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Khora: the Re-Exploration of the Feminine in Auden's the Shield Of Khora 89 Feminist Studies in English Literature Vol.22, No. 1 (2014) Khora: The Re-exploration of the Feminine in Auden’s The Shield of Achilles and Homage to Clio Jung Pil Park (Seoul National University) I. Auden’s later representative poetry, The Shield of Achilles (1957) and Homage to Clio (1960) composed after the Second World War, provides a critical reflection on history—as suggested by the title of a poem in one of the collections, “Makers of History”— particularly, the two World Wars in the twentieth century, utterly deplores the irreversibly deteriorated western culture—in “The Secondary Epic”1 Auden asserts that we cannot even conceive of the idea of the composition of Virgil’s epic in the future, repeatedly employing the phrase, “No, Virgil, no” in the first and last stanzas— and seeks new alternatives for a world that demands urgent reconstruction. In analyzing the causes of the apocalyptic wars, 1 Edward Mendelson claims that the poem obliquely questions what later writers called the “Pax Americana” by commenting on the “failure of Virgil’s prophecy of the Roman future” (Later Auden 370). 90 Jung Pil Park Auden’s research eventually reaches the fundamental anatomy of Western culture, criticism on Western civilization, asserting that the contemporary pathological symptoms including the unlimited parade of ferocity and the succession of fatuous totalitarianism as burlesqued in “T the Great” —““Death is on you! T is coming!” / … / Came N to bring her back to sanity / And T was pushed off to the nursery / Before his hundredth anniversary” (600)—are intimately linked to the problems and defects of the structure of the whole of the Western civilization, which Westerners have inherited. Auden points to the entrenched reliance on the masculine principle—the excessive employment of virility or hyperactivity heedless of limitations—as the most crucial issue in Western culture, which is, in fact, a real creator of appalling wars, unprecedented catastrophes, and inappropriate institutions including despotism, imperialism, fascism, the police state system, mechanical philosophy, industrialism, urbanization—for the sake of “the Rational City” or “the Conscious City” (592)—and bureaucracy in human history. Auden cites many examples of these imprudent actions even from Greek mythology, tracking the sources of Westerners’ misconducts. For instance, Achilles, who has been esteemed as a war hero in the Western culture, can also be reinterpreted as a symbol of the most precarious mode of life, which does not concern itself with or take any responsibility for widespread destruction. The poem “The Epigoni,” which deals with the second Theban war, and which denounces the unrelenting bellicosity from generation to generation, concludes that the trounced Thebans do not evoke modern people’s empathy, because they, who are also so steeped in this masculine Khora 91 recklessness, no less than the Epigoni, did not recognize how they could recourse to the feminine principle, which includes “wailing” (604). Under scrutiny, it is also true that even the representative Greek goddesses Artemis and Aphrodite, even if they wear female body shapes, revert to masculinity or “phallic presence” in the words of Julia Kristeva (Desire 164). In addition to this foundational diagnosis of the causes of the repeated horrors that Western culture has engendered, Auden pursues alternatives to the reparation of the sickly civilization and for a new history, and locates the source of the new history in the feminine principle, which has been ignored and misrepresented as a manageable docility, or reticence at best, and entire incapacity at worst. Paradoxically enough, Auden strains to uncover boundless possibilities within the circumscribed2 and forsaken passivity, as the “backward and dilapidated” limestone landscape connects to the big busy world by a tunnel in “In Praise of Limestone” (540). Thus, instead of calling other goddesses, now he summons such goddesses as Clio the Muse of history, who possesses more detached yet more contemplative and positive qualities, beyond her silence and inactivity, which echo Derrida’s notion of khora. Reappropriating Plato’s khora, which signals a formless container, Derrida ponders its amorphousness and underscores its negative or empty capability such as spacing and construction surpassing the concept of the 2 As Victoria Arana claims, for Auden, the “awareness of limit is crucial to emotional and intellectual growth.” Thus, in his later stage, he invokes the Roman god Terminus the god of all boundaries, rules and grammars, who is regarded as the “symbolic embodiment of reticence and modesty” (3–6). 92 Jung Pil Park passive receptacle, and its entire otherness as a potential for multiple meanings and things. In the same vein, Auden points out the admirable perseverance of the feminine, its capacity to delay every injudicious movement, its contemplative aspect—which can suggest the more profound source of historical activities—and its perplexing interposition into history, while advocating the new doctrine. In addition, Auden attempts to link the feminine principle to Christian existentialism or Christian mysticism—which postulates the communication between the vulnerable subject and its paradoxical counterpart, its mysterious and absolute otherness, God the omnipotent—reverse the existential situation from the bottom of passivity to the ceiling of vigor, and thus unseal Christian feminism. In The Shield of Achilles and Homage to Clio, we, who can, above all, encounter Auden’s historical consciousness, can trace how the older Auden portrays the despoiled modern civilization, and diagnoses the causes of the atrocious world wars and their unparalleled damages, and what factors he points as the reasons for the apocalyptic debacle. Also, we can be awakened to Auden’s thoughtful of new alternatives, particularly the feminine principle in the universe, which, in spite of its peculiar passivity, displays positive traits including dissociation, silence, contemplation, production, intervention, and perturbation through reinterpretation of the submissiveness. II. Derrida extols and reappropriates Plato’s notion of “khora,” which appears in Timaeus and refers to the immense and Khora 93 indeterminate spatial receptacle, and which ulteriorly “eludes philosophy” that tends to “stick to the father (eidos) and its legitimate son (cosmos)” (Caputo 92), as apt for postmodern reinterpretation. The word khora is the common Greek noun for a concrete place, so the word is translated into Latin as locus. In terms of postmodernism khora can be designated as a “great abyss” or “void,” which may be occupied by sensible things that the void creates (Caputo 85). First of all, khora carries feminine or maternal undertones eliciting functions such as a receptacle, a matrix stretching out beneath, and a womb. In Timaeus Plato explains that khora as a “containing principle” “receives every variety of form” like the “smooth and soft materials on which figures are impressed” (25). And among the imprints exist considerably vicious and even gory ones. In the words of Derrida, the khora remaining impassive can be a place “traversed,” “pierced,” and “penetrated” like a “screen,” a “paper” or a “canvas,” or a place of “travail,” “abortion,” and “cadaver” (“To Unsense” 76, 101, 112, 133). Kristeva also remarks on the locus of isolation or regression in the femininity, in which a woman, especially an “enceinte” woman, enclosed in “elsewhere,” suffers the loss of “communital meaning,” which suddenly appears to her as “worthless, absurd, or at best, comic” (240). In addition, khora surpasses the function of the passive receptacle by disassociating from the notion of an amenable reception, unearthing the interval between the imprinted receiving and the ejection of the inscription, and targeting an indefinite position, no location, or the very “singular impropriety” (Derrida “Khora” 97). Kristeva maintains that khora preceding “evidence,” specularization, “verisimilitude,” “spatiality,” and temporality can 94 Jung Pil Park “never be definitely posited,” nor given “axiomatic form” (Revolution 26). In fact, Plato already noted that, since khora received all forms, it “must be formless,” like the “inodorous liquids, which are prepared to receive scents,” free from the impress of any of those shapes from without (25). Although all things are made out of khora, the khora is “like none of them” (Plato 25). Or the khora rests between the sensible and the intelligible, through which everything passes but in which nothing is retained. The khora, which is neither sensible nor intelligible, belongs to a “third kind” (Plato 25). It is possible to proclaim the paradox that khora does not receive, merely let herself be “lent the properties which she receives” (Derrida “Khora” 98). Derrida maintains that, because khora defies the “order of the paradigm,” the “logic of binarity,” of the “yes or no,” and the attempts at naming, and because it might derive from the logic other than the logic of the logos, one cannot even say of khora that it is “neither this nor that” or that it is “both this and that” (“Khora” 89– 90). In short, the khora, which “precedes any possible impression,” is distinguished by its elusive properties (Derrida “Khora” 116). Khora seems “never to let itself be reached or touched, much less broached” (Derrida “Khora” 95). As no definite object, it designates spacing itself—effecting a “dissymmetrical relation” to all that seems to couple with her (Derrida
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