only copy of his thesis, Anderson in the end agrees to bring the script to Hollar’s flat the next day. When he gets there, he learns that Hollar has been arrested and the flat is being searched by the police. He is getting more and more irritated not because of what is happening in the flat (he is not yet able to understand the situation) but because he is not allowed to leave, which makes him miss the match. The police find some dollars which they planted earlier and Hollar is considered by them to be “an ordinary criminal” (70). When the police inspector decides to check the contents of Anderson’s bag, the latter gives him two symposium papers – his own and McKendrick’s, but not the one of Hollar. Slightly later on, during a meeting with Hollar’s wife and their son, Anderson is warned by them that he might be searched at the airport and he should not try to smuggle the young philosopher’s thesis. Being deeply shocked with how he was treated in Hollar’s flat and moved by the situation of the Hollar family, Anderson rewrites his conference paper, pointing out the concordance of the American and Czechoslovakian constitution on certain fundamental human rights and developing the idea of an inherent, inborn sense of freedom and justice. Being unable to stop Anderson from delivering such a dangerous paper (for the authorities), which propagates liberal and democratic ideas, the Chairman presses the fire alarm button and breaks off the session. As the drama approaches its end it transpires that, having reached the catastrophe point, Anderson decides to commit a professional foul, one of the numerous professional fouls we witness in the play, all of which, in the context of the drama, refer to the pragmatic, ethically questionable actions which are needed to reach the required goal. His foul concerning smuggling Hollar’s thesis is of two-­fold nature: he not only acts against the Czechoslovakian authorities – doing the thing he refused to do earlier, while asked by Hollar, then arguing it would be immoral and not in accord with good manners. Furthermore, suspecting that he might be searched at the airport, Anderson hides Hollar’s thesis in McKendrick’s luggage

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without his knowledge. Thus he illustrates his own opinion expressed earlier in the discussion with the fellow philosopher concerning catastrophe theory: “There would be no dilemmas if moral principles worked in straight lines and never crossed each other. One meets test situations which have troubled much cleverer men than us” (79). He finds himself in such a test situation, reaches a catastrophe point and discovers that morality is not always the opposite of immorality – some human actions are moral and immoral at the same time. Catastrophe was written by Samuel Beckett for Havel’s benefit night at the Festival in Avignon in 1982 and it is dedicated to the Czech dissident, which amplifies the play’s overt politics, uncharacteristic of Beckett. This dramaticule presents, as the stage directions indicate, “Rehearsal. Final touches of the last scene” (297). The play is characterised by fragment-­like brevity and its three characters are not given any proper names, only initials which indicate their function in the events presented: D – Director, A – his female Assistant and P – Protagonist. The only character who is given a name is the permanently offstage character – Luke, the light technician. P is placed on “a black block 18 inches high” (297) which is referred to by D as a “plinth” (297) and a “pedestal” (299) and thus what follows may be associated with the creation of a sculpture by means of subtraction. Originally, P is dressed in black and is wearing a hat which is supposed to cover his face. Then changes are introduced: the hands are made visible, resting on the chest in a gesture of supplication or prayer; his gown and hat are removed and his head and hands are whitened. D decides that P’s head is to be turned down, more nudity is to be shown and the whole body is to be whitened. He calls Luke, the electrician, asking him to lighten first the whole figure of P and then only his bowed head. The Director finally states: “Good. There’s our catastrophe. In the bag. Once more and I’m off ” (300). While using the word “catastrophe,” the Director refers to its theatrical meaning, denoting the end of a tragedy which marks the protagonist’s final defeat. The statement uttered by D expresses his conviction that the production will be a success. Really a “Distant storm of applause” can be heard and then, suddenly, “P raises his head, fixes the audience. The applause falters, dies” (301). The final moments of the drama mark the director’s defeat and the catastrophe of his undertaking. His attempt made at the total subordination and depersonalisation of the Protagonist has failed, P’s raising of the head being equivalent to a rebellion and a rejection of the rules imposed on him. The gaze of the silent P corresponds to the end of a cusp-­catastrophe process with the aggressive dogs as described by Zeeman. Unlike Stoppard’s Professional Foul, a realistic drama with a clear political message, Beckett’s symbolic Catastrophe has been interpreted in a number of different ways, and, so, for instance, some critics say it is a religious play (Libera 1988,

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723-­726 and Guest) or “a passionless passion play” (Elam 1994, 14). Metaphysical and religious interpretations are justified by Beckett’s whole output which presents the playwright’s philosophical vision of human existence. Yet many critics also argue that the play’s message is clearly political and metatheatrical. Hersh Zeifman rightly contends that Catastrophe “is not a play focusing primarily on politics which uses theatre as a kind of metaphor, but rather the reverse: it is a play focusing primarily on theatre from which a political interpretation may be inferred” (2009, 135). Similarly, Keir Elam concedes: If on the literal plane the action is theatrical and metatheatrical […] on the metaphorical plane it is clearly ethico-­political, representing the dehumanizing constrictions of a totalitarian regime. The play ends with what is on both levels an act of transgression: the Protagonist/Political Prisoner disobeys the instructions of the Director/Dictator by daring to stare at the audience/society, instead of remaining in dutiful dummy-­like stillness. (1999, 8)

Even though fully justified, this opinion seems to need a qualifier, namely specifying precisely what the audience/society means exactly and stating which audience is meant – the within-­the drama who, on seeing P raise his head, stop their applause or the actual audience watching the play produced in the theatre. Some critics argue that the ending is a trap for the real audience, and so John Peter, the reviewer of the 1984 Edinburgh Festival production, contends: But we are also in the dock; at the end the victim raises his head, and as he looks at us with blasted, cavernous eyes, the applause of the unseen audience falters and dies. We have seen the face of real suffering, and we cannot bear that much reality.6 (1984, 37)

It is impossible to accept the notion that the unseen audience and “us”/the real audience are the same, this opinion being supported by the standing ovation the production of the drama received in Avignon and elsewhere. It must be, then, the invisible audience of the theatre-­in-­the-­theatre production. A question may be asked: Why do they applaud the vision of the conquered, totally crushed P and become silent when he raises his head? The answer may be that this audience stands for the passive members of a totalitarian society who accept the all-­powerful authorities of suppression and will rather bear their hard fate (if they realize it as such) than try to change anything. For such people the dissidents are a challenge because they endanger the existing state of affairs by opposing it. Whereas the fictitious audience existing in the play fears dissidents and the potential danger brought about by their actions, the real one, gathered in Avignon, realized that it 6 See also: States 1990, 20 and Elam 1994, 16.

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was a must to oppose the totalitarian oppression and, simultaneously, to support P and other dissidents, Havel included. It is noteworthy in this context to mention Dogg’s Hamlet/Cahoot’s Macbeth, a political play written by Tom Stoppard (1979) where the second part of the double-­bill is dedicated to Pavel Kohout, a playwright, a non-­person for the authorities of Czechoslovakian “normalization” who, with other dissidents, organized a Living Room theatre, producing, among others, a version of Macbeth. Stoppard’s drama presents a production of the Bard’s tragedy interrupted by the entrance of an Inspector, trying to investigate the illegal activities taking place in the room. The Inspector’s reaction to the scene presenting Macbeth’s coronation – “so nice to have a play with a happy ending” (58), and his disillusionment when the play progresses link him to the fictitious audience in Catastrophe. Being a representative of a repressive regime, he cannot perceive Macbeth as a play about the usurpation of power, as we, the inner audience and actors do. His reaction, like the one of the fictitious audience of Catastrophe, is one of the regime, yet the morally and ethically correct one is the one of P raising his head, Anderson smuggling Hollar’s thesis and, last not least, Havel being a dissident who wins in the end.

Works Cited Abbott, H. Porter. 1996. Beckett Writing Beckett. The Author in the Autograph. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press. Ackerley, C. J. & S. E. Gontarski, eds. 2006. The Faber Companion to Samuel Beckett. A Reader’s Guide to His Works, Life and Thought. London: Faber & Faber. Beckett, Samuel. 1984. “Catastrophe.” In Collected Shorter Plays. London and Boston: Faber & Faber. Berkvist, Robert. 1979. “This Time Stoppard Plays It (Almost) Straight.” The New York Times, November 25. Billington, Michael.  1987. Stoppard the Playwright. London and New York: Methuen. Birkett, Jennifer and Kate Ince. 2000. Introduction to Samuel Beckett, edited by Jennifer Birkett and Kate Ince, 1-­36. London and New York: Longman. Boxall, Peter.  2000. “Introduction to ‘Beckett/Aesthetics/Politics’.” In Beckett and Religion. Beckett/Aesthetics/Politics, edited by Marius Buning, Matthijs Engelberts and Onno Kosters, 207-­214. Amsterdam and Atlanta, GA: Editions Rodopi. Bradley, A. C. 1966. Shakespearean Tragedy. London, Melbourne and Toronto: Macmillan.

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Buning Marius, Matthijs Engelberts and Onno Kosters, eds. 2000. Beckett and Religion. Beckett/Aesthetics/Politics. Amsterdam and Atlanta, GA: Editions Rodopi. Cobley, Eveline. 1984. “Catastrophe Philosophy in Tom Stoppard’s Professional Foul.” Contemporary Literature 25: 53-­65. Delaney, Paul. 1990. Tom Stoppard, The Moral Vision of the Major Plays. London: Macmillan. Elam, Keir. 1994. “Catastrophic Mistakes: Beckett, Havel, The End.” In Intertexts in Beckett’s Work, edited by Buning and Sjef Houppermans, 1-­28. Amsterdam and Atlanta, GA: Editions Rodopi. Głowiński, Michał et. al. 1976. Słownik terminów literackich. Wrocław: Zakład Narodowy Imienia Ossolińskich. Gollob, David and David Roper. 1981. “Trad Tom Pops In.” Gambit. International Theatre Review 10.37: 5-­17. Guest, Michael. 1995. “Act of Creation in Beckett’s Catastrophe.” Reports of the Faculty of Liberal Arts. Shizuoka University, Japan. Web. Gussow, Mel. 1995. Conversations with Stoppard. London: Hern Books. Hayman, Ronald. 1974. “Tom Stoppard.” The New Review. 1.9: 15-­22. Hayman, Ronald. 1979. Tom Stoppard. London: Heinemann. Hebert, Hugh. 1979.“A Playwright in Undiscovered Country.” Guardian, July 7. Highfield, Roger. 1993. “The Day Art Met Science.” Daily Telegraph, April 15. Hill, Leslie. 1997. “‘Up the Republic!’: Beckett, Writing, Politics.” Modern Language Notes 112.5: 907-­928. Hudson, Roger, Catherine Itzin and Simon Trussler. 1974. “Ambushes for the Audience: Towards a High Comedy of Ideas. Interview with Tom Stoppard.” Theatre Quarterly 4.14: 3-­17. Innes, Christopher.  1992. Modern British Drama 1890-­ 1990. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. James, Clive. 1975. “Count Zero Splits the Infinite.” Encounter 45.5: 68-­76. Knowlson, James. 1996. Damned to Fame. The Life of Samuel Beckett. New York: Simon and Schuster. Kuurman, Joost. 1980. “An Interview with Tom Stoppard.” Dutch Quarterly Review of Anglo-­American Letters 10: 41-­57. Libera, Antoni. 1988. Przypisy i objaśnienia tłumacza. In Samuel Beckett, Dzieła dramatyczne. Warszawa: Państwowy Instytut Wydawniczy. Libera, Antoni. 1995. Introduction to Samuel Beckett, Dramaty. Wrocław: Zakład Narodowy Imienia Ossolińskich.

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Pavis, Patrice.  1998. Dictionary of the Theatre: Terms, Concepts, and Analysis, Translated by Christine Shantz. Toronto and Buffalo: University of Toronto Press. Peter, John. 1984. “Putting the Audience in the Dock.” Sunday Times. August 26: 37. Postle, Denis. 1980. Catastrophe Theory. Predict and Avoid Personal Disasters. Glasgow: Fontana Press. Rosen, Alan. 1994. “Ends and Means: Catastrophe in the Context of Dramatic Form and Theory.” In Intertexts in Beckett’s Work, edited by Marius Buning and Sjef Houppermans, 327-­333. Amsterdam and Atlanta, GA: Editions Rodopi. Shulman, Milton. 1978. “The Politicizing of Tom Stoppard.” The New York Times. April 23. States, Bert O. 1987. “Beckett’s Laboratory/Theatre.” Modern Drama 30: 14-­22. Stoppard, Tom. 1973. Jumpers. London: Faber & Faber. Stoppard, Tom. 1978. Every Good Boy Deserves a Favour and Professional Foul. London and Boston: Faber & Faber. Stoppard, Tom. 1980. Dogg’s Hamlet. Cahoot’s Macbeth. London and Boston: Faber & Faber. Thom, René. 1979. “At the Boundaries of Man’s Power: Play.” Sub-­stance 25: 11-­19. Tynan, Kenneth. 1981.“Withdrawing with Style from Chaos. (Excepts from a Profile of Tom Stoppard”). Gambit. International Theatre Magazine 10.37: 19-­59. Uchman, Jadwiga. 1998. Reality, Illusion, Theatricality. A Study of Tom Stoppard. Łódź: Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Łódzkiego. Watt, Stephen. 2000. “Beckett by Way of Baudrillard: Toward a Political Reading of Samuel Beckett’s Drama.” In Samuel Beckett, edited by Jennifer Birkett and Kate Ince, 50-­64. London and New York: Longman. Woodcock, Alexander and Monte Davis. 1978. Catastrophe Theory. New York: E. P. Dutton. Zeifman, Hersh.  2009. “Catastrophe and Dramatic Setting.” In Reflections on Beckett. A Centenary Celebration, edited by Anna McMullan and S. E. Wilmer, 129-­136. Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press.

Visions and Revisions Collected under the theme of Visions and Revisions, the papers included in this volume examine different aspects of literature and culture of the Anglophone world. The first part gathers articles dealing with poetry of such epochs as the seventeenth century, the Victorian era and the modern times. Part two focuses on prose works representing such conventions and modes as the romance, the Gothic novel, the condition of England novel, Victorian and neo-Victorian fiction, the science fiction novel and gay fiction. Part three concerns various aspects of British and American culture, including the new media, drama and journalism, and advertising. In its diversity the volume reflects the dynamics of

change in literature and culture, enabling the readers to investigate the multifaceted canon.

The Editors Grzegorz Czemiel, Justyna Galant and Marta Komsta are Assistant Professors at the Department of English Studies, Maria Curie-Skłodowska University in Lublin, Poland. Anna Kedra-Kardela ˛ and Aleksandra Kedzierska ˛ are both Associate Professors at the Department of English Studies, Maria Curie-Skłodowska University in Lublin, Poland.

A. Kedzierska / M. ˛ Komsta (eds.)

Grzegorz Czemiel / Justyna Galant / Anna Kedra-Kardela / ˛ Aleksandra Kedzierska / Marta ˛ Komsta (eds.)

4 ˛ Visions and Revisions G. Czemiel / J. Galant / A. Kedra-Kardela /

Silesian Studies in Anglophone Cultures and Liter atures 4

Silesian Studies in Anglophone Cultures and Liter atures 4

Grzegorz Czemiel / Justyna Galant / Anna Kedra-Kardela / Aleksandra ˛ Kedzierska / ˛ Marta Komsta (eds.)

Visions and Revisions Studies in Literature and Culture