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Transatlantica Revue d’études américaines. American Studies Journal

1 | 2018 on Screen / American Women Writers Abroad: 1849-1976

Electronic version URL: http://journals.openedition.org/transatlantica/11425 DOI: 10.4000/transatlantica.11425 ISSN: 1765-2766

Publisher AFEA

Electronic reference Transatlantica, 1 | 2018, “Slavery on Screen / American Women Writers Abroad: 1849-1976” [Online], Online since 27 August 2018, connection on 29 April 2021. URL: http://journals.openedition.org/ transatlantica/11425; DOI: https://doi.org/10.4000/transatlantica.11425

This text was automatically generated on 29 April 2021.

Transatlantica – Revue d'études américaines est mis à disposition selon les termes de la licence Creative Commons Attribution - Pas d'Utilisation Commerciale - Pas de Modifcation 4.0 International. 1

TABLE OF CONTENTS

L’esclavage à l’écran / Slavery on Screen Dirigé par Michaël Roy et Philip Kaisary / Edited by Michaël Roy and Philip Kaisary

Introduction« A hole in the canon of cinema » ? L’esclavage nord-américain à l’écran Michaël Roy

From to Nat Turner: An Overview of Slavery in American Film, 1903-2016 Melvyn Stokes

« Spirit of the dead, rise up! […] and claim your story ». Représentation de l’esclavage et esthétique de la résistance dans Sankofa (Haile Gerima, 1993) Claire Dutriaux

Confronting Race Head-on in (Steve McQueen, 2013): Redefining the Contours of the Classic Biopic? Anne-Marie Paquet-Deyris

“Queen of the fields”: Slavery’s Graphic Violence and the Black Female Body in 12 Years a Slave (Steve McQueen, 2013) Hélène Charlery

The Birth of a Nation (Nate Parker, 2016): The Tale of Nat Turner’s Rebellion Delphine Letort

American Women Writers Abroad: 1849-1976 Edited by Stéphanie Durrans

American Women Writers Abroad: Myth and Reality Stéphanie Durrans

In, Out, and Beyond: Dislocation, Contamination and the Redemptive Power of Womanhood in California, In-doors and Out by Eliza W. , 1856 Claire Sorin

Transnational Relationships, US Feminism, and the Labor of Dark Foreign Men in the “New World” of in Louisa May Alcott’s Diana and Persis Leslie Hammer

Reading the Bibliographies of the Women’s Rest Tour Association: Cultural Travel in the Long Nineteenth Century Julia Carlson

Travels, and Limitations: Ambasciatrice Caroline Crane Marsh Etta Madden

“Travelling in the Family”: Elizabeth Bishop’s Brazilian Autobiographical Voice Myriam Bellehigue

Weimar Migrations: Katherine Anne Porter in Joseph Kuhn

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“Back and Forth Between the Sea and the Mountain”: Negative Mobility and Transnationalism in Hualing Nieh’s Mulberry and Peach Grazia Micheli

Hors Thème

« Somnambulisme », ou l’après-coup de la métaphore Marc Amfreville

Le regard impossible Réflexions sur les présupposés et les mécanismes idéologiques des images de synthèse photoréalistes dans le blockbuster hollywoodien contemporain Mathias Kusnierz

De la porte de Brandebourg à La Havane : Wilder, Hitchcock et l’héritage révolutionnaire Julie Michot

Recensions

Jim Cocola, Places in the Making: A Cultural Geography of American Poetry Neal Alexander

Béatrice Pire, Figures de la décomposition familiale dans le roman américain contemporain Sophie Chapuis

Carrie Hyde, Civic Longing : The Speculative Origins of U.S. Citizenship Hélène Cottet

Dean J. Franco, The Border and the Line: Race and Literature in Michael Docherty

Hélène Le Dantec-Lowry, Claire Parfait, Matthieu Renault, Marie-Jeanne Rossignol et Pauline Vermeren (dir.), Écrire l’histoire depuis les marges : une anthologie d’historiens africains-américains, 1855-1965 Nicolas Martin-Breteau

Hélène Valance, Nocturne. Night in American Art, 1890–1917 Winner of the Terra Foundation for American Art – Yale University Press American Art in Book Prize. Helena Lamouliatte-Schmitt

Nicole Brittingham Furlonge, Race Sounds. The Art of Listening in African American Literature Charles Joseph

Emily C. Burns, Transnational Frontiers: The American West in James R. Swensen

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Actualité de la recherche

Melynda Price: “‘When Black Mothers Weep’: Race, Motherhood and Anti-violence in Detroit” May 30th, 2018 – Université Sorbonne Nouvelle Jeanne Boiteux

« Passeurs de la littérature américaine en France 1917-1967 » Université Rennes 214-15 mars 2019 Christelle Centi

Percival Everett: Theory, philosophy and fiction ERIAC (EA 4705), Rouen UniversityMay 2nd and 3rd 2019 Anne-Julie Debare

« La machine dans la littérature et les arts visuels du monde anglophone » Journée d’études internationale OVALE, Sorbonne-Université28 mai 2019 Olivier Hercend

« Dorothea Tanning, le modernisme et l’avant-garde transatlantique » Conférence d’Alyce Mahon, Maîtresse de conférences en histoire de l’art moderne et contemporain à l’Université de Cambridge« Giacometti Lab », Institut Giacometti, , 7 juin 2019 Yasna Bozhkova

« Frontières dans les Amériques » Université Grenoble Alpes, ILCEA4, Laboratoire Pacte, 11-13 juin 2019 Cléa Fortuné

“Passages”: The Robert Duncan Centennial Conference in Paris Sorbonne Université, Paris, June 12-14, 2019 Berengere Riou

“The Legacies of Ursula K. Le Guin: Science, Fiction and Ethics for the Anthropocene” /“Héritages d’Ursula Le Guin : Science, fiction et éthique pour l’Anthropocène” Paris, 18–21 June 2019, Institut du Monde Anglophone, Université de la Sorbonne Nouvelle David Creuze

Perspectives (Nate Parker, 2016) : modèles et contre-modèles

The Birth of a Nation de Nate Parker, une anti-adaptation ? Michaël Roy

Réécrire l’histoire du/au cinéma : The Birth of a Nation de Nate Parker, et l’ombre de D.W. Griffith Emmanuelle Delanoë-Brun

Nat Turner à l’écran : un héritage controversé Antoine Guégan

Trans'Arts

“Ernst Haas, la couleur visionnaire,” at Les Douches La Galerie (Paris) Guillaume Mouleux

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Là où réside la mémoire : Sally Mann au Jeu de Paume Sally Mann : Mille et un passages, 18/06/2019 – 22/09/2019, Jeu de Paume (Paris) Faustine Rondin

Sally Mann’s “A Thousand Crossings” at the Musée du Jeu de Paume Mary-Elaine Jenkins

La boîte à musique

Leaving the Building: Elvis, Celebrity, Biography, and the Limits of Psychological Autopsy Mark Duffett and Paula Hearsum

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L’esclavage à l’écran / Slavery on Screen Dirigé par Michaël Roy et Philip Kaisary / Edited by Michaël Roy and Philip Kaisary

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Introduction « A hole in the canon of cinema » ? L’esclavage nord-américain à l’écran

Michaël Roy

1 « The slaves left. » Prononcés par Amy (Oona Laurence) dans la scène d’ouverture des Proies de (The Beguiled, 2017), alors que la jeune fille s’apprête à porter assistance au caporal unioniste interprété par Colin Farrell, ces trois monosyllabes suffisent à évacuer du récit tout traitement de la problématique esclavagiste. De ces personnages d’esclaves – des femmes, des hommes ? combien ? employés à quelles tâches ? – on ne saura rien, hormis qu’ils ont déserté le pensionnat de Miss Farnsworth (), où se déroule l’essentiel de l’action. Leur acte de résistance est moins ici le signe de leur capacité d’agir (agency) qu’une façon d’éviter un sujet qui ne semble pas fondamentalement préoccuper la réalisatrice, quoi qu’elle en dise en interview ; « I didn’t want to brush over such an important topic in a light way », a-t-elle ainsi répondu à ses détracteurs. Car la critique a pris la mesure de cette troublante absence des esclaves et de l’esclavage dans un film se déroulant en Virginie pendant la guerre de Sécession, d’autant plus manifeste que les incarnations précédentes des Proies – le roman de Thomas Cullinan publié en 1966 et sa première adaptation par Don Siegel en 1971 – abordaient la thématique raciale, à travers les personnages de l’esclave domestique Matilda, renommée Hallie (Mae Mercer) dans le film de Siegel, et celui de la maîtresse d’école Edwina, métisse dans le roman. La première disparaît du film de Coppola, tandis que la seconde est interprétée par . Difficile dans ces conditions d’échapper aux accusations de whitewashing, Les Proies puisant par ailleurs dans l’iconographie du film de plantation de l’âge classique d’, entre robes à crinoline, grande maison à colonnes ioniques et dîner à la bougie ; il n’est pas tout à fait anodin que Coppola ait conseillé à l’actrice Elle Fanning de s’inspirer du personnage de Scarlett O’Hara (Vivien Leigh) dans Autant en emporte le vent (Gone with the Wind, , 1939) pour le personnage d’Alicia. L’esthétisation des images va de pair avec une dépolitisation du propos, centré sur les jeux de séduction au sein du pensionnat, et

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oublieux de la réalité sociale et historique de la guerre, comme l’a noté Richard Brody dans sa critique pour (Brody ; Atad ; Miller).

2 Sans doute Les Proies ne pouvait-il que susciter la controverse, alors que depuis le début des années 2010 se multiplient les films et les séries télévisées évoquant tant l’esclavage nord-américain que le lourd héritage racial qui en est le produit. Quatre films en particulier, tous sortis pendant le second mandat du premier président noir des États- Unis, ont installé le thème de l’esclavage et de son abolition dans le paysage cinématographique : Lincoln de (2012) présente la lutte abolitionniste comme le combat héroïque d’un homme politique blanc aux convictions inébranlables ; Django Unchained de (2012) fait le pari de montrer le système esclavagiste sur un mode carnavalesque, délibérément anachronique ; 12 Years a Slave de Steve McQueen (2013) dresse un tableau glaçant de « l’institution particulière », telle qu’elle est perçue par un Noir libre de l’État de New , (), capturé et réduit en esclavage en Louisiane1 ; The Birth of a Nation de Nate Parker (2016), enfin, explore les modes de résistance des esclaves à travers le récit d’une révolte sanglante et le portrait de son leader charismatique, Nat Turner, interprété par le réalisateur2. Deux séries télévisées, le remake de la mini-série Racines (, 2016), dont la version originale date de 1977, et la série Underground (2016-2017), centrée sur le Chemin de fer clandestin, s’ajoutent à cette liste de longs métrages. L’esclavage des Noirs, parfois figuré dans ses réalités les plus brutales, constitue désormais un réservoir de fictions cinématographiques et télévisuelles en même temps qu’un terrain de réflexion politique pour le cinéma américain3.

3 Interrogé par l’historien Henry Louis Gates Jr. sur la genèse de 12 Years a Slave, le réalisateur Steve McQueen répondait : What happened was that, from the beginning, I wanted to tell a story about slavery. I just felt there was a hole in the canon of cinema. Also, I sometimes feel that slavery has disappeared from the discussion, that it’s not looked at in a way that it is deemed important. (Gates) La « béance » cinématographique observée par McQueen (« a hole in the canon of cinema ») est à relativiser. Si l’on assiste sans aucun doute à un foisonnement inédit de films montrant la violence de l’institution esclavagiste et les résistances qu’elle suscite, le monde des plantations du Sud des États-Unis n’a jamais été complètement absent des écrans de cinéma, comme le souligne Melvyn Stokes dans sa contribution à ce dossier. Il sert d’arrière-plan à quelques-uns des films les plus emblématiques de l’histoire du jeune cinéma américain, parmi lesquels Naissance d’une nation (The Birth of a Nation, D.W. Griffith, 1915), film pionnier sur le plan technique et esthétique, et Autant en emporte le vent, immense succès populaire récompensé de dix Oscars, dont celui du meilleur film ; nul autre roman n’a été aussi fréquemment adapté pendant l’ère du film muet que le bestseller antiesclavagiste d’Harriet Beecher Stowe, La Case de l’oncle Tom (Uncle’s Tom Cabin, 1852). L’historienne Brenda Stevenson va jusqu’à faire de l’esclavage un thème « central » de la production hollywoodienne (Stevenson 489).

4 Bien sûr, la représentation qui en est alors faite est hautement problématique, lorsqu’elle n’est pas purement et simplement mensongère. Elle est en phase avec le consensus historiographique de l’époque, largement façonné par l’historien blanc sudiste Ulrich B. Phillips : celui-ci fait de la plantation un lieu d’harmonie, où des Noirs asservis, naturellement inférieurs, peuvent être civilisés et éduqués grâce à l’action bienfaitrice de maîtres fermes mais indulgents (Roy 25). L’industrie hollywoodienne se développe au moment précis où finit par s’imposer le mythe de la Cause perdue (Lost

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Cause), qui idéalise un « Vieux Sud » idyllique à jamais disparu, et fétichise la bravoure de chefs confédérés prêts à tous les sacrifices pour défendre leur « civilisation »4 ; euphémisation de la violence de l’esclavage et mobilisation de stéréotypes racistes (le Tom, la mammy) sont indissociables de ce récit (Bogle). En tant qu’élément de culture populaire propre à façonner les imaginaires, le cinéma hollywoodien participe à sa consolidation dans la première moitié du XXe siècle. L’exemple des Proies de Coppola révèle toute la difficulté qu’il y a à se déprendre du pouvoir de fascination exercé par les somptueuses images en du générique d’Autant en emporte le vent, traduction visuelle d’une vision moonlight and magnolia du Sud d’avant la guerre de Sécession élaborée dans la littérature de plantation de la fin du XIXe siècle. Même le film de Steve McQueen, a priori moins suspect de complaisance idéologique à l’égard de l’esclavage, témoigne selon une critique de la « persistance des tropes sudistes hollywoodiens » et de la « résilience d’une iconographie que 12 Years a Slave semble avoir du mal à tenir à distance » (Lepers). La qualité quasi sensuelle des images lorsqu’est filmée la nature – cyprès majestueux, rayons du soleil reflétés dans les bayous, champs de coton s’étendant à perte de vue – sublime un environnement qui est avant tout « source de terreur et de désespoir pour Northup et les populations réduites en esclavage dans le Sud profond » (Kaisary ; voir également Willis 234).

5 C’est pourtant le projet de 12 Years a Slave que de rompre avec cet encombrant héritage visuel, en confrontant le spectateur à l’horreur de l’esclavage, montré pour ce qu’il est vraiment, à savoir un système d’assujettissement, d’exploitation et de destruction des corps noirs. Il s’agit moins pour McQueen de combler une béance que de rétablir une vérité cinématographique de l’esclavage, dans un geste de dévoilement qui reproduit celui des militants abolitionnistes noirs et blancs de la période antebellum : pour contrer les discours pro-esclavagistes sur le prétendu « bonheur » de ces êtres joyeux et insouciants que seraient les esclaves, les abolitionnistes réunissaient de la documentation, des témoignages, des preuves des traitements cruels qui leur étaient infligés, afin d’informer et d’alerter le public nordiste. L’image jouait alors un rôle moindre que l’écrit, et c’est sans doute dans les récits autobiographiques d’anciens esclaves fugitifs ou émancipés, à commencer par celui de Solomon Northup (, 1853), qu’on trouve les descriptions les plus saisissantes et les critiques les plus véhémentes de l’institution esclavagiste. Ces hommes et ces femmes anciennement asservies s’accordent toutefois à dire que ce qu’ils et elles ont enduré ne peut être retranscrit. Jamais les mots ne rendront justice à la radicalité de l’expérience vécue. Ainsi de , né dans le Kentucky : Reader, believe me when I say, that no tongue, nor pen ever has or can express the horrors of American Slavery. Consequently I despair in finding language to express adequately the deep feeling of my soul, as I contemplate the past history of my life. (Bibb 15) Ou d’, qui note peu après : « my mind has groaned under tortures which I believe will never be related, because, language is inadequate to express them » (H.B. Brown II). On sait par ailleurs la censure qu’ fait peser sur son propre récit, Incidents in the Life of Slave Girl (1861), lorsqu’il s’agit de raconter l’esclavage sexuel auquel son maître entend la soumettre. Et l’on peut conclure avec s’adressant au public de la société antiesclavagiste féminine de Salem, dans le Massachusetts : « Slavery has never been represented; Slavery never can be represented » (W.W. Brown 4). Si l’esclavage reste fondamentalement « irreprésentable », certains réalisateurs ont pourtant pris le sujet à bras-le-corps au

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cours des dernières années, mettant à profit la capacité du cinéma à créer l’illusion du réel et ainsi à affecter les spectateurs de manière viscérale, par le biais de fortes émotions visuelles. La torture, désormais, se montre face caméra, qu’on pense à la de (Lupita Nyong’o) dans 12 Years a Slave ou à la scène de The Birth of a Nation dans laquelle deux esclaves récalcitrants sont édentés à coups de burin puis nourris de force. Tandis que Parker multiplie les gros plans sur les visages tuméfiés et les dos scarifiés, McQueen crée l’inconfort en jouant sur la temporalité : on se souvient du plan fixe de près d’une minute trente sur Northup pendu à un arbre, juste assez bas pour que ses pieds effleurent le sol, tandis qu’autour de lui la vie de la plantation continue, comme si un homme n’était pas entre la vie et la mort. La flagellation de Patsey est également montrée dans toute son insupportable durée (Thaggert 334-335).

6 De tels choix esthétiques posent d’évidentes questions éthiques et politiques, qui ne sont pas sans rappeler celles posées par la représentation de la Shoah à l’écran, quand bien même les deux situations historiques ne peuvent être rabattues l’une sur l’autre. Plusieurs des cinéastes auxquels on a reproché leur figuration des camps de concentration se sont d’ailleurs frottés au thème de l’esclavage dans la suite de leur carrière : Gillo Pontecorvo est à la fois le réalisateur de Kapo (1960) et de Queimada (1969), Steven Spielberg celui de La Liste de Schindler (Schindler’s List, 1993) et d’Amistad (1997). Dans sa célèbre critique de Kapo intitulée « De l’abjection », écrivait : pour de multiples raisons, faciles à comprendre, le réalisme absolu, ou ce qui peut en tenir lieu au cinéma, est ici impossible ; toute tentative dans cette direction est nécessairement inachevée (« donc immorale »), tout essai de reconstitution ou de maquillage dérisoire et grotesque, toute approche traditionnelle du « spectacle » relève du voyeurisme et de la pornographie. (Rivette 54) C’est bien un traitement « spectaculaire » de l’esclavage que proposent Parker et McQueen, et l’on retrouve des éléments de la critique de Rivette dans la réception de The Birth of a Nation et 12 Years a Slave. Quiconque a travaillé sur l’esclavage sait que les charges de « voyeurisme » et de « pornographie » sont monnaie courante dès lors qu’il s’agit d’en révéler les aspects les plus violents5, et les films de notre corpus n’échappent pas à la règle. Les propos du critique africain-américain Armond White à propos de 12 Years a Slave sont éloquents : témoignant du goût du réalisateur pour les « mises en scène sadomasochistes », le film de McQueen serait un « spectacle d’horreurs » à ranger dans la catégorie du torture porn (l’appellation générique désigne des films d’horreur qui se complaisent dans l’observation de la torture) (cité par Sauvage). Du fait de son passé de vidéaste exposé dans les musées d’art contemporain les plus prestigieux, McQueen a fait l’objet de critiques assez vives sur le terrain esthétique : l’esclavage ne serait pour lui qu’un thème parmi d’autres – la grève de la faim d’un nationaliste irlandais dans Hunger (2008), l’addiction sexuelle d’un trentenaire new-yorkais dans Shame (2011) – propre à satisfaire son goût pour l’exploration des états limites et l’exhibition des corps violentés. La forme moins élaborée de The Birth of a Nation semble avoir préservé Parker de semblables attaques, alors même que le film pousse la « reconstitution » et le « maquillage » plus loin que 12 Years a Slave. Avec Django Unchained, Tarantino a contourné l’impasse du « réalisme absolu » en portant – dans le style qu’on lui connaît – un regard « bouffon » sur l’esclavage, qui ne s’embarrasse pas d’exactitude historique. Le spectacle y est pleinement revendiqué afin d’être mieux désamorcé. Cette approche singulière a suscité tantôt l’indignation, par exemple celle de accusant Tarantino de trivialiser l’expérience de l’esclavage, tantôt

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l’admiration, y compris celle d’une figure incontournable des études africaines- américaines : « I think that Django Unchained was the best postmodern take on slavery », a déclaré Henry Louis Gates, Jr. (cité par Vogel 17).

7 La dimension historique, enfin, est au centre de la réception des films sur l’esclavage. Pas un film qui ne sorte sans que les historiennes et historiens de l’esclavage nord- américain ne publient tribunes dans les grands quotidiens nationaux, billets de blog et tables rondes dans les revues spécialisées. La question est trop chargée d’enjeux historiographiques pour ne pas préoccuper la communauté historienne, mais aussi les spécialistes de littérature et de culture africaines-américaines, dans le cas de textes africains-américains adaptés au cinéma, comme le fut Twelve Years a Slave. Ainsi les historiens ont-ils été prompts à pointer la relégation des personnages noirs (toujours passifs) aux marges du récit dans Lincoln, où l’émancipation est réduite à une série de tractations entre hommes politiques blancs à la Maison Blanche et au Congrès (Masur). C’est oublier que la résistance des esclaves est indissociable de l’émergence d’un mouvement abolitionniste puis de la transformation de la guerre de Sécession en une guerre d’émancipation (Sinha, 2016). En se concentrant sur l’arène politique, sur la figure d’un seul homme et sur les quelques semaines précédant l’adoption du XIIIe amendement de la Constitution, Lincoln efface des décennies de luttes antiesclavagistes en même temps que les acteurs et actrices noires et blanches de ces luttes ; il propose de ce fait une vision étriquée et historiquement problématique du processus complexe qu’est l’abolition de l’esclavage. Dans The Birth of a Nation, c’est la radicalité de la révolte de Nat Turner qui fait défaut. L’insurrection à proprement parler est expédiée en quelques scènes à la fin du film : seuls des hommes blancs semblent être visés, alors qu’en réalité les rebelles n’ont épargné ni femmes ni enfants. Le film présente comme une vengeance personnelle contre des maîtres cruels ce qui fut en réalité une révolte collective contre les fondements d’un système injuste (Jones ; Sinha, 2017).

8 Ce sont ces enjeux historiques, politiques, esthétiques et éthiques de la production cinématographique sur l’esclavage qu’interroge le présent dossier. Melvyn Stokes y dresse en ouverture un panorama des représentations de l’esclavage dans le cinéma américain, des premières adaptations de La Case de l’oncle Tom au Birth of a Nation de Nate Parker. Après avoir minimisé la violence de l’esclavage, le cinéma américain a développé après la Seconde Guerre mondiale un regard plus critique, sans toutefois que le thème ne devienne populaire auprès du public. Ce n’est qu’à partir des années 2010 que le sujet a fini par s’imposer et que des films sur l’esclavage ont connu tout à la fois un succès critique et commercial. Stokes relie ces évolutions à des changements de fond dans la société et la culture nord-américaines. Claire Dutriaux consacre son article à Sankofa (1993), du cinéaste éthiopien indépendant Haile Gerima, généralement associé au groupe de réalisateurs noirs américains qu’on appelle la LA Rebellion. Sankofa a la plupart du temps été analysé dans sa dimension politique, idéologique et historique ; Dutriaux se penche ici sur sa dimension esthétique et sémiotique pour montrer que le film définit une esthétique de la résistance à l’esclavage. Les deux articles suivants portent sur 12 Years a Slave, sans doute celui des films récents sur l’esclavage qui a le plus suscité l’intérêt de la critique cinématographique comme du monde universitaire. Anne-Marie Paquet-Deyris replace le film de Steve McQueen dans le contexte des discours sur la prétendue « ère post-raciale » inaugurée par l’élection de Barack Obama à la présidence des États-Unis. À partir d’une réflexion sur le genre du biopic, Paquet- Deyris montre que 12 Years a Slave réinsère au cœur même du débat national la relation

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conflictuelle de l’Amérique à la notion de race et convoque un modèle « post-post- racial » qui intègre pleinement l’histoire raciale du pays. Hélène Charlery se concentre quant à elle sur la place donnée aux personnages féminins – en particulier Patsey – dans le film. L’histoire de Northup, esclave dit « temporaire », est présentée comme une porte d’entrée permettant d’accéder à celle de l’esclave dite « permanente », Patsey, laquelle occupe en définitive une place centrale dans l’économie visuelle du film. 12 Years a Slave est peut-être le premier film à accorder une telle importance à une femme noire réduite en esclavage. L’article de Delphine Letort est consacré aux mémoires de l’esclavage dans The Birth of a Nation de Nate Parker. À travers une étude narrative qui examine la manière dont le réalisateur utilise le genre du biopic pour héroïser l’esclave rebelle, Letort analyse l’impact des images sur la construction de la figure de Nat Turner. Les films de plantation et autres représentations cinématographiques des Noirs ont laissé une empreinte visuelle dont Parker conteste la légitimité en développant une esthétique de l’esclavage qui prend le contrepied des représentations existantes. Outre ce dossier thématique, la rubrique « Perspectives » de ce numéro de Transatlantica contient trois courtes contributions de Michaël Roy, Emmanuelle Delanoë-Brun et Antoine Guégan sur The Birth of a Nation : le film de Parker y est analysé au prisme de ses modèles et contre-modèles (littéraires et cinématographiques), des Confessions de 1831 au film italien Les Négriers (Addio Zio Tom, Gualtiero Jacopetti et Franco Prosperi, 1970), en passant – inévitablement – par le Naissance d’une nation de Griffith.

9 Il est probable que le cinéma américain continue, dans les années à venir, de faire retour sur cet aspect incontournable de l’histoire des États-Unis, inventant de nouvelles formes à même de traduire l’esclavage non seulement dans son extrême violence – ce qu’il a déjà fait –, mais aussi dans sa dimension de système d’exploitation au cœur de la modernité capitaliste – ce qu’il a eu peine à aborder jusqu’ici. On peut également parier que les grandes figures d’esclaves fugitifs et révoltés auront droit à leurs biopics, si tant est que les studios – toujours frileux lorsqu’il est question de sujets politiquement sensibles et de films au casting largement noir – acceptent de financer de tels projets. Les récits d’esclaves, après tout, fournissent un matériau riche sur le plan dramatique : entre pathétique et romanesque, ils peuvent inspirer des scénarios de films hollywoodiens tout en se prêtant à la vision singulière d’un metteur en scène, comme l’a bien montré 12 Years a Slave. Certains projets prometteurs sont en cours de réalisation ou sur le point de sortir au moment où sont écrites ces lignes : , le réalisateur oscarisé de Moonlight (2016) et Si Beale Street pouvait parler (If Beale Street Could Talk, 2018), doit adapter sous forme de mini-série le roman de Colson Whitehead The (2016) ; réalisé par Kasi Lemmons, Harriet, d’après la vie d’ (interprétée par Cynthia Erivo), sortira sur les écrans américains en novembre 2019. Nous espérons que les analyses des contributrices et contributeurs de ce numéro offriront des pistes pour comprendre et interpréter ces films à venir.

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BIBLIOGRAPHIE

ATAD, Corey. « Lost in Adaptation. » Slate, 20 juin 2017. Page consultée le 15 novembre 2018.

BIBB, Henry. Narrative of the Life and Adventures of Henry Bibb, an American Slave, Written by Himself. : Published by the Author, 1849.

BOGLE, Donald. Toms, Coons, Mulattoes, Mammies, and Bucks: An Interpretive History of Blacks in American Films. New York : Viking Press, 1973.

BRODY, Richard. « The Beguiled: Sofia Coppola’s Dubiously Abstract Vision of the Civil War. » The New Yorker, 23 juin 2017. Page consultée le 15 novembre 2018.

BROWN, Henry Box. Narrative of the Life of Henry Box Brown, Written by Himself. : Printed by Lee and Glynn, 1851.

BROWN, William Wells. A Lecture Delivered before the Female Anti-Slavery Society of Salem, at Lyceum Hall, Nov. 14, 1847. : Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society, 1847.

GATES, Henry Louis, Jr. « Steve McQueen and Henry Louis Gates Jr. Talk 12 Years a Slave. » The Root, 24 décembre 2013. Page consultée le 15 novembre 2018.

JONES, Eileen. « Honoring the Real Nat Turner. » Jacobin, 15 octobre 2016. Page consultée le 15 novembre 2018.

KAISARY, Philip. « The and Filmic Aesthetics: Steve McQueen, Solomon Northup, and Colonial Violence. » MELUS, vol. 42, no 2, 2017, p. 94-114.

LEPERS, Maureen. « De l’inévitable retour de la légende du vieux Sud : 12 Years a Slave (Steve McQueen, 2014), vers une révision du film de plantation hollywoodien ? » Mise au point, no 10, 2018. Page consultée le 15 novembre 2018.

MASUR, Kate. « In Spielberg’s Lincoln, Passive Black Characters. » , 12 novembre 2012. Page consultée le 15 novembre 2018.

MILLER, Julie. « Here’s How Much Fun Sofia Coppola, Kirsten Dunst, and Elle Fanning Had Making The Beguiled. » , 26 mai 2017. Page consultée le 15 novembre 2018.

ROY, Michaël. Textes fugitifs. Le récit d’esclave au prisme de l’histoire du livre. Lyon : ENS Éditions, 2017.

SAUVAGE, Célia. « La réception controversée de 12 Years a Slave : l’esclavage entre Histoire, race et émotions. » Communication présentée lors de la journée d’étude « L’esclavage à l’écran / Slavery on Screen », Université Paris Diderot, 12 décembre 2014.

SINHA, Manisha. The Slave’s Cause: A History of Abolition. New Haven : Yale University Press, 2016.

SINHA, Manisha. « Slavery on Screen. » Dissent, vol. 4, n° 2, 2017, p. 16-20.

STEVENSON, Brenda E. « Filming Black Voices and Stories: Slavery on America’s Screens. » Journal of the Civil War Era, vol. 8, no 3, 2018, p. 488-520.

THAGGERT, Miriam. « 12 Years a Slave: Jasper’s Look. » American Literary History, vol. 26, no 2, 2014, p. 332-338.

VOGEL, Joseph. « The Confessions of Quentin Tarantino: Whitewashing Slave Rebellion in Django Unchained. » Journal of American Culture, vol. 41, no 1, 2018, p. 17-27.

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WILLIS, Sharon. « Moving Pictures: Spectacles of Enslavement in American Cinema. » The Cambridge Companion to Slavery in American Literature. Dir. Ezra Tawil. Cambridge : Cambridge University Press, 2016, p. 219-235.

WINKS, Robin, éd. Four Fugitive Slave Narratives. Reading, MA : Addison-Wesley, 1969.

NOTES

1. « L’institution particulière » (peculiar institution) est un euphémisme utilisé au xixe siècle pour désigner l’esclavage, notamment par les Sudistes qui cherchent à le défendre. 2. La photographie qui illustre ce dossier est tirée du film de Parker. Merci à Delphine Letort d’avoir obtenu les droits nécessaires à sa reproduction. 3. Bien que le réalisateur Steve McQueen soit britannique, son film est une production états- unienne qui relève donc du cinéma « américain » au sens culturel et commercial. 4. Sur l’essor de la mythologie de la « Cause perdue », voir le dossier « Guerre de Sécession et esclavage : actualité des conflits de mémoire » coordonné par Nicolas Martin-Breteau dans le numéro 1 | 2017 de Transatlantica (rubrique « Perspectives »). 5. Sans volonté de déprécier les récits d’esclaves, l’historien Robin Winks en parle dans les termes suivants : « one might say that slave narratives were the pious pornography of their day, replete with horrific tales of whippings, sexual assaults, and explicit brutality » (Winks vi).

AUTEUR

MICHAËL ROY Université Paris Nanterre

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From Uncle Tom to Nat Turner: An Overview of Slavery in American Film, 1903-2016

Melvyn Stokes

1 When Steven Spielberg released Amistad (1997), his film about the long legal battle to free the black African slaves found aboard a Spanish ship in 1839, reviewer Christopher Hemblade commented that “as slave epics go, and let’s be honest, there ain’t much demand for them, this is about the most visceral and unclichéd version you could hope for” (Hemblade). In spite of Hemblade’s praise, Amistad’s history at the box office seemingly justified his more general claim: that there was little popular American demand for movies about slavery. Nevertheless, in the second decade of the twenty- first century, a number of films appeared that seemed to defy this observation by both dealing with slavery and being commercially as well as critically successful: Spielberg’s account in Lincoln (2012) of how the sixteenth president led the campaign to pass the Thirteenth Amendment abolishing slavery through the House of Representatives; Quentin Tarantino’s Django Unchained (2012), dealing with a former slave trying to free his wife from captivity; and Steve McQueen’s 12 Years a Slave (2013), retelling the story of real-life Northern free black Solomon Northup’s life as a slave and eventual escape from slavery after he has been kidnapped and sold. In January 2016, yet another film about slavery, directed by and starring Nate Parker, previewed at the . This article will explore the ways in which these recent films have represented the institution of African slavery in America and contrast and contextualize them—and their reception—with earlier American films dealing with the same subject.1

2 Early American cinema was quick to make a film about slavery. But that film was located within a dense network of literary and theatrical reference points. In 1903, Edwin S. Porter directed Uncle Tom’s Cabin for the Edison Company. The film had only fourteen shots. It was probably comprehensible only to those who knew the story it told (Staiger 105). But that included a very large section of the American population. Harriet Beecher Stowe’s classic antislavery novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin, first published in 1852, was still in 1899 the book most frequently borrowed from the New York Public

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Library. Many Americans were also familiar with the story through pirated adaptations of the book for the stage: by the 1890s there were around five hundred traveling theatrical companies in the putting on what had become known as “Tom Trouper” or “Tommer” shows and a 1902 observer estimated that one in every thirty- five Americans would see the play that year (Staiger 105, 108). There would be at least six more film versions of the story by 1927, most focusing on the different fortunes and cruel fate of Tom himself, the brutality of slave owner Simon Legree, and the escape of Eliza and her child to free territory.

3 A very small number of early films also focused on black resistance to the cruelty of slave owners. The Slave Hunt, a Vitagraph movie from 1907, showed a planter whipping a slave woman. A young man, probably her son, rescues her by killing the planter. He flees, pursued by bloodhounds, but is eventually captured and killed. This emphasis on interracial violence went way beyond the treatment of slavery in Stowe’s novel, offending the Variety film critic who saw it as “not at all refined or agreeable” and leaving “a ” (Variety Film Reviews, 1983a). In the following year, a film called The Slave’s Vengeance had a slave whipped at the stake on his master’s orders. In revenge, he kidnaps his master’s young daughter and runs away. When he is caught, the young girl improbably pleads for his life. A reviewer praised this “pathetic finish” to what had been “a stirring if not happily chosen subject” (Variety Film Reviews, 1983a).

4 What is most obvious, looking back, is not the number of early films following in the wake of the antislavery movement and focusing on the evils of slavery. It is the conjunction between the beginnings of American cinema and the growth of a very different view of slavery. This had its roots in four principal intellectual and cultural changes. The first was the development of the myth of the “Lost Cause,” created by Southern writers in the decades after the ending of the Civil War to justify why they had fought. These writers—William Alexander Carruthers, John Esten Cooke, Mary Johnston, John Pendleton Kennedy, Sarah Pryor, and, most crucially, Thomas Nelson Page—romanticized what they presented as the “Old South” of antebellum days in mass-circulation magazines with their mainly Northern readership. According to the “Lost Cause,” slavery was not the main reason for the Civil War. The slaves themselves had been happy and thoroughly content with their status—and, it was argued, the South itself would eventually have abolished slavery on its own initiative (Blight 10; Connelly and Bellows 1-38). The second change was the emergence of history as a professional academic discipline. Scholars who wrote about slavery—notably Georgia- born and educated Ulrich B. Phillips—in the main represented it as a benign and largely benevolent institution that had helped “civilize” (Smith and Inscoe). The third change was the increasing tendency—growing from multiple intellectual routes, including ideas of Aryanism, Anglo-Saxonism, Social Darwinism, and other pseudo-sciences of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries—to rank races in a hierarchy with whites at the top and blacks near the bottom (Baker 11-98; Tucker 9-137). Finally, there was the emergence in the early twentieth century of the “Civil War” genre as a popular category of feature films. The first movies of this type were made in the North, addressed to Northern audiences, and presented a view of the war biased towards the North. Beginning in 1909, however, filmmakers discovered that what Eileen Bowser called “the more romantic, noble, and heroic ideals to be found in the defeated South” were popular also in Northern cities (Bowser 178). From 1911, films reflecting the Southern point of view—including at times flattering perceptions of its

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“peculiar institution” of slavery—were twice as numerous as films with a Northern bias (Bowser 177-179; Ehrlich 77).

5 All these trends reached their apogee in D.W. Griffith’s epic film, The Birth of a Nation, in 1915. The first part of the film balances the kindness and generosity of spirit of the owner of the Cameron plantation in with the loyalty and joie de vivre of his well-treated slaves. Dr. Cameron (Spottiswoode Aitken), the head of the family, is introduced in an intertitle as “the kindly master of Cameron Hall.” The main sequence involving slavery shows the Camerons and their Northern guests visiting the slave quarters. An intertitle informs viewers that the slaves are enjoying their “two-hour interval given for dinner, out of their working day from six to six.” The implicit idea that slaves were not overworked was developed even further when enslaved men are shown having the energy to put on an impromptu dance to entertain their white visitors. Under slavery, Griffith’s film suggests, whites and blacks get on well together because each knows their place. In the second part of the film, with slavery gone, such racial harmony is lost and black men in particular slough off the “civilized” ways they have learned from whites in order to revert to the primitivism of their forebears.

6 Almost half a century ago, in a collective analysis of ’s movie Young Mr. Lincoln, the editors of Cahiers du cinéma argued that even film texts that seemed most overtly to represent the ideology of a ruling class could sometimes be “subversive,” in the sense that they contained inherent cracks and contradictions that invited oppositional readings (“Young Mr. Lincoln”). This is certainly true of the portrayal of slavery in The Birth of a Nation. The fact that slavery was a system of forced labor in which humans were traded simply as chattels is underlined in the very first sequence of the film in which manacled slaves are shown being auctioned in a town square. But the really revealing moment comes in the second part of the film, when Dr. Cameron is brought in chains to face his former slaves. The old master is taunted and even physically assaulted by an African American woman (Madame Sul Te-Wan). This second part of the film is about miscegenation—supposedly the threat posed by black men to white women. What the hostility shown to Dr. Cameron in this sequence seems to underline is that the reality of miscegenation had been white slave owners, as well as their sons and overseers, using their power to prey sexually on black female slaves.

7 Although a new, long version of Uncle Tom’s Cabin by Harry A. Pollard was released in 1927,2 there were comparatively few Hollywood films about slavery made until the end of the 1920s. In part, this was because of the baleful influence of The Birth of a Nation. The controversy surrounding the release of Griffith’s film discouraged the production of movies on similar themes. The Birth of a Nation even narrowed the range of black characters shown in American films in general and its influence led to the movie industry itself banning the showing of miscegenation on screen, first in the “Don’ts and Be Carefuls” of 1927 and later in the Production Code of 1930.3 What few films did refer to slavery during this period mainly treated it as benign. The subsequent period of true nostalgia for the Old South and slavery was the consequence of two things, one technological (the arrival of sound films), the other economic and social (the advent of the Great Depression).

8 The introduction of sound from 1927 made it possible to incorporate features of what was thought of—rightly or wrongly—as “black” music into film. Movies such as Hearts in Dixie (1929) and Hallelujah! (1929), even though—as Jack Temple Kirby points out—these

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two films were actually set after the Civil War (Kirby 68), seemed to suggest that African Americans had carried on living freely on plantations even after emancipation. “Ringing with banjos and brimming with high-kicking, happy darky stereotypes,” Kirby writes, “the[se] films conveyed an interpretation of slavery basically the same as Thomas Nelson Page’s” (Kirby 67). Other films in what might be seen as a “plantation musical” genre included Dixiana (1930), Mississippi (1935), Swanee River (1939), Way Down South (1939), Dixie (1943), and Song of the South (1946). Perhaps the most popular of all these movies were the “Southerns,” such as The Little Colonel and The Littlest Rebel, both from 1936.

9 The economic depression that began in 1929 also encouraged interest in the lost world of the Southern plantation. Hard times and high industrial unemployment made the supposed stability and seemingly timeless rural way of life in the appear especially appealing. To those suffering economic instability or threatened by unemployment in cities, the romantic myth of the Old South was a highly seductive one. “Audiences could marvel,” observed Edward D.C. Campbell, Jr., “at a culture so reliant on the land and the seasons rather than on the city and business trends” (Campbell 76). As the 1930s wore on, the plantations themselves became grander: Hollywood’s representation of the way of life of the Old South became a complex negotiation between filmmakers’ desires and ambitions, previous productions, and what spectators now had been led to accept. The relatively small and intimate plantations in Carolina (1934) and So Red the Rose (1935) made way for the far more impressive Halcyon plantation of Jezebel (1938) and, of course, Tara and Twelve Oaks in Gone with the Wind (1939).

10 Consistently, however, whether plantation musicals or plantation melodramas, these films depicted happy slaves loyally supporting their masters and mistresses. The one film of this kind that, at least to some degree, may seem to contradict this portrayal was So Red the Rose. Unusually, this showed plantation blacks—told that freedom is about to be achieved—who stop working for their master and family and, encouraged by their leader Cato (Clarence Muse), start to seize the livestock of their owners. But this “slave revolt” is easily put down by the daughter of the plantation family (Margaret Sullavan) who confronts Cato and reduces him to silence by evoking memories of the strong interracial bonds that had (supposedly) existed under slavery. Ultimately, therefore, this brief moment of black agency fails to undermine Hollywood’s trope of slavery as intrinsically a benign institution.

11 Although it was not the last plantation melodrama, Gone with the Wind was in many ways the most successful in commercial—and perhaps cultural—terms.4 It offers many benign images of slavery. It is the black foreman, Big Sam (Everett Brown), who—in an unlikely assertion of racial autonomy—calls “quittin’ time” in the cotton fields of Tara. Mammie (Hattie McDaniel), although a slave, is clearly a considerable social presence in the O’Hara household. Pork (Oscar Polk) has been close enough to Gerald O’Hara (Thomas Mitchell) to inherit his former master’s watch. House slaves are allowed or made (it is unclear which) to attend evening prayers at Tara. Ashley (Leslie Howard) later insists that slaves had not been treated as badly as the white convicts Scarlett (Vivien Leigh) proposes to hire, and talks nostalgically of “the high soft negro laughter from the [slave] quarters” that could be heard in the plantation house in “[t]he warm still country twilight.” Scarlett herself, confronted with Big Sam and other field hands cheerfully going off “to dig trenches for the Confederacy”—willing participants in their

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own continuing enslavement—, recognizes each of the workers by name. When they are hurried on their way by a Confederate officer, she calls after them—in a perfect expression of the supposed benign character of slavery—to let her know if they are “sick or ill.” Shortly before his death, Gerald O’Hara underlines to Scarlett the mixture of sternness and benevolence that had—at least according to “Lost Cause” writers— been used to control the slaves: “You must be firm with inferiors, but you must be gentle with them, especially darkies.”

12 Like The Birth of a Nation, however, Gone with the Wind also has sequences that challenge the view of slaves as happy, contented, and faithful. At such moments, slavery is revealed as a brutal system of labor exploitation. The shot of small boys hanging on the bell that is ringing out the end of the working day at Tara has a certain joyousness to it, but is also a reminder of the reality of child labor. This is underlined even more emphatically by the young black girls who are fanning the sleeping white girls on the afternoon of the barbecue at Twelve Oaks. Resting on the assumption that whites could not work in the heat, while blacks were used to it, the stereotype is nonetheless challenged by a close-up of one little black girl tiredly stroking her hair. Scarlett’s treatment of Prissy (Butterfly McQueen) is particularly revealing. Prissy is the only slave we see actually subjected to physical violence—Scarlett slaps her face. Scarlett also threatens Prissy in two other ways. She promises to “whip the hide off” her if she upsets Melanie while sitting with her and—in one of the most revealing phrases in the whole film—threatens to “sell her South.” This tapped into the tendency for slave owners to sell difficult, recalcitrant, or runaway slaves to the chain gangs in the frontier parts of states such as Mississippi, where work was much more arduous and the survival rates much lower than in the coastal plantations of Georgia and the Carolinas. Part of the worst effects of such sales was that they reflected the ultimate reality of slavery: that slaves were property rather than people. The slave concerned was also punished by being separated, probably for good, from his or her family: we know that Prissy has family since she tells Rhett (Clark Gable) that her mother would punish her (“wear me out with a corn stalk”) for entering Belle Watling (Ona Munson)’s saloon/brothel.5 There is one other oblique reference in Gone with the Wind to selling slaves. Uneasy at the attempt to raise money by allowing the men at a charitable ball to bid for their preferred dance partner, Dolly Merriwether (Jane Darwell) asks the doctor’s wife Mrs. Meade (Leona Roberts): “How can you permit your husband to conduct this […] slave auction?”

13 A few of the plantation films of the 1930s and 1940s had a long afterlife. Disney’s Song of the South, described by Jack Kirby as “the ultimate expression of plantation harmony after the [Shirley] Temple movies,” continued to be shown in some movie theatres until the mid- (Kirby 70). Gone with the Wind has periodically been re-released and, after its first showing on American network television—watched by 110 million people—in 1976, became a staple of mass television entertainment (Campbell 188; Taylor 2). But, in the years after the Second World War, two mainstream American films displayed considerably more ambivalence over the institution of slavery. The Foxes of Harrow (1947), loosely based on a bestselling novel by black writer Frank Yerby, undercut the perception of slavery as benign by showing a slave woman who would prefer to die rather than have her child brought up in slavery. Ten years later, Band of Angels, the film version of Robert Penn Warren’s 1955 novel, had Clark Gable playing Hamish Bond, a former slave trader ashamed of his earlier occupation.

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14 As several reviewers commented, the film was reminiscent of Gable’s role as Rhett Butler in Gone with the Wind, yet the institution of slavery in Band of Angels was depicted as much harsher than in the earlier film. Band of Angels, observed the New York Times critic, featured “brutal slave-traders […] the heroine cowers on the slave-block piteously […] and bloodhounds chase slaves across fields” (Crowther). By 1957, with the civil rights movement starting to take off, Hollywood was beginning to revisit the more critical view of slavery that had its roots in the nineteenth-century abolitionist tradition.

15 One film that certainly did this was Slaves (1969), written and directed by Herbert J. Biberman, a member of the “Hollywood Ten,” the group of communist or ex- communist Hollywood employees who had unsuccessfully confronted the House Un- American Activities Committee in 1947 and served time in prison for contempt of Congress. In a major rewrite of the “benign” view of slavery, Biberman’s film showed it as a system of exploitation that eventually drove slaves themselves to revolt. The film focused on the story of a black Christian slave, Luke (Ossie Davis), who is sold by his Kentucky master to save his few remaining slaves. He passes into the hands of MacKay (), a brutal Mississippi planter. MacKay’s mistress is a black woman, Cassy (Dionne Warwick). Luke and Cassy plan to escape together, but the plan fails and Luke— rather than accepting MacKay’s offer of freedom in exchange for betraying other blacks —dies fighting. The film—in some ways like Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin—despite being highly critical of slavery, was curiously balanced in places. As the reviewer for Variety noted, “[s]ympathetic slave owners are shown as well as hard driving profiteers […] some white men cared for keeping [black] families together while others—usually because of economic gain—chose to break [up] the family unit and actually breed slaves” (Variety Film Reviews, 1983b).

16 Biberman’s Slaves failed completely at the box office. Its only audience of reasonable size was African American residents of big cities. As long as films covering slavery did so within the context of the nostalgia for the Old South, it was possible to make films that appealed to the dominant white audience in the United States. When Old South films were no longer produced—in large part because of the shift in racial attitudes as a result of the growing effectiveness of the civil rights movement in the late 1950s and 1960s—it was harder and harder to see how slavery could be featured in a commercially successful film. Director Franklin J. Schaffner did so with in 1968 by discussing the issue obliquely and metaphorically. In this , the planet in another galaxy 2,000 years in the future is ruled by apes with humans as their oppressed slaves (Crémieux 232-237).

17 During the 1970s, two films enjoyed mixed success by developing further the theme of miscegenation as defined by the Production Code of 1930. In 1957, Kyle Onstott published a novel called Mandingo about a slave-breeding plantation in Alabama. Five years later, he published a second novel, Drum, intended as a sequel to the first (Kirby 116). Italian producer thought the books provided him with the opportunity to break further into the American movie market. Mandingo, released as a film in 1975, blended—because of its portrayal of a sexually hyperactive black man, played by boxer Ken Norton—with the “blaxploitation” genre of the time.6 New York Times critic Vincent Canby commented that Mandingo offered “steamily melodramatic nonsense” that conveyed no impression of “what life on the old plantation was really like” because of its “erotic interest in the techniques of humiliation, mostly with sex

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and violence” (Canby, 1975). Other reviewers were equally caustic: according to one, Mandingo was an “embarrassing and crude film” that wallowed “in every cliché” associated with “the slave-based […] pre-Civil War South” (Variety Film Reviews, 1983c).

18 Clearly designed as an “exploitation” film, Mandingo reached a large audience mainly for its prurience in dealing with the theme of miscegenation, with two pairs of interracial lovers and a brutal ending. In spite of its many faults, Mandingo did focus on the sexual politics of slavery, undercutting earlier perceptions of it as a benign institution. Robin Wood, in fact, would later—controversially—describe it as “the greatest Hollywood film about race” (Wood 267) for its highly critical view of Southern white patriarchy. (The idea of “Mandingo” boxing, of course, would later be taken up by Quentin Tarantino in Django Unchained.) Its sequel, Drum, failed to repeat the financial success of Mandingo at the box office, though its treatment of slavery was just as brutal. In the end, the New York Times reviewer dismissed it as “exploitation junk.” “Life on the old plantation was horrendous,” he admitted, “but movies like this are less interested in information than titillation, which, in turn, reflects contemporary obsessions more than historical truth” (Canby, 1976).

19 The career of the civil rights movement—with its emphasis on the long and continuing tradition of racial discrimination—made it difficult, perhaps even impossible, to return to the nostalgic view of the Old South with its happy, contented slaves. Moreover, beginning principally in the 1970s, there was a growing move on the part of historians to document the active role played by slaves in their own liberation. The Freedmen and Southern Society project, beginning in 1976, played a major part in this process (see, for example, Berlin, 1998; Berlin, 2003). In 1990, according to Kate Masur, Ken Burns’s documentary series for PBS on the Civil War began, at least to some extent, to disseminate the results of this scholarship to a wider public. But, as Masur points out, one of Hollywood’s latest films to deal with the issue of slavery—Steven Spielberg’s Lincoln, released in 2012—turns the clock back “even if inadvertently, [with] the outdated assumption that white men are the primary movers of history and main force of social progress” (Masur).

20 Spielberg’s film focuses on the three-week period in January 1865 during which Lincoln (Daniel Day-Lewis) masterminded the successful attempt to get the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution abolishing slavery through the House of Representatives. While we see black Union soldiers in several shots in the movie, the only slaves shown are those in Alexander Gardner’s photographs. In order to focus on Lincoln as a shrewd politician fighting a winning battle in a bitterly divided House of Representatives, Spielberg’s Lincoln ignored the fact, as Eric Foner argues, that slavery “died on the ground, not just in the and the House of Representatives.” Escaped slaves since the beginning of the war had made the fate of slavery a national issue and, by the time of the House debate, former slaves were already “sacking plantation homes and seizing land” (Foner, 2012).

21 The year after the Freedmen and Southern Society project was founded in 1976, the American Broadcasting Corporation first screened (January 1977) an eight-part TV miniseries adapted from Alex Haley’s novel Roots, telling the story of a black family’s struggle to survive over several generations. Amongst other things, it showed the experience of the (the transportation by sea of countless Africans to the Americas), a shipboard slave rebellion, and the sexual exploitation of enslaved women. The program-makers made a range of compromises to make Roots palatable to a mainly

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white television audience. They added many new white characters, emphasized the theme of racial integration and—rather paradoxically—sold the idea that it was a universal human story of survival and liberation rather than a study of black/white relations. But, with a total audience of 130 million Americans, it suggested there might be a possible audience for the right film about slavery (Graham 184). Hollywood filmmakers, however, remained unconvinced. It took two decades for one of the industry’s most significant players to commit to making what he hoped would be a major movie about slavery. Released in 1997, Amistad was Steven Spielberg’s attempt— as he himself put it—to do “for the American experience of slavery what Schindler’s List did for the Holocaust” (quoted in Jeffrey 77). Sadly, from his point of view, Spielberg was about to be disappointed.

22 The film focused on the experiences of a group of black Africans who, in 1839, revolted against and largely slaughtered the crew of a Spanish boat, the Amistad, that was carrying them into slavery. Stopped by the American navy off the coast of Connecticut, they were the subject of three trials to decide whether they were free or not. The lawyer arguing the last case was former president, now congressman, John Quincy Adams (Rediker). Actress Debbie Allen had first come across a fictionalized account of the real-life Amistad affair in 1978 and tried for many years to produce a movie about it. Her luck apparently changed when she met Spielberg and persuaded him it would be a great subject for a film. Around this time, Spielberg and his wife adopted two African American children: there were probably personal as well as commercial reasons for his decision (Jeffrey 79-80). The film followed the increasing tendency of historians to give agency to slaves: it dealt with the aftermath of a revolt by kidnapped Africans to win back their own freedom. Its central character, and leader of the revolt, is Cinqué, played by Djimon Hounsou from Benin. Cinqué also learns to participate in the judicial proceedings that ultimately secure freedom for himself and his companions. The film, indeed, ultimately suggests that the American legal system, if left free of political interference, will in the end come up with the correct moral verdict. But, sixteen years after the Supreme Court freed the Amistad Africans on a technicality (rather than the broader case for their liberty made in the film), Chief Justice Roger B. Taney announced the verdict in the case of 1857, which decided that African American slaves were only property, with no civil rights.

23 Perhaps the major problem with Amistad was that the story it told involved Africans rather than African Americans. It used African rather than American in black roles, had them speak an accurate version of the Mende language in what is now (the area from which the Amistad captives came), and at the end of the film has most of them, including Cinqué, sailing back home to . Yet Amistad made little deeper attempt to explore African cultures: as Nigel Morris notes, the captives wear a variety of tribal costumes and there are shots of Muslim Africans praying but these are “neither foregrounded nor framed centrally” (Morris 256). What the movie did show, more revealingly than any of its predecessors, was the process by which Africans were captured and transported to become slaves in the New World. The Middle Passage sequence in Amistad is probably the most honest—and most brutal—treatment of Africans on a up to that point in American cinema.7 It showed the terrible conditions on the slave ships, the chains and poor food, the vicious punishments, the high mortality rate, and also the exploitation of slave women by white sailors (the shot of dancing to music). Most graphically of all, it shows the throwing overboard of fifty slaves when the white crew realizes they do not have enough provisions to feed

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everyone aboard. These sequences proved the most relevant of all to African American spectators, forcing them to confront the background to their own history. For many, it was an acutely distressing experience. ”Only a masochist,” observed Warrington Hudlin, president of the Black Filmmakers foundation, “would want to spend two hours watching themselves be degraded and dehumanized” (quoted in Jeffrey 88). At an early showing of the film, an African American woman became hysterical during the Middle Passage sequence and rushed out of the theatre. “I felt like I was on the ship,” she later explained, “and it was too much. I just really couldn’t take it anymore” (quoted in Jeffrey 88). Making Cinqué the principal character of the narrative, of course, may also have made the movie’s failure more likely with the majority white audience, reducing the film’s white characters to three main categories: the ridiculous (the Christians shown praying and singing); the unscrupulous and ineffective, like abolitionist Lewis Tappan (Stellan Skarsgård) and President Martin van Buren (); and those, like cynical lawyer Roger Baldwin (Matthew McConaughey) and the elderly John Quincy Adams (), who are ennobled through Cinqué’s influence.

24 Although Amistad was not a complete box office failure, it had a gross worldwide of only around $60,375,000 on an estimated production budget of $36,000,000.8 Its example may have discouraged other directors from working on other projects dealing with slavery. It is very noticeable that when Spielberg himself made the successful Lincoln fifteen years later, the film—as noted above—deals with slavery only as a political issue and shows no slaves. But, within a year of the release of Lincoln in the United States in November 2012, two other films were released with slavery itself at their center. Both were considerable box office successes. Quentin Tarantino’s Django Unchained returned a worldwide gross of $425,368,000 on an estimated production cost of $100 million. Steve McQueen’s 12 Years a Slave returned a worldwide gross of $178,414,000 on an estimated production cost of only $20,000,000. Did the success of these two films suggest that both directors and audiences were now ready to engage with the realities of African American slavery? For different reasons connected with the two films, I suspect not.

25 Django Unchained, as might be expected of Tarantino, is a mélange of genres: spaghetti western, buddy movie, exploitation flick, blaxploitation film, a revenge/rescue melodrama, a movie about a quest. Adilifu Nama, moreover, writes that “in the long run and overall” it “is a Gothic ” fusing together “terror with laughter” (Nama 109, 117-118). But it is also, for much of its length, a “Southern” or plantation film with a lineage going back at least to The Birth of a Nation. It has its own Southern lady (Laura Cayouette), who stands up for (white) Southern manners in the way Ellen O’Hara had once done. It has its own “faithful soul,” Stephen (Samuel L. Jackson), this time an “Uncle Tom” figure of surprising malevolence. The plantation itself—much of the film was shot at the Evergreen Plantation in Louisiana9—still visually seduces filmmakers, even Tarantino. Yet underpinning Django Unchained is a sustained deconstruction of the myths of the earlier benign plantation genre. It echoes the work of antebellum abolitionists in emphasizing “the horrible cruelties daily inflicted on the bodies of slave women and men” (Kaster 76). On Calvin Candie (Leonardo DiCaprio)’s plantation in Mississippi, called “Candieland” with deceptive sweetness, brutalities include attack dogs killing a runaway slave, “mandingo” fighters wrestling with each other to the death, and the hot airless box on in which Django’s wife Broomhilda (Kerry Washington) is being punished for attempting (again) to escape.

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26 Stephen, Candie’s loyal black major-domo, knows just how long—seven minutes—it takes for a castrated black man to bleed to death. For much of the film, former slave Django is very much the junior partner to bounty hunter Dr. King Schultz (), who teaches him how to kill and, in return for some months’ assistance, promises to aid him in looking for his wife. It is only after Schultz kills Candie, triggering his own death, that Django becomes the lead character. By virtue of three massacres, Django—now armed to the teeth and toting stylish, anachronistic sunglasses —wins freedom for himself and Broomhilda (though, as the glamorous black couple ride away from burning Candieland, it is hard not to wonder how they will evade Mississippi slave patrols). With its traditional cinematic clichés and stereotypes of plantation life, and its cathartic if imaginary violence, Django Unchained is a modern fantasy of what could have happened rather than what did. It does not inspire remorse for the existence of slavery so much as an illusory sense of redemption for two fictional former slaves. To Reynaldo Anderson, D.L. Stephenson, and Chante Anderson, Tarantino’s film could not “function as a liberating text in any meaningful way. It can only entertain the global masses through fiction and fraud” (Anderson et al. 240).

27 Black British director Steve McQueen’s 12 Years a Slave (2013), on the face of it, is very different. Based on a real story, the kidnapping of black Northern freeman Solomon Northup in 1841, his exploitation in the slave South, and final freedom in 1853, the film is based on Northup’s own 1853 memoir of his experience. It was favorably received by most critics. Tomris Laffly, contrasting it with Tarantino’s “gruesome revenge fantasy,” greeted it as “the most unforgiving account of slavery to date” (Laffly 132-134). Douglas Kellner believed that McQueen had “undeniably produced one of the most compelling indictments of slavery in contemporary cinema” (Kellner 23). To Ann Hornaday it was “the defining epic so many have longed for to examine—if not cauterize—America’s primal wound” (quoted in Garrett). Calum Marsh praised McQueen for his persistence in showing so much of the day-to-day brutality of slavery: the director intended, he wrote, “to show the reality of slavery not by fleeting suggestion, but by a campaign to exhaust and overwhelm” (Marsh).

28 In contrast, a small number of writers criticized McQueen’s film for the unrelieved harshness of his portrayal of slavery. Armond White argued that “[b]rutality, violence and misery get confused with history in 12 Years a Slave.” White dismissed the film as belonging “to the torture porn genre” but complained that “it is being sold (and mistaken) as part of the recent spate of movies that pretend ‘a conversation about race’” (White). In a more subtle critique of the film, Julian Carrington pointed out the number of points at which the film invented things (the murderous crewman rapist on the riverboat) or distorted Northup’s own account (while conceding Mistress Epps was of a jealous disposition, he also observed that “there was much in her character to admire”) to create the impression “that slavery was practiced strictly by some wicked, Southern-bred subspecies of humanity.” The main problem with this approach, Carrington argued, was that [b]y characterizing Northup’s oppressors as semi-demonic sadists, McQueen and [screenwriter John] Ridley invite viewers to overlook the reality of American slavery as a system of economic exploitation that was practiced not by some intrinsically malevolent historical “other,” but by individuals not fundamentally dissimilar to themselves, and which remains evident in contemporary systemic disparities of power and privilege. (Carrington 75)10

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In fact, there are a number of things 12 Years a Slave gets right in historical terms. Slave labor was especially hard in the cotton and sugar plantations of the Deep South: the film’s depiction of slaves roused by a bugle at dawn to work and the weighing of the cotton picked at the end of the day is much truer than the idyllic sequence in Gone with the Wind with Big Sam calling “quittin’ time.” The advice to Northup from another black “not to tell anyone you can read and write if you want to survive” relates to the fact that most Southern states by the 1840s made it illegal for slaves to be taught to read and write. Slaves were bought and sold as property, which at times involved breaking up families—or even the sale of natural mulatto children of slave owners, like Eliza (Adepero Oduye) in the film. Epps ()’s reading the Bible to his slaves emphasizes that, from the , many proslavery writers insisted slavery was justified in the Bible, both in the practices of Hebrews in the Old Testament and the later words of St. Paul (Snay 53-109; Irons 133-246). The film shows in a number of sequences—including the unexplained lynching party Northup blunders upon on his way to town—how easy it was for white men to kill blacks with no real possibility of legal consequences. In one sequence, moreover, it indicates that there was racial prejudice in the North as well as the South: the New York shopkeeper we see fawning over the wealthy-looking Northup reacts only with suspicion to the badly dressed African American who also wanders into his shop.

29 As a film, 12 Years a Slave also includes a number of elements that are less convincing. The many times during the film in which slaves sing—including “Roll, Jordan, Roll” after the death of “Uncle Abe” (Dwight Henry)—imports a cliché from other movies since the plantation musicals of the early sound era. Epps’s malevolent wife (Sarah Paulson) seems to have stepped straight out of Mandingo with her insistence on whipping the life from her husband’s black mistress, Patsey (Lupita Nyong’o). The whipping sequence itself, a staple of most films about slavery, is prolonged to the point it seems inspired by McQueen’s previous film about sexual fantasies, Shame (2011). The sequences involving miscegenation, notably Epps’s sexual exploitation of Patsey, also hark back to Mandingo and Drum. (Having said that, there is also an interesting sequence in which a mulatto woman [Alfre Woodward], clearly married to a white man, invites Northup to tea, suggesting that miscegenation was sometimes acceptable, even formalized.) There are parts of the film that seem far from historically plausible. The liberal carpenter played by Brad Pitt, wandering around the Deep South articulating antislavery views, would have been unlikely in 1853. The aftermath of the sectional compromise of 1850, and the rash of personal liberty laws passed in Northern states in an attempt to negate the effects of the new Fugitive Slave Law, had created a proslavery backlash and growing intolerance in the South ( 166-190; Potter 121-144). For the same reason, the ease with which Northup’s papers as a free man are ultimately accepted and enforced by the local Louisiana sheriff is fairly unconvincing.

30 McQueen was right to confess in an interview that many people in Hollywood had not wanted his film made. In fact, just as Amistad would never have been made if Spielberg had not become involved, 12 Years a Slave probably would never have been released if it had not been for the support of Brad Pitt and his production company Plan B (Aspden). That the film was shot, released, and went on to win two Oscars is in many ways a remarkable achievement. Yet it peripheralizes African American slavery in two principal ways. In the first place, its hero is a free black from the North. There were a number of kidnappings of free blacks and writing about the experience became

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something of a literary trope in the early 1850s. But the true story of slavery was not that of the relatively few Northern blacks who were kidnapped or fell foul of the provisions of the Fugitive Slave Law. It was that of the four million who, in the 1850s, lived (and died) under slavery and the small percentage of that number who tried to escape, and the even fewer—some helped by the Underground Railroad—who managed to cross the Mason-Dixon Line into the free states. The manner in which the film was marketed—as an exposure of the kind of slavery that is still prevalent in today’s world11 —although it underlined the continuing existence of vast social injustices, also helped divert attention from the historical experience of African American slaves in the antebellum South.

31 Subsequent representations of slavery on film and TV would appear in a different racial and political climate in the United States. Four months before the release of 12 Years a Slave in November 2013, white neighborhood watch volunteer George Zimmerman was found not guilty by a Florida jury of either the murder or manslaughter of black teenager Trayvon Martin, shot in February 2012. Zimmerman’s acquittal prompted a national debate surrounding “stand your ground” laws and racial profiling. It also inspired the launch during the summer of 2013 of a new protest organization, Black Lives Matter, which would become nationally visible through the demonstrations it organized in , where African American Eric Garner died on 17 July 2014 after being arrested and restrained by a white police officer, and Ferguson, Missouri, following the shooting of Michael Brown, a black eighteen-year-old, by a white policeman on 9 August 2014. This was only a prelude for what was to come: 2015 saw a record of 1,134 young black men killed by the police—a rate five times higher than that of white men of the same age (Swaine et al.). On 17 June 2015, in a hate crime, white high-school dropout Dylann Roof shot and killed nine black people at Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina.

32 By the middle of the second decade of this century, much of the optimism with regard to race relations generated by the election of Barack Obama as the first black President in 2008 had gone. Already, in 2010, the US Bureau of the Census estimated that 38.2 percent of black children under the age of 18 were living in poverty, with the figure for whites at 12.4 percent (“Poverty”). In 2014, according to the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation, 26 percent of blacks as a whole lived in poverty, contrasted with 10 percent of whites (“Poverty Rate”). The US Bureau of Labor Statistics reported that unemployment amongst blacks in March 2016 was almost twice as high (9 percent) as the general rate of unemployment (5.2 percent) (“Labor Force”). Recent years have also witnessed the undercutting of the Voting Rights Act (1965), one of the principal successes of the civil rights movement, by the Supreme Court in its Shelby County v. Holder decision (2013) and the adoption by many states of stricter voter ID laws and other changes to voting rules that have discriminated against black voters (Rutenberg).

33 There was also growing concern during these years in Hollywood at the lack of racial diversity in the movie industry itself. In response to the nominations for in 2015, April Reign, the managing editor of BroadwayBlack.com, launched the trending hashtag #OscarsSoWhite, which was revived when the nominations for 2016— equally limited in terms of diversity—were announced (P. Ryan). It was against this background that the January 2016 Sundance Film Festival featured a new film by black , now also director, Nate Parker. Titled The Birth of a Nation, as a deliberate attempt by Parker to overwrite D.W. Griffith’s notorious film of 1915, it dealt with the slave

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rebellion led by Nat Turner in Southampton County, , in 1831. After the successful screening at Sundance, wrote Amy Taubin, the movie industry and much of the press greeted The Birth of a Nation as the antidote to “Oscars So White.” And since the Hollywood establishment had a recent history of preferring slavery narratives to contemporary African American stories (Django Unchained had five nominations in 2013 and won two Oscars; 12 Years a Slave received nine nominations in 2014 and won three), she commented that the new award season might well prove such predictions correct (Taubin 62). Nicole Sperling similarly suggested that there could be a major change towards racial inclusivity at the 2017 Oscars, with The Birth of a Nation leading the charge as “a possible Best Picture contender” (Sperling, 2016b). This was probably much in the mind of Fox Searchlight when they bid a record-breaking $17.5 million for the distribution rights (Barnes). Their bid was not the highest one (Netflix reportedly offered $20 million) but Parker, intent on a theatrical release to make his film eligible for the Academy Awards, accepted the lower offer. He must also have been aware of Fox Searchlight’s reputation “as an Academy Awards powerhouse,” having “maneuvered” 12 Years a Slave to the Oscar for best picture in 2014 (Siegel and Ford; Barnes).12

34 Parker’s film—like William Styron’s 1967 novel—was loosely based on The Confessions of Nat Turner, published by a local white Virginia lawyer, Thomas R. Gray in 1831.13 It represents Turner (Nate Parker) as something of a mystic, who dreams of being anointed as a leader and prophet by his African forbears. He is permitted by his owner (the film reduces his several real owners to one) to become literate, but only to strengthen his understanding of the Christian faith. The owner, Samuel Turner (), then takes him on a tour of neighboring plantations, where he is obliged to preach acceptance of slavery—based on the Scriptures—to other slaves. This tour, an obvious plot device, allows a comparatively innocent Turner the slave to become educated in the true depravities of the slave system, observing overseers with bullwhips, metal collars and face-masks as punishments, vicious dogs, posses of slave catchers and, in one brutal instance, a slave on hunger strike who has his teeth knocked out and is then force-fed (Laws 41; Hulbert 110). This exposure to the gruesome violence and barbarities of the slave system begins to set him on the path towards protest and martyrdom. But it is the grim reality of sexual assault by white men on black women that completes the process.

35 Sexual violence has been at the heart of several filmmakers’ fictional attempts to represent racial relations. In 1915, Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation used the alleged threat of rape of white women by black men as his justification for the actions of the . In 1920, black filmmaker Oscar Micheaux demonstrated in Within Our Gates that rape in the South was usually a white man’s crime (in Micheaux’s movie, a white man is about to assault a mixed-race girl when he realizes she is his daughter). In Parker’s The Birth of a Nation, it is the rape of two black women that finally radicalizes Turner and inspires him to lead a slave revolt (Hulbert; Bradshaw). One of them is his wife, Cherry (),14 who is shown with a heavily battered face that critic A.O. Scott sees as recalling “the open-coffin photographs of Emmett Till, who was lynched for supposedly whistling at a white woman in 1955” (Scott).

36 In early August 2016, two months before the release of The Birth of a Nation, an episode in Parker’s own life threatened to derail completely the notion that his film would be an Oscar contender. In 1999, when Parker was a student at Penn State University, he and his roommate, Jean Celestin (credited as a co-author of the film) had been charged

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with the rape and sexual assault of a young woman. Parker was acquitted but his roommate was found guilty of sexual assault and sentenced to a term in jail. His conviction was overturned on appeal and a new trial granted, but this never took place because other witnesses and the victim were not available. The woman concerned committed suicide in 2012 (Sperling, 2016a; Smith). Reviewers of the new movie could hardly be unaware of this backstory, which as A.O. Scott observed in the New York Times, came “to light at a time when rape on college campuses and the sexual depredations of celebrities are all over the news” (Scott). It led some commentators, including Roxane Gay, to reject the film completely, declaring that she could not “separate the art and the artist” (Gay).

37 According to the International Movie Database, Parker’s The Birth of a Nation cost an estimated $8,500,000 to make and had grossed only $15,858,724 by 2 December 2016. The film’s meagre return was paralleled by its failure to capture any major awards. Parker had also hoped that his movie would have a powerful political effect: by showing “how deeply the racial injustices and atrocities” represented in the film continued “to reverberate today,” it would encourage viewers to become “change agents” (quoted in Barnes). But was it ever likely that a movie based on such a historical episode could have achieved this objective? The slave rebellion led by Nat Turner in tidewater Virginia, in August 1831 is the most famous in US history. Turner and his supporters killed around sixty white men, women, and children on neighboring farms in Southampton County.15 After the uprising was suppressed, more than fifty African Americans—including Turner himself—were executed by the state for their part in it and many more, perhaps as many as two hundred, were killed by white mobs and militias (Oates). The story of the Turner rebellion, Justin Chang noted after first viewing the film at Sundance, had a denouement that “will stir deep emotion and inevitable unease” since the film “presents its climactic violence in complicated but unmistakably heroic terms” (Chang).

38 Most of the principal successes of the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s—in particular the Civil Rights Act (1964) and Voting Rights Act (1965)—came about through non-violence and racial cooperation. It is not easy to see what Parker’s film about a man who led a violent revolt against slavery could have brought—as its director hoped —to the current American conversation on race. Certainly, Turner resisted, but his resistance may have actively prolonged the institution he fought. As Lacy K. Ford has pointed out, there was a pronounced historical divide on slavery between the Upper and Lower South (Ford). In 1827, of the 130 abolitionist societies in the entire United States, 106 were in the South, and, according to Donald G. Mathews, “none [of these were] below the southern border of North Carolina” (Mathews 53n42). In the aftermath of the Turner rebellion, Virginia strengthened its black code while many other Southern states passed laws to restrict even further the rights of slaves, including banning them from being taught to read and write. “So many ills of the Negro followed [the revolt],” wrote black scholar John W. Cromwell, himself once a Virginia slave, in 1920, “that one is inclined to question the wisdom of the insurgent leader” (Cromwell 233). The violence of Turner’s rebellion helped unify the South in defense of its “peculiar institution.” In his own time, Turner’s actions were counterproductive. It is hard to see his relevance in battling racial discrimination today.

39 Between 31 May and 2 June 2016, a four-episode remake of Roots, the 1970s television serial based on Alex Haley’s novel, was broadcast on the History, Lifetime, and A&E TV

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channels. The new series reflected many aspects of changing historical perceptions of slavery since the first series was aired in 1977. It described more accurately the African background to slavery, depicting the economies and cultures of West African kingdoms and showing their involvement in the . The Middle Passage sequences were even more harrowing than in Amistad. The number of white characters was appreciably reduced to strengthen the black storyline. More in tune, as Maureen Ryan noted in Variety, with “new scholarship about the slave trade and the antebellum South,” the new Roots foregrounded black agency and slave resistance (M. Ryan). Yet, as Glenn D. Brasher pointed out, most of the resistance shown “is violent, with the enslaved getting retribution in unrealistic fashion and escaping punishment (à la Django Unchained).” In reality, Brasher continued, most slave resistance did not involve the use of force and this focus in Roots “diminishes the accomplishments and courage of the more numerous enslaved individuals who successfully outwitted and successfully manipulated their masters, never letting their slave status define them or destroy their hope and self-esteem” (Brasher).

40 Despite his criticism, Brasher commented that the new Roots “could stand apart as a movie on its own” and noted that a Blu-ray edition was about to appear (Brasher). The fact, however, that it was first shown only on niche TV channels suggests that—even if made available across several platforms—it is unlikely that it will ever match the audience of 130 million who watched the original series on network TV. This, together with the failure of Parker’s The Birth of a Nation, underlines the key problem facing anyone wanting to make a film about slavery. How is it possible to show the brutal, tragic reality of American slavery to a socially diverse mass audience, when many of the issues facing that audience can be traced back to slavery itself?

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MASUR, Kate. “In Spielberg’s Lincoln, Passive Black Characters.” New York Times, 12 November 2012. Accessed 15 March 2018.

MATHEWS, Donald G. Slavery and Methodism: A Chapter in American Morality, 1780-1845. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1965.

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NORTHUP, Solomon. Twelve Years a Slave: Narrative of Solomon Northup, a Citizen of New-York, Kidnapped in Washington City in 1841, and Rescued in 1853, from a Cotton Plantation Near the Red River, in Louisiana. Auburn: Derby and Miller, 1853.

OATES, Stephen B. The Fires of : Nat Turner’s Fierce Rebellion. New York: Harper and Row, 1975.

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POTTER, David M. The Impending Crisis, 1848-1861. Ed. Don E. Fehrenbacher. New York: Harper and Row, 1976.

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TUCKER, William H. The Science and Politics of Racial Research. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1994.

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WHITE, Armond. “Can’t Trust It.” City Arts: New York’s Review of Culture, 16 October 2013. Accessed 15 March 2018.

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NOTES

1. This article is a revised, expanded, and updated version of chapter 2 of Stokes. 2. In this production, Uncle Tom was played by black actor James B. Lowe. In Uncle Tom’s Cabin movies before 1914, Uncle Tom had always been played by a white actor in blackface. The first black Uncle Tom had been Sam Lucas in 1914. 3. In both cases, miscegenation was defined in precisely the same way as “sexual relationships between the white and black races” (quoted in Mast 213, 333). 4. African American movie critic Melvin B. Tolson argued that it was more dangerous to the black community than The Birth of a Nation: “The Birth of a Nation was such a barefaced lie that a moron could see through it. Gone with the Wind is such a subtle lie that it will be swallowed as the truth by millions of blacks and whites alike” (quoted in Farnsworth 214). 5. The break-up of slave families is echoed in Gone with the Wind in the sequence in which Scarlett arrives home at Tara near the end of the war to find that only the “house servants”—Mammie, Pork, and Prissy—remain. All the other slaves have gone. And although they may, like Big Sam and the other field hands, have been conscripted by the Confederacy, the situation at Tara did faithfully reflect the social realities of 1864-65 when, as Eric Foner observes, “it seemed that half the South’s black population took to the roads” (Foner, 1988 80). A high proportion of slaves did leave their former plantations to travel and move around, either because freedom to them meant their right to escape both their former workplace and the pass system that existed under slavery or because they were in search of family members and friends (Foner, 1988 80-84). 6. Edward Campbell notes the breakdown of the American cinema audience after 1965 into white suburban movie-goers and black inner-city spectators. Blaxploitation films were aimed at the latter (Campbell 175). 7. Other films with Middle Passage sequences include D.W. Griffith’s Abraham Lincoln (1930) and Slaves, as well as the television series Roots. 8. The returns from the US only ($44,175,000) barely covered the production costs. All figures from IMDb. 9. Still a privately owned sugar cane plantation, the Evergreen Plantation is also open six days a week for “plantation tours.” For analyses of how plantation museums in the South tend to sideline the , see Eichstedt and Small, and Hix. 10. Solomon Northup himself argued on very similar lines. “It is not the fault of the slaveholder that he is cruel,” he wrote in his original book, “so much as it is the fault of the system under which he lives. He cannot withstand the influence of habit and associations that surround him” (Northup 206). 11. “This film isn’t just an Afro-American film,” declared Joe Walker, editor of 12 Years a Slave. “It’s universal. Slavery exists now all around the world […] in the Middle East, in India, Saudi Arabia. Sadly, it’s an eternal story” (quoted in Collins 50). The DVD of the film released in the UK contained a leaflet with a message from director Steve McQueen, as patron of Antislavery International, asking readers to join the organization. 12. Fox Searchlight was also responsible for the 2016 best picture winner, Birdman.

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13. Page Laws points out that both Turner’s Confessions and the recollections of Solomon Northup were “‘told to’ a white amanuensis” (Laws 42). 14. In Parker’s film, Turner has both a wife and a child, unlike the real-life Nat Turner. 15. Gorman Beauchamp comments that “the proportion of women and children in this list presents a troubling portrait of the revolt, which, although morally grounded in the actual villainy of slave practices, would disturb any devoted hagiographer” (Beauchamp 7).

ABSTRACTS

This article analyses the representation of American slavery in film over more than a century. It argues that the filmic construction of slavery has always been controversial. As American cinema evolved, the dominant filmic view of slavery presented it as a benign institution. Yet, it is noted, even in films such as The Birth of a Nation (1915) and Gone with the Wind (1939), there were sequences that challenged this interpretation and hinted at the brutality and exploitation of the institution. In the aftermath of World War II, a more critical view of slavery began to emerge on film. Yet slavery itself was not a popular theme with audiences, as demonstrated by the reception of Amistad (1997). This seemed to change in the second decade of the twenty-first century when three films—Lincoln (2012), Django Unchained (2012), and 12 Years a Slave (2013)—dealt critically with slavery while also attracting a mass audience. The reasons for the success of these films— and the failure of The Birth of a Nation (2016)—are discussed in relation to broader changes in American social and cultural attitudes.

Cet article analyse la représentation de l’esclavage nord-américain au cinéma sur plus d’un siècle. On y montre que la construction cinématographique de l’esclavage a toujours été sujette à controverse. Pendant longtemps, les réalisateurs américains ont minimisé la violence de l’esclavage. Pourtant, des films tels que Naissance d’une nation (1915) et Autant en emporte le vent (1939) contiennent aussi des séquences où cette violence est suggérée. Après la Seconde Guerre mondiale, le cinéma a développé un regard plus critique sur l’esclavage, sans toutefois que le thème ne devienne populaire auprès du public, comme le montre la réception d’Amistad (1997). La situation a évolué depuis : trois films sont sortis coup sur coup dans les années 2010 – Lincoln (2012), Django Unchained (2012) et 12 Years a Slave (2013) – qui présentent le système esclavagiste sous un jour beaucoup plus sombre tout en ayant connu un succès critique et commercial. Cet article évoque les raisons de ce succès – et celles de l’échec de The Birth of a Nation (2016) – en les reliant à des changements de fond dans la société et la culture nord-américaines.

INDEX

Mots-clés: cinéma, esclavage, questions raciales, représentation, public Keywords: cinema, slavery, race, representation, audience

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AUTHOR

MELVYN STOKES University College London

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« Spirit of the dead, rise up! […] and claim your story ». Représentation de l’esclavage et esthétique de la résistance dans Sankofa (Haile Gerima, 1993)

Claire Dutriaux

1 Haile Gerima, réalisateur africain-américain né en 1946 en Éthiopie dans une famille chrétienne, partit étudier aux États-Unis à l’âge de vingt et un ans (Ukadike, 2002 253). Il s’installa tout d’abord à Chicago, où il suivit les cours de théâtre de la Goodman School of Drama, puis en 1969 s’inscrivit dans le Master of Fine Arts Film Program de l’université de Californie à Los Angeles (UCLA), ouvert à tout étudiant issu de minorités (« Story of LA Rebellion »). Il y rencontra d’autres réalisateurs noirs américains indépendants tels Julie Dash, Larry Clark et Charles Burnett, soit le groupe de réalisateurs africains et africains-américains que l’historien du film Clyde Taylor surnomma par la suite la LA Rebellion (Taylor ; voir également Field, Horak et Stewart). Ces réalisateurs et réalisatrices, de la même génération, cherchèrent à créer un cinéma noir américain indépendant, dont les codes et les conventions n’étaient pas ceux traditionnellement utilisés dans le cinéma hollywoodien, afin de rendre compte de l’expérience unique des communautés noires dans les Amériques, en Europe et en Afrique. En parallèle, les études de Gerima à UCLA lui permirent de se familiariser avec l’œuvre de Frantz Fanon et de W.E.B. Du Bois, ainsi qu’avec le « troisième cinéma » d’Afrique et d’Amérique latine (Ukadike, 2002 254). Haile Gerima a eu, en même temps que sa carrière de réalisateur et de producteur, une carrière d’enseignant à l’université, qui lui a permis de rester indépendant et de financer en partie ses films ; il est toujours professeur de cinéma à Howard University, à Washington, DC. Dans la plupart des entretiens qu’il a accordés, il s’est identifié à la fois comme Africain et comme Noir américain : « Even if I were to return to Africa, I would always protect my direct links with black America. It has given me the courage to discover myself. […] At first, I

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considered myself Ethiopian rather than connected to black America. Black America helped to humanize me » (cité par Reid 108). En tant que membre à part entière du mouvement de la LA Rebellion, Haile Gerima a souhaité réinventer dans Sankofa (1993) le discours hollywoodien dominant sur l’esclavage, qui exposait la thématique en termes binaires. Avant Sankofa, les films hollywoodiens traitant de l’esclavage présentaient les Noirs américains soit comme des victimes ayant besoin d’être secourues par des personnages blancs empathiques – par exemple dans les adaptations de La Case de l’oncle Tom (Uncle Tom’s Cabin), notamment celle de Harry Pollard en 1927 –, soit comme des êtres détestables et mauvais qu’il convenait de faire disparaître de l’écran pour restaurer l’unité de la nation américaine blanche, tels Gus (Walter Long) et Silas Lynch (George Siegmann) dans Naissance d’une nation (The Birth of a Nation, D.W. Griffith, 1915). L’expérience de l’esclavage, du point de vue de personnages africains-américains, a été représentée dans une moindre mesure dans le cinéma d’exploitation, comme dans Mandingo (, 1975), mais elle a surtout été rendue possible à la télévision dans Racines (Roots, 1977), mini-série au succès planétaire.

2 À l’instar d’un Oscar Micheaux, qui dès les années 1910 a cherché à produire d’autres images de la population noire américaine que celles du film de D.W. Griffith, notamment dans Within Our Gates (1920) et Body and Soul (1925), sans toutefois réussir toujours à se départir du discours filmique dominant, Haile Gerima et les réalisateurs de la LA Rebellion ont souhaité produire d’autres discours, qui puissent rendre compte de la véritable expérience de la diaspora africaine, dans les centres urbains en particulier. Ed Guerrero écrit ainsi : the “black independent cinema movement” inspired by the films of university- trained black filmmakers of the 1970s laid a clear political, philosophical, and aesthetic foundation for an ongoing cinematic practice that challenges Hollywood’s hegemony over the black image. The films of Charles Burnett […], Julie Dash […], Bill Woodberry […], and Haile Gerima […] have all contributed to creating an emergent, decolonizing, antiracist cinema that in its images, sounds, aesthetics, and modes of production has attempted to reconstruct the world on the screen from black points of view cast in liberating images and new paradigms. (Guerrero 137) Fruit d’une coproduction entre Mypheduh Films, la compagnie de production de Gerima, et le Ghana et le Burkina Faso, Sankofa se distingue du cinéma hollywoodien non seulement en raison de ses multiples connexions entre les Amériques et l’Afrique et de son contenu singulier, mais également parce que Gerima s’est volontairement inspiré des stratégies des cinéastes noirs américains des années 1920, notamment Oscar Micheaux1, mais aussi de Spike Lee avec Malcolm X (1992), pour financer et distribuer son film lorsqu’il n’essuya que des refus des distributeurs américains. Gerima identifiait ces refus comme de la censure institutionnelle, qu’il convenait de contourner en employant ses propres méthodes de financement et de distribution : « In America, slavery is a very sensitive topic. The moment I wanted to make Sankofa (1993), my credentials in the USA vanished because I was venturing into forbidden territory. The resource centers were closed to me. I couldn’t get funding » (cité par Reid 115). Gerima s’adressa alors à des investisseurs privés et à des associations sur d’autres continents. Quand vint le moment de distribuer le film, il parcourut les États-Unis afin de le montrer dans des églises, des centres communautaires, des festivals et des cinémas loués pour l’occasion, tout en l’accompagnant de conférences. Gerima sut s’entourer de personnalités africaines-américaines influentes, tel le joueur de basketball Magic Johnson, propriétaire de multiplexes, pour distribuer son œuvre (Crémieux, 2009). Le bouche à oreille permit au film de connaître le succès : il généra plus de 2,5 millions de

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dollars de recettes, soit deux fois et demie le montant initialement investi pour le produire, ce qui permit à Gerima d’installer sa propre maison de production (Mypheduh Films) ainsi que son magasin de vidéo (Sankofa) à Washington, DC. Variety, revue de l’industrie hollywoodienne par excellence, consentit même à écrire quelques lignes sur le phénomène de l’autodistribution (Weiner). Gerima s’affranchit néanmoins de l’héritage d’Oscar Micheaux, dont il étudia les films à UCLA, en se concentrant sur un passé esclavagiste que Micheaux ne montrait pas dans ses films, centrés sur l’expérience urbaine et contemporaine des Noirs américains, et en mettant en lumière le concept de diaspora noire.

3 Sankofa raconte l’histoire de Mona (Oyafunmike Ogunlano), jeune mannequin américaine insouciante venue travailler avec son photographe blanc au Ghana. Lors d’une séance photo dans le fort d’Elmina, qui servait de prison d’esclaves au temps du commerce triangulaire, Mona croise Sankofa (Kofi Ghanaba), le gardien spirituel du fort, qui l’exhorte à se tourner vers son passé et la menace : « sankofa » est le nom d’un oiseau de la mythologie akan dont la tête est tournée vers l’arrière pour signifier que « pour avancer, il faut revenir en arrière ». Alors que Mona explore le fort, elle se trouve propulsée en un temps et un lieu différents. Dans le sous-sol du fort, elle voit la traite négrière avant d’être violemment dénudée et marquée au fer rouge : elle devient, ou redevient, Shola, une esclave domestique envoyée sur la plantation Lafayette où est cultivée la canne à sucre. Le film narre alors la vie sur la plantation, rythmée par la dureté du travail de coupe, les coups de fouet, la violence physique et psychologique exercée par les maîtres et le prêtre blancs, les discordes entre esclaves domestiques et esclaves des champs, les viols des esclaves noires commis par les Blancs, mais aussi la construction d’une communauté solidaire avec son propre folklore et la naissance de la rébellion et de la résistance qui permettent aux Noirs d’exister dans un monde qui veut nier leur humanité. Les moments fondateurs de cette résistance sont liés à trois personnages centraux : Shango (Mutabaruka), l’amant de Shola, rebelle par essence ; Nunu (Alexandra Duah), qui symbolise la Mère Afrique et le lien entre l’Afrique et l’Amérique ; et son fils Joe (Nick Medley), mulâtre aux yeux bleus né du viol de sa mère par un maître blanc. Ces trois personnages vont conduire Shola, chacun à leur manière, à son acte final de résistance (la mise à mort du maître blanc), acte qui lui permet d’exister et d’accomplir son voyage spirituel vers la Mère Afrique. À la fin du film, Shola s’envole dans les airs tel un oiseau sankofa et revient au fort ghanéen sous les traits de Mona, qui, désormais pleinement consciente de son passé, peut regarder vers l’avenir. Le film évoque en partie le concept de double conscience élaboré par W.E.B. Du Bois dans The Souls of Black Folk, tout en lui accordant une dimension supplémentaire puisque, dans Sankofa, la double conscience implique une connaissance du passé diasporique : One ever feels his two-ness,—an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder. The history of the American Negro is the history of his strife,—this longing to attain self-conscious manhood, to merge his double self into a better and truer self. In this merging he wishes neither of the older selves to be lost. (Du Bois 3-4)

4 La résistance comme outil d’accession à la conscience, à l’existence, tel est le concept central du film, qui s’exprime tout autant dans la narration que dans la forme. Sankofa crée une esthétique de la résistance pour faire jouer le concept sur plusieurs niveaux, narratif et méta-narratif : la résistance des esclaves exprime dans le même temps une

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résistance aux tropes du cinéma hollywoodien, ce qui permet l’expression d’un cinéma noir américain avec son esthétique propre, ainsi décrite par Ed Guerrero : « the oral tradition, the complex integration of black music into both soundtrack and narrative, and the expression of a black social reality that transcends or shatters Hollywood fantasy » (Guerrero 138). Ce concept de résistance, idéologique et formelle, est exprimé dans la narration et dans la sémiotique du film, dans un mouvement qui décloisonne l’imaginaire en renversant les images, par l’usage de l’écriture symbolique, de la même manière que l’oiseau sankofa regarde en arrière pour se diriger vers l’avenir de la communauté noire américaine. Si le film a déjà fait l’objet de nombreuses études, notamment du point de vue idéologique (Letort), historique et historiographique (Kandé), et si les films des réalisateurs issus de la LA Rebellion ont été analysés à l’aune de la question raciale (Wall et Martin), la dimension esthétique et sémiotique de Sankofa a rarement été prise en compte. Or l’esthétique de la résistance que crée Haile Gerima participe pleinement au discours historique et idéologique du film.

Décloisonner les esprits

5 Dans Sankofa, Haile Gerima cherche à décloisonner un imaginaire noir américain qui a été contraint par l’esclavage. La narration du film désoriente, car elle n’est pas complètement linéaire, notamment au début et à la fin du film. Le montage est fréquemment haché par des coupes sur des gros plans d’oiseaux en vol ou sur un vautour, introduits par des fondus qui ne sont pas enchaînés. Parfois les musiques et les voix s’entremêlent, sans qu’il soit possible de les distinguer. La séquence du prologue est emblématique de ce montage dense, avec en premier lieu une focalisation de la caméra en gros plan d’abord sur un oiseau sankofa, puis sur une statue d’Africain au tambour ; un plan juxtaposant une image de soleil couchant et le fort ghanéen avec le sorcier jouant du tambour ; une succession de plans juxtaposant tour à tour les cannes à sucre et des plans de plus en plus rapprochés sur le sorcier et enfin sur le visage de Mona, ce qui crée une image triple contenant à la fois les cannes à sucre, le sorcier et Mona. Dès le prologue, Mona est tournée vers son passé d’esclave, alors que la narration du film n’a pas encore commencé : tel l’oiseau sankofa de la mythologie akan2, elle regarde vers le fort puis vers les plantations de canne à sucre où, en tant que Shola, elle sera obligée de travailler. Les séquences qui suivent le prologue rompent également avec le style d’une scène d’exposition classique (notamment dans le cinéma hollywoodien, dans lequel la cohérence de l’espace et du temps est primordiale), alternant des plans rapides avec des mouvements de caméra brutaux et des plans plus contemplatifs, entrecoupés par des plans rapprochés sur un vautour, sans qu’un lien entre ces images successives soit immédiatement perceptible. Cette accession au sens ne pourra se faire qu’au cours du film ou en regardant Sankofa une nouvelle fois, ce qui met le spectateur dans la position de l’oiseau sankofa, tout comme Mona.

6 Cette esthétique de la désorientation, avec des images multiples imbriquées les unes aux autres, est relayée par une narration qui, elle aussi, désoriente. Ainsi les lieux de la narration sont-ils multiples, parfois bien définis, comme le fort d’Elmina au Ghana, mais souvent imprécis, comme la plantation Lafayette sur laquelle on retrouve Shola. Le nom de la plantation, qui est aussi celui du propriétaire blanc, évoque la Louisiane, mais les champs de canne à sucre rappellent plutôt les Caraïbes, de même que la présence de montagnes et de forêts où les esclaves rebelles cherchent à se réfugier. Les

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esclaves ont de multiples origines : Nunu est identifiée comme africaine, Joe et Shola sont nés sur le territoire américain mais l’un est mulâtre et l’autre ne l’est pas, Shango est un rebelle des Caraïbes, coiffé de dreadlocks, dont le dialecte créole est systématiquement sous-titré. Il porte le nom d’une divinité vénérée dans la santería et le vaudou haïtien (Murphy 13). De même, l’époque n’est pas non plus identifiable : les séquences de la traite négrière dans le fort font penser aux XVIIe et XVIIIe siècles, mais les séquences sur la plantation suggèrent le XIXe siècle, notamment tel qu’il a été représenté dans le cinéma hollywoodien et en particulier dans Naissance d’une nation et Autant en emporte le vent (Gone with the Wind, Victor Fleming, 1939). Les lieux de tournage du film furent multiples, de la Jamaïque au Ghana en passant par la Louisiane (Kandé 92). La séquence de la transformation de Mona en Shola est un exemple parfait d’un décloisonnement des esprits qui provoque celui du spectateur : Mona semble projetée dans l’époque de la traite négrière, mais il s’agit bien de son corps qui est marqué au fer puisqu’elle crie « Wait a minute, I’m an American! ». La transformation en Shola, dans un autre temps, un autre lieu, indéfinis, est brutale et se fait sans transition.

7 Le film vise à rassembler les populations africaines et afrodescendantes, éparpillées lors de l’exil forcé de l’esclavage, en effaçant les frontières géographiques3. Le public noir, américain comme africain, doit prendre conscience, grâce aux personnages, de son histoire et de son existence en tant que diaspora. Delphine Letort remarque que la sortie du film a coïncidé avec la publication de l’ouvrage L’Atlantique noir. Modernité et double conscience (The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness, 1993), dans lequel l’historien Paul Gilroy présente le concept d’Atlantique noir comme une culture englobant différentes ethnies et nationalités (Letort 2). Dans son ouvrage, Gilroy emploie l’image de bateaux en mouvement entre l’Europe, l’Amérique, l’Afrique et les Caraïbes pour exprimer l’idée de l’hybridité constitutive de la diaspora africaine. C’est précisément ce lien entre Amérique et Afrique, Europe et Caraïbes, passé et présent, qui est opéré dans Sankofa : Mona/Shola est propulsée dans un espace hybride dans lequel s’unifie la diaspora africaine. Le public noir est donc invité à partager l’expérience de Mona et à accomplir le même voyage spirituel, qui consiste à connaître le passé noir (celui de la traite et de l’esclavage) pour mieux appréhender l’avenir, tel un oiseau sankofa. Les gros plans sur le visage de Mona, associés à la voix off, offrent une incursion dans l’intimité du personnage. Le bateau qui emmène Mona/Shola de l’Afrique à l’Amérique reste invisible. Pourtant, c’est précisément le bateau négrier qui constitue pour Paul Gilroy le « chronotope des carrefours » de l’expérience noire de la souffrance, de l’arrachement et de la violence (Gilroy 199, cité par Letort 2). Du voyage négrier, il ne reste dans Sankofa que le vautour, symbole des oiseaux de proie qui suivaient les bateaux du commerce triangulaire à l’affût des cadavres jetés par-dessus bord. En réalité, l’expérience fondatrice de Shola se produit lorsque son corps est marqué au fer dans le fort. L’existence de la diaspora noire est construite dans ce marqueur spatio-temporel du fort, puis dans l’espace extradiégétique du voyage entre l’Afrique et l’Amérique.

Renverser les images

8 Haile Gerima ajoute une étape supplémentaire à la désorientation initiale du spectateur, qui correspond à l’arrachement de Mona à sa culture africaine, avec le

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renversement des images traditionnellement transmises par le cinéma, notamment hollywoodien. Gerima a ainsi déclaré dans une interview, à propos de Sankofa : In Hollywood, most slaves are happy. They talk the same. Their identity is fully determined by the context of the plantation. They are nothing. They are property utilized to make the plantation life better, and they have no human dimensions, no desires. And this stereotype does not operate solely against Africans: the experiment began with Native Americans. So, the whole idea of Africans who are happy to be slaves, devoted to their owners, who will sell themselves twenty times over to save their gambling master—all this is the romantic literature of the plantation, the view from the plantation owner’s perspective. Now, what I did was flip this. I brought out the individual identities and motives of the characters, transforming the “happy slaves” into an African race opposed to this whole idea, by making the history of slavery full of resistance, full of rebellion. Resistance and rebellion—the plantation school of thought believed it was always provoked by outsiders, that Africans were not capable of having that human need. (Woolford 92) De fait, aucun personnage d’esclave dans Sankofa n’est présenté comme « heureux d’être esclave ». L’essence même du personnage de Shango est de se rebeller et de résister, et en cela il correspond à cette description de Frantz Fanon dans Peau noire, masques blancs : Pour le nègre qui travaille dans les plantations de canne du Robert [commune de la Martinique], il n’y a qu’une solution : la lutte. Et cette lutte, il l’entreprendra et la mènera non pas après une analyse marxiste ou idéaliste, mais parce que, tout simplement, il ne pourra concevoir son existence que sous les espèces d’un combat mené contre l’exploitation, la misère et la faim. (Fanon 181-182) Tout au long du film, Shango est coiffé, comme tous les marrons du film, d’un foulard rouge qui symbolise sa défiance et chaque séquence le présente dans un acte de rébellion. Dans sa toute première séquence, il demande à Shola d’empoisonner toute la maisonnée, ce qui comprend les esclaves de maison, soupçonnés d’être parties prenantes de la domination blanche. Quant à Nunu, elle défie les maîtres par son refus de diluer son identité dans celle créée par les Blancs. Ce qui la constitue, c’est sa résistance à l’idéologie blanche. À l’origine, Nunu était un personnage essentiel du script de Gerima, écrit dès 1975 : elle en était l’héroïne, en tant qu’esclave dans une plantation de canne à sucre dans le Sud des États-Unis quelques années avant la guerre de Sécession (Pfaff 144).

9 Nunu et Shango amènent progressivement Mona à retrouver son identité africaine, en favorisant son retour aux rites des origines et en l’incitant à se rebeller contre le maître qui veut la violer. L’idée que la résistance est constitutive de l’existence est énoncée dans la séquence où Nunu réconforte un des esclaves contremaîtres ; celui-ci lui répond : « Not being able to say no is what is killing me », ce qui sous-entend que la résistance permet de vivre. Quant à Joe, le mulâtre, qui est le personnage le plus susceptible d’être gagné à l’idéologie blanche, il sombre progressivement dans la folie et tue à la fois sa mère, Nunu, et son père, Father Raphael (Reginald Carter), le prêtre blanc. Ces derniers actes lui permettent de résister à l’endoctrinement du prêtre en faisant sienne la religion catholique, et surtout en se l’appropriant au prisme de son expérience de mulâtre : le film prend soin de multiplier les plans sur des images de madones blanches, qui n’ont pas de lien avec Joe, ce dont il se rend compte en tuant sa propre mère. Lorsque le prêtre blanc cherche à empêcher Joe de déposer le corps de Nunu sur l’autel de l’église, Joe s’écrie « Ain’t she a saint? », signifiant par là même sa résistance à une forme de religion qui exclut plutôt qu’elle n’inclut, alors que le prêtre

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a sans cesse cherché à nier Nunu en la présentant comme païenne. Joe est un personnage ambivalent, antipathique, dont la fonction est de signifier l’internalisation de l’oppression et de montrer les effets de la colonisation sur l’esprit. Joe souffre de sa double conscience et cherche, tout au long de la narration, à se débarrasser du pan de cette conscience que la société blanche juge inacceptable. Le meurtre de Nunu et de Father Raphael, et son suicide dans l’église, révèlent que Joe ne parvient pas à s’affranchir de l’oppression, contrairement à Mona, qui a accepté de se tourner vers les horreurs du passé pour reprendre possession de son avenir.

10 Le renversement des images inclut un renversement des tropes hollywoodiens. Ainsi la théoricienne radicale noire bell hooks indique que Shola correspond au stéréotype de la séductrice Jézabel et Nunu à celui de la réconfortante mammy, mais de fait ces stéréotypes sont renversés (hooks 127 ; Bogle). Shola est loin d’être une Jézabel qui tire parti de l’attrait qu’elle exerce sur les hommes blancs : le film montre au contraire qu’elle est à plusieurs reprises brutalement violée par son maître, ce qui permet au film de rompre le silence du cinéma hollywoodien à ce sujet. Les relations sexuelles forcées entre maîtres blancs et esclaves noires ont rarement été montrées à l’écran avant Sankofa – le film d’exploitation Mandingo, dont Quentin Tarantino s’est inspiré pour Django Unchained (2012), faisant figure d’exception. Nunu n’est pas non plus une mammy serviable et dévouée à sa famille blanche d’adoption : elle n’a au contraire aucun lien avec elle dans l’espace diégétique. Si Nunu est une mammy, c’est plutôt dans le sens de la Mère Afrique, alors que Shola la décrit ainsi : « She’s all strength and passionate and tenderness ». Nunu n’est pas une mammy hollywoodienne, page blanche sur laquelle s’écrit l’histoire de la famille blanche, car elle porte en elle toute l’histoire de l’Afrique, qu’elle restitue, tel le griot, à la communauté africaine exilée sous forme de contes, de rituels et de paraboles4. Quant à Joe, figure de mulâtre tragique, néanmoins atypique car, contrairement à la plupart des films hollywoodiens, il s’agit dans le film de Gerima d’un homme et non d’une femme5, il renverse le mythe de l’oncle Tom. Le film montre délibérément Joe se réfugier dans la religion chrétienne, mais alors que l’oncle Tom est présenté comme une figure du martyr christique dans le roman d’Harriet Beecher Stowe, Joe démontre toute l’ironie d’un christianisme dont la norme est la blancheur et qui ne perçoit la sainteté qu’en blanc (Williams). À la place, Sankofa introduit une religion africaine, avec ses propres rites et sa propre culture : le film multiplie les images de cérémonies et de baptêmes. Ces nouveaux rites de la résistance éclairent d’une lueur nouvelle l’admonition de Sankofa au début du film : « Spirit of the dead, rise up! » La résistance permet à la spiritualité africaine de prendre le dessus sur l’oppression chrétienne, en réintroduisant le motif de la possession (« possess your bird of passage »), répété dans la possession de Mona par Shola. Il s’agit de désigner le christianisme comme l’un des grands oppresseurs des peuples africains et l’un des plus grands mensonges du colonialisme, selon le film : prétendant élever les Africains à la spiritualité, le colonialisme a pu occulter les pratiques religieuses préexistantes (Ukadike, 2014 184-185). Les personnages sont à la fois des individus, avec leurs motivations propres, et une communauté africaine, unie dans son élan de résistance.

L’écriture symbolique

11 Dans « Black American Cinema: The New Realism », Manthia Diawara décrit le nouveau cinéma des réalisateurs noirs américains indépendants dans les termes suivants :

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These films are concerned with the specificity of identity, the empowerment of Black people through mise-en-scène, and the rewriting of American history. Their narratives contain rhythmic and repetitious shots, going back and forth between the past and the present. Their themes involve Black folklore, religion, and the oral traditions which link Black Americans to the African diaspora. The narrative style is symbolic. (Diawara 10) De fait, outre les liens effectués entre le passé et le présent, et une esthétique spécifique, Haile Gerima use de l’écriture symbolique, notamment avec le motif de l’oiseau sankofa. La première séquence du film indique que ce mot vient de l’akan, un dialecte ouest-africain, et qu’il signifie « one must return to the past in order to move forward ». Le sankofa est ce fameux « bird of passage » que les Africains et les Noirs américains doivent reconquérir dans le discours du prologue. Le film débute donc sur l’image du sankofa, cet oiseau dont la tête est tournée vers l’arrière, le buste vers l’avant, portant un œuf dans son bec, et se termine sur cette même image, comme pour signifier que le début est la fin et inversement, tout en indiquant que le début contient la fin, avec la symbolique de l’œuf. Le sankofa possède également une forme de cœur, ce qui ajoute la dimension supplémentaire des origines de l’existence.

12 Dans le dossier de presse rédigé spécialement pour la diffusion du film dans les salles de cinéma françaises en 2000, Haile Gerima écrit : Dans Sankofa, le symbole récurrent de l’oiseau est une donnée primordiale. Au bout de vingt ans de recherche, j’ai fini par découvrir que l’oiseau était important aux yeux des esclaves et des « marrons ». Le vautour symbolise la dualité Vie/Mort. Pour les fugitifs, le vautour était un guide vers les collines, loin des chiens, des chevaux et des poursuivants. Quant à ceux qui succombaient, les vautours les dévoraient. Mais, dans ce cas, une symbolique supplémentaire opérait pour les Africains, celle de la liberté, car leur croyance voulait que le vautour ramenât l’esprit du défunt aux sources de la Mère Afrique. Certains mythes mentionnaient même des esclaves échappés qui, mutés en oiseaux, s’étaient envolés pour l’Afrique. (Gerima, 2000) Or il s’agit exactement du parcours de Mona, qui se transforme, à la suite de son acte ultime de rébellion – la mise à mort du maître –, en oiseau s’envolant pour l’Afrique.

13 En réalité, dès le prologue, l’accent est mis sur l’écriture symbolique, à mesure que la voix off nomme ceux qui doivent se sentir concernés par le voyage du sankofa : Spirits of the dead, rise up, lingering spirits of the dead, rise up and possess your bird of passage. Those stolen Africans step out of the ocean from the wombs of the ships and claim your story. […] Those Africans, shackled in leg irons and enslaved, step out of the acres of cane fields and cotton fields and tell your story. […] Those lynched in the magnolias, swinging on the limbs of the weeping willows, rotting food for the vultures, step down and claim your story. […] Those tied, bound, and whipped from to Mississippi, step out and tell your story. Those in , in the fields of , in the swamps of Florida, the rice fields of Carolina—you waiting Africans, step out and tell your story. L’incantation du sorcier Sankofa dans le fort d’Elmina rassemble toutes les origines partagées de la diaspora africaine, origines qui ont été oubliées par les êtres comme Mona au sortir du mouvement pour les droits civiques, mais aussi par les autorités africaines, incarnées dans le film par les soldats du fort, qui chassent le sorcier. Dans cette écriture symbolique, chaque être humain noir vient de toutes ces contrées où les Noirs ont été forcés de ramasser le coton ou de couper la canne à sucre, ont été lynchés, pendus et fouettés, de l’Amérique Latine au Sud des États-Unis.

14 Mona symbolise tous les Noirs qui ont oublié ces origines, ce qui les aliène : sa séquence de présentation montre ainsi qu’elle est aliénée par le regard du photographe,

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incarnation des médias dominants aux États-Unis. Mona est piégée dans une logique d’oppression, marquée dans l’esthétique du film par une succession de plans en plongée sur le corps de Mona et en contre-plongée sur le photographe. L’oiseau sankofa lui permet alors d’exister parce qu’il la transforme en être capable de résister, par exemple lorsque Shango place un pendentif de sankofa autour de son cou : « After he put that bird around my neck, I became a rebel. No longer was I scared to be flogged and burned. » Évidemment, la séquence de prédation du photographe blanc est aussi un commentaire métatextuel sur la prédation institutionnelle opérée par la caméra hollywoodienne sur les actrices noires, auxquelles on a souvent demandé – comme on l’a suggéré plus haut – d’être des Jézabel (ce qui fut le cas de l’actrice noire américaine Fredi Washington) ou au contraire des êtres asexués dévoués à leurs maîtres blancs, telle l’actrice Hattie McDaniel, la mammy d’Autant en emporte le vent, qui dans le même temps qu’elle recevait l’Oscar du meilleur second rôle féminin devait s’asseoir à une table séparée des acteurs blancs du film lors de la cérémonie. Cette prédation est soulignée par les plans en plongée et par le fait que la caméra se substitue à l’œil du photographe.

Le mouvement du sankofa

15 La quatrième étape de la création d’une esthétique de la résistance dans le film de Gerima procède directement de l’écriture symbolique, liée au mouvement du sankofa. De fait, le film sollicite à de nombreuses reprises le motif de la boucle ouverte : les séquences de début semblent être les séquences de fin et de nombreuses séquences s’organisent selon une disposition concentrique, comme le signale Anne Crémieux dans son livre sur les cinéastes noirs américains (Crémieux, 2004 181). Ainsi lors de la préparation de la rébellion, ou lorsque Nunu raconte des histoires aux enfants, ou encore lorsque les esclaves entourent une esclave enceinte sur le point d’accoucher, les esclaves forment des cercles qui excluent les Blancs et protègent leur centre. Le cercle permet tantôt de protéger l’existence même des esclaves (dans le cas du bébé à naître), tantôt de protéger leur culture africaine (dans le cas des histoires de Nunu). Haile Gerima a appelé ce type de disposition le « cinéma du foyer » (fireplace cinema). Il explique la centralité du foyer dans la culture africaine, foyer qui permet de rassembler, de réchauffer, de partager : The fireplace tradition created time and space for observation and critical analysis, benefiting the entire social network, including artists. It is entirely appropriate to perceive the cinema as being symbolic of the fire—the central point of life, earth and energy. (Gerima, 1984 54)

16 Ces moments de disposition concentrique, autour d’un foyer ou d’un enfant à naître, fonctionnent donc non seulement comme des actes de résistance au niveau de la narration, mais aussi comme des commentaires métatextuels sur la fonction de résistance du cinéma : le spectateur fait partie intégrante du cercle autour du foyer. Ces séquences invitent le spectateur à observer et à analyser, de la même manière que Shola observe et analyse : nous devons effectuer le même voyage spirituel que Mona/ Shola, un retour vers le passé pour mieux appréhender l’avenir. De fait, le mouvement du sankofa – et donc du film – n’est pas exactement circulaire, bien qu’il puisse de prime abord paraître tel. Lorsque Mona revient, elle est irrémédiablement changée. Elle ne répond plus aux appels du photographe, car elle n’est plus un objet ; elle est devenue l’agent de son histoire, et peut désormais regarder l’avenir, avec sa communauté, tout

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en intégrant le passé dans sa conscience. Il en va de même du cinéma noir américain selon Haile Gerima : tel le sankofa, il avance tout en ayant pris conscience de ses formes antérieures.

BIBLIOGRAPHIE

BOGLE, Donald. Toms, Coons, Mulattoes, Mammies, and Bucks: An Interpretive History of Blacks in American Films. New York : Viking Press, 1973.

CRÉMIEUX, Anne. Les Cinéastes noirs américains et le rêve hollywoodien. Paris : L’Harmattan, 2004.

CRÉMIEUX, Anne. « Haile Gerima, une œuvre entre deux continents ». Africultures, avril 2009. Page consultée le 15 mars 2018.

DIAWARA, Manthia. « Black American Cinema: The New Realism ». Black American Cinema. Dir. Manthia Diawara. New York : Routledge, 1993, p. 3-25.

DU BOIS, W.E.B. The Souls of Black Folk: Essays and Sketches. Chicago : A.C. McClurg & Co., 1903.

FANON, Frantz. Peau noire, masques blancs. Paris : Éditions du Seuil, 1952.

FIELD, Allyson Nadia, Jan-Christopher HORAK et Jacqueline Najuma STEWART, dir. LA Rebellion: Creating a New Black Cinema. Oakland : University of California Press, 2015.

GERIMA, Haile. Dossier de presse de Sankofa rédigé à l’occasion de la sortie du film en France, archives personnelles de l’autrice, 2000.

GERIMA, Haile. « Fireplace-Cinema (Gathering, Warming, Sharing) ». Filmfaust, no 39, 1984, p. 44-55.

GUEDJ, Pauline. Panafricanisme, religion akan et dynamiques identitaires aux États-Unis. Le chemin du Sankofa. Paris : L’Harmattan, 2011.

GUERRERO, Ed. Framing Blackness: The African American Image in Film. Philadelphie : Temple University Press, 1993. hooks, bell. Reel to Real: Race, Sex, and Class at the Movies. New York : Routledge, 2009.

KANDÉ, Sylvie. « Look Homeward, Angel: and Mulattos in Haile Gerima’s Sankofa ». African Cinema: Postcolonial and Feminist Readings. Dir. Kenneth W. Harrow. Trenton : Africa World Press, 1999, p. 89-114.

LETORT, Delphine. « Sankofa (Haile Gerima, 1993) : la mémoire de l’esclavage dans la conscience diasporique ». Transatlantica, no 2, 2012. Page consultée le 15 mars 2018.

MURPHY, Joseph M. Santería: African Spirits in America. Boston : Beacon Press, 1993.

PFAFF, Françoise. Twenty-five Black African Filmmakers: A Critical Study, with Filmography and Bio- bibliography. New York : Greenwood Press, 1988.

REID, Mark A. Black Lenses, Black Voices: African American Film Now. Lanham : Rowman & Littlefield, 2005.

« Story of LA Rebellion (the) ». UCLA Film and Television Archive. Page consultée le 15 mars 2018.

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TAYLOR, Clyde. « The LA Rebellion: New Spirit in American Film ». Black Film Review, vol. 2, no 2, 1986, p. 9-16.

UKADIKE, Nwachukwu Frank. « Critical Dialogues: Transcultural Modernities and Modes of Narrating Africa in Documentary Films ». Critical Approaches to African Cinema Discourse. Dir. Nwachukwu Frank Ukadike. Lanham : Lexington Books, 2014, p. 177-191.

UKADIKE, Nwachukwu Frank. Questioning African Cinema: Conversations with Filmmakers. Minneapolis : University of Minnesota Press, 2002.

WALL, David C., et Michael T. MARTIN, dir. The Politics and Poetics of Black Film: Nothing But a Man. Bloomington : Indiana University Press, 2015.

WEINER, Rex. « Straight as an Arrow ». Daily Variety, 25 juillet 1995, 17.

WILLIAMS, Linda. Playing the Race Card: Melodramas of Black and White from Uncle Tom to O.J. Simpson. Princeton : Princeton University Press, 2001.

WOOLFORD, Pamela. « Filming Slavery: A Conversation with Haile Gerima ». Transition, no 64, 1994, p. 90-104.

NOTES

1. Les « retours » à Oscar Micheaux sont multiples dans la carrière d’Haile Gerima : l’un de ses premiers films, Harvest: 3,000 Years (1976), reçut le prix Oscar Micheaux du Black Filmmakers Hall of Fame, à Oakland, en Californie. Dans un entretien avec Françoise Pfaff en 1977, il tenait les propos suivants : « In order to survive, young black filmmakers should follow the example of early Black American directors like Oscar Micheaux. Even if one is critical about the content of his films, one should learn from him » (Pfaff 142). 2. Pauline Guedj indique dans son ouvrage sur la mythologie akan que l’oiseau sankofa – « un symbole akan, très populaire au Ghana, représentant un oiseau se penchant sur sa queue, métaphore de la nécessité pour tout homme de se tourner vers son passé pour avancer vers le futur » (Guedj 9) – est devenu aux États-Unis dans les années 1960 et 1970 l’emblème de toute une génération de militants qui préconisaient le retour aux racines africaines pour décoloniser les esprits et guérir la communauté noire américaine des méfaits de l’oppression. 3. « La voix off s’adresse à la diaspora noire des Amériques dans un discours englobant qui efface les limites géographiques entre pays esclavagistes pour décrire une communauté de victimes parmi les Noirs de la traite atlantique » (Letort 7). 4. Le personnage de Nunu est très probablement inspiré de la mère et de la grand-mère éthiopiennes de Gerima : « His mother and grandmother were great storytellers, and listening to them, he acquired mastery of the legends and tales of the Ethiopian oral tradition, which was later to become the quintessence of his cinematic narrative style » (Ukadike, 2002 253). 5. La mulâtresse tragique est une figure importante du cinéma hollywoodien lorsque celui-ci se préoccupe de questions raciales, par exemple dans Images de la vie (Imitation of life, John Stahl, 1934, dont Douglas Sirk a réalisé en 1959 un remake intitulé en français Mirage de la vie), L’Héritage de la chair (Pinky, , 1949) ou encore L’Esclave libre (Band of Angels, Raoul Walsh, 1957). Il existe peu de mulâtres masculins dans le cinéma hollywoodien. Silas Lynch, le mulâtre de Naissance d’une nation, n’est pas tragique mais maléfique.

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RÉSUMÉS

Le cinéaste éthiopien indépendant Haile Gerima fait partie du groupe de réalisateurs noirs américains baptisé LA Rebellion. Parallèlement à sa carrière d’universitaire, Gerima a réalisé plusieurs films traitant de divers aspects de l’expérience noire américaine et diasporique. C’est avec Sankofa (1993) qu’il connut son premier grand succès. Traitant de la résistance à l’oppression par le biais de la mythologie akan – en particulier l’oiseau sankofa, symbole de la nécessité pour toute personne de se tourner vers son passé pour appréhender l’avenir –, le film définit une politique et une esthétique de la résistance à l’esclavage. Sankofa a essentiellement été analysé dans sa dimension politique, idéologique et historique. Cet article se penche sur sa dimension esthétique et sémiotique, élément à part entière du discours idéologique sur la résistance à l’esclavage.

Haile Gerima, an independent Ethiopian filmmaker who belonged to the LA Rebellion film movement, directed films which dealt with various aspects of the African American and black diasporic experience. Sankofa (1993) was his first important critical and commercial success. The film used Akan mythology—in particular the sankofa bird symbolizing the need for every person to turn to the past in order to face their future—to broach the issue of resistance to oppression. In Sankofa, Gerima developed a politics and aesthetic of resistance. While the film’s political, ideological, and historical dimensions have been extensively analyzed, this essay focuses on its aesthetic dimension, which is the cornerstone of its ideological discourse on resistance to slavery.

INDEX

Keywords : Sankofa, Haile Gerima, slavery, resistance, LA Rebellion Mots-clés : Sankofa, Haile Gerima, esclavage, résistance, LA Rebellion

AUTEUR

CLAIRE DUTRIAUX Université Paris Sorbonne

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Confronting Race Head-on in 12 Years a Slave (Steve McQueen, 2013): Redefining the Contours of the Classic Biopic?

Anne-Marie Paquet-Deyris

1 During the Obama years, the issue of race seemed to dissolve into the so-called “post- racial” era in the media. For critics such as H. Roy Kaplan in The Myth of Post-Racial America: Searching for Equality in the Age of Materialism (2011) and David J. Leonard and Lisa A. Guerrero in African Americans on Television: Race-ing for Ratings (2013), however, such colorblindness led to the bypassing of any direct confrontation with the persistent problems linked to race in contemporary American society.

2 In his critically acclaimed 2013 cinematic release 12 Years a Slave, Steve McQueen circumvents the “great white narrative” by addressing race “head-on” instead of metaphorically, writing every character within their own racial background. As in Solomon Northup’s 1853 Twelve Years a Slave, black characters are not removed from their own histories; instead, they are shaped and defined by them. To what extent, then, does the film distinctly voice racial concerns and tensions and provide representational spaces on screen in a nuanced and reflective manner? How does it—if indeed it does—subvert the characteristic black slave/character and white master/hero dynamic and embrace a wide variety of black stories and perspectives? By reconsidering the classic biopic/historical film, I will examine how the movie relocates America’s problems with race at the very heart of the national debate and offers a “post-post-racial” screen model that directly confronts race history.

3 In The Black Image in the White Mind: Media and Race in America, Robert M. Entman and Andrew Rojecki suggest there is a new goal (or end) for media operations in the realm of race: encouraging audiences and media producers alike to become more critically self-aware as they deal with the culture’s racial signals. Such activity would serve not only the social interest in racial comity, but the media’s long-term economic interests as well. And

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it would set the stage for an eventual cessation—an end in the other sense—to color consciousness, for arrival at the time, however far off, when “race” no longer holds meaning for media producers and their audiences. Building on Benedict Anderson’s work on “imagined communities,” they insist that “[t]oday, the same processes operate: common identification is shaped by mediated images of who constitutes one’s own people and nation” (Entman and Rojecki 205).

4 To what extent does 12 Years a Slave rebuild and extend this imagined community by inscribing the experience of slavery on screen? Does McQueen’s treatment of the historical movie/biopic change the way in which the race factor has been addressed so far in American cinema and is it a socially subversive intervention?

One hundred years of silence

5 At the time 12 Years a Slave was released, quite a few critical voices had already emphasized the impossibility of squaring “post-racialism” with contemporary material realities in the United States. The main comments had to do with the misrepresentation of the black experience on screen—including in movies where the lead actors were black—and with the lingering stereotypical treatment of racialized bodies. Even some movies and TV shows like Quentin Tarantino’s 2012 Django Unchained or Veena Sud’s 2018 Seven Seconds and Dan Fogelman’s 2016 This Is Us, reputed for championing a representational space for black bodies, critics claimed, were structured around a white male narrative arc to further the plot.1

6 In 1984, American photographer and director Gordon Parks had already fictionalized Solomon Northup’s narrative of enslavement, adapting it for television under the title Solomon Northup’s Odyssey. But his protagonist (interpreted by Avery Brooks) very much fell into the “hypermasculine categor[y] of the ‘Heroic Slave’ as famously invented by ” (Tillet 360). His representation of Northup bordered on the exceptional. By figuring the past, Parks felt compelled to construct an idealized heroic figure, thus bypassing the rules and conventions of the biopic. If we consider that the biopic’s fundamental tenets are to “[depict] the life of a historical person, past or present” (Custen 5) and provide a certain degree of realism, objectivity, and verifiability, then this earlier adaptation of Twelve Years a Slave is by no means a classic biopic. Neither is 12 Years a Slave. Northup only recently became a “famous” public figure, largely thanks to McQueen’s film. As McQueen emphasized in numerous interviews, Twelve Years a Slave was seldom read even in African American literature classes and was not as well-known as slave narratives such as The Interesting Narrative of the Life of (1789) and Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave (1845) (Roy 13-14). That 12 Years a Slave should relate the life of a real nineteenth- century free black man kidnapped into slavery is the main aspect that links it to the category of the biopic. Yet McQueen’s goal has little to do with “[the] genre’s charge, which […] is to enter the biographical subject into the pantheon of cultural mythology, one way or another, and to show why he or she belongs there” (Bingham 10). As a violinist who was well integrated in Saratoga’s local community and provided for his family, Northup was in many ways an ordinary citizen, a status that stands in sharp contrast with the usual paradigm of heroization which is emblematic of the classic biopic. McQueen goes against the grain as he re-visions the biopic in a manner similar to Dennis Bingham’s in his 2010 Whose Lives Are They Anyway? The Biopic as Contemporary

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Film Genre. For Bingham, the genre needs to be reevaluated as a complex, fast-evolving, impure category which can actually invent new ways of looking at the person and rendering his or her experience in some unadulterated way, making it virtually palpable.

7 McQueen uses a fractured storyline, artfully weaving past and present. He deploys flashbacks within flashbacks to stage the centrality of the body, which is both his artistic staple and the way in which producers and early African American directors like Oscar Micheaux fought the relegation of black characters to the margins of the frame and society.2 In a conversation with Harvard scholar Henry Louis Gates, Jr., he talks about the use of the body in his work as follows: All we have is our bodies. That’s our vessel. But what I am interested in is not necessarily that, but the subjects that are around it. […] The story is about the environment, and how individuals have to make sense of it, how we locate the self in events. The body is used, but it’s a byproduct of the bigger question. (Gates 191) With the potential “too-much-ness” of unrelenting scenes of violence (Gates 191), he voices what Michael Taussig calls “the public secret […] which is generally known, but cannot be articulated” (Taussig 5). Countering the current effort to deliberately avoid the awareness of race, he flaunts every possible racial signal so as to “do […] justice” to “what took place in those times” (Gates 192).

8 In her introduction to Harriet Jacobs’s 1861 Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, white abolitionist Lydia Maria Child similarly commented on this tale of sexual abuse by insisting that even though “[t]his peculiar phase of Slavery has generally been kept veiled […] the public ought to be made acquainted with its monstrous features, and I willingly take the responsibility of presenting them with the veil withdrawn” (Andrews and Gates 747-748). In her essay “The Site of Memory,” Toni Morrison suggested as well that her mission was to “rip that veil drawn over ‘proceedings too terrible to relate’” and to expose and articulate the unspeakable in her fiction (Zinsser 191). Possibly inscribing it on screen for the first time in such a graphic way, this is also what McQueen resolutely does. The straight cut from the joyful dinner scene in Washington, DC, to the silence and darkness of the cell where Northup (Chiwetel Ejiofor) has been locked up materializes on screen “the dark night of slavery.” When Douglass uses the phrase in his Narrative, he foregrounds the taming process at work and its devastating effect on body and soul: I was somewhat unmanageable when I first went there, but a few months of this discipline tamed me. Mr. Covey succeeded in breaking me. I was broken in body, soul, and spirit. My natural elasticity was crushed, my intellect languished, the disposition to read departed, the cheerful spark that lingered about my eye died; the dark night of slavery closed in upon me; and behold a man transformed into a brute! (Andrews and Gates 324) The breaking process starts all the more savagely for Northup as the contrast with his previous circumstances is total. The camera captures him having dinner at a fine restaurant with his white employers and giving a toast to celebrate his successful and profitable tour. Refined classical background music is heard before the straight cut to the dark basement where he finds himself in shackles.

9 The brutal shift in atmosphere is thus effected thanks to a straight cut to a dark room and an absence of sounds, until Northup regains consciousness and is startled by the rattle of his chains. A metaphorical and actual “cage” of light visually enacts the dehumanizing process of slavery already at work. Just as rebel leader Joseph Cinqué

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(Djimon Hounsou) wrenches off the nail of his manacles in Steven Spielberg’s Amistad (1997), Northup tries to free himself from his chains. His uncomprehending stare at his own irons enacts the unthinkable and compels the viewer to face a world in which freedom has become an irrelevant concept.

10 In the source autobiography, Northup describes his terror in the following terms: From that moment I was insensible. How long I remained in that condition— whether only that night, or many days and nights—I do not know; but when consciousness returned, I found myself alone, in utter darkness, and in chains. (Northup 37-38) After the in medias res beginning, the complex structure of this sequence where at least three different time levels are interwoven allows for an even greater focus on the individual, which is one of the characteristics of the biopic genre. This is paradoxical as it takes place precisely at a time when Northup is denied the status of independent free human being. From this beautifully lit sequence and chiaroscuro shot on, the blurred frontiers between the black and white communities become more and more demarcated.

11 Even though McQueen was working within the received conventions of the biopic while adapting a slave narrative, his representation of the black body met with harsh critical comments. The most common charge had to do with the misrepresentation of the black experience on screen and the stereotypical treatment of racial bodies mostly shown as suffering bodies. Historian Margaret Washington, for instance, insisted on the prevalent representation of black people as mere victimized bodies in the film: There is no slave community in the movie. Instead, Platt [Northup’s ] is a silent observer of enslaved people who assert no agency, no struggle, and do not have a culture or a sense of morality. They are beaten-down victims. Only Platt wants “to live”; others are content to “survive.” However, in the actual narrative Platt describes how he fits into a slave community. He recounts for the reader the personalities, individualities and temperaments of enslaved people, and he relates their culture. […] In the movie, slaves are cotton-picking, cane-cutting stick figures; recipients of white violence; even sexually wanton. (Miller 322-323) Ironically, some of McQueen’s early shots register on screen as snapshots of slavery, strange blended families mostly presented as surface images that catch but a fragment of a complex experience.

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But these early snapshots recomposing new “blended” families quickly interact to form a wider patchwork telling numerous interrelated true stories. Most of the black and white figures McQueen represents on screen end up being full-fledged characters having firmly established roles in a fully developed plantation system. Once Northup has been transported south, the various figures of the plantation unit start to interplay and interact so that the activities and the mindsets of slaves and masters alike are foregrounded. The geographical concentration of the enslaved men and women on the various plantations does not reflect homogenization in their representation, but instead further complicates the slave experience. It highlights for instance slave hierarchies in the plantation culture and the addiction of some masters to their black sex slaves or concubines.

12 In 12 Years a Slave the visual and aural shock is so powerful that the debate over placing the black body at the center of the frame is displaced by that of constructing an authentic environment and narrative arc. What the director seems most intent on achieving is, as he told a film critic, “to present this as the life that people lived, and twist it” (quoted in Thaggert 332). The film’s first intertitle against a black background —“This film is based on a true story”—is the exact opposite of a disclaimer clause. Everything the director purports to inscribe on screen derives from bona fide sources and therefore fits part of the definition of the biopic, which is to be based on the biography or portions of a historical person’s biography. But contrary to the classic division between “the pre-war biopic [which] tends to address its spectators as citizens [and] the post-war biopic [which] tends to address its spectators as consumers of popular culture” (Neale 54), 12 Years a Slave first and foremost addresses the viewers as fully aware and responsible citizens.

Blackness visible

13 McQueen claims to cling to an authenticity which implies recoding Northup’s 1853 autobiographical narrative into a new set of signs and conventions, as well as a non- glossed-over visual inscription of slavery. As a result, he positions himself beyond debates over truth and falsehood, and sets out to bring about catharsis. Through the prism of film, he makes the viewers intimately touch on the reality of slavery, however briefly. To some extent, this runs contrary to the general goal of the classic biopic: dramatizing the lifelong journey of a historically-based individual it ends up glorifying. As he mines the more recent formula of the “slice of life” biopic by focusing on Northup’s time as a slave, McQueen circumvents not only the Great White Male narrative, a vehicle of the dominant reactionary or conservative ideology, but the Great Black Male narrative as well. The multiplicity of viewpoints, especially of African American protagonists in a genre film—one in which “generic identification becomes a formative component of film viewing” (Altman 277)—then further complicates the issue. Does McQueen productively question how media can make apparent the incoherence and fragmentation of relatively recent real events in American history? And in the wake of four hundred years of slavery, what strategies does he adopt to inscribe both historical facts and fictional narratives on screen in a cohesive and coherent ensemble? Very early on his goal was to help the readers and spectators experience difference and similarity between two sign systems through intersemiotic

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transposition. Even when reading the book, he was already obsessed by the actual inscription of “those [unadulterated] images” on screen: Seeing the images. All I wanted to do was see those images. That has always been the power for me. Seeing those images. When I read the book, I wanted to see those images. Slavery is like the elephant in the room, and what you do is sprinkle flour over it and make it visible. We have to confront this topic in a real way. No one’s blind anymore. No excuses. That’s the power of cinema. (Gates 188) With Northup’s reverse trajectory from freedom to slavery and back to freedom, the usual framework of the slave narrative is inverted but also directly questioned as the un-sanitized depiction of slavery causes two time periods to overlap. The contemporary filmgoer’s view of the “peculiar institution” is fundamentally defamiliarized and reshaped as there is an uneasy temporal juxtaposition between the historical moment depicted graphically in the film and a belief that the type of racial inequality once institutionalized by slavery in the nineteenth century, then legally removed in the twentieth, is now completely and fully eradicated in the twenty-first. (Thaggert 333) Such a strategy of disjunction and yet proximity between time periods literally and metaphorically plays with focal distance and generates viewer discomfort. Destabilizing the spectator entails focusing on individuated blacks whose complicated life stories interact with whites’. The shapes pain and suffering take in both communities are inscribed on screen in a singularly intense way. Each time, pain is literally embodied in flesh. Whether it be female or male pain, McQueen’s camera gets as close as possible to the suffering subject, at times capturing only part of his or her tortured body within the frame or filming for an excruciatingly long time a scene of near-lynching or whipping.

14 In 12 Years a Slave, each disturbing “snapshot” fully extends into a scene or sequence which creates “cinematic discomfort” by “manipulating [the] representation of time and duration” (Thaggert 334). McQueen compels the viewer to take in the centrality of the black body as it is both being subjugated and asserting agency and rebellion. From this point of view, the two unusually long scenes of Northup’s near-lynching and Patsey’s (Lupita Nyong’o) flogging participate in testing representational limits. With such an insistent showing mode, it is no longer possible to accommodate violence, nor is looking away an option. The visual experience of slavery McQueen imposes on the spectator is all the more inescapable as he consistently uses the key trope of violence in new ways. Close-ups of body parts like Northup’s feet barely touching the ground become powerfully metonymic of the whole person fighting “to survive,” as Northup tells Eliza (Adepero Oduye). They circumvent any temptation to fetishize black visibility and suffering. They become the symptoms of some greater narrative arc that we have to follow to the end and which bridges the gap with today’s supposedly post- racial America.

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15 Miriam Thaggert underlines the way in which 12 Years a Slave captures how Americans became accustomed to the violence of slavery and draws a parallel with how they explore today’s racial subtext or confront head-on some overtly problematic racial content: His representation charts the desensitization to violence in antebellum America; and […] the reactions to his film may suggest an increasing numbness, or tolerance, for subtle forms of discrimination in our own supposedly postrace America. (Thaggert 334) The entire virtually silent scene uncompromisingly inscribes on screen the visual shock of the “photographs and postcards taken as souvenirs at lynchings throughout America” that collector James Allen uncovered while searching through the nation’s past. His book Without Sanctuary, which came out in 1994, has since then been reissued several times and has given rise to the much-accessed website “Without Sanctuary” complete with photos and a forum.

16 McQueen and Northup before him rework some of the classic tropes of African American culture. When focusing on enslaved black women, racial desirability and its devastating consequences are no longer exclusively connected to the figures of the tragic mulatta or the disposable “comfort girl.” The fatal attraction Patsey exerts on Epps (Michael Fassbender) actually gives rise to a long analysis of the young girl’s frame of mind and behavior which prevents the inscription of heavily stereotyped representations of black mistresses and white masters. The staging of the relationship between black sex slave and white master materializes on screen not so much another development of the great white narrative as an in-depth analysis of the girl’s own feelings of entrapment and desperation. The sections of the film relating to Patsey indeed operate as yet another peculiar biopic. In these sequences, the biopic stops being “differential in the role it assigns to gender” (Custen 3) and reworks the classic black archetypal figure of the Tragic Woman. Patsey is a “historical person” in her own right (Custen 5). She also becomes the focus of the biographical film which is consistently “minimally composed of the life, or the portion of a life, of a real person whose real name is used” (Custen 6) even though she is neither a mulatta nor a bereft mother whose children have been sold away like Eliza.3

17 Along with the latter, Patsey epitomizes a tragic facet of the objectified and brutalized woman while telling a very personal story. The crude scenes of sexual intercourse

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between master and slave never achieve any degree of intimacy. Paradoxically, the most intimate moments are those when the young girl is playing, oblivious to her surroundings, and making corn husk dolls. McQueen’s camera frames Patsey lost in the wonder world of childhood, sometimes only partly registering on screen as entire portions of her secret self and life cannot be captured and thus have to remain off screen.

McQueen alternates shots focusing on Patsey’s ravaged body being manipulated and violated by the white masters, both , and shots of the young girl asserting her own subjectivity and selfhood as when trying to convince Northup that he should end her life or coming up with strong arguments for Epps not to flog her.

18 Hence the visual inscription of pathos and horror alternates with the materialization of self-assertion even if the final shot of Patsey is that of a small figure receding in the background as Northup is extracted from the plantation world. As he leaves behind the slave’s subhuman status, the camera captures him stepping up into the horse carriage on his way to regain his former identity and reintegrate his own New York state community.

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Shock corridor: impossible closure?

19 After viewing the film for the first time at the Paris press screening in 2014, members of the audience were left speechless. We had just emerged from what once called a “shock corridor” (Shock Corridor, 1963) and felt compelled to remain silent, before eventually comparing the forceful impact of the movie with Richard Fleisher’s Mandingo (1975) among other films. The tagline of Fleisher’s film was “Expect the Truth,” and at the time he was one of the very few American moviemakers willing to confront race and slavery in a realistic way (Paquet-Deyris, 2014).

20 McQueen chooses a similar approach but he also further plays on the conventional tropes of African American culture. He revisits the classic definition and motifs of the biopic to make blackness visible in a contemporary Hollywood film and a context of white-controlled mass media organizations. Mediating Northup’s literary source, he turns it into a central filmic text imposing on the viewer a methodology to foreground underrepresented black bodies, experiences, and histories. He thus promotes a new kind of American national identity bypassing the frequent critical comment that “Blacks appear less individuated, more homogeneous [as] film reinforces Whites’ ignorance of Blacks’ variety and humanity” (Entman and Rojecki 182). According to some critics, in order to come up with rich and complex ethnic and racial representations on screen, he sometimes overdoes the self-conscious capture of the past. Jim Down’s reaction is also typical of the type of visceral reactions the movie generated: Unlike other films, or even books for that matter, that have the ability to transport me to another time and place, that make me forget that I am sitting in a movie theater, 12 Years a Slave did not achieve that level of literary, imaginative migration. Instead I could feel the director’s, screenwriters’, and actors’ efforts to so self- consciously capture the past. (Miller 313) But through the emphasis on violence, the director, screenwriter, and cast allow the movie to clearly materialize what Toni Morrison calls “Unspeakable Things Unspoken” (Morrison), fully disclosed on a global scale.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

ALLEN, James, ed. Without Sanctuary: Lynching Photography in America. Santa Fe: Twin Palms, 2000.

ALTMAN, Rick. Film/Genre. London: BFI Publishing, 1999.

ANDREWS, William L., and Henry Louis GATES, Jr., eds. Slave Narratives. New York: Library of America, 2000.

BINGHAM, Dennis. Whose Lives Are They Anyway? The Biopic as Contemporary Film Genre. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2010.

CUSTEN, George F. Bio/Pics: How Hollywood Constructed Public History. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1992.

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ENTMAN, Robert M., and Andrew ROJECKI. The Black Image in the White Mind: Media and Race in America. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001.

GATES, Henry Louis, Jr. “12 Years a Slave: A Conversation with Steve McQueen.” Transition, no. 114, 2014, p. 185-196.

KAPLAN, H. Roy. The Myth of Post-Racial America: Searching for Equality in the Age of Materialism. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2011.

LEONARD, David J., and Lisa A. GUERRERO, eds. African Americans on Television: Race-ing for Ratings. Santa Barbara: Praeger, 2013.

MILLER, Brian Craig. “Film Roundtable: 12 Years a Slave.” Civil War History, vol. 60, no. 3, 2014, p. 310-336.

MORRISON, Toni. “Unspeakable Things Unspoken: The Afro-American Presence in American Literature.” Quarterly Review, vol. 28, no. 1, 1989, p. 1-34.

NEALE, Steve. Genre and Hollywood. London: Routledge, 2000.

NORTHUP, Solomon. Twelve Years a Slave: Narrative of Solomon Northup, a Citizen of New-York, Kidnapped in Washington City in 1841, and Rescued in 1853, from a Cotton Plantation Near the Red River, in Louisiana. Auburn: Derby and Miller, 1853.

PAQUET-DEYRIS, Anne-Marie. “Autour du film 12 Years a Slave de Steve McQueen.” France Culture, 25 January 2014. Accessed 26 August 2019.

PAQUET-DEYRIS, Anne-Marie. “Glorious Bastards in Tarantino’s Django Unchained: When the West Crosses the South.” Critical Perspectives on the Western: From a Fistful of Dollars to Django Unchained. Ed. Lee Broughton. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2016, p. 153-166.

ROY, Michaël. Textes fugitifs. Le récit d’esclave au prisme de l’histoire du livre. Lyon: ENS Éditions, 2017.

TAUSSIG, Michael. Defacement: Public Secrecy and the Labor of the Negative. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999.

THAGGERT, Miriam. “12 Years a Slave: Jasper’s Look.” American Literary History, vol. 26, no. 2, 2014, p. 332-338.

TILLET, Salamishah. “‘I Got No Comfort in This Life’: The Increasing Importance of Patsey in 12 Years a Slave.” American Literary History, vol. 26, no. 2, 2014, p. 354-361.

ZINSSER, William, ed. Inventing the Truth: The Art and Craft of Memoir. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1998.

NOTES

1. On Django Unchained, see Paquet-Deyris, 2016. 2. In McQueen’s earlier movies Hunger (2008) and Shame (2011), the body is a symptom, the product of some ailing condition. To a certain extent, Micheaux also used it as a visual sign of dysfunction and exclusion from the white normative world. In Within Our Gates (1920), the scene in which the young mulatta is almost raped by her white father is a direct answer to the racist scene of the attempted rape of Flora Cameron (Mae Marsh) by black soldier Gus (Walter Long) in D.W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation (1915). It also exposes historical truth about black/white relationships in an uncompromising way.

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3. Hélène Charlery makes the case for the central role of Patsey in 12 Years a Slave in her contribution to this issue.

ABSTRACTS

In his successful 2013 cinematic release 12 Years a Slave, Steve McQueen circumvents the “great white narrative” by addressing race “head-on” instead of metaphorically, writing every character within their own racial background. As in Solomon Northup’s 1853 Twelve Years a Slave, black characters are not removed from their own histories; instead, they are shaped and defined by them. To what extent, then, does the film distinctly voice racial concerns and tensions, and provide representational spaces on screen in a nuanced and reflective manner? How does it—if indeed it does—subvert the standard black slave/character and white master/hero dynamic, and embrace a wide variety of black stories and perspectives? By reconsidering the classic biopic/ historical film, this article examines how the movie relocates America’s problems with race at the very heart of the national debate and offers a “post-post-racial” screen model that directly confronts race history.

Dans son film à succès 12 Years a Slave (2013), Steve McQueen contourne le grand récit blanc en abordant directement et non plus métaphoriquement la notion de race, et en réinscrivant chaque personnage dans son propre contexte racial. Tout comme dans le récit autobiographique de Solomon Northup (Twelve Years a Slave, 1853) à l’origine du film, les personnages noirs ne sont pas construits indépendamment de leur histoire, mais bien modelés et définis par celle-ci. Jusqu’à quel point le film donne-t-il voix aux questions et tensions raciales et offre-t-il de manière nuancée et réflexive un espace de représentation à l’écran ? De quelle façon subvertit-il – si tel est bien le cas – la dynamique narrative conventionnelle entre esclave/personnage noir et maître/héros blanc ? Comment parvient-il à intégrer un large spectre d’histoires et de perspectives spécifiquement noires ? En revenant sur les contours du biopic et du film historique classique, cet article montre de quelle façon le film réinsère au cœur même du débat national la relation conflictuelle de l’Amérique à la notion de race et convoque un modèle « post-post- racial » qui intègre pleinement l’histoire raciale du pays.

INDEX

Keywords: 12 Years a Slave, Steve McQueen, slavery, race, slave narrative Mots-clés: 12 Years a Slave, Steve McQueen, esclavage, questions raciales, récit d’esclave

AUTHOR

ANNE-MARIE PAQUET-DEYRIS Université Paris Nanterre

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“Queen of the fields”: Slavery’s Graphic Violence and the Black Female Body in 12 Years a Slave (Steve McQueen, 2013)

Hélène Charlery

1 One among at least ten prominent movies by and about black Americans released the same year, 12 Years a Slave confirmed that 2013 was “a breakout year for black films” (Cieply).1 Noting movies such as 12 Years a Slave, Fruitvale Station (), Mandela: Long Walk to Freedom (Justin Chadwick), The Butler (Lee Daniels) and 42 (), both mainstream media outlets and black-oriented news community websites endorsed the idea that 2013 marked a “black film renaissance” (BBC) or a “renaissance of black cinema” (The Grio) (Penrice; Brook). The claim was later nuanced by critics such as Kellie Carter Jackson, who points out that most of these films are limited to “male-dominated or male-centered stories.” Although she mentions prior exceptions such as The Color Purple (Steven Spielberg, 1985) and The Help (Tate Taylor, 2011), Jackson argues that the “peripheral” images of black women in films “subtly [send] the message that black men can play great and complex roles, while black women can continue to play marginalized roles as their girlfriends or wives.” Male- centered historical narratives emphasize the active role of black men in national history while they deny black female characters historical agency and impact. Slavery- themed films in particular, from Slaves (Herbert Biberman, 1969) and Solomon Northup’s Odyssey (Gordon Parks, 1984) to Amistad (Steven Spielberg, 1997) and Django Unchained (Quentin Tarantino, 2012), have firmly established the image of “the black male slave fighting for freedom” (Jackson 173-177).

2 While centering on a male character, 12 Years a Slave stands out in its treatment of slavery. In his interviews, McQueen explained that the story of a free man “who gets kidnapped and pulled into the maze of slavery [would allow] the audience [to follow] this person in every step that he takes within the context of slavery” (“12 Years”). McQueen thus frames his cinematic treatment of slavery in an indirect immersive

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experience that relies on the fact that, by the end of the film, the main character returns to his initial free status. In her review of 12 Years a Slave, French film critic Charlotte Garson calls Solomon Northup (Chiwetel Ejiofor) a “temporary” slave: the protagonist experiences slavery for a limited period of time, as the title of the movie indicates. To that extent, the film focuses on “an exception” rather than on one of “the estimated forty million who did not escape slavery” (Morris 265). Garson laments that 12 Years a Slave addresses the larger history of slavery through the story of a single exceptional individual, as if audiences were deemed “incapable of identifying with a ‘real’ slave, one that was born and died in slavery” (Garson 107).

3 Rather than assessing McQueen’s strategy negatively, I suggest that Northup’s double status as “temporary slave” and “exception” endows the character with the status of victim, witness of, and authority over the slave narrative that unfolds on screen. I also argue that the film’s “permanent” slave is the black female supporting character Patsey (Lupita Nyong’o), a field slave who is brutalized at the hands of her master (Michael Fassbender). As the Northup narrative progresses, McQueen’s graphic depiction of slavery intensifies and is projected onto the black female character’s narrative and body. Although she occupies a peripheral position in a male-centered narrative, Patsey is neither girlfriend, nor wife, and plays a meaningful role in the filmmaker’s attempt at providing a different cinematic construction of the black experience of slavery.

Northup as “temporary” slave and “exception”: his story within history

4 In their brief history of Hollywood treatments of plantation slavery and the slave trade, Hernán Vera and Andrew Gordon argue that Hollywood long “denied the horror of slavery by sentimentalizing it.” Movies such as Gone with the Wind (Victor Fleming, 1939) and The Littlest Rebel (David Butler, 1935) are cases in point. The 1950s and early 1960s saw few direct treatments of the subject apart from Band of Angels (Raoul Walsh, 1957). The late 1960s and 1970s marked a turning point, with several “blaxploitation” films such as Mandingo (Richard Fleischer, 1975) and its sequel Drum (Steve Carver, 1976) “[driving] a stake through the heart of the plantation genre.” Only in the 1990s did Hollywood turn to “more direct, serious treatments of slavery,” Vera and Gordon assert, citing movies such as Jefferson in Paris (, 1995), Amistad, and (, 1998) (Vera and Gordon 54-55). While Amistad graphically conveys the horrors of the Middle Passage, the movie—like Jefferson in Paris—ultimately focuses on the white male characters’ discourse on American values. When it came out, 12 Years a Slave was logically presented as the film “no one was making”—a film based on a firsthand account of slavery, allowing viewers “to understand Solomon’s psychological journey, to understand who he is, what he’s endured, and in a wider sense, what people endured in that time” (“12 Years”). In Ejiofor’s words, Northup’s story was meant to illustrate the sufferings of a whole people and their experience of national history.

5 Portraying slavery in 12 Years a Slave raises the wider question of bringing slavery to the screen from a black perspective in an industry that has traditionally favored a white perspective of slavery in mainstream films. For McQueen, this implies telling the exceptional story of “one of the few victims of kidnapping to regain freedom from slavery,” as the film’s final title credit puts it. In an interview, actress Alfre Woodard,

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who plays Mistress Shaw in the film, states that Northup’s being kidnapped into slavery is “the entrance that […] viewers take” into slavery (“Actress”). Building on this idea, I would suggest that Northup’s status as a free black man kidnapped into slavery allows contemporary audiences who are unfamiliar with the historical significance of Northup’s account or other similar accounts to engage with his narrative, feel sympathy for the freeman, and empathy towards the slave.

6 Before being taken to Louisiana, Northup is put in jail in Washington, DC. The “scene in the slave pen at Washington,” as it is called in the original 1853 narrative, ends with Northup screaming for help, the camera slowly moving away from his cell’s window to reveal the White House in the distance. No other moment in the film illustrates more clearly the vulnerability of free blacks during slavery. The film’s ending credits pay tribute to this group of people, reminding viewers that, as a black man, Northup was unable to testify “in the nation’s capital” and therefore lost the case against the owner of the slave pen. Along with the film’s ending credits, the scene in the slave pen illustrates McQueen’s criticism of the institutions that made Northup’s enslavement possible. It also dramatizes the shift from Northup the freeman to Platt the slave.2

7 Simultaneously, the Washington scene illustrates the movie’s discourse on sympathy and empathy. Quoting from another critic, Salma Monani suggests that “both [sympathy and empathy] ultimately engage ‘a capacity or disposition to respond with concern to another’s situation.’” Yet Monani argues that race can be “a barrier to engaging empathetically with non-white characters” because “racial assumptions often impinge on how viewers feel concern for or with characters.” Instead, circumstances of the narrative may “allow [white] viewers to be sympathetic and forgiving of the racism of white characters.” For that reason, Monani claims, “many white viewers can ‘have trouble imagining what it is like to be African American “from the inside”—engaging black points of view empathetically’” (Monani 226-227). The Washington scene in 12 Years a Slave participates not only in Northup’s construction as the author, narrator, and subject of the story that unfolds, but also in his construction as what Monani calls an “emotive agent”—an agent “with whom audience members can have feelings with or for” (Monani 226).

8 12 Years a Slave’s opening sequence is framed between two title cards, one explaining that the film is “based on a true story,” the other displaying the film’s title. The first images reverse the chronology, showing Platt among the other slaves before going back to Northup before his abduction. This allows viewers to compare, through parallel editing, the two conditions the character experiences—enjoying the benefits of freedom in the North and experiencing bondage in the South. As a free black man in Saratoga in 1841, Northup puts his children to bed, then shares a moment of intimacy with his wife in the comfort of their bedroom. As an enslaved man, he has to sleep in a crowded cabin where an unknown female slave lying next to him forces her desire for intimacy upon him before bursting into tears. The film’s comparative structure reinforces the contrast between Northup’s life and Platt’s survival. This comparison is framed within the “true story” dimension of the film and the film’s title, which reinforces the temporary nature of Northup’s condition and provides the audience with the reassurance that the situation of the character for whom they are asked to feel sympathy and empathy will find a positive outcome.

9 The empathy/sympathy strategy also relies on the way the film defines . Northup’s account is not that of heroic rebellion or a quest for justice, like that of

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Amistad’s central male character Cinqué (Djimon Hounsou). The rebellion that is initiated on the boat that leads Northup to the South is quickly suppressed after the black man who fomented it has been murdered. The film does not define black slave heroism the way Amistad did. In 12 Years a Slave, heroism is not romanticized rebellion, but survival, and being able to sort out the complexities of such survival. In the film’s introduction, Northup is depicted as a respected citizen, a “distinguished individual,” and an expert violinist. These features do not disappear as the character becomes Platt the slave. Platt is a literate black slave—Master Ford () calls him “an exceptional nigger” after he has devised a way to save costs on the transport of wood on the Ford plantation. As talented as Northup/Platt may be, however, he is subject to the same humiliating and painful use of his body and life as other slaves. As the film progresses, the elements that emphasized his distinction are used as means to further control black bodies: during the slave auction scene, Northup/Platt is summoned to play the violin so that the children’s cries do not jeopardize the auction. He is also asked to perform when Master Epps whimsically wakes up exhausted slaves to have them dance late at night, or when Patsey’s body, after she was hit by the carafe that Mistress Epps (Sarah Paulson) threw at her, is dragged away from the room. Northup/Platt is gradually turned into a powerless witness of, and unwilling participant in, slavery’s daily atrocities. As a vehicle allowing viewers to enter the narrative, his progress into slavery sustains the audience’s capacity to feel for and with him. As a filmic “exception,” “one of the few victims of kidnapping to regain freedom from slavery,” one of the few whose accounts could be written, his story allows for engagement. Meanwhile, it is through the eyes of the atypical temporary slave that the daily horrors and typicality of slavery, as experienced by Patsey, are displayed on screen.

Patsey as “permanent” slave: her story within his/tory

10 The character of Patsey is more important in McQueen’s movie than it is in the original Twelve Years a Slave (Tillet). Patsey first appears on screen almost an hour into the film, when Northup is sold to Edwin Epps. Little is known about how she ended up on the Epps plantation; nor do we know what becomes of her after Northup is rescued. Garson claims that Patsey’s treatment is devoid of any potential romantic construction (Garson 107). While extradiegetic music (Colin Stetson’s “Awake on Foreign Shores” in particular) dramatizes Northup’s journey into the South, no music accompanies Patsey’s scenes. Rather, emphasis is placed on the intradiegetic natural sound of crickets chirping, which connects her with Southern landscape and imagery. When Northup is about to leave the Epps plantation, both natural sounds and ’s “Solomon” (the film’s musical theme) can be heard as Patsey and Northup hug goodbye. As the camera focuses on Northup and Patsey faints in the distance, the sound of crickets gradually fades away while the musical theme remains and serves as a transition to the following scene on Northup’s doorstep in the North.

11 As a permanent slave, Patsey is denied agency over narrative, life, and body. Contrary to Northup, her mobility is limited to the Epps plantation or to Mistress Shaw’s house. Her Sunday visits to the Shaw farm provide her with much-needed respite from Epps’s “hard countenance,” but she pays the price for these visits. Whereas Northup has enough privacy at night or during the day to try and write letters to his friends in the

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North, Patsey is shown making corn husk dolls under the jealous gaze of Mistress Epps. McQueen carefully distinguishes between the “temporary” slave who owns his own narrative and the “permanent” slave who is seen through the gaze of others. In the original narrative, Northup is impressed by Patsey’s dexterity in picking cotton: “Such lightning-like motion was in her fingers as no other fingers ever possessed, and therefore it was, that in cotton picking time, Patsey was queen of the field” (Northup 188). In the film, the same description of Patsey is used negatively by Epps: “Queen of the fields, she is. […] Damned queen. Born and bred in the field. Nigger among niggers. And God gave her to me.” This shift from Northup’s voice in the text to Epps’s in the film is meant to highlight Patsey’s vulnerability to the white male gaze. As previously demonstrated, the film makes clear Northup’s authority over his narrative. When Patsey’s experience of slavery is concerned, however, Northup’s authority is diminished. While Northup is unable to pick the required amount of cotton, for instance, Patsey is revealed as the top picker on the plantation. The comparison reinforces the distinction between the permanent slave who is used to picking cotton and the temporary slave who has a more recent experience of bondage on a cotton plantation.

12 In spite of these differences, Patsey is regularly associated with Northup. She first appears in the scene where Epps reads the Bible to his slaves: the camera shows her listening to Epps before panning to Northup. Though this camera move reminds viewers that this is Northup’s narrative, it subtly introduces Patsey as a supporting character in his story. Likewise, the farewell scene between Northup and Patsey is as much about the end of Northup’s experience of slavery as about Patsey’s persistent enslavement. The focus shifts from Patsey to Northup as his carriage drives him away. In the background, Patsey, though out of focus, can be seen fainting, unnoticed by Northup; while she enters Northup’s narrative rather inconspicuously, Patsey leaves it in a dramatic manner. A similar technique is previously used in Patsey’s whipping scene, where the camera focuses alternately on Patsey and Northup. Thus McQueen links the two characters so that Northup’s experience of enslavement on the Epps plantation is clearly informed by Patsey’s own experience of permanent enslavement.

13 It is worth noting that 12 Years a Slave provides three enslaved women as supporting characters—Patsey, Mistress Shaw, and Eliza (Adepero Oduye)—and not a single enslaved man. McQueen focuses on the subjugation of black female bodies by white male patriarchy. Northup is made the direct witness of how these three enslaved women experience subjugation. He listens to Eliza’s account of her “privileged” status as her master’s favorite and subsequent downfall. He watches when she is separated from her children during the slave auction scene, and when she is forced to leave the Ford plantation. As will later be the case with Patsey, we do not know what becomes of Eliza, Northup’s “last connection to his days as a free man” (Ridley 53). Eliza, however, serves as a counterpoint to another supporting character, Mistress Shaw. While the former laments what she has lost, the latter is clear-eyed about her situation: Got no cause to worry for my sensibilities. I ain’t felt the end of a lash in more years I can recall. I ain’t worked the field neither. Where once I served, now I have others serving me. The cost of my current existence be Massa Shaw broadcasting his affections and me enjoying a pantomime of his fidelity. If that what keep me from cotton pickin’ niggers, that what it be. The camera focuses on Patsey, as Mistress Shaw justifies her accommodation strategy. Her narrative then shifts to the story of her past, which is actually Patsey’s present: she

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mentions the “lusty visit in the night” and occasional “visitation with the whip.” The stories of these three enslaved women in Northup’s survival account are meant to bring together their respective experiences of enslavement: Mistress Shaw has experienced the miserable life that Patsey is currently living on the Epps plantation; Eliza has experienced and lost the comfort that Mistress Shaw now enjoys; so that if Patsey’s fate were to turn into Mistress Shaw’s, it would remain as fragile as it was for Eliza, and as fragile as Northup’s status as a free black man in the North.

14 12 Years a Slave alternates between scenes showing Patsey being brutalized and scenes where Northup attempts to regain his freedom. Mistress Epps’s first assault on Patsey, for instance, is immediately followed by Northup’s first walk to Bartholomew’s, while a direct cut marks the transition between the rape scene and Northup’s second visit to Bartholomew’s; the close-up shot of the foolscap paper harks back to the film’s opening scene, in which Northup was seen trying to write a letter using blackberry juice as ink. After the scene in which Mistress Epps viciously scratches Patsey’s face, Northup goes to Willard Yarney’s house to play the violin; he later promises Armsby (Garret Dillahunt) “the proceeds of [his] fiddling performances” if the latter agrees to deposit a letter in the Marksville post office. Finally, the flogging of Patsey is followed by the last conversation between Northup and Bass (Brad Pitt), which itself leads to Northup being rescued. Narratively, there are no cause-and-effect relationships between the episodes of physical abuse against Patsey and Northup’s journey back to freedom. The scenes about Northup trying to regain his freedom provide respite from the increasing violence against Patsey’s body. The presence of Patsey thus creates a sub-narrative of permanent bondage within Northup’s narrative of temporary bondage. McQueen tells Northup’s story while using Patsey as a means to depict slavery’s larger history.

Patsey’s rape and the filmic discourse on “slavery’s grotesque and relentless violence”

15 Commenting on Lincoln (Steven Spielberg, 2012), historian Barbara Krauthamer explains that “the film’s depiction of emancipation largely excludes African-American women and men as anything other than the patient and grateful recipients of the gift of freedom.” Lincoln is unable to “come to terms with slavery’s grotesque and relentless violence, especially sexual violence against black women” (Krauthamer). 12 Years a Slave narratively and graphically depicts “slavery’s grotesque and relentless violence”— grotesque to the extent that the violence inflicted on the enslaved is mostly due to the whims of enslavers, relentless because of its intensification throughout the movie. Although Northup is the protagonist, Patsey is the receiver of the greater share of this violence; she is given a prominent place in the film’s discourse on slavery. In this last part of my essay I want to focus on the rape of Patsey. Though he shows it in a less graphic manner than her whipping, McQueen brings Patsey into a form of resistance and agency that are uncommon in other male-dominated historical films such as The Butler and Django Unchained.

16 The rape that takes place at the beginning of The Butler is not set under slavery but in the 1920s. Yet director Lee Daniels clearly shows a continuity between slavery and the sharecropping system that developed after the Civil War and kept African American families dependent on white Southerners. The rape of Hattie Pearl (Mariah Carey) occurs as the protagonist’s family has just experienced a brief moment of happiness.

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While Hattie is being taken to a barn by the white farmer who then rapes her, her powerless husband explains to their young son that there is nothing they can do: “Come here. Look at me, boy! Don’t you lose your temper with that man. This his world, we’re just living in it. […] Now get on back to work.” Crucially, the rape is not shown but heard. The black cotton-pickers freeze as they hear Hattie’s coming out of the barn. The interruption, however, is momentary. As soon as the white rapist leaves the barn, readjusting his suspenders, the black workers get back to work. Thus the film suggests that black female bodies are as vulnerable in the South in the 1920s as they were in the 1850s. But the dramatization of the rape scene is ultimately meant to support the film’s focus on black fatherhood. The emphasis is on the black father’s inability to protect his wife and his own life, as he is immediately shot dead when trying to confront the white farmer. The rape of the black female character in The Butler is one episode among others in the main character’s psychological construction as a black father.

17 In Django Unchained, Broomhilda von Shaft (Kerry Washington) does not experience rape per se. Yet the brutalization of the black female body is explicit in the “hot box” scene. Broomhilda has been locked up in a hot airless box after attempting to run away; she is allowed to leave it only to be offered as a “comfort girl” to her owner’s guest. Again, the scene focuses less on Broomhilda than on her male partner, Django (Jamie Foxx). As a naked and screaming Broomhilda is being retrieved from the box in which she has spent several hours, the camera lingers on Django, who is standing in front of the plantation house and looking towards the box; there are several extreme close-ups on his eyes. The brutalization of the black female’s sexualized and objectified body serves to construct the protagonist’s revengeful black masculinity. In both The Butler and Django Unchained, the scenes of rape and violence against women are represented as spectacular and exceptional.

18 While these scenes take place in broad daylight and with numerous witnesses, the rape of Patsey in 12 Years a Slave occurs in the middle of the night with only the film’s viewers as witnesses. Patsey’s muffled groans contrast with Hattie’s and Broomhilda’s piercing screams in The Butler and Django Unchained respectively. The absence of any extradiegetic music and the almost static camera force the audience to fully experience the horror of what is happening on screen. Although a single shot of Northup lying on his mat suggests that he might be aware of what is happening, Patsey’s experience as a permanent slave seems to be fully dissociated from his experience as a temporary slave at this point. Northup’s story is about knowing the pain inflicted on enslaved women; Patsey’s is about experiencing it.

19 The rape scene in 12 Years a Slave leaves it to the viewers to understand that Patsey’s body is both vulnerable and resistant in its own, passive way. Patsey’s lack of reaction and empty eyes first convince Epps that she is dead, and then infuriate him to the point that he brutally slaps her and chokes her. As Epps leaves the scene, the camera shows Patsey breathing again, as if regaining life. Here McQueen distances himself from the traditional model of “sentimental vulnerability” which sees women as especially vulnerable to pain and injury, and reads pain and injury as debilitating to the female subject. […] This traditional model asks us as viewers to reserve our greatest sympathy for the suffering female body. (Hagelin 3) Although quite real, pain and injury are not “debilitating” in Patsey’s case. While the rape of Hattie and the murder of her husband in The Butler leave her in a debilitated state, Patsey decides to orchestrate her own death, begging Northup to kill her: “End

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my life. Take my body to the margin of the swamp. Take me by the throat. Hold me low in the water until I’s still’n without life. Bury me in a lonely place of dyin’.” Patsey is shown trying to keep control over her own body, if only to destroy it. Northup’s uncomprehending response to her pleading furthers the dissociation between the two characters. Because in 12 Years a Slave heroism is survival, Northup’s status as a male lead is not built upon his capacity to save the black female supporting character, but on his ability to survive enslavement for twelve years, return to his family, and write about his life as a slave. Yet in the final part of the movie McQueen focuses less on the protagonist’s (fruitless) quest for justice than on Patsey’s efforts at gaining agency over her body, even when she “got no comfort in this life.”

20 Thus 12 Years a Slave centers on its male protagonist as an entry point to the horrors of slavery, but it does not marginalize female roles—those of Patsey, Eliza, and Mistress Shaw. Northup’s temporary journey into slavery opens a window onto the world of black enslaved women, highlighting their exploitation and surviving strategies.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

“12 Years a Slave Was a Film that ‘No One Was Making.’” National Public Radio, 24 October 2013. Accessed 30 December 2015.

“Actress Alfre Woodard on Truthful Storytelling in 12 Years a Slave.” National Public Radio, 3 March 2014. Accessed 30 December 2015.

“Black Female Voices: Who Is Listening.” Public dialogue between bell hooks and Melissa Harris- Perry. The New School, 8 November 2013. Accessed 30 December 2015.

BROOK, Tom. “A Renaissance of Black Cinema?” British Broadcasting Corporation, 21 October 2014. Accessed 30 December 2015.

CIEPLY, Michael. “Coming Soon: A Breakout Year for Black Films.” New York Times, 1 June 2013. Accessed 30 December 2015.

GARSON, Charlotte. “12 Years a Slave.” Études. Revue de culture contemporaine, February 2014, p. 105-112.

HAGELIN, Sarah. Reel Vulnerability: Power, Pain, and Gender in Contemporary American Film and Television. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2013.

JACKSON, Kellie Carter. “‘Is Viola Davis in it?’: Black Women Actors and the ‘Single Stories’ of Historical Film.” Transition, no. 114, 2014, p. 173-184.

KRAUTHAMER, Barbara. “Slavery’s Grotesque and Relentless Violence.” The Chronicle of Higher Education, 4 December 2012. Accessed 30 December 2015.

MONANI, Salma. “Evoking Sympathy and Empathy: The Ecological Indian and Indigenous Eco- Activism.” Moving Environments: Affect, Emotion, Ecology, and Film. Ed. Alexa Weik von Mossner. Waterloo, ON: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2014, p. 225-248.

MORRIS, Nigel. The Cinema of Steven Spielberg: Empire of Light. London: Wallflower, 2007.

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NORTHUP, Solomon. Twelve Years a Slave: Narrative of Solomon Northup, a Citizen of New-York, Kidnapped in Washington City in 1841, and Rescued in 1853, from a Cotton Plantation Near the Red River, in Louisiana. Auburn: Derby and Miller, 1853.

PENRICE, Ronda Racha. “A Black Film Renaissance, or a Step Backward for Black Actors?” TheGrio.com, 4 October 2013. Accessed 30 December 2015.

RIDLEY, John. 12 Years a Slave. Screenplay. 2012.

TILLET, Salamishah. “‘I Got No Comfort in This Life’: The Increasing Importance of Patsey in 12 Years a Slave.” American Literary History, vol. 26, no. 2, 2014, p. 354-361.

VERA, Hernán, and Andrew M. GORDON. Screen Saviors: Hollywood Fictions of Whiteness. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2003.

NOTES

1. The author wishes to thank Hilary Sanders for kindly and attentively reading an earlier version of this article. 2. On this scene, see also Anne Marie Paquet-Deyris’s contribution to this issue.

ABSTRACTS

This paper examines Steve McQueen’s strategy in 12 Years a Slave, which consists in filming the horrors of slavery through a narrative construction that mostly concerns Solomon Northup, a “temporary” slave who survives slavery, and a visual construction centered on Patsey, a “permanent” slave who is born and dies in slavery. This double construction allows viewers to get “into” and “out of” the history of slavery, without reproducing some of the problematic patterns that previous slavery-themed films have allowed.

Cet article étudie la stratégie mise en œuvre par le réalisateur de 12 Years a Slave. Celle-ci consiste à filmer les horreurs de l’esclavage à travers une construction narrative portant principalement sur Solomon Northup, un esclave « temporaire » qui survit à l’esclavage, et une construction visuelle centrée sur Patsey, une esclave « permanente » qui vit et meurt en esclavage. Cette double construction permet aux publics du film « d’entrer » dans l’histoire de l’esclavage et d’en « sortir », sans reproduire certains schémas problématiques que les films sur l’esclavage ont jusqu’alors permis.

INDEX

Keywords: 12 Years a Slave, Steve McQueen, slavery, race, slave narrative, gender, women Mots-clés: 12 Years a Slave, Steve McQueen, esclavage, questions raciales, récit d’esclave, genre, femmes

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AUTHOR

HÉLÈNE CHARLERY Université Toulouse-Jean Jaurès

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The Birth of a Nation (Nate Parker, 2016): The Tale of Nat Turner’s Rebellion

Delphine Letort

1 The historiography of slavery long focused on the transatlantic slave trade and the institution of slavery as an economic system that produced a dehumanizing view of the enslaved people.1 Nineteenth-century proslavery historians such as James Schouler described the enslaved Africans as “a black servile race, sensuous, stupid, brutish, obedient to the whip, children in imagination” (Schouler 239), giving ground to racist stereotypes that have plagued American literary and visual culture—the Uncle Tom, the Sambo, the coon, the mammy, and the pickaninny among others (Guerrero 15-17). In American Negro Slave Revolts (1943), provided a corrective to this perception by bringing to light “records of approximately two hundred and fifty [slave] revolts and conspiracies in the history of American Negro slavery.” Aptheker pointed out the causal relation between acts of rebellion and the “degradation, exploitation, oppression, and brutality” of slavery, thus emphasizing the political awareness of the enslaved and their capacity to resist (Aptheker 162, 139). In Slavery: A Problem in American Institutional and Intellectual Life (1959), Stanley Elkins stressed the devastating effects of forced servitude (which he compared to a totalitarian institution) on the black personality. Elkins’s thesis of black victimization was at odds with the ideological shifts of the 1960s and 1970s, which foregrounded the creative resistance of blacks in the context of the Black Power movement. Herbert Gutman’s The Black Family in Slavery and Freedom, 1750-1925 (1976) revealed the persistence of a specific African American cultural heritage despite uprootedness, whereas Richard Price’s Maroon Societies: Rebel Slave Communities in the Americas (1973) and Eugene D. Genovese’s From Rebellion to Revolution: Afro-American Slave Revolts in the Making of the Modern World (1979) “laid to rest the myth of slave docility and quiescence” (Genovese xxiii) and documented instances of marronage—“the living proof of the existence of a slave consciousness that refused to be limited by the whites’ conception or manipulation of [authority]” (Price 2). More recently, Robert L. Paquette has remarked that “slaves resisted wherever

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slavery existed. They resisted as individuals and in groups. They resisted passively and violently. They organized acts of collective resistance that were essentially their own” (Paquette 272).

2 These historiographical developments in the study of slavery seem to have had little influence on filmmaking. From The Birth of a Nation (D.W. Griffith, 1915) to Jezebel (, 1938) and Gone with the Wind (Victor Fleming, 1939), Hollywood cinema has contributed to the circulation of racial stereotypes: racist characterization has thrived in the Hollywood plantation genre in particular (Bogle). In the 1960s and 1970s the civil rights movement ushered in a new range of representations, including the rebellious (LeVar Burton/John Amos) in the TV miniseries Roots (1977) and the boxer Mede (Ken Norton) in the blaxploitation film Mandingo (Richard Fleischer, 1975). The depiction of the idealized virility of the Mandingo slave resonates with the racist portrayal of black sexuality as animalistic desire in Griffith’s film. Tavia Nyong’o nonetheless argues that Mandingo represents “an astonishing effort to capture and destroy, within the cinematic apparatus, the homoerotic, hypersexualized image of the rebellious black slave” (Nyong’o 175). Sankofa (Haile Gerima, 1993) is the only film that daringly broaches slave revolt as insurrection through characters who continually talk about escape, with Shango (Mutabaruka) voicing the doctrine of the and its discourse of universal liberty.2 While Amistad (Stephen Spielberg, 1997) may stand out as “an attempt to revise the codes surrounding the notion of black armed revolt” in Hollywood cinema (Stokes, 2013 47), some critics question the ideological slant of a film that fails to challenge the “mainstream American image of the black male body as violent” (Osagie 127).

3 Representing slavery on screen is an arduous task considering the discriminatory power of race-laden images: it entails the risk of reactivating the visually racist discourse that insidiously pervades American cinema. Darieck Scott observes that a “surfeit of signification attends the image of black bodies in the visual field” (Scott 337). Referring to Frantz Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks, he argues: [The black image] is enmeshed within the various overdeterminations which produce it as replete with readable meanings—it is always bearing a story, an explanation, always flaunting its valence as different/difference, evoking the familiar but largely inescapable assumptions of hypersexuality, hyperphysicality, monstrosity, and criminality that shape visual representations of blackness in Western culture. (Scott 341) In The Birth of a Nation, Nate Parker self-consciously engages with the visual legacy of slavery and revisionist literatures about slavery. The Birth of a Nation is a film conceived in reference to Griffith’s own movie of the same title, aiming both to revise its historical discourse and to counter a racist imagery that has endured through the dissemination of stereotypes across various genres.

4 Following the trend of slave narrative films that has recently flourished, and which the box office success of 12 Years a Slave (Steve McQueen, 2013) epitomized, Parker provides a self-reflexive approach to a text—the 1831 Confessions of Nat Turner—that has sparked many controversies. The filmmaker attempts to retrieve the voice of the enslaved man from the words couched in the pamphlet published by Thomas R. Gray, a white lawyer who recorded Nat Turner’s confession before he was hanged for leading a slave insurrection that caused between 55 to 60 deaths among the white population of Southampton County, Virginia, and even more among the enslaved who were killed in retaliation. Forty black men joined the rebellion, which started with the murder of

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Turner’s own master and his family on August 21, 1831. Genovese extols the “extraordinary heroism” of slaves who “took the insurrectionary road,” which he understands as “part of the most radical wing of the struggle for […] democracy” (Genovese 1-2). Turner’s struggle was first and foremost inspired by religious beliefs and ideas of the revolution; but it may also have been motivated by the maroons’ stories which the filmmaker includes as part of Turner’s childhood environment.

5 Nat Turner is celebrated as a hero whom many textbooks call “deeply religious” or “a gifted preacher” (Loewen 181)—although historians have also warned against Thomas Gray’s intrusive intervention in a narrative that cannot be taken at face value. African American literature scholar Mary Kemp Davis calls into question the accuracy of Gray’s transcription when she declares “I don’t believe for a moment that Nat Turner spoke that way” in Charles Burnett’s documentary Nat Turner: A Troublesome Property (2003). Burnett examines the resonance of Turner’s name in collective memory by interviewing writer William Styron, whose own fictional account of the slave rebellion (The Confessions of Nat Turner, 1967) precipitated a wave of critiques in 1967-1968. The novelist was blamed for falsifying history by expanding on the sexual fantasies Turner allegedly nurtured about Margaret Whitehead, a white woman who was killed during the revolt. writer William Strickland viewed Styron’s Confessions as “a racist book designed to titillate the fantasies of white America,” while Stokely Carmichael and Rap Brown refused to engage discussion on what they called “the distorted contents of Styron’s book.” “Lies, deception, and distortion,” they added, “is the only thing we can expect from hunkies” (quoted in French 252, 256). Styron responds to these accusations in Burnett’s film by suggesting that Turner “fits into the role each creator wants to make him fit into” because so little is known about him. Turner is a floating signifier whose character can be fleshed out with different traits and qualities. Cartoonist Kyle Baker, for example, explored the subtext of the Confessions in his graphic novel Nat Turner (2008) and imagined the story which Turner supposedly recalled as a child—an unspecified event that had happened before his birth and caused him to be seen as .3 Baker situates the mysterious event during the Middle Passage, where an African mother throws her baby overboard to save it from a life of misery. Born in Virginia, Turner never experienced the horrors of the Middle Passage; but the episode is constructed as an act of empowerment connecting Turner’s rebellion to repressed collective memories. The embedded story evokes a diasporic culture which has slipped into oblivion.

6 Parker exploits similar gaps in Gray’s narrative to re-appropriate memories of black experience. The Birth of a Nation traces Turner’s life trajectory from childhood to death, filling in the gaps in the character’s life story through fiction. Using the biopic format to elevate Turner to heroic status, Parker creates narrative and mise-en-scène effects that allow him to describe the slave rebel as the driving force behind historical events that have all too often objectified the enslaved. Parker looks at Sankofa for aural inspiration and at 12 Years a Slave for visuals that exploit the shocking contrast between picturesque sceneries and staged violence, and emphasize the sadistic nature of the white gaze (Wilderson). The film’s carefully constructed visuals show that it fits an ideological project that does not strive for historical accuracy; it is a revisionist slavery film that produces a new image of the enslaved people by highlighting dreams of freedom that prompt some to rebellion. The Birth of a Nation spotlights the exceptional character of Nat Turner, played by Parker himself and portrayed as a messianic

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prophet and revolutionary leader. As director, Parker attempts to circumvent preexisting imagery of slavery to avoid turning the black body into an object of abjection that might elicit horror and disgust (Chapman 182; Kristeva 4).

Turner: the making of a hero

7 The Birth of a Nation is devoted to the creation of a screen hero, whom the narrative visually singles out amid various crowds. Whether as a child or an adult, Nat Turner stands out in the middle foreground of the screen running toward the camera with a determination that animates every nerve of his body. The similitude between two screen shots, portraying him first as a child and then as an adult, enhances the exceptional character of an individual whose rebellious streak is an ingrained personality trait. In Toward the Visualization of History: The Past as Image, Mark Moss discusses the influence of visual culture on the study of history in the following terms: “Since the advent of film, one of the most common ways of dealing with historical subject matter on film has been to resuscitate the Great Man/Person version of history” (Moss 126). Nate Parker’s biographical film intersects with slave narrative in order to put a new spin on black history: the narrative portrays Turner as an exceptionally talented child who is taught to read by his white owner’s wife Elizabeth (Penelope Ann Miller). The script deviates from Turner’s Confessions, which mention no such experience, suggesting that Parker bases the figure of Turner on a variety of sources that include other slave narratives. Sophia Auld’s reading lessons in Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass (1845) immediately come to mind.

8 Genovese describes Turner as a man who “projected an interpretation of Christianity that stressed the God-given right to freedom as the fundamental doctrine of obligation underlying a political vision that itself reflected the new ideologies of the Age of Revolution” (Genovese 45-46). Parker characterizes his hero as a preacher whose eloquence is rooted in his reading of the Bible. Although treated as an object whose sermons are commodities to be sold and purchased, Turner is obviously empowered by his literacy, which he uses to articulate a collective sentiment of injustice. Turner’s religious discourse underpins his growing political awareness; the more plantations he visits, the more radical his sermons become. The Christian references add to the subversive tone of the film, pointing out the hypocrisy of a system that abuses religious rhetoric to deprive black men and women of their humanity. Turner’s religious sermon is imbued with the rhetoric of equality that permeates the Declaration of Independence when he addresses a group of enslaved people he invites to pray and sing with him: Brethren—I pray you sing to the Lord a new song. Sing praise in the assembly of the righteous. Let the saints be joyful in glory. Let them sing aloud on their beds. Let the high praises of God be in the mouths of the saints, and a two-edged sword in their hand, to execute vengeance on the demonic nations, and punishments on those peoples! To bind their kings with chains, and their nobles with fetters of iron! To execute on them this written judgment!

9 The Birth of a Nation is pervaded by a religious iconography that inscribes Turner’s rebellion within the Christian master narrative of love, suffering, and redemptive resurrection. Taïna Tuhkunen argues that “the three-fold theological plot has left its embedded imprints on a long series of ‘leader biopics’ which repeatedly mingle the secular and the ‘real’ with the sacred and the legendary” (Tuhkunen 159). Steven Spielberg used such religious allegories in Lincoln (2012), a biopic which portrays the

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American president as saint, for instance in the deathbed scene where a Christlike light haloes Lincoln’s dead body. The Birth of a Nation is a work of hagiography that aims to elevate Turner to the pantheon of national heroes by showing his rebellion as an act of sacrifice for the collective good. The visuals consistently emphasize this interpretation: one thinks, for instance, of the support Turner receives from the other enslaved who display candles on their doorsteps on the night after he is publicly whipped, or of the solar eclipse that Turner interprets as a sign from God to start his rebellion. Turner’s revelations are inspired from the Old Testament, including a passage from the Book of Samuel in which the prophet announces the destruction of the Amalek people, which in the Confessions he recalls as follows: And on the 12th of May, 1828, I heard a loud noise in the heavens, and the Spirit instantly appeared to me and said the Serpent was loosened, and Christ had laid down the yoke he had borne for the sins of men, and that I should take it on and fight against the Serpent, for the time was fast approaching when the first should be last and the last should be first. (Turner 11)

10 Turner embodies the rebellious spirit that runs in and the film portrays solidarity among the slaves who join the insurrection. The final scene shows a group of rebels outnumbered by armed soldiers in Jerusalem—a city that they never reached according to historical accounts. Parker eschews claims made by historian William Sidney Drewry, who ascribed the failure of the insurrection to “the refusal of the slaves in general to participate,” thereby reactivating the myth of the faithful slave (quoted in French 167). While Parker includes this stereotypical character as the Isaiah (Roger Guenveur Smith)—another addition to the source text—he also points out his isolated status by showing that the enslaved men on the same plantation would rather join the resistance than continue living in bondage. Isaiah’s refusal to join the insurrection does not weaken the solidarity around Turner, although it anticipates the betrayal of the rebellion by a young boy.

11 For New Yorker film critic Richard Brody, Parker’s film is gender-biased because it conveys the men’s perspective only and thereby avoids debates on the possible outcomes of the uprising: Isaiah […] gets wind of Nat’s plot and, confronting him the next morning, tells Nat that it means death, certain death, for Nat and many other black people. Isaiah speaks brilliantly and incisively to Nat; the preacher, a religious visionary, claims to be acting according to the will of God, and Isaiah warns that Nat may be acting, rather, on his own will, not God’s. Isaiah, whose position makes him privy to much in white society, accurately understands the dangers that Nat and his cohorts face— and the dangers to which they’re exposing the entire population of slaves. Here, too, Parker keeps the perspective on men; he doesn’t visit the cabins where Hark talks with Esther, where the other trusted friends talk with their wives or parents, doesn’t suggest at all that the others have any awareness of the dangers or give any heed to their plot’s effect on their families. (Brody) Turner’s Confessions do not include political reflections on the aftermath of the revolt. While he recalls the visions that inspired him, Turner quotes from another rebel (Will) to suggest that dreams of liberty moved the men to action: “I saluted them on coming up, and asked Will how came he there, he answered, his life was worth no more than others, and his liberty as dear to him. I asked him if he thought to obtain it? He said he would, or loose [sic] his life” (Turner 12).

12 Caroline V. Schroeter objects to the biopic structure of the film which, she contends,

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seems to adhere to a model of presenting the historical figure in personalised terms that will “speak to” the audience, but the method he [Nate Parker] employs, which favours evocative close-ups, visual symbolism, directive music etc., threatens to overshadow the political message of black power that, ostensibly, is the film’s raison d’etre.̂ Parker’s imperative to present Turner as the focal point, and to conceive of him in Christ-like terms (visually and narratively) results, too, in the diminution of the supporting characters. (Schroeter 147) As Genovese notes, large uprisings rarely happened without strong leaders who might prevent internal dissension and betrayal (Genovese 8). Among other rebels, in Richmond (1800) and in Charleston (1822) planned strategies for their uprisings and provided political and military leadership. Parker uses elaborate visuals and music to legitimize Turner’s fight, which remains a cinematographic taboo topic as suggested by the dearth of films dealing with slave rebellion. In other words, Parker uses the typical biopic techniques—including the Christian narrative of sacrifice —in order to celebrate the memory of Turner. The biopic visually underlines the rebel’s exceptional insight and judgment to transcend the meaning of an insurrection into an act of liberation. The speech he delivers in front of the enslaved men and women who have been made free by the killing of their masters positions him as a guide to freedom. The upward shot and dramatic music heighten the power of his words at a pivotal moment—when men and women have to decide whether they will continue the fight for freedom: Your earthly master is gone. You are now free men and woman, servants of only the Lord. Are we dead? No. I say we are now alive, seeing through eyes that have been denied us since being born into the darkness of bondage. Stand with us—that your other captive brothers and sisters may also know freedom. Stand, that our children, for generations to come will know that with the supernatural power of God, we straightened our backs against the works of the evil one.

The enslaved as agents of subversion and resistance

13 Parker calls attention to acts of subversion and resistance among the enslaved. The opening sequence of The Birth of a Nation portrays a community of maroons meeting in the woods to celebrate Nat Turner’s African ancestry in a ceremony where the elders acknowledge the special status of a child bearing the three marks of wisdom, courage, and vision on his chest, which designate him as a leader and a prophet. This inaugural scene challenges Eurocentric readings of slavery by introducing ethnicity in the lives of the enslaved as an emancipation path. Few fiction films actually mention the maroons who “settled in the wilderness, lived there in secret, and were not under any form of direct control by outsiders” (Diouf 1). Historian Sylviane A. Diouf explains that “autonomy was at the heart of their project and exile the means to realize it” (Diouf 2). The reference to marronage accounts for Turner’s filmic dreams of liberty. The same sequence filmed in the woods at night appears in a dream and in a flashback later in the film, both suggesting the existence of an alternative world and pointing out the compelling power of the African imagination over the bleak reality of slavery. Marronage also conveys an ideal of freedom that cannot be compromised by running away to the North while other people remain enslaved in the South. It helps convey the radical understanding of freedom which the film espouses through the portrayal of Turner’s rebellion—a vision also inherited from Turner’s father, who is forced to flee after accidently killing a slave hunter in a fight for his own life. Young Nat witnesses

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the scene when his father catches the man’s gun and runs for his life; the scene portrays his father as a slave rebel rather than an Uncle Tom. The sequence that follows shows patrollers visiting Turner’s mother and grandmother to question them about the boy’s father’s escape, but all remain silent and claim ignorance. Survival is bound to deceit, which is one of the first lessons the child learns about slavery as he himself shares in the secrecy.

14 The film delves into slavery as a racial system of labor exploitation which the enslaved make every attempt to subvert. Close-ups on Nat’s hands as he is forced to pick cotton after his master’s death convey the objectification of the boy; a long shot of the cotton fields suggests the life of labor awaiting him whereas an aerial tracking shot over the cotton flowers conveys his lack of prospects. An imperceptible cut turns his bleeding child’s hands into an adult’s, embedding the time lapse of his teenage years into an ellipsis. The camera captures the expert adult hand as it picks cotton quickly without shedding a drop of blood; Turner may have become a model slave, but he is also shown preaching in front of the other enslaved, thereby appearing as representative of a community that bonds together through praying and singing. “Let us bow our heads,” he says in an invitation to collectively pray for the Lord, a message which, by the end of the film, he subsequently revises and transforms into a call for rebellion. The sequence serves to highlight Turner’s sense of leadership and his authority over the enslaved. The Birth of a Nation follows a causal narrative that allows Nate Parker to emphasize enslaved men’s ability to generate action; Turner’s vision of blood oozing out of a corn cob may be an illumination but it leads him to rebellion. The film shows that Turner’s religious consciousness develops into a rebellious instinct as he visits more and more plantations, witnessing the horrors of a slave system that produces misery among his fellow enslaved.

15 Parker uses intertextuality to add significance to images that have become clichés through overmediatization. Images of victimization are used to enhance resistance. The scene where a attacks Turner is reminiscent of an iconic photograph by Bill Hudson showing a police dog attacking an African American civil rights demonstrator in Birmingham, Alabama, in 1963. Whereas civil rights photography conveyed, in the words of Martin A. Berger, “the determined efforts of the white press to frame the civil rights movement as nonthreatening” by showing (active) white agents exercising power over (passive) blacks, Parker reframes the photograph in close-ups that emphasize protective gestures to signify resistance on Turner’s part (Berger 7). The re-appropriation of such visuals not only testifies to the enduring legacies of the past over the present, suggesting that contemporary police brutality is rooted in the racial (if not racist) history of the nation, but it also relates images of antebellum victimization to the civil rights narrative, connecting individual and invisible acts of slave resistance to the long collective struggle. The close-up on the swollen face of Turner’s wife Cherry (Aja Naomi King) lying in bed after she has been brutalized and raped is also reminiscent of press photographs of Emmett Till in his coffin that were used to display the racist motivations behind segregation and support the civil rights struggle. Likewise, Turner’s scarred back after he is whipped for baptizing a white man evokes the lacerated back of Gordon, an enslaved man who joined the in 1863 after he ran away. The Army surgeon made a photo of his back that became part of abolitionist visual culture. The intertextual nature of the visuals in the film reveals that The Birth of a Nation is a deliberate attempt to challenge

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the standard patterns in slavery-themed Hollywood films—including Quentin Tarantino’s Django Unchained (2012) which, Karen A. Johnson contends, “reinscribes past ideological myths about slavery” by presenting Django (Jamie Foxx) as “the exceptional black” in counterpoint to the “docile and content enslaved individuals” (Johnson 213). The Birth of a Nation challenges stereotypes by highlighting the agency of the enslaved. While the biopic underscores Turner’s exceptional abilities as a leader, the film does not endorse a hierarchy opposing house and field servants. The only racial hierarchy that stands out entrenches the color line as a barrier between the slave quarters and the “big house” of the plantation.

Revising the Hollywood slave narrative

16 While The Birth of a Nation follows a classical Hollywood narrative structure, it reverses the racial order in cinematic terms by foregrounding white stereotypes of the redneck. Rather than assigning black people to a position of “otherness,” Nate Parker turns white people into the “other” by filming from the point of view of the enslaved. The camera is positioned on the side of the black characters and the composition of shots delineates space along racial lines. Camera movements are fluid in the slave quarters when following young Nat Turner as he runs through the alleys where the women do their chores, whereas still long shots convey the rigidity of the plantation system. The plantation mansions loom in the distance, making the enslaved the estranged spectators of a life of comfort lived indoors. The same distance, however, allows for some autonomy on the part of the slaves, whose dreams cannot be controlled, as suggested by the dreams of flight entertained by Turner as a child. Historian John M. Vlach argues that the enslaved “were under control but they were not totally coerced by that control because, while they were being held down, they were also being held out and away from the center of authority” (Vlach 222). The Birth of a Nation explores the interstices in the slave system, the liminal spaces where the enslaved can carve out pockets of resistance. Mise-en-scène captures those spaces in the woods and around the plantations, where the enslaved escape surveillance and carry out ancestral traditions and ceremonies. The intimate sequences between the newlywed Nat and Cherry contribute to the film’s melodramatic tone while depicting feelings of love that humanize the characters.

17 The film is a slave narrative that aims to undercut the “melodrama of black and white” which historian John Blassingame defines as “miscegenation and cruelty, outraged virtues, unrequited love, and planter licentiousness” characterizing most abolitionist literature (Blassingame 373). Borrowing from , literary scholar Robin Bernstein refers to Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852) as a book that created a “‘state of vision, of feeling and of consciousness’—that is to say, subjectivation” about slavery by exploiting the innocence of childhood (Bernstein 14). “The violence of slavery,” Bernstein argues, “constituted an attack on Topsy’s natural innocence, which could be partially restored—transmitted—through the loving touch of a white child” (16). Parker refuses to indulge in the melodramatic tropes of slave narratives by proleptically positioning young Samuel Turner as a potential threat in the opening sequence. The hide-and-seek game the black and white children play creates tension as the camera focuses on the white boy’s two feet when he opens the door of the shack where Nat is hiding, foreshadowing the menace that the white man

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(Armie Hammer) later comes to embody. Long shots further convey an unbridgeable distance between the boys, exhibiting the race and class differences through sets and clothes. Filmed from young Nat’s point of view, the mansion where the white boy lives stands in forbidden territory in the distance. Subjective shots undermine the representation of an idealized antebellum Southern life, conveying the boy’s estrangement from white culture as symbolized by the mansion which he approaches when there is no chance to be seen—as implied by the cut showing that a book has disappeared on the front porch and is now in the hands of the audacious boy.

18 The director eschews an overly intimate portrayal of his characters to avoid excessive sentimentality. Parker neither plays up intense emotionalism to arouse sympathy with the wretched characters—be they raped and whipped black women and men, or terrorized Southern belles—nor does he visually or narratively linger on the melodramatic elements of the genre. Contrary to 12 Years a Slave, in which Steve McQueen highlights the misfortunes of enslaved life through aural and visual elements that make sadism visible (Wilderson 146), including a musical score that “brings terrible, frightening splendor” and long shots that put labor on display (Redmond 157), Parker tones down the spectacle of slavery by using cuts that leave rape unseen.

19 Parker downplays melodrama by avoiding round characterization and using such stereotypes as the redneck who, Williamson writes, drinks hard liquor—and not at cocktail parties. He’s theatrically lazy but remains virile. He nearly always possesses the wherewithal for physical violence—especially involving dogs and guns. He’s gullible when skepticism would be wiser, and he’s stupid when smart would be safer. He reminds us symbolically of filth, of disgusting bodily functions. (Williamson 2-3) The film captures the leering gazes of the men during an auction where an African American woman is put on display for all to visually and imaginarily consume. The woman is explicitly sold as a sexual object in a scene which the film does not sentimentalize; she does not have a name or a voice. There is no heart-wrenching scene of separation between a mother and her children. The crude scene depicts a blunt system that turns human beings into commodities to be bought and sold. However, the close-ups on the white men’s smiling faces and ogling eyes emphasize their rugged and rough facial features; the actors chosen to embody the white men express no emotion but lust. Their vicious gaze betrays the evils of the “peculiar institution.”

20 The biographical narrative focus on Nat Turner is expressed by the many close-ups on his face, a self-conscious strategy to avoid lingering, voyeuristic gazes at the violence perpetrated against black bodies—including Turner’s when he is publicly whipped. The close-up may even be read as resistance to the white objectifying gaze in that case, isolating Turner’s Christian words from his listeners through camera movements that undermine the power of the Bible (or the Gospel of Luke), which he reads out in order to ensure the submission of the enslaved to their masters and to promote solidarity among them by nurturing a sense of bonding when all of them join in collective prayer, thereby overturning the expected effect of his preaching. The camera also focalizes on Turner’s face when he is hanged after he turns himself in, a technique used by Parker to avoid reactivating the spectacle involved in many lynching photographs. Leigh Raiford examines these photographs and draws on Michel Foucault’s Discipline and Punish to observe that punishment must mark the victim’s body: “Through a macabre exhibition of torture,” she writes, “lynching simultaneously retraced the always already inscribed mark of infamy, the victim’s blackness, while celebrating the triumph

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of mob law” (Raiford 39). By excluding the crowd from the scene, which is cropped from the frame in the close-up, Parker undermines the spectacle of lynching and retains Turner’s humanity. The extreme close-up undercuts objectification by capturing signs of life in opposition to the cruelty of a jeering crowd. Interestingly, pioneering filmmaker D.W. Griffith had aptly explored an innovative use of close-ups to deepen characterization and support narrative development by making the emotional reactions of his characters visible at dramatic moments (Stokes, 2007 76). In counterpoint, Parker uses close-ups of Turner as a recurring means to restrain the drama when the spectacle of horror becomes too painful to bear. In the New Yorker, Richard Brody is more critical of the close-up as it appears in Parker’s The Birth of a Nation: In a scene that’s another pivot of the film, another pivot that relentlessly personalizes Nat’s story, Sam orders him to be whipped; Nat is lashed to a post with his arms outstretched like Christ on the cross, and Parker shows Nat’s agony with extreme closeups on Nat’s—on Parker’s own—face. Similarly, when Nat is hanged— after passing through his own Via Dolorosa, assailed by the braying crowd of whites —Parker puts the camera, absurdly and pompously, in extreme closeup on Nat’s face. Though, early in the film, Parker’s intense identification with Nat Turner leads to remarkable moments of psychological complexity, it also leads, later in the film, to a self-aggrandizement that distorts the drama, the image, and, for that matter, the spirit of the film. With Parker casting himself in the role of Nat Turner following a script that the director also authored, Brody contends, the film’s directorial choices reveal the filmmaker’s own “traits of character—arrogance, vanity, and self-importance” (Brody). As suggested in this essay, however, the close-up may have another purpose when considered as part of a filmic strategy devised to challenge conventional framing.

21 Some of the final sequences of The Birth of a Nation depict the aftermath of the rebellion, in particular the lynching of several black men and women. Once again, the camera pans on their faces before they are hanged; rather than voyeuristically filming dead black bodies, Parker focuses on the image of a rope tightening with the weight of a humanized person being hanged. Another sequence reveals corpses dangling from the branches of trees, just like the “strange fruit” Nina Simone sings about on the extradiegetic score, creating an atmosphere of mourning. The camera tracks backward and movement once again counters objectification while offering a moment of contemplation. The sheer number of bodies indicates the massacre that followed the rebellion.

Conclusion

22 Adopting a transnational approach that analyzes and compares how the past of slavery impacts memorializing processes, Elisa Bordin and Anna Scacchi observe that the United States seems to deal reluctantly with the memories of slave rebellions: Differently from the Caribbean, where rebels and freedom fighters have traditionally been celebrated both in the public and the private sphere, although not always in the service of progressive politics, in the US public memory slave rebels are still considered racially divisive and problematic. (Bordin and Scacchi 13) The memory of Nat Turner certainly arouses ambiguous feelings among some Americans who question the sense of a rebellion which is sometimes reduced to a “carnage.” Scot French examines how the tale of Nat Turner was translated into a

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painting series by Lawrence Jacobs, a mural by Charles White, and other works by African American artists; French also notes that “a far less flattering picture of Turner and his followers emerged from the other side of the color line” (French 201, 207). A commemorative plaque was set up in Virginia, insisting on the deadly consequences of the uprising by mentioning the number of white casualties and black rebels punished by law. Yet, these facts fail to convey the spirit of the revolt, which Nate Parker aimed to capture in The Birth of a Nation. The film stands out as an attempt to revise the slavery narrative by highlighting the heroic struggle of the enslaved as rebels whose desire for freedom will not be subdued by constraint.

23 Although the tale of Turner’s rebellion is also one of defeat leading to increased repression, the hanging of the rebel leader at the end of The Birth of a Nation is followed by a cut to an image of a black soldier fighting for the Union in the Civil War, which serves to demonstrate the impossibility of crushing the slave’s rebellious spirit. The film’s perspective differs from that of the normative narratives about emancipation, which often promote the actions of leading white abolitionists at a political level as illustrated in Spielberg’s Lincoln. Parker’s film portrays Turner as an enlightened slave rebel and hero whose fight provides a corrective to the representation of slaves as passive or content. Celeste Marie-Bernier contends that Turner’s memory has served differing political agendas—“from his demonic appearances in proslavery atrocity literatures to his circulation as a divine symbol in hagiographic texts written to inculcate race pride and endorse black fights for civil rights” (Bernier 72). The Birth of a Nation puts another spin on the tale of Nat Turner, turning him into a martyr whose fight for freedom the director aims to have acknowledged in the nation’s racial narrative.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

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NOTES

1. The author wishes to express her gratitude to the two anonymous reviewers for their insightful critical feedback. 2. See Claire Dutriaux’s essay in the same issue of Transatlantica. 3. “Being at play with other children, when three or four years old, I was telling them something, which my mother overhearing, said it had happened before I was born—I stuck to my story, however, and related somethings which went, in her opinion, to confirm it—others being called on were greatly astonished, knowing that these things had happened, and caused them to say in my hearing, I surely would be a prophet” (Turner 7).

ABSTRACTS

This essay examines the memories of slavery shaped by Nate Parker in The Birth of a Nation. It shows how Parker uses the biopic as a narrative frame to turn the slave rebel into a hero and

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analyzes the impact of the visuals over the construction of a historically controversial figure. Parker, the essay argues, has devised an aesthetic of slavery that aims to counter the visual legacy of the plantation genre and other existing representations of blackness.

Cet article est consacré aux mémoires de l’esclavage dans The Birth of a Nation de Nate Parker. À travers une étude narrative qui examine la manière dont le réalisateur utilise le genre du film biographique (ou biopic) pour faire de l’esclave rebelle un héros, cet article analyse l’impact des images sur la construction d’une figure historique controversée. Les films de plantation et autres représentations cinématographiques des Noirs ont laissé une empreinte visuelle dont le réalisateur conteste la légitimité en développant une esthétique de l’esclavage qui prend le contrepied des représentations existantes.

INDEX

Keywords: The Birth of a Nation, Nate Parker, Nat Turner, slavery, race, rebellion Mots-clés: The Birth of a Nation, Nate Parker, Nat Turner, esclavage, questions raciales, révolte

AUTHOR

DELPHINE LETORT Le Mans Université

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American Women Writers Abroad: 1849-1976 Edited by Stéphanie Durrans

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American Women Writers Abroad: Myth and Reality

Stéphanie Durrans

1 Be they explorers, adventurers, travellers, exiles or expatriates, scores of women have broken free from the domestic sphere to which a male-dominated society would have them bound and recorded their impressions of the wider world in their writings or used them as artistic material. For a long time, though, British Victorian women’s literature remained the almost exclusive focus of critical inquiry while American women writers’ contribution to this field was by and large neglected.1 This gap in the existing scholarship has been filled over the years by a number of compelling studies which have brought to light specific paradigms of female mobility in a U.S. context. Most of these studies understandably addressed the question within the time frame of the long nineteenth century, when the development of modern means of transportation allowed for extensive travelling across land and sea. This was also a time when the U.S. was struggling to assert its difference from European superpowers and establish itself as a full-fledged nation. As a result, no study of women’s travel texts in the nineteenth century can afford to neglect the intertwined questions of selfhood and nationhood—and the first four essays included in this collection are no exception to this rule. They also show women trying to navigate their way between the two extremes highlighted by Elsden: Mainstream, nineteenth-century constructions of White femininity seemed to limit male portrayals of women abroad to two categories: the assertive “feminist,” whose forthrightness as a person and an American signify as “masculine,” and the hyperfeminine lady, whose superficiality trivializes her as a non-threatening diversion. (xxiv) The next three essays focus on a heterogeneous group of twentieth-century women writers whose experience abroad led them to uncover the darker sides of their own selves or of human nature in general—from childhood traumas to a confrontation with evil and a state of utter disarray when faced with the impossibility to relate to any place.

2 The contributors to this special issue2 build on previous studies by established scholars like Mary Suzanne Schriber, Amy Kaplan, and Susan L. Robertson,3 to name but a few,

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to examine the complex ways in which American women travelers have approached the question of otherness while seeking to understand how these women’s travel experience contributed to reshaping their identities and how it helped them negotiate gender expectations. For many of them, like Marsh and Bishop, translation plays a key role in this process. In Mulberry and Peach though (a late twentieth-century novel written in Chinese by a Chinese-American author), the protagonist stands out as one of those modern-day migrants whose impossibility to create connections with either their home or their host country condemns them to remain lost in translation. “Remain / lost,” to borrow the phrase used by Myriam Bellehigue as a coda to her essay, nicely encapsulates the tension between presence and absence, between memory and oblivion, as well as between stasis and motion for some of these wanderers.

3 The following essays focus on a variety of texts, ranging from the more traditional travel accounts and so called “ego-documents” (i.e. memoirs, private correspondence, etc.) to the reading lists of women’s associations, to illuminate the ideological dimension underlying the works under study. Farnham travelled to California at a time when it was still a Western territory; Alcott to France and ; Marsh to Italy and Turkey; WRTA members to , France, and Italy for the most part; Porter to ; Bishop to Brazil; and Hualing Nieh from China to the U.S., bringing us back full circle to the beginning of our journey—or not quite on account of the inconclusive nature of Mulberry/Peach’s “translation” process. Such a broad geographical scope allows exploration of a variety of experiences and approaches to the foreign element in their texts.

4 The first two essays in this collection feature writers who articulate a critique of separate spheres and women’s domestic confinement in sharply differing ways. Farnham’s account of her eventful journey to the rugged frontiers of civilization in 1849 could be expected to provide a welcome corrective to official male-centered narratives of expansion, adventure, or colonization in the Wild West, but the epic dimension of the first half soon gives way to a more factual, impersonal approach. These sharp structural contrasts point at possible divisions within her own self which, in their turn, might suggest a tension between subject and object, i.e. between the desire to project herself as an adventuress type and the need to step back and retreat behind a more conventional, self-effacing account that would not undermine social expectations of gender roles. Claire Sorin shows how, in Farnham’s view, feminizing California paved the way for the development of democratic institutions since women would be the ones to deliver the state from corruption and degeneracy. In doing so, Farnham championed the ethos of “Manifest Domesticity,” a concept which allowed critic Amy Kaplan to conflate the rhetorics of domesticity and Manifest Destiny since both of these “share a vocabulary that turns imperial conquest into spiritual regeneration in order to efface internal conflict or external resistance in visions of geopolitical domination as global harmony” (588). At the same time, however, domestic discourse “both redresses and reenacts the contradictions of empire through its own double movement to expand female influence beyond the home and the nation while simultaneously contracting woman’s sphere to police domestic boundaries against the threat of foreignness both within and without” (Kaplan 585). Although, at this early stage of her writing career, Farnham does not quite manage to resolve these many contradictions, the book does foreshadow the development of more radical views that she would expound a few years later in Woman and her Era.

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5 Inversely, the transgression of geographical borders does appear to allow for more gender fluidity in Alcott’s unfinished novella Diana and Persis. Leslie Hammer shows how Alcott playfully undermined and reversed the polarity Old World / New World by transforming the U.S. itself into the Old World and praising Europe as a land where American women could throw off the shackles of domesticity and break free of their culture’s patriarchal ideology. In many ways, however, Alcott’s novella simultaneously reinforces the boundaries that it seeks to transcend. Hammer’s perceptive reading shows how, far from undermining the nation-building rhetoric of the U.S. as well as conventional constructions of race and citizenship, Alcott’s feminist agenda is predicated upon foreign exploitation and subjugation of the dark-skinned Other. Reformist views thus combine with ethnocentrism in this highly complex sentimental novella.4

6 The same ambivalence between progressive and conservative views permeates the reading lists provided by the Women’s Rest Tour Association (WRTA) to the thousands of American women who set off for Europe at the turn into the twentieth century. While the WRTA promoted women’s education, featured numerous women writers in its bibliographies, and encouraged their members to travel independently by providing them with all the advice they needed on their journeys across Europe, Julia Carson shows that it also manifested a clear nationalist bias in favor of Boston’s cultural authority and of English connections. Class and ethnic prejudices are also in evidence in the WRTA’s emphasis on the picturesque in the depiction of the local populations as well as in the absence of any book addressing more controversial social or political concerns.

7 Caroline Crane Marsh’s experience in Italy and Turkey, Etta Madden reports, reveals an altogether different approach to cultural negotiation as she became involved in social reform movements in the countries where she stayed. The tension between preserving traces of “the foreign” and absorbing it into some sort of universal essence consequently informs her work as a translator. Like Martha Bayard before her (see Schriber 1994 84), Caroline Crane Marsh was one of those diplomats’ wives who followed their husbands abroad but in her case contact and interaction with the local population served less to promote the imperialistic ventures of her home nation than to foster the emergence of a new, self-assertive woman whose work was recognized for its intrinsic value.

8 Unlike those of Caroline Crane Marsh, Elizabeth Bishop’s translations from Brazilian texts do not foreground the intersections between the intimate and the political. Instead, they served as a catalyst for a very personal investigation into the poet’s past and the intricate workings of memory and oblivion. Bishop even appropriated these translations by incorporating them within her own collections of prose and poetry. What could have been construed as an escape from confrontation with oneself actually turned into a path to self-knowledge. As noted by Terry Caesar, “Americans have not historically experienced travel abroad as a displacement but as a replacement—and then either a return or a reinscription” (68).

9 As was the case for Bishop, a chance happening led Katherine Anne Porter to spend some time in a country which was not her initial destination. Instead of investigating Porter’s well-known connections with Mexico, Joseph Kuhn has chosen to focus on a little-known episode in Porter’s life and on its reverberations throughout her work. Porter’s five-month stay in Weimar Germany was a veritable eye-opener which led her

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to reflect upon the nature of evil and to develop a conception of “negative evil” that bears striking affinities with ’s “banality of evil.” In both authors’ works, memory once more plays a vital part in countering the devastating effects of irresponsibility and carelessness. Unlike Farnham and Alcott, for instance, Porter is not concerned with articulating a feminist perspective. Instead, her experiences abroad prompted an inquiry of a more metaphysical order while bringing her closer to a philosopher with whom she appeared to have little in common and leading her to develop a modernist aesthetics that could best capture the dramatic political transformations underway.

10 Away from the exclusive white, middle-class focus that characterizes the first six women under study, Grazia Micheli explores the potentially negative impact of transnationalism when emigrants end up in a perpetual condition of exile, be it linguistic, political or cultural. Travelling obviously has altogether different implications for a Chinese immigrant than it does for the more affluent middle or upper classes of American society. In Mulberry and Peach, the Chinese-American writer Hualing Nieh goes even further than Porter in experimenting with form and language. Her heroine finds no release from the constraints of patriarchy or female oppression in the U.S. The twin experience of dislocation and “attempted relocation” that characterizes Eliza Farnham in Sorin’s reading is one that the heroine of Mulberry and Peach will never carry through, doomed as she is to remain stranded in a terrifying in- between which complicates our understanding of transnationalism. In Mulberry and Peach, Hualing Nieh refutes accepted views of the transnational as likely to counter hegemonic discourses, views that the American historian of Chinese descent Mae M. Ngai expressed most forcefully when she seconded Shelley Fisher Fishkin’s call for a transnational turn in American studies and claimed that “[a] focus on the transnational, with its emphasis on multiple sites and exchange, can potentially transform the figure of the ‘other’ from a representational construct to a social actor” (60). Instead, Nieh’s protagonist finds in travel no source of agency, self-knowledge, uplift or empowerment—only confusion and turmoil.

11 The roughly chronological order in which the following papers have been arranged allows us to witness the gradual deconstruction of the myth of the journey by women writers who, for their most part, chose not to follow the beaten tracks of travel literature. The present collection, albeit limited in its format, provides a composite view of how American women have engaged with travelling and transnational issues since the middle of the nineteenth century and it will hopefully enable readers to appreciate more fully the complexities of a shape-shifting genre in which the dark dynamics of power and appropriation are played out against a background of exciting adventures and picturesque landscapes.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

BIRKETT, Dea. Spinsters Abroad: Victorian Lady Explorers. Oxford: Blackwell, 1989.

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BOHLS, Elizabeth A. Women Travel Writers and the Language of Aesthetics, 1716-1818. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995.

CAESAR, Terry. Forgiving the Boundaries: Home as Abroad in American Travel Writing. Athens: The University of Georgia Press, 1995.

COSCO, Joseph P. Imagining Italians: The Clash of Romance and Race in American Perceptions, 1880-1910. Albany: SUNY Press, 2012.

ELSDEN, Annamaria F. Roman Fever: Domesticity and Nationalism in Nineteenth-Century American Women’s Writing. Columbus: the State University Press, 2004.

FISH, Cheryl J. Black and White Women’s Travel Narratives: Antebellum Explorations. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2004.

FISHKIN, Shelley Fisher. “Crossroads of Cultures: The Transnational Turn in American Studies: Presidential Address to the American Studies Association, November 12, 2004.” American Quarterly, vol. 57, no. 1, 2005, p. 17-57.

GHOSE, Indira. Women Travellers in Colonial India: The Power of the Female Gaze. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998.

GREWAL, Inderpal. Home and : Nation, Gender, Empire, and the Cultures of Travel. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1996.

KAPLAN, Amy. “Manifest Domesticity.” American Literature, vol. 70, no. 3, 1998, p. 581-606.

McEWAN, Cheryl. Gender, Geography and Empire. Victorian Women Travellers in . Leicester: Ashgate, 2000.

NGAI, Mae M. “Transnationalism and the Transformation of the ‘Other’: Response to the Presidential Address.” American Quarterly, vol. 57, no. 1, 2005, p. 59-65.

ROBERTSON, Susan L. Antebellum American Women Writers and the Road: American Mobilities. New York: Routledge, 2011.

RUSSELL, Mary. The Blessings of a Good Thick Skirt: Women Travellers and Their World. London: Collins, 1986.

SCHRIBER, Mary S. “Assuming a Public Voice: The Travel Writing of Margaret Fuller and Harriet Beecher Stowe.” Femmes de conscience : Aspects du féminisme américain (1848-1875). Eds. Daniel Royot and Susan Goodman. Paris: Presses Sorbonne Nouvelle, 1994, p. 127-148.

SCHRIBER, Mary S. Writing Home: American Women Abroad, 1830-1920. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1997.

STEADMAN, Jennifer B. Traveling Economies: American Women’s Travel Writing. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2007.

STEVENSON, Catherine B. Victorian Women Travel Writers in Africa. Boston: Twayne’s English Author Series, 1992.

NOTES

1. See, for instance, Dea Birkett’s Spinsters Abroad: Victorian Lady Explorers, Elizabeth A. Bohls’s Women Travel Writers and the Language of Aesthetics, 1716-1818, Indira Ghose’s Women Travellers in Colonial India: The Power of the Female Gaze, Inderpal Grewal’s Home and Harem: Nation, Gender, Empire, and the Cultures of Travel, Cheryl McEwan’s Gender, Geography and Empire. Victorian Women

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Travellers in West Africa, Catherine Barnes Stevenson’s Victorian Women Travel Writers in Africa, and Mary Russell’s The Blessings of a Good Thick Skirt: Women Travellers and Their World, all of which were published in the 1980s and 1990s. 2. The essays in this volume were largely though not entirely selected from those presented at the 2017 Society for the Study of American Women Writers International Conference. The conference was held at the Université Bordeaux Montaigne, France, from July 5 to July 8 2017 on the subject of “Border Crossings: Translation, Migration, & Gender in the Americas, the Transatlantic, & the Transpacific.” 3. In addition to Mary Suzanne Schriber’s Writing Home: American Women Abroad, 1830-1920, and Susan L. Robertson’s Antebellum American Women Writers and the Road: American Mobilities, Cheryl Fish’s Black and White Women’s Travel Narratives: Antebellum Explorations and Jennifer Bernhardt Steadman’s Traveling Economies: American Women’s Travel Writing provide valuable insights into the experience of American female travelers from an intersectional perspective. 4. The contradictions inherent in the American perception of Italians as both attractive and repulsive are the focus of Joseph P. Cosco’s remarkable study, Imagining Italians: The Clash of Romance and Race in American Perceptions, 1880-1910. How to reconcile visions of Italy as “the land of art, history, culture, and romance” (Cosco 22) with the distrust generated by those “hundreds of thousands of picturesque, but dirty and menacing, Italian peasants pouring into […] New York City” (Cosco 23) was the challenge faced by late nineteenth-century Americans.

AUTHOR

STÉPHANIE DURRANS Université Bordeaux Montaigne, [email protected]

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In, Out, and Beyond: Dislocation, Contamination and the Redemptive Power of Womanhood in California, In-doors and Out by Eliza W. Farnham, 1856

Claire Sorin

1 In 1856, the New York-based Dix, Edwards & Co. published a book on California which received many favorable reviews, both in the eastern cities and on the newly-settled western coast.1 In January 1857, the Hutchings California Magazine recommended California In-doors and Out; or, How we Farm, Mine, and Live generally in the Golden State for its style and its illuminating treatment of a wide array of subjects: The volume before us is descriptive of adventure, climate, scenery, soil, population and production, mining, farming, grape growing, gardening, milling, ranching and dreaming—of men and women, their education, pursuits, social habits, and condition, of what they have been, are or can be. In fact, of almost everything that is interesting in, and to Californians, from digging gold to raising calves; not omitting some suggestions of improvement to men and women. It is an interesting book, fluently and pleasingly written and we commend it to our readers. It is, moreover, the first book that has been written in, or concerning California, by a lady.2

2 This “lady” was no anonymous pioneer. Although her name may no longer sound familiar today, Eliza W. Farnham was a popular writer as well as a celebrated and controversial reformer in the nineteenth century. By the late 1840s, she was known as the author of a book on early Illinois and the bold matron of Sing Sing prison, where she had introduced original reforms based on phrenology.3 After the death of her husband Thomas Farnham, she decided to migrate to California, where Thomas had bought land.4 In 1849, the year of the Gold , Eliza sailed from New York to San Francisco via Cape Horn, with a one-month forced stay at Valparaiso, where the captain of the ship, whom she had antagonized, left her stranded, sailing off with her two sons,

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one of whom was severely handicapped.5 Once in San Francisco, Eliza Farnham headed for Santa Cruz, where she struggled to set up a farm. In 1852, she remarried and had a daughter but her baby died in 1855, shortly after her disabled son had passed away. Eventually, she divorced her abusive and alcoholic husband in 1856. While Farnham’s tragic experience of loss, grief, domestic strife and financial problems was not unique, her public career was notable as she became a respected lecturer and asylum reformer in California in the second half of the 1850s.6

3 In the preface to California In-doors and Out , written in 1856, Eliza notes that her personal experience was “not more novel than that of scores of my sex who emigrated both before and after 1848” and she thanks God for having been spared the trials of physical suffering and utter destitution (iv). This humble, religious stance characterizing the whole preface—and indeed many female-authored writings of the time—also aims to suspend disbelief in the reader, for her tale, warns Farnham, contains “strange developments” and “grotesque features” (v). Although not unique, the extraordinary narrative of her personal story promises to be “as tamely stated as truth will permit” (iv).

4 It seems, however, that Farnham’s professed love of truth did not extend to the most painful events of her private life as she writes nothing about the failure of her farming experiment, her unhappy remarriage, the loss of her children, or her divorce. This silence is all the more striking as the first chapters of the book are openly autobiographical. Emptied of its subjective narrative source, the second half of the volume adopts a journalistic style which strongly contrasts with the vivid, often humorous tone of the previous pages. In the process of writing, which began in the early 1850s and ended in 1856, Eliza seems to have dis-located herself, both on a personal and discursive level.

5 The notion of dislocation—both as process of displacement and state of disruption— aptly describes the dialectics shaping the flesh and skeleton of the narrative. Indeed, as a story of dis-location and of attempted re-location, Eliza Farnham’s book revisits gendered space and spatial boundaries, picturing, as its title indicates, indoors and outdoors life, but exploring above all the porous nature of these “doors” and the shifting frontiers between the “in” and the “out,” which not only stand for domestic and public spheres but also for the spiritual and the material, the self and nature, nation and world. California In-doors and Out is deeply permeated with contemporary discourses of Manifest Destiny and domestic ideology which Farnham merges into a form of “Manifest Domesticity” (Kaplan). The present essay proposes to analyze Farnham’s work as a reconfiguration of the separate spheres model, highlighting the connections between gendered spaces and issues of race, nation and empire.7

6 It is crucial to point out that in the 1850s, Farnham’s fairly conventional belief in the Home as a vector of social purity was evolving toward a more radical vision of woman’s superiority, which her subsequent work fully expounded.8 Before her emigration to California—and partly with a view to financing it—she tried to set up a project inciting poor and virtuous eastern women to move west and civilize “that distant and homeless land” (Levy, 2004 35).9 Her project failed but her book contains an appeal to women readers, urging them to come and carry out their redemptive mission. Farnham’s narrative teems with images of contamination and promises of redemption anchored in California’s unique potential for freedom and equality, and in a firm doctrine of female

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purity. The feminization of California, then, is presented as a prerequisite for its full democratization.

“California is altogether anomalous”: Spatial and Textual Dislocation

7 Eliza Farnham’s first glimpse of San Francisco, from the ship, is marked by a blurring of familiar spatial landmarks: […] we dropped anchor somewhere off North Beach, on the tenth evening, after it was too late to see anything, but two or three straggling lights shining dull through the fog that never cleared, and the rain that never ceased pouring […] the next day […] we went ashore almost immediately, if that could properly be called shore where the falling flood filled the atmosphere so, that floundering along with a strong man at each elbow, we seemed to be almost submerged, and felt thankful for so small a favor as having the upper portions of our persons bathed in a medium somewhat purer than that below. (Farnham, 1856 21-22) In a scene reminiscent of the deluge, Eliza is introduced into this new land through a somewhat grotesque baptism that leaves her neither pure nor whole. Drenched and half-drowned, she immediately becomes upon landing an object of curiosity, for white women were so rare at the time that they were “uncomfortably stared at.”10 Forming “little islands” in the streets, men left the gaming houses and the bar rooms to gaze at her (22-23).

8 The confusion between water and earth, the undefined contours of the shore and the moral impurity of San Francisco all mark a deep contrast with the well-ordered, bright, Eden-like landscape of her Santa Cruz farm where, upon arrival, she experiences a genuine aesthetic and mystical shock. Becoming the gazer this time, she depicts a scene whose epiphanic function is linked to the perfect architecture of the surrounding space: I look at a picture so filled with repose and beauty, that while I gaze, the hateful stir of the world seems to die out of the universe, […] On either hand, at a short distance from the stream, rise hills, now beautifully rounded, now more abrupt and stern, but all clothed with richest herbage, […] Just back of the house these hills approach each other so nearly, that what is a broad vale becomes a deep ravine, with wooded banks, upon which a dozen tall redwoods tower above their neighbors, and seem, to my wondering eyes, to be penetrating the very clouds. In front, the hills open generously […] Beyond this, I gaze upon the sparkling waters of the great bay, whose surrounding coast is diversified by hill and plain, cloud and sunshine, so exquisitely, that I deem it a fairy scene, […] I wonder, while beholding it, that religious and devout thankfulness to God does not continually ascend from the hearts of those who dwell in so fair a portion of his creation. (Farnham, 1856 45-46) Those two contrasting scenes of fog and sunshine, flood and rebirth, humiliation and revelation, somehow encapsulate the gist of Eliza Farnham’s migration experience as well as that of California itself. Indeed, in this land of unceasing fluctuations, of paradox and distortion (Farnham 1856 367), norms are constantly disrupted. This is first visible in the gigantic size of nature—the enormous size of the horned cattle, the impressive height of the wheat and the immensity of the trees—that Farnham details for the eastern reader and that she ascribes to “the energy of California soil” (202-203). California itself is personified as a “young giant but half conscious of its own power” (21) and life in this part of the globe, concludes Farnham, is “altogether anomalous” (28).

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9 The symptoms of this anomalous life affect the frontiers between the “in” and the “out” that the swift-changing nineteenth-century American society carefully erected. The theory of “separate spheres,” the ideal of “true womanhood” and the “cult of domesticity,” all dear to Victorian culture, partook of an attempt to categorize and stabilize the social and economic transformations, as well as the gender relations of the expanding nation. In theory at least, the home was exalted as a walled sanctuary protecting man and woman from the hustle and bustle of the world.

10 But in California, the home as physical and moral shelter is either absent, dirty, or dilapidated. The typical “rancho style” is described as “a dark, dirty, adobe house, windowless, swarming with fleas, the ground in all directions strewn with bullock’s heads, horns, and hides, and guarded by an immense troops of worthless dogs” (Farnham 1856 181). When Eliza arrived at her own farm, she found a “casa […] made of slabs which were originally placed upright, but which have departed sadly from the perpendicular in every direction” (42-43). After discovering the “fairy scene” mentioned above, she describes her coming back to the broken house. Sitting in the ashes, she contemplated her “in-door world” and mentally started to construct a home: “In my meditations, I inverted the black walls, turned them inside out, laid an ideal floor, erected imaginary closets set apart corners for bedrooms” (48).

11 In reality, the reconstruction of the house was much more painstaking and imperfect. First, she had to sleep in a tent and live in a “half nomadic state”; then, in passages fraught with humor, Farnham depicts her attempts to divide the space of the casa into apartments partitioned by curtains which, like the thin outer walls, failed to provide proper privacy (67). Eventually, Eliza’s home was reduced to a stoveless shelter housing a non-nuclear family.11 Only later in the narrative was a brand-new house erected which, at least in imagination, recreated the cozy, genteel space of Victorian homes, neatly divided into sleeping chambers, bathroom, library, parlor and dining room (104-105, 169).

12 Yet, this recreated home does not become the focus of Eliza’s domestic activities, for the book mainly stages the narrator/character outdoors, engaged in all sorts of physical tasks including plowing, gardening, planting potatoes and building the roof of the house. Farnham readily depicts herself as a house builder rather than a housekeeper, a reversal of traditional gender roles that she attributes to California’s peculiar character: “it is no more extraordinary for a woman [here] to plough and hoe with her own hands than for men to do all their household labor” (28).

13 Her job as carpenter (a male but holy occupation) enabled her to discard the long traditional dress and don the bloomer costume, which she found so comfortable that she eventually decided not to change dresses even when male visitors came (133).12 While this victory over bodily constraints and genteel expectations signals the greater degree of women’s emancipation in the west, it should be noticed that Farnham did not openly militate for women’s rights, for she believed—like other contemporary promoters of the theory of separate spheres—that a woman’s nature was essentially spiritual and domestic.13 When her friend Georgiana Bruce Kirby, a fervent supporter of the newly launched women’s rights movement, noted that her daily life and activities contradicted her principles, Farnham justified the paradox by claiming that “necessity prescribed [her] practice and only reason, taste and conscience [her] theory” (173).

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14 The pressing demands of her new environment occupy a central place in the first half of the book, which reads like a lively, epic tale of war against all sorts of enemies in the shape of fleas, weeds, rain, grasshoppers, and unreliable employees. This “continual external struggle” has mixed consequences on her life and on the frame of her narrative: at one point, Farnham notes that her spirit is so overwhelmed by material concern that despair and social isolation threatened to pervert her soul and her usual wonder at the “visible throne of God” (152). In a land where human society barely existed, the private space of her secluded home became a prison: Shut up in my narrow house, with the interests and sympathies which had been wont to embrace classes, communities, humanity, chilled and driven back upon myself; unable to approach the social life about me in the way of co-operation or enjoyment, or individuals in the relation of serving or aiding […] I was, most of all unhappy in finding myself circumscribed in all action to my small family circle and my private interests. (Farnham, 1856 154-155) This passage, which sheds light on the intricate intersections between the public and the private, redefines the notion of home. As an eastern reformer and a defender of women’s domestic nature, Eliza Farnham had learned to expand the walls of her house so that it could transcend her own “small family circle.”14 As is made clear here, the ideal home was not supposed to be an insulated haven but a private locus connected to and, through woman’s loving and selfless power, devoted to the outside world (“classes, communities, humanity”). In the same way as a world with no homes was likely to degenerate into a masculine jungle, a home cut off from the public sphere could shrink into a prison cell. Farnham laments the loneliness and the lack of social fabric and purpose which made educated and well-meaning females like herself feel “out of place” (155); she concludes this despondent chapter by warning that “none but the pure and strong-hearted of my sex should come alone to this land” (157). It seems, at this point in the narrative, that her social and spiritual identities can neither exist “in” nor “out” and that her sense of self is literally dislocated.

15 Farnham was redeemed by the coming of a female friend, with whom she shared the kind of intense and long-lasting friendship bonding nineteenth-century women.15 Georgiana Bruce Kirby joined her in 1850, worked by her side on the farm and cheered her spirits. Reflecting on her trials in a subsequent introspective passage, Farnham concludes that “each struggle had contributed to my womanhood. Each had helped on my interior life. Are not the internal experiences of like natures like, under all external circumstances, however various? Do not the truly good truly advance in their own souls?” (224).

16 This passage offers the last insight into Eliza’s interior life, for from chapter 27 to the end (chapter 40), the narrative abruptly changes in focus, tone, rhythm, and characterization. While the first part of the book reads like an entertaining and informative novel, intertwining the adventures of Farnham’s private life with the main features of California’s history, the second half of the volume is a rather terse, somewhat impersonal account of external characteristics. Thus, the mixed population, the evolution of San Francisco, the widespread corruption in morals and politics, and gold mining are documented in a series of shorter chapters where the subjective narrator is replaced by the voice of a witness, reporter or travel guide. This trend climaxes in the last two sections composed of an appendix and a supplementary chapter which detail the 1856 activities of the Vigilance Committee and relate the story

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of a dreadful emigration experience in 1846 known as the “Donner Party.”16 The reader thus perceives a dissonance in the narrative that Farnham never justifies.

17 Increasingly, the author’s personal voice dissolves into the widely used pronoun “we,” which is inscribed in the very title of the book and has fluctuating referents—her own family group, the Californians with whom she identified, or the “old world” to which, as a “civilized” and educated lady, she still belonged. The recurrence of the first-person plural actually operates like an inclusive and exclusive force that creates an illusion of cohesion while keeping the contours of the narrating subject undefined. Both in and out of the narrative, Farnham’s voice becomes disembodied, more openly didactic and moralizing, and eventually prophetic.

Contamination and the Redemptive Power of Womanhood

18 In the latter part of the book, Eliza Farnham is concerned about the mechanisms of contamination, purification and redemption shaping California’s budding society. While the bountiful nature is conceived as a gift of God, the cities and the mining towns are depicted as hellish places where language, manners, and social relations have degenerated into swearing, violence and selfish individualism (Farnham, 1856 271). Farnham noted that the gaming houses, most numerous in San Francisco, also prevailed throughout the country and that the “inland towns were equally infested” (307). Oaths, she laments, “crowded into the commonest conversation” and even women were not immune to impure language (297). Bar rooms thronged and drunkenness was a rampant vice that contaminated even the children (357).

19 The main culprit for this degenerate society, Farnham claims, is gold, or rather the blind quest for it which, “once tasted, like the fabled leaf, causes forgetfulness of old ties […] and does not create new ones” (251). While she admits that the Gold Rush marks a revolution in history which will ultimately amount to progress (356), and that gold-seeking fosters the “republican sentiment” by enabling any poor and lucky hardworking man to get rich, she dwells on the immediate negative consequences of the craze for gold (353).

20 The first one is that it attracts, in the reported words of a white Californian, “all types of rascality” (332). Farnham in particular the “foul population” from , those “carrion birds,” whose “pestilent presence” invaded the land (332). Chinese emigration is curiously absent from her report, which essentially focuses on the different types of European and American migrants in ways that both qualify and reinforce stereotypes. Farnham writes that “the Jew […] does honor to his name here. He eschews old clothes, and rarely if ever, so far as my observation entitles me to speak, attempts to get a greater advantage in trade than his neighbors” (264). The New England Yankee is censored for his speculative mind, his business talents, and his dislike of hard manual labor; brushing aside the Puritan work ethic, Farnham declares that “the American is not a working animal like the Swiss, the German, or the Englishman” and she ironically adds that the Puritan colonial venture might have failed in the mild and sensuous climate of California (265).17

21 The other consequence of the Gold Rush concerns the widespread corruption plaguing politics and justice, which the narrative documents with many anecdotes of bribed

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politicians, immoral judges, swindled elections, and unpunished criminals. Farnham notes that “in the California of ’49 and ’50 […] no man appeared desirous of abiding by these laws, unless the law and his pleasure were one, and the courts seemed to be little more guided by it than individuals” (93). The whole public sphere is likened to a sick body contaminated by “venality” which “cannot better consist with true civil and political greatness, than can organic disease with perfect animal development. It is the gangrene ever surely eating its way to the sources of vitality” (379). Most importantly, Farnham laments “the decline in personal, social and civil morality” which tests and threatens the “Saxon spirit”: “The respect one feels for the noblest race on earth, does not mitigate the pain of witnessing its degradation in the same fields where inferior peoples have fallen” (306). In the narrative, the “inferior peoples” mainly include the Native Americans (referred to as “Indians”) and the conquered Mexicans (labeled “Spanish” or “old Californians”). Farnham treats them with mixed feelings of contempt and pity, highlighting their simple-heartedness, laziness, lack of ambition as well as cleanliness (131, 181, 182). She also notes that in the “absence of that grand characteristic of enlightened Christianity—respect for woman”—wives, sisters and mothers are in “the position of a humanely-treated slave” (183-184).

22 Farnham’s praise of Anglo-Saxon racial and moral superiority reflects her vibrant faith in Manifest Destiny. As she sees and foresees redemption for California, her writing becomes permeated with a form of visionary optimism which gives way to flights of lyrical prose strongly reminiscent of John O Sullivan’s glorification of America:18 America is young and strong; […] Her civilization, springing from Saxon energy, Protestant Christianity, and social, political and religious liberty, has in it elements of durability never before combined. (331) California is the world’s nursery of freedom. The centuries […] have witnessed no event so significant to the nations as its development under a free government. It marks an era to which, in future years, the new men of nations grown hoary in despotism, will point as the time when the masses began to gather the earth’s treasures and make them their own. The lessons in political and religious freedom learned here will be remembered and repeated beneath the palm trees of India—in the tea-fields of China—among the frozen snows of —in the saloons of the proudest cities of Europe, where dotard monarchy yet hugs his shivering members together—[…] What hopes are awakening in these years! […] What persistency in man toward a high destiny! […] The march will be onward with triumph into the ages. (327-329) In this utopia exalting America’s exceptionalism and California’s potential for universal regeneration, California is portrayed as the “theatre of first test” for absolute liberty. Thus, the young state is meant to carry out the original republican experiment to its extreme logic of democracy: “If America is republican elsewhere, here she will be democratic” (277). Farnham already saw many signs of this new era in the tangible progress that she had noticed over the seven years she spent in California. Thus, she noted the diminution of gambling houses, the decline in alcohol consumption, the development of social and educational institutions, and mostly, she felt confident that, once the gold fever had died down, the fertile lands of California would materialize the Jeffersonian dream of a great agrarian republic peopled by virtuous farmers. It is not by chance that the passages describing farming far outnumber those that she somewhat reluctantly devotes to gold mining. She encouraged her readers to till the land instead of digging gold, predicting that this would increase health and virtue and “elevate [California] to the level of her elder sisters” (31).

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23 Another sign of social and moral purification is commented upon at great length in the last section of the book devoted to the Vigilance Committee, an association of San Francisco citizens created in response to the widespread crime and corruption. Its well- organized members judged and executed criminals, patrolled the city to protect life and property, and in 1856, they issued a document inspired by the Declaration of Independence which asserted the people’s right to self-government and hinted at revolution. Farnham relates the conflict that opposed the Vigilance Committee to the governor of California and she gives her undivided support to the action of the Committee, lauding the nobility, courage and self-restraint of its members, whom she implicitly compares to the Founding Fathers of California. Rejoicing that “the country is redeemed from the worst of all despotisms—a despotism of ruffians (505), she thanks them for having taken indispensable “steps of purification” (499) in San Francisco and given examples of republicanism served by “true manhood” (507).19

24 While the courage, honesty and “moral power” (501) of “true manhood” are presented as necessary ingredients for the salvation of California, the book is ultimately a tribute and a call to the redemptive power of “true womanhood.” The scarcity of women, the impossibility to set up families—especially in the mining towns—the presence of prostitutes and the constant and unjust sexual suspicion bearing on all women are put forth by Farnham as the most serious obstacles to the purification of the social sphere. Through several anecdotes, in particular in the chapter narrating the emigration of the Donner Party that stages the heroic selflessness of a mother20—and implicitly through her own story—the author glorifies womanhood. Her praise of female courage, of the almost miraculous power of motherly love, of women’s self-sacrifice and unrivaled capacity for survival elevates woman to the level of Christ. The book is finally an invitation to martyrdom: Come to the country which is the home of those you are bound to adhere to and save, […] I say to my countrywomen that if they have the natures which can pass unscathed through the furnace seven times heated, every sentiment of duty binds them to follow here, […] one suffers with so much more firmness when one feels that good flows from it—though it be to the antipodes. […] We see the fruits of the martyrdoms that have been. We feel the pains only of our own. (301-305) Farnham thus issues a call to the “Angel in the House,”21 urging her to leave her home and found a purer state. The book ends with a vision of redeemed California reminiscent of her initial mystical experience upon discovering the Santa Cruz landscape: When society shall have struck its roots into Californian soil […] [t]hen the benign summer heavens will smile upon hearts tranquil enough to expand beneath them into charity and love—free enough to be penetrated by the exquisite harmony of the material world—then the glorious hills and teeming vales will be dotted with homes where plenty reigns […] A country so clothed with majesty […] must have a hopeful destiny. (377-378) This civilized, christianized, feminized, version of the picture, which blends the accents of Manifest Destiny with the virtues of domesticity, provides a good of “Manifest Domesticity,” i.e. a combined rhetoric of national expansion and domestic ideology that “turns imperial conquest into spiritual regeneration to efface internal conflict or external resistance in visions of geopolitical domination as global harmony” (Kaplan 190).

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Conclusion

25 California In-doors and Out emerges as a non-uniform narrative offering American readers the vision of a harmonized civilization based on the contemporary assumptions of Anglo-Saxon superiority and female innate virtue. In this utopian projection where the Native Americans and the conquered Mexicans are hardly visible, the “other” to be conquered is human (mainly male) moral impurity. As Farnham writes: “The present is a war, not between parties or persons, but between the principles of good and evil” (1856 v–vi). To some extent, this moral war reshapes—and is reshaped by—the tensions between the “in” and the “out,” which take on multiple forms and sometimes contradictory values: California is both a home and a strange land, the domestic space a claustrophobic and regenerative haven, the public sphere gangrened and destined to become the vector of universal democracy. Also, porosity between indoor and outdoor spaces may be infectious or healing, constructive or destructive. Ultimately, however, Farnham’s grand scheme is to dissolve the frontiers between the external and the internal, and attain a stage when the soul, no longer absorbed by physical concerns, can be, as is said in the above-quoted extract, “penetrated by the exquisite harmony of the material world.”

26 Farnham’s apocalyptic vision of a new heaven and a new earth is coupled with a final prediction that, once the dark shadow of slavery has been removed, California and the other states will form a great domesticated nation of freedom. Looking beyond the increasing sectional tensions plaguing the country, she inscribed on the book’s last page: “Let the talking wires span free soil from the Atlantic to the Pacific, and let free labor, with its , progress, and intelligence, possess and build up Kansas and Nebraska, through which California will ultimately be connected, by railroad, with the East and in a few years, she will be the garden of the Union” (507). Interestingly, the final comparison of California to a garden, which echoes the image of the “nursery” of freedom, not only hints at the state’s bountiful and tamed nature; in the House/Nation metaphorical configuration, it also identifies California to a hybrid and fecund space located both in and out of the Union. It seems that Farnham’s gender theory and female experience, professedly anchored in the separate spheres model, actually found their deepest roots in such a hybrid and fecund space, generated by the blurred and moving frontiers of the domestic empire.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

BAYM, Nina. Women Writers of the American West. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2012.

CHURCHILL, Charles B. “ Farnham: an Exponent of American Empire in Mexican California.” The Pacific Historical Review, vol. 60, no. 4, 1991, p. 517-537.

COTT, Nancy F. The Bonds of Womanhood: “Woman’s Sphere” in New England, 1780–1835. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1977.

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DAVID Lewis, W. “Farnham, Eliza Wood Burhans.” Notable American Women, vol. 1. Eds. Edward T. James, Janet Wilson James, Paul S. Boyer. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1971, p. 598-600.

DAVIDSON, Cathy N. and Jessamyn HATCHER. “Introduction.” No More Separate Spheres! Eds. Cathy N. Davidson and Jessamyn Hatcher. Durham: Duke University Press, 2002, p. 7-26.

EPSTEIN, Barbara L. The Politics of Domesticity: Women, Evangelism, and Temperance in Nineteenth- Century America. New York: Wesleyan University Press, 1981.

FARNHAM, Eliza. California, In-doors and Out; or, How we Farm, Mine and Live generally in the Golden State. New York: Dix, Edwards & Co., 1856.

FARNHAM, Eliza. Life in Prairie Land. New York: Harper & Bros., 1846.

FARNHAM, Eliza. Woman and Her Era, 2 volumes. New York: A.J. Davis & Co., 1864.

FARNHAM, Eliza. Letter to Parke Godwin, August 11, 1855. JoAnn Levy Papers, California State Archives, Sacramento.

FARNHAM, Eliza. Letter to a friend in New York, December 30, 1849. JoAnn Levy Papers, California State Archives, Sacramento.

FISCHER, Gayle V. Pantaloons and Power, a Nineteenth-Century Dress Reform in the United States. Kent, OH: The Kent State University Press, 2001.

GINZBERG, Lori. Women and the Work of Benevolence: Morality, Politics, and Class in the Nineteenth- Century United States. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990.

HELSINGER, Elizabeth K., Robin Lauterbach SHEETS, and William VEEDER. The Woman Question, Society and Literature in Britain and America, 1837–1883, vol. 2. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983.

JOHNSON, Kristin, ed. Unfortunate Emigrants: Narratives of the Donner Party. Logan, UT: Utah State University Press, 1996.

KAPLAN, Amy. “Manifest Domesticity.” 1998. No More Separate Spheres! Eds. Cathy N. Davidson and Jessamyn Hatcher. Durham: Duke University Press, 2002, p. 183-207.

KERBER, Linda K. “Separate Spheres, Women’s Worlds, Woman’s Place: The Rhetoric of Women’s History.” 1984. No More Separate Spheres! Eds. Cathy N. Davidson and Jessamyn Hatcher. Durham: Duke University Press, 2002, p. 29-65.

LEVY, JoAnn. Unsettling the West, Eliza Farnham and Georgiana Bruce Kirby in Frontier California. Berkeley: Heyday Books, 2004.

LEVY, JoAnn. They Saw the Elephant, Women in the California Gold Rush. Norman: Press, 1992.

O’SULLIVAN, John. “The Great Nation of Futurity.” The United States Democratic Review, vol. 6, no. 23, 1839, p. 426-430.

PATMORE, . The Angel in the House. 2 vols. London: John W. Parker and Son, 1854-1856.

PIEPMEIER, Alison. Out in Public: Configurations of Women’s Bodies in Nineteenth-Century America. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2004.

RILEY, Glenda. Inventing the American Woman, vol. 1. Wheeling, Illinois: Harlan Davidson, Inc., 1995.

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SMITH-ROSENBERG, Carroll. “The Female World of Love and Ritual: Relations between Women in Nineteenth-Century America.” 1975. Disorderly Conduct: Visions of Gender in Victorian America. Carroll Smith-Rosenberg. New York: Oxford University Press, 1985, p. 53-76.

SORIN, Claire. “Anatomy of the Female Angel or Science at the Service of Woman in Woman and Her Era by Eliza Farnham.” Women and Science, 17th Century to Present: Pioneers, Activists and Protagonists. Eds. Donna Andréolle and Véronique Molinari. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2011, p. 55-68.

STANTON, Elizabeth Cady, Susan B. ANTHONY and Mathilda J. GAGE. History of Woman Suffrage, vol. 1, 1848-1861, 1881.

WARREN, Kim. “Separate Spheres: Analytical Persistence in United States Women’s History.” History Compass vol. 5, no. 1, 2007, p. 262-77. DOI: 10.1111/j.1478-0542.2006.00366.x. Accessed 15 Nov. 2016.

WELTER, Barbara. “The Cult of True Womanhood: 1820-1860.” American Quarterly, vol. 18 no. 2, part. 1, 1966, p. 151-74.

WOLOCH, Nancy. Women and the American Experience. New York: Knopf, 1984.

WOODWARD, Helen Beal. The Bold Women. New York: Farrar, Straus and Young, 1953.

NOTES

1. The book was primarily but not exclusively intended for an eastern audience. Eliza Farnham asked for 300 copies of her work to be sent to California (Letter to Parke Godwin, August 11, 1855). 2. For a survey of early women’s writings on California, see Baym and Levy. 3. Eliza Farnham’s first book, Life in Prairie Land (1846), was an account of her years in Illinois where she joined her sister and got married in 1836. Back in her native New York State, she headed the women’s division of Sing Sing prison from 1844 to 1848 and was forced to resign because the prison inspectors disapproved of her liberal methods. 4. A staunch supporter of U.S. territorial expansion, Thomas Jefferson Farnham (1804-1848) led a missionary expedition to Oregon in 1839 and lived for a while in California where he bought land in Santa Cruz. He published four books relating his travels between 1842 and 1846. For more detailed information, see Churchill. 5. Thomas Farnham and Eliza had three sons but only one reached adulthood. Eliza’s hectic voyage to California is related in Levy (2004 35-39). 6. For details on women’s experiences in the early phase of California’s settlement, see Levy (1992). In the mid 1850s, Eliza Farnham gave a series of public lectures on spiritualism (of which she was an eager adept), philosophy, contemporary civilization and female valor. She returned to New York City in 1856 and came back to California in 1859 when she resumed public lecturing and became matron of the female department at the Stockton Insane Asylum. During the Civil War, her abolitionist convictions incited her to volunteer as a nurse at Gettysburg. She contracted tuberculosis and died in December 1864. 7. Since the 1960s, historians engaged in the rewriting of women’s history have produced an impressive amount of studies focusing on the shift in gender roles and sexual ideology in nineteenth-century America. In the wake of Barbara Welter’s foundational 1966 essay (“The Cult of True Womanhood”), the metaphor of separate spheres was systematically used by critics, to such an extent that its language became “vulnerable to sloppy use” (Kerber 37). Since the late twentieth century, with the rise of queer theory and black feminist criticism, the inadequacy of

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the metaphor has been pointed out by a number of literary critics and historians denouncing a middle-class white bias that excludes other women and other categories of analysis, such as “race, sexuality, class, nation, empire, affect, region and occupation” (Davidson and Hatcher 9). Post-separate spheres criticism also points at the porous boundaries of gendered spaces, stressing the need to deconstruct binaries and to “consider the spheres not as a determining force but as one discourse among many that shaped the lives of women in the nineteenth century” (Piepmeier 5). While the present essay acknowledges the porosity of spheres, it does not reject the validity of the separate spheres metaphor and considers it a “useful tool because with an understanding of intended gender boundaries, scholars will be able to continue to identify the expansion of such limits” (Warren 270). 8. Like other nineteenth-century female reformers, such as Sarah Hale and Catharine E. Beecher, Farnham promoted the domestic ideology and insisted that woman’s nature was primarily fit for a domestic life. Yet, she was unique in the sense that her belief in the angelic ideal gradually developed, through the 1840s and 1850s, into a radical theory of absolute female superiority. Her 1864 master work, Woman and her Era, fully expounds her gynecocratic views, arguing that women are not only spiritually but also organically superior to men; in Farnham’s utopia, Woman is described as a semi-divine creature destined to redeem the world (for more details on this aspect, see Woodward and Sorin). This essentialist approach, which heralded “a female savior leading the way to a fuller humanity and ushering in a new era of community and love,” has been coined “apocalyptic feminism” (Helsinger xv). While the emerging women’s rights movement preferred to stick to an egalitarian ideal, Helsinger notes that the tenets of apocalyptic feminism deeply inspired late nineteenth-century reforms seeking to “purify” society, such as temperance and the fight against political corruption (xv). 9. Farnham’s initial plan meant to recruit 130 widowed or single female participants “not under twenty-five years of age, who shall bring from their clergyman, or some authority of the town where they reside, satisfactory testimonials of education, character, capacity,&c.” Each woman was also expected to pay 250 dollars (letter to Lydia Sigourney, February 22, 1849). Eventually, only 5 women were part of this expedition which Farnham was unable to organize successfully, partly because she was ill during the weeks preceding departure. 10. It is estimated that men constituted 90% of the migrants at the time of the Gold Rush. On arriving in San Francisco, Eliza Farnham wrote a friend in New York that “women are more in requisition here than gold or anything else” (letter from E. Farnham, December 30, 1849). For more details on the female population in the California Gold Rush, see Levy, 1992 xvi-xxii. 11. In the early phase of her California years, she lived with her two children, one, then two women friends and the Irishman she hired as help. 12. Popularized by Amelia Jenks Bloomer in the early 1850s, this costume was composed of a knee-length dress worn over loose trousers. Its comfortable and healthy cut enabled women to breathe and move more freely than in the long and cumbersome traditional dress. The bloomer costume reflected the concerns of the health reform movement and was adopted for a time by the early women’s rights’ advocates as a symbol of emancipation. Many women also wore it for practical reasons and this seems to have been the case in San Francisco. See Fischer (79-131) and Levy ( 1992 180-182). 13. While Eliza Farnham was aware of women’s oppression and respected the work of the women’s rights’ advocates, she thought that the fight for suffrage and political equality did not suit a woman’s true mission and nature. In 1858, she spoke at the National Woman’s Rights Convention in New York City and exposed her views on female superiority which impressed the audience but were not welcome by the leaders of the movement (see Stanton, Anthony and Gage’s History of Woman Suffrage 669). 14. As many late twentieth-century studies have shown, since the early nineteenth century, a growing number of women had gradually learned to expand their ascribed sphere of action; by

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anchoring their motives in religious and moral grounds—their legitimate domain—they could get involved in various reform movements meant to cleanse the society of its sins, be they alcohol addiction, sexual license, or slavery. Not all women got committed and only a minority became abolitionists, but the global religious atmosphere pervading the period () vindicated the existence of such attempts at purification. For illuminating surveys of these aspects, see for instance Epstein, Riley, Woloch, Clinton, Ginzberg. 15. Carroll Smith Rosenberg’s 1975 foundational essay (“The Female World of Love and Ritual”) identified a specific women’s culture in nineteenth-century America, marked by female bonding, spirituality and occasional homoeroticism. There is no evidence that erotic relations existed between Kirby and Farnham but their mutual emotional commitment to their friendship is obvious through the many letters they exchanged from the 1840s to the time of Eliza’s death. Smith-Rosenberg’s work and many subsequent others, including Nancy Cott’s 1977 Bonds of Womanhood, marked a reappraisal of the separate spheres model, arguing that the women’s sphere could be turned into a potentially positive force. 16. The Donner Party refers to the tragic migration of a group of 87 men, women, and children who left Illinois in 1846 and were trapped in the snows of the Sierra Nevada. Half of the group died of exposure, disease or starvation and some resorted to cannibalism. For more information on this event, see Johnson. 17. It is important to note that despite these critical views Farnham assumed that, contrary to the Spanish character, the Americans of Anglo-Saxon origins were also endowed with “unfaltering energy,” “self-control,” “personal courage” and “sublime patriotism” (267). 18. The journalist and editor John O’Sullivan (1813–1895), who is credited for having coined the phrase “Manifest Destiny” in his 1845 article defending the annexation of Texas, extolled its main themes as early as 1839 in “The Great Nation of Futurity” (The United States Democratic Review, volume 6, issue 23): “Yes, we are the nation of progress, of individual freedom, of universal enfranchisement […]. We must onward to the fulfilment of our mission—to the entire development of the principle of our organization—freedom of conscience, freedom of person, freedom of trade and business pursuits, universality of freedom and equality. This is our high destiny […]. All this will be our future history, to establish on earth the moral dignity and salvation of man […]. For this blessed mission to the nations of the world […] has America been chosen; and her high example shall smite unto death the tyranny of kings, hierarchs, and oligarchs […]” (429-430). 19. Farnham devotes a “supplementary chapter” to the Vigilance Committee, induced by the 1856 conflict that was opposing the second Committee to California’s political authorities. The chapter describes the activities of the first Vigilance Committee, organized in 1851, and then proceeds to analyze the unfolding crisis. It includes the complete transcription of the document addressed by the Vigilance Committee to the people of California on June 9, 1856. 20. While two-thirds of the males of the Donner party died, two-thirds of the women survived and reached California. Farnham interpreted this gap as proof that women, and mothers in particular, were endowed with a higher capacity for survival conferred by “love’s divine self- abnegation” (422). 21. This phrase, which was made famous by Coventry Patmore’s long narrative poem, first published in 1854, and expanded until 1862, became a catch phrase in the late nineteenth century to refer to the ideal wife and mother. It is difficult to know whether Farnham had actually read the poem, but “The Angel in the House” perfectly encapsulates her belief in the angelic nature of women primarily fit for the domestic sphere.

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ABSTRACTS

Eliza W. Farnham (1815-1864) was the first woman migrant to publish a book on California. Her 1856 account offers a unique insight into the early and essentially male phase of California’s settlement, as well as a complex narrative of personal adaptation to a new environment. Its vivid and at times humorous descriptions of agrarian life, embryonic political institutions, social relations and violence, are permeated with the spirit of Manifest Destiny. Yet, the deep originality of Eliza Farnham’s account lies in its gendered perspective, which combines traditional and radical views of the female sex and disrupts dialectics of public and private spheres. This partly autobiographical book blurs the frontiers between the “in” and the “out” and contains the seeds of the gynecocracy theories that the author subsequently expounded in a voluminous work aiming to demonstrate the absolute superiority of the female sex (Woman and her Era, 1864).

Eliza W. Farnham a publié en 1856 le premier ouvrage écrit depuis la Californie, et sur la Californie, par une femme. Ce récit à la fois personnel et impersonnel offre une plongée unique dans la Californie à la période de la ruée vers l’or et révèle les réactions d’une femme originaire de New York et son adaptation à un univers essentiellement masculin. Le portrait du nouvel état et de ses embryons d’institutions sociales et politiques est fortement influencé par les discours de la Destinée Manifeste. Toutefois, Eliza Farnham introduit dans son récit une perspective genrée qui combine une vision à la fois traditionnelle et radicale du sexe féminin tout en brouillant la frontière des sphères publiques et privées. Cet ouvrage partiellement autobiographique, qui reconfigure les espaces intérieurs et extérieurs, contient également les germes de la pensée gynocratique que Farnham exposera pleinement dans son œuvre maîtresse Woman and her Era, publiée en 1864.

INDEX

Mots-clés: Californie, sphères publiques et privées, espace, frontières, genre, maison, nation, hybridité Keywords: California, public and private spheres, space, frontiers, gender, house, nation, hybridity

AUTHOR

CLAIRE SORIN Aix Marseille Université, LERMA, Aix-en-Provence, [email protected]

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Transnational Relationships, US Feminism, and the Labor of Dark Foreign Men in the “New World” of Europe in Louisa May Alcott’s Diana and Persis

Leslie Hammer

1 The egalitarian relationships and uncommon level of womanly independence that we find in the final novel that Louisa May Alcott wrote in 1879, Diana and Persis,1 are what have led scholars to praise this sentimental story as “one of [Alcott’s] most skilled, important, and feminist contributions,” to use Elaine Showalter’s words (xlii). Indeed, the novella is thought-provoking and important because of its impressive feminist vision of marital reform and feminine self-reliance. Yet even more intriguing is the transnational context through which the story puts forth its feminist agenda. In this essay, I explore how the foreign setting and sentimental representation of relations among US and non-US citizens in Diana and Persis offer a critique of US gender hierarchies, labor to teach women that gender equity should be sought outside of the US, and encourage women to emigrate from the US for good.

2 In so doing, the novel, I argue, provides a radical counter-narrative to the typical storyline found in nineteenth-century US fiction wherein women characters travel or live abroad. Both Diana and Persis serve as revised models of the quintessentially US American heroines who journey to Europe that we find in books by Alcott’s contemporaries, such as Nathaniel Hawthorne, Susan Warner, and Henry James, to name a few—stories that include US sentimental heroines who encounter danger when living in Europe and who serve as warnings to readers who dare to follow in their footsteps.2 Alcott rewrites the script of the Old World versus the New World. In Diana and Persis, the US represents the “Old World” and Europe stands as the “New World.” Both Diana and Persis engage in positive, life-transforming relations with non- American citizens (especially with Europeans who are racialized) when they migrate to

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Paris and , transnational sentimental relationships that facilitate Diana’s and Persis’s artistic maturation as well as fulfillment of their professional and personal goals. Diana and Persis serve as revised paragons of sentimental femininity, just as their trans-national/cultural/racial relationships stand as new models of marriage and other kinds of unions.

3 In navigating its white middle-class feminist agenda, the novel, like other sentimental and gothic works of Alcott’s, employs a “flexible strategy of accommodation and resistance.”3 That is, while Diana and Persis strives to help white middle-class US women acquire equal rights to men, it also suggests that equity for white middle-class US American women shall be forged through the subjugation of dark foreign bodies, restoring conventional nineteenth-century representations of foreign racial Others. The European males that Diana and Persis find sexually attractive and with whom they enter into relations are often racialized by Alcott. These transnational/cross-racial relationships are impressively revolutionary in many ways. Yet, at the same time, they replicate hegemonic racial hierarchies of the mid-nineteenth century. Persis’s dark foreign husband, like other racialized men in the story, serves as what Toni Morrison calls an “Africanist presence” (6) whose dark body is “[s]erviceable to the last [and who] is permitted speech only to reinforce the slaveholders’ ideology, in spite of the fact that it [may] subvert the entire premise of the novel” (Morrison 27).

4 Furthermore, Diana and Persis advances its feminist agenda through both undercutting, and contributing to, the impulses of “manifest domesticity” that, as Amy Kaplan has helped us to recognize, was common to U.S. sentimentalism in what she calls “traveling domesticity.” In surprisingly radical ways, the novel conjures anti-American sentiment through encouraging women to abandon the U.S. for good because the nation has failed to fulfill its democratic promise to women. Alcott argues for women’s emigration from the U.S. as a solution to gender inequity. However, in contradiction and ironically perhaps, Alcott’s story also contributes to a nation-building project that is typical of nineteenth-century U.S. sentimentality, creating social desire for the U.S. to compete with European nations in their imperialistic race for world power.

Inspirations for Diana and Persis

5 Louisa May Alcott heavily based Diana and Persis on May Alcott’s life abroad. Louisa’s sister is virtually synonymous with the character of Persis. Not satisfied with simply vacationing overseas, May left the U.S. for good to settle in Paris to develop her creativity and artistic career. Daniel Shealy points out that “For May, Europe represented a chance not just to see antiquities but to explore her own artistic ability” (xxxix). May wrote in a letter home to her family that “Europe seems a cure for everything” (Shealy 100). Living an intellectually stimulating and unusual life similar to those of later expatriate U.S. women writers in Europe, May studied painting, drawing, and sculpture in Paris while living in a community of women that included world- renowned artists in Paris such as and .4 Louisa envied and to some extent even resented May for the artistic and personal freedoms that she experienced in Europe and in her egalitarian marriage to a Swiss businessman and violinist named Ernest Nieriker.5 A couple of years prior to May’s permanent move to France, Louisa took a carefree vacation to Europe with her sister when the enormous success of Little Women (1868) gave her a rare reprieve from her lifelong burden of

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supporting her family through writing. “These days of recreation and wandering in Europe with May,” according to Caroline Ticknor, “were perhaps the happiest in Louisa’s life” (80). In an earlier trip to Europe, Louisa had been swept away by a Polish man named Ladislas Wisinewski, who she fondly nicknamed “Laddie.” Louisa reflected happily in her journal in 1865 about her “walks and talks” with her “very gay and agreeable” Laddie (Cheney 179) and how she felt “happy as a freed bird” when she was in Paris (Cheney 182). Louisa wished she could have the luxury to move to Europe permanently the way that May had. As Louisa later wrote in her journal in 1877, “Ought to be contented with knowing I help both sisters with my brains. But I’m selfish, and want to go away and rest in Europe. Never shall” (Ticknor 240). Louisa was right in predicting that she “[n]ever shall” have the opportunity to emigrate from the U.S. to “rest in Europe” as her sister May did. Louisa’s desire to live freely in Europe like May, I argue, was expressed vicariously in her final novel through the two main characters Persis and Diana, where she made Persis a thinly veiled version of May and wrote her own desires into the character of Diana.

6 Louisa based her novel so heavily on her sister’s experiences that entire passages from May’s letters are quoted almost verbatim in Diana and Persis (Rosenfeld 10-11). In letters written in the 1870s to Louisa and other family members about her life abroad with Nieriker, May often reflected on the advantages of living as a woman and wife in Europe. In a letter sent to her family in 1878, for example, May comments, “America seems death to all aspirations or hope of work [whereas Europe offers] the perfection of living; the wife so free from household cares, so busy, and so happy. I […] lead the delightfully free life I do now with no society to bother me, and nothing to prevent my carrying out my aims and in succeeding in something before I die” (Ticknor 267-68). A month later, in April 1878, she writes in another letter to her family, “Nothing would ever induce me to live in Concord again burdened with cares after this taste of all life can be. If woman wants a new lease on life let her come here […]. This foreign life is so satisfactory so full of the picturesque, so independent & charming that Concord or Boston would be like a prison to me” (qtd. in Rosenfeld 17). May goes on to reiterate these sentiments in another missive, noting that in Europe, “we can live for our own comfort not for company,” which “[i]n America […] cannot be done” (Ticknor 278). The notion that Europe provides a woman “the perfection of living” and the opportunity to “lead [a] delightfully free life” while the U.S., in contrast, is a “prison” that leads to “death to all aspirations or hope of work” is one that May returned to repeatedly in her journal entries and letters while she traveled and lived abroad. It is also the theme of Louisa’s Diana and Persis.

7 Diana and Persis opens with a young lady, Persis/May, who is a free spirit, announcing to her closest friend Diana that she is leaving the U.S. behind and heading to Paris where she can pursue her art. The novella follows the typical opening to sentimental stories of an orphan leaving home.6 Like most sentimental heroines, Persis, who is referred to as Percy by the narrative voice in the story,7 is an orphan whose grandmother raised her. In Paris, Percy enjoys living with a commune of women artists who are progressive, independent, and committed to art. Percy paints nude male models, freely comments on the (usually dark) male subjects of her art to whom she is attracted, enthusiastically debates on the pressing political issues of the time, and wears her hair down as a rejection of the tradition of women wearing their hair pulled up. Percy grows increasingly focused on her art, rejecting conventionally feminine interests. Eventually

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her dream of having one of her paintings selected for the world renowned Salon comes true.

8 After her victory at the Salon, Percy enters into an egalitarian marriage and has a baby with a dark Swiss man named August Müller, a character whom Alcott racializes and feminizes. The dark August represents a revised model of masculinity who redefines manly ideals, and the transnational marriage between him and Percy is meant to stand as a paragon of what marriage should be. Meanwhile, Diana, inspired by Percy’s experiences and accomplishments in Europe, decides to sail to Italy to pursue her own artistic career as a sculptor. On her way to Rome, she makes a stop in France for the purpose of seeing if Percy’s professional and personal goals have been reached. After leaving the U.S. and arriving in Paris, Diana, like Persis, feels liberated. She is impressed by Percy’s and August’s egalitarian relationship and is delighted to meet their child.

9 Then, Diana, who is modeled after the nineteenth-century U.S. American woman sculptor Harriet Hosmer, heads to her original destination, Rome, to develop her own artistic career as a sculptor.8 In Italy, Diana meets a five-year old boy named Nino whose mother is dead. Diana and Nino instantly bond to one another as mother and child, and she acts as his surrogate mother. It turns out that Nino’s father, Antony Stafford, is a world-renowned European sculptor. Like August, Stafford is a dark European man whom Alcott racializes. Diana instantly falls in love with Stafford. Likewise, Stafford becomes deeply enamored with Diana because they are both interested in sculpting and because she is his equal in terms of art and intellect. The story idealizes the egalitarian relationship between Diana and Stafford in Rome as well as Diana’s maternal union with Nino.

10 That Margaret Fuller, who lived in Rome herself, had a son named Nino is likely more than coincidental. As Rosenfeld points out, “Louisa must have had Margaret Fuller in mind in the fourth chapter of Diana and Persis, for Fuller’s own child was named Nino” (19). Showalter, as well, links the novel’s Nino to Fuller’s son, showing how that connection “powerfully suggests Fuller’s choice to seek fulfillment in her Italian exile had inspired Alcott” (xl). Fuller’s emigration to Italy left an impression on Alcott, who greatly admired Fuller for her extraordinary intelligence and uncommon independence. According to Sarah Elbert, Fuller was “Louisa May Alcott’s lifelong heroine” (1978 xiii). Elbert suggests that there was a reciprocal relationship between Alcott and Fuller in that it was not just Alcott who looked up to Fuller as a model of feminist reform, but, rather, that Fuller, too, admired Alcott as a “prototype of a new generation of Americans who might shape a more democratic Eden” (1978 xiii). Louisa heeded Fuller’s call to “shape a more democratic Eden” with her feminist story Diana and Persis, which is partially inspired by the legacy of Fuller.

Europe as the New World

11 When Percy leaves the U.S. to sail to Paris, she excitedly exclaims, “I feel like Columbus going to discover a new world […]. I go alone [to Europe] with only my common sense and courage to protect me” (Alcott, 1988 389). Identifying with Columbus and alluding to the “common sense” made famous by Thomas Paine, Percy views her journey to Europe as a revolutionary act. Also driven by an imperialistic impulse, she imagines that the “new world” shall be a site where she and those women who follow her lead

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may colonize and attain glory—a place where, as Percy proudly tells her family and friends in her letter to home, a U.S. American woman can produce art that will be “surveyed by admiring nations” (408). Frequently referring to Europe as the “new world,” Diana and Persis reverses the usual script. Suggesting that U.S. American women rely on their “common sense,” the text also propagates a new revolution—a feminist revolution that can be, the text suggests, achieved in Europe but not the U.S.

12 In making Europe the new New World, Alcott writes a counter-narrative to much of the U.S. fiction written by her contemporaries. By the mid- to late nineteenth century, journeying to Europe had become a “must do” for the middle- and upper-middle classes of U.S. Americans if they wished to be held as “cultured.” One of the outcomes of this bourgeois travel trend was that it became common practice for authors to write about young, white, U.S. American women touring through and living in Europe, as Louisa May Alcott does in Diana and Persis. As William Stowe contends, “Early American travelers such as Thomas Jefferson and were eager to define themselves in transnational terms as ex-Europeans with a special relation to European culture, whereas their successors in mid-century—Fuller, Greeley, and Twain, for example— were more concerned with asserting a uniquely American identity” (Stowe xi). In “Culture,” Ralph Waldo Emerson famously wrote, “we go to Europe to be Americanized” (Emerson 141), a motto that is in line with his call for a distinctly U.S. American literature and culture in “The American Scholar.” This Emersonian theme gets translated into much of the fiction written by the nineteenth-century U.S. American literati, where journeying to Europe or elsewhere is encouraged and even celebrated, but ultimately for the purpose of creating and reinforcing a distinctly U.S. American identity that can be set apart from—or above—Europe or elsewhere.

13 While such stories shaped and reinforced the cultural desire to sail across the Atlantic to Europe because they presented Europe as the pinnacle of artistic and social sophistication, the moral of these stories differed from Diana and Persis in that they often taught, at the same time, that Europe pollutes the purity of U.S. American white womanhood and may even endanger the lives of young ladies who travel and live there, especially those who dare to enter into romantic relations with European men. These works sent a strong message that white middle-class U.S. American women would be wise to remain in—or return to—the U.S. and marry men of their own nationality and race. Urging that U.S. citizens marry only other U.S. citizens was a way of maintaining a national family that upheld white U.S. American middle-class men as models of ideal masculinity and worked self-consciously against potential competition from European men.

14 Examples are many. In Nathaniel Hawthorne’s sentimental romance, The Marble Faun (1860), the fair expatriate ingénue, Hildy, not only risks tainting her “snowy whiteness” and “purity of heart” when she abandons the U.S. to develop her artistic talents in Italy, but also (literally) imperils her life (Hawthorne 54-55). Hildy’s feminine virtue and life itself are rescued at the conclusion of the story only by her returning to the U.S. and tying the knot with her fellow U.S. citizen Kenyon. Hawthorne closes his romance with a serious reminder that “the years, after all, have a kind of emptiness, when we spend too many of them on a foreign shore […]. It is wise, therefore, to come back” (Hawthorne 461). Similarly, a decade earlier, in Susan Warner’s The Wide, Wide World (1850), the prototypical sentimental heroine, Ellen Montgomery, falls into the most vicious hands of all of her caretakers when she leaves the U.S. to settle in Scotland

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with the Lindsay family. We are relieved when the U.S. American hero, John Humphreys, finally “saves” Ellen from the cruel Scots by returning her to the U.S. and marrying her. A little later, Henry James, too, would caution that there are dire consequences for women who “spend too many [years] on a foreign shore.” After all, it is in Europe that and Isabel Archer, two of the most famous—and famously American—of all heroines, lose their innocence, respectively in Daisy Miller (1878), published the same year that Diana and Persis was written, and (1881). In both, Europe serves to accent Daisy Miller’s and Isabel’s distinct Americanness, to reinforce their U.S. American identity. Daisy’s and Isabel’s experiences in Europe, like those of Hildy and Ellen Montgomery, ultimately serve to make the characters more American and emphasize the Old Worldness of Europe.

15 In contrast, Diana and Persis sends a message to young ladies that the danger comes from clutching on to U.S. American culture and remaining in the U.S.—a “prison cell” for women (Alcott, 1988 410). In Christine Doyle’s analysis of how Louisa May Alcott “talks back” to Henry James in her fiction, she argues that in Daisy Miller there are no benefits to U.S. American women living in Europe, and that James’s “views [on living in Europe] directly contradict Alcott’s perspectives in Little Women” where Europe is presented as positively shaping U.S. American women’s identity (Doyle 211). Amy and other characters in Little Women, Doyle demonstrates, are “learn[ing] from Europe while not being bound to it” and “return to America to pursue productive lives” (209). This same lesson is taught in Alcott’s Shawl Straps, a fiction based upon May and Louisa’s travels in Europe. At the closing of Shawl Straps, Alcott writes: […] we would respectfully advise all timid sisters now lingering doubtfully on the shore, to strap up their bundles in light marching order, and push boldly off. They will need no protector but their own courage, no guide but their own good sense and Yankee wit, and no interpreter, if that woman’s best gift, the tongue, has a little French polish on it. Dear Amandas, Matildas, and Lavinias, why delay? Wait on no man […]. Bring home empty trunks, if you will, but heads full of new and larger ideas, hearts richer in the sympathy that makes the whole world kin, hands readier to help on the great work God gives humanity, and souls elevated by the wonders of art and the diviner miracles of Nature. (Alcott, 1872 306-307) Diana and Persis takes a step further than Alcott’s earlier works like Shawl Straps and Little Women by teaching that U.S. American girls and women not only reap rewards from visiting Europe and returning home with “heads full of new and larger ideas,” but that they would be wise to hop on a boat and sail for good out of the U.S. as fast as they can and engage in romantic relations and friendships with foreigners in the New World of Europe. There is no indication that U.S. American women should even return to the U.S. in Diana and Persis. Percy advises Diana in one of the letters she writes from Paris, “you must prepare to join me […] and persuade the dear old lady to come along. You would find yourself a new world, and she would enjoy this life immensely” (Alcott 1988 405, emphasis added).

16 When Diana accepts Percy’s advice to follow her lead and move to Europe, Diana indeed passes like a pilgrim from what she perceives as the Old World to the New. Alluding to John Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress from This World to That Which Is to Come, Alcott sentimentally describes Paris as the “Celestial City,” which, in The Pilgrim’s Progress, is the term for heaven, or “that which is to come.” Anne Phillips has shown how central a role Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress plays in Little Women and Jack and Jill. She argues that the pilgrim metaphor in Little Women empowers the pilgrim. According to Phillips, “the

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pilgrims in Little Women demonstrate a tendency to move beyond the limits of city and society as a way of authorizing the self” (Phillips 225). She claims, moreover, that “the power of the pilgrims as embodied in Little Women stems from the sentimental tradition” and that “self-reliance elevates them above the limitations of their social and economic position in the world” (Phillips 214-15). The allusions to Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress in Diana and Persis serve a similar purpose to Little Women. Diana’s and Persis’s pilgrimage to Europe spiritually elevates them beyond the gender codes that confined them in the U.S. When first setting foot in the “great city” of Paris, Diana “felt like one released from the quiet solitude of a prison cell and suddenly turned loose” and is so overwhelmed with the joy that “her eyes filled with sudden tears and set wide the doors of her heart to let a new emotion in” (Alcott, 1988 410-11). Describing her first impression of Paris to Percy, Diana cries “[Paris] looked like the Celestial City in this light,” and we are told that she “yield[ed] herself to the spell […] of this woman-city of the world” (414). Percy agrees with Diana’s impression of Paris as the “Celestial City” and the “woman-city of the world,” and answers by affirming her own pilgrimage from the U.S. to Europe, telling Diana that Paris has proven to be “Heaven” to her (414). Throughout the story, Europe is referred to regularly in New World terms, sometimes as “the promised land” (391) and at other times the “land of promise” (425). If Percy and Diana correlate the U.S. to a “prison cell,” an Old World from which they are thrilled to finally be “turned loose,” it is, the text suggests, because they feel constrained by U.S. American gender codes that prevent them from growing artistically and personally (Alcott, 1988 384). As Percy says, “I am tired of everything [in the US]. I cannot find [inspiration and freedom] here so I am going to look for it!” (384). The U.S. stands in contrast to Europe, which is labeled in New World terms, and Percy and Diana are presented as pilgrims in that new New World. In representing Europe as “the promised land” and the “Celestial City,” then, Alcott both critiques and appropriates what Sacvan Bercovitch calls “the typology of America’s mission.” To Diana, the U.S. is a far cry from the “city on the hill.” Alcott calls for a withdrawal from the U.S., suggesting that the U.S. never turned out to be the “New Jerusalem” and that the “errand” failed, at least for women (Bercovitch 95-96). If Diana and Persis employs U.S. American jeremiad rhetoric, Europe replaces the U.S. as the New World and offers a “vision of the future” because, Alcott suggests, Europe offers far more freedom and equality for women.

17 Europe is idealized because Percy finds an unusual degree of artistic and personal freedom living, something that was unavailable to her as a woman when she lived in the U.S. Percy and her roommates in Paris are happily self-sufficient and have the luxury of devoting themselves entirely to their careers in art. As Percy writes to Diana, “we live, three merry spinsters, doing most everything for ourselves in the simple, free and easy way best suited to our professions and our purses” (Alcott, 1988 395). May’s sketches and Louisa’s letters to home describe such enjoyment during the trip they took to Europe with their friend Alice Bartlett; in Alcott’s Shawl Straps and Aunt Jo’s Scrap Bag as well, much of the comedy is related to the American spinsters’ independence in Europe and prompts Louisa to even sign letters, “Spinsterhood Forever” (Elbert, 1987 25-26). France offers Percy Mary Cassatt and Rosa Bonheur as women models after whom she fashions herself. Importantly, Europe, the novel stresses, is a world that poses no conflict between romance and art for women. That is what especially makes Europe the New World. In the “promised land” of Europe, Percy can unabashedly paint a male model with a “superb physique and the head of a god”

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and feel entirely comfortable expressing how he “distracts” her as “great drops [of sweat] come upon his forehead and every muscle shows” (Alcott, 1988 396). Her sexual attraction to the male model here as well as her desire for other male models that pose for her are unleashed in Europe, releasing her from the Protestant prudery of New England. In France, Percy feels free to express and explore her sexual desires, and Italy triggers a sexual awakening in Diana. Moreover, Percy can retain her “liberty-loving nature” (384-85) and Diana can remain a “strong, self-reliant woman” (391) while having relationships with men. They are not forced to choose between their careers and personal lives. Instead, the text suggests that romance and professional development coincide harmoniously.

18 In reality, however, Europe was not the “promised land” that could deliver more rights to women than the U.S. as Alcott makes it out to be in Diana and Persis. The women’s movements in the U.S. and throughout Europe were moving at roughly the same pace in the nineteenth century. Olympe de Gouges and Mary Wollstonecraft were certainly towering icons for women’s rights in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and there were important waves of feminist activism in the nineteenth century throughout Europe, particularly in the 1860s. Yet it was not really until the 1890s, many years after Alcott wrote Diana and Persis, that the “flowering of feminism” in Europe began to seriously take off (Offen 346). In fact, Karen Offen has shown that “resistance [to women’s rights] in Europe remained so considerable in the nineteenth century that no thorough overhaul of the legal status of married women would occur until the middle of the twentieth century” (Offen 343). Social and legal gender codes for women in Europe were not all that better, if at all, than in the U.S. in the mid- to late nineteenth century, especially in Italy, the nation where Diana is sexually liberated and enters into a blissful, romantic, egalitarian relationship.

19 So why the fiction of a freer Europe? Certainly, May Alcott’s enthusiasm for Europe and her happy marriage in Paris to the Swiss Ernest Nieriker captured the imagination of Louisa, who, burdened with supporting her family, was generally unhappy in the U.S. and envied the carefree life May led in Europe. Louisa also greatly admired Margaret Fuller whose experiences in Italy partly inspired her to write Diana and Persis. I would suggest, however, that Louisa makes Europe the setting of her novel not because Europe really represented a utopia for women—it did not, and Alcott would surely have known that—but, rather, because Europe could serve as a safe backdrop to criticize the legal and social gender codes in the U.S. That is, the fact that Europe represents the New World is less significant than the fact that the U.S. stands as the Old World. As I pointed out earlier, by representing Europe as the “promised land” for women, writing a counter-narrative to the tale of the Puritans’ pilgrimage to the New World, Alcott offers a sharp feminist critique of the U.S.

Revising Sentimental Models of Masculinity and Marriage

20 In Europe, the “land of promise” (Alcott, 1988 425), Percy marries August Müller, a Swiss man who, as his name “August” suggests, is meant to inspire respect and admiration. He is a thinly veiled representation of May’s Swiss husband, Ernest Nieriker. In her analysis of May’s portrayal of Ernest in her letters, Azelina Flint claims, “Ernest comes across as the ideal suitor and husband, for there was nothing he would

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not do for his wife” (60). In turn, Alcott portrays Percy’s transnational/cross-cultural relationship with August as utopian, an egalitarian model of marriage for which readers should strive. She draws upon and appropriates the conventions of sentimentality to revisit some of the very tenets of the culture of sentiment. She revises the sentimental masculine ideal, making August the new model of manhood. He represents a new kind of knight in shining armor. He does not “save” the heroine by providing her with the economic support of marriage. A large part of what makes August the new masculine ideal is that he overtly supports equal rights for women, contending that a woman should not have to devote her entire life to the man she marries and live the conventional domestic life sanctioned by the culture of sentiment. August argues openly that women should be able to pursue a relationship with a man and maintain a professional career and that there is no conflict between the two: “I believe a woman can and ought to have both [a professional career and a relationship with a man] if she has the power and courage to win them. A man expects them, achieves them, why is not a woman’s life to be as full and free as his?” (Alcott, 1988 424). Alcott lends moral authority to the feminist inquiry, “why is not a woman’s life to be as full and free as his [a man’s life]?” by having August, a husband and respected middle class white man, repeatedly articulate questions and comments that defend women’s rights. If he is “august” and the new model of masculinity, it is because of his courage to speak out on behalf of women’s right to pursue professional careers.

21 Moreover, the text presents August as rivaling U.S. American men. Egalitarian relationships between European men and U.S. American women occur in other Alcott works as well, as seen, for example in Jo’s relationship with the German professor Friedrich Bhaer in Little Women. In her analysis of the romantic relations between Friedrich and Jo, Sarah Wadsworth shows that “by unsettling the conventional coordinates that positioned the heroine as inferior in power and authority […] Alcott presents Jo’s courtship as that of an emotionally independent woman who is on an equal footing with her ‘match’ in terms of maturity, class, and gender expectations” (186). This is also true in Alcott’s representation of relations between European men and U.S. American women in Diana and Persis. Entering into a relationship with a European man like Friedrich or August, Alcott advises, reaps rewards for U.S. American women, as Alcott noticed in May’s blissful marriage to the Swiss Ernest Nieriker.9 August challenges the notion that US American men are the model of manhood that is sanctioned in U.S. American sentimentalism. He adamantly supports “the success of [his] splendid wife,” and, as the text points out, in some ways, “he was more ambitious for this young wife of his, both as woman and artist, than she was herself” (Alcott, 1988 420). Percy contrasts August to U.S. American men, noting, “There, Di! Could the most liberal-minded American say more than that? I did not convert him, he came to it himself through his own love of liberty, being a free Switzer with as great a hatred for tyrants as our glorious William Tell himself” (424). Percy’s remark suggests that even the most “liberal-minded American man” could not compete favorably against European men. Furthermore, the quality of Percy’s life is high because August not only verbally espouses women’s rights, but, importantly, acts upon his words. We see him carrying his fair share of the domestic duties, if not actually bearing a greater load than Percy, and helping his wife in whatever ways that he can to support her artistic career. Often, “August rocks the baby” (414), which frees time for Percy to paint. He also does much, if not all, of the shopping and cooking. In ways like this, the story encourages

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women readers to abandon the US, like Percy does, to marry European men and to find a better life.

22 What makes Alcott’s story even more daring is that her new model of manhood is not only a foreigner, but a dark foreigner. In many ways, sentimentality in Diana and Persis challenges the culture of sentiment in the U.S. by breaking the taboo of a white woman desiring a non-white foreign man as a husband and lover. It is worth noting that Ernest Nieriker, May Alcott’s Swiss husband after whom Louisa modeled August, was actually a fair man in real life.10 Alcott wrote August (read: Ernest) into her story as a man with “warm coloring and dark hair” (Alcott, 1988 423). With his “clustering dark hair” (417) and “dark head” (411), August represents more of a brown or black foreign Other than the fair European man that Ernest actually was. Alcott rewrote Ernest into her sentimental text as a non-white man, racializing him just as she does with other male characters in many of her sensational stories.11

23 Although clearly a sentimental story rather than a sensational story, Diana and Persis shares with many of Alcott’s sensational thrillers a foreign setting where unconventional cross-cultural/racial relationships take place. Betsy Klimasmith’s discussion of interracial desire in Alcott’s sensational stories, “M.L.” (1863), “My Contraband” (1863), and A Long Fatal Love Chase (written 1866) is helpful in thinking about Diana and Persis. Klimasmith writes: Alcott is less interested in the extremes than in the middle of the spectrum, where ambiguously-raced, highly-eroticized male bodies must be read and re-read by their female viewers in order to be made “safe” to interact with. By making identifiable characteristics ambiguous, Alcott can construct and manipulate her own syntax of race, nation, and genre to write the (almost) unwritable narrative of interracial love. (Klimasmith 116) Klimasmith’s point holds true in the sentimental context of Diana and Persis as well. August is marked as a racial Other, yet he can simultaneously be read as an Anglo man. Alcott makes August’s “identifiable characteristics ambiguous,” so that interracial desire can be read “safely.” One cannot pinpoint the text as directly being a story that sanctions interracial transnational marriage. At the same time, no one could overlook the fact that the story subtly propagates just that.

24 Like August and other European male characters in the novel such as Stafford, Alcott had a dark complexion like her mother, Abigail May Alcott, who is described by Alcott as “Spanish-” looking. Betsy Klimasmith, Elaine Showalter, and Sarah Elbert have all demonstrated that Alcott’s hallucinations that she experienced when she was ill in a Civil War hospital with typhoid fever, dreaming that she married a “stout, Handsome Spaniard, dressed in black velvet, with very soft hands, and a voice that was continually saying, ‘Lie Still, my dear!’” reflect the ways in which Alcott’s self-identification of gender, race, and sexuality were blurred and explored in her fiction. As Elbert notes, Alcott was a “dark-skinned ‘white’ woman with a ‘boy’s nature’ and a writer’s gift. Whatever she felt in the confusion of gender and race was released in her delirium, and it found outlet in her fictions” (1978 xxxi). This is true in Diana and Persis where Alcott explores interracial desire and projects her own identification with racial Others and men onto her male characters.

25 August’s racial Otherness also signals an ambiguity regarding his citizenship. The fact that he is not fair-skinned nor has light hair like the “real life” August (Ernest Nieriker) calls his European identity into question. His national origin becomes almost as questionable as his race, although there were certainly blacks, mulattoes, and other

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dark-skinned people throughout Europe. The text blurs his citizenship, making him a racial Other whose foreignness cannot easily be identified. In the imagination of the reader, he could be a foreign racial Other without a definite national identity or he could be a mixed-race Swiss man. It is not clear, and Alcott leaves it as such.

26 Foreignness and darkness are not just masculine qualities valued by Percy. When Diana goes to Rome after visiting Percy, she, too, falls in love with a dark foreigner whom she is on her way to marrying.12 A renowned sculptor named Stafford, whose skin is “bronzed by the ardor of Spanish skies” and whose “hair and head are still dark below but white above as if with a sudden snow fall,” sweeps Diana off her feet and triggers Diana’s sexual awakening (433). Although Stafford lives in Rome, it is unclear whether Stafford’s national origins are English or Italian or Spanish or something else altogether. What is clear is that he is another attractive dark non-American man who is appealing not just because he is handsome, but because he, like August, represents the revised masculine ideal.

27 What makes the relationship between Diana and Stafford ideal, even more than the marriage between Percy and August, is that they view one another as equals and “felt the charm” of the “mutual interests” they share (Alcott, 1988 434). Despite the fact that Stafford is a “well-known sculptor whose fame was already made” (431), he admires Diana’s sculpting. Stafford and Diana show professional respect for one another. Stafford refers to her as a “genius [and] comrade” (438), viewing her as talented as himself. The text presents Stafford as the masculine ideal and idealizes his transnational romance with Diana because there is no gender hierarchy in their relationship; they see “eye to eye” (438). What is more, Stafford, like August, happily performs the “feminine” domestic duty of childcare, which Diana finds attractive. Rather than following the traditional course of hiring a nanny to care for his son Nino when his wife dies, Stafford recognizes the value of “devoting his life” to Nino and decides to perform “his duty” of raising his son himself (431). The story teaches that a key trait of the masculine ideal is being a hands-on father like Stafford and August, both of whom actively care for their children rather than dismissing childrearing as women’s work. In this sense, the text revises the role of men in the culture of sentiment.

Dark Foreign Men and the Liberation of White U.S. American Women

28 Although Diana and Persis promotes egalitarian relationships that cross conventional gender boundaries, as well as sexual boundaries in terms of race, culture, and nation, the novel does not escape the tendency of white feminist sentimentalism to subjugate dark Others in the service of liberating white, middle-class U.S. American women. As we see in Diana and Persis, the personal and professional liberation of Percy’s white U.S. American body depends on the service of dark foreign Others—her husband August as well as the exoticized dark foreign men who work as models for her paintings.

29 August’s labor grants Percy the freedom to pursue her career and live carefree. As such, the marriage between August and Percy replicates the sentimental racial hierarchy of white mistress to dark servant. Percy acquires an unusual amount of freedom for a nineteenth-century woman and a blissful lifestyle because in her home, which Percy aptly refers to as “my kingdom” (412), her foreign dark husband cares for the baby,

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cooks, and runs Percy’s errands. At times, Percy speaks to August more like a servant than a spouse, telling him, for instance, “you must be trained, my love” (416). August proves to be very well trained, for, as we read, he “does his errands with a good will that lent romance even to prosaic marketing” (418). Not only does he attend to Percy’s every need, he does so with “good will.” He represents the ideal servant who is taught so well that his happiness stems from his ministering to Percy’s needs.

30 The story romanticizes August’s devotion to pleasing and serving Percy. When Diana observes August combing the garden for items to include in the salad and salad dressing he prepares for their dinner, for instance, she notes that what turns August into a “far manlier man” with a “nobility of expression” that makes him stand out from other men is that he makes domestic tasks like preparing salad dressing a serious endeavor. For August, making a salad dressing that suits Percy’s tastes is worth concentrating on. A foreign man with “dark clustering hair” who has visions of “salad dressing” and “strawberries” running through his head while he searches the garden for items for dinner are, the story teaches, “the sure index of a character in which rectitude and resolution reign” (417).

31 Alcott rewrites the masculine ideal so that domestic duties are included in the model of manhood, but this feminist revision of masculinity has an ethnic bias to it. Alcott can only imagine a dark foreign man being able to serve a white U.S. American middle-class woman in a domestic capacity, revealing the limitations of her feminist vision and the complex ways in which she mutually critiques and reinforces the tenets of the culture of sentiment. She does offer a bold vision of a new masculine ideal that includes performing domestic tasks conventionally confined to women; she does idealize Percy and August’s mixed-race, transnational marriage. However, the story conjoins August’s servitude to his “darkness,” making the combination of his domestic servitude and presumptive ethnic origin a key aspect of Alcott’s revised model of masculinity. Diana Paulin’s analysis of interracial desire in Alcott’s sensational thrillers, “My Contraband” and “M.L.” is useful here too.13 Paulin convincingly shows that “Alcott’s black characters [in “My Contraband” and “M.L.”] provide the impetus for articulation of white female agency and transformation. The interracial relationship remains ‘safe’ as long as the black male character occupies a nonthreatening position” (Paulin 120). Although Diana and Persis draws from the sentimental tradition, rather than the sensational Gothic tradition, the representation of interracial desire and its relationship to white female agency are similar. I would extend Paulin’s analysis to the context of the foreign: in the context of Diana and Persis, it is both August’s “darkness” and foreignness that “safely” provides the “impetus for articulation of white female agency and transformation,” to use Paulin’s words. That is, the sentimental moral of the story is that white female agency can be acquired by breaking down the color line and the borders of the U.S.

32 It is not just August’s dark foreign body that engenders the liberation of Percy and Diana. The dark-skinned foreign models who serve as the objects of Percy’s art trigger her sexual liberation. Like August, the models are racialized and often exoticized. One of the “new models” that Percy is attracted to and writes home about is a “handsome Moor” who is a “negro” that she names “Othello” because of his “fine dark face” and “brave breast with scars on it” that makes him look like “every inch a soldier and a prince” (402). She notes in her epistle that her “Othello” gave her that “nod which makes our hearts leap” and “flashed a smile at [her] as he vanished behind the screen”

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which “left her as red, with surprise and pleasure, as the drapery he flung over his shoulder with a superb gesture” (403). This risqué image of a naked black man flirting with Percy is suggestive of the great extent to which Percy has broken free of the sexual and racial mores of the U.S. and directly reflects May’s own experiences painting a partially clothed African model in Paris.14 Similarly, Percy’s sexual desire for another dark nude model who has the “superb physique and the head of a god” is hard to miss in her letter to Diana (396). She describes the challenge she has in focusing when drawing the dark model in “a magnificent pose”: His rich coloring distracts me because I can not paint it all day, and I try vainly to get a good copy of his great dark eyes, proudly dilating nostrils and picturesque head with its jovelike curls. The pose is perfect, and it is wonderful how he can keep it so long. Figure to yourself the difficulty; head thrown back, eyes raised, stepping forward with an air of rapid motion in every limb, and so he stands for an hour like a statue, and we draw like mad, for soon great drops come upon his forehead and every muscle shows, so great the effort and yet so perfect his control […]. So much for school. (396) Percy objectifies and exoticizes this nude model who poses for her with “great drops” of sweat dripping down his “forehead” while “every muscle shows.” It is difficult to read him as anything but a sexual object whose desirability is based solely upon the features of his dark nude “superb physique.” It is his “rich coloring,” “great dark eyes,” “dilating nostrils,” “picturesque head,” and “jovelike curls” that “distract” Percy. That the portrayal of this model appears in Percy’s first letter to home signals to readers that her voyage abroad is marked by the unleashing of pent up sexual desires and rejection of the U.S. sexual mores that reward prudery in women and condemn interracial sexual relations. This letter, like other epistles in the story, entice women to venture to go abroad and sends the message that not only do U.S. American women have the freedom to live independently and pursue their interests abroad, but they can also enjoy the pleasure of being unfettered by sexual constraints. In sum, Percy’s letters to home promise women that leaving the borders of the U.S. will lead to sexual liberation.

33 But this sexual liberation for white middle-class women largely depends upon what Toni Morrison calls “black surrogacy” (13). Alcott’s linking Percy’s sexual liberation to dark foreign men like the “handsome Moor” is certainly bold. Yet, it also duplicates the racial stereotypes and hierarchy of the culture of sentiment. Men like Percy’s “Othello” and the sweating dark model with the “superb physique” described above are flat characters, whose sole purpose in the text is to forward the storyline of white middle- class feminist liberation. The dark models are under the gaze of white middle-class women, who literally use them as objects to produce their art and obtain their independence. The models appear mysterious and exotic to the reader, reinforcing the stereotype of the exotic dark Other.

34 Importantly, the foreign dark models have no voice of their own. They are only given voice through Percy. For instance, when the “negro” model “Othello” sparks a debate on slavery among the women painting him, Percy states in her letter home that “He could understand little English but I know he felt what was said, for his eyes kindled and the brave breast with the scars on it (better than medals in my eyes), heaved now and then as if he longed to speak, while he looked what he is, every inch a soldier and a prince” (403). Both “beast” and “prince” at once, “Othello” represents a Rousseau-like . As was typical in nineteenth-century U.S. American sentimental works, the dark Othello, like the other dark models, is spoken for by a white middle-class

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woman. Percy is so confident—she “know[s] he felt what was said” and that “he longed to speak”—that she launches into an “antislavery lecture which would have delighted [her] Grandma” (403). In Alcott’s text, the authority shifts to the middle-class white U.S. American woman who speaks on behalf of the foreign dark man, performing the classic sentimental triangular rhetorical model wherein sympathy is evoked for a black body only to silence that body and redirect power and sympathy to a white body.15

Conclusion: The Imperialistic Mission

35 In encouraging white U.S. American middle class women to venture beyond the borders of the U.S. to empower themselves, Diana and Persis both challenges and perpetuates U.S. American imperialism. On the one hand, the story uses the conventions of sentimentalism to critique the U.S. for not delivering social and legal equity to women. The text suggests that this failure of the U.S. to provide equal rights to women has resulted in women being forced to flee from the U.S. and immigrate to the “new world” to acquire the gender equity that the “old world” cannot provide. In this respect, it conjures anti-American sentiment that runs counter to the hyper-patriotic mentality that propels U.S. American imperialism. Moreover, through its daring representation of transnational relationships, the text challenges hegemonic gender, racial, and sexual mores. Yet only to a certain point because the story also restores U.S. American imperialistic desires and racial/national hierarchies by teaching that the labor of dark foreigners in the “new world” is what makes emigration—or colonization—so profitable to white U.S. American middle-class women who go abroad.

36 In effect, Europe provides a decoy for the real “new world” where white U.S. American middle-class women are urged to go: the story suggests that foreign nations with dark- skinned people shall provide women with the liberation and power they cannot find in the U.S. Emigration from the U.S. and colonization elsewhere becomes the solution to solving U.S. American women’s problems with gender inequity. The story, however, also links white U.S. American middle-class liberation to foreign exploitation and colonization. In Diana and Persis, however, Europe is not clearly Europe. Alcott racializes almost every “European” that Percy and Diana encounter. Whatever the case, the novella urges in sentimental fashion that U.S. American white women go abroad to seek empowerment and liberation, which, the story promises, can be attained with the assistance of dark foreigners. Percy’s exclamation at the start of the story, “I feel like Columbus going to discover a new world” (389), signals to readers the imperialistic mission of her venture abroad. The utopian “new world” that Percy finds abroad is one where white middle-class U.S. American women find professional, personal, and sexual liberation through the labor of dark foreign men.

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BIBLIOGRAPHY

ALCOTT, Louisa M. Diana and Persis. 1978. Alternative Alcott. Ed. Elaine Showalter. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1988, p. 381-441.

ALCOTT, Louisa M. Aunt Jo’s Scrap-Bag. Volume 2. Shawl Straps. Boston: Roberts Brothers, 1872.

ARTESE, Brian. “Overhearing Testimony: James in the Shadow of Sentimentalism.” The Henry James Review, vol. 27, no. 2, 2006, p. 103-125.

BAYM, Nina. Woman’s Fiction: A Guide to Novels by and about Women in America, 1820-70. Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1993.

BENSTOCK, Shari. Women of the Left Bank: Paris, 1900-1940. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1986.

BERCOVICH, Sacvan. The American Jeremiad. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1978.

BEREND, Zsuzsa. “‘Written All Over With Money’[:] Earning, Spending, and Emotion in the Alcott Family.” Journal of Historical Sociology, vol. 16, no. 2, 2003, p. 209-236.

CHENEY, Ednah D., ed. Louisa May Alcott: Her Life, Letters, and Journals. Boston: Roberts Brothers, 1889.

DOYLE, Christine. “American Girls and American Literature: Louisa May Alcott ‘Talks Back’ to Henry James.” Critical Insights: Louisa May Alcott. Salem: Salem Press, 2016, p. 205-220.

ELBERT, Sarah. A Hunger for Home: Louisa May Alcott’s Place in American Culture. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1987.

ELBERT, Sarah. “Introduction.” Diana and Persis. New York: Arno, 1978, p. ix-xliii.

ELBERT, Sarah. “Introduction.” Louisa May Alcott on Race, Sex, and Slavery. Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1997, p. ix-lx.

EMERSON, Ralph W. “Culture.” The Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson: The Conduct of Life. Fireside Edition. Boston and New York: Ralph Waldo Emerson. 1860, p. 125-160.

FLINT, Azelina. “‘Her lovely presence ever near me lives’: A Brief Encounter from the Archives with May Alcott Nieriker.” Brief Encounters, vol. 2, no. 1, 2018, p. 53-68.

HAWTHORNE, Nathaniel. The Marble Faun. 1860. New York: Penguin, 1990.

JAMES, Henry. Daisy Miller. 1878. New York: Penguin, 1986.

JAMES, Henry. The Portrait of a Lady. 1881. New York, Penguin, 1995.

KAPLAN, Amy. The Anarchy of Empire in the Making of U.S. Culture. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2002.

KEMP, Mark A. R. “The Marble Faun and American Postcolonial Ambivalence.” Modern Fiction Studies, vol. 43, no. 1, 1997, p. 209-36.

KLIMASMITH, Betsy. “Slave, Master, Mistress, Slave: Genre and Interracial Desire in Louisa May Alcott’s Fiction.” ATQ, vol. 11, no. 2, 1997, p. 115-135.

LEVINE, Robert. “Sympathy and Reform in The Blithedale Romance.” The Cambridge Companion to Nathaniel Hawthorne. Ed. Richard H. Millington. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004, p. 207-229.

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MASON, Jennifer. Civilized Creatures: Urban Animals, Sentimental Culture, and American Literature, 1850-1900. Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 2005.

MORRISON, Toni. Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination. New York: Vintage, 1992.

NOBLE, Marianne. “Sentimental Epistemologies in Uncle Tom’s Cabin and The House of the Seven Gables.” Separate Spheres No More: Gender Convergence in American Literature, 1830-1930. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2000, p. 261-281.

NGUYEN, Viet Thanh. Race and Resistance: Literature and Politics in Asian America. New York: Oxford University Press, 2002.

OFFEN, Karen. “Contextualizing the Theory and Practice of Feminism in Nineteenth-Century Europe, 1789-1914.” Becoming Visible: Women in European History (3rd ed.). Eds. Renate Bridenthal, Susan Mosher Stuard, and Merry E. Wiesner. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1998, p. 327-356.

PAULIN, Diana R. “‘Let Me Play Desdemona’: White Heroines and Interracial Desire in Louisa May Alcott’s ‘My Contraband’ and ‘M.L.’” White Women in Racialized Spaces: Imaginative Transformation and Ethical Action in Literature. Eds. Samina Najmi and Rajini Srikanth. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2002, p. 119-130.

PHILLIPS, Anne K. “The Prophets and the Martyrs: Pilgrims and Missionaries in Little Women and Jack and Jill.” Little Women and the Feminist Imagination: Criticism, Controversy, Personal Essays. Eds. Janice M. Alberghene and Beverly Lyon Clark. New York: Garland Publishing, 1999, p. 213-236.

ROSENFELD, Natania. “Artists and Daughters in Louisa May Alcott’s Diana and Persis.” The New England Quarterly, vol. 64, no. 1, 1991, p. 3-21.

ROTUNDO, E. Anthony. American Manhood: Transformations in Masculinity from the Revolution to the Modern Era. New York: Harper Collins, 1993.

SAMUELS, Shirley. “Introduction.” The Culture of Sentiment: Race, Gender, and Sentimentality in Nineteenth-Century America. New York: Oxford University Press, 1992, p. 3-8.

SHEALY, Daniel. “Introduction.” Little Women Abroad: The Alcott Sisters’ Letters from Europe, 1870-1871. Ed. Daniel Shealy. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2008, p. xv-lxxiii.

SHOWALTER, Elaine. “Introduction.” Alternative Alcott. Ed. Elaine Showalter. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1988, p. ix-xliii.

STOWE, William W. Going Abroad: European Travel in Nineteenth-Century American Culture. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994.

TELLEFSEN, Blythe Ann. “‘The Case with My Dear Native Land’: Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Vision of America in The Marble Faun.” Nineteenth-Century Literature. Vol. 54, 2000, p. 455-479.

TICKNOR, Caroline, ed. May Alcott: A Memoir. Boston: Little, Brown, & Co., 1928.

WADSWORTH, Sarah. “Unsettling Engagements in Moods and Little Women; or Learning to Love Louisa May Alcott.” Critical Insights: Little Women. Eds. Anne K. Phillips and Gregory Eiselein. Ipswich: Grey House Publishing, 2015, p. 174-188.

WARNER, Susan. The Wide, Wide World. 1850. New York: Feminist Press, 1987.

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NOTES

1. Diana and Persis was written in 1879, but was not published during Alcott’s lifetime. The manuscript was left unpublished until 1978. 2. Although Hawthorne and James are often viewed by critics in contradistinction to sentimental writers—and even the authors themselves would distance themselves from sentimentalism—I would argue, as other critics have, that many of their works can be characterized as sentimental. See, for example, Brian Artese, Robert Levine, Marianne Noble, and Jennifer Mason. 3. I borrow the phrase, “flexible strategy of accommodation and resistance,” from Viet Thanh Nguyen (5-7). 4. For more on May Alcott’s life in Europe, see Ticknor. 5. According to Natania Rosenfeld, “[Louisa] dreamed of escaping the dreary atmosphere of Concord, Massachusetts, and, like her sister, finding self-fulfillment in Europe. Her resentment at the role she had to play and at May’s freedom and good fortune are recorded in her written works. Even in her last years, she expressed her anger and misery in journals and letters” (4). 6. See Nina Baym for more on the typical plotlines of sentimental novels. 7. For a discussion of the links between Percy Shelley and the goddess Diana to the characters Persis/Percy and Diana, see Showalter’s “Introduction” to Diana and Persis. 8. For more on the connections between the character of Diana and Harriet Hosmer, see Showalter. 9. These positive representations of transnational relations between European men and US American women were not only inspired by May’s blissful marriage to Ernest Nieriker, but also by the happy, romantic relationship Louisa developed in Europe with Ladislas “Laddie” Wisinewski, the young Polish man who many critics have pointed out left such a major impression on Louisa that he was the inspiration for Laurie in Little Women. 10. Rosenfeld points out, “Mueller’s physical appearance differs from that of Ernest Nieriker. May described her husband [in her letters to home] as fair” (Rosenfeld14). 11. For more on how Alcott racializes men in her sensational stories, see Paulin and Klimasmith, as well as Elbert’s introduction to Louisa May Alcott on Race, Sex, and Slavery. 12. Because Alcott left the novel unfinished, we do not know for certain whether or not she ties the knot with Stafford. However, most critics agree that “the novel […] strongly suggests that Diana was going to marry her sculptor-hero [and] become a mother to his little boy” (Showalter xlii). 13. See also Elbert. Though Elbert, like Paulin, focuses on Alcott’s gothic thrillers, her essay is useful in thinking about interracial/transnational desire in the sentimental context as well. Elbert shows that the Spanish man of Alcott’s dreams appears in her texts and that “A Spanish spouse and ‘Spanish’ was frequently a code word for black” (Elbert, 1997 xxxv). I would extend Elbert’s claim to Diana and Persis and suggest that dark foreigners are coded as black in this text as well, just like Spanish men. 14. See Azelina Flint on May’s representation of painting a half-nude African model in her letters home and how that might have been perceived at home. 15. For more on the triangular sentimental rhetorical model, see Shirley Samuels. I have extended Samuels’s discussion here to include foreignness. Samuels’s focus is on African American bodies.

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ABSTRACTS

This paper examines romantic relationships between U.S. and non-U.S. citizens in Diana and Persis, Louisa May Alcott’s 1879 sentimental novella set in Europe and based on May Alcott’s life. The essay argues that Alcott uses sentimental, transnational relationships and the adulation of France and Italy to question gender and racial inequities in the U.S., as well as to encourage U.S. American women to escape the dominant patriarchal ideology through emigration to Europe. Although these transnational relationships propagate a feminist agenda that challenges gender and racial hierarchies in powerful ways, the novella also complexly participates in the subordination of dark foreign Others and the US imperial project.

Cet article examine la façon dont Louisa May Alcott représente les rapports amoureux entre citoyens américains et non-américains dans Diana and Persis (1879), longue nouvelle sentimentale qui a pour cadre l’Europe et fut en partie inspirée par la vie de May Alcott. Combinées à une vision idéalisée de la France et de l’Italie, les relations transnationales et sentimentales qui se développent entre les personnages permettent à Alcott de remettre en question les inégalités de genre et de race aux États-Unis et invitent les Américaines à émigrer en Europe afin d’échapper aux pressions de l’idéologie patriarcale. Toutefois, même si ces relations transnationales véhiculent des positions féministes qui participent à la déconstruction des hiérarchies de genre comme de race, la nouvelle, paradoxalement, renforce aussi le projet impérialiste américain, et la subordination d’un autre racialisé.

INDEX

Keywords: Louisa May Alcott, sentimentalism, transnationalism, feminism, imperialism, gender, race Mots-clés: Louisa May Alcott, sentimentalisme, transnationalisme, féminisme, impérialisme, genre, race

AUTHOR

LESLIE HAMMER University of California, Santa Barbara, [email protected]

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Reading the Bibliographies of the Women’s Rest Tour Association: Cultural Travel in the Long Nineteenth Century

Julia Carlson

Overview of the WRTA

1 The increasing involvement of American women in independent transatlantic travel in the late nineteenth century was reflected in the establishment of the Women’s Rest Tour Association in Boston in 1891. Founded by poet and biographer Imogen Guiney and fiction writer and editor Alice Brown along with their friends, Anna Murdock and Maria Reed, the WRTA was established accidentally when Brown and Guiney wished to publish A Summer in England: A Handbook for the Use of American Women after having been encouraged by Dr. Clarence Blake of Harvard Medical School to produce a manual for women on the subject of transatlantic travel based on their experience in the British Isles (Norton 3).1 When they were unable to obtain copyright for the handbook without being incorporated as an association, the WRTA was formed and soon became a significant women’s organization in the New England region where it operated effectively as a private club. The inspiration for the Association’s name came from Blake, who subscribed to the belief that travel could serve as a “rest” cure for women; however, it was clear from the start that although there was emphasis on travel as leisure and recovery, there was an even greater emphasis on a progressive feminist agenda establishing the benefits of independent travel for empowering women intellectually and encouraging their productivity. As the Association’s first circular from 1892 stated: “A trip abroad is the best of all remedies for tired brains and overstrained nerves, for narrowing or monotonous lives, and inevitably endows the busy woman of intellectual and cultivated tastes with renewed inspiration for better work and greater usefulness” (Norton 3). In her groundbreaking discussion of the

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WRTA, Libby Bishof establishes its wide-ranging significance for women and underscores the ways in which it was “a unique travel organization” that challenged Victorian gender conventions and encouraged women to work cooperatively to create “a community of confident women travelers” (Bischof 155). Combining idealism with practicality, the WRTA focused on boosting women’s self-confidence through disseminating information: it was described in its handbook as “a bureau, to which women who have travelled may bring the results of their study and observation for the enriching of others, and where the timorous or inexperienced may apply for aid” ([Guiney and Brown] 5). Benefits offered by the WRTA included access to its lending library of guidebooks, an introduction service for women looking for travel companions, access to the Association’s much-coveted Lodging List, and security in the form of voluntary consuls in countries where members traveled. The WRTA’s handbook provided advice on everything from managing finances and seasickness to traveling on continental trains and choosing undergarments for hot weather. Moreover, the handbook included two lengthy bibliographies of recommended reading, one for the British Isles and one for the Continent.

2 When examined in depth, these two bibliographies reveal a duality at the heart of the WRTA, not commented upon before, in which a progressive feminism, which encouraged Association members to act and think independently, is balanced against a cultural and social conservatism, which cushioned them from questioning cultural and ethnic prejudice. Helen Norton indicates in her history of the WRTA that it reached out, with an almost missionary fervor, to a coterie of educated, puritanical, middle class New England women who valued learning and cultural experience above all else: Women of cultivated tastes and small means dreamed of the day when they could save enough money for a European trip. At the outset, it was this group and especially low-salaried teachers, that the Association aimed to reach. In the New England states particularly where “high thinking and plain living” prevailed in many a household, those who stood to benefit from such a project were legion. (Norton 1)

3 Norton also reveals, however, that membership was highly selective. Not only did applicants require references from two current members, they also needed to possess certain character traits: “Meeting admission requirements adequately called for of certain personal qualities such as reliability, good judgment, cooperation, and a sense of responsibility.” Moreover, social acceptability was a prerequisite: These attributes must be supplemented, the Membership Committee insisted, by social acceptability as evidenced by refinement, intelligence, good manners, good taste and an instinct for fair dealing. The society felt deeply responsible for sending out under its name only persons whom the listed proprietors would be glad to receive, and who would creditably represent our country abroad. (Norton 6) Thus, while there is no question that the WRTA was a progressive organization, it also had a socially conservative side, which manifested itself clearly in the class bias of the Membership Committee and, it will be seen, was equally present in the bibliographies of its handbook.

Progressivism in the WRTA

4 Guiney and Brown’s progressive ambitions for the WRTA could not be more apparent than they are in the handbook’s two lightly annotated bibliographies. Combined, they

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contain over four hundred entries, and although they have been largely overlooked, Norton identified them as “unsurpassed for [their] purpose and the day, and of permanent value” (Norton 3). The feminist focus of the Association is immediately evident in the sheer scale of the bibliographies and in the strong emphasis placed on writing by a wide range of contemporary American and European women writers. William W. Stowe has indicated that in the nineteenth-century United States “[t]he traveling class was a reading class, and travel was seen as a preeminently literary activity” (Stowe 13). The WRTA bibliographies exemplify this, and like several writers of travel handbooks before them, such as George P. Putnam and Roswell Park, Guiney and Brown frequently address the reader as a “student” or “scholar,” indicating their conviction that transatlantic travel was as much an intellectual journey as a geographical one (Stowe 35). In doing this Guiney and Brown also insert themselves into the ongoing feminist debate about women’s education and make a clear connection between education and empowerment for women by equating independent cultural travel with rigorous study. Study is recommended at home before departure and on board ship. The dedicated “student” is given information on how to procure British Library and British Museum reading tickets, while a section of the handbook entitled “English Universities” contains the epigraph “‘Study is like the heaven’s glorious sun’” from Love’s Labour’s Lost, and offers detailed information on possibilities for study at Oxford, Cambridge and other universities (54). Pleasure is not excluded as an end result of reading, but there is that the better informed the woman and the more comprehensive her reading, the more she will become empowered and thereby benefit from her experience of independent travel.

5 In the same way that the bibliographies place the educated woman traveler at the center of the WRTA, they are progressive in the way in which they emphasize the importance of academic study for women, indicating thereby that it is not solely the province of the male reader. Annotations compare the various merits of academic works and literary texts, while critical thinking and analysis are encouraged. Those traveling to Greece, for example, are alerted to the intellectual challenge confronting them: Even the hurried visitor needs here to have studied the myths and legends of the country. She should have read the “Iliad” and “Odyssey” (Bryant’s translation), and have made herself familiar with Bulfinch’s “Age of Fable.” If she has read the great dramatists, Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides, so much the better. ([Guiney and Brown] 80)

6 The art of Italy, particularly that of the Renaissance, which Van Wyck Brooks observed was enjoying a renaissance of its own in Boston at the time, receives special attention (Brooks 446). Guiney and Brown present it as a scholarly project: “One who would know Italy, her literature, art, and history, needs at least two life-times of study” ([Guiney and Brown] 82). Four pages of the Continental bibliography are devoted to works concerning Italy, including many by recognized Renaissance scholars. American Classical archaeologist Lucy M. Mitchell’s A History of Ancient Sculpture (1883) is identified as being “[m]ore entertaining” than German art historian Wilhelm Lübke’s History of Sculpture (1863); Jacob Burckhardt’s The Civilisation of the Renaissance (1860) is included, along with his guidebook The Cicerone: An Art Guide to Painting in Italy for the Use of Travellers and Students (1873), which is described as “invaluable.” British authorities also are highly recommended, including John Addington Symonds whose Renaissance in Italy (1875) is described as “very long and very delightful” ([Guiney and Brown] 83-84).

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7 Throughout the British bibliography the cultural authority of academics and those with connections to Oxford and Cambridge, in particular, is privileged. Oxford historian Edward A. Freeman’s English Towns and Districts (1883), erroneously entitled “English Tours and Districts” in the bibliography, comes with the annotation that everything by him and Oxford based historian John Richard Green “abundantly repays hard study” ([Guiney and Brown] 63). Scottish academic David Masson is identified specifically as a “professor of literature in Edinburgh University, [who] has a fund of personal reminiscence, and knows how to set it forth” in Edinburgh Sketches and Memories (1892); Oxford bookseller John Henry Parker’s An Introduction to the Study of Gothic Architecture (1881), based on lectures given by him at the Oxford Architectural Society, is described as “a text-book well worth conning” ([Guiney and Brown] 65).

8 Although they address the high-thinking woman with their emphasis on academic preparation for travel, the bibliographies are not limited in focus to academic study. Guiney and Brown show an equal awareness that women’s personal empowerment depends upon access to practical information. To this end, they compare the merits of various guidebooks, recognizing their usefulness in spite of the fact that tourists were being ridiculed for relying on them. The bibliography for the British Isles advises the traveler to “[b]uy everywhere the local shilling guides.” Baddeley and Ward’s Thorough Guides to the Lake District and other regions will lead one “to all places heart can wish”; while English publisher John Murray’s popular handbooks are compared to Baedeker’s: “‘Murray’ is perhaps less practical, but brims over with accurate information.” Ultimately, it is the more practical Baedeker which receives the WRTA’s seal of approval as the traveler is advised: “perhaps Baedeker needs no supplementing, except by general reading” ([Guiney and Brown] 62-63). In fact, when addressing the subject of visiting London, Guiney and Brown go so far as to dismiss their scholarly approach completely, effectively setting themselves up to be caricatured: “The unanimous indorsement of all the women at the bottom of the Rest Tour Association is: Buy a ‘Baedeker’s London,’ study it, sleep with it, and swear by it. With that, and a large-print Bacon’s map of London and its environs, you are in a fair way to know all that is knowable of the ancestral capital” ([Guiney and Brown] 33-34). This is quite a risqué statement for the handbook, and as such only serves to underscore the central role that acquisition of practical information plays in creating self-sufficiency for women.

International Coverage of Women Writers

9 The progressive feminist focus of the bibliographies is further evident in the wide- ranging international coverage given to women historians, biographers and novelists. While works by women were included in other guidebooks of the period, such as Mary Cadwalader Jones’s European Travel for Women (1900), there is no comparison in terms of numbers to what Guiney and Brown offer. Works by English writers such as Maria Francesca Rossetti’s A Shadow of Dante (1871), Margaret Oliphant’s biography of St. Francis of Assisi and her studies The Makers of Venice (1885) and The Makers of Florence (1876) are all included, as is Oliphant’s study of Scottish royalty, Royal Edinburgh (1890), while studies of the French court by Lady Catherine Jackson (1824-1891) are recommended as “entertaining” ([Guiney and Brown] 78). Four works by Irish art historian Anna Brownell Jameson (1794-1860) are recommended, along with Emily Lawless’s The Story of Ireland (1887); and visitors to Greece are advised to “[r]ead, at least, Mrs. Mitchell’s description of the Parthenon and its neighbors” (81). Equally,

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there is emphasis on biographies of prominent women, such as Mrs. Gaskell’s Life of Charlotte Brontë (1857), Agnes Strickland’s Lives of the Queens of England (1840), and Frances Gerard’s Angelica Kaufmann (1892), a study of the Swiss painter who was one of two female founding members of the Royal Academy, while the dress-conscious traveler is catered to in Georgiana Hill’s A History of English Dress from the Saxon Period to the Present Day (1893).

10 In the same way that they highlight historical studies by and of women, the bibliographies indicate an extensive knowledge of, and support for, fiction by women novelists. In drawing attention to the value of fiction, Guiney and Brown enter into the debate current at the time concerning the impact of the reading of fiction on women, and again they take a progressive stance, arguing strongly for its educational value and defending it as an intellectual exercise, rather than self-indulgence, emphasizing that it has what Kate Flint has termed a “manifestly utilitarian end, offering the reader empirical information about historical events or geographical settings” (Flint 49). “There is a liberal education to be had in a study of English novels,” the reader is told, “those who have long steeped their souls in this delightful atmosphere have a knowledge not to be despised concerning customs and people” ([Guiney and Brown] 67). Particularly notable is the number of Continental novelists. Amongst others, Clara Mundt (1814-1873), who wrote under the pseudonym Luise Mühlbach, has three novels included in the German section, while Eugenie John (1825-1887), who wrote under the pseudonym E. Marlitt, is recommended for work that contains “interesting pictures of German life” and as an alternative to Goethe whose “great prose romances [are] only to be attempted by the elect” (80). George Sand (1804-1876) is recommended for Consuelo in the Italian section, while the novels of Swedish feminist Fredrika Bremer (1801-1865), which WRTA members would have known from Little Women where Mrs. March reads from them along with Scott and , are judged as “old- fashioned but delightful” ([Guiney and Brown] 86).

11 The wide-ranging coverage of works by British and Continental women writers is matched in the bibliographies by coverage given to works by women from the Boston and New England regions. When the WRTA was established, high profile women in the Boston literary community, such as Sarah Orne Jewett and Julia Ward Howe, who became the Association’s first President, were recruited to lend authority to the organization. Both Guiney and Brown were prominent figures in Boston literary circles, and the bibliographies suggest the solidarity existing between women writers with Boston connections. Well-known writers such as Harriet Beecher Stowe and Mabel Agnes Tincker, whose novel Signor Monaldini’s Niece (1879) had gained her an international reputation, are included, along with many authors familiar to readers locally. Susan Hale, who wrote a history of and fictional travel books with her brother Edward Everett Hale, appears several times, although her fictionalized travel book A Family Flight through Spain (1883) is incorrectly identified as co-authored with her brother. Translator and novelist Harriet Waters Preston, known for fiction set in New England, is recommended for her translation of Mistral and her study of French poetry, Troubadours and Trouvères (1876). Virginia W. Johnson, whose family had Boston connections and who lived in Florence where she wrote numerous non-fiction books, including The Lily of the Arno (1891) about Florence and Genoa the Superb: The City of Columbus (1892) also appears, as does Francesca Alexander, the daughter of expatriate portrait painter, Francis Alexander, who grew up in Boston and is recommended for

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her sketches of Italy, Christ’s Folk in the Apennine (1887), which are remarked upon for their portrait of “peasant life” ([Guiney and Brown] 85).

Travelogues by American Women Writers

12 A striking feature of the bibliographies, which lends further support to the feminist agenda of the WRTA, is their extensive inclusion of travelogues by British and American women writers, many of which had their origins in columns in periodicals. Mary Suzanne Schriber has written about the proliferation of travel journalism by women in the 1880s and 1890s, exactly the time of the establishment of the WRTA (Schriber 56). Both Guiney and Brown published regularly in Boston-based periodicals, and they suggest the significance of journalism for women readers when they enthusiastically recommend Poole’s Index to Periodical Literature as a resource: “‘Poole’s Index to Periodical Literature’ contains, alphabetically arranged, the titles of all articles published in the leading periodicals. These form a rich library in themselves” (75). Numerous travelogues by English writers feature in both bibliographies, but the number of travelogues by writers with Boston connections is particularly notable. Works are included by May Alcott Nieriker, the sister of Louisa May Alcott, who gives advice on studying art in Paris in The Art Student in Paris (1887) and Studying Art Abroad and How to Do It Cheaply, which are singled out as “valuable,” and Amy Fay, who became a well-known pianist in Boston and wrote of her studies in Germany with Franz Liszt and others in Music Study in Germany (1880) (79). Interestingly, Alice Brown’s travelogue, By Oak and Thorn: A Record of English Days (1896), is excluded, perhaps out of modesty, because, as Bishof has established, Guiney and Brown deliberately concealed their shared authorship of the handbook in order to present it as a collaborative effort (Bishof 156-57). Journalists with Boston connections are well represented in book length accounts of travel by Helen Hunt, who wrote for the Atlantic Monthly; Blanche Willis Howard, who wrote for the Boston Evening Transcript; Mary Elizabeth Blake, whose “Rambling Talks” appeared in the Boston Journal; and Kate Field, whom Henry James used as a model for Henrietta Stackpole in The Portrait of a Lady, and who wrote for periodicals in Boston, New York and Washington. All of these accounts, apart from Fay’s, were published in Boston, three in James R. Osgood’s Saunterer’s Series.

13 These travelogues by women writers, particularly those with New England connections, can be seen as providing a template for the experience of cultural travel as encouraged by the WRTA. May Alcott Nieriker could have been writing for the WRTA, when she identified her ideal reader in Studying Art Abroad: I am supposing our particular artist to be no gay tourist, doing Europe according to guide-books, with perhaps a few lessons, here and there, taken only for the name of having been the pupil of some distinguished master, but a thoroughly earnest worker, a lady, and poor [...] wishing to make the most of all opportunities, and the little bag of gold last as long as possible (Nieriker 6-7).

14 There is a feminist focus in the travelogues, each of which gives prominence to the fact that women are traveling independently without male chaperonage. Stowe has identified European travel in the nineteenth century as “a kind of secular ritual, complete with prescribed actions, promised rewards, and a set of quasi-scriptural writings” (Stowe 19). Although Blake, Howard, and Hunt adhere to prescribed routes and punctuate their travels with observations from similar cultural authorities, valuable advice for women traveling independently is embedded in their texts that

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directly echoes advice provided in the WRTA handbook. Like Nieriker, Howard addresses readers in One Year Abroad, challenging them to be assertive and to resist the security of the guidebook: Too much guide-book makes you know far too well what to do, where to go, how long to stay. It leaves nothing to imagination, to enthusiasm, to the whim of the moment. Dear guide-book people, don’t know so much, don’t calculate so much, don’t measure and weigh and test everything! Don’t speak so much to what you see, and then what you see will speak more to you. (Howard 4)

15 Similarly, the travelogues encourage women to challenge accepted female behavior. Howard uses a comic scene, in which she and her traveling companions struggle to be polite after being handed spoons so they can share a bowl of soup with a group of workmen in a small Austrian village, as a vehicle for exploring her own cultural prejudices and mocking the culturally conservative voices that dictate what constitutes correct behavior for women: we ate not in a proper true spirit, but like a hypocrite, or an actress, so strong are these silly prejudices that govern us. […] Our one regret in the whole experience was, that we could not summon the primest [sic] woman of our acquaintance to suddenly stand in the doorway and gaze in, aghast, upon this convivial scene. (Howard 143)

16 Kate Field takes a more assertive approach in Ten Days in Spain as she recounts her journey in the company of a hired courier in September 1873 to interview Emilio Castelar, President of the First Spanish Republic, during a time of civil war when few Americans traveled to Spain. Schriber has argued with regard to Field’s collection of travel articles Hap-Hazard (1873) that she uses European travel as an occasion for “travels into the politics of gender as they operate on the homefront” (Schriber 156). This is certainly the case here as Field uses not only her own self-dramatized derring- do to celebrate American womanhood but also her observations of Spanish women as a springboard for discussing political debates in the United States. Describing the physical labor Spanish women engage in, for example, Field challenges the “hot-house rearing” of American women to deride “the miserable sentimental theory that women are born to be sickly dolls” (Field 56). In a similar, more subdued vein Nieriker reinforces the importance the WRTA places on collective action when she recalls how a group of American women art students banded together to defeat sexual discrimination within a Paris atelier, arguing how impressed Parisians were with the “dignity […] modesty […] and steadfast purpose” of the women (Nieriker 48-49). Taken together, these travelogues exemplify the way in which Guiney and Brown utilized the bibliographies as agents of empowerment for women, not only using them as tools for educating the reader, but also using them to provide a complex network of role models that supported cultural travel for women by connecting them to their fellow travelers.

Cultural Conservatism in the WRTA

The Cultural Authority of Boston

17 At the same time that the bibliographies reveal the progressivism of the WRTA, they expose its deep-seated cultural conservatism. This conservatism is suggested immediately in the high number of texts by authors with connections to the Boston area, indicating the New England region was as central to the bibliographies as it was to

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membership of the organization. In addition to work already mentioned by women writers from the region, works by Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, William Dean Howells, , Henry James, Francis Marion Crawford, who was a nephew of Julia Ward Howe, Thomas Bailey Aldrich, who served as Editor of the Atlantic Monthly, and Nathaniel Hawthorne and his son-in-law George Parsons Lathrop all appear, along with works by historians Edward Everett Hale and William H. Prescott, and Maturin Murray Ballou, the first editor of , making the bibliographies a showcase for the cultural output of Boston. While the inclusion of women writers from the Boston area certainly can be read from a feminist perspective, once their texts are combined with those of their male counterparts, the provinciality of the WRTA becomes strikingly apparent. In effect, the bibliographies reclaim cultural authority for Boston at a time when, as Brooks indicates, that authority was already passing from New England (Brooks 535). Moreover, they ensure the cultural values of Boston travel abroad with WRTA members who, if they adhere to a carefully curated selection of reading material recommended by Guiney and Brown, need never leave the cultural authority of Boston behind.

Anglophilia

18 In the same way the bibliographies claim cultural authority for Boston, they also claim it for the British Isles, in general, and England, in particular, further defining the conservatism of the WRTA. British books dominate the bibliographies, and although nationalist perspectives espousing American democracy surface in many of the texts, this nationalism is ultimately overridden by reverence shown for the cultural authority of the British Isles. Brooks identifies a nostalgia for things British as endemic in Boston in the late nineteenth century and explicitly links it not only to an upsurge in travel from Boston to the British Isles, but specifically to Guiney, who moved permanently to England in 1901 (Brooks 462-63). Within the handbook this Anglophilia is on full display and although Guiney and Brown warn the reader against being a “rabid Anglomaniac,” their Anglophilia is inescapable ([Guiney and Brown] 51).

19 Highly romanticized, England is identified as the handbook’s “principal theme,” the country where the reader “can be most certain to live idyllic days” ([Guiney and Brown] 6-7) and where the artist “may find […] his earthly paradise” (41). Shakespeare has a dominant position in the form of epigraphs for individual sections throughout the handbook, which opens with a quotation from Richard II: “‘This royal throne of kings, this scepter’d isle,/ [...] This other Eden, demi-paradise;/ [...] This blessed plot, this earth, this realm, this England’” (4). Epigraphs from Shakespeare precede the bibliographies: “‘I will read politic authors’” from Twelfth Night introduces the bibliography for the British Isles (62), while “‘Your wisdom be your guide’” from Henry IV introduces the Continental one (75). Not surprisingly, British guidebooks, histories and travelogues dominate the bibliography for the British Isles, and the reader is encouraged to view the region through the lens they provide. Novelists are also well represented with Thackeray, Dickens, George Eliot, Jane Austen, William Black, R. D. Blackmore and George MacDonald all included, while Trollope is recommended for “something cathedrally” and “[f]or Parliamentary life,” Hardy for Dorsetshire, and Walter Besant’s novels for Lyme Regis, Portsmouth, Southwark and the story behind the People’s Palace in East London (67-68). Similarly, British poetry is shown to have a practical application, and the reader is advised that “[i]t will not, indeed, be amiss to

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shake hands over again with all the Lake School,” and that “Scott is rich in legend, and Wordsworth’s ‘Excursion’ might serve as a wanderer’s guide” (65). British writers also are well represented in the Continental bibliography, taking precedence over those from the Continent itself. The poems of Browning are the first works of literature recommended with claims being made for them as “very rich in local references” (75); William Morris’s “books on the Wolfings” are recommended as “fine settings of the most precious jewels from northern mythology” in the section on Norway and Sweden (86). In the two-page section on France, only two works by French historians appear, whereas Thomas Carlyle’s “The ” and “Diamond Necklace” are singled out as “wonderful tales dramatically told” (77). Travelogues and novels with French settings similarly are dominated by English writers, with Victor Hugo, Balzac, Erckmann-Chatrian and Daudet the only French writers mentioned, thus further establishing the concept of British cultural authority.

20 The Anglophilia displayed in the bibliographies is reinforced in the handbook when Guiney and Brown focus upon social codes, demonstrating a cultural insecurity with regard to British social behavior. In keeping with the practical focus of the handbook, the reader is introduced to British etiquette in a section entitled “Social Customs” where she is advised on matters such as the use of calling cards and how to dress for the theatre and garden parties. Although Guiney and Brown reassure the reader “that John Bull and all his family are disposed to like us heartily” and that “[t]o be ‘American’ [...] is to be endowed with a grace as unique and distinctive as that of French, Italian, or English dames,” (51) they also emphasize the important role the traveler has in representing the United States, issuing warnings with regard to social conduct and, like many writers of the period, singling out Daisy Miller as a role model to be avoided: And above all, remember that, although the eyes of the world may not be upon you, even the kindliest transatlantic relative will not be surprised if there crop out in your behavior the traits of a Daisy Miller or a Red Indian. Therefore, good and gracious country-women, “be vigilant,” and resolve to do your nation credit in word, look, and deed. (54) The duality characterizing the bibliographies surfaces here as Guiney and Brown balance the woman traveler’s independence against a more conservative social code, and, significantly, they opt for the latter when they offer the Englishwoman as a role model: “Independent as you may be, do not scorn to imitate one grace of the English woman, be she duchess or chambermaid,—her soft, low voice, that excellence which no American woman has yet attained in its infinitude of sweetness. Listen to it, delight in it, copy it if you can” (54). In this way, Guiney and Brown check the reader, underscoring the culturally conservative side of the WRTA as they signal the superiority of British manners and suggest American assertiveness needs modification in Europe.

21 This duality and the fascination with British social codes are dramatized in London- based Canadian Sara Jeannette Duncan’s satirical novel, An American Girl in London (1891), recommended for being “full of amusing imaginary experiences” (67). Christopher Mulvey has commented on the obsession American travelers of the nineteenth century had with the British aristocracy and upper classes, and throughout the novel Duncan satirizes this obsession by having her Chicago-born character, Mamie Wick, whose father’s wealth comes from manufacturing baking powder, narrate a story of how she attained access to English society in spite of making a succession of faux pas after misreading social codes (Mulvey 147). Mamie identifies herself as a voice for

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democratic principles and independence for women, yet she also reflects a pronounced Anglophile preoccupation with British society. In her social rounds she methodically introduces the reader to the social geography of London and a succession of upper class rituals, including visits to Ascot, a private ball and a country house estate. Throughout, Mamie receives detailed instructions in etiquette from a Lady Torquilin until she is eventually received at Court by the Queen, an event she recalls as the highlight of her trip: “To be perfectly candid, I liked going to Court better than any other thing I did in England” (292). The novel’s satirical tone is sustained throughout, with Mamie, who is at one point criticized by a group of proper Bostonians for being like Daisy Miller, being mocked for her gaucherie and the English being exposed for attempting to bolster up their finances with American wealth. Nevertheless, focus is principally upon educating the reader in the intricacies of social behavior within English society, making it, in effect, a conduct book, albeit a tongue-in-cheek one, for an Anglophone readership in the same way that Guiney and Brown use the WRTA handbook, in a more serious fashion, to educate the reader in what constitutes acceptable social behavior while traveling in the British Isles.

Ethnic and Class Prejudice

22 The cultural conservatism of the WRTA evident in the privileging of Boston and the British Isles extends further to an ethnic and class bias, which manifests itself at critical points in both the handbook and texts within the bibliographies. Significantly, the Anglophilia of Guiney and Brown plays its part in this ethnic bias when they implicitly exclude those not of British ancestry from their readership by equating a visit to the British Isles with a return to ancestral roots. In “this gracious motherland,” readers are told, travelers will find “a people. […] As someone has cleverly said, England may not actually be ‘home’ to the younger civilizations which are its offshoots, but ‘it contains all the title-deeds’” (6-7). Susan L. Roberson has indicated other writers of the period of British ancestry also referred to England in this way (Roberson 220). Nevertheless, a statement like this could be seen to suggest that Guiney and Brown, consciously or unconsciously, excluded those without British ancestry from their readership and, by extension, from the WRTA.

23 Three texts focusing on rural Europe and the conditions of peasantry, all of which are highly praised by Guiney and Brown, exemplify the ethnic and class prejudice which seeps out of a significant number of texts in the bibliographies: Margaret Symonds’s Days Spent on a Doge’s Farm (1893), recommended for its “beautiful and poetic pictures of country life in Italy” (85); Irish writer Jane Barlow’s collection of stories, Irish Idylls (1893), identified as offering “[w]onderful and pathetic pictures of peasant life” (68); London-based American expatriates Joseph and Elizabeth Robins Pennell’s Play in Provence (1892), singled out for its “incidents of happy travel” (78).

24 Throughout these texts there is a pronounced avoidance of discussing economic and class inequality and a corresponding emphasis on the poetical and the picturesque, terms used for praise in annotations. In fact, texts that call for social reform would appear to be deliberately omitted from the bibliographies. Zola’s naturalistic fiction is excluded from the French section, for example, while only one text is flagged as containing “discussions of social problems”: Lee Meriwether’s Afloat and Ashore on the Mediterranean (1892), which combines his investigations for the United States

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government into convict labor and the conditions of workingmen with a lighter account of travel (76).

25 The calculated avoidance of drawing attention to social and economic problems is exemplified in Play in Provence. Elizabeth Robins Pennell defines the narrative angle she and her husband adopt, revealing how they rejected a socioeconomic and historical approach in favor of a poetic one: Provence has a history as picturesque as itself, but we studied it solely in Roumanille and Mistral and Daudet. [...] Agricultural and industrial problems may darken many a mas, many a vineyard and olive-garden, but never did we go out of our way to find them. [...] Life was gay and beautiful in the sunshine; we never sought the shadows. One need not be forever earnest and solemn, forever on the scent of evil, forever rooting out wrongs. (38, 40, 42) Focusing chiefly on traditional festivals, such as a bull run in Arles and a display of religious relics at the Maries Feast in Saintes-Maries, the Pennells breezily represent Provence as an antiquarian curiosity. Poverty is romanticized and the Provencal peasant merged metaphorically with the landscape, while ethnic prejudice is used as a tool to distinguish the Provencal from other ethnic groups: “He is gay as his sunshine. I do not mean that he is shiftless and lazy and irresponsibly happy, like the negro or the gipsy. He works hard. He has his bad seasons. Luck at times goes against him, and he has seen days of distress and disaster. But in his toiling and in his poverty he laughs” (Pennell 23-24). Thus, realistic details of working life are airbrushed as the Pennells deploy a strategy of evasion that enables them to create a picturesque lens through which the reader can view Provence and, thereby, avoid seriously questioning the existing social order.

26 A comparable strategy of evasion exists in Jane Barlow’s stories set on tenant farms in the isolated Irish village of Lisconnel. Barlow preserves class distinctions by utilizing a narrative structure in which an educated narrator interprets the behavior of villagers who speak in a dialect that underscores their ethnicity and suggests social inferiority. Although Barlow places considerable emphasis on the material conditions of villagers living in fear of eviction and emigration, she avoids directly addressing controversial political questions, such as the Irish Land Wars, which were actively debated at the time. In the “mournful history” related in the story “Herself,” for example, Mrs. O’Driscoll’s eviction following the death of her husband and the emigration of her children is viewed fatalistically by her fellow villagers, “as one of those things with which there is no contending” (Barlow 158). Significantly, the narrator never challenges this view, instead emphasizing how Mrs. O’Driscoll is humored and supported by the community. Instead of focusing upon social injustice, then, the story foregrounds “the forlornness of her plight,” with the result that Barlow uses pathos to create sympathy for her character but never directly challenges the existing social order (150).

27 Class and ethnic bias likewise surface in English writer Margaret Symonds’s Days Spent on a Doge’s Farm where Symonds resists investigating the situation of the peasantry of the Veneto in Vescovana in favor of celebrating the achievements of the widowed English Countess Pisani. Like the Pennells and Barlow, Symonds demonstrates an awareness of the living conditions of the peasantry, and in a chapter entitled “The Melancholy of the Plain,” she reflects upon their possible state of mind: To be truthful, I must state at once that the effect of life in this plain seems to be a saddening one. […] The very songs which they sang at their work were weighted

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with a human misery which was almost discordant; and lacking any hope or sunshine such as may be reflected back upon a happier soul, they almost startled one. (Symonds 99, 102) She does not pursue the subject further, however, preferring to romanticize the countryside and focus on the Countess’s expert management of Villa Pisani, her transformation of it from a troubled family estate into a successful working farm and her creation of an English style garden on the property. Reflecting the Anglophilia prominent in the bibliographies, the Countess’s success is attributed in no small part to her Englishness: “Englishwomen are said to be capable of wonderful things. Certainly I have met one at least in a remote corner of Italy whose life work is no trifling matter” (Symonds 117). Moreover, Symonds has nothing but praise for the Countess’s air of command: “I believe if this imperious lady owned Westminster she would attempt to control its slums” (121). In this way, Symonds offers the Countess as a model of paternalistic, aristocratic authority, suggesting it, rather than social change, could hold the solution to social problems. With their positive annotations, these three texts when taken together offer a template for the cultural and social conservatism of the WRTA, underscoring its class and ethnic bias and revealing how it privileged the Anglo-Saxon voice.

Conclusion

28 When analyzed closely, the bibliographies of the Women’s Rest Tour Association reveal it to have supported cultural travel for women by combining a progressive feminism with a cultural conservatism. In the same way that the WRTA screened applicants, restricting its membership to well-connected, high-minded women who would represent it favorably abroad, so too the bibliographies ensured that reading recommended by the WRTA never veered too far from the cultural authority of the British Isles and Boston. The cultural tour of Europe recommended in the bibliographies is carefully scripted: the healthful, invigorating walks in the countryside advocated in the WRTA’s handbook find a parallel in the intellectual challenges offered in the academic program the bibliographies set forth, while the handbook’s advice to avoid working class districts of European cities finds a parallel in texts which poeticize the landscape and carefully avoid analysis of contemporary social and economic problems. Unquestionably the WRTA was a progressive organization for its time and it would be incorrect to say that its achievement was radically undermined by its cultural conservatism, nevertheless it was restricted by it and by the cultural biases that both empowered and cushioned its members.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

BARLOW, Jane. Irish Idylls. New York: Dodd, Mead & Company, 1893. Internet Archive, Web. Accessed 1 May 2018.

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BISCHOF, Libby. “A Summer in England: The Women’s Rest Tour Association of Boston and the Encouragement of Independent Transatlantic Travel for American Women.” Transatlantic Women. Eds. Beth L. Lueck, Brigitte Bailey, and Lucinda L. Damon-Bach. Durham: University of New Hampshire Press, 2012, p. 153-71.

BROOKS, Van Wyck. New England: Indian Summer. New York: E. P. Dutton and Company, 1950.

DUNCAN, Sara J. An American Girl in London. New York: D. Appleton, 1891. Internet Archive, Web. Accessed 1 May 2018.

FIELD, Kate. Ten Days in Spain. Boston: James R. Osgood, 1875, Internet Archive, Web, 1 May 2018.

FLINT, Kate. The Woman Reader, 1837-1914. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993.

[GUINEY, Louise Imogen, and Alice BROWN]. A Summer in England With a Continental Supplement: A Handbook for the Use of American Women. Boston: A. J. Ochs, 1900.

HOWARD, Blanche W. One Year Abroad. Boston: James R. Osgood, 1878. Internet Archive, Web. Accessed 1 May 2018.

MULVEY, Christopher. Transatlantic Manners: Social Patterns in Nineteenth-Century Anglo-American Travel Literature. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990.

NIERIKER, May Alcott. Studying Art Abroad and How to Do It Cheaply. Boston: Roberts Brothers, 1879. Internet Archive, Web. Accessed 1 May 2018.

NORTON, Helen Rich. “The Story of the Women’s Rest Tour Association.” MS, Women’s Rest Tour Association Collection, Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA.

PENNELL, Joseph and Elizabeth Robins PENNELL. Play in Provence. New York: The Century Co., 1892. Internet Archive, Web. Accessed 1 May 2018.

ROBERSON, Susan L. “American women and travel writing.” The Cambridge Companion to American Travel Writing. Eds. Alfred Bendixen and Judith Hamera. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009, p. 214-227.

SCHRIBER, Mary Suzanne. Writing Home: American Women Abroad, 1830-1920. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1997.

STOWE, William W. Going Abroad: European Travel in Nineteenth-Century American Culture. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994.

SYMONDS, Margaret. Days Spent on a Doge’s Farm. London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1893. Internet Archive, Web. Accessed 1 May 2018.

NOTES

1. Although Guiney and Brown are not identified as authors on the title page of the handbook, Norton indicates their authorship.

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ABSTRACTS

The Boston-based Women’s Rest Tour Association provided a carefully selected reading list for its “literary pilgrims” from its founding in the 1890s into the twentieth century. As an organization designed to support educated American women traveling on a budget, the WRTA provided members with a range of information to facilitate travel, including a handbook containing two lengthy bibliographies. These bibliographies expose a duality within the organization that balances a progressive feminism with a deep-seated cultural and social conservatism. They exhibit strong support for women writers and educational reading as a tool for personal empowerment at the same time that they show a commitment to the cultural authority of Boston and the British Isles and reveal a notable degree of class bias and ethnic prejudice.

Depuis sa création dans les années 1890 et jusque dans les premières décennies du XXe siècle, la Women’s Rest Tour Association (WRTA), basée à Boston, eut pour objectif d’apporter son soutien à des Américaines éduquées n’ayant pas les moyens de voyager à grands frais. L’association fournissait à ses membres une panoplie d’informations pour faciliter leur périple, notamment un guide de voyage comprenant deux volumineuses bibliographies révélatrices d’une certaine tension entre un féminisme progressiste et un conservatisme social et culturel. Si elles encouragent le développement de pratiques d’écriture et louent les bienfaits éducatifs de la lecture comme mode d’affirmation et d’émancipation de ces femmes, ces bibliographies n’en restent pas moins inféodées à l’autorité culturelle de Boston et des îles Britanniques, témoignant de préjugés notables ethniques et sociaux.

INDEX

Mots-clés: Women’s Rest Tour Association, clubs de femmes de Boston, voyages culturels, anglophilie, guides de voyage, bibliographie Keywords: Women’s Rest Tour Association, Boston women’s clubs, cultural travel, anglophilia, guidebooks, bibliography

AUTHOR

JULIA CARLSON National University of Ireland Galway, [email protected]

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Travels, Translations and Limitations: Ambasciatrice Caroline Crane Marsh

Etta Madden

The child who translates gradually perceives everything in the language of man […] a kind of knowledge without which he would be confined all his life to the circle of his own nation—a circle that is narrow, like everything exclusive. Germaine de Staël, 1816 Translation forces us into new trains of thought, demanding new forms of phrase; lifts us out of the rut [...]. George Perkins Marsh, 1860

1 Caroline Crane Marsh (1816-1901), little known except in relationship to her husband, George Perkins Marsh, was a significant figure in her own right. Although George is notable for his involvement with establishing the Smithsonian Institution, for being an early conservationist, and for his longstanding service as a U.S. diplomat (Lowenthal 91, 251, 359), Caroline did more than prop George up in his career. To date, the longest publication dedicated to Caroline is a translated abridged version of the expansive journals she kept while the couple lived in and near Turin, the first parliamentary seat and capital of the new Italian kingdom (Lowenthal and Quartermaine). Within the title of that publication, the term ambasciatrice signals a point of this essay. While literally the translated Italian word for a female ambassador, it also translates as assistant to the male ambassador and resonates with the diminutive form also designating a lesser gender. Similar to the English “authoress” or “actress,” terms used frequently in the nineteenth century but out of favor now, Italian employs such endings to designate female subjects (autrice, attrice, scrittrice, direttrice – author, actress, writer, and director, respectively). Ambasciatrice in this essay’s title underscores that Caroline has been viewed primarily as an auxiliary to George in his political roles abroad, yet at the

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same time the essay revises that image by pointing to numerous other facets of her identity and developing agency.1

2 During a period of more than thirty years, Caroline interacted with people of other cultures during travels and cross-cultural experiences that her husband’s career facilitated, first during his appointment to Constantinople (1850-53) and then in the newly formed Kingdom of Italy (1861-82).2 Caroline saw herself not only as dutiful wife to George, who supported her literary labors; but also as surrogate mother to stepson, nieces, nephews and orphans (several visited and lived with the Marshes in Italy); as social activist and teacher, for nieces and children of an orphanage and school in Florence; and as aspiring author. Her increasing self-understanding of her abilities—as well as her limitations—in all these roles were influenced by travels abroad and the published and extemporaneous translations associated with those travels. Most importantly, I assert here, Caroline’s translating labors illustrate the ways in which they were more than what might be seen as the lesser-valued work of an invisible “handmaiden” to authorship; instead they should be understood as linguistic engagement that translation theorists such as Lawrence Venuti and Sherry Simon have noted is a significant part of an ethical participation in political change—for better and for worse (Venuti 19; Simon 2).

3 Caroline’s language study and translating practices, which began when she was a young student in Providence, Rhode Island, in the 1820s, continued as a teacher there and in Burlington, Vermont, and New York’s lower Manhattan in the 1830s. Her early skills with French, German and Latin would later contribute to studies of Italian, Turkish, Swedish and Greek ([Crane] 5, 32, 82). Early on Caroline’s reading, speaking and writing other languages contributed to her knowledge of a much larger world than New England offered her. Of course, her husband’s skills, interests and opportunities contributed to her development as well. Sixteen years younger than the widowed attorney she married, Caroline was drawn to George’s interest in languages, culture, history and the natural sciences (Quartermaine, 1999 61). Likewise, for George, Caroline’s “intellect and personal charm” had attracted and stimulated him when they met in 1839 ([Crane] 6). The couple’s devotion to and dependence upon each other in their daily lives and linguistic work emerges in the written records. In fact, due to Caroline’s poor eyesight, George (or another family member) often would read to or write for her (Lowenthal 91). Caroline wrote George’s first biography. And they worked closely together on many literary works, including the two translated volumes that bear Caroline’s name on the title page: The Hallig or, the Sheepfold in the Waters: a Tale of Humble Life on the Coast of Schleswig (1856), and The Wolfe of the Knoll, and other Poems (1859). The latter volume concludes with an ode dedicated to her “Beloved” (324-327).3 In it Caroline wrote admiringly of George as “teacher,” whose “beloved voice” shared “many a sage’s, many a nation’s lore,” and had given her “culture,” even while it “charmed” her “ear.”

4 This essay adds two points to prior interpretations of the relationship: first, an extension of biographer David Lowenthal’s view, which includes a description of George’s writings on language and translation as asserting an ever-present and proud “Anglophiliac” position (208). Caroline’s writing and translating, I would add, often reveals her understanding of the process of cultural negotiation. These negotiations helped her to realize ever-present cultural differences and her own limitations in bridging or eliminating them through her belief in human “universals,” even while she

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continued to long for peaceful interactions. In spite of what Venuti refers to as the inevitable “violence of translation,” Caroline’s hopes were to transport or “carry over” aspects of other cultures without “domesticating” the “foreign” (2008 13-20). Second, the couple’s correspondence during the periods of Caroline’s intense translating labors for publication demonstrates her role as more than a “handmaiden,” as her self- assertion and George’s dependence upon and faith in her emerge. He wrote to her, for example, when she was in the midst of the first lengthy project, laboring to complete eight pages per day, “Your translation is so good, that I almost wish you would undertake Kalevala, but that would not pay” (April 2, 1856). Kalevala, a Scandinavian epic Henry Wadsworth Longfellow had drawn from for The Song of Hiawatha (Calhoun 205), stood in the Marshes’ minds. (The Harvard bard’s immensely popular and financially successful epic of native American culture had appeared in 1855, just before Caroline began The Hallig.) George’s letter shows his hope for Caroline as translator was not simply improvement of American readers through enlarging their global perspectives but also financial gain in a period of struggle between his appointments. While she knew they needed money, Caroline’s views of translation’s values also extended beyond the monetary and endured for years beyond George’s attention.

5 These views of Caroline come to light first through consideration of The Hallig and The Wolfe of the Knoll, translated from German, Swedish and French, while the couple was stateside between George’s two appointments. Then, journal records and letters referring to Caroline’s numerous “extemporaneous translations” in Italy reveal her recognitions of the possibilities for, challenges of, and limitations to resolving difference. In sum, Caroline’s literary works provide windows to the ongoing intertwined values of translation as an activity of cultural exchange that, at best, highlights difference and limitations even while pointing to human “universal” connections across time and space.

“Nibbling at Turkish”: Purposes of Translation

6 Caroline’s time abroad during her husband’s first appointment, 1850-54, introduced her to the cultures of the Mediterranean region and eastern Europe and prompted her published translations. As the New York Tribune announcement of Wolfe of the Knoll noted, “the authoress (Mrs. Marsh) turns to good account the experience derived during the Eastern mission of her husband” (November 5, 1859). Her travels through Europe en route to Constantinople, a few holiday excursions from the post, and the return trip provided views of northern and southern Europe as well as travel south into Egypt that opened her to new ways of thinking about cross-cultural contact. While in Turkey, for example, she witnessed Anglo Protestant missionaries’ attempts at social activism in the Muslim culture—trying to convert them to a Christian creed—and commented negatively upon their work, although she considered them “very nice people” ([Crane] 22). She began “nibbling at Turkish” so that she could converse with local women ([Crane] 32), presumably in a manner different from the missionaries. While there she “became much interested in the political refugees” from central Europe ([Crane] 37), including Lojus “Louis” Kossuth and Cristina Trivulsio Belgiojoso. Kossuth had been a political leader of Hungary and spokesperson for freedom of the press and democracy at the time of the European revolutions of 1848, and Belgiojoso was a noblewoman from the Lombardy region of Italy who had established a salon in

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Paris before becoming a supporter of attempts to overthrow in the same revolutionary period. Both had fled to Turkey, where Belgiojoso continued her journalistic writings, including messages on the oppressive condition of women. Caroline’s reflections from Constantinople capture her openness to the world around her, her attempts to engage with its political and social concerns, and her desires to do what she might to improve people’s conditions, just as American correspondent Margaret Fuller had in her Tribune dispatches a few years earlier. 4 Certainly, Caroline possessed a strong belief in democracy and representative government, a version of American exceptionalism that would remain with her at least in residual form, even as these cosmopolitan interchanges began to feed her reform efforts and shift her ethnocentric views.

7 Not long after meeting Belgiojoso, in the winter of 1853, Caroline met another woman whose writings and social reform efforts likely influenced her: Elizabeth Barrett Browning. Caroline noted that she knew Elizabeth’s poetry far better than Robert’s (which she knew only “a little” ([Crane] 38).5 Casa Guidi Windows, which had appeared just two years before Caroline met Elizabeth at Casa Guidi in Florence, reflects on the thronging masses supporting Italian unification—of primary interest to the Marshes. “The Cry of the Children,” published a decade earlier in Blackwood’s Magazine, is said to have influenced child labor reform movements. Caroline’s meeting with Elizabeth stimulated later correspondence and invitations for further visits ([Crane] 38-42). Soon after meeting the poet, Caroline returned to the U.S. and began translating her two volumes, which included poetry. And in the same period, at least two of her poems, “Frustra Laboravi” and “Life’s Lesson,” were published. These works reveal the ways in which cross-cultural connections likely motivated her to develop her literary life as both translator and author. Even if early on she saw herself as a “handmaiden,” serving what she believed the more worthy endeavors of authors she translated, Caroline’s literary choices indicate she began to see herself as an agent promoting social change.

8 This view of translation’s purposes appears in recent theoretical discussions as well as nineteenth-century publications on the topic. Caroline’s translating decisions exemplify, for example, not only what Venuti refers to as “foreignizing” but also two among what Luise Von Flotow categorizes as “practices of feminist translation,” all of which make the translator’s work obvious, rather than “invisible”: first, “supplementing,” an obvious “foregrounding” or “compensation” that appears even as a kind of “textual exhibitionism,” and second, “prefacing and footnoting” (Venuti 15; Von Flotow 69, qtd. in Simon 14-15). While Caroline’s choices do not point to her feminist stance, they do call attention to her role as translator and to a thematic underscoring of the “foreign” even while she contrasts it with Anglo-American ways of understanding. They create a tension between maintaining particulars of “the foreign” and the “domestication” of the foreign into an assumed “transcendental” and “universal” essence. These two poles, the subject of Colleen Glenney Boggs’s discussion of nineteenth-century American translating practices among authors such as Longfellow, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Fuller, emerge in Caroline’s practices and in her husband’s writings about translation (Boggs 1-28).

9 Some of these nineteenth-century ideas George voiced in lectures during the winter of 1858-59 at Columbia in New York, later published as Lectures on the English Language (1860). Because Caroline and George shared thoughts about what they were reading and writing, it is not difficult to imagine that ideas from George’s “Translation” essay in

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that collection would have influenced Caroline’s thinking on the subject. In the essay George wrote that translation “forces us into new trains of thought, demanding new forms of phrase; [it] lifts us out of the rut” (1860, 616). Additionally, related to the concept of newness, George referred to “extemporaneous translation,” “reading off into English a book or a newspaper in a foreign language.” This type of translation would have engaged Caroline constantly while she lived abroad, since daily demands with letters to local political figures, responses to invitations, and reading newspapers occupied much of her time. This “extemporaneous translation,” George explained, “confers the power of readily calling up familiar or less habitual words and combinations,” in the process “securing us against contracting a restricted personal dialect, […] which reacts injuriously on our own originality and variety of thought” (616).

10 George’s ideas about translation providing “newness” and opening up a “variety of thought” echoed in many ways Germaine de Staël’s, who likewise emphasized the role of translating for broadening a child’s knowledge beyond “his own nation—a circle that is narrow” and “exclusive” (301). Many versions of de Staël’s writings, such as the French edition of her most famous work on language—On Germany (De L’Allemagne, 4 th ed. Paris, 1818)—, T. John Paul Richter’s Review of Madame de Staël’s Allemagne, Corinne and Pensées et Lettres, were in the Marsh library (Catalogue 642). Collectively these volumes suggest the Marshes’ familiarity with de Staël’s ideas. Language study, she explained, “combines precision of reason with independence of thought” (301). She connected geographical region to language, and language to national character. She wrote, “By studying the spirit and character of a language, one comes to know the historical cause of national opinions, customs, and usages” (289). In her eyes, this integral connection of language with “a particular culture” and “national character” lay at the heart of translation work. De Staël saw the translator’s work as “negotiating universality through particularity” (Boggs 95). The “universal” would be the tool that would “do good for the human race” (“The Spirit of Translations” 1816, qtd. in Boggs 95). Yet the translator must also maintain a sense of the particular.

11 George extended some of her ideas by linking a culture’s language to its moral life: “every nation forms a vocabulary suited to its own moral and intellectual character, its circumstances, habits, taste and opinions, […] not precisely adapted to the expression of the conceptions, emotions and passions of any other people” (1860, 597). His moral stance and what he would express as a resistance to change distinguish his view, however, as “Anglophiliac” and provide a point of contrast also to Caroline’s, as they emerged in her writing. George saw English as better than “so much of the contemporary expression of Continental genius, a magic mirror showing forth the unsubstantial dreams of an idle, luxurious, and fantastic people,” that had profited from its interaction with Romance languages. This “amalgamation” caused English to be better than “both Teutonic and Romance literature” (Lowenthal 208). The goal of the mix, through circulation of published texts, was promoting “‘oneness of thought and oneness of speech’” (qtd. in Lowenthal 211). Caroline’s linguistic work, by contrast, while attempting to recognize human connections across cultures, continually acknowledged difference, or the particularities within the universals, as Boggs has described the views of de Staël and her American follower, Fuller, gradually shedding some of the judgmental American exceptionalism she originally manifested (100).

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12 One other concept from George’s lectures illuminates Caroline’s transformations as a literary woman crossing cultures. Translating, he explained, included rewording ideas within the same language, as even “ancient rhetorical instructions advised their pupils to practise [sic]” such exercises in “paraphrase” and “metaphrase” for their educational value, and Benjamin Franklin had followed suit with Addison (614). This educational theory, not new to him, reflects methods Transcendentalist author and teacher Fuller had assigned to female students at the Greene Street School in Providence and in her Conversations with women in Boston. This philosophy of “knowledge reproduction,” she explained, began with copying but moved beyond it with reflection, rendering creativity and new thought (Vogelius). Strict copying of “forms and lessons” would lead students to understand “the limitations of the copy” and prompt them to develop “personal voice” and ideas.

13 This development from strict copyist or simple decoder of language to what Boggs refers to as “literary innovation” emerges in Caroline’s writings (2007, 6). In addition to the published translations from German, she left behind a short story modeled on children’s fables she read in Italian and poetry that imitated Horace’s odes in Latin and Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s in English. Likewise, the title poem of Wolfe of the Knoll appears to be her own creation rather than a translation. These texts together illustrate how Caroline’s experiences abroad and her translating, at both extemporaneous and literary levels, recognized and negotiated cultural differences without eliminating them.

Published Translations: Handmaiden and Mediating Agent (1856-1860)

14 During the stateside period, the couple was in a period of financial limbo, as George wrestled with claims for back pay he believed his due from the U.S. government. The time they spent in New York “was a therapeutic and social if not a financial success,” Lowenthal has explained. Not only was Caroline’s health improved, but also the city “was intellectually stimulating” (197-98). They interacted in the salon culture supported by Anne Lynch Botta, who was married to an expatriate Italian political leader and philosophy professor, Vincenzo Botta. George encouraged Caroline’s translation of The Hallig, helped her negotiate with the publisher, Gould and Lincoln, and advised her on specific words and the editorial apparatus, such as the German author’s biography, which he wrote, and the translator’s note. Although her translations, like her husband’s lectures and literary work, were financially motivated, they and letters about them also convey a didactic purpose. The next summer, 1859, they returned to Vermont, where Caroline completed Wolfe of the Knoll and George prepared his lectures for publication. The volumes were advertised and reviewed together, and the couple was “warmed by New York and Boston reviews.” Caroline’s work, according to the London Athenaeum (11 August 1860), “was no ordinary transatlantic drivel,” or “‘third-rate Germanism,’ but [rather] on a par with ‘our own romantic poetesses’” (qtd. in Lowenthal 200).

15 Lowenthal describes Caroline’s Wolfe of the Knoll as “inspired by her German reading and travels in the Levant” (199-200). But the volume’s contents and those of The Hallig provide a significant extension of Lowenthal’s descriptions. First, the volumes’ contents suggest that female literary figures such as Barrett Browning and Lynch Botta,

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foremost among “the literati of New York” at mid-century (Oliva 6), influenced Caroline’s interest in, and written expression of, both cross-cultural exchange and social reform. Second, they reveal Caroline’s role as active, mediating agent as a translator, especially in the volumes’ cross-cultural contents, including their “prefacing and footnoting.” With the selections of what literary works to translate, and how to introduce them to readers, Caroline made obvious her goal of educating Americans on other cultures.

16 As for selecting content, publishers Gould and Lincoln had written prior to the first translation that the Marshes knew what choices to make “for the American people” (February 5, 1856). And publisher Charles Scribner wrote about Wolfe of the Knoll, in spite of the “unsalebility” [sic] of poetry, he believed it worth publishing and would do what he could to help its circulation (March 29, 1859). Caroline selected cultures beyond the typical for armchair travelers or those of privilege who have experienced the typical “Grand Tour” of Europe—over the Atlantic to England and across the channel to the continent, south and west through France, over the Alps to the Italian peninsula before return north into Bavaria. In both The Hallig and The Wolfe, Caroline made connections between the region of northern Germany known as the Schleswig and other parts of the world, such as the northern coast of Africa, whose languages, dialects and religious practices seemed much more “strange” and “foreign” than the more typically read literature of France, Germany, Spain and classical Greece and Rome.

17 While The Hallig focuses on a single area and story, The Wolfe is an anthology similar to Botta’s Handbook of Universal Literature (1860), published just after Caroline’s translations, in its culturally wide-ranging content. Botta’s Handbook includes, for example, literature and authors of diverse cultures and traditions—Hebrew, Persian, Sanskrit, German, and Scandinavian. The anthology became a standard text for university students, in use for decades, with several revised editions. The signed gift copy of Botta’s Handbook in the Marsh library also reflects the global interests of literati with whom Caroline was engaged (Catalogue 84, 412).

18 Both volumes demonstrate Caroline’s interests in religion, as she explains in her two- page introduction to the first lengthy poem in The Wolfe, for which the volume is titled. That is, it includes much more than what the Tribune described as the long “narrative romantic poem.” Many works in Wolfe, translated primarily from German and French, consider religious themes throughout Europe and northern Africa.6 Caroline selected “A Godlie Hymn” from Ulrich Zwingli as well as a “Fable” about a widow who has lost all her “little lambs” except one. In it, the woman continues to pray regularly and to send her lamb to the pasture, where it, too, is devoured by the wolf. “Daniel, the Cistercian” is based on a story illustrated on the wall of a monastery in Osseg, Bohemia, about a monk whose own obedient, faithful works light his hand and the path ahead of him. And “The Glow-Worm” from Helmine Von Chezy celebrates God’s care for such small and seemingly insignificant creations. Many works intertwine religion with tales of romantic love. “The Moss-Rose,” also from Von Chezy, emphasizes how beauty springs from pain and suffering. “A Lay of the Danube,” for example, ends with lovers only getting to be together in eternity. Such epic and lyric verses as “Song of the Lap- land Lover” from the Swedish of Franzen and “The Maid of the Merry Heart” are of the style popular with Longfellow and Tennyson, among others; regular meter and rhyme sing stories of adventure, love and loss. These themes cross cultural boundaries with

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attempts to demonstrate a “universal” suffering and human spirit even as they recognize what is “peculiar” to each region.

19 The “Translator’s Preface” (iii-v) to The Hallig describes the work as “a highly interesting contribution to the physical geography of a part of Europe lying quite beyond the reach of ordinary observation.” More than merely descriptive, the twenty- five-chapter, almost-300-page prose romance includes adventure, travel, love and loss —dramatic elements “of human life under conditions which are hardly paralleled elsewhere,” all set in the Hallig, a remote island of the North Sea. The work’s “skillful and picturesque delineations of nature and of man, in their reciprocal action under new and strange relations,” Caroline stated, would “interest and instruct” readers. The “new and strange relations” were based on the author’s experience in a new culture. The author, Johann Christoph Biernatzki (1795-1840), wove a fictional thread through his autobiographical account of the life and theology of an outsider. The outsider, a Lutheran pastor who speaks “High German,” arrived from elsewhere in Germany to serve this community. Caroline’s Preface refers to the pastor’s complex and challenging relationship with “his flock,” perhaps of interest to her because of George’s work as a secular minister in a strange country and because of Protestant missionaries she witnessed in Turkey. That is, it captures an outsider’s relations with insiders over an extended period of living within another culture.

20 The introductory comments to both volumes invite consideration of Caroline’s agency, as she removes the veil of invisibility by calling attention to herself through the textual apparatus. In addition to The Hallig’s “Translator’s Preface,” which informs readers that it is Caroline’s rather than Biernatzki’s introduction, in Wolfe, for example, she noted that the verses related to her experiences in other cultures, and she wanted to mediate, or “carry over” these feelings of difference through the translation. As she explained, the title epic’s purpose is “to connect the strong contrasts of life and nature offered by the peculiar regions” (12, emphasis mine). It presents paired contrasts, alternating between the Baltic and the Mediterranean: “the island of Amrum near the coast of the duchy of Schleswig-Holstein, and in the city of Tunis and the territory of that Beylik” (emphasis mine).

21 Here as in other sites throughout the volume, she calls attention to a culturally-specific term. Rather than substituting “territory” or “kingdom” or defining Beylik, she pushes readers to experience the culture’s term and, thus, something of its political and governing structure, even while demonstrating her own knowledge. Throughout her selections, she chose to emphasize the “new and strange relations” that the works convey. Often explanatory footnotes call attention to Caroline as translator and her desire to “supplement” with instruction from her knowledge of other cultures, especially as she saw how prior translations failed to “carry over” meanings that conveyed the appropriate differences. She wrestled with how much of this material to include in notes and what to place in appendices, wanting to acknowledge her sources. 7

22 These accounts illustrate cultural practices such as “the hareem” and hospitality to the stranger—points that Marsh wants to make for her Anglo-Christian readers, who likely misunderstand Muslim culture. For example, one poem includes the note, “The morning prayer of the faithful Mohammedan should commence as soon as he can distinguish a white thread from a black one.” Other exemplary notes of linguistic work explain that “the invited of God” is a “name given to a stranger who asks hospitality”

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(30), or develop the historical and social significance of Khair-ad-deen’s name, which means “the Excellence of Religion.” Instead, he has been ineptly named as Barbarossa, the Redbeard, which does not convey the respect he is due as “Nelson” of the Ottoman empire in the sixteenth century, when he conquered Algiers and Turin and frightened the Franks, the Spaniards and the Italians (29).

23 Beyond the notes, specific elements of translation within both volumes mark Caroline’s desire to make overt the “strange.” Caroline acknowledged that Biernatzki had been influenced by “the orient” and had “a more figurative mode of expression than is quite consistent with the soberer taste of the best European writers,” but she did not attempt to “retrench” his “exuberance” in her translation. Her decisions come to light alongside another English translation, Samuel Jackson’s The Maid of the Hallig, which had appeared in London in 1843.8 Most obviously, Jackson inserted no didactic textual apparatus—neither a translator’s note nor a biographical sketch of the author to call attention to himself as translator.

24 The opening paragraphs reveal how Caroline made Biernatzki’s language even more figurative and intensively pejorative than the “original,” while Jackson presented them more similarly, attempting what translation theorist Eugene A. Nida would later refer to as providing “functional equivalence,” a seamless transition with a “naturalness of expression” from one culture to another in the transfer of meaning (Venuti 16). Personifying the powerful waters of the region, Caroline at first employed and repeated Biernatzki’s phrase “trügerische Riese” (2)—“the treacherous giant” (26) rather than Jackson’s slightly softer “the gigantic foe” (2). But while Biernatzki described the islands as entangled by the sea like arms of a snake—“gleichsam Schlangenarme” (2)—and Jackson used the simile, “the channels […] wind themselves, as with snaky folds, around the islands” (1-2), Caroline contracted the simile, choosing the more powerful rhetorical device, a metaphor. She made the islands entangled in “the serpent embrace of their giant enemy” (26). Contributing to the negative language and calling attention to her position as translator, she translated the German “Wanderer” into the more pejorative “loiterer” and transliterated “Wasserwüste” (3) as “waste of waters” (26) rather than as “mud flats” or “estuary,” or another term familiar to those on the U.S. east coast. For Biernatzki’s Schlickgrund she referred to “slimy flats” (2) at ebb-tide, where Jackson simply chose “a muddy bed” (1), and for his Schlickläufer (3) she gives ebb-walker, leaving it italicized to highlight the strangeness of this word and character to U.S. culture. Jackson simply had “the sand-stroller,” with no visual indicator such as italics (2).9

25 A few additional specific choices within The Hallig and “The Wolfe of the Knoll” will illustrate Caroline’s attention to “the peculiar.” For example, Caroline must have asked George about the meaning of the Hallig hero Godber’s name and whether to use Gottber —the high German “bright God”—instead, for George wrote to her in early January, 1856, “Godber is closer to our idiomatic forms than Gottber.” She responded in her next letter, “Why will not the name Godber then do just as it is?” And the more “idiomatic” remained. The correspondence reflects Caroline’s desire to capture the regional, low German form rather than the high German, which might have been more recognizable to English readers and certainly would have reflected the growing nineteenth-century desires for national languages. Similarly, Caroline queried George by letter in August 1859 about two phrases she wished to employ as identifiers for the main characters of “Wolfe of the Knoll.” Would “Iceland Bride” and “Wonder Child” be “too foreign?” The

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decision was to maintain these particular labels of difference within the publication (82, 88).

26 Caroline’s translating decisions—at the micro-level of phrases and the macro-level of including specific literary selections and textual apparatus—demonstrate both the regional particularities and the global networks of the many who had sailed and continued to traverse the seas, from the Baltic, through the Atlantic, into the Mediterranean and beyond. The topic remained of interest to Caroline during her second and longer period abroad. In the newly unified Kingdom of Italy, she again would seize opportunities to interact with those around her, reading their regional literature and attempting to understand and participate in the culture as an effective mediator.

Extemporaneous Translations: The Idea of Italy, Revised

27 When Caroline arrived in Turin in 1861, she brought with her not only her translating skills and past experiences abroad but a pre-established view of Italy’s oppressive subjugation to other European powers and the Roman Catholic church. She and other American Protestants were celebrating the religious liberty non-Roman Catholics in the Piedmont region had been enjoying since 1848, ushered in by European revolutions (Mortara 57). For her as for many Americans who observed the political changes from afar, “Italy” provided a playground for enacting what they believed were the best America offered as model: democratic leadership, accessible education for the masses and, through these two venues, alleviation of poverty (Vance 94; Gemme). This idea of “Italy” and its possible futures shifted for Caroline as she, who labeled herself a “Progressivist,” religiously speaking, continuously gained new information about the culture in which she lived.10 Many journal pages reveal Caroline being moved by a thread of human sympathy that tugged at her heart. Lowenthal emphasizes what he sees as Caroline’s transformation from “moralist” to “informant as participant sociologist” in Italy, describing “her rigidly egalitarian rustic New England Puritanism” giving way in the face of “everyday life,” where “she became less critical and more compassionate, less censorious and more self-deprecating.” (2008 157-58). I would add that while she maintained her American Protestant “Progressivist” stance, several journal entries reveal Caroline was beginning to let go of her ideals about missions and social reform—and these changes emerged through extemporaneous and private, rather than published, translations.

28 Soon after the Marshes’ arrival in the Piedmont, for example, Caroline met “Mr. Bert,” a leader of the non-Catholic Waldensians, and was impressed by his knowledge of many languages (9).11 The next day she wrote of parliament at Turin discussing the kidnapping of Jewish babies and other “evil” works of the Roman Catholic priests, “a story too scandalous to be believed,” she explained, except “for the evasions” of those testifying, which gave the stories “substance” (21). But by 1863 any simple anti- Catholic/pro-Catholic binary was confounded in her journal. She expressed frustration about political leaders, such as their friends Vincenzo Botta and Massimo d’Azeglio, writing that such men changed their minds about politics and philosophy, but about religion they never did. Even when educated—that is, knowledgeable of other languages and cultures—they hung onto “superstitions” from their childhood (164). But

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she also negatively critiqued one of Waldensian Bert’s colleagues, Meille, for a funeral oration he delivered. He did not understand that taking the public opportunity to make negative comments about Roman Catholics to an audience of primarily Roman Catholics was not persuasive rhetoric nor the best practice for realizing religious reform (173).12

29 Other entries during a period when the Marshes had undergone a somewhat isolating move to a rural area on the plains of the Po southwest of Turin demonstrate Caroline’s changed household management, relationships and cultural views. The change decreased urban visitors while it increased reading and writing time and opportunities for interactions, or influential “extemporaneous translations” with the gardener’s family. When the village priest arrived to bless the Marshes’ new home, for example, Caroline did not pay him to perform the rite which, for her, had no efficacy. She did, however, communicate with and pay the priest to bless the gardener’s house (166).13 A month later she swapped tales with the gardener’s wife. When Caroline confessed sadness due to missing family, her new confidant expressed surprise that even the Marshes, with their material abundance, felt the pain of personal loss (176).14

30 A third reference to the influential extemporaneous translations with the gardener’s family arose from Caroline’s reading. She wrote of “a little anthology of Italian tales” (174)—likely Temistocle Gradi’s Racconti popolari, which was in the Marsh library (Catalogue 286).15 She explained that all three tales that she read underscored challenges of village life. Two elements of Caroline’s response to this translating work merit noting. First, she transcribed into her journal rhyming lines of proverbs from the book without translating them. That is, some she paraphrased in English, and others she copied in the original language, suggesting she wanted to remember the latter to use as needed. Also, they reflect her understanding of the particular area. For example, of one story she explained: “The writer, in speaking of the inhabitants who according to him are not very kind and honest, he admits that they have had for centuries a bad reputation and, as proposed by Radda, cited this proverb: Radda!/Passa e guarda!/Non ti fermar per via,/Chi ’un* fa ’l ladro, fa la spia.”16 The entry continues with a description and transcription of “the third story,” which is “a legend of the same region.” She explains, “the writer takes occasion, after painting the horrors of life here during the Middle Ages, to pay Baron Ricasoli a handsome compliment.” The Baron, known as the “terrible Brolio” who ruled forcefully and cruelly, no longer reigns. The old rhyme “Quando Brolio vuol broliare/ Tutta Siena fa tremare!” no longer carries much value, as the family leadership has been supportive of national unification.17 Both tales point to regional isolation and reign, maintained through fear and warfare, even as Caroline recognizes that times are changing.

31 Perhaps Caroline wanted to practice recall of such proverbs central to the culture. Perhaps she was considering another publication, similar to Wolfe but focused on Italy. Neither came to pass. But they may have prompted her drafting of an unpublished children’s tale in English. An additional point worth noting is that Caroline was so moved by these tales—likely the regional particularities they revealed—that she decided to follow the gardener’s advice when he saw her reading them. He recommended that the Marshes’ niece Carrie, who was living with them, study Piedmont rather than Tuscan tales, because they would help her fit in to the region, and he offered to find a local teacher for her (175).18

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32 These tales likely led to Caroline’s creation of a lengthy moralistic story with a rustic Italian setting, the mountain village Pruno and its rags-to-moral riches hero. Its topics include the value of literacy, the necessities of hard work and shunning frivolous parties, the challenges of arranged marriages, the power of the domestic realm, the responsibilities of parenting—all themes that would reappear in Caroline’s journal entries.19 But the tale also includes another theme—religious art as a vocation. Early on, the hero played his fiddle at dances. When he fell ill, a friar told him he “deserved it for going out to play at night-frolics.” He then “broke” his fiddle and channeled his love of music into becoming the church organist. In addition to developing musically, the hero also becomes a visual artist. Enduring patience, hard work, and criticism, he carved first a crucifix in wood, then with marble. He left a on a hillside, then created a Saint Michael and a “Conception,” based on pictures he had seen of “a young girl with her hands clasped, a crown of twelve stars on her head and the half moon and the serpent under her feet.” Next he created a St. Anthony, another Madonna, a Martha and a Magdalen. Notably, the story shows that Caroline now shunned neither Roman Catholic aesthetics nor Mariology. The hero’s concluding deathbed message speaks Caroline’s transformed, more inclusive view, even while it voices remnants of her New England ethic: “As to me I have always seen that he who works hard, and does all the good he can will get on somehow,—he’ll get on, and never come to a bad end. God is for us all” (49). Through her translations and her interactions with individuals with unique differences, Caroline’s views of religious life and her own art were evolving, slowly accepting more of other ways of being.

Extemporaneous Translation: Increasing Ambivalence and Limitations

33 Despite openness to some Roman Catholic practices in Italy, Caroline’s writings also demonstrate initial desires for Protestant social reform and increasing ambivalence about it. While Caroline’s time in the Piedmont had introduced her to European salon culture, by the late 1860s when the Marshes and the Italian capital had moved to Florence, she became engaged with reform efforts. She wrote in her journal less as she engaged more with needs around her, especially focusing on females and extending the project of political exile Salvatore Ferretti, who returned to Florence from London in 1862 as a leader of the “Free Church” movement and founder of the school which bore his name. Caroline’s work became a favorite of Anglo supporters in the U.S., Scotland and England. Letters to and from prominent U.S. and British families refer to their support of it. In addition to New York philanthropist Mrs. J. J. Augusta Astor, for example, donors included Cyrus West Field, founder of the Atlantic Telegraph Company, responsible for the first transatlantic cable connected in 1858, who sent funds through Caroline’s nephew Alexander B. Crane, another successful New York businessman.

34 Countering such records of leadership roles and fundraising successes through her letters, however, Caroline’s less-frequent journal entries provide another picture. Entries from the fall of 1873, in particular, erupt with trials—with arranging teachers, with debts, and with troublesome committee members. She wrote in November, for example, while George was in Rome, “Yesterday went to a meeting of our Orphanage Com. Debts over 7000 frcs!” (Diary 6 November 1873). Three days later, she picked up

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the thread again, writing of an out-of-touch, unnamed committee member labeled merely, “Mme Blank.” The woman proposed as a fundraiser one of several “private theatricals,” noting that it “would be very fine—not a dress was to cost less than 1500 frc.” With rough calculations of 1500 francs as about 300 dollars in 1873, the price of each dress would be exorbitant.

35 Simultaneous to such challenging meetings, Caroline was “translating extemporaneously” as she read works on approaches to religion and social reform. She wrote in her journal, for example, of Fénelon’s assertion that “everyday acts” should have “a religious character”; of the “very suggestive” material in [James Anthony] Froude’s “Philosophy of Catholicism”; and about “a curious book” by Charles de Ribbe, Les Familles et la société en France avant la Révolution, that “ought to be read by all of us Progressivists.”20 The string of titles suggests more than her desire to keep up with the latest literature and ability to read French. This extemporaneous translation points to how French authors’ ideas about religion intertwined with Caroline’s activism, combining to manifest uncertainties, frustrations and new ideas. Would she give up her goals or keep trying? Would she hang on to old methods, infusing them with new ideas, or employ new methods but attempt to teach old “truths”? Fénelon’s “everyday acts” suggests an answer—an approach to reform that would be partial and fragmentary, on an individual level, rather than one of overarching uniformity that would insist on cultural conversion or oppression in the shadow of national unity. As Fuller’s writings had recognized twenty years earlier, the ideal of “national unity” enacted would do so at the risk of dissolving or overlooking the needs of unique individuals (Boggs 108). That is, Caroline’s comments reflect theories of translation that indicate an openness to ideas that crossed national and cultural boundaries, a cosmopolitanism that, even as it sought universals, recognized ongoing difference.

36 Another example of this openness appears in Caroline’s response to Matthew Arnold’s Literature and Dogma entered in her journal a few weeks earlier.21Although she did not find Arnold’s ideas compelling, she read them “with infinitely more pleasure for knowing him personally.” But knowing Arnold was not enough. Caroline explained that the touchstone was his openness: “[H]ow completely he possesses the spirit of a learner. […] Instead of talking oracularly like so many litterateurs, he is evidently trying to collect new truths.” Arnold appealed to her because he was “a modest listener where he might well assume to teach” (Diary, October 19, 1873). Although a teacher herself, in this period Caroline wavered in confidence about “truths” that some “litterateurs” espoused. Ironically, one such figure was Fénelon, referenced during the same period, who was well-known for his moralistic didacticism and highly popular novel Telemachus, published widely in France, England and the U.S. (Bell 54-65). Caroline’s unpublished tale set in the mountain village Pruno likely was influenced by his method of teaching children through moralistic fables. But because no record indicates that the tale ever circulated, she may have doubted her writing skills, or she may have lost faith in this method’s efficacy. Nonetheless, she continued to believe in extemporaneous translation as a means of crossing cultures and learning about others, rather than as a means of imposing truths.

37 Caroline’s reading of Horace’s first and second odes in Latin in this same difficult year of 1873 supports this assertion (Diary, Nov. 22, Dec. 1). The Marshes owned poetic collections of Horace’s works in Latin, as well as in Italian, English, and German, and a book on his metrical style (Lundy, Metra Horatiana; Catalogue 329, 422). The themes of

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the odes range broadly from artistic skill and patriotism to love and loss and war and peace. Without specific references to the content, it is impossible to know what themes might have touched and influenced Caroline. But the journal reference underscores her ongoing translating and her love of poetry’s imagery and meter which powerfully convey such themes.

Predictive Poetry: “Frustra Laboravi”

38 One poem Caroline wrote and published years earlier was eerily anticipatory of the despair and hope she balanced in the mid-1870s. It provides a conclusion to this essay because although it does not employ translation, it reveals her global and “universal” interests as she worked intensively with language to give shape to perhaps inchoate sensations and to publicly share those thoughts through carefully crafted verse. Published at the invitation of Abby Maria Hemenway within her anthology Poets and Poetry of Vermont (1860), the poem also celebrates female labor in many forms and is not linked to the regionalism Hemenway’s title suggests.22 With the Latin title, “Frustra Laboravi,” which evokes a phrase from Job 9:29, “in vain have I labored,” the poem acknowledges past difficulties but refuses to give up hope, anticipating those emotions that filled Caroline’s journal pages in 1873. Although no overt self-references appear in the poem, Caroline seems to have written it in a moment when waves of memories of failed idealistic ventures washed over her. Indeed, the period of composition was that of intense financial need and future uncertainties, when she labored with her translations and wrestled with family responsibilities, such as George’s young adult son. This son from a first marriage remained financially dependent on his father and implicated in business problems in Vermont, where Caroline translated while George was in New York. The verses would have helped her process such experiences, just as translating Horace’s poetry did. Although the poem’s title suggests a religious tone, the verses include no appeal to the divine for delivery. Instead of a heavenly, spiritual or transcendental realm, it exudes a “universal” sentimental connection with humanity writ large while grounding the problems in specific allegorical examples.

39 Of typical verse style, the poem’s eight five-line stanzas each end with repetition that lends the poem hymn cadence. Variations of “I have labored in vain” serve as a refrain, emphasized with a shift from the regular iambic pentameter of the previous lines to a break with fewer feet. This broken anaphora creates not an ecstatic experience in a pleasurable sense but rather, as it is repeated through the poem, one of dulled numbness linked to grief and despair. The first stanza, in fact, opens with these feelings of pain as common to every “human” whose “voice” will exude a “bitter cry” of weariness: “My strength is spent for nought!” This bitter cry O’er all our earthly moanings riseth high; For ah! No human voice shall ever fail To swell the mighty chorus of this wail, “I have labored in vain!” (ll. 1-5) Following the first stanza’s image of humanity in general, spent by laboring in vain, the sensations of despair continue with slight variation, as images of specific types of people who have labored in vain emerge. In the second stanza, for example, “The farmer sows in hope the golden grain,” but “The torrid heavens withhold the latter rain,” such that “The shriveled ear a sickly color shows,/ And the poor husbandman no

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harvest knows;/ He has labored in vain!” (ll. 6-10). The next four stanzas turn respectively to merchant, parent, artist, and reformer, all of whom have “labored in vain!” for wealth, children, art, or social change.

40 Although Caroline was neither farmer nor merchant, she passionately noted in her journal the poverty of Italian farmers, who ate primarily grain. While in Turin, Florence and Rome, she would have witnessed Italian merchants struggle, but the merchant’s description, “with pallid cheeks” and “Dark in his brow, [as] despair doth gnaw his heart” (ll. 11-12), also reflects what she wrote of her New Yorker nephew Alexander, as she saw him weaken and age under duress and encouraged him to visit Italy to relieve stress.23 And she sympathized with any parents holding a “tortured memory” of “children” who met difficult ends, “Disgraced by folly and with crime defiled” (l.17). Her stepson George fell to alcohol addiction during the Civil War and died soon after; niece Carrie died tragically when the ship Schiller sank on her travel to Italy; fragile niece Ellen died soon after leaving Caroline for the U.S.; and an adopted son Carlo remained forever unteachable, she noted in her journal. Certainly, Caroline also expressed the experience of the artist “with a strong passion stirred” who labored over “the thought […] in [… her] soul,” that often resulted in “the feeblest shadow of […] lofty dreams” (ll. 21, 23-4). And, similar to the despairing reformer, she had attempted reform “with a noble zeal” (l. 33), while seeing “trusted weapons shattered in [her] hands” (ll. 26-27). After these variations the poem returns in its penultimate stanza from specific despairing laborers to the general situation of any “son of man” who “know[s] their highest energies misplaced,/ To have labored in vain!” (ll. 31-35).

41 Going further than this circuit from general to specific to general wearied laborers, however, the poem’s last stanza turns to consolation through admonition. The speaker remembers, “there is a plaint more sad than this,/ Breathing of darker, deeper, hopelessness—/ ‘In vain I have suffered!’ (ll. 36-8). Writing of suffering, the speaker gives a directive to the “mortal” reader to “take […] heed/ That of these fearful words thou have no need!/ Else thou has lived in vain!” (ll. 38-40) Through this concluding stanza, Caroline’s poem justifies the pain she has experienced—as surrogate mother, artist and reformer. She turns the poem from one focused on vanity of labors to what she sees as essential elements of life—suffering in the midst of laboring for what seems to be an important and just cause, as well as reflecting on the labor and causes to determine their justness.

42 The poem illustrates in brief a prediction of the many challenges Caroline would face while abroad and her adjustments to what she learned about her own limitations. Translating languages of other cultures contributed to that knowledge and a recognition of ongoing cultural differences. Yet “Frustra Laboravi”’s last stanza also crystalizes Caroline’s actions in 1882, after George’s death, as she prepared to rise from doubts and despair to move on with hope. More than thirty years after she had crossed the Atlantic the first time, Caroline rose to cross the Atlantic a final time. Back in the U.S. she reread her previous writings, translating them to craft her husband’s biography.24 She wrote about political life, published in the New York Evening Post, and she continued to study philosophy, poetry and languages for much of her next twenty years ([Crane], 82). The experiences she had in Turkey, the translations of The Hallig and The Wolfe of the Knoll, and the numerous extemporaneous translations she noted in her journals in Italy demonstrate that for the ambasciatrice, translating was a practice

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that evoked both a connection across cultures and the inevitable limitations and gaps she realized as she faced ongoing differences.

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BIERNATZKI, Johann C. Die Hallig, oder die Schiffbrüchigen auf dem Eiland in der Nordsee. Hammerich, Altona, 1840. reader.digitale-sammlungen.de/de/fs1/object/display/bsb10105734_00001.html (Bayerische Staatsbibliothek). Accessed April 2019.

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CHANNING, William E. “Remarks on the Character and Writings of Fénelon.” The Works of William E. Channing, D. D. vol.1. 8th ed., Boston, J. Monroe and Company, 1848, p. 167-215. (Reprinting of “Selections from the Writings of Fénelon,” The Christian Examiner, Boston, 1829).

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LOWENTHAL, David and Luisa QUARTERMAINE, eds. and introduction. Un’Americana alla corte della Savoia. Il diario dell’ambasciatrice degli Stati Uniti in Italia dal anno 1861 al 1865. Translated by Luisa Quartermaine. Torino: U. Allemandi, 2004.

LUNDY, F. J. Metra Horatiana; or the Metrical Systems of Horace, Arranged on a New Plan. Burlington, VT: C. Goodrich, 1838.

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MARSH, Caroline Crane. Wolfe of the Knoll and other Poems. New York: Scribner, 1859. Hathi Trust Digital Library, babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=hvd.hxdlu3;view=1up;seq=9. Accessed February 25, 2016.

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SCRIBNER and Company. Letter to George Perkins Marsh, March 29, 1859, Carton 3, Folder 34, GPM, UVM.

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DE STAËL, Germaine. Politics, Literature, and National Character. Translated from the French and edited by Morroe Berger. New Brunswick: Transaction Publishers, 2000.

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VENUTI, Lawrence. The Translator’s Invisibility. 1995. New York: Routledge, 2008.

NOTES

1. This essay has benefitted immensely from the feedback of anonymous reviewers for Transatlantica and participants at the Border Crossings Conference sponsored by the Society for the Study of American Women Writers and Université Bordeaux Montaigne, France, 2017. 2. I choose to employ first names to distinguish Caroline from her husband George. 3. Although unsigned and without naming George, the poem’s venue and content mark it as by Caroline and about her husband. 4. Luisa Quartermaine also compares Marsh to Fuller in her time abroad, political observations and written commentary, acknowledging that Caroline’s marriage to George took her life in a different direction from that of the unmarried Fuller’s (1999, 61). 5. Both poets’ collections were in the Marsh library (Catalogue, 1892 92). 6. Several notes cite French sources, such as Revue de l’Orient, rather than “originals,” for her translations. 7. Caroline gave freedom to her editors to make any final decisions (August 12, 1859). It appears that they maintained her notes but eliminated the appendices, which are not in the volume. 8. Likely Marsh was unaware of this translation, or she would not have made the claim in her preface that hers was the first translation in English.

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9. I am grateful to Professor Judith E. Martin at Missouri State University for assistance with Biernatzki’s text. 10. Caroline Crane Marsh, Diary, 9 November 1873. Hereafter cited within the text by date. 11. Page numbers refer to the notebooks edited by Lowenthal and Quartermaine (2004). Corresponding dates in the notebooks, available in the George Perkins Marsh collection at the University of Vermont, Carton 18, are 16 June 1861, 27 Aug. 1861, 8 Feb. 1863, and 27 March 1863. 12. 20 April 1863. 13. 27 March 1863. 14. 26 April 1863. 15. 23 April 1863. 16. Radda! Take a look but don’t stop as you walk by; whoever is not a thief is a spy! Note * in original interprets the dialect “’un” as “non.” 17. When Brolio wants to be Brolio, all Siena trembles. 18. 23 April 1863. UVM Box 18 Vol. 14. 19. The tale also celebrates missionary preachers, whose words were like kernels of corn the villagers gobbled up, goal-setting and achieving success. I elaborate on the related journal entries elsewhere. Lowenthal also discusses Marsh’s attitude toward arranged marriages (“‘The Marriage of Choice’”). 20. The Marsh library included writings by and about Fénelon in Channing’s Works and by De Ribbe (Catalogue 222, 570). It did not include Froude’s essay. 21. The Marsh library included a copy (Catalogue 35). 22. Boggs notes this volume as an example among several regional anthologies of the period (170, n. 9). 23. See letters from and to A. B. Crane in 1870, 1875 and 1876 and to niece Cornelia in 1876. 24. The proposed second volume was never completed; GPM UVM holds the manuscript.

ABSTRACTS

Caroline Crane Marsh (1816-1901), wife of George Perkins Marsh, a U.S. diplomat to Turkey and Italy, deserves recognition for the ways in which her self-understanding was transformed by her travels abroad and translating practice. Caroline saw herself not only as dutiful wife or “handmaiden” to George, but also as surrogate mother, social activist, teacher, translator and aspiring author. Two volumes she translated into English, The Hallig or, the Sheepfold in the Waters: a Tale of Humble Life on the Coast of Schleswig (1856), and The Wolfe of the Knoll, and other Poems (1859), considered alongside her poetry, letters and journals, provide windows to the values of translation as a venue of negotiation and cultural exchange. Caroline’s translating work emerged in a period of American exceptionalism that celebrated the Anglo as ideal subject (if not imperial colonizer) and often occluded cultural difference that had been part of the Americas since European arrival. Yet her literary labors reflect that Caroline realized her role as a mediator rather than militaristic conqueror, with translations that make difference overt and journal entries that demonstrate she recognized her limitations as a reformer and a conveyor of religious “truth.” This emphasis on Caroline as translator contributes to an understudied area in discussions of American women’s travel writings, building from diverse views of translation in the nineteenth century and today.

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Caroline Crane Marsh (1816-1901) mit à profit ses séjours à l’étranger (Italie et Turquie) où elle accompagnait son époux, le diplomate américain George Perkins Marsh, pour développer une pratique régulière de la traduction et, ce faisant, sa propre connaissance de soi. Caroline ne se voyait pas seulement en épouse dévouée ou simple assistante, elle se présentait comme une mère de substitution, une activiste sociale, une enseignante, une traductrice et une auteure en herbe. En regard de sa propre poésie, de sa correspondance et de ses journaux intimes, les deux œuvres qu’elle traduisit en anglais (The Hallig or, the Sheepfold in the Waters: a Tale of Humble Life on the Coast of Schleswig, 1856, et The Wolfe of the Knoll, and other Poems, 1859) permettent de mieux cerner le rôle joué par l’activité de traduction dans la négociation et l’échange culturels. Ces traductions parurent à une époque d’exceptionnalisme où l’on célébrait l’Anglo-saxon comme sujet idéal (voire comme colon impérialiste) et où la différence culturelle, pourtant indissociable de la construction des Amériques depuis l’arrivée des premiers colons, était souvent passée sous silence. Dans son travail de traductrice, Caroline met en avant son rôle de médiatrice plutôt que de conquérante militariste. Ses traductions accentuent cette notion de différence et les notes de ses journaux témoignent qu’elle avait conscience de ses limites en tant que réformatrice et détentrice d’une « vérité » religieuse. Aborder Caroline Crane Marsh comme traductrice permet donc d’éclairer certains aspects méconnus de l’expérience du voyage au féminin à la lumière de différentes conceptions de la traduction du dix-neuvième siècle à nos jours.

INDEX

Mots-clés: traduction, Caroline Crane Marsh, Italie, activisme, religion Keywords: translation, Caroline Crane Marsh, Italy, activism, religion

AUTHOR

ETTA MADDEN Missouri State University, [email protected]

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“Travelling in the Family”: Elizabeth Bishop’s Brazilian Autobiographical Voice

Myriam Bellehigue

1 The story of Elizabeth Bishop’s arrival in Brazil in January 1952 is an anecdote well- known to all Bishop readers and scholars: because of some medical problem (a violent allergy to cashew nuts), what was originally supposed to be a short stop in Rio on a South American trip turned into a much longer stay. Bishop was eventually to spend fifteen years in Brazil with her Brazilian partner Lota de Macedo Soares. Such voluntary exile gave her the opportunity to discover the country’s geography (one of Bishop’s passions) but also its culture and language. Bishop early manifested a keen interest in Brazilian literature, going as far as translating and publishing several Brazilian works among which several autobiographical texts: The Diary of Helena Morley to begin with, which is the diary of a teenage girl who grew up in a small mining town at the end of the nineteenth century. Bishop wrote a long introduction to The Diary that was later included in her Collected Prose. She also translated several family poems by Carlos Drummond de Andrade published in the 1969 edition of Bishop’s Complete Poems and later in an Anthology of 20th Century Brazilian Poetry edited by Bishop in 1972.

2 Several scholars have paid critical attention to Bishop’s interest in Brazilian texts. While underlining that Bishop undertook to translate these works in part to learn the Portuguese language (Hicok 1586) and to “introduce modern Brazilian poetry to an American readership” (Machova 5), they also suggest that most of the texts she chose to translate deeply resonated with her own personal and literary interests. Bethany Hicok concludes her chapter on Bishop’s translations on this perceptive statement thus: “Bishop’s translations are important because they bring us closer to Brazil and its writers. They also bring us to Bishop” (Hicok 2140). Machova’s analysis strikes a very similar note: The Brazilian poems she translated offer a kind of commentary on her own work, and can even serve as a way to approach her own texts. […] The anthology can be placed among Bishop’s books, as a step between Questions of Travel and Geography III,

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a step in which the voices of other poets helped her to form and develop her own way of seeing some things and speaking about them. (Machova 73)

3 Following in these two scholars’ path, this essay explores Bishop’s relationship to these Brazilian works and analyzes how they resonate with her own autobiographical endeavors, especially as she erased the limit between these foreign texts and her own, deciding to include the translations among her own works. Bishop must have been confronted with distinct difficulties and pushed to develop distinct translating strategies when working on a non-fictional diary written by a teenager and family poems composed by an adult. My intention in this study is not so much to focus on these distinctions as to trace the converging influences these different texts may have had in the shaping of Bishop’s narrative and poetic voice at the moment when she was trying to grapple with her own childhood memories. The fact that Bishop chose to translate from various genres is not surprising considering the absence of distinction she made between fiction and memoirs, prose and poetry. Bishop’s interest in “border genres,” especially diaries, travel sketches, letters and memoirs probably lay in her attraction to their uncertain status, between “literary and documentary, art and fact” (Machova 37). Several texts presented as “stories” in the Collected Prose edition clearly partake of the autobiographical vein and could have been inserted in the first part of the book entitled “Memory : Persons and Places.”1 Bishop also reworked several prose pieces into poems. Considering that Bishop herself circulated between genres and forms in her autobiographical pieces (both published and unpublished during her lifetime), this essay suggests that she invites us to read them conjointly and along with her autobiographical translations, however diverse these might be.

Back to Nova Scotia “with a bang”

4 As soon as she settled in Brazil, Bishop was struck by a paradoxical parallel that she kept marveling at in her correspondence: her immersion in Brazilian life reminded her of her own childhood spent in Nova Scotia with her maternal family. In the rural house of Petropolis Samambaia that she shared with Lota, she faced material conditions that took her back to her early years; oil lamps, stoves, homemade bread and marmalade are part of her everyday routine and they conjure up her previous life: The village was 50 years or so backwards. We made yeast from the hopvine on the barn; had no plumbing, oil lamps, etc. My grandmother was a famous buttermaker. Everything is quite changed now, of course. But when I came to live first in Samambaia and we had oil lamps for two or three years, etc., a lot came back to me. I helped design our sitting-room stove, for example […] and without ever having done such things before I found myself baking bread, making marmalade, etc. When the need arises apparently the old Nova Scotian domestic arts come back to me! (Harrison 22) As spatial and temporal boundaries are blurred, so are identities: I also have a “cannon-ball” stove, I brought two—the other’s a Franklin, for the sala —burning away, and I just realized last night as the lights failed in the kitchen and I fried myself an egg by the light of the oil lamp, that probably what I am really up to is re-creating a sort of deluxe Nova Scotia all over again, in Brazil. And now I’m my own grandmother. (Harrison 184)

5 Reading Helena Morley’s prose seems to have led Bishop to experience the same kind of reenactment and identity confusion. Here is what she wrote to May Swenson and Marianne Moore about the Diary:

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I do think you’ll enjoy the rest of it. It will take you back to your early family life with a bang. (Bishop, 1994 354) I was so afraid that “Helena” would go unappreciated [...]. All the effects seemed so slight to me that I was afraid they would be overlooked. But I’ve had so many nice letters noticing all the things I wanted noticed that I’m very cheered up about the book and of course you noticed best of all. [...] So many of those remarks took me right back to Nova Scotia; I’m sure I’ve heard most of them before. (357) What Bishop enjoyed in Helena’s Diary is the day-to-day recording of ordinary events and relationships from a child’s perspective, that is to say a naïve and cheeky outlook that often strikes one as clear-minded and most relevant. Helena’s childhood echoed her own, reactivating distant memories and distant emotions. As Harrison underlines, Helena “introduced Bishop to Brazilian culture and language and revived the memories and longings of her childhood”; however distant in time and place from her, the Diary was “entirely familiar in the pull of emotion” (Harrison 176-177). Reading the Diary and working on it as a translator encouraged the autobiographical turn in Bishop’s works dating back to that period. Indeed Bishop wrote most of her childhood stories in the fifties and early sixties.2 The collection of unpublished manuscripts contains several poetic and prose drafts centered on scenes drawn from her early childhood in Nova Scotia, all composed between 1951 and 1955.3 She first published “Sestina,” one of her most famous autobiographical poems, in 1956 in the New Yorker before it was finally included in her third collection Questions of Travel in 1965. The book is divided into two distinct sections entitled “Brazil” and “Elsewhere”—therefore two symmetrical parts that reflect each other. The structure of the book symbolizes the strong parallel between Brazil and Nova Scotia, between present and past. In the original edition, the story “In the Village” was included as a transition between the two parts, thus enhancing even more the role that the Brazilian experience played in the autobiographical return.

Oblivion as Forgetfulness and Omission

6 In her introduction to The Diary of Helena Morley, Bishop insists on the universal dimension of the book: “The scenes and events it described were odd, remote, and long ago, and yet fresh, sad, funny, and eternally true” (Bishop, 1984 82). But what strikes her even more is the freshness of the recording, its authenticity. The Diary reminds her of other texts written in the voice of a child: “Wordsworth’s poetical children and country people, or Dorothy Wordsworth’s wandering beggars. Occasionally entries referring to slavery seemed like notes for an unwritten, Brazilian, feminine version of Tom Sawyer and Nigger Jim” (82). But, contrary to these texts, The Diary is not fictional: “This was a real, day-by-day diary, kept by a real girl, and anything resembling it that I could think of had been observed or made up, and written down, by adults” (82). This is a first-hand account that faithfully retraced experiences at the very moment when they took place, or soon after: “It really happened; everything did take place, day by day, minute by minute, once and only once, just the way Helena says it did” (100). Helena’s “wonderful gift” consists in having “kept her childhood fresh as paint” (108). So that what Bishop seems to admire about the Diary is a form of immediacy and truth that she sought to retrieve in her own autobiographical approach. Machova contends that Helena’s “unpretentious, spontaneous way of writing” served as a model for Bishop’s efforts at finding her own voice, and translating the Diary gave her a chance “to examine Helena’s style very closely, but also to ‘reenact’ it” (Machova 34). However,

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Bishop never tried to write autobiographical pieces that strictly adopted a child’s vision and a child’s voice as in a diary; for she knew that the freshness she was so much attracted to in Helena’s prose could not be recaptured in her own autobiographical works. Because these works came late in her career, they necessarily bore the traces of the passing of time. Remembering one’s childhood decades later necessarily meant forgetting and therefore recomposing what time had erased or transformed. Bishop’s interest in composing childhood pieces lay in the re-enactment of past events and emotions, but also in a reflection on the workings of memory that becomes an intrinsic part of this autobiographical material. “Life and the memory of it so compressed / they’ve turned into each other. Which is which?” (Bishop, 1983 177). The passing of time and the various disruptions it implies is a recurrent theme in Bishop’s unpublished texts dating back to the early fifties. In “A Short, Slow Life” for instance, Time is allegorized as a monstrous giant who, through a mere gesture of the hand, produces disarray and dislocation: We lived in a pocket of Time. It was close, it was warm. along the dark seam of the river the houses, the barns, the two churches, hid like white crumbs in a fluff of gray willows and elms, till Time made one of his gestures; his nails scratched the shingled roof. Roughly his hand reached in, and tumbled us out. (Bishop, 2006 103) Time’s intrusion abruptly puts an end to the idyllic pastoral existence led so far by the speaker and her community in some kind of temporal suspension. The rural setting is clearly reminiscent of the Nova Scotia landscapes of Bishop’s early years. This former life sounds like some Edenic garden from which the poetic voice has been expelled and which has turned into some irretrievable Paradise. The unusual transitive use of the verb “tumble” further conveys the helplessness of the subject. The first stanza of the short unfinished poem “Syllables” (alternatively titled “Autobiography”) seems to lament the same kind of separation: Whatever there was, or is, of love let it be obeyed: —so that the grandfather mightn’t have been blinded, the river never dwindled to what it is now, nor the leaning big willows above it been blighted, nor its trout fished out; nor, by the naked boys, the swimming hole been abandoned, dissolved, abandoned, its terra cottas and gilt. (101) Although time is never named, it is implicitly staged like the hidden force that “blinds” and “blights,” “dwindles” and “dissolves.” These alliterative pairs of verbs are opposed to negations (“not,” “never,” anaphoric “nor”); but “abandon,” expressed through another repetition, finally prevails. Time is once again depicted as an unstoppable adversary, which forces anybody involved in any autobiographical attempt to work against and along with various forms of loss. There might lie what Jean-Bertrand Pontalis defines as the “secret” of all autobiographies: Si c’était là le “secret” de toute autobiographie ? Si c’était dans cette apparente exception—l’autobiographie d’un autre et d’un proche, d’un autre devenu étranger à lui-même—qu’il fallait trouver le motif méconnu, y compris par ceux qui s’y engagent, du projet qu’on se propose ici d’interroger : faire de sa vie un livre ? S’il s’agissait dans tous les cas de restituer un Je à celui qui l’a perdu ? […] De faire

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entendre, au-delà des traces visibles mais à partir d’elles, la voix du disparu, de l’effacé, de l’incompris ? De faire parler le muet, de donner par l’écriture un langage à l’infans ? (Pontalis 338-339)

7 What many of Bishop’s autobiographical texts show indeed is that writing about one’s childhood consists in striving to revisit a long-lost territory and identity. It consists in trying to regain a form of familiarity with what has become foreign and trying to find words for what often remained silent in the past. In Bishop’s case, this double challenge is made even more complex by her predilection for secrecy. Reminiscing is just as much about making some things resurface as it is about burying others—either unintentionally because things dissolve or get lost, or on purpose because there are things you do want to keep hidden and unsaid. Oblivion is to be heard as both forgetfulness and omission. When Bishop remembers Nova Scotia, she recollects landscapes and places, anecdotes involving various relatives. However, the shameful story of her mother’s depression and internment that permanently upset the family balance and the child’s life is never frontally tackled (neither is her father’s early death). But the mother’s absence from Bishop’s texts is so glaring that it becomes a haunting and founding presence in most of her autobiographical pieces, the “absent sun”4 around which all these texts seem to have been composed. The best example is of course “Sestina” whose spiraling structure draws and follows the contours of Bishop’s family tragedy without ever naming it. The tragedy is perceptible in filigree, through the network of repetitions and metonymic associations that the poem weaves around a silent core whose gravity is thus enhanced. Although the mother’s disease and absence are never referred to, they are refracted so to speak throughout all the other motifs of the sestina (the September rain, the grandmother’s tears, the kettle’s song, the child’s drawing). Even if the trauma is never openly addressed, remaining partly “inscrutable,” it is obliquely inscribed in the text. “Homesickness” is an unpublished story ruled by the same dynamics of reserve and indirectness. It narrates a family anecdote Bishop summarizes in her correspondence: My mother went off to teach school at 16 […] and her first school was in lower Cape Breton somewhere—and the pupils spoke nothing much but Gaelic so she had a hard time of it at that school, or maybe one nearer home—she was so homesick she was taken the family dog to cheer her up. (Bishop, 2006 294)

8 The prose piece reconstructs the trip undertaken by the father and two siblings (the absent daughter’s younger sister and brother) to drive the family dog to her new place. The narrative focuses on the Cape Breton settings, the travelers’ descriptions, the dog’s and the horse’s behaviors during the journey, but the object of the trip is not dwelt upon. A brief passage hints at the girl’s situation without revealing anything about her vulnerability: “Mr. MacLaughlin was on his way to see another daughter, Georgie, who had left home for the first time that autumn, to teach school, and he was taking her some presents” (Bishop, 2006 189). We have to wait until the very final lines of the text to get a brief glimpse at the true depth of the daughter’s ill-being: There was something very settled and domestic in [the dog’s] manner; if she could have talked one could imagine her conversation: cheerful, practical, and tedious,— but a character to turn to with confidence in life’s darker moments. Indeed, although she didn’t know it, that was exactly why she was being taken on this trip, and among the cloth-wrapped packages under the seat was a large leg-bone with some meat on it, to be given her when they reached their destination. (Bishop, 2006 190)

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Rereading the story, we then understand that the travelers’ silence, the overwhelming accuracy of most descriptions, the young boy’s extreme concentration on the tip of his whip and the trace it leaves on the wheel-track, all express a form of intensity and gravity that can be accounted for only by an out of text element. The father and his two children know they are on a mission to try and relieve the exiled daughter’s suffering. Yet these “darker moments” (premonitory of the mother’s ulterior more serious depression) are merely mentioned in passing, almost impersonally, and this “homesickness,” named only in the title, acquires another “ghost-like” dimension: it can be related to Bishop herself who always described her forced departure from Nova Scotia as some traumatic uprooting she never completely recovered from.5 Once “exiled” to her paternal grandparents’ New England house, Bishop became ill, first with eczema, then asthma. The situation deteriorated so much she finally had to go and live with her aunt Maud, her mother’s eldest sister, and her husband, in Worcester, Massachusetts. In “Mrs. Sullivan Downstairs,” an unpublished prose memoir, she recalls the years she spent with them. The text opens on the speaker’s reminiscences about the apartment and the family’s everyday domestic life, but it soon drifts towards external elements—the portraits of several members of the Italian or Irish communities who tried hard to start anew in America, or of a young neighbor, Barbara Hunt, “a bastard,” who lived among “grim and cold” relatives. Without making the parallel too explicit,6 Bishop composes her autobiographical piece focusing on other lives from which she indirectly borrows to tell something about her own existence—her homelessness and homesickness. In all the examples developed so far, her autobiographical strategy thus appears as a complex interaction between memory and oblivion understood as forgetfulness, omission or indirectness. It is striking that a very similar dynamics is precisely at the core of two of Drummond de Andrade’s texts Bishop translated and included in her own collection. This is why they may help us shed light on her autobiographical approach and more precisely on the treatment of oblivion as previously defined in her own writings.

Drummond de Andrade’s Specters: “Family Portrait” and “Travelling in the Family”

9 Carlos Drummond de Andrade (1902-1987) was one of Bishop’s favorite Brazilian poets. She translated all seven of his poems published in the anthology, four of which deal with childhood and memory. There is no doubt Bishop felt a strong “affinity of spirit”7 with this poet whom she met only once but with whom she exchanged several letters. In “Family Portrait” (1945), a speaker comes across an old family photograph. The whole text relies on a paradoxical tension: the picture shows just as much as it hides. Presence and absence are staged in a variety of forms that participate in the haunting effect produced by the photograph on its observer. According to Roland Barthes, the haunting effect of a picture results first from the temporal blurring the observer experiences when faced with the photographs of dead persons: The living and dead relations multiply in the glass. I don’t distinguish those that went away from those that stay. I only perceive the strange idea of family

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travelling through the flesh. (Bishop, 1983 261)

10 In de Andrade’s family portrait, the dead relations that strike a pose (“And the sand, beneath dead feet, / is an ocean of fog”) correspond to what Barthes calls “spectrum,”8 that is to say specters who belong to an abolished past when they were still alive. Life and death are suddenly superimposed and this impossible co-presence produces a spectral effect. Besides, while the picture revives relatives bringing the observer back towards a long-gone past, it also conjures up in the observer’s mind numerous associations with ulterior episodes or out of the frame depths that the picture cannot register: The father’s face doesn’t show How much money he earned. The uncle’s hands don’t reveal The voyages both of them made. The children, how they’ve changed. […] They could refine themselves in the room’s chiaroscuro, live inside the furniture or the pockets of old waistcoats. The house has many drawers, papers, long staircases. (Bishop, 1983 260-261) In other words, the visible elements of the picture co-exist with invisible ones that the observer can perceive just as well. Finally, the speaker’s description of the fixed portrait tells us about his way of remembering the past, and he confesses that his eyes are just as “dusty” as the photograph: “The portrait does not reply, / it stares; in my dusty eyes / it contemplates itself,” acknowledging that reminiscing is a process that implies forgetting. At all levels, intermittence seems to define this family picture caught between past and present, presence and absence, visibility and invisibility. A striking run-on line in stanza 8 summarizes this central tension: “Family features remain / lost in the play of bodies.” Something remains that is lost at the same time, so that even if the speaker fails to recognize his relatives (“All these seated strangers, / my relations?”), he still manages to perceive something familiar within their otherness: “I only perceive / the strange idea of family / travelling through the flesh.”9 Memory is intimately linked with loss, and what remains, de Andrade seems to suggest, can only be felt “through the flesh,” that is to say through the body.

11 Such thematics are re-explored and developed in “Travelling in the Family.” It is another autobiographical poem by de Andrade devoted to the crucial part played by oblivion in the shaping of memories. The poem tells the story of a son (the poetic voice, Carlos Drummond de Andrade himself) who meets the ghost of his dead father (Rodrigo M.F. de Andrade to whom the poem is dedicated). Together they revisit the land of the past (travelling is the central metaphor), described as “a lost kingdom” that has to be re-discovered since it has turned into an unknown territory. The son has to catch up on “lost time.” He had a conflicting relationship with his father, full of resentment and unspoken issues: I saw grief, misunderstanding and more than one old revolt dividing us in the dark. The hand I wouldn’t kiss, the crumb that they denied me,

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refusal to ask pardon. Pride. Terror at night. (247) When he meets the old man again, he hopes for some kind of reunion: The narrow space of life crowds me up against you, it’s as if I were being burned completely, with poignant love. Only now do we know each other! (248) But this apparent reconciliation is described as painful burning and the father’s figure cannot be grasped: “I caught at his strict shadow / and the shadow released itself / with neither haste nor anger. But he remained silent” (248). The father remains silent throughout the whole journey; the line “But he didn’t say anything” is the final refrain of the first seven stanzas. Even if the son wants to believe in some form of forgiving, the final image of the poem is an image of flooding by the waters of time and “blood.” The ephemeral proximity with the father is over and distance now seems impossible to bridge10: Eye-glasses, memories, portraits flow in the river of blood. Now the waters won’t let me make out your distant face, distant by seventy years… I felt that he pardoned me but he didn’t say anything. The waters cover his moustache, the family, Itabira, all. (248)

12 Throughout the whole text, the father’s silences are echoed by the son’s own reserve. When traumatic episodes are brought back to the surface, the syntax of the poem becomes irregular, with more pauses as if the poetic voice could no longer speak: In the desert of Itabira things come back to life, stiflingly, suddenly. The market of desires displays its sad treasures; my urge to run away; naked women; remorse. (246-247) The son’s reluctance to evoke “forbidden time and forbidden places” is palpable. Twice in the poem he exhorts his father to speak: “I cried to him: Speak! My voice / shook in the air a moment” (247). But on line 47, the enjambment incites us to read and hear “speak my voice,” as a form of self-encouragement. Similarly line 62 is made of four imperative forms “Speak speak speak speak,” four stressed syllables with no mark of punctuation nor clear grammatical referent so that they may be addressed to the father or the son alike.

13 The lost time in this poem is also the time that has gone by and whose vivid details cannot be retrieved a posteriori. Time is said to have “gnawed” at places, beings and things: We have come a long way. Here there was a house. The mountain used to be bigger. So many heaped-up dead, and time gnawing the dead. And in the ruined houses, cold disdain and damp. (246)

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The poem sounds like an incomplete puzzle and the lost kingdom can be reconstituted only partially, through furtive images separated (and related) by numerous blanks. It draws several fragmentary portraits through synecdochic associations: The street he used to cross on horseback, at a gallop. His watch. His clothes. His legal documents. His tales of love affairs. Opening of tin trunks and violent memories. (246) Reminiscence is interrupted as soon as it reaches disturbing secrets. Other members of the family are evoked just as evasively: Stepping on books and letters we travel in the family. Marriages; mortgages; the consumptive cousins; the mad aunt; my grandmother betrayed among the slave-girls, rustling silks in the bedroom. (247) The nominal list seems to be governed by alliterations and metonymic associations that do not reveal anything about personalities or relationships.11 The reader is simply left at the end of the stanza with the sound of rustling silks… Several questions remain unanswered: “A sigh? A passing bird?” (7); “what cruel hand…” (stanza 6). Several nouns have no clear syntactic referent (“remorse,” “pride,” “terror”). They seem to be suspended among other words, referring to either father or son or other relatives… so that it is impossible for the reader to establish any clear logical connection between people and events.

14 In other words, Drummond de Andrade’s poem is a text that seems to have been written against oblivion and along with it, striving at the same time to recover some distant past and to skip painful or shameful memories. Whether it is imposed or chosen, oblivion strikes as the “vivid force” (“force vive”) that confers to the text its images, its rhythm, its syntax… The expression “force vive” is taken from Marc Augé’s book Les Figures de l’oubli, in which the anthropologist incites us to view oblivion not as a mere loss of memory but as a major component of memory itself, an active agent that shapes memory just as a seashore is shaped by seawater (Augé 21, 29). Drummond de Andrade revisits a past that has been blurred, amputated, distorted. His aim is not to reconstitute its chronology exhaustively but rather to recover a few moments whose emotional impact has been very strong and has left some kind of subconscious trace. He strives to recover diffuse sensations and emotions that were not put into words in the past and are barely more articulated in the present. The poetic voice focuses on places, objects, sounds, colors, textures (desert, house, mountain, street, cold, damp, tin, rustling silks, stones, clay, pallid hand, white eyes, painted birds…). Drummond de Andrade seems to explore what Nathalie Sarraute defines as childhood “tropisms.” It is a concept she borrows from biology (acknowledging it might be inadequate to express what she means), and that she defines several times in her works.12 Commenting on the character of the writer from Entre la vie et la mort, she gives a clear definition of the notion saying that he moves towards “obscure and silent zones which no word has entered yet, on which language has not yet exerted its drying and petrifying influence —zones characterized by micro-movements, virtual issues, vague sensations, all that is not named yet, that resists naming but that calls for it at the same time because its very

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existence depends on language.”13 Tropisms correspond to “inner turbulences/ disturbances,” “tiny and intimate dramas” (Gosselin 16) taking place in one’s subconscious. In Sarraute’s texts (as in Drummond de Andrade’s and Bishop’s as we shall see), they are always related to something disturbing and kept secret such as fear, shame, and irrepressible urges. Years later, they can be grasped at only through uncertain language. The present reconstitution of these disturbances does not consist in explaining them, in disclosing what they hide or what they mean. If the poet or the writer used more elaborate and rigid syntax, they would turn these fleeting instants into fiction because they would betray or stifle the recovered sensations. “Travelling in the Family” is a poem shaped by silences; this enables Drummond de Andrade to resurrect a few sensory traces laying the emphasis on their frailty, their discontinuity and their opacity. It is a poem in which remembering consists in caressing the past without forcing resurgence but giving full attention to the emotional impact of the remembered situation, which is precisely the strategy that Bishop seems to adopt in her own autobiographical writings. So that translating somebody else’s tropisms seems to be the closest Bishop gets to defining her own autobiographical approach.

Bishop’s Tropisms: “In the Village” and “Dickie and Sister”

15 “In the Village” is a text that Bishop described as a fragment of “poetic prose” that did not follow the pattern of a traditional autobiography either in its structure or its style. 14 It relates the mother’s depression and absence but the events are not narrated in any clear temporal or causal chronology. The story progresses through ellipses, digressions, cyclical repetitions of situations or images that convey a specific tempo. It is structured around two spaces, each marked by strong metonymic connotations: the family house, on the one hand, perceived as a place of secrecy, fear and shame; the blacksmith’s shop, on the other hand, associated with warmth and security. Bishop concentrates on a few scenes, narrated in the present tense as if they were reenacted through writing. The speaker is a silent observer who tries to resurrect intermittently her sensory experience (through sounds, smells, physical contacts). Let us compare two passages— the first one is extracted from preparatory notes and the second corresponds to the final published version: The afternoon I tapped on my mother’s door and went in. Easter [the mother] was standing in the middle of the room with Miss O’Neil [the dressmaker] kneeling at her left and Aunt Grace at her right. The tiny fan of shiny needles in Miss O’Neil’s starved looking mouth might well have been a sacred host. She stared up at Easter [fictive name of the mother] with fear and wonder, and I thought to myself “Oh, she knows...” Miss O’Neil picked up a large pair of shears & took hold of the extra cloth, to cut it away. At once Easter fell to her knees and snatched the cloth away from her. “Oh, oh!” she cried, “You hurt me. You mustn’t cut it... It’s mine... so take the scissors away. Grace [fictive name of the aunt]! Make her stop. It will bleed. I shall bleed.” ... She jumped up & ran to the other end of the room trailing the cloth in a wonderful swirl behind her. She stood there and screamed. (Manuscripts, Vassar College, “Reminiscences of Great Village,” box 54, file 13) In this extract, the narrator relates the scene of the mother’s scream in a rather linear and clear way: the various characters are named and located in space. Their actions are interrelated. We have access to the child’s thoughts and the mother’s words. The final version contrasts a lot:

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Unaccustomed to having her back, the child stood now in the doorway, watching. The dressmaker was crawling around and around on her knees eating pins as Nebuchadnezzar had crawled eating grass. The wall paper glinted and the elm trees outside hung heavy and green, and the straw matting smelled like the ghost of hay. Clang. Clang. Oh, beautiful sounds, from the blacksmith’s shop at the end of the garden! Its gray roof, with patches of moss, could be seen above the lilac bushes. Nate was there— Nate, wearing a long black leather apron over his trousers and bare chest, sweating hard, a black leather cap on top of dry, thick, black-and-gray curls, a black sooty face; iron filings, whiskers, and gold teeth, all together, and a smell of red-hot metal and horses’ hoofs. Clang. The pure note: pure and angelic. The dress was all wrong. She screamed. (Bishop, 1984 252-253) Here the narrator speaks in the third person. The dressmaker is immediately introduced as a monstrous figure that is to say as the child perceived her at that moment. The narration focuses on visual and auditory perceptions and on smells. It is punctuated by onomatopoeia. The many alliterations and monosyllabic words also translate the sonorous dimension of the experience. The scream comes abruptly after a long ellipsis corresponding to the digression about Nate’s place. It surprises the reader as it must have shocked the child. The passage does not give any psychological explanation. It simply makes us feel what the child experienced at the time. The child did not express her experience through words; and the words used years later to convey what she felt then seem to work like the “torn fishnets” she describes in “Cape Breton”: they manage to recapture a few fleeting sensations and emotions while leaving part of the experience in the dark. What seems to matter is to retrieve, beyond facts but from them at the same time, the emotional impact some episodes had on the child, the traces they have left.

16 Two unpublished manuscripts Bishop started working on while composing “In the Village” provide another significant example. “Dickie and Sister” is a poetic draft derived from various elements already present in the prose memoir “Mrs. Sullivan Downstairs.” Reworking her story into a poem, Bishop displays once more her predilection for tropisms. The first paragraphs of the story depict the childhood setting (the Worcester apartment) in a very organized way, detailing all the rooms in some exhaustive survey: I could draw the floor plan now: you went up the long staircase that was always cool —in the winter freezing—made a sharp right turn and entered the narrow hallway. To the right the front bedroom where my aunt and uncle slept, to the right front the doorway to the tiny living room. [Straight in front] of [one] the doorway to the tiny dining room, and off it a small bedroom with one window. To the left the kitchen where we did so much of our living, taken up by a blackish green [stove] (its name was Magee Ideal) and two “set tubs” with a big hood with a great deal of brass pipe (my job to polish). Two windows, and hanging in them the canaries Dickie and Sweetie. Off that another small bedroom, mine. [Out from the end of the] kitchen another narrow dark hall, this one going onto the piazza and just having space enough for a small refrigerator. The narrow back staircase with two turns in it descended past Mrs. Sullivan’s back door. (Bishop, 2006 197-198) The house is also located in a specific neighborhood, enjoying a specific view. It is set in a particular perspective, related to spatial landmarks that have completely disappeared in the poetic version. The latter focuses solely on the kitchen (where the family did so much of their living) and the objects of their everyday routine. The poetic voice

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undertakes another kind of mapping, a more intimate but incomplete one, based on a nominal list punctuated by dashes that both space out and link up all the items. We follow the voice’s reminiscing logic that seems to be ruled by the way light, shapes, materials and textures were imprinted on her mind at the time, leaving disjointed but vivid traces: In the kitchen of the old wooden “double decker”, top floor— Winter Sunlight coming in [from the right] from afar— Two windows, two canaries Dickie and Sister. A stove : Magee Ideal ______The sink, the ‘set-tub’— The pairs of faucets, staggered. The table, the sewing machine covered with an old red tablecloth the list of someone’s peculiar (DIET) foods brass— & at right angles— the paired brass water pipes up to the ceiling— the linoleum—& a hooked rug—very worn— & towels behind the stove— over the table a calendar —a picture of a baby cut from “the Ladies Home Journal” cover & a list—someone’s diet (170) What the speaker seeks to recreate is not the exact unfolding of specific events but the sensory background in which the child was immersed. Bishop’s choice to center the whole poem on the pair of canaries and their songs also participates in her wish to translate an ambience rather than facts: Dickie and Sister sing & call, argue and quarrel He has the better disposition Dickie and Sister quarrel & sing The set tubs sit (or set), Magee Ideal Sends out a chuff of coal gas (the water tank is full) the brass pipes shine, the soup boils, the Jello jells & the alto voice sings hymns & hymns (168) The bird’s songs on which the draft opens are immediately associated with other domestic noises. Beyond the apparent sonorous fragmentation, a concert of “voices” seems to be orchestrated through lexical simplicity, syntactic parallels and alliterative sequences which reproduce the musical cadence of a nursery rhyme. The aunt’s “alto voice” is all that remains of the beloved relative who cannot be identified if one has not read the prose piece. The two texts follow a shift from day to nighttime. In the prose memoir, this passage is clearly associated with terror:

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There was a streetlamp that was still lit by a lamplighter every evening. […] When I lay in bed at nights the light threw the shadows of the leaves uphill and greatly magnified on the tan painted walls […] The leaves looked gigantic […] and on nights of strong wind, in the late summer, […] their shadows would move agitatedly, frantically, wagging, chop-chopping—I half consciously frightened myself watching them. I looked at them and saw a group in lively conversation or in an argument, threatening each other, [menacing], interrupting, insulting, roaring—and all in silence—Horrible wide open mouths, waving hands, gnashing , thrown back heads, contemptuous laughs… […] Used to violence in the neighbors and a certain amount threatened even in my own apartment. (203) The voice analyzes her fears, revealing their causes, explaining how she distorted perceptions and projected fantasies that she related to the violent scenes she used to witness during the day. In the poem, night terrors are also expressed but in a sideways fashion: At night who knows what happens? The birds don’t know— Only perhaps the mice know & the occasional (cock-) roach—? Do the set tubs still set— The brass pipes cling to the wall? The faucets stay turned off? At night what happens? Who knows? […] Magee Ideal dances Jigs a (little) on her tiny black claw feet— The Singer pedals furiously Furious, trapped, the Singer pedals— […]The bread rises— The brasses shine The moon that bosses Or Magee Ideal’s oven door— Her broken thermometer cyclop-eye […] the towels dry at last & the scuttles scuttle […] The water tank—hisses with greenish tarnish The Singer sings, everything sings In its own way— Silently— Hum themselves to sleep Sleep humming in the partial dark (171-172) The poetic “I”—that never appears in the text as a grammatical form—articulates the questions that, in the past, crowded her mind at night. All the objects in the kitchen are personified: when no one looks at them, they become animated and start living their silent lives. The wonderful dimension of the passage clearly conveys a child’s perspective, synonymous with wonder indeed (the whole scene sounds like a choreographed show reminiscent of the poem’s opening concert) but also with disquiet (the invisible presence of mice and cockroaches, the fury of the Singer, the hissing of the water tank, the monstrous eye and the claws of the stove, the very cadence of this night life that seems to potentially get out of control through syntactic hammering). It is as if the social violence recalled in the prose piece had been partly transferred onto all those things working as contiguous extensions in the child’s environment and indirectly reflecting the child’s diffuse anguish. It sounds like fragments from a fairy-

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tale through which the speaker gives shape to her unspoken fears. This draft (in which Bishop literally gives voice to mute things and a silent witness) exemplifies once again her strategy to verbalize muffled emotions, “tiny and intimate dramas” whose intensity and mystery she manages to preserve.

17 The various Brazilian texts Bishop chose to translate have played an important role in Bishop’s career, echoing her own life and pushing her to travel in her own family history, to explore the opaque and turbulent zones of her own childhood. This corresponds to what Pontalis calls “l’épreuve de l’étranger,” that is to say some kind of “round trip” during which one first explores an unknown territory to become more familiar with it before being led to discover unknown zones within one’s own familiar environment15—as if a detour via otherness was a way to explore one’s own strangeness —in this particular case, the terra incognita of one’s childhood. Translating may still emphasize this double movement between familiarity and otherness,16 for translating consists in turning foreign words into familiar ones. Nonetheless, in the process of translation, something is always lost—one’s familiar language often proves unable to convey the exact nuances of the original text. Translating, Pontalis says, consists in discovering flaws or limits within one’s own language, in perceiving one’s language as “other” so to speak. That is why Pontalis defines translation as a form of “emigration within one’s language.”17 In Bishop’s Brazilian experience, translating could be seen as a linguistic migration that doubled the geographical one and that may have helped her give shape to her much commented upon “reticence,” that is to say, not only a form of reserve that distinguishes her from the Confessional poets, but also another facet of “the art of losing” she celebrates in her villanelle “One Art.” Oblivion is a form of loss that always leaves tangible traces in her autobiographical compositions. Sarraute explained about Enfance that her aim was not to write the whole story of her life but rather to assemble images pulled out of a sort of cotton wool18 in which they were buried. What Bishop’s and Drummond de Andrade’s autobiographical texts often give us to perceive best is this layer of cotton wool which shrouds and clouds memories just as much as it protects them. Remain / lost.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

AUGÉ, Marc. Les figures de l’oubli. Paris : Payot, 1998.

BARTHES, Roland. La chambre claire. Paris : Gallimard, Le Seuil, 1980.

BERMAN, Antoine. L’épreuve de l’étranger. Paris : Gallimard, 1984.

BISHOP, Elizabeth. The Complete Poems, 1927-1979. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1983.

BISHOP, Elizabeth. The Collected Prose. 1969. London: Chatto & Windus, 1984.

BISHOP, Elizabeth. The Diary of Helena Morley. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1957.

BISHOP, Elizabeth and Emanuel BRASIL, eds. An Anthology of Twentieth Century Brazilian Poetry. Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1972.

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BISHOP, Elizabeth. One Art. Letters selected and edited by Robert Giroux. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1994.

BISHOP, Elizabeth. and the Juke-Box (Uncollected Poems, Drafts, and Fragments, Edited and Annotated by Alice Quinn). New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2006.

GOSSELIN, Monique. Nathalie Sarraute, Enfance. Paris: Gallimard, 1996.

HARRISON, Victoria. Elizabeth Bishop’s Poetics of Intimacy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993.

HICOK, Bethany. Elizabeth Bishop’s Brazil. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2016.

LARTIGUE, Pierre. L’hélice d’écrire (La sextine). Paris : Les Belles Lettres, 1994.

LOMBARDI, Marilyn May. The Body and the Song: Elizabeth Bishop’s Poetics. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1995.

MACHOVA, Mariana. Elizabeth Bishop and Translation. London: Lexington Books, 2017.

MILLEO MARTINS, Maria Lucia. Duas Artes: Carlos Drummond de Andrade and Elizabeth Bishop. Belo Horizonte: Editora UFMG, 2006.

PONTALIS, Jean-Bertrand. Perdre de vue. Paris : Gallimard, 1988.

SARRAUTE, Nathalie. Tropismes. 1939. Paris : Éditions de Minuit, 2012.

SARRAUTE, Nathalie. Enfance. 1983. Paris : Gallimard, 1985.

NOTES

1. In his introduction to the 2011 edition of Bishop’s prose, Lloyd Schwartz notices that “Bishop deliberately blurs the distinction between fiction and memoir” and that her definition of the genre of her prose was uncertain, “vacillating between ‘stories’ and ‘essays’ in her draft of the contents of a planned but never materialized book of her prose” (Machova 38). 2. “Gwendolyn” (June 1953), “In the Village” (December 1953), “Manners” (November 1955), “The Country Mouse” (1960), “Primer Class” (1961). 3. Among which six poems: “For M.B.S., buried in Nova Scotia…,” “One afternoon my aunt and I…,” “Syllables,” “Where are the dolls who loved me so…,” “A Short, Slow Life,” “The Grandmothers,” and two prose pieces: “Homesickness” and “Mrs. Sullivan Downstairs.” 4. “Soleil absent” is the expression used by Lartigue to depict the formal mechanism of a sestina (Lartigue 38). 5. Several passages from “The County Mouse” are unequivocal: “I had been brought back unconsulted and against my wishes to the house my father was born in, to be saved from a life of poverty and provincialism, bare feet, suet puddings, unsanitary school slates, perhaps even from the inverted r’s of my mother’s family” (Bishop, 1984 17). 6. She simply hints at the parallel between Barbara and herself: “A horrible strange grim unlovely cold family—Barb’runt was obviously the brightest member of it but I didn’t even feel the mystery or romance of her sad situation then—we were both orphans, that is, almost fairy princesses and living here just temporarily—that was our great bond although we took it so much for granted we never once referred to it as far as I remember” (Bishop, 2006 202). 7. The expression, taken from Milleo Martins’s comparative study on Bishop and de Andrade published in 2006 but not translated into English yet, is quoted by Hicok who draws on this monograph in her own chapter. Milleo Martins also suggests that the two poets might have been simultaneously driven to revisit the “landscapes” of their childhood because they shared a

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“coincidental displacement” to . De Andrade came from his native Itabira and Bishop from the United States (Hicok 2006). 8. “Spectrum, parce que ce mot garde à travers sa racine un rapport au ‘spectacle’ et y ajoute cette chose un peu terrible qu’il y a dans toute photographie : le retour du mort” (Barthes 23). 9. So far, “Family Portrait” has mostly been analyzed in relationship with Bishop’s “In the Waiting Room,” the two poems being linked through the paradoxical trope of “family as estrangement” (Hicok 2016). Machova suggests it also bears resemblances with Bishop’s story “Memories of Uncle Neddy” whose starting point is the observation of a portrait by a speaker who ponders on the relationship between the painted portrait and the relative as she remembers him (Machova 64). 10. Both Milleo Martins, quoted by Hicok (2050), and Harrison (178) draw a parallel between “Travelling in the Family” and one of Bishop’s elegies, “For Grandfather,” published posthumously (Bishop, 2006 154). The two poems describe “vast landscapes” (a desert for de Andrade, the frozen North for Bishop) and focus on a speaker’s “overwhelming desire to communicate” with a dead relative. Bishop’s last lines (“Grandfather, please stop! I haven’t been this cold in years”) clearly echo de Andrade’s hailing (“I cried to him: Speak!”). 11. Machova relates de Andrade’s nominal and metonymic lines to Bishop’s “The Moose” and the intermittent and enigmatic conversation of an old couple’s conversation in the bus: “names being mentioned, / things cleared up finally; / what he said, what she said, / who got pensioned; deaths, deaths and sicknesses; / the year he remarried; / the year (something) happened” (Bishop, 1983 171-172). 12. She uses the notion for the first time in 1939, but it reappears in several works, especially her autobiographical book Enfance. 13. The exact quotation in French is: “ces régions silencieuses et obscures où aucun mot ne s’est encore introduit, sur lesquelles le langage n’a pas encore exercé son action asséchante et pétrifiante, vers ce qui n’est que mouvance, virtualités, sensations vagues et globales, vers ce non-nommé qui oppose aux mots une résistance et qui pourtant les appelle car il ne peut exister sans eux” (Gosselin 233). 14. “They [the New Yorker] find fault over and over with the story’s being ‘mysterious’ while giving a perfectly lucid synopsis of it, so somebody around there must have understood it all right [...]. The idea underneath it all seems to be that the New Yorker reader must never have to pause to think for a single second, but be informed and reinformed comfortably all the time, like newspaper writing a little” (Bishop, 1994 254). 15. “L’épreuve de l’étranger, c’est un aller et retour : je fais mien un pays inconnu, me le rends peu à peu familier, après quoi je découvre de l’inconnu dans mon pays familier” (Pontalis 70). 16. “Épreuve de l’étranger” (Trials of the Foreign) is an expression Pontalis borrows from Berman’s study on translation. 17. “Qu’est-ce donc que traduire ? Émigrer, oui, cela est sûr, mais émigrer dans sa langue. Vivre à nouveau l’exil en elle, renoncer à l’illusion, qui a pu être la nôtre, que nous en étions propriétaires et maîtres, pouvions en disposer, comme d’un bien, à notre gré” (Pontalis 262). 18. Sarraute uses several times the image of “ouate.” See for instance the final words of Enfance: “Je ne pourrais plus m’efforcer de faire surgir quelques moments, quelques mouvements qui me semblent encore intacts, assez forts pour se dégager de cette couche protectrice qui les conserve, de ces épaisseurs blanchâtres, molles, ouatées, qui se défont, qui disparaissent avec l’enfance…” (Sarraute, 1985 277).

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ABSTRACTS

The aim of this paper is to analyze Bishop’s interest in Brazilian autobiographical works especially The Diary of Helena Morley and poems by Carlos Drummond de Andrade that she translated into English and included among her own poems. Of particular interest is the privileged dialogue established between these translations and Bishop’s own autobiographical texts, either in verse or in prose, both published and unpublished during her lifetime. Particular attention is paid to the treatment of oblivion defined as both forgetfulness and omission. Oblivion strikes as the “vivid force” that shapes most of these autobiographical works and pushes both poets to explore their childhood “tropisms,” that is to say, according to Sarraute’s definition, micro-movements, intimate dramas that affect the child’s subconscious and that the adult tries to grasp at years later through uncertain language. The aim of the autobiographical return is not to recreate a whole life but to retrieve the emotional traces left by a few episodes.

Cet article se penche sur l’intérêt d’Elizabeth Bishop pour plusieurs œuvres autobiographiques brésiliennes, notamment le journal d’Helena Morley et certains poèmes de Carlos Drummond de Andrade qu’elle a traduits en anglais puis inclus dans l’édition de ses Collected Poems. Il s’intéresse en particulier au dialogue intertextuel qui s’établit entre les traductions de Bishop et ses propres textes autobiographiques (poésie et prose), au traitement de l’oubli, notamment, dans ces textes. À la fois perte du souvenir et omission, l’oubli semble être la « force vive » qui façonne beaucoup de ces écrits autobiographiques, poussant les poètes à explorer leurs tropismes d’enfance, à savoir, ainsi que les définit Nathalie Sarraute, des « micro-mouvements » ou drames intimes qui affectent subconsciemment l’enfant et que l’adulte ne peut que reconstruire imparfaitement des années plus tard. Le retour autobiographique, pour Bishop comme pour de Andrade, ne consiste donc pas à recomposer l’intégralité d’un parcours mais à retrouver et mettre en mots quelques traces émotionnelles laissées par certains épisodes.

INDEX

Keywords: Elizabeth Bishop, Carlos Drummond de Andrade, translation, intertextuality, autobiography, childhood, tropisms, memory, oblivion Mots-clés: Elizabeth Bishop, Carlos Drummond de Andrade, traduction, intertextualité, autobiographie, enfance, tropismes, mémoire

AUTHOR

MYRIAM BELLEHIGUE Université Paris-Sorbonne, VALE, [email protected]

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Weimar Migrations: Katherine Anne Porter in Berlin

Joseph Kuhn

Introduction: Weimar Berlin and Porter’s “Plan” For Her Fiction

1 In the spring of 1931 Katherine Anne Porter, then living in Mexico and already the author of the classic short story “Flowering Judas” (1930), won a Guggenheim fellowship and set sail for France on a German liner. Quite by chance—the difficulty was that she could not obtain a visa for France en route—Porter ended up not taking the usual Lost Generation route to Paris, but sailing all the way to Weimar Germany and living in Berlin between September 1931 and January 1932. Unbidden and unwanted, this short stay became the black swan event in Porter’s literary career. Brief and bleak as it was, it arguably had a greater role in shaping her fiction—and the way that she reread her fiction up to that point—than did her longer stays in Mexico or France (she went on to live between 1932 and 1936 in Paris).1 It was not only that the ocean voyage and the subsequent stay in a Berlin lodging house provided the germinative sources, respectively, of her two Weimar fictions: the short story “The Leaning Tower” (1941) and her only novel Ship of Fools (1962). It was also that, as she pointed out in her introduction to Flowering Judas and Other Stories (1940), Porter could relate the entire body of her fiction to the idea of a European crisis—the crisis that was concentrated on the demise of the German liberal state in the early 1930s (before Hitler’s chancellorship of January 1933). In the preface to the volume she observes that these stories in the 1940 collection (none of them set directly in Germany) are “fragments of a much larger plan which I am still engaged in carrying out.” This plan, which she formed during the “slowly darkening decade” of the 1930s, sought to “grasp the meaning” of “the heavy threat of world catastrophe,” to “trace” it to its “sources” and to “understand” its “logic” (Porter, 2008 717-18). This essay will try to explain why Porter’s short stay in Weimar Germany had such an impact on her fiction and why it was able to provide her with an overarching “plan” for her entire literary output. For Porter, expatriation was

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a dominant literary figure, but where she differed from most of her American contemporaries in the period of the Lost Generation is that her variety of transatlantic modernism was attuned to the politics of interwar Europe: to the supplanting of the nineteenth-century liberal state by a new type of mass politics.2 In her sensitivity to the political shape of modernity Porter should rather be placed in relation to the Weimar thinker, Hannah Arendt, who took the inverse trip from Berlin to the American continent and whose expatriate writing was likewise molded by the crisis years of the 1930s.

2 Porter and Arendt: isn’t this a mismatch? Arendt was a Weimar Jewish philosopher, who subsequently belonged to the radical group of New York intellectuals, and if she is compared with any American fiction writer it is usually with another member of this group, her friend Mary McCarthy. On the other hand, Porter was a self-educated southern fiction writer whose family were Texan farmers and she hated German philosophy. Yet Porter and Arendt have a counterintuitive affinity that is based on their oddly analogous responses as literary migrants to the totalitarian “catastrophe” of interwar Europe. In reaction to this crisis each of them worked out a woman writer’s way of being a modernist and wrote in a hard, juridical style that insisted on restoring responsibility to the modern self.3

Ship of Fools: Late Weimar Germany and “Negative” Evil

3 What exactly was this “larger plan” of Porter’s? Porter’s remark about tracing events to “sources” suggested that she saw a historically-conditioned, psychological structure at the origin of the “catastrophe”: to use her language, it was the secret complicity of “good people” in acts of evil (Porter, 1987 67).4 This psychological structure is set forth by Dr. Schumann in Ship of Fools: “Our collusion with evil is only negative, consent by default you might say. I suppose in our hearts our sympathies are with the criminal because he really commits the deeds we only dream of doing!” (Porter, 1962 294). The structure operates in the passengers on the Vera, the German ship that crosses the Atlantic from Veracruz to Bremerhaven, a ship that is evidently an allegorical representation of the late Weimar state. Despite a very liberal constitution, by 1931 the Weimar Republic was being undermined by proto-totalitarian movements on the right and the left. The man at the helm of the ship of state, the monarchist Captain Thiele, is akin to the conservative nationalists, President Hindenburg and Chancellor Brüning, who were the heads of state in Germany when Porter was visiting Berlin. Captain Thiele is prevailed upon by the radical nationalists—the proto-Nazi characters, Hans Rieber and Lizzi Spöckenkieker—to expel Wilhelm Freytag from the Captain’s table because Freytag is married to a Jewish woman. What Porter called her “parable of political action” in this novel is one in which the traditional right represented by figures such as Hindenburg is outmanoeuvred by the radical right (who in 1933 used Weimar laws of the state of emergency to create a totalitarian system) (Porter, 1990 501). In the novel, as in the last three Weimar governments, the conservative and the radical right share enough common ground in anti-semitism and a reliance on a strong, extra-legal executive to make this alliance possible. The late Weimar state is what Dr. Schumann calls “collusion” writ large.

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4 In Ship of Fools, Porter orchestrates two parallel levels of action. There is the allegorical figure of the Weimar ship of state, mediated through Sebastian Brant’s Das Narrenschiff (1494), in which the voyage toward the “mystic Fatherland” is also that of Brant’s ship toward Narragonia, the paradise of fools (Porter, 1962 40). Then within this allegorical figure, and calibrated to its schema of decline, Porter sets off a series of interactions between the individual travelers, many of which exemplify “negative” evil.

5 To the central event—the “Freytag crisis” (Porter, 1962 244)—Porter subtends a number of analogous examples of “collusion,” such as Herr Glocken’s refusal to report the thievery of the zarzuela company in the shops of Tenerife. These examples seem apparently quite minor in comparison to the political gravity of the Freytag case, and this impression of slightness is confirmed in some of the examples of “collusion” from the 1940 collection Flowering Judas and Other Stories. For example, in the story “Theft” (1929), the nameless protagonist, a single woman in her late thirties, allows herself to be taken advantage of in a series of everyday infringements, including the theft of her purse by a janitress; but although the janitress and her devilish eyes make a convenient external source of evil, the woman-protagonist realizes that it is she who, through her moral inertia, is the responsible party, the “thief” of herself (Porter, 2008 71). Porter’s focus on the marginal, everyday event can perhaps be seen as the personalistic mode of fiction associated with women writers. As Porter famously put it: “my fiction is reportage, only I do something to it” (Givner 206). But such attention to minor details is also her distinctly literary way of indicating how pretotalitarian government manifests itself in the interstices of everyday life.5

Porter and Competing Styles of Transatlantic Modernism

6 Porter is an unusual case in interwar literary migration in that her distinctly juridical imagination fixes upon Weimar Berlin as the epicenter of post-Versailles Europe rather than the Paris of Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Stein and Eugene Jolas. She insisted upon putting the modernity of the state at the heart of her aesthetic modernism—in particular she dramatized the way in which in the early twentieth century liberal governments such as those of the Weimar state and that of President Wilson in the United States in 1918 turned into constitutional dictatorships.6 In “The Wooden Umbrella” (1947), her demolition of Gertrude Stein, Porter dismissed the colony of American expatriates who gathered around Stein as being blind to “a falling world” and divided them up into two parties: “those who were full of an active, pragmatic unbelief” (she meant Hemingway and Fitzgerald) and those, such as Eugene Jolas, “who searched their own vitals and fished up strange horrors in the style of transition” (Porter, 2008 560). “The Wooden Umbrella” is a reminder that, as a literary traveler to post-Versailles Europe, Porter was at the forefront of an international movement of competing modernisms, selecting and synthesizing among them. In the main she was in the line of the formal, traditionalist modernism of the Southern New Critics: she saw herself as a disciple of Henry James and as such spoke for the “conscious, disciplined artist” (Porter, 2008 702). Porter’s adherence to the formal control of the unconscious lay behind her quarrel with Eugene Jolas’ transition. Although Porter had published “Magic” (1928) and “The Jilting of Granny Weatherall” (1929) in this most experimental of transatlantic little magazines, she came

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increasingly to detach herself from Jolas’ expressionist poetics.7 In some unpublished notes, probably from the early part of the Second World War, Porter observed a parallel between and the experimental avant-garde (her examples are Joyce, Stein, and the surrealists) in that both Fascism and the avant-garde turned away from “the use of reason” to “myth and sleep”: “Hitler is Surrealism in action, applied to politics” (McKeldin library, qtd. in Brinkmeyer 215).

Hannah Arendt: Porter’s Weimar Twin?

7 Porter’s emphasis on the centrality of the modern state in her transatlantic modernism brings her into proximity with another group of interwar migrants: the German intellectuals who left the Third Reich for the United States. At the same time that Porter was in Berlin another peripatetic young woman, Hannah Arendt, was also living in the city and working on her habilitation project on Rahel Varnhagen, after completing her doctorate on Love and Saint Augustine (1928). In 1933, however, she was forced to leave Hitler’s Germany, and by 1941 ended up in the United States. Both Arendt and Porter were interwar peregrini who were drawn to Saint Augustine as a philosophical source of their thinking about travel (to each woman travel had its existential roots in the interwar loss of a co-habitable world and it spatially measured out the exile of the migrant from a transcendent point of origin).8 Each could say that their “bent” was “to the Left” (Porter, 2008 1008), although each had a streak of traditionalist elitism (of a southern plantocratic type in Porter’s or of a Hellenophile in Arendt’s); this unquantifiable streak could puzzle their liberal colleagues—as it did when both opposed desegregation of schooling in the South in the 1950s (Porter, 1987 39-40; Arendt, 2003 193-213). Their imaginations took shape around the “world catastrophe” of interwar Germany; later in the early 1960s they both were drawn into the acrimonious first public debates about the Holocaust through the critical reaction of the New York intellectuals (who were often of Jewish descent) to their two works: Ship of Fools in 1962 and Eichmann in Jerusalem in 1963. In these books Porter and Arendt saw the political evil of their historical time not as a demonic force but as something commonplace and widely distributed—“negative” evil in Porter’s description, the “banality of evil” in Arendt’s (Arendt, 2006 250).

8 The novel element in Porter and Arendt’s assessment was that it saw evil not so much as a presence as a lack, a puzzling withholding of the activity of thought in moral predicaments. This banal evil is very different from classical conceptions of evil. As Porter’s Dr. Schumann says, “it takes a strong character to be really evil” and “most of us are too slack, halfhearted, or cowardly” (Porter, 1962 294). This “strong character,” according to Arendt, was certainly not in Eichmann, who did not have the depth in evil found in such classical villains as : “It was rather sheer thoughtlessness […] that predisposed him to become one of the greatest criminals of that period” (Arendt, 1968 287-288). This focus on banality or “slack” (which might be Porter’s synonym for banality) caused both authors to be harshly reprimanded by many of their first critics, such as Theodore Solotaroff and Lionel Abel, for refusing to see an “active evil” in the work of the Nazis and allegedly replacing this with an aesthetic distaste for the triteness of their evildoers (Solotaroff 143).9

9 For Arendt, the central cause of the interwar crisis was the withdrawal of the citizenry from the polis, the public space where the vita activa necessary to human dignity could

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be exercised (Arendt, 1998 198-199). Porter, who was not a political philosopher by education, nevertheless came to a parallel insight to Arendt’s and showed it at the concrete level of composition because the action of Porter’s stories is often organized around public, collective structures: ocean liner (Ship of Fools), Berlin boarding house (“The Leaning Tower”), hacienda (in the story of that name), and hospital (“Pale Horse, Pale Rider”). These are places where citizens are brought together, willy-nilly, in a common world, but from which each retreats into a form of inwardness or private existence. Porter says, for example, of the passengers embarking on the German vessel in Veracruz: “This common predicament did not by any means make of them fellow sufferers. On the contrary, each chose to maintain his pride and separateness within himself” (Porter, 1962 11). This “pride and separateness” has many manifestations: that of the ethnic solidarity of the Captain’s table after the expulsion of Freytag or, in personal interactions, in the tendency of couples such as Jenny and David or the German families such as the Huttens and Baumgartners to form islands of sentiment, the equivalent of this tribal identification in the individual life.

“The Leaning Tower”: Berlin as Phantasma and the Northern Renaissance

10 In Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951) the central reason for the rise of the totalitarian state is the emergence of apolitical and “superfluous” mass communities in Europe after the First World War. But this is abetted by the retreat of the bourgeois into “private life” and their temporary reliance on the “mob” to conduct government on their behalf (Arendt, 1958 338, 124). In Porter’s Weimar fiction “The Leaning Tower” there is also a withdrawal from the polis by the middle classes. The story concerns the stay of the young Texan painter, Charles Upton, in Berlin during the final days of 1931 at a time when Chancellor Brüning was imposing a strong deflationary policy as a way out of the Depression, a policy that spared large businesses, but cut working class incomes. Porter gets this shrinking liquidity into the story—every act of buying and selling on the part of small hoteliers and shopkeepers is a desperate one. There is no explicit mention in the story of the chief threat to the Weimar republic from the right, the National Socialists (they had become a sizeable minority—106 seats—in the Reichstag after the September 1930 elections). Instead Porter shows the descent of a dark mood on Charles, which flickers out in such expressionistic details as the white worms that wriggle out of the sausage he is served at the hotel. The mood is also a temporal one, as though for Charles the possibility of the future has been cut off. By the end of the story there is a stultification of the forward sense of time as Charles is left in the pension house on New Year’s day in 1932 feeling the dying of the liberal state in his very bones, a dying which he senses as something “threatening […] hanging over his head” (Porter, 2008 511).

11 The story focuses on Charles’s stay at Rosa Riechl’s pension house, which becomes a microcosm of social relations in Germany. Towards the end of the story Charles attends a New Year’s Eve party with the student lodgers, Hans Gehring, who has a duelling scar, and the mathematician Otto Bussen. Each of them breaks out into the pan-Germanist views of the so-called conservative revolution in Weimar. Hans tells Charles that “pure power is what counts to a nation or a race”: such crude concepts of government as power were, according to Arendt, the result of the nationalists’ importation of

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imperialistic concepts of colonial rule back into Europe (Porter, 2008 502; Arendt, 1998 138, 155). But more insidious than the students’ frank politics of violence is the attitude of Rosa, the landlady with the “foxy smile,” who makes a special favorite of Hans (Porter, 2008 510). With her plush and her feather beds, Rosa exemplifies a middle-class anxiety over insecure status that has turned inward and refuses to engage the political world. In a letter written in October 1933, Porter commented that “the suffocated middle-classes” in Germany felt they were “slip[ping] into the proletarian class” and fell back on the Nazis because they thought that this party would save “the plush on their chairs” (Porter, 2012 116-7).10 The attitude of the middle class is objectified in the clambering cupids that Charles observes on the roof opposite his room, which keep up their “senseless play” and “wanton” vulgarity even in the snow and rain (Porter, 2008 462). It is as though they are trying to freeze the “eternity” of middle class sentiment as a permanent attitude regardless of the withering circumstances of the Depression.11 The central symbol of the story, the statuette of the leaning tower of Pisa, points to the precariousness of this hope. Rosa proudly exhibits this souvenir in memory of her marriage and it is inadvertently broken by Charles on his first visit. The souvenir captures Rosa’s forlorn southern nostalgia for Italy, a forlornness that comes out of her sense that the middle-class world of the Wilhelmine period and its Mediterranean honeymoons has slipped away.

12 The narrative dynamic is that of Charles’s slow absorption of the political stasis of late Weimar Berlin. He comes with a nineteenth-century romantic image of Germany as castles in the mist, derived from his childhood friend Kuno, but by the end of the story he comes to absorb the peculiar temporal mood of modern Berlin, its inability to open into a liveable future. He is left in a curled up, fetal position, refusing to be born into the new year: he cannot “think clearly” and feels “an infernal desolation of the spirit, the chill and the knowledge of death in him” (Porter, 2008 511).

13 Porter makes Charles an artist because this profession means that, like herself when she was in Berlin, he is forced to size up the Weimar crisis in terms of representational form. Charles tells himself that this city “is not right” for painters: “There’s something wrong with the shapes, or the light, or something” (Porter, 2008 455). In trying to show this “something wrong with the shapes,” Porter strategically uses an expressionist style to mark the intrusion of the unconscious into the rational sphere of the political. For example, she says: “The darkness closed over the strange city like the great fist of an enemy who had survived in full strength, a voiceless monster from a prehuman, older and colder and grimmer time of the world” (Porter, 2008 472). In such a description Porter temporarily adopts the night language of Eugene Jolas, who had initially acted as her guide to literary Berlin in 1931.12 She seems indeed to be citing, with her own slant, Jolas’s remark that “Nothing can ever destroy in [man] the immense night of the prehistoric” (“Literature and the New Man” [1930]) (Jolas 263). This expressionist image of the “fist” in Porter shows how in Berlin disorder and poverty seem to have moved into a state of ontological or archaic permanence. At times Charles appears to think that some of the German characters in their rigidity belong to this archaic state. When confronted with Hans’s pride in his duelling wound Charles is baffled—he cannot comprehend the satisfaction in self-mutilation that in his home state of Texas would be regarded as the shameful evidence of a street fight. In Germany such wounds are exhibited with an “arrogance” that comes from some inner primitive certainty, “the mysterious place where Hans really lived” (Porter, 2008 479).

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14 Such descriptions might suggest that interwar Germany is for Porter only the irrational Other, coded with an emotive surplus as in the scene of the shoppers in “a trance of pig worship” before the confectionery pigs (Porter, 2008 458). Certainly Porter is known for her anti-Germanism. But the model of “collusion”—her belief that “none of us has any real alibi in this world”—also applies to the American visitor (Porter, 2012 183). Charles as visiting American is both benefactor and late enemy, both “the rich American who pays the rent for all of us” in Tadeusz Mey’s description (Porter, 2008 482) and a citizen of a country that, as Rosa and Hans Gehring remind him, brought about the final defeat of Germany in the last war. Behind Charles stand the American politicians and bankers who in an economic game of hot and cold with Germany supported German payment of reparations, then invested in the Weimar boom between 1924 and 1928, and then withdrew short-term loans to Germany in 1929.

15 Charles’s insensitivity as an American benefactor is summed up in the episode of his coat, a would-be gift to the impoverished Herr Bussen. Tadeusz Mey, the Polish boarder, advises against this gift, saying that Bussen will feel Charles’s “contempt” in his act of generosity and will only respond with hatred. Thinking perhaps of the examples of Dawes, Young and Hoover—American politicians who wanted to give financial aid to defeated Germany between 1924 and 1931—Tadeusz says “you Americans have some very odd notions. Why all this benevolence?” “If you set yourself up as a benefactor,” Tadeusz says, “you must expect to be hated” (Porter, 2008 490-491). In unconscious ways Charles’s relationship to Bussen, even as he feels pity for him, is predatory and he imagines Bussen’s indebtedness as a late medieval scene on a par with the emblematic allegory of Holbein and Sebastian Brant, German artists Porter admired. He sees Hans Bussen fleeing like a stag across snowy wastes, with he, Hans, Tadeusz and Rosa bringing him down by the throat like hunting dogs and this with the contradictory aim of giving him “aid and comfort” (Porter, 2008 492).

16 Porter published “The Leaning Tower” in the New Critical mainstay, The Southern Review, which was edited by Cleanth Brooks and Robert Penn Warren. Nevertheless, it is not quite enough to say that the story only demonstrates her New Critical aesthetic of Jamesian control. In the story, and in another story published in the journal, “Pale Horse, Pale Rider,” it is evident that new forms of state power (seen in the constitutional dictatorships in Weimar Germany and in the wartime United States) intrude into Porter’s poised prose and threaten to unbalance it. This is explicit in “Pale Horse, Pale Rider,” the last story in the autobiographical Miranda series, in which Porter’s protagonist, Miranda Gay, falls ill during the influenza epidemic in the last days of the Great War. Her hallucinations during her illness incorporate her recent encounters with the Wilson security state of 1918 and its Liberty Bond promoters, but they do so in a wild and expressionistic style in which her inner voice becomes incoherent (for example, she dreams of the German doctor in the hospital as a well poisoner and baby murderer). Porter’s compositional problem is to be both within this dream state and to register it rationally. “The Leaning Tower” shows Porter searching for another way, apart from expressionism and surrealism, of understanding these phantasmal images in the Weimar landscape; as a result, she goes back to a completely different tradition in pre-modern Europe than that of T.S. Eliot and his liking for Dante and the Latin countries. She found this different tradition, that of the Northern Renaissance, while staying in Basel in 1932, shortly after the Berlin trip, when she began to read Erasmus and Sebastian Brant. For what the hunting scene shows is that

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Porter sometimes uses a hallucinatory register that incorporates the late medieval allegorism of Holbein and Dürer. This is a moral understanding of the night that is distinct from the understanding of romantic-expressionism: Charles discovers a truth about himself in his dream; he does not submerge himself in irrationalism. In one of his early walks around Berlin Charles confronts the “skull of famine” of a young unemployed man on the street. He secretly sketches the man in hard Düreresque lines; these are the lines of Porter’s own style as it turns from a documentary or sociological record toward a Northern Renaissance art of mortality, exemplified by Holbein’s “Dance of Death”. Because the man is so emaciated “his teeth stood out in ridges under the mottled tight skin of his cheeks” (Porter, 2008 456). He becomes a baroque auto- graphic of himself and etches out the outline of his skull by using his own famished skin as paper. Modern Berlin is seen through a religious-humanist dimension of truth and the symbolism of the mortal that goes with it—a dimension that originates in an older, pre-secular Germany. These images might seem expressionistic, but they are allegorical in the manner of the Northern Renaissance writers.

Porter and Arendt: Responsibility and Judgment in Dark Times

17 Porter returned to her fictionalization of Weimar Germany in Ship of Fools, a novel whose schema of the fool as traveler was derived from Sebastian Brant’s Das Narrenschiff. The outline of this novel was already available to Porter in 1931 in a journal that she wrote on the voyage, but it took thirty years to put together and it was therefore shaped by the whole post-Second World War question of how it was possible for citizens of a modern European state to carry out the genocide of peoples. It is in Ship of Fools that Porter’s proximity to Arendt, the Weimar exile, comes particularly close: it was Arendt’s Eichmann book that made the American reading public aware of the subjects of guilt and responsibility in the Second World War, subjects that became pressing in America in the early 1960s after some fifteen years of discussion of the Holocaust (at least, as Peter Novick argues in The Holocaust in American Life [1999], as a specifically ethnic crime against the Jewish people). It is just these questions of responsibility that Porter raises in her novel, which appeared a year before the publication of Arendt’s book. In her writings from 1945 onwards Arendt had sharply distinguished guilt from responsibility: guilt was a private feeling of wrong, while responsibility was a public category and one which involved being answerable to a specific legal charge (King 25-42). Porter also tried to bring her characters in Ship of Fools under the legal category of judgment, and she seemed to share Arendt’s suspicion of guilt as a loose feeling that could easily slide into empathy with the accused. The professor’s wife in the novel, Frau Hutten, undoubtedly speaks with Porter’s voice when she says that “we have lost our sense of justice” because of a “sentimental dishonesty” about the offender (Porter, 1962 295). Most of the first critics of Ship of Fools missed this juristic aspect in Porter’s narrative voice. One critic, Theodore Solotaroff in Commentary, indeed accused Porter of projecting a vague sense of collective guilt over all her characters on the vessel—Germans, Jews, Spaniards and Americans—and seeing them all as equally damnable, all on a highway to hell (for Solotaroff, whose grandfather was an Odessa Jew, this allowed the specific crimes of Germans in the Third Reich to be diffused in the general culpability of the human). In Solotaroff’s

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opinion the novel’s repetitive structure showed that the characters cannot change, and this demonstrated the author’s “misanthropy” (Solotaroff 149). Such arguments got under the skin of Porter because they diminished the role she saw for responsible self- reflection in her characters. Porter sets the reflectiveness of Dr. Schumann, Jenny, Herr Glocken and even Wilhelm Freytag against the spread of “negative” evil on the ship. For example, after La Condesa has disembarked, Dr. Schumann has a lightning-like perception of his “guilty love” for her, of his supplying her with sedatives and kissing her when she is in a narcotic trance. He subsequently resolves not to be “a coward” (Porter, 1962 373). Dr. Schumann thus becomes an exponent of that Socratic self- examination that Arendt called judgment, a two-in-oneness that is able to resist the fungus-like expansion of evil by seeing oneself from outside, from the standpoint of another. Dr. Schumann here mediates Porter’s own authorial position of objective distance, a distance that is always judging and assessing her characters in a quasi-legal way. For Porter, this authorial act of judgment was “the most important thing in any book” (Porter, 2012 195) and its perceived absence, for example, in the works of William Faulkner, was why she regarded novels such as Sanctuary, with their non- judgmental immersion in evil, as the antithesis of her own fiction. Faulkner, she told her students in the 1950s, “does not want to think” (Givner 392).

18 Arendt observed that what was striking about Eichmann was “an inability to think, namely, to think from the standpoint of somebody else” (italics in original) (Arendt, 1968 49). The thinking that Arendt had in mind was not thinking through ideas or even thinking with moral concepts. She had too much evidence of how her friends in Germany easily reversed their humanist ideas and moralities in the early days of the Third Reich and coordinated themselves with the new government—as though all they were changing was a set of table manners. Porter likewise shows how Professor Hutten, a professional representative of the German mind, quickly accommodates himself within the Captain’s tightening “ring” of “blood and sympathy” that excludes Freytag, even though the professor had in an earlier discussion exposed the fictional biology of racial thought (Porter, 1962 247). Instead of finding a point of anchorage against banality in ideas or norms, Arendt found this point in the faculty of judgment: the ability to stop and reflect on particular relevant examples. She felt the faculty of judgment was called for particularly “in times of crisis” and that it is “the most political of man’s mental abilities” (Arendt, 2003 104, 188). Both Porter and Arendt— exhibiting a similar coldness—saw that the faculty of judgment had to set itself apart from pity or emotionalism because this served to dissolve the moral distinctness of actions. The dangers of pity are evident. Just before his “lightning stroke” of reflection in Ship of Fools Dr. Schumann feels that his “guilty love” draws him into a “wallow of compassion for every suffering thing” so that “he could no longer tell the difference between […] the violator and the violated” (Porter, 1962 372).

19 In the Kantian scheme that Arendt draws upon, the reflective or legal judgment is similar to the aesthetic sensibility because each focuses on a singular object without subsuming it under a general concept. That is to say, aesthetic judgement is an immediate response, like that of the sensation of taste, and it bypasses the processes of cognition and moral reasoning because in these latter cases the object under consideration is indeed subsumed into a general law. But even though taste is an absolutely individual response, Arendt lays much emphasis on Kant’s argument that the aesthetic judgment is also outer-directed because it appeals to the agreement of

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others who also make their own judgments in taste about the object. Another point about the aesthetic judgment for Arendt is that it allows the perceiver to see the world in all of its newness and thick particularity. This places the community of receptive selves not only in a kind of cosmopolitan mini-state but also within a co-habitable planet or ecology. It is curious that in Ship of Fools the only moment when the passengers are “cleansed of death and violence” is when they observe the aesthetic splendor of three whales swimming alongside their vessel. Even the twins of the Spanish dancers, Ric and Rac, who are the apparent incarnations of a radical evil, break out in “pure ecstasy”: “Whales, whales, whales, whales!” (Porter, 1962 329). For a moment all of the passengers are united as a community of spectators around a purposeless object of beauty. They become connected to what Kant called an “enlarged mentality,” one that is consistent with a universal or cosmopolitan viewpoint and thereby potentially resistant to the thoughtlessness of evil (Arendt, 1977, location 7972). It is evident that this “enlarged mentality” could prevent the pre-totalitarian drift in Porter’s passengers and in political terms correlates with institutional structures of liberalism that are able to secure a civic plurality. For both Arendt and Porter these structures were quintessentially found in the structures created by the Founding Fathers (Arendt in On Revolution [1963] and Porter in “Act of Faith: 4 July 1942”).

20 How might this aesthetic judgement work in Porter’s fictional practice? In both of the Weimar works Porter often shows her characters in a process of mental weaving around the singular object. At the end of “The Leaning Tower” this activity is especially foregrounded with the reappearance in Charles’s room of the statuette of the tower of Pisa; it is now repaired and stored safely behind glass, away from his clumsy fingers. The tower, as was said earlier, relates to the fragile Weimar nexus of middle-class German sentiment and Porter perhaps suggests that it has now found a way of shielding itself from further breakage (its alliance with “pure power”). Its reappearance puts Charles on the spot, insisting on its aesthetic triteness, and his reflective judgment begins to work or, as Arendt puts it, “go visiting”: “Well, what? […] What had the silly little thing reminded him of before? There was an answer if he could think what it was, but this was not the time.” So Charles’s reflection in his drunken haze gets arrested, even though his need to “go visiting” is at this historical moment “terribly urgent” (Arendt, 1992 43; Porter, 2008 511).

21 There are similar objects of potential reflection in Ship of Fools: the whales, the sculptural body of the drowned woodcarver, the sodden form of the Huttens’ bulldog that he selflessly rescues. In addition, Porter, through the rotational interactions of the characters, creates a potential version of an intersubjective community on the ship although it is one that keeps breaking down. The characters can voice penetrating insights (for example, Dr. Schumann and Frau Hutten on “negative” evil) but they act at variance with these insights in moments of crisis (neither character objects to Freytag’s expulsion); they can speak versions of what Arendt calls the ideological logic of “supersense” (Professor Hutten “was not interested in discussion, but in speaking his own thoughts aloud in company”); and their dialogues are often more defensive assertions than they are reflections from the other’s point of view (Arendt, 1998 458; Porter, 1962 289). An example of this last point is when Freytag meets Mrs. Treadwell— the middle-aged divorcee who informed Lizzi of his wife’s Jewishness—and reproaches her for the “indifference” and “boredom” that prompted this betrayal of a secret. These remarks evidently make the Arendtian point about the banality of evildoing. But

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Freytag is himself suspect: not only is he as racialist as any anti-semite about his German blood, but his indignation with Mrs. Treadwell is his stage manager’s way of “enjoying the scene.” The pair’s reconciliation, facilitated by her drop into “shapeless” empathy, is not genuine and it is as if they used words such as “friends” and “forgive” as empty (Porter, 1962 257, 258, 262). The reader has to relativize all of these positions within what Robert Penn Warren, in his classic essay “Irony with a Center: Katherine Anne Porter” (1942), called a “total circumstantiality” and work out the moral “center” of these ironic relativizations (Warren 155).

22 Many of the first critics of the novel misread this strategy of cold irony. Solotaroff called it “misanthropy” and thought that Porter was laying the blame for contemporary disorder on the “stage Jew,” Herr Löwenthal (Solotaroff 149, 144). It is Löwenthal however who perspicuously voices what is perhaps at the “center” of Porter’s accumulating perspectives: an insistence on human dignity. For Porter, as for Arendt, the chief crime of totalitarian regimes was their attempts to strip away the human status of their victims and make them things; a tampering with the conservative givens of human nature. Löwenthal therefore puts forward a simple human claim: “All he wanted in the world was the right to be himself, to go where he pleased and do what he wanted” (Porter, 1962 336). In a letter to Julius S. Held, a German-American art historian, Porter affirms Löwenthal’s position: “I like him. He has self-respect.”13

“Holiday” and the Biopolitical Community

23 To think in the “two-in-one” relation of Dr. Schumann is to have a dialogic relationship to an outer plurality or, put differently, to the intersubjective space of co-judging selves that is postulated in Kant’s aesthetics (as in the observation of the whales). But, as Porter shows, this public and universal space constantly threatens to break away into ethnic and personal partialities—Porter keeps showing how the passengers split off into smaller units (including that of families such as the Baumgartners or of pairs of lovers such as Jenny and David). On the question of the quasi-organic partialism of ethnic communities, notably that of the Captain’s table, it is pertinent here to refer to one of Porter’s earliest stories, “Holiday,” begun in 1923 and finally published in 1960, which, like her novel, depicts part of the early twentieth-century German diaspora on the American continent (it is set in Texas). The story shows that even at the very beginning of her fictional career (when she had published just two stories set in Mexico), Porter was already thinking about the moral dangers of fused communities, particularly German ones, although she did not directly relate them yet to constitutional or totalitarian dictatorships. The narrator goes to stay with a German- Texan farming family just before the First World War and she observes how their lives are completely absorbed in the primary, cyclical activity of work. In this context it is perhaps helpful to recall two categories of human activity that Arendt described in The Human Condition (1958): action, or participation in a public space, and labor, a type of act that is part of the life process and is fundamentally apolitical (it belongs to the sphere Arendt calls the social). The Müller family are caught up in labor, that is in a seasonal, repetitive process of farmwork, animal husbandry, childbirth, weddings and so on—activities that are webbed together as a single organic process. Porter emphasizes the thoughtlessness of this cycle: “the almost mystical inertia of their [the

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Müllers’] minds in the midst of this muscular life” (Porter, 2008 432). To be such a homo laborans might seem to be something archaic, but in Arendt’s analysis this is a very modern condition, one central to the rise of the modern bio-political state because this state bases itself on the supplanting of a public political sphere by the organic domain of the social. The Müllers strike the narrator as “one human being divided into several separate appearances” (Porter, 2008 431).

24 In this corporate entity there is, the narrator remarks, only one person who is an individual and this is the daughter Ottilie, who after a childhood accident lost her reasoning and has become the family servant. Ottilie has “been stripped of everything but her mere existence” (Porter, 2008 442), and she resembles the pariah existences of Herr Löwenthal the Jew and Herr Glocken the hunchback from Ship of Fools in her raw biological being. She is a bio-political caesura in the mini-state of the Müller family. It happens in the story that she is sustained by the supporting wholeness of her family, but she might in other circumstances serve as a point of eugenic intervention. Ottilie turns into the moral crux of the story: the narrator cannot forget her and feels held “to our inescapable common source” by her (Porter, 2008 441). In the last scene of the story the narrator and Ottilie absent themselves—their “holiday”—from the funeral train of the matriarch Mrs. Müller, who suddenly dies and whose funeral becomes another addition to the repetitive organic cycle. With their cart moving “in a truly broad comedy swagger,” the narrator and Ottilie become “the fools of life”: they try to invest the life principle with a joyous and different meaning from that of the homo laborans (Porter, 2008 448-9).

25 The “inescapable common source” that unites the narrator and Ottilie is perhaps the fundamental ground of Porter’s fiction. For her, as for Arendt, it is goodness that has roots (in contrast to the depthless nature of evil) and that has a deep place in memory. There is a curious insistence in “Holiday” on the narrator remembering Ottilie “for the rest of my life” while the Müllers “forgot her in pure self-defense” (Porter, 2008 441). This insistence on the ethical value of memory as a bulwark against thoughtlessness is also brought out in Arendt’s late work on responsibility and judgment: “For human beings, thinking of past matters means moving in the dimension of depth, striking roots and thus stabilizing themselves, so as not to be swept away by whatever may occur—the Zeitgeist, or History or simple temptation” (Arendt, 2003 95). Memory, according to Arendt, is a way of reaching back to natality, that is the “new beginning” that starts with the birth of each individual and which is referred to again with each free action or judgment of that individual (Arendt, 1998 171). In her lectures on Kant’s political philosophy Arendt explains that the “sociality” of free-judging aesthetic selves has been there from the beginning of human association; “sociality” is an “origin” and not a construction that results out of mutual need (Arendt, 1991 74). In the much earlier Weimar work Love and Saint Augustine, however, Arendt prefers to trace natality back to Saint Augustine’s theology of the creation.14 This is another point of congruence between Porter and Arendt. Their ethics of memory points to a common derivation from Saint Augustine, who is the subject of Porter’s essay “St. Augustine and the Bullfight” (1955). Both women writers acknowledge that turning backwards to the “source” in Augustine’s philosophy (Arendt, 1996 50)—to the life-giving act of creation —is a way of renewing and understanding experience, of turning random sensation into knowledge or that which is informed by “truth” (without “truth,” Porter said in her essay, showing here an Augustinian insight into her own migrations, travel was just

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“adventure”: “truth” forced her to confront her own contradictory joy in the Mexican bullfight) (Porter, 2008 808). Porter and Arendt both mobilize Augustine’s thought to counter the cruelty of their times: in other words they go back to the source, to natality, rather than to the frequent orientation toward death found in Weimar existentialism and the expressionist style.15 This orientation, most pertinently found in Heidegger’s notion of being-toward-death, is a symptom of the breakdown of the liberal state into tribalisms and dark personal sensibilities. Without grounding in an institutional structure guaranteeing plurality, this type of thought, which is located in the isolated, existential self, has a particular occasion to flourish. It is fixated on its own end and its own expressive complex of fear and desire around that end. When Charles tries to think of the future, in the last paragraph of “The Leaning Tower,” he conceives of it, in Heideggerian fashion, as a death’s head, the “chill and the knowledge of death” (Porter, 2008 511).16 There are other politically pointed fantasies of death in Ship of Fools such as when the Captain, an admirer of gangster films, imagines mowing down the zarzuela company and “other people whom it was lawful to kill” with a machine gun (Porter, 1962 427). Similar fantasies also play their role in the sexual life of those on board. It is part of the Augustinian structure of Ship of Fools that all of the characters are seeking a home to fill out their insufficiency of being, but they are often looking in the wrong direction, most often looking toward a narrow erotic desire that must finally be disappointed. Like Jenny they see a “death’s-head” between themselves and their partner or like Dr. Schumann mutter “Death, death” in departing from La Condesa (Porter, 1962 93, 369). Augustinian concepts of beginning again are a release from this fixation on death. One of the few times that Jenny finds peace in the novel is when she remembers swimming with the porpoises off the coast of Mexico, connecting with natality and coming to a reconciliation with the spontaneity of nature that temporarily stills her war with David.

26 What, to return to an earlier question, might explain the parallel minds of Porter and Arendt? Both were mid-century migrants moving between the Americas and a “falling” Europe (Porter, 2008 1016). Each used a style that many called one of “heartless malice” to counteract the banality of the modern self and reset it to an older, more conservative model of human nature (“heartless malice” is Porter’s description of how one Jewish exile, Freytag’s wife Mary, might respond to the dullness of the Captain’s table [Porter, 1962 335]). This made Porter and Arendt unpredictable combinations of liberalism and conservatism; and it is probable that the Weimar background of Arendt and the southern one of Porter helped to create this combination, particularly when seen in contrast to the more unquestioned progressivism of their northern literary colleagues. What fitted this liberal-conservative combination was the political philosophy of Kant or perhaps, more precisely, what Arendt constructs as this philosophy. Kant was central to Arendt’s secular-Jewish beginnings in Weimar thought. But he was also a philosophical influence on the Southern New Criticism with which Porter was closely associated. In “Criticism as Pure Speculation” (1941) John Crowe Ransom, Porter’s favourite poet, brought his Kantian definition of a poem close to Porter’s central concerns when he said that: “A poem is, so to speak, a democratic state, whereas a prose discourse—mathematical, scientific, ethical, or practical and vernacular—is a totalitarian state.” Ransom observes that in a totalitarian state citizens are “functional members” while in a democratic state they have “free exercise of their private and independent characters.” In this trope of poem as state, totalitarian subjects are the equivalent of the logical paraphrase of the poem, its “structure,” while

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democratic subjects stand for “the particularity asserted by the parts in a poem” or its “texture” (Ransom 137, 138). The main purpose of a poem is to reveal “texture,” the unique qualities of the world as body. This is a Kantian distinction: it is the intellectual judgment that takes care of the logical statement in a poem, while the aesthetic judgment comprehends the textural. Robert Penn Warren adopts Ransom’s model in his essay “Irony with a Center: Katherine Anne Porter,” published in Ransom’s Kenyon Review in 1942. Implicit in Warren’s notion of irony as diversity of viewpoints is a Kantian politics. By deploying a “delicate balancing of rival considerations” and a “counterpoint of incident and implication,” Porter (Warren says) refuses “the straight line, the formula, through the material at hand” (refuses, that is, its reduction to scientific statement) (Warren 155). From both Porter’s and Warren’s perspective such a view of irony is congenial to a southern, Jeffersonian localism trying to resist the incursions of a powerful twentieth-century state (the scientific state).

Conclusion

27 In her 1940 preface Katherine Anne Porter observed that she was not one who “could flourish in the conditions of the past two decades” because literature needs “a green and growing world,” whereas she had had to find “order and form and statement” in “grotesque dislocations” of the political body (Porter, 2008 717). It was her visit to Weimar Berlin over 1931 to 1932 that compelled her to take account of the post- Versailles decline of the liberal state or, to put the question in Arendt’s existential terms, the decomposition of a co-habitable world or polis. In response to this “falling world” Porter shaped a modernist narrative form that melded Jamesian control, dream state and Northern Renaissance symbolism. This narrative form has a strong ethical imperative. As Ship of Fools above all shows, her imagination is distinctly juridical and puts an emphasis on the faculty of judgment in historical times of “collusion” and “negative” evil.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

ARENDT, Hannah. Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil. New York: Viking Press, 1968.

ARENDT, Hannah. Lectures on Kant’s Political Philosophy. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992.

ARENDT, Hannah. The Life of the Mind. Kindle edition, San Diego: Harcourt, 1977.

ARENDT, Hannah. Love and Saint Augustine. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996.

ARENDT, Hannah. Responsibility and Judgment. New York: Schocken Books, 2003.

ARENDT, Hannah. The Human Condition. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998.

ARENDT, Hannah. The Origins of Totalitarianism. Cleveland: World Publishing Company, 1958.

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BRINKMEYER JR., Robert H. Katherine Anne Porter’s Artistic Development: Primitivism, Traditionalism, and Totalitarianism. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1993.

GIVNER, Joan. Katherine Anne Porter: A Life. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1982.

HEIDEGGER, Martin. Being and Time. Translated by John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1978.

JOLAS, Eugene. Eugene Jolas: Critical Writings, 1924-1951. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2009.

KING, Richard. Arendt and America. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015.

KRACAUER, Siegfried. From Caligari to Hitler: A Psychological History of the German Film. Ed. Leonardo Quaresima. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004.

LOPEZ, Enrique H. Conversations with Katherine Anne Porter. Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1981.

PORTER, Katherine Anne. Collected Stories and Other Writings. New York: Library of America, 2008.

PORTER, Katherine Anne. Katherine Anne Porter: Conversations. Ed. Joan Givner. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1987.

PORTER, Katherine Anne. Katherine Anne Porter’s Poetry. Ed. Darlene Harbour Unrue. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1996.

PORTER, Katherine Anne. Letters of Katherine Anne Porter. Ed. Isabel Bayley. New York: The Atlantic Monthly Press, 1990.

PORTER, Katherine Anne. Selected Letters of Katherine Anne Porter: Chronicles of a Modern Woman. Ed. Darlene Harbour Unrue. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2012.

PORTER, Katherine Anne. Ship of Fools. Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1962.

RANSOM, John Crowe. “Criticism as Pure Speculation.” Selected Essays of John Crowe Ransom. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1984, p. 128-146.

SOLOTAROFF, Theodore. “Ship of Fools and the Critics.” Katherine Anne Porter: A Collection of Critical Essays. Ed. Robert Penn Warren. Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall, 1979, p. 134-149.

WARREN, Robert Penn. “Irony With a Center: Katherine Anne Porter.” Katherine Anne Porter: A Collection of Critical Essays. Ed. Robert Penn Warren. Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall, 1979, p. 93-108.

WARREN, Robert Penn. “Notes on the Poetry of John Crowe Ransom at His Eightieth Birthday.” The Kenyon Review, vol. 30, no. 3 (1968), p. 319-349.

NOTES

1. The personal bleakness of the stay is seen in Porter’s poem “Bouquet for October,” written in Berlin, in which the author’s dispirited love for her partner (Eugene Pressly) emanates outwards into the “bereaved branches” of autumn and into the inert “monuments” of “potbellied kings” and “Statesmen” (Porter, 1996 93-94). 2. The nearest equivalent in Anglo-American modernism to Porter’s writing about Weimar Germany is Christopher Isherwood’s Goodbye to Berlin (1939). For Isherwood, as for fellow English modernists W.H. Auden and Stephen Spender, Berlin embodied sexual otherness and fostered an anti-bourgeois frisson that came through an encounter with the late enemy. Isherwood,

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however, is more of a modernist flâneur than is Porter. Despite his powerful impressionistic sense of the Nazi threat, he is not so concerned as she is with laying bare the “logic” of a state in crisis. 3. Deborah Nelson sees the “heartless” style of Arendt and McCarthy as a strategy, also found in other mid-century women artists, that tries to confront facts through pain (Tough Enough: Arbus, Arendt, Didion, McCarthy, Sontag, Weil [2017]). She does not include Porter in her list but she could well have done so. 4. Porter in interviews of the 1960s sometimes elaborated on her thesis that Weimar politicians surreptitiously abetted the rise of Hitler. Referring to the coming to power of “these criminals— these clowns—like Hitler,” Porter observed in 1961 that “the good people who didn’t believe in the clowns […] still let the clowns commit the crimes good worthy people would commit if only they had the nerve” (Porter, 1987 67). In her interviews with Hank Lopez she even places herself in a Berlin political soiree in the winter of 1931-32 at which Goering, Goebbels and Lord Halifax are all in attendance and where she alone voices the danger posed by the Nazis (Lopez 175-189). 5. This focus on the marginal event is also one variant of the regional modernism of the South. Robert Penn Warren, speaking of John Crowe Ransom, named this variant the “pastoral” or “the dramatization of great issues by reduction.” Where writers such as Eliot and Pound, Warren observed, set forth “the crisis of culture” on a “world stage,” for southern pastoralists such as Ransom “the great issues are most poignantly or forcefully dramatized in the local and the small” (Warren, 1968, 326). 6. The war administration of Wilson is depicted in her story “Pale Horse, Pale Rider” (1937). In “The Never-Ending Wrong” (1977), her essay on the Sacco and Vanzetti case, Porter quoted Nietzsche: “The state is the coldest of all cold monsters” (Porter, 2008 865). 7. In “The Wooden Umbrella” Porter attributed to Jolas a “hoarse, anxious, corrupted mysticism speaking in a thick German accent” (Porter, 2008 560). 8. In one of her letters from Berlin Porter mentions taking out a map of the ancient world and tracing out Augustine’s travels on it as though her modern peregrination could be overlaid upon his (Porter, 1990 66). 9. This is a misunderstanding of the argument of the two women writers, who are not aesthetes. They do use a moral criterion to gauge the absence of the moral in the evildoer. 10. In a letter sent from Berlin Porter wrote—in what could be an exposition of Rosa’s “foxy smile”—that “Middle class virtue is a kind of code of behavior based on fear of consequences, an artificial line set up, but to [be] sneaked over if one can manage it with secrecy” (Porter, 1990 65). 11. Kracauer says that the middle classes tried to keep up a social status that had no basis in reality—ignoring political allies in the working class who might have helped protect liberal democracy—and these “emotional fixations” meant that they surrendered to the Nazis (Kracauer 10, 23). Rosa as the embodiment of this “mental forlornness” has a favorite in Gehring (a proto- Nazi) “because he fought a mensur” (Porter, 2012 485). 12. It was Jolas who provided Porter with an introduction to the Expressionist poet Gottfried Benn in Berlin, a meeting that fell flat because of linguistic barriers. “I went in,” Porter wrote, “in serious hopes of saying something I wished to say, and of hearing him say certain things I had been told he would say in a particularly interesting manner” (Porter, 2012 90). Jolas himself went on a literary trip to Berlin in 1930, a forerunner of Porter’s own stay, and there he met Benn and other representatives of Expressionism; like Porter he observed that political nationalism was becoming stronger in the Depression. Later, when in Paris, Porter seems to have distanced herself from Jolas and he makes no reference to her in his autobiography, Man from Babel (1998). 13. Letter to Julius S. Held, 28 April 1963, Katherine Anne Porter papers, University of . I should like to thank Beth Alvarez for kindly supplying a copy of this letter. 14. Kant and Augustine are aligned sources of natality in Arendt’s thought, but perhaps she never finally quite reconciled these two approaches.

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15. In Love and Saint Augustine Arendt observes that what for Augustine determines “man” as a “remembering being” is “natality” while what determines “man” as a desiring being is a sense of mortality. What “ultimately stills the fear of death is not hope or desire, but remembrance and gratitude” (Arendt, 1996 51-52). 16. Arendt’s thought about natality was developed in her Augustine book in opposition to the prominent role of death in the thought of her mentor, Martin Heidegger. In his phenomenology of the Weimar years Heidegger said that the self’s expectation of death could become its “own most potentiality-for-Being” (Heidegger 294). The self can either flee this scene or it can face this possibility resolutely. This seems like an exclusively existential drama, but in 1933 Heidegger, on becoming a National Socialist, argued that this capacity for resolute decision should be turned toward making a decision for the Reich. Porter, without being a reader of Heidegger, seems to sense the role that death plays in the political ontology of Weimar existentialism, which is why Charles’s plight at the end of “The Leaning Tower” can be seen as a critical presentation of a Heideggerian narrative that does not lead to decision but becomes a cul-de-sac.

ABSTRACTS

In the 1920s and the 1930s the Texas author Katherine Anne Porter lived out the life of a modernist expatriate, restlessly moving from one country to another, but it was a short trip to Weimar Berlin between September 1931 and January 1932 that had the strongest influence on her fiction. Porter came to feel by 1940 that her Berlin stay shaped what she called the entire “plan” for her literary output. This is because she found exemplified most starkly in late Weimar Germany the moral predicament that most of her fiction is about: a “collusion with evil” on the part of supposedly “good people.” In Berlin she witnessed at close hand the demise of the nineteenth-century liberal state and the rise of a new type of total or biopolitical state, one that was specific to twentieth-century modernity. Her two Weimar fictions, the novel Ship of Fools (1962) and the long story “The Leaning Tower” (1941), attempt to find modernistic literary forms that can represent this shift. The political element in Porter’s writing makes her transatlantic modernism quite unlike that of the Lost Generation writers. It is more appropriate to compare Porter’s work with that of a Weimar expatriate, Hannah Arendt, especially in their mutual emphasis on the thoughtlessness of evil; on the particular need for the exercise of the faculty of judgment in times of crisis; and on Saint Augustine’s concept of natality as a means for counteracting the existential despair of interwar Europe.

Dans les années vingt et trente, l’auteure texane Katherine Anne Porter vécut en expatriée moderniste, voyageant sans répit d’un pays à un autre. Mais c’est un court séjour à Berlin, de septembre 1931 à janvier 1932, qui marqua le plus profondément son œuvre. Dès avant 1940 elle considérait que ce voyage avait façonné ce qu’elle appelait le « plan d’ensemble » de son œuvre, au sens où la République de Weimar chancelante était l’illustration saisissante d’un des pivots de sa fiction : la collusion avec le mal des « braves gens ». À Berlin, Porter fut le témoin direct de la chute de l’État libéral du XIXe siècle et de la montée en puissance d’un nouveau type d’État total, ou biopolitique, associé à l’époque moderne. Dans les deux œuvres inspirées par ce séjour, le roman Ship of Fools (1962) et la longue nouvelle « The Leaning Tower » (1941), Porter s’efforce d’élaborer des formes modernistes susceptibles de représenter cette mutation. La dimension politique de l’écriture de Porter en fait toute la singularité comparée au modernisme

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transatlantique des écrivains de la Génération Perdue. Il serait plus approprié de rapprocher son œuvre de celle d’une autre expatriée de Weimar, Hannah Arendt, ne serait-ce que pour l’accent qui y est mis sur l’insouciance du mal, sur le besoin impérieux d’exercer sa faculté de jugement en des temps de crise et sur le recours au concept de natalité d’inspiration augustinienne pour contrer le désespoir existentiel de l’Europe de l’entre-deux-guerres.

INDEX

Keywords: Ship of Fools, The Leaning Tower, Holiday, transatlantic modernism, literary migration, Weimar Germany, banality of evil, Hannah Arendt, biopolitics, the Kantian faculty of judgment, Saint Augustine Mots-clés: Ship of Fools, The Leaning Tower, Holiday, modernisme transatlantique, migration littéraire, République de Weimar, banalité du mal, Hannah Arendt, biopolitique, Kant, faculté de jugement, Saint Augustin

AUTHOR

JOSEPH KUHN Adam Mickiewicz University, Poznan, , [email protected]

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“Back and Forth Between the Sea and the Mountain”: Negative Mobility and Transnationalism in Hualing Nieh’s Mulberry and Peach

Grazia Micheli

1 The following analysis of Mulberry and Peach: Two Women of China (1998) by the Chinese American writer Hualing Nieh focuses on how the text portrays transnationalism and mobility negatively.1 In our hyper-connected world, travelling has become available to many people, and mobility is often associated with ideas of freedom and self- realisation. Yet immigrants’ tales can uncover a dark, alienating side of mobility. Mulberry and Peach offers a female counterpart to Asian American novels produced by male writers who present mobility as negative, such as Carlos Bulosan in America Is in the Heart: A Personal History (1946). The protagonist of Nieh’s novel, Mulberry, is a Chinese refugee woman who is forced to relocate across China, Taiwan and the United States between 1945 and 1970 to escape war as well as male and institutional violence. Placed in a transnational web against her will, Mulberry refuses to attach herself to any nation, as both China and the United States are fraught with violence. Thus, she develops what might be regarded as a negative version of transnationalism. Mulberry is doomed to wander perpetually, and, at the same time, she is trapped in a frightening in-between space. As a result, she develops a multiple personality disorder that will haunt her for the rest of her life.

Beyond China: Reading Mulberry and Peach as a Transnational Asian American Text

2 As the novel was written in Chinese (桑青与桃红, Sangqing yu Taohong) by a female immigrant in the United States who had been in exile in Taiwan, Mulberry and Peach “has been claimed as an example of modern Chinese literature, overseas Chinese

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literature, literature by writers from Taiwan, literature of exile, diasporic literature, Asian American literature, feminist literature, border-crossing literature” (Wong 210). Literary critics who have focused on the Chinese tradition of the novel have read Mulberry and Peach as an allegory of modern Chinese history, the protagonist being a symbol of the self-exiled “Wandering Chinese” obsessed with China2 and her split personality a metaphor of the division between Nationalists and Communists (Pai; Lee; Yu). Other critics have concentrated on the Asian American dimension of the text and on Mulberry’s experience as a female immigrant who travels from China to the United States, thus also looking at gender (Amato; Chen; Chiu; Cho; Greenberg; Feng; Fusco; Wong).

3 This essay further develops the discussion on Mulberry’s unstable condition as a female immigrant by introducing the idea of a negative transnationalism. I draw the concept of transnationalism from social sciences that have used it to theorise the immigrant’s experience of being attached to more than one country—whereas diasporic approaches tend to focus on the unilateral ties to the originary/ancestral homeland. Before the 1990s, the term “transnationalism” was mainly employed in economic and political sciences, and, in its earliest usage, it was a synonym for international relations (Clavin 433). Subsequently, the adjective “transnational” acquired the meaning that can be found in contemporary dictionaries: “extending or having interests extending beyond national bounds or frontiers” (Oxford English Dictionary). The term related to “large- scale and powerful actors such as multinational companies and, to a lesser extent, political parties” (Faist 1673). The term was first used in relation to immigrants by Randolph S. Bourne in his 1916 article “Trans-national America.” It was not until the 1980s and 1990s that “transnationalism” was used again with regard to immigrants, and it spread especially after social scientists Nina Glick Schiller, Linda Basch and Cristina Szanton Blanc used it to refer to “the process by which immigrants forge and sustain simultaneous multi-stranded social relations that link together their societies of origin and settlement” (48).

4 In my study of Mulberry and Peach, I reverse and problematise this concept. Indeed, critics such as Françoise Lionnet and Shu-mei Shih have highlighted the limits of standard definitions of transnationalism and the need to reframe and expand them. Mulberry’s story demonstrates that transnational ties are not as positive and enriching as social scientists tend to suggest (Portes; Vertovec): Mulberry rejects transnational ties, but they are nevertheless imposed upon her, which has devastating existential effects on her. In addition, although social scientists usually consider transnationalism as a typical phenomenon of the contemporary, capitalistic era (Glick Schiller et al.; Vertovec), Mulberry and Peach shows that transnationalism is relevant to earlier contexts.

5 Recent discussions on mobility as framed by critics such as Mimi Sheller and John Urry are also worth taking into account. In describing the “new mobilities paradigm,” Sheller and Urry explain how such a paradigm challenges both “sedentarist theories” (208) and “nomadic theory [that] celebrates [...] metaphors of travel and flight” (210). Thus, while acknowledging the centrality of mobility in today’s world, the “new mobilities paradigm” does not uncritically praise mobility. Instead, it explores how mobility is often accompanied by immobility; how people are denied mobility depending on their race, class and gender; and how mobility does not always coincide

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with freedom as it can be coerced. For Mulberry, a female refugee, mobility does not represent an opportunity: it is imposed on her, and it turns into a form of immobility.

6 Nieh combines Eastern and Western literary techniques and borrows both modernist and postmodernist techniques such as interior monologue, montage and pastiche from the Western literary tradition. Considering that Mulberry and Peach was first published in Chinese in 1976, it represents one of the earliest examples of modernist and postmodernist Asian American texts together with Chuang Hua’s Crossings (1968), the better-known The Woman Warrior (1976) by Maxine Hong Kingston and Dictee (1982) by Theresa Cha. Evidently, modernist and postmodernist literary devices, by creating fragmentary and heterogeneous texts, are particularly suited to give voice to the equally fragmented, plural subjectivities of immigrants and their descendants. Ethnic- minority writers have often been expected to create realistic portraits of their community and its history. This literature is thus reduced to the status of historical or sociological document; hence the lack of critical attention toward the aesthetic aspects of their works. In Mulberry and Peach, form matters: “Nieh’s innovativeness reveals itself not only in the text’s structure but also in its diction, syntax, and even page layout: variations in sentence length and rhythm, paragraph structure, and typography are carefully correlated with narrative content” (Wong 211). As Nieh herself has pointed out, “in art, form is one of the artistic expressions. Form has meaning too” (quoted in Nazareth 17).

7 Yu-Fang Cho reads Chinese literary modernism as a legacy of U.S. cultural hegemony in post-war Taiwan as well as, more generally, a trace of Euro-American imperialism in Asia. He explains that Nieh was part of a group of writers who relocated from mainland China to Taiwan after the Communist takeover in 1949. These writers “formed the mainstay in the modernism movement and dissident voices that challenged the Nationalist government’s dictatorship in Taiwan” (161). Thus, Nieh’s use of both modernist and postmodernist techniques reveals the transnational links between China and the United States, and it contributes to the novel’s transnationality3 as Nieh’s style is not purely Chinese but is also infused with Western influences.

8 The publication history of Mulberry and Peach further confirms the transnationality of this text. Sangqing yu Taohong was first serialised in a Taiwanese magazine in the early 1970s. The serialisation was soon interrupted as the novel was considered immoral for its satire of the Nationalist regime. The novel was finally published in Hong Kong in 1976, and a second, expurgated edition appeared in Beijing in 1980. Nieh agreed to such intervention in her novel because that was the only way to see it published in China at the time. The unexpurgated version was published on the mainland in 1989. The text was translated into English in 1981 by Jane Parish Yang and Linda Lappin and published in Beijing by New World Press and in New York by Sino Publishing Company. Changes were made by New World Press, which was “under government control, like all publishers on the mainland at the time” (Wong 149). The altered version appeared in Great Britain in 1986, published by The Women’s Press. In 1988, Beacon Press of Boston published a version based on the original manuscript but later dropped the title because of unsatisfactory sales (Wong 225). The text was republished in 1998 by the Feminist Press at the City University of New York.

9 Despite the English translation and the fact that Nieh lives and writes in America, Mulberry and Peach is still an overlooked text outside the Asian American literary field. This is certainly true for many other Asian American works with probably the

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exception of Kingston’s The Woman Warrior, Amy Tan’s The Joy Luck Club (1989) and Bharati Mukherjee’s Jasmine (1989). According to Sheng-mei Ma, these authors’ success is determined by their ability to satisfy the dominant American readership’s appetite for “exotic (hence ethnographic) and politically correct (hence feminist) readings” (12). Monica Chiu compares the success of Jasmine with the invisibility of Mulberry and Peach and affirms that “Jasmine’s reception […] becomes representative of ‘acceptable’ women’s immigration trials […]. Meanwhile, less positively concluding and more difficult novels, like Mulberry and Peach, attract scant critical attention and are relegated to library shelves” (20). Thus, Jasmine’s ostensibly successful assimilation into the U.S. social fabric may facilitate its appeal for an American audience.

10 Initially, under the influence of cultural nationalism—which represents the earliest phase of Asian American studies—and its emphasis on Americanness, Mulberry and Peach, like other overseas Chinese novels, did not receive much attention from Asian American critics either. Cultural nationalism defined Asian Americans as those who were born in America, spoke English as their mother tongue and knew Asia through the media. Consequently, if membership in the Asian American canon “is dependent upon being born in America [...] those who lie outside this imagined community are pushed into a form of symbolic literary exile” (Amato 34-35). Not only was Nieh not born in the United States but also, unlike writers such as Mukherjee, she kept writing in her mother tongue. Furthermore, overseas Chinese authors’ “continued identification with the socio-political realities of their homelands” reinforced their exclusion from early Asian American literary scholarship (Amato 34). Thus, “until recently overseas Chinese works from the U.S. [...] were usually considered the sole terrain of Chinese literature or area studies departments” (Amato 35). It is only after the transnational turn that such texts have been rediscovered to some extent.

11 The transnational turn in Asian American studies represents its most recent development: it emerged in the late 1980s in response to post-1965 demographic changes in the Asian American population as well as to the phenomenon of globalisation. After the 1965 Immigration Act, much more diverse Asian populations— in terms of gender, class and region—started migrating to the United States in larger numbers. The transnational phase was especially inaugurated by Lisa Lowe’s article “Heterogeneity, Hybridity, Multiplicity,” published in 1991. Lowe introduces the idea that there is no unifying or fixed Asian American identity but rather heterogeneous, hybrid and multiple Asian American identities. The arrival of a significant number of Asian immigrants also meant that it no longer made sense to define Asian American identity and literature on the basis of American origin and English language proficiency. Thus, the United States stopped being the pivot around which Asian American identity and literature were supposed to revolve according to cultural nationalism. The transnational turn has led critics to consider the works of Asian immigrants like Nieh as well as of American-born Asians and to explore the connections between Asia and America in their works. Indeed, the transnational approach sees immigrants not as individuals who need to be assimilated into the host society but as active agents able to build networks of social relations that span borders and link them to their country of origin as well as country of settlement.

12 As for Mulberry and Peach, only a transnational reading could do justice to this “border- crossing” text: “because the protagonist’s journey originates in China and continues on to the United States, […] the novel could be understood as a text spanning the Chinese

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and the Chinese American, the Asian and the Asian American” (Wong 131). Thus, “Sinocentric readings” (Wong 137) of this novel need to be integrated with readings that account for the Asian American dimension of the text. My analysis endorses this transnational perspective and contributes to establishing Mulberry and Peach as a transnational Asian American text since, although it was originally written in Chinese, it reaches beyond Chinese borders in terms of content, form and reception.

13 This study is based on the English translation (by Jane Parish Yang and Linda Lappin) since, although translation is limited in its ability to convey a perfectly corresponding version of the original text, here it highlights the transnationality of the text. Indeed, the translation of Mulberry and Peach into English has made the text available to an Anglophone audience, thus increasing its already transnational character. As long as the text was only read by a Chinese-speaking audience, its transnationality in terms of content was barely acknowledged (because of the focus on its Chinese aspects), and it was definitely not transnational in terms of its circulation and reception. Studying this work in the light of the transnational turn in American and Asian American studies consequently draws attention to the transnational connections between the United States and China and their literatures while also problematizing too positive views of transnationalism and mobility.

Mulberry and Peach: A Story of Im/mobility and In- betweenness

Escaping War and Violence

14 Mulberry and Peach is divided into four parts preceded by a prologue and followed by an epilogue. In the prologue, the protagonist, Peach, discusses her identity with a U.S. immigration officer: she claims that Mulberry (her former self) is dead. Each part of the novel opens with a letter from a defiant Peach to the U.S. immigration officer, telling him about her relocations across the United States and including a map of her itineraries. Each letter is followed by an extract from Mulberry’s diary. The time span covers some of the most significant events in twentieth-century Chinese history (broadly understood to include Taiwan): the Sino-Japanese war, the Communist takeover and the White Terror in Taiwan. In the first part (1945), on the eve of the Chinese victory over the Japanese, sixteen-year-old Mulberry escapes from the war and her dysfunctional family but is stranded on a boat with other refugees in a Yangtze River gorge. In the second part (1948-1949), shortly before the Communist takeover, Mulberry flees to besieged Beijing where she marries Shen Chia-kang, the son of a declining upper-class family to whom she was betrothed from childhood. Part Three (1957-1959) sees the couple escaping to Taiwan where they are forced to live hidden in an attic with their eight-year-old daughter Sang-wa because Chia-kang has embezzled funds from the bank where he worked. In the last part (1969-1970), Mulberry is alone in the United States: she is an illegal chased by the Immigration Service and pregnant with an illegitimate child. In this part, Peach takes over Mulberry. The epilogue retells a Chinese myth.

15 Mulberry/Peach escapes war and political repression but also male violence. In Part Two, male violence and oppression are portrayed through Mulberry’s relationship with Chia-kang who objectifies her as “a vehicle in service of male sexual desire and

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patrilineal reproduction” (Cho 175). Mulberry has no other choice but to marry him: “she is bounded by the arranged marriage and she does not have a home to which to return. [...] she cannot escape her role dictated by the patriarchal script” (Cho 176). At the wedding, the master of ceremonies says to Mulberry: “I will quote from The Classic for Girls the following words of advice: ‘A woman must submit to her husband’” (89). He then adds: “May your sons and grandsons be without end” (89). Mulberry wants to escape this patriarchal order that puts her in a lower position than men and imposes on her the established role of wife and mother.

16 Her journey to America, however, does not secure her a final escape from male violence and oppression. Here, Mulberry/Peach has an affair with Chiang I-po, a Chinese professor married to a white woman. I-po, like Chia-kang, uses Mulberry/Peach to reclaim his masculinity (see Cho) but does not want to compromise his social position and so demands that she has an abortion when he finds out that she is pregnant with his child. Although Mulberry/Peach wants to keep the baby, Mulberry knows that she is “an alien with no way out I must get an abortion” (201; emphasis in original). Her position as an illegal immigrant in the United States does not give her the security she needs: if her application for permanent residency is unsuccessful she will be deported although “the Chinese are foreigners who haven’t any place to be deported to” (182; emphasis in original). Mulberry declares of her pregnancy: “an illegitimate child with no roots I don’t have the courage to keep it” (193; emphasis in original). She herself is now rootless as adverse circumstances and the experience of violence preclude a physical and psychological return to China.

17 Furthermore, in both countries, Mulberry/Peach is subjected to state control. The attic where Mulberry, Chia-kang and their daughter hide symbolizes the “claustrophobic political policies” of the Taiwanese government in those years (known as “White Terror”) and their “alienating effects” (Amato 39).4 The family “can’t stand up straight” (118) because the room is too small, they “don’t dare stand in front of the window for fear someone might see [them]” (118), and they cannot talk aloud so they write words with their fingertips on each other’s palm or use matches to reproduce ideograms. As a consequence, conversations are very short and compressed; sometimes they are a sequence of isolated words: SOMEONE ON ROOF RAT MAN WHO SOMEONE IS FOLLOWING US (117) This conversation between Mulberry and Chia-kang also reveals Mulberry’s persecution complex, a sign of her declining mental health rendered on the formal level by the repetition of the same words and phrases. Indeed, “the narrative style of this section of the novel is obsessive in its use of iteration” (Fusco). Some examples include: “The noise on the attic roof has started up again” (116); “On the roof the gnawing is beginning again” (121); “The rat teeth on the roof gnaw into my body” (121); “Tonight there is no gnawing on the roof” (123); “The noise on the roof starts up again” (125). Thus, the language and images used in this section effectively reflect the sense of oppression within a tight and isolated space and the resulting sense of alienation further exacerbated by the prohibition to communicate or move freely.

18 State power is embodied in Part Four by the U.S. immigration officer, a meaningfully neutral and anonymous figure:

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He is dressed in a dark suit with a black and grey striped tie. He wears sunglasses, although it’s an overcast day. The dark lenses disguise the only distinguishing part of his face: eyebrows, eyes, the bridge of his nose. Only the anonymous parts are visible: bald head, sharp chin, high forehead, beak nose, and pencil-thin moustache. (3) As Serena Fusco notes, the officer is “almost parodic in his anonymous de- humanization.” Peach, however, calls him “Mr. Dark” (3; emphasis added), thus providing him with a masculine gender and reinforcing the idea that violence is primarily masculine. Mr. Dark wants to determine Mulberry’s identity on the sole basis of her behavior: “What we want to investigate isn’t your state of mind, your emotions, or your motivations. I’ll say it again; what we want to investigate is your behavior” (165). Therefore, Mulberry is not considered a human being whose actions are driven by a variety of reasons and feelings: she is just an “alien” whose identity is dictated by the numerical sequence “89-785-462” (3).5

19 Mr. Dark demands that Mulberry/Peach be loyal to the American government if she wants to obtain permanent residency. Mulberry protests that she is Chinese but is forced to confirm her U.S. loyalty: “Are you loyal to the American government?” “I’m Chinese.” “But you’re applying for permanent residency in America. Are you loyal to the American government?” “Yes.” (165) Mr. Dark’s language is coercive and does not leave much freedom of speech or room for maneuver to Mulberry. Thus, “from the Mainland, to Taiwan, to the U.S., Nie [sic] places her protagonist(s) in the middle of a complex and inescapably transnational web” where Mulberry is subjected to the pressure of “a double request of political loyalty” (Fusco n. pag.). Therefore, if Mulberry’s split personality can be read as a metaphor of “political disintegration” (Pai 210) or “political irreconciliation” (Chiu 24) in China (namely the division between Nationalists and Communists but also between mainland China and Taiwan), such national divisions actually develop on a larger, transnational scale. Mulberry is required to choose between Right and Left but also between the United States and China. Yet America and Asia are not two separate entities: not only because many Asian immigrants chose to inhabit U.S. soil (especially after the 1965 Immigration Act) but also because of U.S. involvement in Asian matters— of which the Vietnam War is a prime example.

20 Thus, Mulberry is forcibly placed within a transnational network that turns into a trap. Throughout the novel, Mulberry’s limited freedom is rendered by the juxtaposition of images of mobility and immobility. While Mulberry is often placed within confining spaces such as the refugees’ boat, the Shens’ house, the attic and Taiwan itself (“Taiwan is a green eye floating alone on the sea” [118]), in her letters Peach seems to celebrate the American myth of mobility and, particularly, of Westward movement: He [a Polish lumberjack] wanted to go east. I wanted to go west. (159) I’m wandering around these places shown on the map. [...] Sometimes I hitchhike. Sometimes I take a bus. As soon as I get somewhere, I leave. I don’t have any particular destination. I’m always on the road. [...] One by one, the horizons sink behind me and new ones rise ahead of me. (11) Yet “when an Asian American mobility narrative consciously alludes to Westward movement as a possible structuring principle, the effect is typically ironic” (Wong 127).

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Although Peach claims to be headed West, she does not move Westward but in a circle (Feng 147) in contrast with the American myth of Westward movement.

21 Furthermore, Peach’s optimistic tone is easily destroyed in a context of forced migration. While she seems to have complete agency and control over her movement [...] [h]er ostensible mobility [...] is forever haunted by the reality of her forced flight across the United States: the constant threat of the officer’s efforts to hunt her down, to mark her as an illegal alien, and to deport her. (Cho 164; emphasis added)

22 Another example of forced relocation is Peach’s banishment from the water tower where she was living with a Polish lumberjack and where she had decided to have her baby. Before leaving, Peach hangs a wooden plaque imitating what was written on the plaque that the astronauts left on the moon:

A WOMAN WHO CAME FROM AN UNKNOWN PLANET ONCE LIVED IN THE WATER TOWER 22 FEBRUARY 1970-21 MARCH 1970 I CAME IN PEACE FOR ALL MANKIND (159; emphasis added)

The reference to the unknown planet presents Peach as an “alien”: such designation is given real substance by the U.S. Immigration Service which actually labels her as “(Alien) number 89-785-462” (3). Moreover, just as the astronauts left the moon after their exploration, so too as an “alien” Mulberry will actually never be able to settle in the United States. Mulberry’s reworking of the moon plaque reveals her desire to “claim America” (see Feng 147): she portrays her presence in America as a conquest, but she is aware that her foreignness will prevent her from staying longer.

23 Immigrants’ tales of mobility, therefore, often constitute a counter-discourse to exalted portrayals of the same themes of mobility and travel. Mobility is, in this case, a necessity or even an imposition. As Sau-ling Cynthia Wong affirms, there is one striking difference [...] between mainstream and Asian American discourses on mobility. In the former, [...] movement across the North American continent regularly connotes independence, freedom, an opportunity for individual actualization and/or societal renewal [...]. In the latter, however, it is usually associated with subjugation, coercion, impossibility of fulfillment for self or community—in short, Necessity. (121) Wong’s classification is perhaps too rigid given that novels such as Mukherjee’s Jasmine or John Okada’s No-No Boy (1957) end on an optimistic note, implying a movement toward America that is liberatory, full of hope, warmth and light. The same is true for Bulosan’s America Is in the Heart: yet the ending contrasts with the fact that, throughout the novel, mobility does not translate into a linear movement toward a final resolution. In fact, mobility is dictated by reasons that are out of the protagonist’s control, and so he embarks upon a directionless journey at the end of which he does not achieve what he was looking for. As for Mulberry and Peach, they are both compelled to cross multiple borders without actually wanting to do so because of the war and as a result of male and institutional violence. Hence, although images of confinement, imprisonment and immobility seem to conflict with Mulberry/Peach’s endless relocations, both mobility and immobility constitute a form of oppression and a cause of suffering, what Cho calls “immobility within mobility” or “im/mobility” (160).

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Mulberry/Peach: Fragmentation and Multiplicity

24 In order to avoid the trauma of another relocation and of male and institutional control, Mulberry recedes and metaphorically dies to make way for Peach who is not afraid of the U.S. Immigration Service or of travelling and is assertive in her relationships with men. Nieh describes Mulberry’s metamorphosis into Peach as a process of disappearance and rebirth: I grope my way into the bathtub. As I sink down into the water, I become a [...] all my pains vanish. All feelings of suspicion, fear, and guilt disappear. The water warms my whole body. I am translucent as water. It is wonderful to be alive. (166) The symbolic image of water is usually associated with both death (as in flood mythologies) and rebirth (as in the Christian baptism) as well as with the erasure of a definite identity. Mulberry, becoming as “translucent as water,” a natural element that takes the shape of its container, can abandon her previous identity and acquire a new one. Yet Peach emerges from Mulberry’s trauma, and therefore represents an illness that will destroy rather than save Mulberry.

25 Interior monologue, a typically modernist technique, is largely used to express Mulberry/Peach’s thoughts, especially in Part Four where Peach and Mulberry emerge as two distinct voices (in Mulberry’s narrative). However, just as the final transition from Mulberry to Peach happens almost imperceptibly, so too does the splitting of their voices. To distinguish between them, the author italicises Mulberry’s thoughts, but she does not explicitly indicate who is talking. Therefore, it is the reader’s task to understand and follow the shifts between voices. It is only after some time that Peach openly addresses Mulberry, making it clear that the italicised paragraphs report Mulberry’s thoughts: My finger tips [sic] hurt suddenly I realise that the cigarette I’m holding is burning my fingers my shoes are splattered with mud on the table beside the bed there’s a half-drunk Bloody Mary. What’s happened to me. I never touched alcohol cigarettes or mud. [...] It was my joke. You’re dead, Mulberry. I have come to life. I’ve been alive all along. But now I have broken free. You don’t know me, but I know you. I’m completely different from you. We are temporarily inhabiting the same body. (182-183) Mulberry’s speech is an example of stream of consciousness: while Peach’s thoughts are somewhat more rational (e.g. conventional punctuation and a logical sequence of thoughts), the syntax in Mulberry’s speech more closely reproduces the ramblings of the mind (e.g. lack of punctuation and flows of sentences without conjunctions). Mulberry is indeed the character suffering from the mental illness whereas Peach is the mental illness, what makes Mulberry delirious.

26 Other modernist features of Mulberry and Peach are its non-linearity and fragmentation, which reflect Mulberry’s “fractured self-images [...] coupling the novel’s [...] form with function” (Chiu 22). To begin with, the protagonist’s duality is rendered on the formal level by the juxtaposition of Peach’s letters and Mulberry’s diary entries—which in turn are directed to a double audience, that is, the U.S. immigration officer and the addressees. As Cho observes, “the entire novel consistently juxtaposes two fragmented temporalities (in Peach’s letters and Mulberry’s diaries), dual geographical references (the United States versus ‘Chinas’), and alternate voices of Mulberry/Peach” (159). The epistolary or diary form, being constituted by a series of letters or diary entries, is in itself fragmentary, and it is often employed to give voice to a fragmented rather than a

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unitary self (Goldsmith cited in Greenberg 278). Moreover, although Mulberry’s diary entries follow a chronological order, such order is fragmented and disrupted by numerous flashbacks and by Peach’s letters.

27 Generally, in Mulberry and Peach, syntax is also quite fragmented. Both sentences and paragraphs tend to be short, thus contributing to the text’s fragmentation: Our boat lurches along the crest of a wave, bobbing up and down, then lunges downstream like a wild horse set loose.

There’s a crash. The boat stops. The drum stops. The cursing stops. We’re stranded on the rocks. (25)

Taiwan is a green eye floating alone on the sea.

To the east is the eyelid. To the south is a corner of the eye. To the west another eyelid. To the north, the other corner of the eye. The sea surrounds the eyelids and the corner of the eye. (118)

As it is possible to see from these excerpts, language is charged with symbolism and poetic rhythm as it plays with short sentences, repetition, enumeration and assonance.

28 To increase the text’s fragmentation, Nieh makes use of the literary device of montage6 by inserting in the text heterogeneous materials such as maps, drawings, newspaper clippings, slogans, popular stories, rhymes and songs. The text presents other typical features of “montage literature” such as “syntactic contractions and breaks, or visualizations through an emphasis on typography [...]. Furthermore, it stresses intermediality by experimenting with discourses of modern communication technologies: newspaper, radio, film” (Barndt et al.). For instance, in Part Two, the narration is frequently interrupted by the radio whose “talking” is signaled by the italicized font: “‘I, the commander, am mounted on my horse, and I am busy looking for signs of movement. [...]’ Chia-kang keeps moving the radio dial back and forth” (78). Capital letters are also used to report the materials mentioned above, thus providing the text with a visual quality that recalls fragmentation. Indeed, the usual fullness and homogeneity of the conventional written page is disrupted by the insertion of variously formatted written fragments or of drawings. Nieh also employs, although to a lesser extent, the postmodernist technique of pastiche, reproducing, for instance, fragments taken from Beatles songs or from Buddhist texts.

29 All these features combine to provide the reader with a sense of the protagonist’s fragmented self. Moreover, through the heterogeneity of its formatting as well as of the fragments it incorporates, the text reflects the protagonist’s multiplicity: her multiple identities and multiple (re)locations. In addition, there is no single narrative voice in the text but three: an omniscient narrator (in the prologue); Peach’s voice; and Mulberry’s—although, as mentioned earlier, shifts between voices are often not marked, thus providing a sense of fluidity between voices that are, in fact, one. Thus, the fragmentary and heterogeneous nature of the text strengthens Nieh’s depiction of the protagonist as a fragmented and plural subject, traumatised and destroyed by forced mobility and transnationalism.

30 Another post-modernist feature of the text is its metafictionality. Usually, the epistolary genre implies its own authenticity. The letters that compose the novels suggest the genre’s value as artifact, and editorial introductions often

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reiterate the text’s status as found material. This is a fiction, of course, but one that explicitly asks the reader to suspend disbelief, to treat the material as historical sources. (Greenberg 273) But here the presence of a “theatrical apparatus” (Chen 96) that introduces the characters and the setting draws attention to the fictional nature of both Peach’s letters and Mulberry’s diary entries. The author added the paratext (i.e. the subtitle and the lists of the characters) to the English translation to make the text more understandable to the Anglophone reader. Yet this paratext also plays a subtler role: by revealing the fictionality of the narrative, it presents the text as an allegory rather than as an accurate account of Mulberry/Peach’s life. By adding the subtitle “Two Women of China,” Nieh also establishes a link between individual and nation, private and public, thus anticipating that the novel is a metaphor for “what it is to be Chinese in the twentieth century” (Nieh in Nazareth 12).

31 However, Mulberry/Peach is actually “stateless—a wanderer cut off from homeland, family, and community” (Wong 220), and if she is “a representative of the Chinese in diaspora” (220), she nevertheless rejects China as well as America. Jean Amato affirms that “there is no security of an essential homeland to go back to in this novel—no comfort zone” (39). Cho further argues that Mulberry and Peach “does not cast exile in a sentimental light, imagining home, and by extension, the nation, as the authentic origin of belonging and return” (187). This is why it would be wrong to read the protagonist’s mental illness “as an active resistance to assimilation and as a reaffirmation of the character’s ‘Chineseness’” (Martin 348). Nonetheless, not only can Mulberry/Peach not return home but she also cannot stay in America.

32 Therefore, Mulberry/Peach’s story does not belong either to the diasporic or to the assimilationist paradigm. As a matter of fact, various forms of violence encountered both in China and America make Mulberry/Peach reluctant to choose between one or the other. Pin-chia Feng’s statement that Mulberry and Peach is “about how a Chinese diasporic woman turns American” (147) ignores the fact that if Mulberry/Peach wants to claim America, she soon has to come to terms with its hostile reality. Thus, Mulberry/Peach experiences a negative kind of transnationalism: instead of establishing links between her homeland and her host land, she rejects any national attachment. Mulberry and Peach conveys that transnational ties are not necessarily as enabling as sociologists tend to suggest: the protagonist is forcibly placed within a transnational web that traps her rather than enriches her.

33 Hence, Mulberry remains in a “liminal” position (Feng 138), a frightening in-between space that causes “a vertiginous unbalancing of life and self” (Roberson 11). Susan Roberson points out that “for the immigrant, exile, or refugee, living in diasporic border zones multiplies identities, loyalties, voices, and violence, making the diaspora a site of hybridity and alienation” (12). Therefore, hybridity can be a resource, but it also entails violence: as Lowe argues, hybridization is not the ‘free’ oscillation between or among chosen identities. It is the uneven process through which immigrant communities encounter the violences of the U.S. state, and the capital imperatives served by the United States and by the Asian states from which they come, and the process through which they survive those violences by living, inventing, and reproducing different cultural alternatives. (82) But even though Mulberry survives, her solution to end her suffering, turning into Peach, does not work as expected: “the agency she gains depends on her psychic

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fragmentation into two different personae, a fragmentation that the Mulberry persona [...] finds terrifying and not at all enabling” (Greenberg 287). As a matter of fact, Mulberry keeps re-emerging and is plunged into a state of confusion and fear: “How could I have done such a shameless thing [...] I don’t even recognize myself!” (177); “Does this face in the mirror belong to me?” (195). These excerpts vividly convey Mulberry’s state of disorientation and distress, her terror as she realizes that she has become a threat to herself and that she has lost every anchor, even her own self. Mulberry is ultimately an unbalanced, alienated and destroyed character, resisting “notions of the malleable and empowered postmodern subject, the border-crossing nomad, the happy transnational” (Chiu 30-31). Mobility destroys her, and having no place to go is traumatic.

Conclusion

34 The epilogue further confirms Mulberry’s in-betweenness, her troublingly liminal, transnational positioning. Nieh retells a Chinese myth: Nu-wa, the daughter of a god, drowns in the sea (hence the metaphor of water recurs) but “refuses to die” (207) and so transforms herself into a bird. Princess Bird goes to live on a mountain but flies “back and forth between the Sea and the Mountain” (207), each time carrying a pebble in her beak in order to turn the sea into solid ground. There is definitely something positive about Princess Bird’s resilience and confidence (“I will do it if it takes me billions and trillions of years, until the end of the world” [207]), but a sense of desperation is also intrinsic to this story. The final sentence, “To this day, Princess Bird is flying back and forth between the Sea and the Mountain” (207), suggests that Princess Bird will never accomplish her impossible task and will always fly “back and forth.” Similarly, Mulberry rejects physical death and so turns into Peach. Mulberry, however, will always come back, weaker but conscious that Peach is destroying her.

35 Princess Bird’s story also implies that Mulberry/Peach will never stop wandering, and so she will always be a foreigner. If identity can be constructed outside the national space (Feng 145), Mulberry/Peach’s grievous state indicates that this is not a desirable condition. The tale of Princess Bird stresses “the impossibility [...] to find a real home, either permanent or temporary” (Cho 180) and how this constitutes a cause of suffering. Nieh “constructs the movement from China to America as incomplete, as an oscillation between ‘Chineseness’ and an (im)possible translation and absorption within a ‘Chinese American’ identity label” (Fusco n. pag.). It is precisely this “oscillation,” this movement “back and forth,” that marks the desperation in Princess Bird’s tale as it recalls trauma through repetition. Trauma, “a wound inflicted not upon the body but upon the mind” is a “pattern of suffering that is inexplicably persistent in the lives of certain individuals” (Caruth 1-3). Hence, traumatic events keep coming back for those who lived them.

36 To conclude, Nieh makes use of modernist and post-modernist literary techniques such as interior monologue, stream of consciousness, montage, pastiche, metafictionality, and a fragmented and non-linear narrative structure. These and other formal features combine to give substance to a fragmented and multiple character, destroyed by coerced mobility and transnationalism. Mulberry/Peach’s forced relocations disrupt positive notions and narratives of mobility and travel. Mobility is imposed on the immigrant and refugee, and so it does not represent an experience of liberation and self-fulfillment but a form of oppression and, therefore, paradoxical immobility.

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Mulberry has to escape war and state control, and, as a woman, she has to face male abuse as well. Her pregnancy makes her even more vulnerable and complicates her situation. She needs to find a home for herself and her child, but both China and the United States are unsuitable, being places of violence and oppression. As a result, she does not forge any form of attachment to either Asia or America, experiencing a negative kind of transnationalism. Mulberry/Peach is placed within a transnational network (China-Taiwan-US) against her will, and so transnational ties turn from a powerful resource into a trap. Living outside and between national borders is eventually painful, causing the protagonist’s descent into madness.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

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BARNDT, Kerstin, Joshua SPERLING, and Sabine KRIEBEL. “Montage.” Routledge Encyclopedia of Modernism. 2016. www.rem.routledge.com/articles/overview/montage. Accessed December 17, 2018.

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NOTES

1. Part of this paper was presented at the inaugural British Association for Contemporary Literary Studies - What Happens Now Conference (Loughborough University, July 2018) and at the 45th Austrian Association for American Studies Conference “American Im/Mobilities” (University of , November 2018). I would like to thank Dr. Ruth Maxey and Dr. Gillian Roberts for their support and their useful comments and the two anonymous reviewers of Transatlantica for their insightful suggestions. 2. The expression “obsession with China” was coined by C. T. Hsia in 1971 to describe the work of modern overseas Chinese writers. 3. I use the term “transnationalism” to indicate the process of forging relations to more than one nation and “transnationality” to refer to the condition or quality of being transnational. 4. The attic also recalls Nieh’s own state of isolation in Taiwan after the closure of Free China, the magazine where she worked from 1949 to 1960. 5. The American legal system defines as “alien” a person who is not a citizen. 6. Montage is usually associated with Soviet cinema of the 1920s and particularly with the theorist and filmmaker Sergei Eisenstein (Barndt et al.).

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ABSTRACTS

Increased mobility and interconnection have characterized the end of the twentieth century. “‘Globalization’ is on everybody’s lips,” Z. Bauman wrote in 1998, and travelling is within everyone’s reach, a clichéd idea that evokes images of freedom and self-realisation. Yet immigrants’ tales often reveal that mobility and transnational ties can be negative and alienating. Through an analysis of Mulberry and Peach: Two Women of China (1976/1998) by the Asian American writer Hualing Nieh, this essay focuses on the negative outcomes of coerced mobility and transnationalism. The protagonist, Mulberry, is a Chinese refugee woman who is forced to relocate across China, Taiwan and the United States to escape war as well as male and institutional violence. If by “transnationalism” we mean “the process by which immigrants forge and sustain simultaneous multi-stranded social relations that link together their societies of origin and settlement” (Glick Schiller et al. 48), in Mulberry and Peach the author depicts a negative version of transnationalism. Placed in a transnational web against her will, Mulberry refuses to establish links with any nation, as both China and the United States are fraught with violence. She is therefore doomed to wander perpetually, and, at the same time, she is trapped in a frightening in-between space that causes “a vertiginous unbalancing of life and self” (Roberson 11).

Dans un siècle caractérisé par des phénomènes de mobilité et d’interconnexion accrues, Z. Bauman a pu écrire : « ‘Globalization’ is on everybody’s lips » (Bauman, 1998, 1) et voyager est à la portée de tous ; ce cliché évoque des images de liberté et de réalisation de soi. Toutefois, les récits d’immigrés révèlent souvent que la mobilité et les liens transnationaux peuvent être négatifs et aliénants. A travers une analyse de Mulberry and Peach : Two Women of China (1976/1998) par l’auteure asiatique-américaine Hualing Nieh, cet article entend se concentrer sur les résultats négatifs d’une mobilité et d’un transnationalisme forcés. La protagoniste, Mulberry, est une réfugiée chinoise qui se déplace à travers la Chine, Taïwan et les États-Unis pour échapper à la guerre et à la violence masculine et institutionnelle. Si par « transnationalisme » on entend « the process by which immigrants forge and sustain simultaneous multi-stranded social relations that link together their societies of origin and settlement » (Glick Schiller et al., 1995, 48), dans Mulberry and Peach, l’auteure décrit l’envers de ce processus. Placée dans un réseau transnational contre sa volonté, Mulberry refuse toute association avec la moindre nation dans la mesure où elle se retrouve confrontée à une même violence tant en Chine qu’aux États-Unis. Elle est donc condamnée à une errance perpétuelle et, dans le même temps, elle se retrouve piégée dans un entre-deux effrayant et vertigineux (« a vertiginous unbalancing of life and self », Roberson, 1998, 11).

INDEX

Mots-clés: Mulberry and Peach, Hualing Nieh, littérature asiatique-américaine, immigration, mobilité, transnationalisme, traumatisme Keywords: Mulberry and Peach, Hualing Nieh, Asian American literature, immigration, mobility, transnationalism, trauma

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AUTHOR

GRAZIA MICHELI University of Nottingham, [email protected]

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Hors Thème

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« Somnambulisme », ou l’après- coup de la métaphore

Marc Amfreville

1 On me pardonnera ce titre, ou du moins ce sous-titre, malgré son caractère redondant – toute métaphore n’implique-t-elle pas dans son « transport » même un mouvement d’après-coup tel que l’a défini Freud au fil de son œuvre entière, et tel que l’a magistralement ressaisi Laplanche (2006) ? On rappellera que ce terme désigne, par- delà le sens commun de conséquence, de séquelle presque, sans toutefois que l’acception première soit exclue, une rétrospection. Il s’agit bien de relire un événement dont la mesure consciente n’avait pas été prise à la lumière d’un autre survenu ultérieurement. Typiquement, ce processus est à l’œuvre dans les descriptions du trauma où une seconde occurrence fait émerger le souvenir enfoui d’une première effraction, parfois de même nature, parfois seulement d’intensité comparable, qui agissait jusqu’alors de façon souterraine et se voit soudain ranimée, réinterrogée sous forme d’angoisse fébrile assortie de cauchemars obsédants ou de sidération glacée accompagnée d’amnésie. N’en va-t-il pas de même de la métaphore, dont le véhicule ramène inexorablement à la teneur, qui à l’évidence était d’abord un moteur de sa création ?

2 C’est donc bien en tant qu’elle constitue une métaphore, et donc le premier élément d’un après-coup, que sera interrogée ici une nouvelle de Charles Brockden Brown composée à la toute fin du XVIIIe siècle et publiée à l’orée du XIXe, puis disparue durant deux siècles comme tant des premiers écrits de la Jeune République. On s’attachera à mesurer, aux antipodes d’une démarche qui consisterait à appliquer la découverte freudienne de l’inconscient à un texte antérieur, ce que la littérature américaine, à son origine, avait déjà « sans le savoir » théorisé, et l’on sent d’ores et déjà toute la parenté qui unit cet insu et l’inconscient qui nous occupe, ne serait-ce que par l’allemand de Freud qui les confond sous le même terme de « Unbewußt ».

3 Ce texte relativement court a sans doute été composé aux premiers mois de 1799, mais publié seulement quelques années plus tard dans The Literary Magazine and American Register (1805). Edgar Huntly, mémoires d’un somnambule (1799), traduit pour la première fois en 1980 par Liliane Abensour et Françoise Charras de Paris VII, en est un

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prolongement, une extension quasi simultanée. Brown reprend en outre et clôt avec Edgar Huntly un roman interrompu deux ans plus tôt intitulé « Sky-Walk ou l’homme inconnu de lui-même » dont il n’a subsisté qu’un fragment très succinct, qui suffit toutefois à montrer que le somnambulisme y était central. La nouvelle retenue, « Somnambulism », d’ailleurs inexplicablement sous-titrée « Un Fragment », sonde le concept même d’inconscient et nous rappelle à l’évidence : ce lieu/non lieu, tout comme le somnambulisme, est une métaphore que vient inscrire la négation qui le définit : l’inconscient, par essence inaccessible, ne se communique-t-il pas seulement par le dialogue qu’il instaure – ou non – avec la conscience, un peu à la manière dont veille et sommeil s’entremêlent dans la figure, tout à la fois prodigieuse et redoutable, de celui qui marche en dormant ? Ce n’est pas manquer de respect à Freud que de s’interroger avec Gladys Swain, dans son célèbre Dialogue avec l’insensé, sur les conditions d’avènement de la psychanalyse : Assumons l’indécente et blasphématoire trivialité d’une formulation qui a le mérite de la commodité didactique : Freud a-t-il tout trouvé tout seul ? Longtemps le mirage chéri de la « rupture », qui en tous domaines assure la recette, et le choc réel de la nouveauté, ont dispensé de cette troublante préoccupation. (Swain 192)

4 C’est bien en tout cas ce que je compte faire ici, après une présentation d’un auteur tristement méconnu et un rapide résumé de la nouvelle, à travers les métaphores si indémêlables de la wilderness, du double, et du somnambule – autant d’éléments d’une poétique qui annoncent et recoupent la cartographie de la psyché, le clivage et la question même de l’impossible représentation de l’inconscient. Au contraire de l’idée même d’une influence – si Freud, dans Le délire et les rêves dans la Gradiva de Jensen, tenait les écrivains en haute estime et leur reconnaissait toujours une longueur d’avance sur les recherches scientifiques, il n’avait lu des auteurs du Nouveau Monde que Mark Twain, et ne fit jamais la moindre allusion à ce qu’il est convenu d’appeler le Gothique américain – nous tenterons de repérer rétroactivement, en ce moment où s’inaugure une littérature nationale, les traces de ce que Freud ne théorisera que cent ans plus tard, et qui germine tout au long du XIXe siècle.

5 En manière de biographie, examinons deux extraits de lettres de celui qui fut presque le premier écrivain américain (1791-1810). À un ami de passage qui s’étonnait de l’étonnant écart qui séparait son caractère affable et optimiste en société et la nature sombre et tourmentée de ses premières tentatives de fiction, Brown déclare : « I am aware of a double mental existence » (cité par Axelrod 15). Il concède une opposition irréconciliable, dépassant les bornes convenues de changements d’humeur, entre une part solaire dans laquelle on reconnaît l’homme de lettres, animateur de clubs littéraires, fondateur et éditorialiste de plusieurs magazines, et surtout l’ambitieux jeune homme qui veut doter son jeune pays d’une littérature propre ; et un côté mélancolique, on dirait aujourd’hui dépressif, qui informe ceux de ses écrits qui lui tiennent le plus à cœur. Quelques années plus tard, alors qu’il s’apprête à abandonner la veine gothique qui a présidé à de nombreuses nouvelles et à ses quatre grands romans, il écrit à son frère : « Your remarks upon the gloominess and out-of-nature incidents of Huntly, if they be not just in their full extent, are doubtless such as most readers will make, which alone is a sufficient reason for dropping the doleful tone and assuming a cheerful one, or at least substituting moral causes and daily incidents in place of the prodigious or the singular » (Clark 195). Quelques années plus tard encore, en 1803, Brown notera dans l’éditorial qu’il adresse aux lecteurs d’un nouveau magazine qu’il vient de fonder : « I have written muckiest, but take much blame to

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myself for some things that I have written, and no praise for anything. […] I should enjoy a larger share of my own respect at the present moment if nothing had ever flowed from my pen, the production of which could be traced to me » ([Brown] 3). Dans ce renoncement, ce reniement même des romans où il a mis en scène un dément meurtrier qui, saisi d’hallucination, tue sa femme et leurs enfants, un somnambule qui sombre dans la manie (Edgar Huntly ; or Memoirs of a Sleepwalker), un ventriloque pervers (Memoirs of Carwin, the Biloquist), les terribles épidémies de peste qui se font le reflet de l’âme noire de mystérieux intrigants (Ormond ; or the Secret Witness, et Arthur Mervyn ; or Memoirs of the Year 1793), il faut sans doute lire davantage que ce que l’écrivain en dit lui-même. Celui qui, en l’important d’Angleterre, avait radicalement transformé le Gothique anglais peut-être plus naïf qui l’avait précédé, substituant aux faciles chimères surnaturelles et aux châteaux hantés les méandres obscurs de la psyché, et puisant pour cela aux racines de tourments intimes, a sans doute pris peur. Effaré par la radicalité de ses intuitions sur la nature du mal, en ce qu’elle révèle une part de l’homme « inconnue de lui-même », et qui, comme le formule avec génie Leslie Fiedler, conduit en toute logique à déduire que « we are all sleepwalkers » (Fiedler 158), il préfère se taire, se réfugiant d’abord dans une fiction sentimentale sans intérêt, puis dans un silence complet auquel l’arrachera la mort prématurée par la tuberculose qui le rongeait.

6 « Somnambulism » s’ouvre sur un extrait apocryphe de la Vienna Gazette datée de 1784 qui décrit un fait divers scientifiquement attesté : un jeune homme, jouissant apparemment d’une parfaite santé mentale, a tué sa bien-aimée alors qu’il était endormi et n’en avait par conséquent aucune conscience (« unknown to himself ») (246). Cet extrait, de par les ressemblances précises qu’il présente avec le cas du jeune Althorpe, protagoniste et narrateur de la fiction qui va suivre, retire au texte tout son suspens. Même le lecteur le plus inattentif établira le lien et comprendra qu’il a désormais sous les yeux le témoignage de celui qui a commis un meurtre à son insu. Althorpe est éperdument amoureux de Constantia qui est promise à un autre. Alors qu’elle doit, en compagnie de son père, traverser un espace de cette forêt inconquise qu’on nomme en anglais wilderness, entre nature sauvage et désert biblique, Althorpe, envahi de sombres pressentiments, offre de les accompagner pour les protéger mais voit sa proposition rejetée. De plus en plus agité par ses peurs irraisonnées, il finit par s’endormir et, durant son cauchemar, il s’imagine suivre sa bien-aimée pour la protéger, puis assaillir et tuer celui qui la menaçait. Il apprendra le lendemain matin qu’en traversant la forêt, la jeune femme a été assassinée d’un coup de feu. De façon étonnamment moderne, le texte, laissant le narrateur endormi, fait alors retour sur le périple de Constantia et de son père, harcelés par une silhouette constamment entrevue entre les arbres, et dont ils apprendront, un temps rassurés, que c’est celle d’un attardé mental, Nick, qui joue à effrayer les voyageurs en poussant des cris terribles dans la nuit mais ne présente aucun danger. C’est toutefois un de ces cris qui fera s’enfuir le cheval des protagonistes, et c’est alors que le père part à sa recherche que retentira le coup de feu fatal à sa fille. Il importe de souligner pour finir que le texte ne revient jamais à la situation d’énonciation et qu’en d’autres termes Althorpe n’avoue jamais une culpabilité évidente à plus d’un titre pour le lecteur.

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La wilderness

7 Riche, nous venons de le voir, de ses doubles associations à la culture biblique héritée de l’Europe et, de façon presque antithétique, à une nature que l’Américain veut croire primitive et vierge au mépris de ses premiers occupants, la wilderness est le théâtre du drame. Elle occupe dans cette nouvelle, et surtout dans Edgar Huntly, la place que tenait le château hanté ou l’abbaye en ruine dans le Gothique anglais. Loin cependant de la représentation reconstruite d’un passé disparu dont l’ombre continue de menacer le présent des Lumières, la forêt du Nouveau Monde est tout à la fois mystérieuse, insondable, mais aussi formidablement présente dans sa proximité spatiale et temporelle. Elle s’associe dans le texte aux deux personnages qui y errent (intraduisible anglais « to rove » qui signifie parcourir sans but, dans un sens proche du verbe hanter), Nick et Althorpe, et acquiert ainsi une dimension sourdement violente, liée à une forme d’inquiétante étrangeté : elle est en effet à la fois familière à celui qui prétend servir de guide dans ses détours nocturnes, et étrangère à ceux qui y guettent les signes annonciateurs des dangers qui les menacent. Soulignons que les cris qui la traversent, ceux de l’idiot mais aussi des bêtes invisibles dans la nuit, signent le caractère étymologiquement « sauvage » de cet espace – wilde désignant, à l’origine, les bêtes indomptées, mais en étant déjà venu à signifier une désorientation (bewilderment, entre étonnement et déroute), et même une forme de folie.

8 Dès lors, est-ce trop solliciter le texte que de voir dans ce qui ne saurait être qu’un décor la représentation d’un territoire qui, bien au-delà de sa réalité – on peut y faire des incursions, sa traversée s’impose et effraie à la fois –, affirme un caractère allégorique dont la première valeur métaphorique serait l’inconnaissable. Rappelons que, pour Freud, le choix d’une topique pour représenter l’appareil psychique, d’abord sous forme d’une cloison étanche entre conscient et inconscient avant même L’Interprétation des rêves, puis dans la configuration des trois « étages » que sont le surmoi, le moi et le ça (seconde topique) à partir de 1920, est une cartographie imaginaire, dont il insiste pour dire qu’elle « n’a rien à voir avec l’anatomie » (Freud « L’Inconscient », 79). Avec un degré de conscience impossible à établir, Brown inscrit néanmoins un paysage, dont il n’est pas innocent qu’il soit si essentiellement américain, comme ce qu’il nous faut considérer comme la projection – d’autres diraient le corrélat objectif – d’une insaisissable part de soi. « Pouvez-vous imaginer un espace circulaire d’environ neuf kilomètres de diamètre qui présenterait à l’infini un enchevêtrement de sommets et de vallons profonds ? » (Edgar Huntly 102) Et plus loin : « It is a tedious maze, and perpetual declivity, and requires, from the passenger, a cautious and sure foot. Openings and ascents occasionally present themselves on each side, which seem to promise you access to the interior region, but always terminate, sooner or later, in insuperable difficulties, at the verge of a precipice, or the bottom of a steep. » (Edgar Huntly 96-97) Tout est là résumé : un lieu à la fois circonscrit et illimité, un lieu où vient s’ajouter à une horizontalité déconcertante une profondeur inquiétante. Le sous-sol désert du Norwalk (Norwood dans « Somnambulism ») est creusé de poches et de passages souterrains, et le protagoniste médusé se retrouvera dans l’une de ses grottes au noir absolu, victime, il le comprendra plus tard, d’un accès de somnambulisme. Préfiguration de l’inconscient en termes spéléologiques que n’aurait pas désavoués Freud, à condition de comprendre avec Pontalis (dans son introduction à la Gradiva) que ce qui affleure d’un enfouissement n’est jamais

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exactement ce qui avait été enseveli. En une conception dynamique du refoulement, Brown imagine des personnages de somnambules qui ne seront plus jamais les mêmes quand ils émergeront des ténèbres littérales de la wilderness et de celles métaphoriques de leur ignorance d’eux-mêmes, une ignorance que vient figurer la création des doubles.

Le double

9 Nous l’avons déjà entrevu : sur la piste du crime, Althorpe et Nick sont interchangeables. Tous deux parcourent la forêt, tous deux effraient les visiteurs, le premier par ses inquiétudes contagieuses, le second par ses cris. Sur l’axe du crime, si l’idiot n’est qu’un faux coupable, mais qui ne trompe pas le lecteur dûment informé par l’extrait de la Vienna Gazette à l’incipit, il représente sur un autre plan une partie projetée du désir primitif du narrateur et s’affirme comme un double d’Althorpe, une sorte d’émanation de l’esprit de la nature sauvage encore présente sous les dehors policés du narrateur, qui s’exprimera dans un désir incontrôlé dont la frustration entraînera l’assassinat de celle qui s’est refusée à lui. Cette poétique de la ressemblance, qui efface les contours des identités pour nous amener à penser l’énigme de l’être dans ce qu’il a de pluriel – je n’est-il pas un autre ? –, va pour ainsi dire se radicaliser dans Edgar Huntly qui met en scène deux somnambules, le narrateur éponyme et l’objet de son enquête policière, Clithero, qui représente à la fois le scélérat venu d’Europe, et la virtualité psychotique du protagoniste. Sous les auspices d’une fascination homo- érotique, les deux personnages sont eux aussi interchangeables, les mémoires d’un somnambule du sous-titre désignant simultanément le récit enchâssé de Clithero, et celui, englobant, d’Edgar. Si ce n’est qu’au terme de son périple que ce dernier découvrira son propre somnambulisme, son excursion dans la wilderness l’aura confronté au sauvage qui est en lui, animé de pulsions meurtrières, voire cannibales, et de la tentation d’une folie qui ne le cède en rien à celle de son double dément.

10 Nous touchons là à un point essentiel : les deux aspects de la poétique du double tel que Freud la définira en filigrane dans sa lecture de « L’Homme au sable » de Hoffmann, illustrent une théorisation de « L’inquiétant » qui s’ancre dans le principe même du refoulement. Ce qui fait qu’un élément familier peut devenir inquiétant, et dans une certaine mesure que l’inverse puisse se produire, est lié à une connaissance antérieure mais refoulée d’un lieu, d’une personne ou d’une situation. Ce premier aspect serait développé dans la nouvelle d’Hoffmann dans la résurgence des deux figures paternelles que sont le père et Coppelius sous les traits du bon professeur et du marchand d’instruments d’optique, ou de celle de Clara dans la poupée Olympia. Il s’agit du relevé d’un subtil procédé de correspondances textuelles dont on ne rappelle pas assez souvent que Freud l’a pratiqué en orfèvre et qu’il a ainsi ouvert la voie à nos pratiques structuralistes. Mais il convient de ne pas négliger le second aspect de cette poétique du double. Nathanaël devient fou. Son esprit se scinde entre celui qui aime sa fiancée et celui qui tente de l’assassiner et qui finit par se suicider dans un accès de démence meurtrière retournée contre lui-même. C’est la conjonction de ces deux versants qui fait toute la force de la description freudienne et, alors qu’il nous a fallu les dissocier dans un souci de clarté, il importe ensuite de les rassembler pour mesurer pleinement la radicalité de la proposition. Les deux aspects décrivent en fait conjointement un même phénomène de division, d’une part au sein du sujet qu’est le personnage sous

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forme de ce que l’on appellerait aujourd’hui une schizophrénie paranoïde, d’autre part, dans la constitution d’un réseau de signifiants qui tout à la fois séparent et rassemblent différentes instances fictionnelles. Le point de rencontre de ces deux versants se trouve sous la forme d’une note où Freud envisage l’automate Olympia comme « une matérialisation de l’attitude féminine de Nathanaël à l’égard de son père dans sa prime enfance » (Freud « L’Inquiétant », 165-166). Ici culmine le rapprochement de deux signes textuels distincts (Nathanaël et la poupée) et la fracture interne d’une instance psychique dont l’éclatement a précisément présidé à la création de l’automate et à celle de la figure scindée des deux pères.

11 Le même fonctionnement paradigmatique est à l’œuvre dans les textes de Brown. Althorpe et Edgar sont irrémédiablement morcelés, et cette fragmentation interne essaime et crée les doubles que sont les personnages de Nick et de Clithero. Surtout, il apparaît essentiel de souligner que cette division se fait sous le signe de l’insu, chacun des protagonistes ignorant qu’il est somnambule, et chacun insinuant la possibilité d’une lecture erronée de son double comme coupable. Toutefois, de même qu’Althorpe est le coupable qu’il ne connaît pas, il est possible de penser qu’Edgar est bel et bien le meurtrier de son ami qu’il recherche dans un accès de somnambulisme. Cette étrange affection figurerait alors dans toute sa radicalité la division du moi entre conscient et inconscient, mais aussi ce que bien plus tard Freud désignera comme le clivage.

Le somnambulisme

12 Althorpe a tué la femme qu’il aimait. De même, Clithero, saisi de démence, avait voulu éliminer sa bienfaitrice et croit d’ailleurs y avoir réussi, ce qui explique, dans l’économie du texte, ou du moins dans la compréhension qu’a Edgar de la conduite de son double, un poignant sentiment de culpabilité qui se traduit en accès de somnambulisme. Or, il n’en est rien. Quand, pensant le délivrer de cette souffrance, Edgar lui révèle que Mrs. Lorimer n’était qu’évanouie et qu’elle est en parfaite santé aujourd’hui, Clithero, pris d’un nouvel accès maniaque, n’a de cesse qu’il ne la tue. Ce que le roman met ainsi en scène, c’est bel et bien une ambivalence, au sens le plus radical que lui donnait Breuer, c’est-à-dire, la coexistence de deux pulsions contradictoires, telles que l’amour et la haine, qui se juxtaposent sans jamais s’émousser l’une l’autre : « deux tendances opposées et se manifestant chacune à sa façon, en même temps » (Boutonier 29). Rapportée à Clithero, cette ambivalence extrême s’accompagne d’un processus de clivage où le sujet ne sait rien de la haine qu’il éprouve, tout entier occupé à l’amour qu’il ressent. S’il réalise ainsi des états psychiques opposés, il faut bien considérer que la première motion a fait l’objet d’un déni, mais que ce processus est trop consommateur d’énergie : le psychotique doit en quelque sorte faire passer dans un agir du corps le trop-plein de la pulsion négative. En termes littéraires, c’est ce qu’a intuitivement saisi Brown en faisant de la déambulation nocturne une manière de mise en acte. Il est aidé en cela par les conceptions de la psychiatrie embryonnaire de son temps, qui voyait, avec Erasmus Darwin notamment, auquel l’écrivain a souvent recours en note pour décrire les pathologies qu’il met en scène, que le somnambulisme était une maladie mentale au même titre que la manie ou la mélancolie. Comme le notait le médecin-poète : « No one in perfect sanity walks about in his sleep. »1

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13 Pour en revenir plus étroitement à la nouvelle, Althorpe est bel et bien une personnalité clivée ou, plus exactement, le sont les sentiments qu’il porte à Constantia. Là encore, un détour par la future définition freudienne est éclairant. Après avoir décrit le début du processus de clivage chez l’enfant comme un « conflit entre la revendication de la pulsion et l’objection faite par la réalité » et expliqué que ce dernier ne fait « ni l’un ni l’autre, ou plutôt fait simultanément l’un et l’autre, ce qui revient au même », Freud développe en une phrase lourde d’implications : « Le succès a été atteint au prix d’une déchirure dans le moi, déchirure qui ne guérira jamais mais grandira avec le temps » (Freud « Clivage », 284).

14 Althorpe, consciemment, porte à Constantia une passion sans mélange, et on pourrait se satisfaire d’une description où seule la frustration de cet amour et la jalousie font jaillir la haine qui préside à l’assassinat. Ce serait méconnaître deux faits d’importance inégale : tout d’abord l’angoisse qui s’empare de lui quand est évoqué le périple nocturne que doit entreprendre Constantia, laquelle redouble quand la jeune femme refuse sa protection. N’est-on pas tenté de penser déjà qu’une part obscure en lui désire que le voyage se passe mal, et que soit ainsi punie l’aimée de sa désertion ? Le second est que le meurtre intervient durant le sommeil d’Althorpe, c’est-à-dire en un temps où, libérée de toute censure, la haine peut s’exprimer librement. Elle ne se contente cependant pas d’une représentation telle qu’en forgerait tout névrosé, mais devient un agir criminel sous les auspices d’un somnambulisme qui signe à la fois la division du moi et son dédoublement : la fracture à l’intérieur de lui et la création d’un autre lui- même en la personne de l’idiot. Il est d’ailleurs tout à fait intéressant de constater que ce double projeté est en réalité innocent, malgré son apparence coupable, en une symétrie inversée de l’image que le narrateur donne de lui-même. Notons aussi que cette méconnaissance absolue de soi inaugure la formule qui connaîtra un indiscutable succès dans le reste des écrits de Brown et la littérature américaine en général – on songe ici en particulier à Poe mais aussi à Hawthorne, Melville et James. L’écrivain vient en effet de mettre en place son premier narrateur « unreliable », entendons fallacieux et, partant, le ressort gothique d’une fiction qui repose presque entièrement sur les erreurs de perception. On est loin ici cependant des radcliffades où le surnaturel s’explique au terme des œuvres comme un stratagème soudain éventé : l’illusion d’innocence dont est victime Althorpe, comme le seront aussi Edgar, Clara dans Wieland, Sophia dans Ormond, Arthur dans Arthur Mervyn, trouve son origine dans une prescience de mécanismes psychiques infiniment complexes que la psychanalyse théorisera cent ans plus tard. En 1915, dans « Pulsions et destins des pulsions », Freud isolera le cas de la transposition de l’amour en haine. On ne peut alors manquer d’être surpris quand, dans le même essai, il avance l’idée déterminante que « la haine en tant que relation à l’objet est plus ancienne que l’amour » (Freud « Pulsions » 186). Réfléchir à cette contradiction apparente nous entraînerait trop loin de la littérature. Pour le cas qui nous occupe, il nous faut bel et bien penser que la haine préexistait à l’amour que porte Althorpe à Constantia, qu’il l’a transposée en amour, et que le rejet que la jeune femme lui oppose fait sauter la barrière protectrice derrière laquelle cette haine s’abritait. Saisi d’une angoisse insensée à l’idée de ce qui apparaît comme un double abandon – elle s’apprête à en épouser un autre et refuse même l’amitié d’Althorpe – il rêve de tuer une image de son rival pendant que son double effraie le cheval de la belle avec les conséquences funestes que l’on sait : il pourra alors, endormi, la faire disparaître, comme si son acte lui rendait une maîtrise que son aimée lui refusait en le laissant derrière elle… tel un enfant.

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15 Comment ne pas songer, parce que précisément les deux histoires se juxtaposent chronologiquement et symboliquement, qu’à l’instar de Clithero, c’est bien une figure maternelle que détruit le narrateur, ramené par les moqueries de Constantia à la position de l’enfant qui voit sa mère lui préférer un homme et qui disqualifie sa passion dans laquelle elle ne reconnaît qu’une agitation puérile ? Le jeune Althorpe, comme ne cesse de l’appeler Constantia avec condescendance quand elle parle de lui au sein du couple qu’elle forme avec son propre père (lequel matérialise l’inaccessibilité de la jeune femme en attendant son mariage), est sans doute orphelin. Comme Edgar Huntly qui, lui, l’est explicitement, Althorpe vit chez son oncle, et on peut songer à une communauté de destins (la mère d’Edgar ainsi que toute sa famille ont été assassinées par des Indiens). Althorpe tomberait ainsi facilement amoureux de la première femme venue, comme le lui reproche Constantia, pourvu qu’elle soit plus mûre que lui et le traite comme un enfant, et il refoulerait alors une haine originaire contre la mère qui l’a inexplicablement délaissé.

16 Rien ne permet d’étayer davantage cette hypothèse dans le cadre étroit de la nouvelle, non plus que celle qui voudrait, dans Edgar Huntly, que le narrateur somnambule soit le meurtrier qu’il recherche, mais dans la fluctuation même d’une fiction à l’autre telle que nous avons pu la repérer, disons à tout le moins qu’elle constitue une lecture plausible, en tout cas parfaitement cohérente avec les incursions que mène l’écrivain dans ce qu’il n’appelle pas encore lui-même l’inconscient.

Conclusion

17 Au terme de ce parcours de deux textes de Brown et de plusieurs essais de Freud, nous avons relevé des résonances dont il importe au fond assez peu, à la lumière du principe bidirectionnel de l’après-coup, de savoir qui a précédé qui. Il est certain que l’écriture de fiction permet sur un mode proleptique de corroborer certaines hypothèses freudiennes au moins autant que ces dernières éclairent rétroactivement l’entreprise de création littéraire. Surtout, le trope du somnambulisme s’affirme comme une puissante métaphore de l’inconscient. Il nous invite à penser dans un premier temps, avec le Freud de L’Esquisse d’une psychologie scientifique et de L’Interprétation des rêves sans doute, en termes d’étanchéité entre conscient et inconscient, mais nous amène presque aussitôt à revenir sur cette idée, de même que l’inventeur de la psychanalyse y reviendra pour parfaire sa représentation. Comme il le développe en filigrane d’abord mais avec une force croissante dans sa « Note sur l’Inconscient en psychanalyse » (1912), la frontière n’existe que par sa transgression : l’inconscient ne cesse d’engager une sorte de dialogue avec le conscient, dont le refoulé et ses retours donnent une première idée, mais que poursuit le concept même de « rejetons de l’inconscient » qu’il développera dans le texte de 1915. « L’Ics est au contraire vivant, capable de développement, et il entretient bon nombre d’autres relations avec le Pcs, parmi lesquelles aussi celle de coopération. Sous forme résumée, il nous faut dire que l’Ics se prolonge dans ce qu’on nomme les rejetons, il est accessible aux actions exercées par la vie… » (Freud « L’Inconscient », 230-31). Ne peut-on pas dire que cette plasticité est précisément ce qui permet au travail analytique d’advenir, de même que l’écoute flottante qu’il faut savoir porter au texte littéraire autorise sa transmission ? Tout est là, un inconscient vivant au contraire de statique, comme est vivant le lien, « l’espace

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entre »2, disait Liliane Abensour, qui unit la veille et le sommeil dans la relation paradoxale qu’est le somnambulisme.

BIBLIOGRAPHIE

AMFREVILLE, Marc. Charles Brockden Brown, la part du doute. Paris : Voix américaines, Belin, 2000.

AXELROD, Alan. Charles Brockden Brown, an American Tale. Austin : University of Texas Press, 1983.

BOUTIONIER, J. La notion d’ambivalence. Toulouse : Privat Éditeur, 1972.

BROWN, Charles Brockden. Edgar Huntly, ou les mémoires d’un somnambule. Traduction et appareil critique Liliane Abensour et Françoise Charras. Paris : Jean-Michel Place Éditions, 1980.

[BROWN, Charles Brockden]. « The Editor’s Address to the Public ». The Literary Magazine and American Register. Vol. I (Saturday, Oct. 1, 1803), p. 3-6.

---. The Novels and Related Works by C.B. Brown, Bicentennial Edition. 6 vols. Éds. S. Krause et S.W. Reid. Kent, OH : Kent State University Press, 1977-87.

---. « Somnambulism ». Edgar Huntly ; or Memoirs of a Sleepwalker with Related Texts. Éds. Philip Barnard et Stephen Shapiro. Indianapolis : Hackett, 2006, p. 246-258.

CLARK, David Lee. Charles Brockden Brown, Pioneer Voice of America. Durham, NC : Duke University Press, 1952.

FIEDLER, Leslie. Love and Death in the American Novel. 1960. Dalkey Archive Press, 2008.

FREUD, Sigmund. Œuvres complètes, volumes XI pour « Note sur l’inconscient en psychanalyse ; vol. XIII pour « L’inconscient », « Pulsions et destin des pulsions », vol. XV pour « L’inquiétant ». Paris : PUF, respectivement 1998, 2005, 2002.

---. « Le clivage du moi dans le processus de défense. » 1938. Résultats, Idées, Problèmes II, Paris : PUF, 1998, p. 283-288.

LAPLANCHE, Jean. Problématique VI. L’après-coup. Paris : PUF, 2006.

PONTALIS, J-B. « La jeune fille », préface à S. Freud, Le délire et les rêves dans la Gradiva de W. Jensen. Paris : Folio Gallimard, 1986, p. 9-23.

SWAIN, Gladys. Dialogue avec l’insensé. A la recherche d’une autre histoire de la folie, Paris : NRF, Gallimard, 1994.

NOTES

1. Erasmus Darwin, Zoonomia, cité p. 336 de l’appareil critique d’Edgar Huntly ; or Memoirs of a Sleepwalker. Sur la façon dont cette vision du somnambulisme était généralement admise, on consultera la longue note (p. 336-337). 2. « L’espace entre » est le titre de l’éclairante préface rédigée par Liliane Abensour pour l’édition française d’Edgar Huntly (p. 289-294). On garde par exemple le souvenir des quelques lignes

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suivantes : « De façon insistante, les écrivains, les poètes ont tenté de rendre compte de cette aventure poétique presque indicible, insaisissable, qui se referme sur elle-même, de cette percée vers un lieu mortifère et fécond […] Comme les grands explorateurs qui le fascinaient et dont il voulait écrire l’épopée, [Brown] découvre un espace entre, cet espace riche et redoutable d’où émerge la création poétique » (294).

RÉSUMÉS

Cet article tente de mesurer combien la nouvelle de Charles Brockden Brown, « Somnambulism » (1799), préfigure plusieurs découvertes freudiennes qui, à leur tour, permettent une relecture éclairante d’une œuvre de fiction méconnue, en un double mouvement qui correspond à la définition psychanalytique de l’après-coup. Métaphore au sens tout à la fois d’une préfiguration et d’une reprise, la représentation de cette étrange et poétique affection psychique est de nature à bousculer toute conception chronologique et confirme les intuitions communes de la littérature et de la psychanalyse sur la nature de l’inconscient, mais aussi sur le double, le clivage et l’ambivalence.

This essay aims to show that “Somnambulism,” a short story by Charles Brockden Brown published in 1799 foreshadows several Freudian tenets that allow, in turn, to fully measure the symbolic purport of this fiction. Reading thus becomes bidirectional, obeying the very principle of Nachträglichkeit (deferment or belatedness). The representation of what the eighteenth century viewed as a serious mental illness for all its poetical associations ends up shattering any chronological conception of knowledge, and thus confirms the commonness of literary and Freudian intuitions on the Unconscious, but also sheds light on doubling, splitting and ambivalence.

INDEX

Keywords : somnambulism, psychoanalysis, wilderness, double, unconscious Thèmes : Hors-thème Mots-clés : somnambulisme, psychanalyse, wilderness, double, inconscient

AUTEUR

MARC AMFREVILLE Paris Sorbonne

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Le regard impossible Réflexions sur les présupposés et les mécanismes idéologiques des images de synthèse photoréalistes dans le blockbuster hollywoodien contemporain

Mathias Kusnierz

1 Dans son livre de 1966 intitulé Special Effects in Motion Pictures, Frank P. Clark expose, à destination des techniciens d’Hollywood, les différentes manières d’élaborer les effets spéciaux d’un film. Son inventaire s’étend du trucage le plus simple – un écran de fumée, par exemple (40-43) – aux effets spéciaux les plus élaborés, comme l’animation image par image (108-109) ou la construction de maquettes animées complexes (89, 146, 152). Le livre de Clark se veut un exposé technique, sans parti pris, et appuyé sur une solide connaissance pratique du métier de concepteur d’effets spéciaux. Il fait ainsi fréquemment référence au travail des artisans les plus illustres d’Hollywood, comme Willis O’Brien, ou Ub Iwerks, mais aussi à des techniciens moins connus tels que Harry Barndollar, Lee Zavitz, John Hench, Joshua Meador ou Larry Hampton. Parmi les films qui nourrissent sa réflexion, l’auteur mentionne certains des derniers chevrons de l’industrie : Destination Moon (Destination… Lune !, Irving Pichel, Eagle-Lion, 1950), When Worlds Collide (Le Choc des mondes, Rudolph Maté, Paramount, 1951), War of the Worlds (La Guerre des mondes, Byron Haskin, Paramount, 1953), 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea ( 20.000 Lieues sous les mers, Richard Fleischer, Productions, 1954), The Lost World (Le Monde perdu, , Twentieth Century Fox, 1960), The Devil at 4 O’Clock (Le Diable à 4 heures, Mervyn LeRoy, Columbia, 1961) ou encore The Birds (Les Oiseaux, , Universal, 1963)1.

2 Derrière le souci d’objectivité et d’actualité des informations exposées dans l’ouvrage, un important présupposé théorique se dessine cependant au fil des pages : le responsable des effets spéciaux ou le technicien doit toujours tâcher d’élaborer des effets qui donnent au spectateur le sentiment de la réalité, de sorte que le récit demeure crédible à tout moment. On peut formuler aisément l’envers de cet impératif : l’image doit faire illusion, et même, l’illusion de réalité que le film procure au spectateur ne doit jamais être interrompue.

3 Il n’y a, dans ce présupposé, rien qui soit en désaccord avec les normes esthétiques et narratives du cinéma classique hollywoodien, fût-ce en 1966. La production

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hollywoodienne, même post-classique, demeure un cinéma de la continuité et de la transparence narratives, du « montage “invisible” et “psychologique”2 », pour le dire avec Th. Schatz, qui se fonde le plus souvent sur des récits lisibles, efficaces, dramatiquement orientés et propres à engranger des profits. Grâce à la transparence narrative et à la fluidité du montage, le spectateur entretient avec le défilement des plans un rapport d’identification et d’adhésion : autrement dit, il regarde l’image de cinéma comme il adhère au réel (Bordwell, Staiger et Thompson 174-193). Les principes de transparence et de continuité narratives définissent – d’après les historiens – le paradigme classique et servent à assurer la stabilité du système de production (Lastra 200-201). Surtout, parce qu’ils garantissent l’efficacité narrative hollywoodienne, ils en fondent aussi la puissance idéologique, en assurant que le spectateur adhère au récit, donc aux discours des films, qui se confond bien souvent avec le discours de l’American way of life (Bordwell, Staiger et Thompson 3-41, 70-85, 341-352 ; Bidaud 20, 192-217). Ainsi, les mécanismes idéologiques des films permettent d’amoindrir les antagonismes du réel et de juguler l’expression des protestations d’ordre social ou politique. En cela, on peut dire que les films sont le lieu d’une intense production idéologique (Žižek, 1997 40-44).

4 Par « productivité idéologique », je ne veux pas dire que le cinéma hollywoodien manipule le spectateur, loin s’en faut. Les formes du cinéma hollywoodien mettent en jeu des idéologies, ou des systèmes de valeurs et de pensées, qui s’affrontent dialectiquement dans l’arène visuelle du récit : complotisme contre vérité d’État dans Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen (Transformers 2 : La Revanche, , Paramount, 2009), écologie contre climatoscepticisme dans (Le Jour d’après, , 2004) et (, Warner Bros., 2017), anarchisme et désobéissance civile contre autoritarisme politique dans Mission: Impossible – Fallout (Christopher McQuarrie, 2018). Mais rares sont les films hollywoodiens qui imposent au spectateur un point de vue univoque sans que lui soit laissée la possibilité de le dépasser dialectiquement. Aussi sommes-nous toujours capables de distance critique face aux films : notre adhésion au récit ne détermine pas systématiquement notre pleine approbation à tel ou tel discours.

5 Par ailleurs, le caractère toujours plus spectaculaire des computer generated images et l’usage de dispositifs comme les projections stéréoscopiques (couramment appelées 3D) ont poussé plusieurs historiens et théoriciens à remettre en question le paradigme classique de la transparence, non pour s’en débarrasser mais pour l’amender (Paci, 2004 et 2006). Les travaux historiques sur la résurgence d’un cinéma des attractions dans la production contemporaine (Paci, 2003) et notamment dans les blockbusters hollywoodiens (Tomasovic) étudient ces nouveaux dispositifs visuels ; ils réévaluent aussi la notion de transparence pour en élaborer une théorie plus complexe que celle proposée par Bordwell, Staiger et Thompson (174-193).

6 Dick Tomasovic montre que Jaws (Les Dents de la mer, Steven Spielberg, Universal, 1975) et : Episode IV – A New Hope (Star Wars, épisode IV : Un nouvel espoir, , Twentieth Century Fox, 1977), tout en signant le grand retour du récit à Hollywood (Berthomieu 29), ont aussi l’ambition de créer des « chocs visuels » à l’aide de séquences interminables, véritables morceaux de bravoure destinés à épuiser le regard du spectateur (Tomasovic 311-312, 319). Il montre aussi que , et ont délaissé au cours de leur carrière un cinéma de la pure attraction au profit d’un intérêt renouvelé pour le récit, comme chez leurs aînés Lucas

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et Spielberg. Contrairement à ce qu’on observe chez ces derniers, ajoute-t-il, ce regain d’intérêt pour le récit ne vise pas à le revivifier mais bien à intégrer davantage les attractions de sorte qu’elles paraissent moins gratuites. Tomasovic montre ainsi les rapports complexes entre la transparence et le spectacle en mettant en question l’idée communément admise de la souveraineté de la première sur le second.

7 Je formule donc mes réflexions sur la productivité idéologique des images de synthèse photoréalistes en tenant compte de ces travaux : elle ne s’exerce pas sans partage ni de manière hégémonique. D’une part, la complexité séductrice des digital effects se fonde sur un plaisir conscient de l’effet qui accompagne l’immersion du spectateur sans l’asservir au spectacle ni l’en distancier absolument. D’autre part, la transparence narrative est régulièrement battue en brèche par des formes d’attraction spectaculaire ; par conséquent la productivité idéologique est, très souvent, intermittente. Ce sont d’ailleurs ces intermittences qui ouvrent au spectateur les espaces de liberté herméneutique dont je parlerai plus loin.

8 Je voudrais tout de même nuancer la portée et l’ampleur des attractions étudiées dans les travaux que je viens de mentionner. Ils prennent parfois avec excès le contrepied du paradigme de la transparence, en posant que les attractions correspondent nécessairement à une « rupture narrative » et à « un rappel de son statut au spectateur ». Si l’adresse au spectateur ne repose guère sur le regard à la caméra des acteurs, les mouvements d’appareil hyperboliques produisent une rupture narrative et révèlent au spectateur son statut. Sans oublier, parmi bien d’autres éléments, toute une série de plans qui fonctionnent par allusion (la scène d’amputation des tentacules d’Octopus, un clin d’œil à ses premiers films que Raimi adresse à ses spectateurs fidèles) et le recours à des gros plans burlesques (l’insert sur l’araignée qui mord Peter dans Spider-Man, un pur moment visuel, autonome, frappant et comique)3. (Tomasovic 316-317)

9 Les excès spectaculaires ne défont pourtant pas nécessairement la cohérence narrative, ce qu’a montré Scott Bukatman (75) en revenant sur les thèses célèbres de Laura Mulvey (1975) sur le plaisir visuel. Tomasovic semble justement ignorer que les « vues attentatoires » (Belloï 77-159) et la suppression agressive de la distance que le spectateur entretient avec l’écran renforcent aussi, par l’immersion dans le récit, l’adhésion de son regard à ce qu’il voit. Les attractions font basculer l’image de cinéma dans une modalité performative : « ça fait vrai ! », pense-t-on devant l’écran, et cette exclamation intérieure signifie en réalité « c’est vrai ! ». Les attractions sont dialectiques : en même temps qu’elle exhibent notre statut de spectateur et la place que nous occupons devant l’écran, elles nous plongent au cœur de l’action en nous y impliquant physiquement. Par ailleurs, Tomasovic semble présupposer que tous les spectateurs font preuve du même regard savant. Or, si le public ordinaire, et notamment les adolescents auxquels ces films sont destinés par les producteurs, voient bien le spectacle hollywoodien dans son ensemble et le détail de certains procédés, ils ne perçoivent pas tous avec un regard analytique la virtuosité de la caméra et les références érudites à l’univers de Spider-Man et aux films de Sam Raimi. Lesquelles peuvent d’ailleurs décupler le plaisir du récit, selon que le spectateur est plus ou moins amateur d’intertextualité et de mise en scène visible.

10 Le souci de transparence et de continuité narratives – y compris quand il ménage un espace pour les attractions – explique, mais en partie seulement, l’exigence de réalisme au fondement des effets spéciaux et, plus tard, des images de synthèse. Ce réalisme a

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pour fonction de remplir l’une des attentes courantes des spectateurs de l’époque : rêver au sein d’un cadre le plus crédible possible. Le cinéma hollywoodien entretient un rapport lâche au réel ; il propose des récits qui ne rompent pas les liens du spectateur avec la réalité mais qui l’en éloignent cependant. C’est la raison pour laquelle il préfère généralement les films qui lui proposent une évasion hors de son quotidien à ceux qui le ramènent à la réalité (Nacache 392-395, 402 ; Koppes et Black 281-285). Pourtant, le spectateur veut que les modes visuels de cette évasion restent les plus réalistes possibles – ou tout du moins les producteurs pensent que c’est là le souhait du public – ainsi, il continue de plébisciter les films de science-fiction tournés avec de véritables acteurs et présentant des environnements photoréalistes, alors que de tels films pourraient aujourd’hui être intégralement conçus sur ordinateur (Williams 289). Je vois là une double contradiction structurelle des effets spéciaux et des images de synthèse tels qu’ils sont pratiqués à Hollywood : ils visent à davantage de réalisme – et ce phénomène n’a fait que s’accroître au cours de leur histoire – mais ils le font le plus souvent dans des films que les spectateurs américains appellent « escapist fare »4. Il s’agit là de longs-métrages qui relèvent de genres fondés sur le merveilleux, l’imagination ou l’évasion tels que le film fantastique, le film d’horreur ou le film de science-fiction (Worland 49-50). Il existe bien sûr à Hollywood des images de synthèse qui ne relèvent pas du photoréalisme mais elles demeurent minoritaires dans les blockbusters ; je fais donc le choix de les écarter de mon champ de réflexion pour cet article. Je fais l’hypothèse que cette double contradiction structurelle des effets spéciaux et des images de synthèse à Hollywood procède de mécanismes idéologiques profondément ancrés dans l’industrie du cinéma américain et que ceux-ci dissimulent leur nature idéologique ainsi que celle des effets spéciaux.

11 Afin de clore ce préambule, je voudrais définir ce que j’entends par le mot « photoréalisme ». Le terme désigne d’abord un courant de l’histoire de l’art apparu à la toute fin des années 1960 et popularisé grâce à l’exposition 22 Realists du Whitney Museum de New York en 1970 (Monte 12-15). En réaction à l’action painting, à l’abstraction et au minimalisme, le photoréalisme vise à produire des toiles qui donnent au spectateur l’impression de se trouver face à une photographie (Meisel 12). Tout l’enjeu de cette pratique est qu’elle se propose de reproduire des photographies réelles par les moyens de la peinture tout en appareillant celle-ci par des outils techniques modernes (agrandissements photographiques, reproduction par grille, procédés photomécaniques). Le paradoxe est peu ou prou le même pour les images de synthèse, qui visent à reproduire une image du réel grâce aux technologies numériques modernes. Ce détour par l’histoire de l’art permet de saisir l’enjeu de ces pratiques : le mot désignera, dans mon propos, la postulation ou la capacité d’une image à passer pour une photographie, donc une image exacte du réel, alors même qu’elle est conçue par des moyens informatiques. En infographie, on parle de rendu photoréaliste lorsque les images de synthèse ne se laissent pas distinguer d’une photographie et s’intègrent de manière invisible à des prises de vues réelles. Cette invisibilité n’empêche pourtant pas le spectateur de les déceler : il sait spontanément qu’un engin spatial, un corps cybernétique ou un dinosaure gigantesque sont des images de synthèse, quand bien même ils semblent réels. J’étudierai dans cet article ces images de synthèse photoréalistes.

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Analyser les mécanismes de la production idéologique

12 À partir de la réflexion que l’esthétique, la philosophie et la psychanalyse mènent sur le réel et l’illusion, et en examinant les usages discursifs des effets spéciaux et des images de synthèse dans un corpus de blockbusters américains des années 1990 à aujourd’hui, j’entends donc mener une réflexion théorique dans laquelle je tâcherai de comprendre pourquoi le caractère idéologique de l’illusion créée par les effets spéciaux et les images de synthèse photoréalistes reste obstinément dissimulé. Dans le même mouvement, je tenterai aussi de révéler cette dimension idéologique, en analysant ses mécanismes et ceux de sa dissimulation. Enfin, j’examinerai à l’aide de quelques cas précis la manière dont les formes critiques – même au sein du cinéma hollywoodien – s’entendent à briser les mécanismes de la production idéologique mis en jeu par les effets spéciaux et les images de synthèse.

13 La question de l’idéologie sera donc le centre de gravité de cet article. Je l’envisage dans sa double acception, contemporaine et marxiste. À un premier niveau et dans son sens courant, l’idéologie est l’ensemble des valeurs et des idées qui structurent une société donnée ; à un second niveau, dans son acception marxiste qui prolonge la première, l’idéologie est le système de représentations qui se prétend neutre alors qu’il fonde la structure de domination qui a cours dans une société donnée. Elle est la fausse conscience qui éloigne le prolétaire de la lutte sociale ; elle « représente le rapport imaginaire des individus à leurs conditions réelles d’existence » (Althusser 101), c’est-à- dire qu’elle leurre les travailleurs, de manière à ce qu’ils acceptent ces conditions comme immuables et justes. Or, dans le cinéma hollywoodien, ces deux acceptions travaillent de concert (alors qu’elles ne se recoupent pas nécessairement hors de la sphère cinématographique) : les films sont porteurs d’idéologèmes (Jameson 20) – des signes dont le signifiant masque la teneur idéologique du signifié – qui ne sont pas seulement des valeurs morales ou des idées, mais qui servent une structure de domination tout en se prétendant neutres.

14 Prenons un exemple. À travers son récit d’espionnage domestique, (James Cameron, , 1994) ne cesse de rejouer les moments saillants de l’histoire militaire de l’Amérique : la guerre de Sécession, lorsque Arnold Schwarzenegger poursuit un terroriste à cheval, la Seconde Guerre mondiale lorsqu’il s’infiltre dans un manoir suisse gardé par des sentinelles aux allures d’officiers nazis, ou encore la guerre du Viêt Nam dans le plan où le jet Harrier décolle sur fond de soleil couchant, ce qui évoque, bien sûr, (, , 1979). Chacune de ces vignettes est coulée dans la geste individuelle d’un common man, en réalité héros national, qui impose avec son triomphe celui de l’Amérique. Mais il y a plus dans ces images que de simples valeurs historiques et morales. En faisant advenir la victoire historique et militaire, le récit entérine la domination patriarcale (c’est en sauvant son pays qu’Harry Tasker ramène son épouse sous le joug d’un mariage sans écarts extra-conjugaux) ainsi qu’une forme de ségrégation raciale où le terroriste est aussi le travailleur arabe victime de discrimination au travail. Quand Salim Abu Aziz, le terroriste en chef, se retrouve suspendu par les bretelles de son habit au nez d’un missile de l’avion de Tasker, ce dernier déclenche la mise à feu de l’engin d’un laconique « you’re fired! ». Le spectateur américain entend bien sûr « t’es viré ! » mais aussi, plus littéralement et eu égard aux images, « t’es explosé ! » ou « t’es cramé ! ». Le gros plan en travelling arrière sur le visage de Salim, grotesquement déformé par la

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vitesse du missile, humilie donc autant le travailleur immigré que le terroriste, tandis que le mouvement de la caméra accompagne (et accomplit) le meurtre du personnage. En véhiculant des valeurs d’ordre idéologique, les images travaillent donc aussi à renforcer la structure de la domination et à la rendre acceptable au spectateur5. J’ai étudié ailleurs la productivité idéologique de telles images (Kusnierz, 2017 ; 2019 ; 2020) et je voudrais ici me concentrer sur les soubassements idéologiques des images de synthèse photoréalistes, en tant qu’elles sont l’un des rouages de cette productivité.

Les quatre paradoxes des effets spéciaux

15 Avant d’entrer dans le vif de l’analyse, il me faut donner une précision terminologique. En français, on a tendance à utiliser l’expression « images de synthèse » comme un hyponyme de l’expression « effets spéciaux ». Or, en anglais, les « special effects » désignent plutôt les effets analogiques, tandis que les « digital effects » désignent les effets conçus par ordinateur. Pour des raisons de clarté et de cohérence lexicale avec un certain nombre des sources que je cite, j’emploierai parfois l’expression « effets spéciaux », parfois « images de synthèse » ou « digital effects ». Ce sont ces digital effects – que l’anglais appelle aussi « computer generated images » ou « CGI » – qui constituent l’objet principal de mon étude et qui présentent selon David Rodowick une ontologie distincte des effets spéciaux analogiques (Rodowick 163-174).

16 Les effets spéciaux et les images de synthèse sont des objets plastiques et visuels éminemment paradoxaux, et cette dimension contradictoire entre pour une bonne part dans la dissimulation de leur caractère idéologique. Non seulement leurs modes opératoires et figuratifs sont trop divers pour entrer dans une catégorie unique, mais leur déploiement dans les films et leur devenir sont eux-mêmes paradoxaux, comme nous allons le voir. Historiquement, les effets spéciaux sont la version moderne du « trucage ». Ce mot, écrit Réjane Hamus-Vallée (2004 5-6), apparaît en 1872 sous la graphie « truquage » ; il désigne la falsification d’objets et notamment d’objets d’art. Un peu plus tard, le Robert le définit comme suit : « Au spectacle, tout procédé d’illusion comportant l’emploi de trucs. » Le mot « truc » est quant à lui utilisé dès 1803 dans la prestidigitation et le théâtre. De fait, le syntagme « effets spéciaux » a une acception spécifiquement cinématographique, que ces effets soient mécaniques et réalisés sur le plateau ou visuels et réalisés en post-production. Dans les premiers ouvrages sur la question, le terme « illusion » apparaît fréquemment. Aussi Pierre Hémardinquer (5) donne-t-il cette définition, empruntée presque mot pour mot à Frank P. Clark : Les « effets spéciaux » sont les techniques qu’ils [le metteur en scène et l’opérateur] utilisent pour assurer l’illusion visuelle et sonore des spectateurs, étendre la gamme des images et des sons au-delà de la réalité courante, créer des illusions d’action ou simuler des événements trop difficiles à filmer directement pour des raisons de sécurité, de possibilités pratiques ou de prix de revient. (Clark 5)

17 On peut déduire de ces considérations quatre paradoxes spécifiques aux effets spéciaux et qui en déterminent la nature idéologique. Le premier tient à ce qu’ils prétendent représenter le réel à partir d’artifices ; le deuxième est qu’ils relèvent explicitement de l’illusion tout en étant sous-tendus par une exigence de réalisme ; le troisième est que, très souvent, ils entendent représenter des objets impossibles tout en donnant à cet impossible les atours du réel. Plusieurs théoriciens l’ont remarqué. Pour Stephen Prince, les images de synthèse sont « réalistes sur le plan de la perception tout en étant non réelles sur le plan référentiel »6. Pour Lev Manovich, elles « jouissent d’une

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crédibilité photographique parfaite bien qu’elles n’aient jamais été filmées »7. On peut les résumer en un seul paradoxe, sous la forme d’une injonction contradictoire : l’effet spécial idéal est simultanément hypervisible et invisible ; on doit le percevoir comme phénomène sans jamais en déceler la cause ; la plupart du temps on le voit et l’on sait qu’il s’agit d’un effet spécial mais simultanément on l’oublie pour continuer de croire au récit. Il serait donc cette « impression pure » dont parle Merleau-Ponty (10), sensation dont la cause nous échappe. Mais avec la cause, c’est également l’idéologie qui échappe à notre regard et notre vigilance, et qui s’impose alors d’autant mieux qu’elle passe inaperçue.

18 Le remake dit live de Ghost in the Shell (Rupert Sanders, DreamWorks, 2017) pousse très loin ce paradoxe. Adaptation en prises de vues réelles de l’anime de Mamoru Oshii, lui- même adapté du manga de Masamune Shirow, le film ne cesse de faire évoluer son actrice de chair et d’os () dans des environnements simulés par informatique, tout en l’habillant d’une peau de synthèse elle-même conçue à l’aide d’outils numériques. Le photoréalisme des images de synthèse vient de leur complète homogénéité aux prises de vue réelles, au point que l’on oublie si ce sont les images informatiques qui sont parfaitement intégrées aux images live ou si ce n’est pas plutôt ces dernières qui sont intégrées aux images engendrées par l’ordinateur. Les logiciels de conception d’images de synthèse pour le cinéma comme Maya, Houdini ou Realflow simulent désormais le dispositif cinématographique (caméra virtuelle, profondeur de champ, cadrages, focales), de sorte que l’image filmique contemporaine devient un mixte de prises de vues réelles et d’images de synthèse où chacun de ces deux éléments est intégralement nécessaire à l’autre. Le paradoxe est d’autant plus visible dans les plans prélevés sur le film original, où ils étaient dessinés à la main : le saut dans le vide du Major en plongée zénithale, sa traversée au ralenti d’une baie vitrée, son combat à mains nues avec un malfaiteur alors qu’elle est invisible sont quelques-unes des scènes qui ont contribué à la renommée du film d’Oshii et qui se trouvent refaites, à l’identique ou presque, en prises de vues réelles et en images de synthèse. Tout se passe, dans le film de Rupert Sanders, comme s’il s’agissait d’incarner des personnages et des lieux d’abord immatériels, à l’aide d’outils qui mettent pourtant en doute l’incarnation et la matérialité des corps et des lieux. Et ce paradoxe se vérifie jusque dans l’ultime plan du film, où le Major saute dans le vide et devient invisible grâce à son camouflage thermo-optique. La technologie, qui fournit un corps glorieux au corps réel de Scarlett Johansson et qui donne vie aux environnements numériques du film, est aussi l’outil qui oblitère ce corps charnel de l’image.

19 La scène d’introduction nous montre la fabrication d’un corps cybernétique modélisé en images de synthèse, au gré de plans en pied enchaînés par des raccords sur le mouvement et sur le corps. Le spectateur observe la genèse du corps cybernétique, mais également, d’une certaine façon et au second degré, la fabrication de ce corps par l’ordinateur. Seul un gros plan en insert détaille le grain de la peau d’une main humaine et atteste la parfaite indistinction du corps humain et du corps cybernétique, bien que la coupe et la différence d’échelle tracent aussi, entre les deux corps, une invisible frontière. Le film ne cessera ensuite de montrer les états-limite de ce corps, ceux qui laissent apparaître la machine sous ou sur l’enveloppe humaine – à la manière dont Johansson, à la fin d’Under the Skin (, Film4, 2013), ôtait sa peau humaine comme une combinaison et révélait sa nature extraterrestre. Ces états-limites sont autant de situations où le cinéma expose les modalités sous lesquelles il

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s’approprie le corps humain par la technologie et où l’on observe l’entrelacs parfait entre l’image filmée du corps humain et sa reproduction en images de synthèse (Momcilovic 75-84)8. Le corps du Major explose et révèle ses mécanismes métalliques après avoir bandé toute sa musculature en arrachant la tête du spider tank à la fin du film ; ses tissus sont progressivement reconstitués après qu’il a échappé à une explosion, dans une scène qui rappelle La Leçon d’anatomie du Docteur Tulp (Rembrandt, 1632) (Momcilovic 72-74) et où le spectateur peut observer en transparence les différentes couches de cet être artificiel (ossature robotique, réseaux de veines et de circuits imprimés, derme et épiderme) ; Kuze ôte une plaque du visage du Major et révèle une étrange figure inhumaine où le vide mange les contours familiers du faciès humain ; à plusieurs reprises, le corps du Major disparaît sous les scintillations de son camouflage thermo-optique.

20 Ailleurs dans le film, les figures et les corps hybrides prolifèrent, et il n’est pas indifférent que l’espace urbain représenté dans Ghost in the Shell soit saturé d’apparitions holographiques qui, presque toutes, procèdent à un écart figuratif avec le corps humain, qu’elles le déforment, en restituent une aura vacillante et spectrale ou le représentent comme un assemblage de pixels (Lécole Solnychkine). Aussi l’image vise- t-elle toujours deux horizons contradictoires que je désignerai, s’il m’est permis, par deux néologismes. D’une part elle est halographique (contraction de « halo » et d’« holographie ») et pulvérise la silhouette humaine en un nuage de miroitement lumineux ; d’autre part elle est hallographique (contraction du grec « allos », « autre », et d’« holographie ») et déforme le corps humain de manière infinitésimale, par une série d’écarts inframinces qui le rendent autre (Duchamp 24). Dans les deux cas, la figure humaine est comme parasitée de l’intérieur par l’image numérique. Mais paradoxalement, c’est le surgissement de l’informatique depuis le cœur même de l’image filmique qui assure l’indistinction entre les prises de vue réelle et les images conçues sur ordinateur (Balides 315).

21 Dans ce cas particulier comme dans bien d’autres, les effets spéciaux (images de synthèse, pyrotechnie) sont à la fois invisibles et hypervisibles, comme le signalait déjà Clark : « De bons effets spéciaux se confondent avec la réalité sans que le public ne s’aperçoive immédiatement de l’illusion »9. En tant qu’ils forment la matière même de la profusion visuelle, on ne voit qu’eux : ils sont le tout de l’image. Mais dans le même temps, ils se dissimulent en tant qu’artifices aux yeux du spectateur puisqu’ils sont entièrement intégrés aux prises de vues réelles et deviennent, dans l’écrin qu’elles forment, pareils à la réalité. Le photoréalisme tient donc à la facture même des images de synthèse, certes, mais surtout à la suture invisible entre les digital effects et les prises de vues réelles. Je développe plus loin les raisons pour lesquelles cette suture invisible revêt une fonction idéologique.

22 Il existe enfin un quatrième paradoxe, qui a trait au devenir historique des effets spéciaux. Inexorablement, leur nouveauté s’émousse, à cause des mécanismes d’habituation et d’automatisme qui tendent à rendre conventionnelles nos expériences ou, précise Chklovski, à nous rendre moins conscients du vif de l’expérience. Non sans dérision, le théoricien russe écrit : « l’automatisation dévore les objets, les habits, les meubles, votre épouse et la peur de la guerre » (22). La déflation de la nouveauté est donc, dans un premier temps du moins, implacable et irréversible, et elle détermine à la fois une « surenchère visuelle » des effets spéciaux et leur banalisation consécutive (Hamus-Vallée, 2004 8). Par conséquent l’histoire des effets spéciaux est celle de leur

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perfectionnement incessant, à travers lequel se réalise progressivement l’hégémonie du photoréalisme, elle-même liée à « l’hégémonie du numérique » qu’évoque Thibaut Garcia (48). En s’imposant de cette manière, à travers la marche même de la technologie vers le progrès, qu’Hollywood présente presque toujours comme irrésistible, le réalisme apparaît naturalisé, comme s’il était le destin de l’image cinématographique (Dubray 206 ; Lastra 210-211 ; Balides 315-320)10. De tels discours montrent combien l’exigence de photoréalisme qui fonde les effets spéciaux et les images de synthèse est informée idéologiquement et fondée sur des mécanismes qui relèvent de l’idéologie.

Idéologie du photoréalisme

23 Notre hypothèse est que la dimension de part en part contradictoire des effets spéciaux vaut pour indice du caractère idéologique de leur photoréalisme ; elle suggère que cette exigence n’est pas seulement due aux normes narratives du cinéma classique hollywoodien mais qu’elle endosse une valeur idéologique – que je préciserai plus loin – le plus souvent dissimulée par l’excès de spectacle, la dépense d’énergie (cinétique, graphique, pyrotechnique) et la profusion visuelle des effets spéciaux et des images de synthèse. Le livre de Frank P. Clark contient ainsi une mention sur sa page de garde : « Avec l’accord du comité de conseil sur les effets spéciaux cinématographiques de la Société des Ingénieurs du Film et de la Télévision » (3). Un tel sceau d’approbation certifie que l’ouvrage est bien conforme au programme théorique et esthétique implicite défini par les instances de régulation d’Hollywood. Les réflexions de James Lastra sur l’évolution des technologies à Hollywood montrent que le cœur du problème est de nature idéologique. D’après lui, c’est le principe même du réalisme qui guide la production et l’adoption des normes : La presse scientifique et industrielle regorge d’articles où les professionnels défendent avec passion divers modèles esthétiques, mais dans quel but ? Quel rôle joue l’articulation entre standards esthétiques et normes ? Celle-ci est loin d’être secondaire : les techniciens semblent souvent obnubilés par la volonté de débattre de leurs positions au sujet de questions telles que l’illusion mimétique, la netteté de l’image, les brevets techniques et la validité des procédés employés, et ils justifient presque systématiquement les standards qu’ils élisent par un discours sur la transparence réaliste11.

24 Par conséquent, l’évolution des technologies à Hollywood (et avec elles, bien sûr, celle des effets spéciaux) est le processus qui permet au réalisme de s’imposer de manière hégémonique, puis d’asseoir et de renforcer toujours plus cette hégémonie. Il en va ainsi des effets spéciaux comme des techniques de tournage plus traditionnelles : ils sont fondés sur une exigence première de réalisme et de transparence, bien que dans certains cas ils doivent exhiber leur dimension spectaculaire. Réjane Hamus-Vallée (2004 3) relève ainsi cette double postulation des effets spéciaux : selon le type de production, il faut que les effets spéciaux soient spectaculaires ou au contraire invisibles. Aujourd’hui, quasiment tous les films font appel aux effets spéciaux : la pluie à volonté, des blessures sans conséquence, une affiche disgracieuse gommée d’un coup de palette graphique… Le numérique a facilité les petites retouches de l’image qui, par contrecoup, deviennent totalement banales. Ces effets invisibles semblent à l’opposé des effets spectaculaires mis en avant dans l’étiquette « films à effets spéciaux ». Ces derniers relèvent de la monstration, si ce n’est bien souvent du

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monstre : ils sont faits pour être vus, alors que les effets invisibles, justement, ne doivent pas se voir, ni même se sentir.

25 Il existe donc des digital effects saillants et d’autres plus discrets. Cette diversité des modes opératoires a pour conséquence de rendre impossible une définition homogène des effets spéciaux (Hamus-Vallée, 2002 8-11). Non seulement parce que l’on ne saurait essentialiser une pratique apparue dans la réalité concrète et souvent bricoleuse du plateau, mais parce qu’ils sont « en perpétuel devenir : du truquage aux effets spéciaux, en passant par les trucs et les effets visuels, l’appellation regroupe des usages disparates, réservés à un public lui-même en perpétuel devenir » (Hamus-Vallée, 2004 3). Dans tous les cas, et même si l’entreprise de définition est destinée à achopper, une constante demeure : excessif ou invisible, l’effet spécial tel qu’il se pratique à Hollywood est presque toujours photoréaliste, parce que l’image doit l’intégrer de manière transparente.

26 Ici apparaît un deuxième indice du caractère idéologique de l’exigence photoréaliste. Dans l’ensemble de la production cinématographique contemporaine, seul le cinéma hollywoodien atteint à ce degré de photoréalisme. On pourrait croire que cet état de fait est simplement dû aux budgets démesurés dont dispose l’industrie du cinéma américain et, certes, on n’aurait pas tout à fait tort. Mais c’est que les sommes colossales qu’injecte Hollywood dans son cinéma constituent déjà en soi un phénomène idéologique (Bidaud 51-86). De fait, cette différence quant au degré de photoréalisme n’est-elle pas plutôt due à de profondes différences culturelles ? Les trois épisodes de Détective Dee (Tsui Hark, Huayi Brothers Media, 2010, 2013 et 2018), par exemple, ont tout du blockbuster tel qu’un studio américain pourrait le concevoir – à ceci près que leurs budgets sont bien inférieurs (respectivement 13, 24 et 25 millions de dollars). Leur option esthétique dominante n’est pourtant pas celle du photoréalisme. Bien au contraire, dans la continuité de l’opéra, ces films ont recours à une palette de couleurs chatoyantes et des éclairages caravagesques ; ils relèvent bien plus du pittoresque que de l’entreprise réaliste. À Hollywood, le cinéma d’heroic fantasy contemporain, comme la trilogie du Seigneur des anneaux (Peter Jackson, New Line Cinema, 2001-2003), insiste plutôt sur l’effet de réel, où « le “réel concret” devient la justification suffisante du dire », et qui « procède de l’intention d’altérer la nature tripartite du signe pour faire de la notation la pure rencontre d’un objet et de son expression » (Barthes 87, 89), comme s’il y avait bien une contiguïté entre le réel et sa représentation filmique ou textuelle.

27 Il me faut bien sûr ajouter à ces considérations que le photoréalisme est autant le fruit d’une intuition du spectateur (il semble que certaines images paraissent à notre œil plus réalistes que d’autres) que d’une construction culturelle, qui nous accoutume à percevoir certaines images comme réalistes. La manière dont la photographie du cinéma américain évolue décennie après décennie me semble tout à fait révélatrice de cette construction culturelle. Les pastels des années 1980 ont fait place à des contrastes plus nets de bleus et de rouges dans les années 1990. Dans les années 2000, la mode a plutôt été à la désaturation des couleurs : ainsi de films comme Letters from Iwo Jima (Lettres d’Iwo Jima, , Warner Bros., 2006) ou The Bourne Supremacy (La Mort dans la peau, , Universal, 2004), dont la photographie est dominée par les nuances de gris. Mais pour le spectateur de chaque décennie, les films qui lui sont immédiatement contemporains sont toujours ceux dont l’image lui semble la plus

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photoréaliste possible, parce qu’en l’éloignant provisoirement de ses habitudes perceptives, ils semblent lui restituer le réel à l’état brut.

Les trois qualités idéologiques des images de synthèse

L’excès visuel et sonore comme dissimulation de l’idéologie et de ses mécanismes

28 Mon corpus d’étude est constitué, pour l’essentiel, de blockbusters américains sortis entre 1990 et aujourd’hui. Dans son bornage temporel, il correspond à l’apparition des digital effects photoréalistes dans des films à grand spectacle, dont la formule est pourtant ancienne à Hollywood : que l’on pense à The Ten Commandments ( Les Dix Commandements, Cecil B. DeMille, Paramount, 1956) ou encore à Cleopatra (Cléopâtre, Joseph L. Mankiewicz, Twentieth Century Fox, 1963) et plus près de nous à Jaws et Star Wars. Au cours de la dernière décennie du XXe siècle, grâce aux progrès technologiques en matière d’effets spéciaux, d’images de synthèse et de procédés sonores et visuels immersifs, le cinéma hollywoodien devient capable de produire de l’illusion à un niveau jusqu’alors inégalé : aussi des films comme 2: Judgement Day (Terminator 2 : Le Jugement dernier, James Cameron, TriStar Pictures, 1991), Jurassic Park (Steven Spielberg, Universal, 1993) et plus tardivement (James Cameron, Twentieth Century Fox, 2009) ont-ils fait date dans l’histoire des représentations à Hollywood (Lemieux 7-12)12. De fait, un véritable pallier qualitatif en termes de photoréalisme des images de synthèse semble franchi avec Terminator 2: Judgement Day (Cotta Vaz 201). Angela Ndalianis le formule en ces termes : Notre époque se caractérise par ses transformations radicales, similaires à celles que le XVIIe siècle a connues : les progrès effectués dans le domaine des technologies optiques ont permis de rendre visible ce qui était auparavant invisible et de construire des réalités alternatives et des environnements numériques capables d’offrir des expériences sensorielles réalistes13.

29 En qualifiant de « néo-baroque » le cinéma spectaculaire contemporain, Angela Ndalianis signale que l’une de ses premières vocations est la création d’illusions. Dans les trois films cités ci-dessus, la dépense spectaculaire est indissolublement liée à la production de faux-semblants visuels et définit pour l’image de cinéma une « folie du voir », selon l’expression de Christine Buci-Glucksmann (20-26), soit une profusion visuelle excédant le langage qui voudrait s’en saisir et qui déborde les cadres de la représentation. Dans Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen, la séquence inaugurale, située en Chine, nous montre une opération militaire de grande ampleur destinée à capturer un Decepticon, une machine de guerre polymorphe d’origine extraterrestre. Les robots en images de synthèse, argument promotionnel majeur du film, déploient à l’écran des formes mi-mécaniques mi-organiques en métamorphose constante et figurent des objets que le langage ne saurait nommer, dans « un visible qui ne fait pas voir » (Rancière 137). Ce phénomène que signale Rancière rejoint l’un des reproches récurrents de la critique : dans ce film au coût faramineux, le spectateur ne distingue jamais nettement les effets spéciaux et les métamorphoses des robots. La profusion visuelle déroute et empêche le regard, dans un régime de vision très singulier où les digital effects se signalent tout en se dérobant.

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30 Le robot ennemi ressemble ici à une structure métallique montée sur de gigantesques roues, amalgame de monster truck et de plateforme pétrolière. Autour de lui, la caméra virevolte en d’incessants travellings circulaires et tremble lorsqu’elle est portée à l’épaule ; les explosions se multiplient ainsi que les forts contrastes de lumière, les faux raccords et les plans très courts. La facture même du film correspond bien à une forme de « folie du voir », tandis que les éléments profilmiques relèvent quant à eux de la dépense pyrotechnique. On pourrait croire cette surabondance visuelle dépourvue de valeur idéologique parce qu’elle court-circuite le discours et la pensée pour ramener le spectateur à une pure passivité sensorielle, en fondant son corps dans celui du film ainsi que l’ont montré Merleau-Ponty (173-175) et Sobchack (203-248). Si la dépense revêt ici une valeur idéologique, c’est parce qu’elle dessine une équivalence entre l’excès pyrotechnique et la figuration de la puissance de feu de l’armée américaine. La profusion et l’excès revêtent donc une valeur idéologique d’autant plus forte qu’ils la dissimulent sous un tourbillon de stimuli sensoriels, supposés étrangers a priori à la signification. Ils sont donc l’idéologie par excellence, tant il est vrai que celle-ci se manifeste à son maximum d’intensité dans les phénomènes ou les objets les plus utilitaires ou triviaux, là où elle semble n’avoir pas droit de cité, comme l’ont montré respectivement Panofsky (183) et Žižek (1997 3-5) à propos de la calandre Rolls-Royce et de la forme propre aux cabinets de toilette des différentes nations d’Europe. Mais plus encore, le réalisme même de la représentation de cette créature impossible qu’est le Decepticon accrédite par la bande la probabilité d’incidents diplomatiques et militaires entre la Chine et les États-Unis et entretient, chez le spectateur, la peur des grandes puissances étrangères. Lorsque l’impossible semble réel, l’improbable se confond avec le vrai. Les représentations construites par les effets spéciaux photoréalistes forment donc, dans le contexte de leur scénarisation, des discours invisibles qui contribuent à remodeler, chez le spectateur, les frontières du fait attesté, du probable et du possible.

Oblitérer les antagonismes du réel

31 D’après Angela Ndalianis, le début des années 1990 est considéré comme le moment de l’histoire du cinéma hollywoodien où les images de synthèse parviennent à une première maturité (151). Dans ces images, la solution de continuité entre la représentation et l’objet, ou la suture entre l’image et le réel, est devenue presque invisible. Par conséquent, le cinéma accède pour la première fois à la possibilité d’une illusion sans interruption, même lorsqu’il représente des entités ou des phénomènes rigoureusement impossibles. L’androïde en métal liquide de Terminator 2: Judgement Day ou le tyrannosaure de Jurassic Park surgissant, grandeur nature ou presque, sur un écran panoramique, sont emblématiques du fossé entre réel et représentation que les effets spéciaux contemporains semblent avoir comblé – bien que la plupart des scènes du film de Spielberg mêlent effets numériques et analogiques. Les images de synthèse méritent enfin leur nom : elles sont devenues capables de synthétiser le réel à partir d’algorithmes.

32 Elles accèdent dès lors à la possibilité de représenter l’impossible, excédant ainsi toute les limites de la représentation pour basculer dans l’anti-représentation (Rancière 134-139). Dans le cas précis que je m’apprête à évoquer, l’anti-représentation correspond au déploiement, à l’écran, d’une situation impensable et impossible mais bel et bien accessible aux sens du spectateur. Slavoj Žižek (1997 16-18) nomme « regard impossible » cette capacité des récits ou des films à figurer ce dont le sujet ne saurait

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être le témoin, comme le moment de sa conception ou de son enterrement. Le regard impossible relève donc de la dystopie ou du récit fantasmatique. Or, poursuit Žižek, il est l’un des moyens privilégiés des appareils de contrôle idéologique : la « boucle temporelle » que forment à la fois le regard impossible et le récit fantasmatique qu’il sous-tend court-circuite la lucidité critique et la raison, et impose au spectateur d’accueillir discours et images sans distance ni vigilance. De fait, un film qui met en jeu des situations totalement dystopiques ou un regard impossible serait – paradoxalement – davantage perméable à l’idéologie qu’un film visant à représenter concrètement des situations réelles ou des problèmes politiques ou sociaux. N’est-ce pas le cas d’Avatar, dont la fable écologique parvient à faire oublier combien le cinéma hollywoodien est mû par des intérêts financiers, industriels et politiques absolument contraires à ceux que le film prétend défendre (Žižek, 2010 66-69) ? De fait, l’idéologie que véhiculent les films semble toujours plus acceptable ou moins violente quand elle est déréalisée et perd de son poids concret. C’est que la fantasmagorie (dans laquelle on fait entrer sans peine images de synthèse et effets spéciaux) gomme les antagonismes du réel sous les atours du fonctionnalisme (l’image sert un récit) et les rend tolérables (Žižek, 1997 7-8, 40-44).

33 La fin de xXx: Return of Xander Cage (xXx: Reactivated, D. J. Caruso, Paramount, 2017) met littéralement en jeu ce regard impossible. Tué au début du film par la chute intempestive d’un satellite (sic), Augustus Gibbons refait surface au cours de l’épilogue dans l’église où l’on célèbre ses funérailles, accompagné du footballeur Neymar, sa nouvelle recrue pour le programme xXx. Accordons notre crédit à ce que dit, littéralement, le scénario : Gibbons et Neymar sont bel et bien morts au début du film et Gibbons assiste pour de bon à son enterrement. Le travail du film consiste ici à assurer la continuité logique de ces deux moments contradictoires. Aucun des membres de l’assemblée, à l’exception de Cage, ne verra d’ailleurs Gibbons. La caméra s’élève lentement, au cours d’un pano-travelling, vers le balcon de l’église où se trouve Cage, rejoint bientôt par Gibbons. Le mouvement de l’appareil, fluide, fait passer le regard du spectateur d’un espace à l’autre sans solution de continuité et les fait coexister alors même qu’ils devraient s’exclure (l’un contient Gibbons vivant, l’autre le contient mort : le cinéma est pareil à l’expérience de Schrödinger). Nous assistons donc à une situation qui défie les lois de la géométrie euclidienne mais que le cinéma rend possible par la grâce de son travail de fiction et d’ imagination (mise en mouvement des images, montage). L’intérieur de l’église est, quant à lui, pareil à une salle de cinéma, avec sa fosse, son balcon et son estrade sur laquelle se trouve le cercueil, objet de tous les regards, et qui figure par métonymie le film lui-même, puisque celui-ci a pour origine la mort de Gibbons. De sorte que nous sommes bien, dans cette scène, coupés du réel, puisqu’elle représente métaphoriquement un lieu destiné à éloigner le spectateur de la réalité. En nous plongeant au cœur de cette situation impossible (un même personnage est, dans un même lieu, simultanément mort et vivant, débout sur un balcon et couché dans un cercueil), le film neutralise notre vigilance critique et nous prépare à accepter des discours que nous n’aurions pas nécessairement acceptés davantage que le retour de Gibbons devant sa propre dépouille. Au premier chef, le film nous prépare à voir sa suite en salles (donc à consommer d’autres films), puisque Gibbons demande à Cage de reprendre du service en ces termes : « Let me simplify it for you: kick some ass, get the girl, and try to look dope while you’re doing it »14. Le triple impératif qu’il formule ici est un programme spectaculaire (action, érotisme, attitude des corps à l’écran) autant qu’idéologique, puisqu’il définit à l’usage du spectateur le partage entre bien et mal,

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entre masculin et féminin, ainsi qu’entre le style et l’absence de style. Dans la bande- annonce, cette réplique est superposée, en voice-over, aux images de l’ultime cascade du film : Vin Diesel s’éjecte d’un avion qui s’apprête à percuter un satellite. La caméra effectue un travelling arrière rapide qui fait défiler sous nos yeux tout l’intérieur de l’appareil, avant de suivre l’acteur en chute libre. Ici, seul Diesel est filmé sur fond vert, le reste de l’habitacle étant modélisé en images de synthèse, lesquelles simulent par ailleurs le dispositif cinématographique. Le mixte entre le corps réel de l’acteur et la simulation, par ordinateur, de l’appareillage de tournage, a là encore pour fonction de neutraliser notre vigilance critique, et nous prépare à accepter l’impératif pour le moins réactionnaire de Gibbons.

Assigner le regard du spectateur

34 La maturité mimétique des images conçues par ordinateur et des effets spéciaux croît sans cesse, et avec elle leur capacité à lisser les antagonismes du réel15. En corollaire, la spécularité du cinéma hollywoodien contemporain accède à un niveau quasi systématique, ce qui accroît d’autant la puissance d’illusion des images. À la limite, tout effet spécial est réflexif parce qu’il prétend au réel alors qu’il montre l’impossible, et interroge de cette manière la représentation. Dans cet écart contradictoire entre le réel et ce qui n’existe pas, une pensée de l’image s’ouvre qui se développe dans et par l’image. Le régime spéculaire du blockbuster contemporain confirme donc la grille analytique néo-baroque d’Angela Ndalianis. La question est, dans un second temps, de savoir ce que les films font de cette réflexivité : l’emploient-ils à consolider la puissance idéologique des films ou plutôt à la contrer ? Dans Total Recall (, TriStar Pictures, 1990), l’hologramme qu’utilise Doug Quaid pour tromper ses ennemis au cœur des ruines de la civilisation extraterrestre sur Mars vaut pour métonymie du film entier, où chaque image pourrait bien n’être que le fruit des fantasmes du héros (Ledoux 40-47). (, Warner Bros., 2010) explore l’analogie déjà ancienne entre le rêve, la pensée et l’image filmique (Deleuze 25-32) : Ariane, « l’architecte », conçoit mentalement, au cours d’un rêve, le décor de l’opération d’« inception » (implanter une idée dans l’inconscient d’une cible, à son insu), une opération que les personnages doivent mener à bien dans le film. Ariane déforme et transforme ce décor à sa guise comme si elle disposait d’une palette graphique. L’identité entre l’image filmique et la pensée est totale puisque les métamorphoses qu’imagine Ariane sont avant tout celles que conçoivent les techniciens en charge des effets spéciaux du film. Et, alors que Total Recall peut être lu comme le récit marxiste de l’émancipation d’un ouvrier, Inception nous montre un individu qui reste prisonnier de ses fantasmes. Dans (, Warner Bros., 2014) enfin, la répétition de la même scène de guerre en une boucle temporelle sans fin ôte toute réalité aux événements représentés. Le héros meurt chaque fois à la fin de la scène mais se réveille dans le passé et revit les mêmes événements comme dans un jeu vidéo, de sorte que l’image filmique est implicitement désignée comme une illusion. Strange Days (, Lightstorm Entertainment, 1995) ou Minority Report (Steven Spielberg, Twentieth Century Fox, 2002) se prêtent eux aussi à de telles analyses, comme si l’industrie trouvait dans la spécularité du blockbuster un espace idéal dans lequel interroger ses propres modes de représentation, de narration et de diffusion. La prolifération des effets spéciaux dans ces cinq films semble en surdéterminer la spécularité, ce qu’Alain Boillat signalait déjà dans Cinéma, machine à mondes (51-56).

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Laquelle, nous allons le voir, peut aussi bien accroître l’illusion mimétique que la renverser, neutraliser la vigilance critique du spectateur aussi bien que l’aiguiser.

35 Les films que je viens d’évoquer figurent tous le dispositif cinématographique de façon détournée (Bolter et Grusin 53-84, 147-158). Cette réflexion du cinéma américain sur son médium tend à laisser supposer qu’il a pleinement conscience de ce que la diffusion idéologique est avant tout une question de support, selon le mot célèbre de McLuhan (7-23) : « le médium est le message ». Dans Minority Report, l’appareil de prévision des crimes que manipule au début du film relève à la fois de l’écran tactile et de la table de montage, tandis que le bassin où reposent les precogs évoque le caractère immersif de la salle de cinéma et le bain amniotique des images. Dans Strange Days, le SQUID est un cinématographe directement relié aux neurones des personnages ; à travers lui, le film explore la nature idéologique des supports de diffusion d’images (et réciproquement la dimension matérielle de l’idéologie) en un récit qui dissout la résistance politique dans l’illusion, alors qu’à la toute fin du film la révolution avorte (Bolter et Grusin 3-15, 166). En représentant cette insurrection mort-née, le film construit deux discours contradictoires. Il montre la faillite de la résistance politique à l’œuvre, de manière à produire chez le spectateur un rapport critique aux images. Mais en en montrant l’échec, il met également fin à cette résistance politique dont il sanctionne l’impuissance au niveau du récit. Si le film détermine le regard du spectateur, il lui conserve donc également la possibilité d’une interprétation libre du récit par le jeu même de ces discours contradictoires, et le public garde toujours le choix d’y voir ce qu’il y cherche (Nacache 402). Le film est comme l’« étrange toupie » dont parle Sartre (48) au sujet du texte littéraire : sous l’œil du spectateur, il fait défiler l’orbe complet de ses significations contradictoires.

36 La tendance du cinéma hollywoodien contemporain à penser ses propres modes de production d’images apparaît donc profondément liée à la genèse de l’illusion. Ce rapport existe déjà à la période baroque, où la manipulation des images est indissociable d’un besoin de penser celle-ci, comme pour donner un cadre rigoureux aux irrégularités plastiques et autres déformations (Baltrušaitis, 1983 6-7, 37-40 ; 1984 5, 15-21, 211-220 ; Prigent 135). Mais il s’impose plus encore à l’époque moderne, dès la Renaissance, et semble toujours opératoire aujourd’hui. Dans des pages désormais célèbres consacrées à Velasquez, Michel Foucault a donné le modèle de l’analyse du lien structurel entre production d’illusions et spécularité (19-31). L’illusion tire son effet de réel de ce qu’elle naît dans une image qui se pense elle-même. Aussi, Velasquez parvient-il à matérialiser dans le hors-champ de la toile sa propre présence, à l’aide du jeu des regards et de la composition. De fait, la toile semble déborder sur la réalité, dans cette contiguïté entre le monde et sa représentation qui définit pour Barthes l’effet de réel (84-89). D’après Foucault, la production de l’illusion dans Les Ménines (Vélasquez, 1656) a un effet majeur : l’assignation du regard du spectateur. Au moment où ils placent le spectateur dans le champ de leur regard, les yeux du peintre le saisissent, le contraignent à entrer dans le tableau, lui assignent un lieu à la fois privilégié et obligatoire, prélèvent sur lui sa lumineuse et visible espèce, et la projettent sur la surface inaccessible de la toile retournée. (Foucault 21)

37 Pareil mécanisme d’assignation immobilise le spectateur dans un ordre symbolique et concret – ici, les deux s’échangent dans la peinture – lui-même immuable. Mais ce dispositif est aussi celui qui dévoile au spectateur l’illusion. En témoigne l’analyse de Foucault ; pour le philosophe, cette assignation du regard demeure problématique dans la mesure où elle impose au spectateur une vérité à laquelle il peut difficilement

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échapper, quand bien même il en a conscience. D’après Colin MacCabe, le discours filmique impose en outre son ordre propre et sa signification au réel en se servant du spectateur et de sa position comme d’une fonction d’ordonnancement. Grâce aux informations que nous glanons dans le récit, nous distinguons les discours des différents personnages et leur situation, et comparons ce qui s’y dit et ce que la narration nous révèle. La caméra nous montre ce qui arrive – elle dit la vérité en regard de laquelle nous évaluons les discours16.

38 La transparence du réalisme est due à la fonction qu’occupe le spectateur. La caméra reconstruit le réel et fournit une image non contradictoire de la réalité mais en dernière instance, c’est le spectateur qui valide la vérité particulière que lui fournit le film. Le circuit complexe par lequel s’élabore le réalisme fait que la manière dont le film impose son ordre et sa signification au réel n’est pas immédiatement perçue par le spectateur. Le réalisme, cette reconstruction du réel, est donc transparent, et avec lui l’idéologie. Colin MacCabe précise ce processus et la manière dont le texte filmique impose au réel son ordre et sa signification tout en contrôlant et en hiérarchisant les différents discours : « Le réalisme classique implique l’homogénéisation des discours par leur subordination à un discours dominant – lequel est assuré de sa domination par la sécurité et la transparence de son image17. » Le réalisme hollywoodien, selon MacCabe, consiste donc bien à refouler la dimension contradictoire du réel, à l’articuler harmonieusement de manière à lui ôter ses contradictions. De telles analyses concordent parfaitement avec les réflexions de Žižek (1997 7, 16-18) sur l’image fantasmatique. Par extrapolation, il devient possible d’affirmer que l’illusion créée par les effets spéciaux permet elle aussi de refouler la dimension contradictoire du réel, comme j’ai tâché de le montrer en analysant l’épilogue d’xXx: Return of Xander Cage. Bien sûr, il ne s’agit pas pour moi d’affirmer que toute représentation fondée sur la perspective a nécessairement pour effet de paralyser la réception critique du spectateur, mais plutôt de montrer à quelles conditions et selon quels mécanismes de telles représentations peuvent servir, dans certains cas, à diminuer la résistance critique du spectateur.

Conclusion : comment briser les mécanismes idéologiques de l’illusion ?

39 Le caractère idéologique des effets spéciaux est déterminé par une série de paradoxes que j’ai tâché de faire apparaître ici. Cristallisés par l’exigence de photoréalisme, les mécanismes de la production idéologique en jeu dans les effets spéciaux forment un système, qui vise tout d’abord à dissimuler leur nature idéologique puis à oblitérer les antagonismes du réel et à assigner le spectateur à une position de regard précise dans un ordre symbolique, concret et politique donné. Les images de synthèse, procédés techniques et concrets, induisent un principe qui, lui, est abstrait : la spécularité cinématographique. Elle guide la création de l’illusion et la production idéologique. En se pensant elle-même, l’image produit un discours silencieux grâce auquel elle révèle son mode de production, tout en dissimulant ses propres fondements et mécanismes idéologiques. Au nombre de ces derniers, on compte l’illusion photoréaliste, l’assignation du regard du spectateur à un ordre et l’omniprésence d’un pouvoir absent mais partout agissant (Foucault 31). Mais si la spécularité est bien souvent utilisée comme une manière d’aveugler le spectateur, pris dans les rets des faux-semblants et

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les séductions de structures disposées en miroir, elle peut aussi être renversée en un instrument de lucidité lorsque les films décident de l’utiliser comme une forme critique.

40 Dans Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen, pourtant fort loin d’être un film subversif, les images de la séquence inaugurale sont montrées une deuxième fois sur les écrans d’étudiants tenant un site web d’informations alternatives. Ils mettent en doute la véracité de la version officielle – une fuite de gaz – en s’appuyant sur le caractère testimonial des images à l’écran. Les personnages s’appuient donc sur la rhétorique des thèses complotistes apparues dans le sillage du 11 septembre. Sam, le héros du film, seul personnage de la scène à pouvoir attester la réalité des images à l’écran, la dément cependant en invoquant la fiabilité de son regard. Voici le dialogue qui l’oppose aux trois étudiants acquis aux thèses complotistes : — Looks fake to me. — Dude, it’s not fake. The internet is pure truth! Video doesn’t lie! — It looks fake… — No man, I’ve seen them! — Look, look, it’s fake! Anybody could do it on any computer, okay? And I wasn’t there, so I can’t comment or speculate18.

41 Puisque je n’ai pas été témoin des faits, dit-il en substance, je ne peux pas me prononcer sur la vérité de ces images. Or, le spectateur sait ici quelle version croire et valide la version des étudiants contre celle du héros qui cherche à dissimuler la vérité. Le discours sceptique est donc invalidé doublement, d’une part parce que l’on sait que les images sont fiables, d’autre part parce que l’on connaît les raisons pour lesquelles Sam les conteste. Parce qu’il valide l’illusion des effets spéciaux contre le mensonge du discours d’État, le récit nous invite, par une injonction contradictoire, à adopter un regard critique et à croire aux images de synthèse. En opposant une illusion fictionnelle (le discours d’État, dont le film nous dit qu’il est un mensonge) à une illusion véritable (les images de synthèse), le film nous fait adhérer à la production de faux-semblants, tout en feignant d’interroger les images sur un mode critique. Le conflit des rhétoriques sceptiques et complotistes au profit de ces dernières est ici l’alibi de la production idéologique.

42 La mise en abyme offre l’occasion d’une disputatio quant à la véracité des images. Celle- ci est figurée à l’écran mais c’est tout aussi bien le spectateur qui la mène avec lui- même et qui se montre alternativement pyrrhonien (c’est-à-dire radicalement sceptique) et empiriste devant les images qui lui sont proposées. Or, comme l’a montré Aurélie Ledoux (174-206), dès lors que le spectateur adopte l’un ou l’autre de ces deux rapports à l’image, il devient un sujet politique indiscipliné, rejetant ce qu’on lui montre au nom de la vérité et de la raison ou croyant à ce qu’il voit pour nourrir son désir de révolte, comme le font les trois étudiants ou comme le fait la foule des émeutiers à la fin du Rollerball de McTiernan (MGM, 2002). La spécularité se pare ici des vertus d’un contre-pouvoir parce qu’elle ouvre, par sa complexité et ses replis, un espace de liberté herméneutique pour le spectateur, grâce auquel il échappe au discours de vérité que les images lui proposent. Quand elle n’est pas employée à renforcer l’illusion mimétique, la réflexivité des images peut donc servir au contraire à la renverser. La contradiction n’est ici qu’apparente, si l’on considère la spécularité moins comme un nécessaire facteur d’illusion (ce qu’elle peut être, mais pas toujours) que comme le lieu où se décide la tendance du récit à favoriser ou à freiner les faux- semblants de l’image filmique.

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43 Il suffit ainsi d’une poignée de scènes renvoyant au processus de maniement et de montage des images pour arracher le spectateur à l’illusion mimétique qui gouverne le récit et les effets spéciaux, selon le modèle brechtien de la distanciation (Brecht 57). Robert Stam a montré par ailleurs que le récit hollywoodien pouvait intégrer la distanciation brechtienne sans perdre pour autant son efficacité narrative. Ainsi des scènes de montage télévisuel dans The Insider (Révélations, , Touchstone, 1999) ou Rollerball, ou de la mise en doute de la mémoire à travers les écrans de Total Recall ou de Strange Days. Dans de tels moments, les films quittent la sphère des images de synthèse sophistiquées et policées pour renouer avec une pratique bricoleuse et frondeuse de l’assemblage d’images. Ils semblent alors dire que s’affranchir des illusions n’est possible qu’à la condition de s’émanciper des appareillages technologiques totalisants et hégémoniques, et invitent le spectateur à élire son propre mode de réception et de production d’images. Sans se retourner frontalement contre le système de production auquel ils appartiennent, ces films tentent en quelque sorte de créer des chemins de traverse ou des bifurcations au sein de l’appareil de production. Ils y ouvrent ainsi des images différentes, qui déterminent des modes de vision non spectaculaires. En refusant ainsi la norme technique hollywoodienne, ils contreviennent en sourdine à sa norme idéologique et se rêvent en grands films politiques consacrés aux images et à leurs manières de résister.

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Star Wars: Episode V – (Star Wars : Épisode V – L’Empire contre-attaque, paru en France en 1980 sous le titre L’Empire contre-attaque). Réal. Irving Kershner. Scénario de Leigh Brackett, Lawrence Kasdan et George Lucas. Avec Harrison Ford (Han Solo), Mark Hamill (Luke Skywalker), Carrie Fisher (Princesse Leia), Alec Guiness (Obi-Wan Kenobi), David Prowse (Darth Vader). Dir. photo. Peter Suschitzky. Montage T. M. Christopher, Paul Hirsch, Marcia Lucas et George Lucas. Musique de John Williams. États-Unis, Lucasfilm, 1980.

Star Wars: Episode VI – Return of the (Star Wars : Épisode VI – Le Retour du Jedi, paru en France en 1983 sous le titre Le Retour du Jedi). Réal. . Scénario de Lawrence Kasdan et George Lucas. Avec Harrison Ford (Han Solo), Mark Hamill (Luke Skywalker), Carrie Fisher (Princesse Leia), Alec Guiness (Obi-Wan Kenobi), (Anakin Skywalker), David Prowse (Darth Vader). Dir. photo. Alan Hume et Alec Mills. Montage Sean Barton, T. M. Christopher, , Marcia Lucas et George Lucas. Musique de John Williams. États- Unis, Lucasfilm, 1983.

Star Wars: Episode I – The Phantom Menace (Star Wars : Épisode I – La Menace fantôme). Réal. George Lucas. Scénario de George Lucas. Avec Ewan McGregor (Obi-Wan Kenobi), Liam Neeson (Qui-Gon Jinn), Nathalie Portman (Amidala / Padmé), Jake Lloyd (Anakin Skywalker), Ian McDiarmid (Sénateur ). Dir. photo. David Tattersall. Montage et Paul Martin Smith. Musique de John Williams. États-Unis, Lucasfilm, 1999.

Star Wars: Episode II – Attack of the Clones (Star Wars : Épisode II – L’Attaque des clones). Réal. George Lucas. Scénario de et George Lucas. Avec Ewan McGregor (Obi-Wan Kenobi), Liam Neeson (Qui-Gon Jinn), Nathalie Portman (Padmé), Hayden Christensen (Anakin Skywalker), Samuel L. Jackson (Mace Windu), Ian McDiarmid (Chancelier suprême Palpatine / Darth Sidious), Christopher Lee (Comte Dooku / Darth Tyranus). Dir. photo. David Tattersall. Montage Ben Burtt et George Lucas. Musique de John Williams. États-Unis, Lucasfilm, 2002.

Star Wars: Episode III – Revenge of the (Star Wars : Épisode III – La Revanche des Sith). Réal. George Lucas. Scénario de George Lucas. Avec Ewan McGregor (Obi-Wan Kenobi), Nathalie Portman (Padmé), Hayden Christensen (Anakin Skywalker), Samuel L. Jackson (Mace Windu), Ian McDiarmid (Chancelier suprême Palpatine / Darth Sidious), Christopher Lee (Comte

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Dooku / Darth Tyranus). Dir. photo. David Tattersall. Montage Roger Barton et Ben Burtt. Musique de John Williams. États-Unis, Lucasfilm, 2005.

Star Wars: Episode VII – The Force Awakens (Star Wars : Épisode VII – Le Réveil de la Force). Réal. J. J. Abrams. Scénario de Lawrence Kasdan, J. J. Abrams et Michael Arndt. Avec Daisy Ridley (), Carrie Fisher (Princesse Leia), Harrison Ford (Han Solo), Adam Driver (), Mark Hamill (Luke Skywalker), John Boyega (), Oscar Isaac (). Dir. photo. Dan Mindel. Montage et . Musique de John Williams. États-Unis, Lucasfilm, 2015.

Star Wars: Episode VIII – The Last Jedi (Star Wars : Épisode VIII – Les Derniers Jedi). Réal. . Scénario de Rian Johnson. Avec Daisy Ridley (Rey), Carrie Fisher (Princesse Leia), Adam Driver (Kylo Ren), Mark Hamill (Luke Skywalker), John Boyega (Finn), Oscar Isaac (Poe Dameron), Andy Serkis (Snoke). Dir. photo. Steve Yedlin. Montage . Musique de John Williams. États- Unis, Lucasfilm, 2017.

Star Wars: Episode IX – The Rise of Skywalker (Star Wars : Épisode IX – L’Ascension de Skywalker). Réal. J. J. Abrams. Scénario de J. J. Abrams, , et Derek Conolly. Avec Daisy Ridley (Rey), Carrie Fisher (Princesse Leia), Adam Driver (Kylo Ren), Mark Hamill (Luke Skywalker), John Boyega (Finn), Oscar Isaac (Poe Dameron), Billie Lourd (Lieutenant Connix). Dir. photo. Dan Mindel. Montage Maryann Brandon et Stefan Grube. Musique de John Williams. États- Unis, Lucasfilm, 2019.

Strange Days. Réal. Kathryn Bigelow. Scénario de James Cameron et Jay Cocks. Avec (Lenny Nero), Angela Bassett (Lornette « Mace » Mason), Juliette Lewis (Faith Justin), Tom Sizemore (Max Peltier). Dir. photo. Matthew F. Leonetti. Montage Howard E. Smith et James Cameron. Musique de Graeme Revell. États-Unis, Lightstorm Entertainment, 1995.

Terminator 2: Judgement Day (Terminator 2 : Le Jugement dernier). Réal. James Cameron. Scénario de James Cameron et William Wisher. Avec Arnold Schwarzenegger (T-800), Linda Hamilton (Sarah Connor), Edward Furlong (John Connor), Robert Patrick (T-1000). Dir. photo. Adam Greenberg. Montage Conrad Buff IV, Dody Dorn, et Richard A. Harris. Musique de Brad Fiedel. États-Unis, TriStar Pictures, 1991.

The Birds (Les Oiseaux). Réal. Alfred Hitchcock. Scénario d’Evan Hunter. Avec Tippi Hedren (Melanie Daniels), Rod Taylor (Mitch Brenner), Jessica Tandy (Lydia Brenner). Dir. photo. . Montage George Tomasini. Musique () de Bernard Hermann et Remi Gassmann. États-Unis, Universal, 1963.

The Bourne Supremacy (La Mort dans la peau). Réal. Paul Greengrass. Scénario de Tony Gilroy. Avec Matt Damon (Jason Bourne), Franka Potente (Marie), (Ward Abbott), Julia Stiles (Nicky), Joan Allen (Pamela Landy). Dir. photo. Oliver Wood. Montage Richard Pearson et Christopher Rouse. Musique de John Powell. États-Unis, Universal, 2004.

The Day After Tomorrow (Le Jour d’après). Réal. Roland Emmerich. Scénario de Roland Emmerich et Jeffrey Nachmanoff. Avec (Sam Hall), Dennis Quaid (Jack Hall), Emmy Rossum (Laura Chapman). Dir. photo. Ueli Steiger. Montage David Brenner. Musique de Harald Kloser. États-Unis, Twentieth Century Fox, 2004.

The Devil at 4 O’Clock (Le Diable à 4 heures). Réal. Mervyn LeRoy. Scénario de Liam O’Brien. Avec Spencer Tracy (Matthew Doonan), Frank Sinatra (Harry), (Joseph Perreau). Dir. photo. Joseph F. Biroc. Montage Charles Nelson. Musique de George Duning. États-Unis, Columbia, 1961.

The Insider (Révélations). Réal. Michael Mann. Scénario de Michael Mann et . Avec (Lowell Bergman), Russell Crowe (Jeffrey Wigand), Christopher Plummer (Mike Wallace),

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Diane Venora (Liane Wigand). Dir. photo. Dante Spinotti. Montage , David Rosenbloom et . Musique de , Pieter Bourke, Michael Brook et Gustavo Santaolalla. États-Unis, Buena Vista Pictures, 1999.

The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring (Le Seigneur des anneaux. La Communauté de l’anneau). Réal. Peter Jackson. Scénario de , et Peter Jackson. Avec Elijah Wood (Frodo), Ian McKellen (Gandalf), Orlando Bloom (Legolas), Viggo Mortensen (Aragorn). Dir. photo. . Montage . Musique de Howard Shore. États-Unis et Nouvelle-Zélande, New Line Cinema, 2001.

The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers (Le Seigneur des anneaux. Les Deux Tours). Réal. Peter Jackson. Scénario de Fran Walsh, Philippa Boyens, Steven Sinclair et Peter Jackson. Avec Elijah Wood (Frodo), Ian McKellen (Gandalf), Orlando Bloom (Legolas), Viggo Mortensen (Aragorn). Dir. photo. Andrew Lesnie. Montage Michael Horton. Musique de Howard Shore. États-Unis et Nouvelle- Zélande, New Line Cinema, 2002.

The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King (Le Seigneur des anneaux. Le Retour du roi). Réal. Peter Jackson. Scénario de Fran Walsh, Philippa Boyens et Peter Jackson. Avec Elijah Wood (Frodo), Ian McKellen (Gandalf), Orlando Bloom (Legolas), Viggo Mortensen (Aragorn). Dir. photo. Andrew Lesnie. Montage . Musique de Howard Shore. États-Unis et Nouvelle-Zélande, New Line Cinema, 2003.

The Lost World (Le Monde perdu). Réal. Irwin Allen. Scénario de Charles Bennett et Irwin Allen. Avec (Lord John Roxton), Jill St. John (Jennifer Holmes), David Edison (Ed Malone). Dir. photo. Winton C. Hoch. Montage Hugh S. Fowler. Musique de Paul Sawtell et Bert Shefter. États- Unis, Twentieth Century Fox, 1960.

The Ten Commandments (Les Dix Commandements). Réal. Cecil B. DeMille. Scénario de Jesse Lasky, Jr., Æneas MacKenzie, Jack Gariss et Fredric M. Frank. Avec (Moses), Yul Brynner (Rameses), Anne Baxter (Nefretiri), Edward G. Robinson (Dathan). Dir. photo. Loyal Griggs, W. Wallace Kelley, J. Peverell Marley et John F. Warren. Montage . Musique d’Elmer Bernstein. États-Unis, Paramount, 1956.

Total Recall. Réal. Paul Verhoeven. Scénario de Ronald Shusett, David O’Bannon et Gary Goldman. Avec Arnold Schwarzenegger (Douglas Quaid), Sharon Stone (Lori Quaid), Michael Ironside (Richter), Rachel Ticotin (Melina). Dir. photo. Jost Vacano. Montage Carlos Puente et Frank J. Urioste. Musique de Jerry Goldsmith. États-Unis, TriStar Pictures, 1990.

Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen (Transformers 2 : La Revanche). Réal. Michael Bay. Scénario de , et Ehren Kruger. Avec Shia Labeouf (Sam Witwicky), Megan Fox (Mikaela Banes), Ramon Rodriguez (Leo Spitz). Dir. photo. Ben Seresin. Montage Roger Barton, Tom Muldoon, Joel Negron et Paul Rubell. Musique de Steve Jablonsky. États-Unis, Paramount, 2009.

True Lies. Réal. James Cameron. Scénario de James Cameron. Avec Arnold Schwarzenegger (Harry Tasker / Harry Rinquest), Jamie Lee Curtis (Helen Elizabeth Tasker), Tom Arnold (Albert Gibson), Bill Paxton (Simon Carlos), Art Malik (Salim Abu Aziz), Tia Carrere (Juno Skinner). Dir. photo. . Montage Conrad Buff IV, Mark Goldblatt et Richard A. Harris. Musique de Brad Fiedel. États-Unis, Lightstorm Entertainment, 1994.

Under the Skin. Réal. Jonathan Glazer. Scénario de Walter Campbell, Jonathan Glazer et Milo Addica. Avec Scarlett Johansson (la femme), Paul Brannigan (Andrew). Dir. photo. Daniel Landin. Montage Paul Watts. Musique de Mica Levi. Grande Bretagne, Film4, 2013.

War of the Worlds (La Guerre des mondes). Réal. Byron Haskin. Scénario de Barré Lyndon. Avec Gene Barry (Docteur Clayton Forrester), Ann Robinson (Sylvia Van Buren), Robert Cornthwaite

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(Docteur Pryor). Dir. photo. George Barnes. Montage Everett Douglas. Musique de Leith Stevens. États-Unis, Paramount, 1953.

When Worlds Collide (Le Choc des mondes). Réal. Rudolph Maté. Scénario de Sydney Boehm. Avec Richard Derr (David Randall), Barbara Rush (Joyce Hendron), Peter Hansen (Docteur Tony Drake). Dir. photo. W. Howard Greene et John F. Seitz. Montage Arthur P. Schmidt. Musique de Leith Stevens. États-Unis, Paramount, 1951. xXx: Return of Xander Cage (xXx: Reactivated). Réal. D. J. Caruso. Scénario de Rich Wilkes et F. Scott Frazier. Avec Vin Diesel (Xander Cage), (Xiang), Deepika Padukone (Serena Unger), Samuel L. Jackson (Augustus Gibbons), Nina Dobrev (Becky Clearidge), Ice Cube (Darius Stone), Toni Collette (Jane Marke). Dir. photo. Russell Carpenter. Montage Vince Filippone et Jim Page. Musique de Robert Lydecker et Brian Tyler. États-Unis, Paramount, 2017.

Œuvres d’art

REMBRANDT (Rembrandt Harmenszoon van Rijn, dit Rembrandt). La Leçon d’anatomie du docteur Tulp (De anatomische les van dr. Nicolaes Tulp). 1632. Huile sur toile, 169,5 x 216,5 cm. Mauritshuis, La Haye.

VÉLASQUEZ, Diego. Les Ménines (Las Meninas). 1656. Huile sur toile, 318 x 276 cm. Musée du Prado, Madrid.

NOTES

1. Destination Moon et When Worlds Collide sont évoqués à la page 110, War of the Worlds à la page 145, 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea à la page 89, The Lost World à la page 23, The Devil at 4 O’Clock aux pages 139, 153 et 214 et The Birds à la page 92 (Clark, 1966). 2. « This period saw the birth of “invisible” or “psychological” editing which was the basis of Hollywood’s classic narrative style, and which generated a degree of audience identification and engagement far surpassing that in the more technically primitive one-reelers. » (Schatz 34). Ici comme ailleurs, sauf mention contraire, c’est moi qui traduis. 3. « If the address of the spectator uses little the look at camera by actors, the narrative break and the reminder of the spectator’s status is revealed by hyperbolic camera movements, but also, among other things, by a series of referential shots (the surgical scene of Octopus’s tentacles amputation, a wink at Raimi’s faithful spectators in the direction of his previous films), and the recourse to the burlesque close-up (the insert of the spider which bites Peter into SM1, a real visual moment, autonomous, striking and comic). » [sic] 4. Bien que cette expression soit difficilement traduisible, on pourrait parler, en français, de « séances pour s’évader ». 5. S’il m’est permis de livrer ici une anecdote personnelle, j’ai été frappé, au moment de revoir le film pour écrire cet article, de constater combien j’avais été aveugle à toute cette dimension lorsque j’ai vu True Lies pour la première fois à l’âge de 13 ou 14 ans. C’est peut-être à partir d’une telle cécité que travaille la fonction idéologique des films américains. 6. « But, as this essay has suggested, some of these representations, while being referentially unreal, are perceptually realistic » (Prince 35). 7. « It is now possible to cut, blend, stretch and stitch digitized film images into something that has perfect photographic credibility, although it was never actually filmed » (Manovich 175). 8. Dans les scènes d’action de Ghost in the Shell, Scarlett Johansson est filmée en motion capture et son camouflage est appliqué en post-production comme une peau numérique.

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9. « Good special effects create the illusion of reality without the audience becoming immediately aware of the deception. » (Clark 27) 10. L’article de Joseph Dubray atteste la précocité du discours sur la technologie à Hollywood. 11. « Page after page in scientific and industry journals emphatically promote various aesthetic models, but why? What function did the articulation of aesthetic standards and norms play? Far from being incidental, technicians almost seem nearly obsessed with discussing their positions on questions of representational illusion, accuracy, propriety, and validity, and, almost uniformly, the standards they assert are justified in terms of a transparent realism. » (Lastra 203) 12. Certes, la prouesse technique de Jurassic Park a plutôt consisté à mêler harmonieusement images numériques et animatroniques (des robots manipulés à distance par des câbles). 13. « Our times are marked by radical transitions similar to those in the seventeenth century: Advances in optical technology have both aided in making the previously invisible visible and constructed alternate realities that build digital environments that offer sensorially authentic experiences. » (Ndalianis 179) 14. « C’est pas compliqué : lattez les méchants, chopez la fille et au passage, tâchez d’avoir l’air cool. » 15. Bien sûr, le gain de photoréalisme de ces images est en quelque sorte compensé par la connaissance croissante que le public a de ces techniques et par le fait qu’il les discerne de mieux en mieux – ce qui ne l’empêche pourtant pas de tenir pour « réaliste » ce qu’il voit, et d’y croire. 16. « Through the knowledge we gain from the narrative we can split the discourses of the various characters from their situation and compare what is said in these discourses with what has been revealed to us through narration. The camera shows us what happens – it tells the truth against which we can measure the discourses. » (MacCabe, 1974 10) 17. « Classical realism […] involves the homogeneisation of different discourses by their relation to one dominant discourse – assured of its domination by the security and transparency of its image. The fact that one such practice involves this homogeneisation is a matter of ideological and political but not normative interest. » (MacCabe, 1976 12) 18. « — Ça a l’air faux. — C’est pas faux mon pote. Internet, c’est la pure vérité. La vidéo ne ment pas. — Mais ça a l’air faux… — Mais non mec, je les ai vus ! — Regarde, mais regarde, c’est faux ! N’importe qui pourrait faire ça sur n’importe quel ordinateur, ok ? Et j’y étais pas, donc je peux pas commenter ces images ni spéculer. »

RÉSUMÉS

Cet article aborde la question de l’illusion photoréaliste et de la production idéologique des films sous l’angle à la fois concret et circonscrit des images de synthèse des blockbusters américains. En problématisant la question du discours des films dans une perspective marxiste, j’interroge d’abord les présupposés historiques, théoriques et techniques du photoréalisme. J’examine ensuite la manière dont les images de synthèse font usage de ce dernier pour façonner, dans les films, un discours invisible, qui est généralement celui de l’American way of life, et garantir l’adhésion des spectateurs à ce dernier. Je montre que les mécanismes de la production idéologique en jeu dans les digital effects forment un système qui vise tout d’abord à dissimuler leur nature discursive, puis à oblitérer les antagonismes du réel et à assigner aux spectateurs une position de regard précise dans un ordre concret, symbolique et politique donné.

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This paper discusses the issues of photorealistic illusion and ideological production in American blockbusters through an analysis of their digital effects and computer generated images (CGI). I adopt a Marxist perspective to question their discourse. Attention is first paid to the historical, theoretical and technical conditions of the photorealism of digital effects and CGI. I then examine how films use photorealism to ensure the audience’s adherence to the ideology of the American way of life. I show that the mechanisms of ideological production at play in digital effects and CGI form a system that aims first and foremost to conceal their discursive nature, then obliterate the contradictions of reality in order to assign a specific viewing position for the audience within the symbolic and political order.

INDEX

Thèmes : Hors-thème Mots-clés : Hollywood, blockbuster, images de synthèse, idéologie, photoréalisme, American way of life, ordre politique Keywords : Hollywood, blockbuster, digital effects, computer generated images (CGI), ideology, photorealism, American way of life, political order

AUTEUR

MATHIAS KUSNIERZ Université Paris Diderot

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De la porte de Brandebourg à La Havane : Wilder, Hitchcock et l’héritage révolutionnaire

Julie Michot

1 et Alfred Hitchcock sont deux réalisateurs qui n’ont pas la réputation de produire des œuvres à forte teneur politique, et qui n’ont jamais revendiqué ouvertement leur soutien à un quelconque parti. Wilder, en effet, est surtout célèbre pour ses prises de position sociales ou éthiques : il fustige par exemple la bêtise humaine dans Ace in the Hole (Le Gouffre aux chimères, 1951), et vilipende l’usine à rêves hollywoodienne dès le début de sa carrière avec Sunset Boulevard ( Boulevard du Crépuscule, 1950), pour récidiver bien plus tard dans Fedora (1978). Certes, depuis le décès d’Hitchcock, des spécialistes se sont intéressés à la dimension idéologique de ses films. Dans son étude du réalisateur en tant que cinéaste politique, Ina Rae Hark (1990) évoque notamment Foreign Correspondent (Correspondant 17, 1940), Saboteur (Cinquième Colonne, 1942) ou encore Lifeboat (1943), c’est-à-dire des longs métrages sortis pendant le second conflit mondial, habituellement considérés comme des objets de propagande anti-nazie et comme la contribution de leur réalisateur à l’effort de guerre ; en revanche, bien qu’Ina Rae Hark fasse allusion à des productions postérieures d’Hitchcock, elle ne se penche pas sur Topaz (L’Étau, 1969), un film pourtant d’autant plus intéressant qu’il est habituellement décrié, à l’instar de One, Two, Three (Un, deux, trois, 1961) de Wilder.

2 One, Two, Three et Topaz ont été tournés en pleine guerre froide et ont en commun de mettre en scène des capitalistes et des communistes à Berlin-Est et à Berlin-Ouest d’une part, en Europe occidentale, à New York et à Cuba d’autre part. Malgré un ton résolument burlesque et des personnages parfois caricaturaux à l’extrême qui placent son scénario à la limite de la comédie screwball, One, Two, Three n’en reste pas moins une critique sans concessions de la révolution soviétique et des régimes qui en ont découlé. Topaz d’Hitchcock, en revanche, est avant tout un récit d’espionnage au ton bien plus sérieux ; adapté d’un roman inspiré de faits réels, son action se déroule en 1962, et le film se clôt d’ailleurs sur la fin de la crise des missiles de Cuba, donc sur le souvenir

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d’une victoire – relative – des États-Unis sur l’URSS. Le film d’Hitchcock, pourtant, fait lui aussi usage de la caricature : en jouant sur les stéréotypes pour présenter l’organisation des sociétés russe et cubaine, et en grossissant le trait s’agissant des personnages de communistes, le script conforte le public américain d’origine dans ses certitudes et lui donne à voir ce qu’il a envie de voir – du moins est-ce ce qu’il ressort d’un premier visionnage.

3 Pourtant, une seconde lecture des deux œuvres révèle une dimension plus inattendue : les dialogues, omniprésents dans One, Two, Three, chargent autant les partisans de Khrouchtchev que les amoureux du tout-puissant dollar et de la société de consommation, et le dénouement fait du héros américain l’arroseur arrosé, battu sur son propre terrain par un jeune communiste. Quant à Hitchcock, il s’offre le luxe, grâce à des séquences d’archives, de faire figurer au casting plusieurs stars de la révolution cubaine dont Che Guevara, mort prématurément deux ans avant la sortie de Topaz. Le charisme du guérillero, déjà un mythe, rendrait presque la réalité (révolutionnaire) plus séduisante que la fiction (hitchcockienne), les acteurs choisis pour interpréter les agents occidentaux manquant majoritairement de relief. Si l’on ajoute à cela que, dans Topaz, la diégèse met à mal deux valeurs américaines par excellence, la famille et la patrie, et que l’épilogue du film d’Hitchcock, comme celui du film de Wilder, suggère un certain retour au point de départ, on commence à mesurer la part de subversion contenue dans les deux œuvres.

4 Les deux réalisateurs ne cèdent pourtant pas à la facilité et se refusent à donner une vision clivée des blocs impliqués dans la guerre froide : en aucun cas leur mise en scène ne présente le capitalisme comme un système sans faille, et le communisme comme une doctrine entièrement néfaste. Leurs prises de position, bien plus complexes et nuancées, passent non seulement par le cadrage, la musique, le jeu des acteurs ou les costumes, mais aussi par les liens évidents que les spectateurs ne manquent pas d’établir à la fois avec des longs métrages de fiction antérieurs, et avec des événements historiques récents. Avec One, Two, Three et Topaz, Wilder et Hitchcock, qui semblent vouloir avant tout divertir leur public avec une comédie ou un suspense, portent en fait un regard ironique sur la révolution et le monde qui les entoure en proposant deux scénarios en forme de pirouette.

Un contexte de tournage tendu pour Hitchcock comme pour Wilder

5 À première vue, ces deux films tournés à Hollywood par des réalisateurs d’origine européenne n’ont vraiment rien de révolutionnaire, que ce soit par leur scénario ou leur esthétique. One, Two, Three de Wilder est en noir et blanc alors qu’il sort en 1961, à une époque où, depuis plusieurs années déjà, le cinéma se raccroche habituellement au procédé Technicolor pour concurrencer la télévision ; un tel choix de la part de Wilder peut être considéré comme une sorte de retour en arrière, voire comme un refus délibéré de combler les attentes des spectateurs, ce qui constitue une certaine prise de risque. Certes, Topaz, produit huit ans plus tard, est bien en couleurs, mais Patrick Humphries rappelle qu’Hitchcock, à 70 ans, est un homme fatigué au moment du tournage de ce film, l’un des derniers de sa carrière (le 51e sur 53) ; il n’a plus le même succès auprès du public et des critiques, sans doute parce que la société change de manière radicale : 1969, année de la sortie de Topaz, est également celle de Woodstock,

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et voit paraître sur les écrans des films comme Easy Rider (Dennis Hopper), Midnight Cowboy (Macadam Cowboy, ) ou Alice’s Restaurant (Arthur Penn). Les jeunes cinéastes du Nouvel Hollywood sont en passe de prendre le pouvoir en bouleversant les codes. Mais Hitchcock, qui a fait ses débuts en Angleterre dans les années 20, reste fidèle à lui-même au risque de paraître démodé (Humphries, 1987, 165-166). Bien qu’il s’en soit rendu compte, il semble impuissant à régler cette difficulté : après avoir visionné Blow-Up (, 1966), il déclare : « Ces metteurs en scène ont un siècle d’avance sur moi au niveau de la technique. Je me demande ce que j’ai fait de tout ce temps » (Bourdon, 2007, 313).

6 En dépit de ses doutes, Hitchcock se lance dans la réalisation de Topaz alors même que son précédent film, Torn Curtain ( Le Rideau déchiré, 1966), qui traite également d’espionnage et des relations Est-Ouest, a connu un tournage compliqué et reçu un accueil particulièrement froid. Le conflit vietnamien s’enlise, la contestation enfle aux États-Unis, et Hitchcock choisit malgré tout d’adapter un roman de Leon Uris1 datant de 1967 mais qui s’intéresse à une crise révolue, celle des missiles, remontant à 1962. Étrangement, les problèmes ne sont pas liés à l’impossibilité de tourner à Cuba mais à la position du ministre de la Culture André Malraux qui refuse à Hitchcock l’autorisation de filmer sur le sol français. Le roman de Uris a en effet été interdit en France car il relate « la présence d’un agent communiste dans l’entourage du général de Gaulle » (Truffaut, 1997, 281). Il faudra toute la diplomatie de l’ambassadeur américain à Paris pour que Malraux revienne sur sa décision (Bourdon, 2007, 314).

7 La politique poursuit également Wilder, mais de manière plus inattendue. Wilder tourne One, Two, Three à l’été 1961 à Berlin, ville occupée mais dans laquelle on passe encore assez facilement la porte de Brandebourg, dans un sens comme dans l’autre. Toutefois, le scénario est un problème pour les autorités de Berlin-Est, comme celui d’Hitchcock l’est pour le gouvernement français. Wilder, qui refuse catégoriquement de communiquer son script, doit donc ruser pour filmer aux abords du monument côté Alliés – notamment la scène dans laquelle un personnage s’apprête à entrer dans la zone soviétique avec un slogan anti-russe bien visible à l’arrière de son side-car. Aucune scène ne peut être tournée à Berlin-Est, mais cela n’a pas grande importance : les quartiers non reconstruits du secteur ouest font parfaitement l’affaire (Wood, 2001, 36-37).

8 C’est cependant un contretemps bien réel qui surgit à la mi-août lorsque, sans préavis, le Mur de Berlin est érigé en l’espace d’une nuit, comme une mauvaise blague que la RDA ferait à Wilder. Cette fois, la réalité politique dépasse la fiction et toute l’équipe du tournage est contrainte de quitter la ville pour s’installer à ; on y construit une réplique de la porte de Brandebourg côté Est, ce qui fait exploser le budget du film sans que ces dépenses ne soient amorties par la suite. En effet, One, Two, Three est une pure comédie censée se dérouler quelques mois à peine avant la construction du Mur ; or, dès l’apparition de celui-ci, des drames se jouent quotidiennement à Berlin où des personnes sont abattues en tentant de passer à l’Ouest. De ce fait, lorsque le film sort en décembre 1961, les spectateurs, aux États-Unis ou ailleurs, n’ont pas envie de rire de la situation (Phillips, 2001, 257-258), et le long métrage est un échec.

9 I.A.L. Diamond, co-scénariste de Wilder, explique que le monde avait changé si vite qu’ils n’avaient pas pu complètement adapter le scénario à cette nouvelle donne. Au moment où l’écriture du script a débuté, il était courant de faire des plaisanteries à propos de Khrouchtchev ou de Castro ; au début de l’année 1961, avec des événements

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comme la mort de Lumumba ou le débarquement de la baie des Cochons, le climat politique est devenu tendu et certains sujets ont soudain cessé d’être drôles (Madsen, 1969, 46). Wilder utilise une métaphore très parlante pour évoquer ces difficultés : « C’était comme faire un film à Pompéi avec toutes les coulées de lave. Khrouchtchev allait encore plus vite que Diamond et moi. Nous devions constamment modifier le scénario pour rester raccord avec l’actualité » (Lally, 1996, 317, je traduis)2. Wilder déclare également : Les réalisateurs sont vulnérables à ce type de risque. Il suffit que la situation ou le climat politique change pendant que vous tournez et, lorsque vous terminez votre film, les choses ne sont plus les mêmes que lorsque vous avez commencé. Si vous écrivez un article de journal, il est publié le lendemain. […] Mais les réalisateurs qui choisissent une histoire contemporaine doivent prier pour que la situation qu’ils mettent en scène soit toujours d’actualité un an et demi plus tard. Dans le cas contraire, les gens pourraient dire que cela est de très mauvais goût […]3. (Phillips, 2001, 107, je traduis)

10 Les deux cinéastes vieillissants qui connaissaient, à l’époque de ces films, un relatif déclin de popularité, ont donc été plus ou moins dépassés par les événements ou se sont quelque peu égarés en ne souhaitant pas coller à l’actualité immédiate, Hitchcock revenant sur une crise réglée depuis des années déjà, et Wilder optant pour une intrigue contemporaine au tournage mais sans faire la moindre allusion au Mur de Berlin. Ces choix périlleux ainsi que les conditions de tournage complexes de Topaz et de One, Two, Three n’empêchèrent cependant ni Hitchcock ni Wilder de faire passer un certain nombre de messages politiques, en premier lieu grâce à une critique féroce de leurs personnages de Cubains, de Russes ou d’Allemands de l’Est.

Une vision peu flatteuse des communistes

11 Puisque Topaz, à la différence de One, Two, Three, n’est pas une comédie, les piques visant les communistes y sont moins explicites que dans le film de Wilder. Pourtant, bien que le long métrage d’Hitchcock reste une fiction, il comporte quelques aspects documentaires qui ne sont pas dénués de sous-entendus. Lorsque Rico Parra (), un proche de Fidel Castro, séjourne à New York avec sa garde rapprochée, ils occupent tout un étage de l’hôtel Theresa de Harlem. Cet hôtel avait fermé ses portes au moment du tournage de Topaz, et il a donc été minutieusement reconstruit ; Hitchcock tenait à cette dépense conséquente car le vrai Castro, venu prononcer l’un de ses discours aux Nations unies en 1960, était effectivement descendu dans cet établissement et y avait rencontré Malcolm X, Nehru, Nasser et Khrouchtchev. Mais ce qui fait réellement de l’hôtel Theresa un lieu historique et révolutionnaire, c’est qu’il a été l’un des premiers hôtels de New York à passer d’une clientèle et d’un personnel exclusivement blancs à des clients et employés blancs et noirs, un caractère multiracial parfaitement en accord avec les idéaux du régime révolutionnaire cubain.

12 Jusqu’ici, donc, Hitchcock se montre objectif, et son intrigue rappelle d’autant mieux l’histoire récente que l’acteur qui joue Rico Parra présente une troublante ressemblance avec Castro lui-même. Cependant, quelques détails furtifs indiquent que le réalisateur se souvient aussi des anecdotes qui ont émaillé la visite du Líder Máximo à New York neuf ans plus tôt. Il se trouve en effet que le vrai Castro et les autres membres de la délégation cubaine se sont d’abord installés dans un hôtel huppé situé sur Lexington Avenue ; ils ont dû le quitter lorsqu’on leur aurait demandé 10 000

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dollars en liquide pour rembourser les dégâts qu’ils avaient causés : certains journaux de l’époque rapportent que Castro et ses hommes écrasaient leurs cigares sur les luxueux tapis et tuaient, plumaient et faisaient cuire des poulets dans leurs chambres. Lorsque Castro a voulu rentrer à Cuba au bout d’une dizaine de jours, il semblerait également que les autorités américaines soient allées jusqu’à lui confisquer son avion en guise de dédommagement, Khrouchtchev lui ayant alors prêté un appareil (Smith, 2016 ; Turkel, 2018).

13 Certes, dans son film, Hitchcock ne nous montre pas Rico Parra et son entourage aux prises avec des volatiles ; néanmoins, les scènes qui se déroulent à l’hôtel présentent les personnages de Cubains comme des rustres, et leur attitude décontractée frôle en fait le laisser-aller total, ce qui en dit long sur les capacités d’organisation que leur attribue Hitchcock. Le couloir de l’étage qu’ils occupent est bruyant et enfumé ; certains hommes sont en compagnie de femmes, vraisemblablement des prostituées ; l’un d’eux, affalé contre un mur, se prépare à manger une orange dont il jette les pelures à même le sol – ce qui pourrait bien être un clin d’œil au sort que les vrais castristes auraient réservé à des poulets. Le garde du corps de Parra, Hernandez (Carlos Rivas), en vient même aux mains avec des visiteurs au milieu d’éclats de voix. La chambre à l’atmosphère poisseuse, qui sert aussi de bureau à Parra, ne donne pas une image plus positive des communistes cubains : il y règne un grand désordre et les restes de nourriture abondent ; Parra, qui retrouve un contrat important sous une moitié de hamburger, tend tout naturellement le document maculé de graisse à son secrétaire pour qu’il lui en fasse deux copies ; en outre, le révolutionnaire semble ne pouvoir se passer de son cigare et, s’il ne l’éteint pas sur un élément d’ameublement, il trouve en revanche normal de cracher sur la moquette de sa chambre. Dernier point, mais non le moindre, de nombreuses bouteilles d’alcool – pleines ou déjà vides – sont visibles aux quatre coins de la pièce ; d’ailleurs, à plusieurs reprises, Hitchcock cadre Parra en plan rapproché avec deux cannettes de bière en amorce : le réalisateur, en rendant Parra presque indissociable des bouteilles, qui occupent parfois plus de place que lui dans le cadre4, insinue que ce personnage ne peut vivre et travailler sans boire de manière immodérée, et qu’il n’exerce aucun contrôle sur cette addiction. Lorsque René d’Arcy (George Skaff), l’ambassadeur de France à Washington, est présenté à son bureau, la sobriété du décor s’oppose diamétralement à l’environnement dans lequel travaille Parra ; en outre, Hitchcock utilise également un plan rapproché pour cadrer René d’Arcy, mais ce sont cette fois des livres anciens à reliure de cuir, soigneusement ordonnés, qui sont visibles en amorce. A priori, Hitchcock prendrait donc le parti de montrer les communistes comme des personnages négligés aimant profiter de la vie et se livrant à des excès en tout genre pendant leurs journées de travail, et les capitalistes comme des personnages sérieux, organisés et attachés à la culture – ou, du moins, attachés à donner une telle image d’eux-mêmes.

14 Dans Topaz, Uribe (Don Randolph), l’assistant personnel de Parra, se fait acheter très facilement, une liasse de billets suffisant à transformer instantanément et miraculeusement un communiste convaincu en ardent capitaliste. Le scénario de One, Two, Three autorise le même type d’observation, mais la critique est assortie d’une note burlesque absente chez Hitchcock : les trois officiels russes, Peripetchikoff (Leon Askin), Mishkin (Peter Capell) et Borodenko (Ralf Wolter), bien qu’ils paraissent profondément anti-américains pendant la première moitié de l’intrigue, se laissent finalement aisément corrompre. Peripetchikoff va jusqu’à trahir la confiance de ceux qu’il appelait encore « camarades » quelques heures plus tôt, afin de passer à l’Ouest pour faire

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fortune dans les affaires en emmenant avec lui Ingeborg (Lilo Pulver), la sublime secrétaire de MacNamara (James Cagney). La façon dont Peripetchikoff compte devenir riche est totalement farfelue puisqu’il envisage d’échanger du fromage suisse contre de la choucroute qu’il vendra aux États-Unis, une fois transformée en guirlande de Noël plaquée argent. Bien qu’il tourne le dos à l’URSS, Peripetchikoff déclare que les Russes ont une longueur d’avance sur les Américains dans le domaine des missiles ; mais là où le spectateur s’attend à des considérations d’ordre scientifique et technique, il explique qu’à Cap Canaveral, on dispose d’un bouton pour faire exploser un missile en cas de problème mais que les Russes, eux, disposent de deux boutons, le second étant destiné à l’ingénieur concepteur du missile défectueux. Le jeune Piffl (Horst Buchholz), Allemand de l’Est qui n’en finit pas de se révolter contre la décadence de l’Occident, assiste impuissant à la scène et lance à Peripetchikoff qu’il est pire encore que MacNamara, représentant de Coca-Cola à Berlin-Ouest, lequel, obsédé par la réussite, fait passer sa carrière avant sa famille. Piffl, au bord du désespoir, demande si le monde entier est corrompu, mais Peripetchikoff ne peut lui répondre… puisqu’il ne connaît pas tout le monde. Le mot de la fin revient à MacNamara : « une civilisation capable de produire le Taj Mahal, et du dentifrice bicolore ne peut pas être foncièrement mauvaise » (je traduis)5.

15 Le sournois et très pragmatique MacNamara, héros du film qui voudrait coloniser le bloc de l’Est grâce à la célèbre boisson gazeuse, semble incarner à lui seul le capitalisme triomphant et pourrait ainsi être perçu comme le porte-parole de nombreux spectateurs américains d’origine du fait de ses jugements sans détour à propos des communistes et de ses réponses à certaines questions posées par les Russes : lorsque ces derniers lui demandent par exemple si, « plutôt que des dollars, [il] accepterait une tournée de trois semaines du Bolchoï », il rétorque, sans détour : « Par pitié, pas de culture : rien que du liquide » (je traduis)6. MacNamara parvient même, contre toute attente, à métamorphoser « Piffl le communiste bourru en parfait dandy capitaliste », et cela en l’espace d’une matinée seulement (Michot, 2017, 164). Cette métamorphose est totale : Piffl adopte en quelques heures le mode de pensée et les manières d’un grand patron capitaliste, volant au passage une idée commerciale à MacNamara, ce qui montre qu’il a bien compris que pour réussir dans le monde des affaires, il fallait oublier l’égalité et la fraternité, et être dépourvu de morale et de scrupules. Mais c’est aussi et surtout par le biais des costumes que Wilder matérialise cette transformation réussie : Piffl, qui ne va pas chez le coiffeur et se refuse à porter des sous-vêtements, va subir une manucure et se voir offrir la garde-robe complète d’un gentleman. Dans la scène finale, il est présenté à sa belle-famille comme un comte, et il porte un costume trois pièces avec un œillet à la boutonnière, ainsi qu’un chapeau melon. MacNamara, roi de la manipulation, est pris à son propre piège car, pour Piffl, qui parvient sans peine à tromper son monde, il semble que l’habit fasse le moine et que cette nouvelle apparence aille de pair avec un revirement complet de ses opinions.

16 Un lien peut être établi entre One, Two, Three et (1939) dont Wilder a co-écrit le scénario pour , son maître absolu. Ninotchka, tourné à la veille du déclenchement de la Seconde Guerre mondiale, voit en effet la « conversion » de Soviétiques à la vie occidentale : les trois commissaires du peuple, Iranoff (Sig Ruman), Buljanoff (Felix Bressart) et Kopalski (Alexander Granach) – qui ne sont évidemment pas sans rappeler Peripetchikoff, Mishkin et Borodenko –, ne résistent pas longtemps aux joies de l’Ouest alors qu’ils sont installés dans la plus belle suite d’un luxueux hôtel parisien. Et c’est par un simple fondu enchaîné et grâce à des costumes, justement, que

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Lubitsch indique à ses spectateurs que ces personnages n’ont plus aucune foi en l’idéologie de leur pays : une casquette de prolétaire et deux toques en fourrure accrochées à un portemanteau s’effacent au profit d’un haut de forme et de deux chapeaux melon. Le chapeau melon est également symbole de promotion professionnelle dans The Apartment (La Garçonnière, Billy Wilder, 1960) comme il est une métaphore visuelle de l’ascension sociale pour le moins fulgurante de Piffl dans One, Two, Three.

17 Dans le film de Lubitsch, un autre chapeau, féminin cette fois, fait comprendre au public que Ninotchka est bien moins convaincue qu’elle ne l’affirme du déclin inexorable de l’Occident : une scène sans paroles, dans laquelle elle est seule, nous la montre retirant d’un meuble fermé à clé un chapeau ridicule ; elle le met sur sa tête et se regarde longuement dans un miroir ; or, elle avait publiquement méprisé ce chapeau en le voyant dans une vitrine. Que Ninotchka ait une apparence grotesque ne signifie pourtant pas que ses certitudes soient tournées en dérision, la critique du communisme comportant des nuances : comme le notent N.T. Binh et Christian Viviani, « jamais Ninotchka n’est ridiculisée. Ses idéaux mêmes ne sont pas traités par le mépris, contrairement aux habituels films anti-communistes hollywoodiens […] ; simplement, ils ne suffisent pas à bâtir un bonheur sans faille » (1991, 248). Par ailleurs, William Paul rappelle à juste titre que l’accessoire adopté par Ninotchka ne concrétise en aucun cas un revirement complet : « [cette] transformation physique liée à la décision de porter le chapeau ne matérialise en rien une conversion de la jeune femme au capitalisme (elle ne perd jamais ses convictions politiques, contrairement à la Ninotchka de Silk Stockings [La Belle de Moscou, Rouben Mamoulian, 1957]) ; cela représente plutôt l’acceptation de sa propre frivolité » (1983, 210, je traduis)7. Les messages politiques portés par les films hollywoodiens évoluent donc avec le temps : Ninotchka, sorti à la toute fin des années 30, est surtout une critique du régime stalinien alors que Silk Stockings, qui date de la fin des années 50, donc de l’époque de Khrouchtchev, se pose en critique globale de l’idéologie communiste.

18 On notera en effet avec intérêt que, dans le remake de Mamoulian, Ninotchka () troque ses vêtements sévères et tristes contre des tenues bien plus féminines – incluant les sous-vêtements en soie qui donnent au long métrage son titre original –, et qu’elle « capitule » par là-même, aux plans éthique et idéologique. Les tenues fonctionnelles sont remplacées par des froufrous que l’on ne revêt pas tant par besoin que par plaisir. Dans le Ninotchka de Lubitsch, le chapeau n’est d’ailleurs pas le seul vêtement à séduire la jeune Soviétique. Lorsqu’elle rentre dans son pays, elle explique à une amie, avec des étoiles dans les yeux, qu’en France, on change de toilette plusieurs fois dans la journée. Le superflu prend le pas sur le nécessaire, ce qui n’est pas pour déplaire à Iranoff, Buljanoff et Kopalski qui, en plus de leurs costumes trois pièces et de leurs couvre-chefs, ont opté pour des cannes. La tenue peut donc trahir des prises de position : ce sont des bas de soie, symboles de féminité par excellence, qui font abdiquer la Ninotchka de Mamoulian ; de même, à la fin du film de Lubitsch, Ninotchka envisage de ne plus faire sécher sur le fil à linge commun le seul souvenir rapporté de Paris, une combinaison en soie, car celle-ci a déjà fait jaser toutes les femmes de l’immeuble qui accusent celle qui la porte d’être antirévolutionnaire.

19 Cette vision assez simpliste permet à des personnages de changer de tenue pour mieux tromper leur entourage. Dans l’épilogue de One, Two, Three, on l’a vu, les vêtements de Piffl ont un rôle au moins aussi important à jouer que le discours qu’il tient afin de

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convaincre les parents de sa toute récente épouse qu’il est le gendre idéal. Dans Topaz, Juanita la Cubaine () ne rechigne pas à revêtir un treillis lorsqu’elle se tient à la tribune officielle à l’occasion d’un discours de Castro alors que dans sa vie de tous les jours, elle est particulièrement féminine. C’est ainsi que Devereaux (), son amant américain fraîchement arrivé sur l’île, prétend lui offrir des bas nylon sous les yeux de Parra, qui entretient lui-même une liaison avec elle et ignore son amour pour Devereaux ; la ruse fonctionne, Parra ne se doutant pas une seconde que Juanita trahit la cause qu’il défend et que le paquet contient en fait du matériel d’espionnage. Bien que la Ninotchka campée par Garbo succombe aux charmes de la vie parisienne sans renoncer à ses principes et à ses opinions politiques, elle finit par épouser un comte français ; de la même manière, dans One, Two, Three, Piffl l’Allemand de l’Est se marie à une héritière américaine. Quant aux trois commissaires des deux films, ils abandonnent également la Russie pour se lancer avec succès dans les affaires, en n’hésitant pas à se duper les uns les autres. Selon Michel Ciment, le monde est, pour Wilder, « le théâtre d’une lutte sans merci où les communistes sont vus comme des capitalistes en puissance qui sont forcés de réprimer leurs instincts » (Ciment, 2015, 153).

20 Outre ces références à d’autres œuvres de fiction, Wilder, tout comme Hitchcock, fait allusion à une anecdote célèbre dans le scénario de One, Two, Three. Lorsque MacNamara, qui cherche à soudoyer les trois Russes, leur rend visite à leur hôtel de Berlin-Est – un établissement délabré aussi peu engageant que celui qui accueille les Cubains dans Topaz –, Ingeborg se met à danser de manière très suggestive et « Borodenko tape sur la table avec sa chaussure – non pour protester comme Khrouchtchev l’aurait fait à l’ONU mais, au contraire, pour […] montrer son contentement. C’est d’ailleurs à ce moment-là que l’immense portrait de Khrouchtchev accroché au mur de la salle glisse de son cadre et révèle un portrait de Staline » (Michot, 2017, 162). En effet, un an avant la sortie de One, Two, Three, lors de l’Assemblée générale de l’ONU du 12 octobre 1960, Nikita Khrouchtchev a été filmé tapant violemment du poing sur son pupitre pour marquer son opposition au délégué philippin qui critiquait la tutelle de Moscou sur les pays de l’Est. Des journalistes présents ont rapporté que Khrouchtchev était allé jusqu’à utiliser sa chaussure pour frapper la table, mais aucune caméra ni aucun photographe n’a immortalisé la scène, ce qui tendrait à prouver qu’elle n’a jamais existé. Toutefois, elle reste gravée dans la mémoire ou la mythologie collective comme un incident marquant de la guerre froide (Michot, 2017, 162), au même titre que le comportement peu civilisé qu’auraient eu Castro et ceux qui l’accompagnaient, le mois précédent dans un hôtel new-yorkais.

21 Une autre allusion du même style peut être décelée dans les dialogues. La jeune Scarlett (Pamela Tiffin), fille du grand patron d’Atlanta, cause bien des soucis à MacNamara qui est censé veiller sur elle alors qu’elle séjourne à Berlin. Quand Ingeborg demande à MacNamara si les écoles ne vont pas rouvrir bientôt, celui-ci lui répond : « En Géorgie ? On ne peut être sûr de rien » (je traduis)8. Cette réplique est une référence à l’actualité de janvier 1961 lorsqu’après une longue bataille judiciaire, deux étudiants noirs ont été autorisés à s’inscrire à l’Université de Géorgie qui n’acceptait jusque-là que des Blancs. Des émeutes ont tout de même éclaté car certains extrémistes contestaient une telle décision, mais ces débordements n’ont pas empêché la déségrégation définitive du campus, événement pour le moins révolutionnaire dans cet État du Sud profond (Besel, 2017 ; « Desegregation of UGA », 2013).

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22 Cette remarque de MacNamara, qui pourrait passer inaperçue au milieu d’un flot de dialogues au débit soutenu, pointe du doigt le problème du racisme et suggère que les USA sont loin d’être un pays parfait. Par conséquent, la repartie, l’assurance voire l’arrogance de MacNamara, personnage qui domine l’intrigue, sont à double tranchant ; de la même manière, les espions occidentaux – loyaux ou traîtres – de Topaz ainsi que la construction du scénario d’Hitchcock révèlent une posture ambivalente. Les deux réalisateurs, loin d’être manichéens, n’hésitent pas à écorcher l’image des États-Unis alors dominante en Occident, en dépassant le mythe d’un pays érigé comme modèle au plan économique mais aussi idéologique pour avoir sauvé l’Europe de la barbarie nazie.

Des capitalistes vraiment épargnés ?

23 Certes, avec One, Two, Three, Wilder et Diamond ne se privent pas de ridiculiser les communistes, mais la réalité censée être représentée est particulièrement déformée, et les personnages en question, qui semblent tous aisément manipulables tant ils sont idiots, sont peut-être trop caricaturaux pour rester crédibles. Peripetchikoff, Mishkin et Borodenko, par exemple, vont se plaindre aux Suisses qui ont osé leur vendre du fromage plein de trous ; en outre, MacNamara se moque des trois Russes en leur rappelant que personne ne veut boire de leur Kremlin-Cola, pas même les Albanais qui s’en servent comme antiparasitaire pour les moutons. Piffl, quant à lui, ne connaît pas le couteau et la fourchette et saisit sa nourriture à pleines mains ; lorsqu’il se fait arrêter par la police est-allemande, c’est parce qu’il transporte à son insu un coucou d’où sort toutes les heures l’Oncle Sam agitant la bannière étoilée au son de Yankee Doodle ; enfin, le jeune homme méprise tant la « culture » occidentale qu’il suffit à la Stasi de lui faire écouter en boucle Itsy Bitsy Teenie Weenie Yellow Polkadot Bikini pour qu’il avoue être un espion américain.

24 Les conditions de vie derrière le rideau de fer sont également tournées en dérision : c’est avec le plus grand sérieux que Piffl dit à Scarlett de se hâter car le train de 7h pour Moscou part à 8h15 précises ; et il lui promet qu’en Russie, elle prendra tous les jours son petit déjeuner au lit, ainsi que son déjeuner et son dîner… car leur logement n’aura ni table ni chaises. Concernant l’absence de confort, la promiscuité et les salles de bains communes (également représentées dans une des dernières séquences de Ninotchka), Wilder aimait à raconter une anecdote. Pendant le tournage de One, Two, Three, The Apartment a été projeté dans un établissement culturel de Berlin-Est, et il a été très applaudi par les invités communistes qui y voyaient une « critique de l’univers capitaliste de la consommation et du travail où tout le monde doit se vendre ». Le réalisateur, invité à donner une petite conférence, a déclaré que ce qu’il avait montré dans le film (un employé qui, en échange d’une promotion, prête son appartement à ses supérieurs pour des aventures extra-conjugales) pouvait se passer n’importe où ailleurs. « Il n’y a qu’une ville au monde où cela ne peut pas arriver, c’est Moscou. [Applaudissements flattés de l’auditoire.] Cela ne peut pas se passer à Moscou pour une raison simple, c’est que Lemmon n’aurait pas pu y louer son appartement. Parce qu’il l’aurait partagé avec trois autres familles. [Silence accablé.] » (Wilder et Karasek, 1993, 415).

25 C’est une impressionnante parade militaire sur la place Rouge qui ouvre Topaz. La première séquence de One, Two, Three contient le même type de cliché : elle présente en effet les habitants de Berlin-Est qui s’adonnent à ce qui est, selon MacNamara, leur

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activité favorite : défiler en brandissant des portraits de leaders communistes ainsi que des banderoles aux slogans anti-capitalistes, chantant L’Internationale à tue-tête et laissant s’envoler des dizaines de ballons portant l’inscription « Yankee go home ». Le cortège passe au milieu des ruines, « comme si la reconstruction pouvait attendre » (Michot, 2017, 166), et les bâtiments détruits s’inscrivent en porte-à-faux avec l’ordre apparent du défilé. La musique diégétique offre également une contradiction ironique avec l’image (Stam, 2005, 20). L’Internationale est un morceau préexistant qui a une portée assez universelle pour que les spectateurs puissent l’identifier ; en outre, même si l’hymne est ici chanté en allemand, la teneur de ses paroles est connue de tous. Pourtant, bien que les personnages soient en mouvement, c’est une impression d’immobilisme qui domine : alors que ce chant révolutionnaire appelle à aller de l’avant et à mener une lutte sociale, l’image suggère que les habitants de Berlin-Est se contentent de protester et qu’ils emploient leur énergie à défiler inlassablement, mais sans réellement agir pour que leur situation s’améliore.

26 MacNamara explique ensuite, en voix-off, que les choses sont bien différentes dans le secteur ouest de la ville, placé sous protection alliée, et dont les habitants sont en mesure de profiter de « tous les bienfaits de la démocratie ». Au même moment, la caméra, qui effectue un panoramique, s’arrête sur un immense panneau publicitaire qui montre une jeune femme en bikini vantant les mérites du Coca-Cola. Selon Neil Sinyard et Adrian Turner, le message est clair : la reconstruction de cette partie de la ville se fait grâce aux capitaux américains, et l’on pourrait donc penser que Wilder glorifie l’esprit d’initiative de son pays d’adoption. Pourtant, les deux auteurs ajoutent que cette alliance de la diplomatie et du dollar est inévitablement porteuse de désintégration morale (Sinyard et Turner, 1979, 105). Et en effet, il n’est pas anodin que Wilder associe l’affiche publicitaire en question au terme si noble de « démocratie » : l’image vient à nouveau démentir ce qu’énonce MacNamara avec tant de conviction. Dès les premières minutes du film, donc, le réalisateur fait preuve d’ironie et insinue que lorsqu’il est question de propagande, l’Amérique surpasse amplement le bloc de l’Est ; il ne s’agit pas d’une ironie d’ordre dramatique qui influerait sur le déroulement de l’action et aurait des conséquences négatives sur les personnages (MacDowell, 2016, 36-38) mais plutôt d’une façon, pour Wilder, d’établir une distance avec son protagoniste et de le décrédibiliser en exposant d’emblée la vraie nature de ses « idéaux ». Car bien que l’intrigue et les personnages de One, Two, Three soient totalement fictifs, les cadres géographique et idéologique de l’action correspondent bien à une réalité contemporaine au tournage. C’est, comme souvent, par un humour incisif que le réalisateur fait passer ses prises de position. Le ton est donné, d’autant plus que l’on a ici un procédé de « double ironie » puisque MacNamara lui-même, qui fait office de narrateur dans cet incipit, est ironique vis-à-vis des communistes qui vivent à Berlin-Est.

27 MacNamara se targue d’ailleurs, par le biais de Coca-Cola, d’être sur le point de réussir à conquérir Moscou, alors que Napoléon et Hitler ont échoué avant lui. Mais est-ce vraiment une fierté que de faire « mieux » qu’Hitler ? L’épouse de MacNamara (Arlene Francis) est, comme le note Kevin Lally, le seul personnage non caricatural du film (1996, 318) et aussi le plus lucide, et il n’y a donc rien d’étonnant à ce qu’elle appelle régulièrement son mari « Mein Führer ». La blague n’en est peut-être pas vraiment une, et ce petit détail suffit à mettre à mal les valeurs américaines incarnées par MacNamara. Narrateur et figure dominante du film dont l’énergie débordante semble toujours être employée à bon escient, MacNamara subira un échec cuisant dans les

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dernières minutes de l’intrigue en étant évincé par celui que le public croyait dépourvu d’intelligence et de discernement puisque communiste – le jeu outré de Horst Buchholz accentuant de fait l’impression que Piffl est borné et complètement idiot.

28 Le film d’Hitchcock contient des sous-entendus similaires mais le réalisateur préférant les images aux dialogues, ces indices sont surtout visuels. Donald Spoto affirme que, dans Topaz, « plusieurs indications subtiles montrent qu’Hitchcock rend, de manière voilée, les États-Unis responsables des souffrances et des assassinats que subissent les personnages de son film. […] Deux lampes placées au-dessus de la tête de l’agent américain McKittreck (Edmon Ryan) lui dessinent des cornes diaboliques […] » (Spoto, 1986, 287-288). Par ailleurs, lorsqu’on se penche sur la chronologie fine du scénario, on constate qu’Hitchcock prend des libertés quant aux événements décrits par Leon Uris, un choix qui est lourd de conséquences : dans le roman, lorsque André Devereaux, l’agent français qui travaille pour les Américains, se rend à Cuba, il en rapporte les preuves de la présence de missiles soviétiques, ce qui permet à l’administration Kennedy d’agir ; dans le film, en revanche, la visite de Devereaux à Cuba est bien plus tardive : à bord de l’avion qui l’emmène dans l’île, Devereaux lit le New York Times daté du 22 octobre 1962, dont les gros titres indiquent que les États-Unis sont déjà au courant de ce que les Soviétiques préparent à Cuba, une intervention télévisée de Kennedy étant imminente. Cela signifie que la mission de Devereaux n’a aucune utilité et, surtout, que sa maîtresse Juanita, qui est à la tête d’un réseau anti-castriste, va mourir pour rien, de même que les Mendoza (Anna Navarro et Lewis Charles), torturés à mort pour avoir volé des photos de manœuvres militaires (Walker, 2005, 298-299). La dénonciation de la guerre froide par Hitchcock est donc globale, et il incrimine le bloc communiste autant que le bloc capitaliste. Le réalisateur faisait déjà de même dans Torn Curtain, un film qui contient son lot de personnages tristes prêts à tout pour passer à l’Ouest ou qui ont la nostalgie des États-Unis. Dans ce film, le bloc communiste baigne dans un climat de désolation, de suspicion permanente et de délation. On ne parvient pourtant pas à oublier que le scientifique américain campé par , le Professeur Armstrong, va voler derrière le rideau de fer une formule qu’il n’a pas su trouver lui-même, et ce afin de donner un nouvel élan à sa carrière. Si son entreprise est couronnée de succès, c’est au prix de la mort d’un homme, Gromek (Wolfgang Kieling), qui ne faisait que son travail et qu’il a assassiné de ses propres mains sans paraître en éprouver le moindre remords. Rien n’est dit ni explicitement montré concernant le sort réservé à la fermière (Carolyn Conwell) qui a aidé Armstrong à se débarrasser de Gromek, ou celui de la comtesse Kuchinska (Lila Kedrova) qui comptait sur le Professeur pour pouvoir émigrer aux États-Unis et qui s’est interposée pour lui sauver la vie. Toute l’organisation permettant à des réfugiés de rejoindre l’Ouest est mise en péril à cause d’Armstrong, qui n’agit pas au service de la liberté ou d’une idéologie, mais bien dans l’intérêt de sa propre personne. Il n’est d’ailleurs pas étonnant que l’épilogue du film d’Hitchcock mentionne une « valeur » proprement matérialiste : lorsqu’il arrive en Suède, Armstrong prononce ces mots : « nous avons de l’argent ».

29 Mais Paul Newman, qu’il joue un meurtrier ou non, bénéficie d’emblée de la sympathie du public, comme ou , qui ont tous deux tourné plusieurs films avec Hitchcock. Les actes d’Armstrong dans Torn Curtain paraîtraient peut-être moins légitimes au spectateur si un acteur moins charismatique (et aux yeux moins bleus ?) incarnait ce personnage. Et justement, aucune grande star américaine ne figure au casting de Topaz, ce qui joue un rôle important dans la perception des camps

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capitaliste et communiste. Les personnages masculins occidentaux paraissent interchangeables : ils affichent la même expression sérieuse voire solennelle, sont vêtus de costumes cravates, et , interprète de l’agent de la CIA Michael Nordstrom, présente une réelle ressemblance avec Frederick Stafford, qui joue l’agent français. et , quant à eux, incarnent la fille modèle et le gendre idéal des Devereaux. Du côté communiste, les personnages sont nettement plus hauts en couleurs : le Russe Boris Kusenov (Per-Axel Arosenius) est énigmatique et imprévisible ; Hernandez, le garde du corps cubain, ne passe pas inaperçu avec sa chevelure et sa barbe rousses ; le chétif Uribe, assistant de Parra, détonne également par sa nervosité permanente et ses petites lunettes rondes qui ressemblent à deux loupes ; enfin, la blonde Nicole Devereaux () ne voit son mari revenir vers elle que parce que la sublime et piquante Juanita a trouvé la mort. À ce propos, le public ne peut qu’éprouver de l’empathie pour Parra, détruit lorsqu’il apprend la double trahison de Juanita, et contraint de tuer cette femme qu’il aime afin de lui épargner la torture. Le passage, techniquement très abouti, et qui nous rappelle qu’Hitchcock se plaisait à filmer ses scènes d’amour comme des scènes de meurtre et inversement, contient un lent travelling circulaire puis une plongée à la verticale lorsque Juanita, les yeux grands ouverts, s’effondre sur le sol carrelé, sa longue robe violette s’ouvrant comme une corolle. La réaction de Devereaux à l’annonce du décès de Juanita – quelques soupirs résignés et un air sombre qui ne contraste guère avec l’expression de son visage dans le reste du film – peine, au contraire, à susciter une identification de la part du spectateur.

30 L’épilogue de Topaz, comme celui de One, Two, Three, confirme la position des deux films. L’originalité de Topaz est qu’un certain nombre de fins ont été envisagées, et trois tournées. Celle qui avait la préférence d’Hitchcock – mais pas celle du public des previews – consistait en un duel au revolver dans un stade désert entre Jacques Granville (), le haut fonctionnaire français à la solde des communistes, et André Devereaux. Granville était en fait abattu par un tireur isolé payé par les Russes. Une autre fin, qui est celle de la version longue du film diffusée de nos jours dans les pays anglophones, montre Devereaux et sa femme Nicole – qui, quelques heures auparavant, était encore la maîtresse de Granville – quitter Paris pour rentrer à Washington à bord d’un avion de la Pan American, alors que Granville embarque au même moment sur un vol Aeroflot pour Moscou et salue le couple avec un large sourire. D’après Laurent Bourdon, il a fallu renoncer à cet épilogue pour ne pas froisser le gouvernement français qui « ne voulait pas laisser à croire qu’un haut fonctionnaire ayant trahi son pays pouvait, à si bon compte, quitter le sol de la République pour rejoindre ses chers camarades » (Bourdon, 2007, 314). La fin qui a été adoptée à la sortie du film pour tous les pays et qui est toujours celle des versions diffusées en France, suggère que Granville, apprenant qu’il est démasqué, préfère se suicider. Il n’y a donc plus d’espion russe infiltré au sein même du gouvernement français et la crise des missiles est terminée, comme l’annonce une nouvelle une de journal ; on voit toutefois défiler à l’écran, en surimpression et fondu-enchaîné, les scènes d’assassinat ou de torture qui ont émaillé l’intrigue et représentent le prix qu’il a fallu payer. Selon Spoto, « le cynisme moral d’Hitchcock, sa profonde méfiance à l’égard de la politique, son mépris du grand commerce international n’ont jamais été aussi évidents que dans ce film » (Spoto, 1986, 289).

31 Wilder est-il aussi désenchanté ? Sans doute, mais le caractère éminemment burlesque de One, Two, Three gomme quelque peu la férocité de la critique idéologique : alors que

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la voiture transportant MacNamara et le jeune couple file à toute allure vers l’aéroport pour accueillir les parents de Scarlett, un artisan, penché par la fenêtre, peint avec une grande précision, et donc à l’envers, les armoiries de Piffl, devenu le comte Otto von Droste-Schattenburg. On ne peut toutefois nier que MacNamara réalise un véritable exploit lorsqu’il parvient à transformer Piffl en gendre parfait aux yeux de Wendell P. Hazeltine (Howard St. John), père de Scarlett, grand patron de Coca-Cola, et conservateur de l’Amérique profonde qui arrive presque sans prévenir d’Atlanta. Mais cette étonnante métamorphose a une conséquence pour le moins inattendue : Piffl est si convaincant que son beau-père, qui ne le connaît que depuis quelques minutes, décide de lui confier un poste important à Londres, celui que MacNamara convoitait depuis des années. La morale de l’histoire est bien que « […] les Américains sont beaucoup plus efficaces que les Soviétiques pour coloniser les cerveaux » (Simsolo, 2008, 70), l’ironie étant que l’efficacité de MacNamara se retourne contre lui.

32 De même, dans Topaz, le personnage qui s’en sort le mieux est sans nul doute Boris Kusenov : au début de l’intrigue, il passe à l’Ouest avec sa famille, mais se montre méfiant et condescendant vis-à-vis des Américains ; plus tard, on le retrouve dans le confortable manoir mis à sa disposition, l’air satisfait, fumant un bon cigare (cubain ?) et se faisant servir par des domestiques. Avant de s’éclipser pour aller profiter du jardin, laissant Américains et Français démêler seuls une affaire compliquée, il conseille à Devereaux de l’imiter, et de penser à son intérêt personnel plutôt qu’à son devoir envers son gouvernement. Cette dernière apparition de Kusenov, comme la dernière apparition de Piffl dans le film de Wilder, est la preuve ultime que les communistes battent aisément les capitalistes à leur propre jeu.

Conclusion

33 À la mort d’Hitchcock, le journal soviétique Literaturnaya Gazeta s’est montré très critique envers le réalisateur, dont l’œuvre, selon lui, faisait l’apologie du vice et de la cruauté, et était le reflet de la décadence de la société occidentale. Les journalistes ciblaient en particulier Torn Curtain et Topaz pour leur caractère anti-russe et la façon dont leur intrigue « brouillait les frontières entre ce qui était moral et immoral » (Humphries, 1987, 167-168 ; je traduis)9. Les jeunes Américains pacifistes qui ont découvert Topaz en 1969 ont vu dans ce film une dénonciation des régimes communistes et une façon de considérer les Russes et les Cubains comme des menaces à l’ordre mondial, ce qui leur a évidemment déplu. Mais Hitchcock, bien qu’il semble mettre en scène une œuvre conventionnelle en accord avec les codes et l’état d’esprit hollywoodiens, n’est pas si conservateur dans la façon dont il traite cette histoire polémique. Uribe et Juanita sont exécutés par Parra, et les Mendoza connaissent une lente agonie dans une geôle cubaine seulement parce que Devereaux, un Français au service des Américains, s’est servi d’eux sans le moindre scrupule. Si Devereaux, lui, n’a pas de sang sur les mains, en aucun cas le scénario ne l’érige en exemple, ce qui souligne à quel point les valeurs associées aux pays occidentaux suscitent la méfiance d’Hitchcock.

34 Wilder, quant à lui, avait indéniablement un côté provocateur : interviewé par Michel Ciment au tout début des années 80 à propos de Ninotchka et de One, Two, Three, il allait jusqu’à déclarer qu’il « ador[ait] irriter tout le monde », que ce soient les communistes ou les capitalistes (Tresgot et Ciment, 1998, 51’10’’). Dans One, Two, Three, l’humour est

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corrosif et les régimes en place derrière le rideau de fer sont effectivement visés par la satire, ce que la critique de gauche a reproché à Wilder à la sortie du film (Simsolo, 2008, 69) ; par ailleurs, le bloc occidental étant lui aussi malmené, la presse outre- Atlantique a immédiatement accusé le réalisateur d’être « anti-américain » (Phillips, 2010, 250). Il est vrai que MacNamara tourne en dérision le totalitarisme tout en s’échinant à faire boire du Coca-Cola à tous ceux qui ne le font pas déjà – une curieuse façon d’envisager la démocratie. On note tout de même avec intérêt que Wilder et Diamond, en dépit des exagérations de leur script, se montrent assez visionnaires : au moment de la chute du Mur, l’un des premiers plaisirs des habitants de Berlin-Est a été de goûter à la liberté… et au Coca-Cola (Canas, 2009) ; de manière moins réjouissante, au début du XXIe siècle, l’armée américaine a utilisé la musique à des fins de déstabilisation psychologique à Guantánamo, ce qui fait tristement écho à la scène de torture de Piffl par la Stasi dans le film.

35 Alors, qui sort gagnant des deux films ? Certainement pas leurs réalisateurs, bien que One, Two, Three, à sa ressortie au moment de la réunification, ait connu un véritable succès populaire, particulièrement auprès des spectateurs allemands. Bien plus tôt, en 1967, soit six ans après la sortie originale du film de Wilder, une courte scène du parodique Casino Royale (, Kenneth Hughes, Val Guest, et Joseph McGrath) prouve que le public était désormais prêt à accepter les plaisanteries en lien avec la guerre froide – une sorte de revanche pour Wilder qui avait participé à ce projet en suggérant quelques idées aux scénaristes : une plongée présente une rue animée de Berlin-Ouest avec ses bars et cabarets, puis la caméra prend de la hauteur pour filmer l’autre côté du Mur, triste et désert (si l’on exclut la présence de militaires) et baigné de lumière rouge, alors que la musique de fosse pop et jazzy de Burt Bacharach a fait place à quelques mesures d’Otchi Tchornye jouées à la mandoline avec une grande mélancolie.

36 L’épilogue de Topaz d’Hitchcock, quelle qu’en soit la version, sonne plutôt comme un match nul entre capitalistes et communistes, la guerre froide devant se poursuivre pendant de longues années. En outre, Juanita la Cubaine, en s’opposant au gouvernement issu de la lutte menée par son défunt mari, confirme que la révolution, plus qu’une rupture, est bien un éternel recommencement. Cette idée de retour au point de départ est à l’image de l’apparition rituelle d’Hitchcock, l’une des plus facétieuses de toutes : assis dans un fauteuil roulant poussé par une infirmière, il se lève soudain sans la moindre difficulté et se met à marcher en levant bien haut le genou ; ce caméo peut être vu comme un avertissement à destination des spectateurs – il ne faut pas se fier aux apparences – ou comme une façon pour Hitchcock de montrer qu’en 1969, il est encore dans la course, bien qu’il n’ait pas l’âme d’un révolutionnaire.

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Ninotchka. Réal. Ernst Lubitsch. Scénario de , Billy Wilder et Walter Reisch. Avec (Ninotchka), Melvyn Douglas (Count Leon d’Algout), Ina Claire (Grand Duchess Swana) and Bela Lugosi (Commissar Razinin). MGM, 1939. DVD. Warner Bros., 2006.

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Sabrina. Réal. Billy Wilder. Scénario de Billy Wilder, Samuel Taylor et . Avec Humphrey Bogart (Linus Larrabee), Audrey Hepburn (Sabrina Fairchild), William Holden (David Larrabee) et John Williams (Thomas Fairchild). Paramount Pictures, 1954. DVD. Paramount Pictures, 2009.

Silk Stockings. Réal. Rouben Mamoulian. Scénario de Leonard Gershe et Leonard Spigelgass. Avec (Steve Canfield), Cyd Charisse (Ninotchka Yoschenko), (Peggy Dayton) et Peter Lorre (Brankov). MGM, 1957. DVD. Warner Bros., 2006.

Sunset Boulevard. Réal. Billy Wilder. Scénario de Charles Brackett, Billy Wilder et D.M. Marshman Jr. Avec William Holden (Joe Gillis), Gloria Swanson (Norma Desmond), Erich von Stroheim (Max von Mayerling) et Nancy Olson (Betty Schaefer). Paramount Pictures, 1950. DVD. Paramount Pictures, 2003.

The Apartment. Réal. Billy Wilder. Scénario de Billy Wilder et I.A.L. Diamond. Avec Jack Lemmon (C.C. Baxter), Shirley MacLaine (Fran Kubelik), Fred MacMurray (Jeff D. Sheldrake) et Ray Walston (Joe Dobisch). The Mirisch Corporation, 1960. DVD. MGM / United Artists, 2001.

The Lost Weekend. Réal. Billy Wilder. Scénario de Charles Brackett et Billy Wilder. Avec Ray Milland (Don Birnam), Jane Wyman (Helen St. James), Phillip Terry (Wick Birnam) et Howard Da Silva (Nat). Paramount Pictures, 1945. DVD. Universal Pictures France, 2007.

Topaz. Réal. Alfred Hitchcock. Scénario de Samuel Taylor. Avec Frederick Stafford (André Devereaux), Dany Robin (Nicole Devereaux), John Vernon (Rico Parra) et Karin Dor (Juanita de Cordoba). Universal Pictures, 1969. DVD. Universal Pictures France, 2001.

Torn Curtain. Réal. Alfred Hitchcock. Scénario de Brian Moore. Avec Paul Newman (Professor Michael Armstrong), Julie Andrews (Sarah Sherman), Hansjörg Felmy (Heinrich Gerhard) et Wolfgang Kieling (Hermann Gromek). Universal Pictures, 1966. DVD. Universal Pictures France, 2001.

NOTES

1. Contrairement à Wilder, Hitchcock n’est pas scénariste de son film, et c’est Samuel A. Taylor qui en a signé le script (on notera que Taylor a également co-écrit celui de Sabrina [1954] pour Wilder, avec Wilder lui-même et Ernest Lehman). Toutefois, on sait qu’à l’époque de Topaz et

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depuis des années déjà, Hitchcock possédait un total contrôle sur l’écriture de ses longs métrages et que les auteurs de ses scripts travaillaient en étroite collaboration avec lui et avec son épouse scénariste, Alma Reville, sans que cette dernière soit nécessairement créditée au générique. 2. « It was like making a picture in Pompeii with all the lava coming down. Khrushchev was even faster than me and Diamond. We had to make continual revisions to keep up with the headlines ». 3. « Film makers are vulnerable to this kind of risk. A situation, a political mood changes in the course of your making a film and things are not the same by the time you finish the picture as they were when you started. If you write a newspaper piece, it appears the next day. […] But film makers who do a contemporary story have to pray that the situation that they are dealing with in the projected movie will still be valid a year and a half in the future. Otherwise people may say that you are guilty of bad taste […] ». 4. On notera que dans une précédente réalisation d’Hitchcock, Notorious (Les Enchaînés, 1946), la tasse de café empoisonné est visuellement démesurée par rapport au personnage vulnérable d’Alicia (Ingrid Bergman), et que des bouteilles en amorce viennent régulièrement « écraser » l’écrivain de The Lost Weekend (Le Poison, Billy Wilder, 1945), comme pour (lui) rappeler l’emprise que l’alcool a sur lui. 5. « […] any world that can produce the Taj Mahal, William Shakespeare and striped toothpaste can’t be all bad. » 6. « Instead of dollars, you would accept three-week tour of Bolshoi Ballet? » – « Please. No culture, just cash. » 7. « Ninotchka’s transformation in accepting the hat is not so much an acceptance of capitalist ways – she never loses her political convictions as the Ninotchka of Silk Stockings does – but rather the acceptance of her own foolishness ». 8. « Won’t school soon open? » – « In Georgia? You never know. » 9. « erasing the distinction between moral and immoral ».

RÉSUMÉS

One, Two, Three de Billy Wilder (Un, deux, trois, 1961) et Topaz d’Alfred Hitchcock (L’Étau, 1969) sont deux films qui n’ont pas rencontré un vif succès à leur sortie et que les critiques n’ont jamais encensés. Pourtant, ils ne sont pas aussi mineurs qu’on pourrait le croire : leur intrigue – loufoque pour le premier, plutôt nébuleuse pour le second – cache des prises de position idéologiques subtiles et inattendues de la part de réalisateurs d’ordinaire discrets quant à leurs opinions politiques. Cet article s’attache à étudier les moyens mis en œuvre par Wilder et Hitchcock, tant au niveau du scénario que de la mise en scène, pour illustrer leur vision du capitalisme et du communisme. Certes, les deux cinéastes critiquent l’héritage révolutionnaire ; mais ils ont également l’audace, en pleine guerre froide, de se montrer peu indulgents à l’égard du modèle proposé par leur pays d’adoption.

Billy Wilder’s One, Two, Three (1961) and Alfred Hitchcock’s Topaz (1969) were not successful when released. This essay argues that in spite of this lack of critical acclaim, they are worth revisiting today: their respective plots—the former, farcical, the latter, rather nebulous—dissimulate subtle ideological stances all the more unexpected because neither Wilder nor Hitchcock were known for making their political views public. The aim of this essay is to study the devices used by both

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whether in their script or filming, to illustrate their vision of capitalism and communism. The two directors did criticize the revolutionary heritage—but in the midst of the Cold War, they also took an unsupportive attitude towards the proposed model of their adopted country.

INDEX

Keywords : Alfred Hitchcock, Billy Wilder, Topaz, One, Two, Three, Berlin Wall, Cuba, Cold War, revolution Thèmes : Hors-thème Mots-clés : Alfred Hitchcock, Billy Wilder, L’Étau, Un, deux, trois, Mur de Berlin, Cuba, guerre froide, révolution

AUTEUR

JULIE MICHOT Université du Littoral-Côte d’Opale

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Recensions

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Jim Cocola, Places in the Making: A Cultural Geography of American Poetry

Neal Alexander

REFERENCES

Jim Cocola, Places in the Making: A Cultural Geography of American Poetry, Iowa City, University of Iowa Press, 2016, 264 pages, $55, ISBN-10: 1609384111

1 Places are always manifest as more than a mere setting or location. Certainly, events must (as we say) “take place” somewhere, and that somewhere will usually be a specific location on the face of the earth. However, most human geographers define “place” as a space or location that has been invested with human meanings. The meanings of a given place will – indeed, must – change over time, whereas its location may remain largely unchanged. What this means is that places do not simply exist but are made (and re-made) through the web of relationships and interactions that constitute human society and culture. One name for this process of making is “poiesis,” the root term in ancient Greek for our narrower and more specialised conception of “poetry.” However, if it is true to say that place-making is a characteristic activity of human cultures, then it might also be said that human cultures are conditioned by the places and landscapes in which they emerge and develop. For phenomenologically-inclined philosophers such as Edward Casey and Jeff Malpas, “emplacement” – being-in-place – is an ontological condition: to be at all is to be somewhere and to have some kind of relationship with place, even when that relationship is one of displacement or migrancy.

2 Jim Cocola’s latest book, Places in the Making, is a lucid critical study of the work of a diverse group of “poets of place” (6) or “geographer-poets” (199) active in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. The book’s central concept is “topopoiesis” or “place making,” by which Cocola means the imaginative creation of place in and through language but also referring, ultimately, to “the world exceeding signification” (4). Although the poetic imagination plays a crucial role in the process of place making, as Cocola conceives it, the places depicted in the poems he discusses are understood as

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more than merely imaginary, for poems are also particular engagements with actual places and contribute to the layers of meaning that such places accrue. Indeed, because of their nuanced uses of language and form, poems are able to explore, interrogate, and invent the meanings of places with a level of eloquence and sophistication rarely encountered elsewhere. Throughout the book, Cocola emphasises both the phenomenological and the political orientations of “the poem attuned to place” (6), and he is at pains to distinguish such poems from the hackneyed genre of “pastoral poetry” (12) that retains a tenacious foothold in critical discussion of ecopoetics and environmental literature generally. Where pastoral poetry fabricates artificial and idealised landscapes that perform a variety of ideological functions, the poetry of place concerns itself with the particularity of specific places as they are encountered by the poet’s imagination acting in and on the world. In this regard, it is also worth noting that while Cocola’s study explores the topopoetic character of much modern and contemporary poetry, it lays equal emphasis upon the ways in which places fashion both poets and the poems that they write (59).

3 The other key line of argument developed in the book concerns the “place-based” rather than “place-bound” character of contemporary poetry of place (19). Indeed, the kinds of places that figure in the poems that Cocola discusses tend to be porous and relational, exhibiting a “translocal” (79) character that registers the far-reaching effects of time-space compression in -world of modernity. Poets do this by establishing the (imaginative or actual) connections between particular places within wider transnational or global networks. For instance, the work of Kamau Brathwaite is at once profoundly emplaced and richly expansive in terms of its historical and geographical horizons, linking specific places and cultures in West Africa with others in the Caribbean archipelago as part of his ongoing engagement with the history of the Black Atlantic. As this example indicates, Cocola’s study focuses upon “American” poetry but does so within an extended geographical and geopolitical range, discussing the work of poets from the Caribbean (Brathwaite), Central and (Pablo Neruda, Roque Dalton, Ernesto Cardenal), and the Pacific Islands (Haunani-Kay Trask, Craig Santos Perez) as well as the continental United States. He also includes a chapter on the work of the Korean-American poets Theresa Hak Kyung Cha and Myung Mi Kim; though (perhaps oddly), there is no room here to consider the contributions made to place making by Canadian poets beyond a brief passing mention (21).

4 Places in the Making is divided into three sub-sections, “Prospects,” “Translocalities,” and “Zones,” each of which contains three chapters. In turn, each of the nine chapters examines the work of two poets, and Cocola relishes the opportunity to create unexpected, and often illuminating pairings. For instance, in Chapter 2 Robinson Jeffers and Pablo Neruda are considered together as poets writing from “the American edge of the Pacific Rim” (42); and in Chapter 3, the differently-inflected local attachments of Charles Olson and Lorine Niedecker are delineated and compared. In Chapter 4, Allen Ginsberg’s protest poem, “Wichita Vortex Sutra,” is read in conjunction with the poetry of Roque Dalton, who was imprisoned in El Salvador in 1965 and interrogated by the CIA. Other pairings are more straightforward but no less effective in highlighting common themes or differences of perspective and approach. In Chapter 6, Cocola critiques Gary Snyder’s tendency to conflate “immigrant and indigenous experience” in his place making (122) by reading his work in apposition to that of Joy Harjo, who is of Muscogee Creek heritage. Gloria Anzaldúa and Jimmy Santiago Baca are both considered as poets of Áztlan, the unofficial homeland of Chicano and indigenous

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peoples that straddles the US-Mexico border, in Chapter 7. Intrinsically comparative and “multi-ethnic” (16) in its critical approach, Cocola’s book also displays truly impressive and wide-ranging knowledge of Anglophone and Hispanophone poetry not only in the Americas but across the globe.

5 The key features of Cocola’s critical method are perhaps most clearly evident in the first chapter of Places in the Making, where he differentiates the respective attitudes to place and place making that are evident in the poetry of Wallace Stevens and William Carlos Williams. Both are white male American modernists with strong attachments to places in the north-eastern United States, but their poetic sensibilities and aesthetic priorities are sharply distinct. Reading the work of both poets in light of the tradition of the prospect poem, Cocola points a contrast by arguing that Stevens exemplifies a broader tendency towards abstraction, whereby wholly imagined or metaphorical landscapes are created in favour of meaningful engagements with actual places. Stevens’s “Anecdote of the Jar” is a case in point, for, in Cocola’s reading, the poem gives expression to “a self-absorbed interiority” rather than any subjective involvement with “the environment of a particular place” (29). In short, the poem seems more concerned with the jar (as symbol of the poet’s imaginative power) than with the natural or cultural landscapes of Tennessee in which it is placed, thereby revealing Stevens as “the antithesis of a place maker” (31).

6 Stevens’s counterpart is Williams, the poet for whom there are no ideas but in things, who grounds the imagination’s powers in a documentary aesthetic and a stubborn fidelity to the everyday, material world of urban and suburban lives. In his late- modernist long poem Paterson, Williams’s “hyperlocal thought” (38) replaces solipsism with inter-subjectivity and a concern for the fundamentally social, collective dimensions of place making (34). However, as Cocola observes, Williams’s intensely local focus upon one carefully chosen and demarcated place can sometimes seem myopic. On the other hand, Williams is also guilty of overlooking “the utter singularity of all places” when he claims that the city of Paterson, New Jersey can stand both for “anywhere” and for “everywhere” (39). The deft counterpointing of Stevens’s and Williams’s respective poetics of place in this chapter is perceptive and revealing; and while Williams’s mode of place making is clearly more in tune with Cocola’s own critical ethics than that of Stevens, it is telling that its weaknesses and contradictions are also productively brought to light.

7 One of the strengths of Places in the Making is the way in which it elaborates a supple and persuasive argument through focused discussion of such a variety of textual examples, both the canonical and the little-discussed. Its interpretive strengths lie in breadth rather than depth, however: Cocola rarely quotes from the poems at much length and contextual or thematic analysis tends to predominate over close reading. His observations on poetic language and form are always astute, but they don’t often occupy a central place in the argument. Just occasionally, the book’s core preoccupation with place and place making gets displaced by the politics of identity, as, for instance, in the sections on Harjo, Cha, and Kim. It is also worth noting that Cocola’s subtitle – “A Cultural Geography of American Poetry” – is a little misleading. Cultural geography is a well-established sub-field of human geography with its own academic conventions, leading practitioners, and venues for publication – none of which feature prominently in Places in the Making. Instead, this is a work of literary history that is, as Cocola himself puts it, “attuned to cultural geography and ethnic studies” (21). Its

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interdisciplinary character is sincere and important but not profound; and the book’s most significant points of reference are other geographically-informed works of literary criticism, such as Jahan Ramazani’s A Transnational Poetics (2009), Paul Giles’s The Global Remapping of American Literature (2011), and Rebecca Walsh’s The Geopoetics of Modernism (2015). In this regard, it seems odd that Cocola should not mention the growing body of work in the field of literary geography, where similar lines of enquiry and argument to his own have also been pursued.

8 These minor caveats notwithstanding, Cocola’s study of place making in modern and contemporary American poetry is terrifically stimulating, cogent, and thought- provoking. Its expansive range and erudition ensure that even the most thoroughly- versed reader will find herself enlightened about the work of poets with whom she was at best half-familiar. The book’s core argument concerning the place-making function of poems and the poem-making function of places also has the potential to be transplanted into other literary and geographical contexts, where it will of necessity acquire new idioms and local inflections. It is, in sum, a very rich, suggestive, and rewarding piece of critical writing.

INDEX

Subjects: Recensions

AUTHORS

NEAL ALEXANDER Aberystwyth University

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Béatrice Pire, Figures de la décomposition familiale dans le roman américain contemporain

Sophie Chapuis

RÉFÉRENCE

Béatrice Pire, Figures de la décomposition familiale dans le roman américain contemporain, Paris : Michel Houdiard, 2018, 132 pages,18 euros, ISBN : 978-2-3569-2163-5

1 L’ouvrage de Béatrice Pire propose une étude de cinq auteurs américains désignés d’emblée comme une famille intellectuelle et artistique bien plus qu’un mouvement littéraire ou une école de pensée. Envisagés comme une fratrie, Jonathan Franzen (1959-), Jeffrey Eugenides (1960-), Rick Moody (1961-), David Foster Wallace (1962-2008) et enfin Jonathan Lethem (1964-), forment, pour reprendre l’image qui parcourt cet essai, les cinq doigts d’une main. Béatrice Pire choisit en effet d’ajouter un cinquième membre à ce clan d’auteurs qu’un journaliste de Time Magazine, R. Z. Sheppard, identifiait déjà dans un article de 1997 comme les « Quatre Fantastiques »1 en référence à la bande dessinée Marvel, introduisant alors une métaphore familiale qui perdurera par la suite. Sheppard l’emprunte lui-même au roman de Rick Moody, The Ice Storm, notamment à ses pages finales que Béatrice Pire choisit d’ailleurs de reprendre comme citation inaugurale de son ouvrage : « Fucking family. Feeble and forlorn and floundering and foolish and frustrating and functional and sad, sad. Fucking family. Fiend or foe. Next month2: the end of the Fantastic Four. The Fab Four. The Fetishistic Four. Family was all tricks with mirrors » (7). À cette variation sur la famille et ses dysfonctionnements succède un extrait d’entretien de David Foster Wallace qui expose clairement l’argument central de l’ouvrage. Les auteurs nés dans les années 1960, se sentent, comme lui, orphelins et dans un état de désarroi profond. Leurs pères littéraires, ces géants de la première vague du postmodernisme eux-mêmes coupables de parricides ont trop joué avec les limites et ont aboli toute forme d’autorité. Ils ont

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laissé derrière eux une « seconde génération perdue » ainsi que le suggère Béatrice Pire, ou bien, pour reprendre les termes de Wallace, une génération qui s’est rendue soudain compte, dans une sorte d’épiphanie, qu’elle devait se substituer à ces parents qu’elle a tant cherchés en endossant leur rôle à son tour : « And then the uneasiest feeling of all, as we start gradually to realize that parents aren’t in fact ever coming back – which means « we’re » going to have to be the parents3 » (7).

2 Cette vacance de la fonction parentale guide l’étude à la fois critique et clinique de Béatrice Pire qui s’accompagne d’un examen des symptômes de ce corps littéraire. À l’image des citations inaugurales, l’ouvrage fait constamment dialoguer le réel et la fiction, ce qui contribue à l’intérêt de la démarche retenue et propose une étude richement documentée de l’angoisse ressentie par cette génération de « fils de », de suiveurs, peinant à se réinventer car ayant le sentiment d’être écartelée entre deux siècles, arrivée ou trop tôt ou trop tard. Cet ouvrage pose des jalons importants pour comprendre ce qui unit cette génération d’écrivains et soutient notamment, dans la lignée de Roland Barthes, que c’est le retour aux structures familiales4, aussi dysfonctionnelles soient-elles, qui constitue le point commun principal de ces cinq auteurs. Aux « Quatre Fantastiques » originels identifiés par Time Magazine, Béatrice Pire ajoute Jonathan Lethem mais troque sans explication Donald Antrim contre Jeffrey Eugenides. C’est donc d’une série de cinq portraits qu’est composé cet ouvrage qui ne présente ni parties, ni chapitres numérotés mais prend plutôt la forme de cinq études offrant chacune une mise en lumière d’un auteur et d’une de ses œuvres, Jonathan Franzen étant le seul à voir trois de ses romans analysés.

3 L’ouvrage s’ouvre sur l’étude de Middlesex (2002) de Jeffrey Eugenides, roman de l’inceste fraternel. S’appuyant sur les théories du psychanalyste Juan Eduardo Tesone, Béatrice Pire suggère qu’en dépit de l’apparente fresque familiale qui se déploie sur trois générations, ce roman est « la seule histoire d’un acte incestueux qui, par définition, exclut toute filiation, aïeux, enfants et petits-enfants, passé, présent et avenir » (20). Dans cette logique, elle fait l’hypothèse que de cet inceste découlerait l’hermaphrodisme de Calliope, car toujours selon Tesone, « le geste incestueux relève de l’androgynie5» (19). C’est précisément parce que Eugenides dépeint une famille qui se complaît dans la banalisation de l’inceste et le bonheur de l’identique que le roman d’apprentissage ne peut opérer.

4 Dans un second temps, Béatrice Pire choisit de s’intéresser à un roman de Jonathan Lethem traitant cette fois d’une relation mère/fils problématique. The Fortress of Solitude, publié en 2003, met en scène une mère qui, par sa dimension tyrannique et toute-puissante, contribue, selon Béatrice Pire, à la « dépossession aliénante et désubjectivante » (28) du jeune garçon. Béatrice Pire propose de manière très convaincante de lire ce texte comme un anti roman familial freudien car la mère déserte très rapidement le foyer et devient une figure de l’absence. Il est suggéré en effet que, contrairement au roman familial freudien dans lequel « la mère est toujours certaine, il semble qu’elle soit frappée ici d’incertitude, entraînant une surenchère de fictions identitaires et un débordement d’appellations » (33). Ainsi s’expliqueraient alors les différents « re-noms » que le fils Dylan se voit donner tout au long du roman tandis qu’il finit lui-même par se rebaptiser - en témoigne le tag commun qu’il choisit conjointement avec son ami Mingus (lui aussi privé de présence maternelle) pour signer ses graffitis, preuve que tous deux sont en quête d’une origine fantasmée.

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5 Le troisième volet est consacré au roman publié en 1996 par Rick Moody, Purple America, dont la figure paternelle est soit absente – le père ayant participé aux premiers essais nucléaires meurt lorsque son fils n’a que neuf ans – ou défaillante – le beau-père, à la tête d’une centrale nucléaire, prend la fuite le jour de sa retraite. Qualifiant ces pères d’« oppressants, tyranniques, guerriers », Béatrice Pire avance l’idée qu’ils sont non plus « garant[s] de l’ordre et de la paix, mais plutôt la cause de tous les chaos à la fois intimes et nationaux » (48). Purple America signerait selon elle la faillite de la fonction paternelle. Les tentatives de restaurer l’image paternelle échouent les unes après les autres si bien que le fils demeure dans un rapport incestueux à sa mère, comme le suggère l’ouverture du roman, dans une scène où le fils qui lave sa mère en la contemplant nue dans sa baignoire, donne une impression de « Vierge à l’enfant inversée » (53). Béatrice Pire attribue au dysfonctionnement de la structure familiale « l’incapacité pour le fils de prendre sa place dans la filiation » (55). S’appuyant sur les analyses de Gérard Haddad, elle soutient l’idée que cela peut plus largement être imputé à l’histoire nationale, qui, par sa propension à exterminer, rend difficile toute forme d’engendrement.

6 Le quatrième volet se propose d’analyser trois romans de Jonathan Franzen, The Corrections (2001), Freedom (2010) et Purity (2015). Des deux premiers, on retient l’idée que « la victime principale est la figure du père » (69). En effet, The Corrections met en scène le fiasco systématique des rituels familiaux tandis que Freedom (2010) est le roman d’un double combat : celui d’un père de famille qui tente de sauver la paruline azurée, une espèce d’oiseau menacée de disparition, tout en combattant un fils qui ne cesse de remettre en cause son autorité, convaincu que, dans un modèle démocratique, l’égalité doit régner jusque dans la sphère domestique. Purity est enfin le texte qui donne lieu aux hypothèses les plus stimulantes de ce volet. Béatrice Pire avance que ce texte se rapproche le plus du roman familial au sens où Freud l’entend car « il témoigne d’une tension entre un réel maternel certain et une figure paternelle douteuse, absente, objet de tous les fantasmes » (80). Béatrice Pire propose alors de faire un parallèle entre la structure du roman qui met en miroir les histoires de Purity et d’Andreas Wolf et la double structure du roman familial caractérisé par les stades « pré-œdipien de l’enfant trouvé et œdipien du bâtard » (82). Mettant enfin en lumière le sous-texte shakespearien qui préside à l’écriture du roman, elle envisage Andreas et Purity comme et Ophélie, le tragique se trouvant toutefois contenu grâce à la résurrection du père de Purity qui refait surface à la fin et amorce ainsi une possible reconstitution familiale.

7 L’ultime volet est consacré à David Foster Wallace, dont le rapport embarrassé à ses pères littéraires se traduit par une expérience douloureuse de la condition d’orphelin. C’est cette carence parentale qui est à la racine de ce divertissement permanent, cet Infinite Jest qu’il emprunte à Hamlet. Si la figure du père défaillant est supplantée par « la figure du Maître, dont les avatars sont aussi les terroristes et les gourous de secte » (102), elle l’est aussi par le règne de l’image et de la télévision. Sollicitant les analyses de Bernard Stiegler, Béatrice Pire suggère que la « société parricide du divertissement » (102) force chacun à faire l’expérience de la condition d’orphelin. Béatrice Pire émet alors l’hypothèse que le recours au motif du conte permet de restaurer cet ordre disparu. Citant Bruno Bettelheim, elle rappelle que, pour l’enfant, la fonction du conte de fées est de « mettre de l’ordre dans sa maison intérieure » (106), suggérant pour finir que si Wallace a été considéré comme l’hôte ou le parent de cette génération, c’est

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précisément par la dimension hospitalière de son œuvre qui accueille les « gamins tristes de la génération à venir » (118).

8 L’essai de Béatrice Pire propose une étude extrêmement minutieuse dont le cadre critique, principalement psychanalytique, permet un éclairage absolument convaincant sur les figures de la décomposition familiale chez cinq auteurs unis non seulement par une même angoisse vis-à-vis de leur héritage littéraire mais aussi par leur statut d’hommes blancs, hétérosexuels, de classe moyenne, ayant souvent reçu le même type d’éducation. On peut alors émettre une légère réserve quant au choix du titre de l’ouvrage qui annonce une étude portant sur « le roman américain contemporain », avec toute l’hétérogénéité que cela présuppose. On aurait presque alors envie de prendre au mot Béatrice Pire qui, déclinant la métaphore familiale, suggère dans son avant-propos que ces cinq auteurs « auraient pu être sept comme dans un jeu de sept familles », ouvrant ici la possibilité de brosser le portrait d’une communauté plus élargie encore. Enfin, si l’essai se termine très logiquement avec une étude consacrée à David Foster Wallace, dont la mort en 2008 marque un tournant fort bien expliqué dans les dernières pages, on peut toutefois regretter que seuls deux romans publiés après ce suicide fassent l’objet d’analyses, Freedom (2010) et Purity (2015) de Franzen. Une conclusion aurait en effet pu mettre en perspective les œuvres plus récentes que ceux qui lui ont survécu ont écrites au cours de ces dix dernières années.

NOTES

1. SHEPPARD, R. Z. « Fiction’s New Fab Four », Time Magazine, 14 avril 1997, p. 89-90. 2. Une coquille s’est glissée dans la citation publiée. Il faut lire « month » au lieu de « mouth ». 3. MCCAFFERY, Larry. « An Interview with David Foster Wallace », Review of Contemporary Fiction, 13.2, 1993, p. 150. 4. Béatrice Pire cite notamment Roland Barthes : « tout récit est une mise en scène du Père (absent, caché ou hypostasié) - ce qui expliquerait la solidarité des formes narratives (et) des structures familiales ». BARTHES, Roland. Le Plaisir du texte. Paris : Seuil, 1973, p. 20. 5. TESONE, Juan Eduardo. « Transgression de l’interdit de l’inceste et problématique narcissique ». Interdit et Tabou. Dir. Marie-Claire Durieux, Félicie Nayrou, Hélène Parat, Paris : PUF, 2006, p. 169.

INDEX

Thèmes : Recensions

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AUTEURS

SOPHIE CHAPUIS Maîtresse de conférences, Université Jean Monnet, Saint-Etienne, laboratoire CELEC

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Carrie Hyde, Civic Longing : The Speculative Origins of U.S. Citizenship

Hélène Cottet

RÉFÉRENCE

Carrie Hyde, Civic Longing: The Speculative Origins of U.S. Citizenship, Cambridge, Harvard University Press, 2018, 308 p., $46,50, ISBN 9780674976153

1 « I am a citizen of somewhere else » (Hawthorne, 1968, 44). C’est en butant contre cette déclaration célèbre de Hawthorne que Carrie Hyde a élaboré son enquête : impossible, en effet, de se rapporter à une définition claire de citizen qui permette d’élucider un contexte de référence impliqué par Hawthorne et partagé par ses lecteurs. En nous faisant part de cette anecdote (Hyde, 2018, 18-19), Hyde nous représente ses propres questionnements de lectrice, lesquels ont toute leur importance dans cet ouvrage qui revendique une approche textuelle de l’histoire de la citoyenneté (« to return citizenship to the acts of reading and writing », 7). Par ailleurs, elle restitue le caractère proprement déroutant du constat dont elle s’empare dans son livre : l’absence de définition juridique du statut de citoyen des Etats-Unis avant le Civil Rights Act de 1866, dont les dispositions intègrent la Constitution à l’intérieur du XIVe amendement en 1868. En 1868 toujours, l’Expatriation Act apporte d’autres éléments cruciaux sur la possibilité de se défaire de cette citoyenneté.

2 Carrie Hyde insiste donc sur ce vide juridique qui dure près d’un siècle après l’indépendance des Etats-Unis, « when the cultural and juridical meaning of citizenship — as well as its scope — was under-articulated and open to debate » (1). Elle va étudier cette période précisément pour démontrer qu’en l’absence de définition juridique le terme de « citoyen » n’en est pas moins largement mis en circulation, et que la valeur même de cette catégorie politique est élaborée par les discours et débats qui s’en emparent, quand bien même ils ne décident encore de rien. Il faut alors admettre le mode « spéculatif » ou encore « subjonctif » des définitions de la citoyenneté qui ont cours avant 1868 : l’analogie proposée par Hyde avec le mode

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grammatical « subjonctif » (16-17) dit bien en effet un discours qui a conscience de sa propre irréalité, d’un décalage avec les faits, et qui exprime un souhait. Pour Carrie Hyde, ces discours subjonctifs revêtent souvent un caractère stratégique, car ils sont des moyens d’infléchir une définition encore en cours : « Their political efficacy resides in subjunctive formulations — where the possible (what might or could be) and the prescriptive (what should or ought to be) collide in language that seeks to compel by persuasion » (16). L’expression « civic longing » (ou encore « the longing to belong », 9) présente dans le titre fonctionne de manière similaire : il ne s’agit pas en effet de considérer « qui a la citoyenneté » et « qui ne l’a pas », pour Hyde, c’est le désir même d’appartenance, ou, dans certains cas, de désengagement, qui aurait façonné la notion de citoyenneté — et ce de manière à la fois préliminaire et durable.

3 La période qu’elle étudie ne serait donc pas vide mais pleine, si l’on considère que le caractère encore sous-déterminé de la citoyenneté américaine permet une réélaboration continue de son sens. Un tel règne des possibles ne signifie pas, par ailleurs, que le statut de citoyen ait été uniquement imaginé ou interprété dans une visée émancipatrice, car l’absence de cadre juridique clair a permis aussi bien l’articulation de conceptions très étriquées d’une appartenance politique. Toutes les propositions examinées par Hyde informent néanmoins la catégorie « citoyen », et cela, largement en-dehors de textes juridiques, c’est-à-dire de discours ayant une véritable efficacité garantie par l’état. C’est l’adjectif « extralegal » (traduit ici par « extra- juridique ») qui permet à l’auteur de définir deux particularités de ses sources : I use the term « extralegal » in two ways : both, in a simple sense, to collectively describe a number of nonlegal traditions of political authorization, and in a more specialized sense, to highlight the negative definitional impulse that has sustained and fueled the almost melancholic idealization of citizenship from its changeable outer limits. (9)

4 De fait, c’est le passage par la négative — par des figures de non-citoyens, ou par des « ailleurs » jugés soit plus hospitaliers que le territoire états-unien, soit, à l’inverse, inhospitaliers — qui contribue à fantasmer ou à idéaliser le statut du citoyen, à l’intérieur d’un imaginaire puissant qui reste culturellement actif.

5 « In this spirit, I read the imaginative traditions of citizenship as historically activated genres of political theory » (9) : c’est à l’occasion d’une introduction très dense — parfois trop, à l’image de cette dernière citation, lorsqu’à force de densité la langue de Hyde perd en clarté — que l’auteur précise son corpus et la méthode de son interprétation. En évoquant « les traditions imaginatives de la citoyenneté », Hyde veut prendre au sérieux la puissance de théorisation, mais aussi l’influence historique, de discours qui s’éloignent ostensiblement du réel. Elle ouvre alors un questionnement méthodologique plus vaste : « the early history of citizenship asks us to think expansively about the kind of documents that are integral to politics » (11). C’est en particulier une réhabilitation de la portée politique de la littérature que Hyde défend, à partir d’un processus d’historicisation : il s’agit en effet de percevoir quels sont les discours reçus de manière politique à l’époque qu’elle étudie, et notamment de prendre en compte combien la littérature états-unienne, tant à l’école qu’en dehors, recevait une importance politique. Elle ajoute : « The decentralized, extralegal development of citizenship offers an instructive opportunity for reexamining what it means to think of the imaginative arts as properly political — rather than normatively social or descriptively historical. » S’appuyant sur The Public and Its Problems de John Dewey, Hyde propose en effet de se départir des modalités indexiques selon lesquelles art et

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histoire sont articulés : l’art n’est pas seulement le véhicule d’une information, situable en son dehors, nous renseignant par exemple sur une réalité historique, il est le lieu où se jouent des manières de voir en commun et, à ce titre, il a pu être un outil de persuasion politique (12). En ayant l’occasion d’aller chercher ailleurs que dans un débat juridique les discours qui infléchissent une première définition de la citoyenneté américaine, Hyde a donc pleinement conscience de réviser les règles courantes des « échanges » entre littérature et histoire, et propose de nouvelles réflexions sur la portée politique de la littérature. Cette dimension théorique de l’ouvrage n’est pas le moindre de ses apports, d’autant que Hyde synthétise en passant bien des débats, et nous fait bénéficier de l’impressionnante somme de ses lectures.

6 Carrie Hyde commence son étude par un rappel du cadre législatif qui, en 1868, mettra un terme aux spéculations en définissant enfin clairement le statut de citoyen des Etats-Unis. Il faut en effet bien prendre en compte ce qui se décide au sein du XIVe amendement à la Constitution et de l’Expatriation Act pour prendre la mesure des différents sujets qui restaient, auparavant, ouverts. On peut souligner en particulier deux points importants qui sont verouillés avec l’encadrement juridique d’une citoyenneté nationale : le droit du sol l’emporte sur le droit du sang, si bien qu’en dépit de servitudes passées les Africains-Américains sont reconnus comme citoyens ; l’Expatriation Act formalise un modèle d’allégeance volontaire de la citoyenneté états- unienne, où l’on en vient à une réciprocité du contrat citoyen-Etat qui n’existait pas au préalable.

7 Si cette réciprocité n’était pas juridiquement établie alors, Hyde montre pourtant qu’elle existait, à l’état de croyance, pourrait-on dire, chez un écrivain comme David Ramsay, l’un des premiers historiens de la Révolution américaine, et auteur de l’ouvrage Dissertation on the Manner of Acquiring the Character and Privileges of a Citizen in the United States en 1789. Ce texte est en effet influencé par la philosophie politique de John Locke et le concept du contrat — pourtant la notion de « citoyen » elle même n’est pas utilisée par Locke, mais dénote l’influence de Rousseau. De manière générale, c’est bien Rousseau par le biais de la Révolution française et de la Déclaration des droits de l’homme et du citoyen qui influence un remplacement outre-atlantique de « sujet » par « citoyen ». Là où le premier est progressivement redéfini par la relation d’assujettissement à laquelle il se soumettrait, la citoyenneté est idéalisée comme l’appartenance politique qui confère des « droits » à qui la détient.

8 Ramsay, pour sa part, adoptait donc une lecture Lockienne qui, pour l’heure, ne coïncidait pas avec une loi fédérale. De manière plus générale, à l’intérieur de cette période formatrice, quiconque essaie de clarifier le statut de citoyen américain met essentiellement en avant ses propres choix de lecture. Carrie Hyde revient notamment sur les propositions faites par le procureur général Edward Bates en 1862, lorsqu’il tente de répondre à la question : est-ce que les hommes noirs peuvent être citoyens américains ? Remarquant qu’il n’existe pas de sources faisant autorité, Bates offre sa propre interprétation textualiste de la loi : en l’occurrence, l’absence de définition claire est reçue par lui comme une opportunité, autorisant tout à fait d’imaginer une citoyenneté des Noirs américains. Cette lecture va à l’encontre de celle fournie précédemment par Roger Taney, Chief Justice à la Cour suprême des Etats-Unis, dans la décision rendue en 1857 pour Dred Scott v. Sandford, qui excluait « la race africaine asservie » de la citoyenneté1. C’est ici selon la théorie de l’« intention originelle » qu’il faut comprendre la lecture faite par Taney du document sur lequel il décide de fonder

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sa décision, la Déclaration d’indépendance – Taney prétendant, au regard de divers éléments contextuels et extrapolations, qu’il était impensable pour les pères fondateurs de prévoir que les Noirs américains soient concernés par leur document.

9 La décision dite Dred Scott fut très importante, mais Hyde explique qu’elle ne peut pour autant être tenue pour représentative des efforts fournis lors de cette période pour définir le statut de citoyen, notamment si on la place en regard des premières constitutions de certains états qui, elles, étaient inclusives. Carrie Hyde se saisit donc de ces différents exemples pour mettre en garde de manière générale contre toute lecture « originaliste », biais que l’on peut conserver même en tant qu’historien ou historienne lorsque les enjeux actuellement charriés par tel ou tel effort de définition sont projetés dans la source elle-même. Hyde sera notamment passée plus tôt par l’exemple des Amérindiens pour bien indiquer que, dans leur cas, l’émancipation passait par des revendications de « souveraineté » qui prennaient largement le pas sur un fantasme de citoyenneté. Il existait, autrement dit, plusieurs manières d’envisager l’appartenance politique, autant de nuances que l’on tend à effacer si l’on interpose entre la source et son interprétation la valeur que nous accordons aujourd’hui à la notion de citoyenneté.

10 Si un retour aux pratiques d’interprétation de Ramsay, Bates, ou Taney, permet donc de souligner le caractère spéculatif de leurs lectures, la deuxième partie de l’ouvrage montre comment, en l’absence de texte de référence clair, il est un livre, la Bible, qui a pu faire autorité en proposant une autre version de la citoyenneté. La loi divine se substitue, alors, à la loi des hommes, et la citoyenneté chrétienne implique, semble-t-il, un renoncement à la politique. C’est là le phénomène qu’étudie Carrie Hyde en s’intéressant à la circulation d’une traduction — concurrente à celle de la King James Version — d’un épître de Saint Paul aux Philippiens où la notion de citoyenneté apparaît : « nous avons notre citoyenneté dans les cieux, d’où nous attendons comme sauveur le Seigneur Jésus Christ » (« we are citizens of heaven, from which we earnestly expect a savior, the Lord Jesus Christ », Thomson, 1808, Phil. 3 :19-21). Comme elle l’explique, l’allégeance aux cieux dépend d’une rupture d’allégeance envers la nation, mais c’est là un déplacement à double tranchant, particulièrement dans le cas des Noirs américains : il peut être signe de fatalisme – renoncement à atteindre ici et maintenant des droits qui seront octroyés dans une autre vie – aussi bien que de résistance – il autorise la critique des institutions humaines au vu d’un modèle religieux. D’autre part, Hyde s’intéresse au développement d’un nationalisme chrétien aux Etats-Unis qui complique encore ce recours à la Bible, puisque, de fait, il s’agit alors d’envisager un royaume de Dieu sur terre, et l’avènement d’une citoyenneté chrétienne ici-bas. Comme elle le note, « political commentators who successfully fused these two strains of Christian thought were able to repurpose the otherwise merely fatalistic metaphor of heavenly citizenship as a theological call to arms and reform. » (Hyde, 2018, 47) Dans ce deuxième grand temps de l’ouvrage, Hyde étudie donc des textes dans lesquels le christianisme devient l’instrument d’une critique de l’esclavage. Elle s’attarde notamment sur Appeal to the Coloured Citizens of the World, de l’abolitionniste noir David Walker (1829), et, ce qui est assez attendu, sur l’œuvre de Harriet Beecher Stowe, choisissant cependant non pas Uncle Tom’s Cabin mais Dred, son second roman abolitionniste, datant de 1856. C’est en particulier dans le cas de ce second texte qu’elle démontre les usages critiques ambigüs d’une notion de citoyenneté empruntée à la Bible, qui permet aussi bien de retarder toute justice que de juger les défaillances des

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Etats-Unis, et, ici, permet surtout à l’auteur de constituer tous Chrétiens, noirs ou blancs, en co-citoyens.

11 C’est encore aux exclus politiques, qui gagneraient à une définition de la citoyenneté dégagée des lois temporelles états-uniennes, que Hyde s’intéresse dans la suite de cette partie, prêtant attention cette fois à l’usage rhétorique qui est fait non plus de la « loi divine » mais d’autres « lois supérieures », les « lois de la nature ». L’objet dont elle part est ici la révolte d’esclaves ayant eu lieu à bord du Créole, en 1841 : 135 esclaves sont libérés lorsqu’ils accostent aux Bahamas, territoire britannique où l’esclavage avait été aboli en 1834. Un tel événement donne soudainement à voir la traversée d’une frontière au-delà de laquelle l’esclavage se révèle dans toute son aberration. L’océan par lequel les esclaves ont accédé à leur liberté devient ainsi représentatif d’une nature qui n’admet pas l’esclavage, et fragilise l’échelle locale à laquelle il persiste. Hyde met ici en regard des textes de Daniel Webster, Secrétaire d’État au moment des faits, et de Frederick Douglass — passant notamment par sa seule œuvre de fiction, publiée en 1852, The Heroic Slave, a heartwarming Narrative of the Adventures of , in Pursuit of Liberty. Il s’agit de comparer les directions inverses dans lesquelles ils mènent l’évocation d’une loi de la nature pour dé-légitimer ou légitimer la révolte des esclaves. Les forces du climat ou l’océan lui-même donnent lieu aux métaphores qui sous- tendent leurs textes, et chez Douglass permettent de souligner le caractère circonscris et local de l’esclavagisme. La portée critique d’une loi naturelle dans le discours est donc qu’elle vient autoriser la révolte et met en scène, au mode subjonctif, l’existence politique de personnes privées de droits.

12 Il existe une modalité moins prescriptive du subjonctif, ayant trait au domaine du possible, que Hyde explore dans sa troisième et dernière partie à travers la notion de « fictivité » (« fictionality — the epistemic mode and problem of the fictive », 117). Il est ici plus pleinement question de littérature, et des relations spécifiques entre textes littéraires et politique. Il semble d’abord qu’un rapprochement puisse être fait entre le désintéressement, ou désengagement, chrétien et l’autonomie qui peut être accordée à la littérature. Pourtant, le croyant tient l’alternative d’une citoyenneté aux cieux comme véritable ou réelle, là où le lecteur se projetant dans l’univers autre de l’œuvre de fiction n’a pas cette foi en l’existence du monde dépeint. L’une des thèses fortes de Hyde sera alors de dire que c’est parce que la fiction échoue, d’une certaine façon, à concevoir une « alternative habitable » (« an inhabitable alternative », 121) aux réalités politiques du présent qu’elle pourra rediriger le lecteur vers la politique et une reconsidération de celle-ci.

13 Hyde veut ici s’intéresser plus directement à un art qui proclamerait sa coupure d’avec le monde, son absence de valeur référentielle, et elle contourne alors deux possibilités : celle d’une valeur politique de la fiction réaliste, la plus raisonnable au premier abord, ou celle d’une radicalité politique prêtée d’emblée à tout art « autonome », qui critiquerait forcément l’histoire dont il se détache : « Critics sometimes discuss the overblown unreality of the romantic aesthetic as a kind of “aesthetic dissent,” wherein the imagination’s departure from history is itself a form of radical protest or revolt » (122). Elle se penche ici tout particulièrement sur Nathaniel Hawthorne, qui dans « The Custom House », texte utilisé comme introduction à The Scarlet Letter, et l’un des lieux principaux où l’auteur développe sa théorie du genre littéraire de la « romance », déclarait : « I am a citizen of somewhere else ». La formule proclame une indépendance qui ressemble au renoncement chrétien à ce monde, mais la notion de citoyenneté n’en

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projette pas moins cet ailleurs selon le modèle de l’appartenance politique. Comme le montre Hyde, c’est toute la subtilité de la « romance » telle que conçue par Hawthorne que d’être cette écriture liminale entre l’ailleurs et l’ici, et qui nous retourne au monde par le biais même de la défamiliarisation. Il n’est donc pas question de nier le monde, ni d’être absent de la politique, mais de la suspendre, et c’est ainsi que Hyde interprète également la notion de neutralité chère à Hawthorne. Être citoyen d’un ailleurs, ce n’est pas non plus s’affranchir des réalités politiques, mais, ainsi que l’interprète Hyde, précisément remettre en question la doctrine britannique de l’allégeance perpétuelle à la nation qui avait cours avant le passage de l’Expatriation Act, et s’extraire du « sol » qui conditionnerait d’emblée l’appartenance. C’est donc, en somme, prendre poétiquement une position politique.

14 Hyde montre d’autre part que Hawthorne, en accentuant dans certains de ses contes, « The New Adam and Eve » par exemple, la virtualité même du monde fictif qu’il propose, nous préparerait d’autant mieux à en revenir, comme d’un exil : à en revenir mus par la nostalgie, précisément, du monde que nous aurions laissé derrière nous en lisant. Il y aurait ainsi une ré-affiliation politique permise par la fiction, sur le mode du désir (« longing »). Mais l’artifice même auquel le texte aura exposé son lecteur aura défait, du même coup, tout ce qui pouvait sembler naturel dans cette appartenance, c’est-à-dire dans le lien entre citoyen et état.

15 Ayant esquissé avec Hawthorne certains des chemins les plus paradoxaux sur lesquels littérature et politique sont amenés à s’entre-croiser, Hyde passe ensuite à un tout autre cas en explorant les usages didactiques de la littérature américaine. Sa dernière étude porte ainsi sur un texte moins canonique en apparence que ceux de Hawthorne mais qui, quoiqu’écrit à l’occasion de la guerre civile, a eu une longévité exceptionnelle, notamment dans les salles de classe. Il s’agit de The Man Without a Country (1862), une nouvelle d’Edward Everett Hale qui porte sur la traîtrise et sur la punition imaginaire du coupable, condamné à errer toute sa vie sur les océans sans jamais plus entendre le nom même de sa patrie. Il est un exemple parfait de negative instruction, c’est-à-dire du potentiel éducatif offert par le contre-modèle. A ce titre, le texte offre aussi un exemple parfait de ce que Hyde entend par l’idéalisation de la citoyenneté : on y voit des personnes qui en sont privées – traîtres, exilés, esclaves – et c’est à partir d’eux que le caractère désirable de la citoyenneté apparaît, sans qu’il soit besoin d’aucune précision sur la nature exacte des droits et privilèges du citoyen. À nouveau, c’est sur un mode résolument nostalgique que se joue le désir d’appartenance. Ici, la sous-détermination du statut du citoyen est décisive pour en élaborer la valeur même. Mais comme le montre Hyde, les limites inévitables d’une instruction par la négative tiennent à sa réception, qui peut déjouer les intentions de départ. Ici, c’est le caractère tyrannique et injuste de la punition qui a pu, au contraire, rendre peu souhaitable l’appartenance à l’état capable de l’infliger, et c’est alors la sympathie ressentie pour l’exilé qui aura pu s’étendre à d’autres personnes privées de droit, notamment les esclaves transitant eux aussi par les mers et à qui le traître est implicitement comparé.

16 Le mode subjonctif propre aux discours étudiés par Hyde aura donc mis au jour un travail politique effectué par une « déréalisation » du statu quo – qui entretient le débat tout en paraissant s’y dérober. Revenant sur le corpus qu’elle constitue dans l’ouvrage, on peut remarquer, en sus, que les textes extra-juridiques dont part Hyde ont tous en commun d’évoquer une extra-territorialité où se déploient vraiment les différentes possibilités d’une citoyenneté. Qu’il s’agisse du royaume des cieux, des océans

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internationaux sur lesquels vogue le Créole, de l’ « ailleurs » de Hawthorne, ou de l’homme sans patrie voguant lui aussi sur les mers, il s’agit bien à chaque fois de se déporter en dehors du sol états-unien pour interroger la politique américaine. Ainsi que le note Hyde, il semble tout à fait paradoxal qu’aussi bien le christianisme ou la romance hawthornienne soient très rapidement devenus les marqueurs d’une certaine américanéité. On peut s’interroger sur cette faculté à naturaliser ou « ré-affilier », en quelque sorte, des pensées qui paraissaient se déprendre nettement d’un enracinement national, et il apparaît surprenant que Hyde ne se soit pas plus systématiquement interressée à ce phénomène : si elle considère qu’un nationalisme chrétien, par exemple, transforme considérablement le sens donné aux invocations religieuses de la « citoyenneté », qu’advient-il des significations politiques qu’elle donne à la romance dès lors que Hawthorne est lui aussi lu comme un écrivain national ? C’est en fait le maniement de la notion d’« autonomie », rapportée à la littérature américaine, qui reste un point malaisé dans l’ouvrage, tant il demeure attendu, au cours du XIXe siècle, que la littérature ait une pertinence pour la jeune nation, soit prise dans un rapport transitif à celle-ci, ce que montrent par exemple les usages scolaires et civiques du texte de Hale. Hawthorne, quoiqu’il soit à l’origine de l’enquête menée, reste néanmoins un cas limite à l’intérieur de celle-ci, à partir de la singulière position dedans-dehors qui fut la sienne et qui n’est pas toujours raccordée aux partis-pris méthodologiques du reste de l’ouvrage.

17 La cohérence de Civic Longing n’en reste pas moins dans son panorama des « ailleurs de la citoyenneté » (« the elsewhere of citizenship », pour reprendre le titre éloquent d’un des chapitres), une somme spéculative qui nous restituerait presque une alternative juridique. C’est peut-être en effet en repartant de la distinction appuyée par Hannah Arendt entre lex romaine et nomos grec à partir de leurs étymologies – lex, la loi comprise comme rapport entre les hommes et accord entre eux ; nomos, la loi d’ores et déjà rapportée à une action de répartir, résider, établir les frontières (Arendt, 1961, 104) – que l’on est tenté de redéfinir la plupart des sources extra-juridiques exploitées par Hyde comme des sources alter-juridiques. Ce qui s’y fantasmerait, ne pourrait-ce alors pas être une conception possible de la loi comme lex – fondement du rapport même entre les hommes –, si bien que la sous-détermination de la notion de citoyenneté aurait permis, pendant un temps, de la soustraire aux seules logiques de territoire ? Si l’on se rappelle que le terme même de « citoyen » est emprunté à un épisode de l’histoire française – mais que la Déclaration des droits de l’homme et du citoyen composait elle-même avec l’exemple de la Déclaration d’indépendance américaine – on perçoit d’autant mieux combien l’émergence du terme échappe aux nationalités, ce qui peut aujourd’hui sembler paradoxal. En mettant audacieusement au centre de son étude des pratiques d’écriture et, surtout, de lecture, Hyde accentue de fait cette instablité de la citoyenneté, et nous restitue ainsi toute l’amplitude d’un désir d’appartenance.

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BIBLIOGRAPHIE

ARENDT, Hannah, La Condition de l’homme moderne, Paris, Calmann-Lévy, 1961.

Dred Scott v. Sanford : A Brief History with Documents, dir. Paul Finkelman, New York, Bedford, 1997.

HAWTHORNE, Nathaniel, The Scarlet Letter, Centenary Edition of the Works of Nathaniel Hawthorne, Columbus, Ohio State University Press, 1968.

THOMSON, Charles, trad., The Holy Bible, Containing the Old and New Covenant, commonly Called the Old and New Testament : Translated from the Greek, Philadelphie, Jane Aitken, 1808.

NOTES

1. « But it is too clear for dispute, that the enslaved African race were not intended to be included, and formed no part of the people who framed and adopted this declaration; for if the language, as understood in that day, would embrace them, the conduct of the distinguished men who framed the Declaration of Independence would have been utterly and flagrantly inconsistent with the principles they asserted; and instead of the sympathy of mankind, to which they so confidently appeared, they would have deserved and received universal rebuke and reprobation. » (Dred Scott v. Sanford, 1997, p. 63)

INDEX

Thèmes : Recensions

AUTEURS

HÉLÈNE COTTET MCF, Université de Lille

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Dean J. Franco, The Border and the Line: Race and Literature in Los Angeles

Michael Docherty

REFERENCES

Dean J. Franco, The Border and the Line: Race and Literature in Los Angeles, Stanford, Stanford University Press, 2019, 224 pages, $25.95, ISBN 9781503607774

1 As Dean Franco reminds us in The Border and the Line: Race and Literature in Los Angeles, newspaper magnate Harry Chandler once infamously branded Los Angeles America’s “white spot” and sought to keep it that way (132). Throughout his latest book, Franco demonstrates the extent to which the city’s multi-ethnic spatialities and textualities have long constituted networks of resistance to and rejection of such monocultural visions as Chandler’s. In doing so Franco makes a significant and novel contribution to the study of the United States’ most singularly non-singular city, with a work of refreshing disciplinary hybridity—part literary critique, part history, part urban geography, part sociological study, but all Los Angeles.

2 Scholarly ambitions towards totalizing or typifying theories of Los Angeles’ cultures tend to founder upon the city’s sheer scale and multiplicity—one need only note the increasing circumspection with which the sweeping claims of Reyner Banham are now viewed (Avila 248). When even the grandest schema seem likely to prove inadequate, a more partial and selective approach, one that does not claim completeness in either its corpus or its conclusions, may in that very refusal be the approach that best “gives us a look into what lies beneath” (12). Certainly, Franco’s illuminating, incisive, frequently anti-canonical “alternative to exemplariness” is a vindication of this latter model (12).

3 Franco’s introduction begins, with the aid of some personal reflections, by using the “odd fluidity” (2) of the Westside-spanning Pico Boulevard as a case study in the ways that L.A.’s “economic, linguistic, ethnic, sonic, and culinary diversity” map to its geography in forms that are segmented but “run into each other inelegantly” (1, 3). He then offers an admirably effective capsule account of L.A.’s intersecting histories of

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race and space—a story of “simultaneous containment and flow” (11). From this, Franco draws the persuasive conclusion that whilst L.A.’s “strategies for producing and managing race are not exceptional”, in seeming “so ahistorical” and yet “so segregated” the city has a “quicksilver character” that does render its racial-spatial politics unlike those of any other American city (11).

4 Chapter 1 focuses primarily on Latinx communities, spaces, and texts. Franco offers a subtle and extensive reading of Helena Maria Víramontes’ Boyle Heights-set novel And Their Dogs Came with Them as a text in which “miracles occur as ruptures—both eruptions and interruptions, events that break from the spatial and material configurations of given life and linear time” (51). Franco segues from this to an exploration of the work done in the very neighborhoods represented in Víramontes’ novel by Union de Vecinos, a community group which, operating on principles of Marxist-informed liberation theology, “exists to empower residents of Boyle Heights to make active claims of communal ownership upon their neighborhood” (62).

5 When Boyle Heights was racked by gang violence in the 1980s, as Franco has it, “the neighborhood did not know itself as a neighborhood because “all territory was contested by gangs and police”—residents themselves were unable to occupy it (63). Franco identifies the means by which UV (Union de Vecinos), through positive engagement with gang members and nonviolent but determined occupation of local spaces, all grounded in “the church-based ethos of loving the neighbor”, gradually “remapped the neighborhood in the image of the neighbor” (65). Franco argues that UV’s work not only demonstrates “the process by which metaphor meets miracle” that Víramontes describes (65); it moreover locates the origins of such a miracle “not in the divine other but in the receptivity to radical possibility among the neighbors themselves”—that is, in a revolutionary hospitality (66).

6 Franco’s second chapter again combines a reading of a neighborhood social program with a reading of a literary text. The primary focus is on ’s work as the founder of the Watts Writers Workshop in the immediate aftermath of the 1965 Watts Rebellion. Here, Franco makes extensive use of archival material to trace how Schulberg’s “earnest faith in representation in representation was inevitably challenged by […] more complicated dynamics of law and property” (75). Thus, what began as an “exercise in expression” became equally a “space-making venture” (82), writes Franco. Recognizing the “materiality of the Workshop writers’ lives” as both a barrier to expression and the very thing that made such expression so necessary, Schulberg pivoted “from writing to real estate, as he prioritized the establishment of a safe, stable home for writers and artists” (86). In this respect, Franco suggests, the Writers Workshop can be understood as an exercise in neighborliness both psychological and spatial, as Schulberg’s “secure perspectives of a West L.A. writer” gave way to “the specific material needs of Watt residents” (83), and Schulberg’s efforts to establish Frederick Douglass House as a reading and performance space grounded him more firmly and physically to the community than critiques that he was an “elite, white outsider” (as advanced by local black nationalists) acknowledged (87).

7 Franco is not, however, by any means blind to the ideological and practical limitations in Schulberg’s project, and to that end offers a nuanced account elaborating upon James Baldwin’s critique thereof, concluding that Baldwin’s intervention might bring us closer to the “politics of liberation” that the Workshop briefly gestured towards but could not attain. Franco follows his disquisition on Schulberg with an analysis of Paul

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Beatty’s Compton-set 2015 novel The Sellout. In Beatty’s novel, writes Franco, politics “simultaneously incorporates and excludes, and perpetuates, the differential logic of insiders and outsiders, winners and losers” (108). In this regard he draws persuasive parallels with both Baldwin’s and Schulberg’s work—although one wonders if this could have been achieved more effectively had the reading of Beatty been enmeshed more cohesively within the analyses of Baldwin and Schulberg rather than appearing as a largely discrete postscript.

8 Chapter 3 takes Franco to the Los Angeles Eruv. Eruvin are areas of public space redesignated as domestic by rabbinical authority, thereby enabling Jewish communities to engage in activities on the sabbath that would ordinarily be prohibited outside the home, and L.A.’s is the largest in the West. Franco’s reading of the spatial, social, religious, and racial politics of eruv as a mechanism of community or neighborhood formation is typically sophisticated and multidimensional. He alights on the central tension inherent in the emplacement of the eruv’s “counter-cartography” within existing (secular) municipal structures—on one hand “the requirement that a non-Jew participate in the formation of the eruv” (125), on the other the “eruv’s reliance on public utilities and it necessary ‘mixture’ with an official non-Jew” (126). Franco suggests compellingly that if the eruv represents “Jewishness as property”, its model for doing so manifests an alternative to critical conceptions of “whiteness as property”, because its “claim on area” does not “secure possession” (132).

9 As the chapter proceeds, Franco collocates his discussion of the eruv’s dialectics of neighborliness with a reading of My Neighborhood, a 2013 documentary about a collaborative effort between leftist Jewish Israelis and a Palestinian family to save the latter’s home from Jewish settlers. I am skeptical of Franco’s claim that “any discussion of Jewish ‘territoriality without sovereignty’” (i.e. his discussion of the eruv’s politics) “must take on the broader relationship of diaspora Jews and the State of Israel” (133, italics in both cases mine). This precludes, problematically, the potential for diaspora Jews to occupy space without having the terms of that occupation interrogated through the lens of Israeli politics. It therein by implication seems to impute to diaspora Jews, in any claim they might make upon space, a kind of inevitable metonymic answerability for the actions of a state on the grounds of their ethnic/religious connection with it. Mercifully, however, this troublingly absolute claim is an exception in what is otherwise a nuanced and subtle exploration of Jewishness, neighborliness, community, and cohabitation. Indeed, in using the politics of the eruv to illuminate My Neighbhorhood and vice versa, Franco provides exemplary evidence of how scholars whose work is intimately embedded in a highly particular sense of place can nonetheless respond productively and positively to the transnational turn in critical studies without abandoning their essential localism.

10 In his concluding chapter, Franco returns to Pico Boulevard, and to the sense of the personal that suffused his introduction, with equally compelling results. He recounts how his sense of space, race, and Los Angeles is informed by his own identity as the son of “a Jewish Latina woman growing up in a deracinated, non-ethnic, atheistic home [in which] none of these identity association meant anything for her beyond a troublesome mix of shame and fear and a dose of financial anxiety that she carried forward into our home” (157). Such personal reflections are combined with perceptive remarks on the discliplines of comparative ethnic and literary studies, constituting in effect a manifesto for the methodology that has informed the preceding chapters. Franco is

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especially strong in interrogating the longstanding academic borderline between Jewish studies and ethnic studies—specifically the issue of why “Jews [are] absent—or worse—from the preponderance of ethnic studies projects” (160). It might perhaps be more customary to find such methodological/field-interrogating observations in the introduction, but appearing as a coda they benefit from the contextualization provided by Franco’s preceding primary discussions.

11 Franco’s theoretical methodology is compellingly syncretic. He draws upon and synthesizes the work of a multiplicity of thinkers, often but not exclusively from broadly Marxist and post-Marxist traditions, to create a methodology entirely appropriate for the city to which it is applied—possessed of a multifariousness and heterogeneity in its constitution that, paradoxically, conspires to create an overarching conceptual cohesion and integrity. Key sources are the works of Emmanuel Levinas, Henri Lefebvre, Alain Badiou, Gilles Deleuze, Ernesto Laclau, Michael Hames-Garcia, and Ed Soja.

12 Franco’s critical omissions, moreover, are as instructive as his inclusions. Mike Davis, for example, receives only one fleeting reference in the main text and another in the notes. Davis has over the past three decades come to cast a long shadow over scholars who seek to use culture to parse the geographies and politics of Los Angeles, and the field will long remain justly indebted to his totemic interventions. It can only speak positively of the current richness and vitality of cultural scholarship on Los Angeles, however, that thinkers of Franco’s skill and vision are escaping Davis’ frameworks (which, as Casey Shoop has noted, can ultimately “fall prey” to the very same city myths they seek to “debunk and historicize”) to chart new courses for the understanding of Los Angeles (Shoop 236). A critical lacuna that seems perhaps more questionable is the relatively limited presence of Jacques Derrida in Franco’s book. Levinas’ ethics of hospitality and neighborliness are intrinsic to Franco’s theorizations of separation and connection between and within communities, but Franco does not explicitly invoke Derrida’s vital expansions upon and responses to Levinas’ work in this area, despite alluding elsewhere to the former’s deconstructions of subjectivity.

13 Franco’s structure also effectively models the city he finds: segregation and difference are acknowledged, even embedded, in the form, but this is not to the exclusion or denial of fluidity, of connection, of contiguity or comparability between segmented groupings. The book “doubles back on itself and revisits its own terms because its subjects—race, space, and Los Angeles—do the same” (25). As his title implies, the principal connective fibre that runs throughout Franco’s text is the notion that borders and lines are not (or not always) the same thing. Lines on maps may mark certain borders in legality, but borders in a social sense are better understood as spaces— contingent, covalent, often unstable or mobile.

14 As Franco himself acknowledges, this is a conception with debts to Gloria Anzaldúa’s “critical coinage of ‘the borderlands’ as a space of possibility”, and to Sandro Mezzadra and Brett Neilson’s idea of the “borderscape” (22). (Arguably, it also recalls Frederick Jackson Turner’s understanding of frontiers as liminal zones of movement rather than merely dividing lines between types of space—an ironic concordance given Turner’s infamous identification of American spatial occupation with white monoculture.) Franco’s most significant original contribution, however, lies in mapping the ways in which cultures of Los Angeles are so often defined by the essential tensions that occur between the competing meanings of border and line. Intimately concerned with how

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people cohabit in communities, Franco’s field-expanding book ultimately reveals itself to be at root preoccupied with what happens when the border and the line themselves must cohabit in a single space.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

AVILA, Eric. Popular Culture in the Age of White Flight: Fear and Fantasy in Suburban Los Angeles. Berkeley, University of California Press, 2004.

DAVIS, Mike. City of Quartz: Excavating the Future in Los Angeles. New York, Verso, 2006 [1990].

SHOOP, Casey. “Corpse and Accomplice: Fredric Jameson, Raymond Chandler, and the Representation of History in California”. Cultural Critique, vol. 77, Winter 2011, pp. 205-238. DOI: 10.5749/culturalcritique.77.2011.0205

ANZALDÚA, Gloria. Borderlands/La Frontera. San Francisco, Aunt Lute Books, 1987.

MEZZADRA, Sandro and Brett NEILSON. Border as Method: Or, the Multiplication of Labor. Durham, Duke University Press, 2013.

TURNER, Frederick Jackson. The Frontier in American History. New York, Henry Holt, 1921.

INDEX

Subjects: Recensions

AUTHOR

MICHAEL DOCHERTY University of Kent

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Hélène Le Dantec-Lowry, Claire Parfait, Matthieu Renault, Marie- Jeanne Rossignol et Pauline Vermeren (dir.), Écrire l’histoire depuis les marges : une anthologie d’historiens africains-américains, 1855-1965

Nicolas Martin-Breteau

RÉFÉRENCE

Hélène Le Dantec-Lowry, Claire Parfait, Matthieu Renault, Marie-Jeanne Rossignol et Pauline Vermeren (dir.), Écrire l’histoire depuis les marges : une anthologie d’historiens africains-américains, 1855-1965, Marseille, Terra HN éditions, collection « SHS », 2018, http://www.shs.terra-hn-editions.org/Collection/?-Historiens-africains-americains-

1 Publiée en 2018 après plusieurs années de travail collectif, l’anthologie Écrire l’histoire depuis les marges : une anthologie d’historiens africains-américains, 1855-1965 est un ouvrage important et novateur1. L’ouvrage présente en effet des textes de certains historiens et historiennes africaines-américaines ayant vécu entre le milieu du XIXe siècle et le milieu du XXe siècle à la fois pour leur rôle pionnier dans l’écriture de l’histoire des Noir.e.s aux États-Unis et, ce faisant, dans la réécriture de l’histoire des États-Unis. Encore peu connu en France, leur travail est désormais accessible en libre accès grâce à une sélection de onze textes pour la première fois traduits et présentés en français.

2 Dirigée par des spécialistes d’histoire des États-Unis et de philosophie postcoloniale – Hélène Le Dantec-Lowry, Claire Parfait, Matthieu Renault, Marie-Jeanne Rossignol et

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Pauline Vermeren –, l’ouvrage accueille aussi les contributions de Claire Bourhis- Mariotti, Rahma Jerad et Michaël Roy. L’anthologie se présente donc comme le fruit d’une collaboration de plusieurs laboratoires et programmes de recherche dans les universités Paris Diderot, Paris 13 et Sorbonne Nouvelle-Paris 3, réunis à l’intérieur du projet Sorbonne-Paris-Cité, « Écrire l’histoire depuis les marges ». L’ouvrage illustre la fécondité des projets de recherche collaboratifs et la mise à disposition de leurs résultats sur Internet.

3 Malgré leur ancienneté, les textes présentés ont été choisis pour leur valeur toujours actuelle dans les débats concernant l’écriture de l’histoire africaine-américaine et, plus largement, l’écriture de l’histoire des groupes sociaux minoritaires. De ce point de vue, l’anthologie invite à réfléchir sur plusieurs questions connexes, comme l’épistémologie de l’histoire et son rôle politique, l’élaboration du récit national, pas seulement aux États-Unis. À cet égard, Écrire l’histoire depuis les marges propose de (re)découvrir une historiographie qui s’est d’emblée pensée et construite dans l’engagement politique en faveur de la dignité et la justice raciales.

Une étude des origines de l’histoire africaine- américaine

4 Écrire l’histoire depuis les marges présente plusieurs générations d’historiens et d’historiennes africaines-américaines, amateures ou professionnelles, connues ou moins connues, depuis le milieu du XIXe siècle jusqu’au Mouvement pour les droits civiques. En cela, l’ouvrage permet d’explorer les origines de l’histoire noire américaine comme discipline scientifique à une époque où ce sujet d’étude était largement ignoré ou méprisé par la profession historienne dominante blanche.

5 L’anthologie propose la traduction de 11 textes représentatifs de l’œuvre de onze historiens et historiennes noires américaines : William C. Nell (1816-1874), William Wells Brown (1814-1884), Williams (1849-1891), Ida B. Wells (1862-1931), W. E. B. Du Bois (1868-1963), John Hope Franklin (1915-2009), Lorenzo J. Greene (1899-1988), Rayford Logan (1897-1982), Dorothy B. Porter (1905-1995), Benjamin A. Quarles (1904-1996) et Charles H. Wesley (1891-1987). Réalisées par Arnaud Courgey, Élise Padirac et Laurent Vannini, ces traductions impeccables de préfaces ou de chapitres d’ouvrage, sont à chaque fois accompagnées d’une notice introductive détaillée qui donne des indications biographiques sur leur auteur.e et permet de situer le texte à la fois dans son œuvre, le contexte général de la période et l’historiographie africaine-américaine. D’une façon générale, tous ces textes entendaient rompre avec l’historiographie dominante de leur temps pour réécrire l’histoire des États-Unis depuis le point de vue africain-américain – une ambition critique et parfois apologétique illustrée en 1876 par George Washington Williams lorsqu’il résume la guerre de Sécession d’une phrase : « l’esclave jeta sa houe, prit son fusil et sauva le pays ».

6 Le premier texte traduit est la préface de à son ouvrage paru en 1855, The Colored Patriots of the qui traite de façon pionnière du rôle des soldats africains-américains pendant ce moment fondateur que fut la guerre d’Indépendance dans l’histoire nationale états-unienne. Ce texte est le seul datant de la période antebellum bien que, comme le rappelle Claire Parfait dans sa notice, les premiers historiens africains-américains amateurs aient publié des ouvrages dès les

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années 1830. C’est par exemple le cas de Robert Benjamin Lewis avec Light and Truth, Collected from the Bible and Ancient and Modern History (1836) et Hosea Easton avec Treatise on the Intellectual Character & Civil & Political Condition of Colored People of the United States and the Prejudice Exercised Towards Them (1837). De façon révélatrice, ces premiers travaux sont publiés au moment où le militantisme africain-américain contre l’esclavage devient plus radical et offensif.

7 La grande majorité des textes de l’anthologie appartient donc au siècle qui suit l’émancipation en 1865. Les deux derniers textes traduits et présentés ont été publiés en 1965, à l’apogée du Mouvement pour les droits civiques. Il s’agit d’une part d’un chapitre de l’ouvrage classique de Rayford W. Logan, The Betrayal of the Negro, intitulé « The Roots of Recovery » qui propose un panorama historique des « soubassements » du « progrès noir » jusqu’aux années 1960. Il s’agit d’autre part de l’essai de Charles Harris Wesley, « Le traitement des Noirs américains dans l’étude et l’enseignement de l’histoire des États-Unis », où l’auteur plaide pour un renouvellement de l’enseignement de l’histoire africaine-américaine en insistant sur la longue durée depuis la vie en Afrique et sur le rôle actif des Africain.e.s-Américain.e.s dans leur propre histoire. La chronologie qui gouverne l’anthologie est judicieuse dans la mesure où l’histoire africaine-américaine se structure comme discipline pendant cette période qui voit l’émergence d’historiennes et d’historiens professionnels aux travaux renommés, comme W. E. B. Du Bois, Benjamin Quarles, Rayford Logan et John Hope Franklin, ainsi que la figure tutélaire de l’histoire noire, Carter G. Woodson – dont on peut regretter l’absence dans l’anthologie. C’est le mouvement Black Power, grâce à l’instauration de départements de Black Studies dans les universités américaines à partir de la fin des années 1960 qui établira la reconnaissance institutionnelle et scientifique de ce champ de recherche aujourd’hui pratiqué par une grande majorité d’historiens et d’historiennes blanches.

8 De même, le choix du genre de l’anthologie se révèle très pertinent pour présenter des travaux peu connus du public français, y compris universitaire. Comme l’expliquent les auteur.e.s dans leur introduction, l’anthologie ne doit pas être identifiée à un genre simplement littéraire : en rassemblant des textes significatifs sur un thème, celle-ci permet de présenter un domaine de recherche scientifique de façon à la fois concise et rigoureuse. En France, ce genre a du reste donné lieu à des publications marquantes en sciences sociales, notamment à propos de la recherche états-unienne. Ce fut le cas de L’École de Chicago. Naissance de l’écologie urbaine par Yves Grafmeyer et Isaac Joseph ou, plus récemment, de Black Feminism. Anthologie du féminisme africain-américain, 1975-2000 par Elsa Dorlin, ou encore Critical race theory : une introduction aux grands textes par Hourya Bentouhami et Mathias Möschel2.

9 En ce sens, Écrire l’histoire depuis les marges vient utilement compléter les recherches actuelles effectuées aux États-Unis sur les origines de l’historiographie africaine- américaine. Ces dernières années, ce travail de « redécouverte » a notamment été entrepris par Pero Gaglo Dagbovie dans The Early Black History Movement et Carter G. Woodson in Washington, D.C., mais aussi par John Ernest dans Liberation Historiography, ou Stephen G. Hall dans A Faithful Account of the Race3. C’est d’ailleurs en pensant à des initiatives comme Écrire l’histoire depuis les marges que Dagbovie, dans What is African American history?, fait de la France l’une des régions les plus dynamiques – peut-être la plus dynamique – sur la recherche en histoire africaine-américaine en dehors des États- Unis4.

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Un outil de travail numérique et évolutif

10 Écrire l’histoire depuis les marges innove également dans son usage des humanités numériques. L’anthologie est en effet publiée grâce au réseau scientifique Terra-HN qui propose des publications en ligne dans différentes disciplines des humanités, comme les arts, les lettres et les sciences sociales, à propos de sujets liés aux migrations et, par extension, aux processus culturels et sociaux d’altérisation (race, classe, genre, âge, etc.)5. Depuis le début des années 2000, Terra-HN s’est ainsi donné pour objectif la publication en accès libre de travaux scientifiques critiques sur ces questions. Ce n’est donc pas la moindre des qualités de l’anthologie, en partie consacrée à l’histoire du livre, de la presse et de l’édition africaine-américaine, que d’utiliser les outils éditoriaux les plus modernes et maniables pour la publication des résultats de la recherche scientifique.

11 De cette façon, l’anthologie met à disposition du public des traductions et des notices de grande qualité selon les termes de la Licence Creative Commons qui permet d’utiliser librement et gratuitement les textes de présentés à certaines conditions6. Ce choix de publication est d’autant plus intéressant qu’il est adossé à une très bonne utilisation des possibilités offertes par l’outil informatique : c’est particulièrement vrai des possibilités de téléchargement des textes traduits et des notices, ainsi que du dense réseau d’informations et de références croisées directement accessibles depuis les sections « Notes et compléments » ainsi que « Documentation » dans chacune des notices. Quand cela était possible, les auteur.e.s ont fait l’effort appréciable de renvoyer à des références libres d’accès, soigneusement choisies et présentées, créant ainsi un hypertexte enrichissant l’architecture et donc la pertinence de l’ensemble.

12 L’intérêt du format numérique réside également dans sa modularité. L’anthologie pointe en effet vers les travaux futurs possibles. Par exemple, la notice de William Cooper Nell propose un état de l’art et répertorie un certain nombre de questions ouvertes à l’investigation : le nombre d’exemplaires imprimés de Colored Patriots, l’identité du public atteint par l’ouvrage, la réception de l’ouvrage par le public, la question éventuelle du contre-public, la création de réseaux éditoriaux alternatifs car marginaux, le rôle des sociétés littéraires africaines-américaines dans la diffusion de ces ouvrages, la biographie même de Nell, le travail sur les archives des imprimeurs et des éditeurs, etc. En listant en creux un nombre de sujets de mémoires et de thèses, l’anthologie remplit son rôle de ressource primordiale sur l’histoire africaine- américaine.

13 Plus généralement, l’anthologie ouvre la voie à d’autres projets de recherche concernant d’autres historiens et historiennes africaines-américaines ou à d’autres sciences sociales travaillées par les Africain.e.s-Américain.e.s. Dans la période couverte par l’anthologie, on peut évidemment penser (entre autres) à W. E. B. Du Bois qui fut aussi bien historien que sociologue, mais aussi aux historiens de l’École d’Atlanta fondée par Du Bois (Monroe Work, Richard R. Wright Jr. et George Edmund Haynes), aux sociologues proches de l’École de Chicago comme Charles S. Johnson, E. Franklin Frazier, St. Clair Drake, Horace R. Cayton, ou d’autres comme les historiens Cedric Robinson et William Leo Hansberry, le sociologue Oliver C. Cox ou bien encore l’ethnologue Zora Neale Hurston. On peut également compléter l’anthologie avec des auteur.e.s noir.e.s originaires de tout le continent américain – ce vers quoi les

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conceptrices de l’anthologie se dirigent désormais. Finalement, rien n’empêche d’ouvrir également le projet vers l’Afrique et l’Asie, comme y invite implicitement l’ouvrage récent de Thomas Brisson, Décentrer l’Occident. Les intellectuels postcoloniaux chinois, indiens et arabes, et la critique de la modernité7. Ainsi, l’un des principaux attraits de l’anthologie est de pointer vers plusieurs pistes de recherche fécondes et, en cela, de se présenter comme un travail à poursuivre.

Une ouverture sur une histoire minoritaire du monde

14 À cet égard, il semble important d’insister sur le fait que cette anthologie participe à l’histoire des populations minoritaires – un type d’histoire parfois appelé histoire subalterne, postcoloniale voire décoloniale, ou encore diasporique pour les populations afro-descendantes hors d’Afrique. À juste titre, l’ouvrage se pense dans un cadre beaucoup plus large que le cadre strictement états-unien afin de montrer comment les historien.ne.s noir.e.s aux États-Unis ont formé une communauté à la fois intellectuelle et politique dont l’objectif a été de subvertir et de réviser le récit national dominant, c’est-à-dire aussi et de façon indissociable le récit de l’impérialisme colonial occidental.

15 Pendant le siècle que couvre l’anthologie, c’est-à-dire une période d’intense violence raciale à la fois physique et symbolique aux États-Unis, les historien.ne.s africain.e.s- américain.e.s ont cherché à faire entendre des voix marginalisées pour changer, non pas seulement l’identité nationale mais aussi et surtout la démocratie états-unienne. Comme toute prise de parole minoritaire dans l’espace public, le but de ces historien.ne.s fut de révolutionner les structures politiques de leur société – un élément qui fait la cohérence principale des personnes rassemblées dans l’anthologie qui, de ce point de vue, forme davantage une communauté politique qu’une simple école historique.

16 Ces premiers spécialistes d’histoire africaine-américaine ont donc cherché à inscrire les Noirs dans l’histoire des États-Unis. D’après Michaël Roy, l’historien Benjamin Quarles se proposait un double objectif : « rendre les Noirs américains fiers de leur passé, et combattre les préjugés des Blancs ». La construction de la fierté raciale comme éducation des leurs à leur propre histoire et le combat pour l’égalité raciale comme éducation des autres à cette même histoire ont été simultanés dans la constitution de l’historiographie et plus largement des mobilisations politiques africaines-américaines. Cette entreprise est passée par la célébration de la grandeur des anciennes civilisations africaines, comme en Égypte et en Éthiopie, ou plus récemment de la révolution haïtienne ayant menée à l’instauration de la première république noire en 1804. En faisant un tel choix, les historiennes et les historiens africains-américains ont nécessairement eu à explorer l’histoire « par le bas », c’est-à-dire par l’étude des actions des anonymes de l’histoire. Plusieurs textes traduits dans l’anthologie sont exemplaires de cette sensibilité historienne. Par exemple, dans « Sarah Parker Remond. Abolitionist and Physician » (1935), Dorothy Porter s’intéresse à une femme noire abolitionniste à une époque où ces sujets de recherche étaient très marginaux dans le champ de la discussion historiographique dominante. De même, Lorenzo Johnston Greene, dans « Mutiny on the Slave Ships » (1944), explore les révoltes d’esclaves sur les navires négriers. Finalement, en 1965, Charles Wesley peut explicitement critiquer l’histoire traditionnelle de l’abolition de l’esclavage célébrant des « grands hommes » blancs qui, tels Abraham Lincoln, auraient donné la liberté aux masses noires afin

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d’insister au contraire sur le rôle actif de la population noire dans ses initiatives d’auto- émancipation avant, pendant et après la guerre de Sécession.

17 Plus généralement, ces historiens et historiennes ont contribué à la naissance de ce que l’on appelle l’histoire mondiale ou globale, au sens où ils et elles ont participé à la « provincialisation » de l’histoire de l’Occident. Matthieu Renault montre que Charles Wesley a, dès les années 1910, orienté ses recherches sur ce qu’on appelle aujourd’hui « l’Atlantique noir », et plus largement « sur la dimension intrinsèquement mondiale de l’histoire noire et de la “question noire” », une attitude liée à sa sensibilité panafricaine voire afrocentriste qui l’a porté par exemple vers des l’histoire de l’abolition dans la Caraïbe et celle du continent africain depuis l’Antiquité. De même, Marie-Jeanne Rossignol insiste justement sur le rôle de Rayford Logan dans la structuration pionnière d’une « histoire atlantique » dès le premier tiers du XXe siècle qui est allée de pair avec ses engagements pan-africanistes et anti-coloniaux.

18 Pour ce faire, ces historiens et ces historiennes ont eu recours à des sources archivistiques nouvelles et habituellement délaissées par les historiens (blancs) dominants. Comme le rappelle Claire Bourhis-Mariotti, Ida B. Wells a massivement utilisé les faits divers et la photographie de presse pour mettre en lumière les motivations dissimulées de la pratique publique du lynchage. De même, Matthieu Renault montre que W. E. B. Du Bois et Lorenzo Johnston Greene, pour aborder de nouveaux objets d’enquête, ont eu recours à nouvelles sources comme les annonces d’esclaves en fuite et les récits d’esclaves afin d’éclairer l’expérience subjective de l’esclavage et de la résistance à l’esclavage. Mais c’est certainement Dorothy B. Porter (l’épouse de Charles H. Wesley) qui, avec de nombreuses autres femmes noires, a le plus révolutionné la collecte, la conservation et l’usage de nouveaux types d’archives pour documenter l’histoire noire alors qu’elle avait la charge du Moorland-Spingarn Research Center de l’université Howard de Washington, D.C. entre 1930 et 1973. Porter utilisa à la fois des livres et des pamphlets, des lettres manuscrites, des journaux intimes, des revues, des feuillets, des cartes, des gravures, des images, des disques phonographiques, des objets de toutes sortes. À ce propos, Hélène Le Dantec-Lowry souligne que Porter a ainsi construit « une contre-archive subversive qui s’opposait à une archive encore souvent essentiellement blanche et masculine élaborée à l’exclusion d’autres récits ».

19 Au total, leurs leçons de méthode scientifique et d’engagement politique restent aujourd’hui magistrales, et utiles aussi bien aux chercheurs et aux chercheuses confirmées qu’aux étudiant.e.s qui débutent une recherche en histoire. Ce sont ces travaux qui, faisant l’histoire des marges depuis les marges (sexuelles-genrées, impériales-coloniales, scientifiques-disciplinaires, etc.), participent à l'écriture d’une histoire globale, nécessairement engagée.

Un débat sur la neutralité et l’objectivité en histoire

20 Écrire l’histoire depuis les marges explore finalement l’usage politique de l’histoire scientifique, ce que l’introduction appelle la science comme « quête d’émancipation, de justice et d’égalité au présent ». Les notices insistent en effet toutes sur le « combat » de cette « entreprise militante » que fut nécessairement la recherche et la publication en histoire africaine-américaine sur la période couverte par l’anthologie (Notice de William Cooper Nell). Les notices relèvent souvent le caractère à la fois « hautement

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militant et objectif » des travaux examinés, soulignant leur « double ambition » à la fois scientifique et politique (Notices de Ida B. Wells et William Wells Brown). La question des rapports entre objectivité scientifique et engagement politique traverse ainsi en sous-texte les notices de l’anthologie. En cela, l’ouvrage intéressera non seulement les américanistes, mais tous les spécialistes de sciences sociales.

21 D’une part, les textes traduits et présentés se distinguent par la qualité de leur méthodologie scientifique – rigoureuse et inventive – et leur ton souvent dépassionné cherchant à mettre à distance l’objection de défense militante de leur communauté. Par exemple, dans « La loi de Lynch » (1893), grâce à un travail journalistique et historique d’investigation, Ida B. Wells s’attache à recenser le plus factuellement possible les occurrences de lynchages en ayant un recours novateur aux sources de presse. L’effet cumulatif des statistiques permet un traitement objectif d’une pratique alors défendue comme un contrefort de la suprématie blanche dans le Sud des États-Unis. Deux générations plus tard, Benjamin Quarles s’attache à présenter dans une langue contenue un travail archivistique minutieux sur le rôle des Noirs dans la guerre de Sécession. La double caractéristique de son travail lui permit de passer à la postérité comme fondateur de l’historiographie moderne sur l’abolitionnisme noir. Enfin, Lorenzo Johnston Greene, adopte également une posture scientifique à la fois irréprochable du point de vue méthodologique et détachée du point de vue de l’exposition de ses résultats, alors même que ses positions politiques sont alors considérées comme radicales.

22 D’autre part, ces textes sont également – et indissociablement – politiques. Wells, Quarles ou Greene ont un agenda politique lorsqu’ils publient leurs travaux. Déjà, au milieu du XIXe siècle William Cooper Nell et William Wells Brown avaient d’emblée adopté une posture critique vis-à-vis des prétentions à l’universalité de l’histoire majoritaire, ravalée au rang de discours suprémaciste blanc. De ce point de vue, le célèbre chapitre final de Black Reconstruction (1935) de W. E. B. Du Bois est sans doute le texte le plus explicite à cet égard puisqu’il cherche à renverser la violence de la « propagande » anti-noire dont les ouvrages d’histoire dominants abreuvait alors le public américain. De fait, ce chapitre laisse transparaître « la colère mêlée de désespoir et l’amertume » qui animait Du Bois à l’issue de son enquête subversive – et aujourd’hui classique – sur la guerre de Sécession et ses suites. Les historiens et les historiennes de l’anthologie déconstruisent donc la blancheur associée au concept d’objectivité à une époque où la quasi-totalité de leurs homologues blancs écrivent sur le mode de l’évidence une histoire racialement partisane, voire ouvertement raciste. De ce point de vue, l’injonction à la « neutralité » imposée aux auteur.e.s noir.e.s apparaît comme une mise en demeure de validation du discours dominant : est « objectif » celui ou celle qui acquiesce au discours dominant ; est « militant » celui ou celle qui s’y oppose.

23 La tension entre ces deux postures – scientifique et politique – est symptomatique dans le cas de John Hope Franklin, l’auteur du fameux From Slavery to Freedom: A History of American Negroes (1ère édition, 1947). Dans sa notice, Rahma Jerad montre que Franklin, pour se faire accepter de la communauté historienne blanche tout en défendant les conclusions politiques de son travail de recherche, dut se soumettre à un « véritable travail d’équilibriste », comme cela est visible dans le chapitre de The Militant South, 1920-1960 (1956) traduit dans l’anthologie où Franklin détaille méthodiquement la création et l’activité des académies militaires dans le Sud esclavagiste pour montrer l’intensité du militarisme qui y caractérisait la culture masculine blanche à la veille de

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la guerre de Sécession. Engagé dans le Mouvement pour les droits civiques, Franklin utilisa en effet l’histoire comme moyen de changer la société de son temps. Cet « effort de funambule » amène Rahma Jerad à souligner implicitement que si Franklin s’était départi de ses opinions, Franklin aurait écrit une « histoire impersonnelle et neutre », c’est-à-dire, précisément, sans intérêt ni politique ni surtout scientifique. Si Franklin atteignit le pinacle de la profession historienne dans les années 1960-1990 (il fut le président des quatre plus grandes associations historiennes professionnelles aux États- Unis), c’est parce que son engagement politique lui permit de proposer une histoire scientifique novatrice, aujourd’hui largement validée.

24 De telle sorte que l’anthologie ne dit peut-être pas assez clairement que c’est l’optique résolument politique du travail scientifique des historiennes et des historiens qu’elle présente qui a fait – et continue de faire – la nouveauté et l’intérêt de leurs œuvres. Ces ouvrages sont passés à la postérité non pas en dépit de leur engagement politique mais précisément à cause de cet engagement qui leur a permis de proposer un cadre d’analyse révolutionnaire à des questions anciennes. Pour eux, perspective scientifique et perspective politique ne furent pas simplement « compatibles » mais consubstantielles l’une à l’autre (Notice de William Wells Brown). De telle sorte que les textes de l’anthologie révèlent la nécessité, soulignée par Matthieu Renault, qu’il y a aujourd’hui à mettre en question le partage convenu et trop peu souvent interrogé entre « histoire militante » et « histoire scientifique ». Les auteur.e.s présenté.e.s dans Écrire depuis les marges ont en effet participé à l’émergence d’une épistémologie nouvelle cherchant à penser la situation minoritaire à l’intérieur des rapports de domination raciaux afin de soutenir l’émancipation de celles et ceux qui les subissent. Ces auteur.e.s subvertissent donc la catégorie d’objectivité scientifique en montrant que, dans leur situation précaire, où écrire l’histoire relevait littéralement d’une question de vie ou de mort, objectivité n’a jamais pu signifier neutralité. Pour ces historiens et ces historiennes, la recherche de la vérité historique a fondé la recherche de la justice sociale, et inversement.

NOTES

1. L’ouvrage a été accompagné de plusieurs colloques et de publications. Voir Claire Parfait, Hélène Le Dantec-Lowry, Claire Bourhis-Mariotti (dir.), Writing History from the Margins: African Americans and the Quest for Freedom, New York, Routledge, 2016 ; Hélène Le Dantec-Lowry, Marie- Jeanne Rossignol, Matthieu Renault, Pauline Vermeren (dir.), Histoire en marges. Les périphéries de l’histoire globale, Tours, Presses universitaires François-Rabelais, 2018. 2. Yves Grafmeyer et Isaac Joseph, L’École de Chicago. Naissance de l’écologie urbaine, Paris, Paris, Flammarion, 2009 [1979] ; Elsa Dorlin, Black Feminism. Anthologie du féminisme africain-américain, 1975-2000, Paris, L’Harmattan, 2008 ; Hourya Bentouhami et Mathias Möschel, Critical race theory : une introduction aux grands textes, Paris, Dalloz, 2017. 3. John Ernest, Liberation Historiography : African American Writers and the Challenge of History, 1794-1861, Chapel Hill, The University of North Carolina Press, 2004 ; Pero Gaglo Dagbovie, The Early Black History Movement, Carter G. Woodson, and Lorenzo Johnston Greene, Urbana, University of

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Illinois Press, 2007 ; Stephen G. Hall, A Faithful Account of the Race : African American Historical Writing in 19th-Century America, Chapel Hill, The University of North Carolina Press, 2009 ; Pero Gaglo Dagbovie, Carter G. Woodson in Washington, D.C.: The Father of Black History, Charleston, The History Press, 2014. 4. Pero Gaglo Dagbovie, What is African American History?, Cambridge, UK, Malden, MA, Polity Press, 2015. 5. Voir http://www.reseau-terra.eu/. 6. Voir https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/. 7. Thomas Brisson, Décentrer l’Occident. Les intellectuels postcoloniaux chinois, indiens et arabes, et la critique de la modernité, Paris, La Découverte, 2018.

INDEX

Thèmes : Recensions

AUTEURS

NICOLAS MARTIN-BRETEAU Univ. Lille, EA 4074 - CECILLE - Centre d’Études en Civilisations Langues et Lettres Étrangères, F-59000 Lille, France

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Hélène Valance, Nocturne. Night in American Art, 1890–1917 Winner of the Terra Foundation for American Art – Yale University Press American Art in Translation Book Prize.

Helena Lamouliatte-Schmitt

REFERENCES

Hélène Valance, Nocturne. Night in American Art, 1890-1917, New Haven: Yale University Press, 2018, 256 pages, 116 color and 35 black and white , $45. Translated by Jane Marie Todd. ISBN: 9780300223996

1 Nocturne - Night in American Art, 1890–1917 was originally published in French as Nuits américaines: l’art du nocturne aux États-Unis, 1890–1917.1 In this lavishly illustrated book, Hélène Valance proposes to explore the radical change that occurred in American art in the early 1890s, from Hudson River School painters’ grandiose depiction of the American wilderness to artists who “devot[ed] themselves almost systematically to an art that favored atmospheric effects, with a preeminent place given to nighttime” (3). This art will then be referred to as “nocturne,” “nocturnal landscape” or “nocturnal genre” in the course of her demonstration. Valance clearly states her theoretical objective in the introduction: “My approach seeks to demonstrate that this corpus constitutes a coherent artistic movement and, beyond it, a particularly significant cultural phenomenon profoundly anchored in a pivotal moment of American history” (12).

2 Following the holistic principles of visual culture studies, she thus aptly intertwines historical, cultural, social, political, and even scientific perspectives, to shed light on this radical departure from the set of representational practices that defined the American landscape in the early nineteenth century. Her approach is definitely in line with W.J.T. Mitchell’s, who defines landscape “not as an object to be seen or a text to be read, but as a process by which social and subjective identities are formed” (Mitchell 1). Indeed, as Valence puts it: “Night fascinated American artists and their public because,

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through its representations, there circulated a set of cultural meanings that resonated profoundly with the everyday lives of Americans and with a modernity to which they sometimes struggled to adapt. Darkness proved to be a particularly fitting source of cultural representations through which to address a number of these new phenomena, whether scientific, technological, political, or social” (10). Her book’s structure revolves around three main thematic axes (studied throughout ten chapters), each one focusing on a specific aspect of the nocturnal genre in relation to the broader issue of the status of images in American culture at that time. The three parts also delve into the three major historical developments that concurrently occurred in the United States: the official closing of the frontier of the Wild West in 1890, the advent of modern art at the Armory Show of 1913, and the radical change in the United States’ international politics that took place at the beginning of the twentieth century.

3 The first part, “Antivisions” focuses more closely on the aesthetics of the nocturne. Just as Thomas Cole (1801-1848) established the visual tropes of the American landscape in the early 19th century, James McNeill Whistler (1834-1903) paved the way for the nocturnal genre. Indeed, Americans rediscovered Whistler’s artwork in the early 1890s: “From 1866 to the mid-1880s, Whistler produced a series of night landscapes characterized by almost monochromatic abstraction […]” (3). Despite the “radical aesthetic stance” (7) and “intransigent formalism of his paintings” (7), it was met with favorable public and critical appraisal and seemed to match the cultural environment of the turn of the twentieth century. To prove her point, the author examines how scientific breakthroughs (X-rays, the microscope, the telescope, etc.) and technological evolutions (mechanical reproduction) “revolutionized the field of the visible” (34) while producing a paradoxical response : as the world became more and more accessible from a visual perspective, it also strengthened the idea that some things may remain unseen and beyond the reach of science, shrouded in darkness somehow. Similarly, the mass production of images and their increased accessibility also spurred painters and photographers to reconsider the status of images, which were in the process of becoming mere commodities. As a result, they produced more high-brow and challenging forms of art (such as nocturnal landscapes, the halftone, or pictorialist photography): “Artists, confronted with that emblematic medium for mechanically reproducing images, strategically used the nocturne’s codes to situate themselves (artistically, sociologically, and economically) within the ever-expanding economy of images” (51). Valance convincingly uses the example of Frederic Remington (1861-1909), one of the most popular commercial illustrators of the time, to demonstrate this point. Indeed, Remington increasingly shifted to night scenes at the end of his career. Finally, psychology began to be officially recognized as a scientific endeavor,2 and consequently, the apprehension of subjectivity took on a Byzantine complexity that perfectly matched the “space of mental projection” (79) depicted by nocturne artists, who sometimes exhibited stereotypical dispositions, like a “feminine sensibility” (80) and/or nervousness that could sometimes verge on madness (see for example the case of Ralph Albert Blakelock, 1847-1919). Valance states that the nocturne ultimately epitomized a complex, shifting and—to some extent—reactionary definition of the American civilization that “revealed [nocturne artists’] anxiety in a context where religion on one hand and scientific positivism on the other seemed to have become incapable of ensuring the idea of a world governed by a stable system” (79).

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4 At that point, in the second part of the book, “”, Valance moves on to a more political interpretation of the genre. Nocturne artists all belonged to the white, urban, and mostly male middle- and upper-class America and the images they created reveled in a nostalgic, melancholy and “muted version of the triumphalist discourse of American imperialism” (87). This new discourse on Americanness was accompanied by a change in foreign policy impelled by William McKinley and Theodore Roosevelt, who abandoned the isolationist stance that had prevailed so far and set forth to bear the torch of American values and Western civilization overseas. Anyhow, Valance admits that one would be hard-pressed to find allusions to race relations in paintings mostly exhibiting a “semantic void” (30). Here again, Valance resorts to a cross-disciplinary investigative model, white studies, “developed by historians and literary critics such as Toni Morrison and David Roediger, [and which] complements the various disciplines of minority studies by offering an analysis of the dominant (often white and male) point of view” (218). She thus analyzes nocturnes, “the landscape of white civilization” (92) in the light of images either betraying a racial bias and/or discourse (advertisements, photographs, postcards) or inspired by cosmopolitanism, like Japanism. She points out that nocturnal landscapes, which used extensively the metaphor of light and darkness, could be accused of using pervasively the imperialist dichotomy that correlated Western civilization and light, and conversely, “nonwhites and darkness” (97). However, Valance also stresses that contradictions and ambiguities were a core element of the genre, which cannot be crudely reduced to a series of cultural clichés. In one of the many thorough visual analyses interspersed throughout the text, she has chosen this time Winslow Homer’s Searchlight on Harbor Entrance, Santiago de Cuba (1901) to prove her point: “The simple setting of Searchlight does not allude directly to the racist violence of colonization. But if Homer’s painting is considered within the mass of images that formed the everyday visual environment at the dawn of the twentieth century, the metaphor of night takes on a more evident signification” (100). The nostalgic subtext of Homer’s image is also used as a symbolic transition towards the “nocturnal imagery of the West” or “frontier nocturne” through which artists grieved the loss of the Western frontier, “metaphorically swallowed up by the dark” (112). These images lamented the “vanishing Indian” (112), the destruction of the wilderness but also the disappearance of “a certain kind of white man” (121). The trope of the Indians was particularly rife with ambiguities since once “an apolitical image of them (128)” that evacuated the crimes committed against them was constructed, they became part and parcel of “the American mythological genealogy” (126) by affirming the New World’s “cultural independence from the Old Continent” (127). The Indian was thus frequently depicted as a ghostly figure in nocturnal landscapes (see for example Edward S. Curtis’s eerie photograph, The Vanishing Race, c. 1904), which visually expressed the ambiguous feelings of nineteenth century Americans toward them but also hinted at their symbolic extermination.

5 Similarly, Americans had to grapple with the issue of a new “ethnic Other” (133), African Americans, whose situation generally became worse in the late nineteenth century. From a visual perspective, African Americans mostly appeared in racist caricatures, and their presence was marginal in the nocturnal genre. Valance notes that “African Americans were not a remote and largely imagined presence, and, unlike the Indians, they did not seem to belong to a bygone or vanishing era” (133). There was only one African American painter among the nocturne artists, Henry Ossawa Tanner (1859-1937), and his mostly religious paintings testify to “the multiple displacements

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through which the nocturne both incorporated and rejected the African American presence” (134).

6 Eventually, the nocturne rediscovered Whistler’s first inspiration: the urban views, as Valance explains in the third part “Landscape Reconfigured.” As a matter of fact, the disappearance of the frontier and the domestication of the last remnants of wilderness also meant the victory of industrialization, thus establishing the primacy of the urbanized landscape, in which nocturne artists found again a convenient “transitional space […] populated by ambiguities and uncertainties” (148) through which they could express their ambivalent and conflicting feelings towards the American society, which was still torn between the Jeffersonian pastoral ideals and the unrelenting march of capitalism at the turn of the nineteenth century. Two opposite schools of artists prevailed. The first one was resolutely focused on an aesthetic approach and was composed of “tonalist painting and pictorialist photography privileged atmospheric effects and formal explorations in often-deserted views of the nocturnal city” (148). The second one was more socially and politically committed and was labelled “the Ashcan School” by art historians.

7 A major technological achievement, the large-scale electrification of American metropolises, contributed to a redefinition of urban spaces at night and a blurring of realities that artists were keen to explore, as Valance exemplifies: “The night enhanced by electric lighting opened up a world of leisure, a time of sociability detached from daytime activities, where hierarchical relations, economic issues, and cultural practices were entirely reconfigured” (152). The visual trope ‘darkness / brightness’ was also a very convenient way to picture the dual aspect of urbanization, from the splendor of Broadway to the squalor of derelict tenements housing the working-class and newly- arrived immigrants, the “other half” in Jacob Riis’s words (157) and documentary practice (161). Valance insists on the fact that, once again, visual art played an ambiguous role when it came to picturing alterity: “[…] though the urban picturesque attenuated certain contrasts, it also reproduced the most entrenched forms of discrimination in American society” (167).

8 Next, Valance turns to the question of the figure in the urban landscape, which caused “a profound visual disorientation” (170) among city dwellers and artists alike. The latter mostly resorted to the representation of the crowd and the shadow to convey this “shift to a problematic appearance” (169) incurred by the reconfiguration of cities. Valance uses the very convincing examples of John Sloan’s (1871-1951) crowd paintings, like Six O’Clock, Winter (1912) or Election Night (1907) or Childe Hassam’s (1859-1935) shadowy figures to illustrate her point.

9 In the final chapter, Valance convincingly argues that the nocturnal genre signaled a transition from the traditional pastoral definition of the American landscape to its contemporary urban redefinition, the “technological sublime” (195) that she presents as follows: “Through the nocturnal imagery of the city, a series of visual codes was set in place, inaugurating a reading of the sublime and of modernity that in large measure still dominates the perception and appreciation of the urban landscape” (187). This new urban aesthetic was particularly suited to the spectacular architecture of the American cityscape at night, to which beholders would soon be so accustomed, thanks to numerous photographs and prints, that they would be ready to accept urban and industrial images in full daylight, such as Charles Sheeler’s paintings. This visual process mirrored the advance of American capitalism of which “at the turn of the

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twentieth century the American metropolis became emblematic” (Trachtenberg, quoted in Valance, 199).

10 In the conclusion, Valance explains that the nocturnal genre began to wane at the beginning of the twentieth century, particularly with the introduction of modernism in American art at the 1913 Armory Show. She chooses Edward Hopper’s painting, Night Window (1928) as a sort of transitional object between two modes of nocturnal images. Indeed, the painting borrows some classical features of the genre (the anonymous and furtive figure for example), but also introduces newer and more abstract visual standards, like color blocks or the multiple sub-frames formed by the windows. According to Valance, Edward Hopper’s images also foreshadowed the future of the nocturne, whose thematic and visual ambivalence would become a standard feature of American movies in the 1940s and 1950s.

11 To conclude, this book is a must-read for anyone interested in or studying American visual culture. It provides a sweeping view of the field at the turn of the twentieth century, and numerous references and insights on the cultural and social developments of Americanness at that crucial period.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

MITCHELL, W. J. Thomas. Landscape and Power. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, (1994) 2002.

TRACHTENBERG, Alan. The Incorporation of America: Culture and Society in the Gilded Age. New York: Hill and Wang, 1982.

NOTES

1. Hélène Valance, Nuits américaines : l’art du nocturne aux États-Unis, 1890–1917. Presses de l’Université Paris-Sorbonne, 2015. 2. Valance explains that: “The University of , for example, established its department of psychology in 1887; it was followed by many other universities in the 1890s. The American Psychological Association was founded in 1892” (75).

INDEX

Subjects: Recensions

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AUTHORS

HELENA LAMOULIATTE-SCHMITT Université Bordeaux Montaigne

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Nicole Brittingham Furlonge, Race Sounds. The Art of Listening in African American Literature

Charles Joseph

REFERENCES

Nicole Brittingham Furlonge, Race Sounds. The Art of Listening in African American Literature, Iowa City, University of Iowa Press, 2018, 206 pages, $ 85, ISBN : 1609385616

1 The realm of orality has held a more and more important place in the study of literature. This analytical prism of hearing first broke ground back in 1956 with poetry and Laurence Perrine’s seminal Sound and Sense, and even though the field of research dedicated to the relationship between poetry and sound has remained active over the years with titles such as Sound as Sense (Eds. Michel Delville and Christine Pagnouille) or The Sound of Poetry/The Poetry of Sound (Eds. Marjorie Perloff and Craig Dworkin), sound is no longer strictly attached to this literary format. Walter J. Ong’s Orality and Literacy (1982) has promoted new pathways to listen more closely to what is first intended to be read, and other fields of research like translation have also tackled this subject. Acoustics have thus developed outside of physics and new approaches have fueled what is now recognized as sound studies : Orality : The Power of the Spoken Word (Graham Furniss, 2004), The Sound Studies Reader (Ed. Jonathan Sterne, 2012), The Ethnography of Rhythm : Orality and Its Technologies (Haun Saussy, 2016), Human and Machine Hearing : Extracting Meaning from Sound (Richard F. Lyon, 2017), The Routledge Companion to Sound Studies (Ed. Michael Bull, 2018), Remapping Sound Studies (Eds. Gavin Steingo and Jim Sykes, 2019), etc.

2 It should be noted that many studies conducted through the prism of sound have also focused on the African diaspora, and over the past decade or so, several monographs have showcased this strong interest : Speaking Power : Black Feminist Orality in Women's Narratives of Slavery (DoVeanna S. Fulton, 2006), The Sounds of Slavery : Discovering African

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American History through Songs, Sermons, and Speech (Shane White, 2006), Multimodality in Canadian Black Feminist Writing : Orality and the Body in the Work of Harris, Philip, Allen, and Brand (Maria Caridad Casas, 2009), Anthem : Social Movements and the Sound of Solidarity in the African Diaspora (Shana L. Redmond, 2013), Imagine the Sound : Experimental African American Literature after Civil Rights (Carter Mathes, 2015), Enduring Truth : Restoring Sound Theology and Relevance to African American Preaching (Aaron E. Lavender, 2016), etc. In Race Sounds, Nicole Brittingham Furlonge positions herself at the crossroads of these movements that have punctuated the development of sound studies and offers a detailed and comprehensive epistemological insight into how sound studies and African American literature can be articulated today. Divided into five chapters, the monograph aims to “understand how listening functions to perceive and interpret bodies, ideas, and aesthetics of race, gender, and class differences” (2).

3 Entitled ““Attuned to it All” : Embodied Listening and Listening in Print”, Brittingham Furlonge’s introduction frames the key notions that she will discuss throughout the monograph and explains very clearly how attentive, relational and deliberate listening practices are at the core of the “modes of oral engagement” debated throughout Race Sounds. Brittingham Furlonge thus argues that “by being aurally attentive to these dynamics”, the contemporary writers, artists, and intellectuals selected in Race Sounds “explore the lower frequencies of representation, considering the ways in which aural perception can tell alternative stories and amplify sound and difference in new ways” (2). Brittingham Furlonge insists that while the study is strongly set in interdisciplinarity, Race Sounds is first and foremost about listening in print through texts that “activate listening as a dynamic aural practice of cultural, political, and intellectual engagement” (6). Relying notably on Josh Kun’s Audiotopia (2005), Alexander Weheliye’s Phonographies (2005) and Jean-Luc Nancy’s Listening (2007), she argues that we now need to become attuned in order to shift from the emphasis on sounding to “an attention to listening practices” so that we might consider listening “as an aural form of agency, a practice of citizenship, […] an ethics of community building, a mode of social and political action, a set of cultural strategies for cultural revision, and a practice of historical building” (10). Illustrating her point, Brittingham Furlonge focuses on Anna Deavere Smith’s Twilight : Los Angeles 1992 (1994), a play in which the actress successively performs testimonies that she had gathered in Los Angeles about the 1992 South Central riots. In Twilight, Smith’s primary work was to perform listening itself and it thus exemplifies the “complex and situational practices of listening” that the author will delve into in Race Sounds.

4 The first chapter entitled “‘Our Literary Audience’ : Listenership in Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God and Sterling Brown’s ‘Ma Rainey’” examines how Hurston’s and Brown’s texts have modeled listening practices through their writing, and how these listening practices are all related to the Harlem Renaissance and the development of the African American literary scene. After analyzing Zora Neale Hurston’s “ethnographic listening” (21), Brittingham Furlonge focuses on a more specific character analysis with Phoeby’s role in Their Eyes Were Watching God as a peculiar modulization of listening and aurality, before considering the wider critical and cultural politics of listening that she identifies in Hurston’s novel. Brittingham Furlonge then shifts to Sterling Brown’s work, arguing that one of the poet’s strongest legacies was to make a call for a black listenership throughout his career, using his

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poem “Ma Rainey” and Brown’s extensive use of the vernacular to show how he successfully modeled listernership (19) in his work.

5 Chapter two, “‘To Hear the Silence of Sound’ : Vibrational Listening in Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man” centers on Ellison’s metaphorical representation of segregation, as Invisible Man longs more “specifically for a sonic confirmation of existence” (41) after explaining how his invisibility has become more and more strenuous on his psyche. Brittingham Furlonge first discusses how Ellison listened for “cultural fidelity” (42) by focusing on his essay “Living with Music” in which Ellison describes his writing experience of Invisible Man and the influence his sonic environment had on the novel’s narrative. She then focuses on the novel itself and reflects first upon the role that sensory perception plays in the novel with Invisible Man’s “listening body” (45) and its vibrational capacities as both receptor and transmitter, but she also considers how sound technology played an equally important role in the construction of the narrative, particularly the phonograph, the microphone and the tape recorder. Brittingham Furlonge aptly concludes this chapter by arguing that Ellison’s Invisible Man offers a “cultural politics of frequency” (55) in addition to convincingly demonstrating how the novel’s narrator is himself is one of the first literary characters to engage actively in what she describes as “ethical listening” (56).

6 The third chapter entitled “When Malindy Listens : Audiographic Archiving in Gayl Jones’s Corregidora” presents another case study centered this time on Gayl Jones’ first novel, interrogating “what different understandings emerge when we think of the black woman vocalist as a listener to her self ?” (16). Titled after Farah Jasmine Griffin’s essay “When Malindy Sings”, Brittingham Furlonge insists upon the “catalytic, generative and constructive process” (59) of listening, processes that she identifies as deeply rooted within the novel’s multiple references to enslavement, defining first the novel’s “storytellers and storyhearers in the flesh” (60) but also how these processes became essential in order to cope with “listening to loss” (64). Brittingham Furlonge then addresses the introspective role that listening acquires in Corregidora and how vocalization and singing are inextricably embedded in nostalgia and at times melancholia. Brittingham Furlonge concludes this case study by putting it cleverly into perspective with two world-famous songs, Aretha Franklin’s “Respect” and Bettye LaVette’s “Blackbird”.

7 Chapter four, “‘If I allow Myself to Listen’ : Slavery, Historical Thinking, and Aural Encounters in David Bradley’s The Chaneysville Incident” is the last chapter of Race Sounds to deal with a case study. As with Corregidora, slavery holds an important place in this chapter, yet here, Brittingham Furlonge’s interest lies in how Bradley’s narrator, a social historian, questions how listening practices can relate to the work of the historian. In a first part entitled “Listening for a Sound (Hi)Story”, Brittingham Furlonge reviews several literary works that revolve around slavery and apprehend it with the intention to revisit (if not reinvent) some of its history. She ponders upon this process and how this approach to slavery “often entails listening as a mode of fictional expression, representation and historical recasting of black subjectivity” (83). She then focuses on The Chaneysville Incident’s narrator, John Washington and how he evolves throughout the novel. First resisting listening as a mode of historical research, Washington undergoes an aural apprenticeship that teaches him that listening can in fact be used as a site of negotiation between past and present. Finally, Brittingham Furlonge skillfully demonstrates how The Chaneysville Incident presents listening as a

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spatial, cultural and contested practice that ultimately serves the book’s objective, to position “readers as ongoing listeners, desiring to know while simultaneously acknowledging that a complete knowing is impossible” (106).

8 The fifth chapter is shorter in length, but is however a much-appreciated addition to the monograph. Entitled “‘New Ways to Make Us Listen’ : Aural Learning in the English Classroom”, Brittingham Furlonge constructed this final chapter as a sort of pedagogical introspection in order to share with her academic readers how listening can also be implemented in class as a teaching practice. She here draws from personal experiences in the classroom and offers meaningful and practical ways to include listening as a pedagogical tool. She also shares in detail an interdisciplinary curriculum for one of her English courses, one that aims for her students “to experience how listening enhances their engagement with the written word and to develop ways in which their aurally inflected reading practices can unmute words in print” (109). The book ends with a short afterword entitled ““All Living is Listening” : Toward an Aurally Engaged Citizenry” in which Brittingham Furlonge beautifully interweaves the epigraph selected for Race Sounds consisting of two verses from Claudia Rankine’s Citizen : An American Lyric (2014) with Barack Obama’s final speech as President of the United States, calling “for a democratic listening” (120).

9 The vast bibliography lists more than 250 references covering sound studies, African American studies as well as literature, thus showing the wide specter that Brittingham Furlonge had to cover in order to deliver strong demonstrations. We can regret that Jennifer Ryan’s Post-Jazz Poetics : A Social History (2010) was not included in the book’s analytical process as it would have reinforced even further the porousness of the different fields of research discussed in Race Sounds. We can also deplore the absence of the African griot tradition in the fifth chapter ; and an exploration of the current status of African American Vernacular English in American society and popular culture would have also strengthened Brittingham Furlonge’s argument regarding the repeated use of the vernacular in several case studies. Race Sounds. The Art of Listening in African American Literature offers however a truly compelling read and an insightful dive into an innovative venture where literature, sociology, race and sound intersect.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

BULL, Michael, ed. The Routledge Companion to Sound Studies. New York : Routledge, 2018.

CASAS, Maria Caridad. Multimodality in Canadian Black Feminist Writing : Orality and the Body in the Work of Harris, Philip, Allen, and Brand. New York : Rodopi, 2009.

DELVILLE Michel, and Christine PAGNOUILLE, eds. Sound as Sense : Contemporary US Poetry &/in Music. Bruxelles : P.I.E.-Peter Lang, 2003.

FULTON, DoVeanna S. Speaking Power : Black Feminist Orality in Women's Narratives of Slavery. Albany : State University of New York Press, 2006.

FURNISS, Graham. Orality : The Power of the Spoken Word. New York : Palgrave Macmillan, 2004.

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MATHES, Carter. Imagine the Sound : Experimental African American Literature after Civil Rights. Minneapolis : University of Minnesota Press, 2014.

KUN, Josh. Audiotopia : Music, Race, and America. Berkeley : University of California Press, 2005.

LAVENDER, Aaron E. Enduring Truth : Restoring Sound Theology and Relevance to African American Preaching. Nashville : B&H Publishing, 2016.

LYON, Richard F. Human and Machine Hearing : Extracting Meaning from Sound. Cambridge : Cambridge University Press, 2017.

NANCY, Jean-Luc. Listening. New York : Fordham University Press, 2007.

ONG, Walter J. Orality and Literacy : The Technologizing of the Word. New York : Methuen, 1982.

PERLOFF, Marjorie, and Craig DWORKIN, eds. The Sound of Poetry/The Poetry of Sound. Chicago : University of Chicago Press, 2009.

REDMOND, Shana L. Anthem : Social Movements and the Sound of Solidarity in the African Diaspora. New York : NYU Press, 2013.

RYAN, Jennifer D. Post-Jazz Poetics : A Social History. New York : Palgrave Macmillan, 2010.

SAUSSY, Haun. The Ethnography of Rhythm : Orality and Its Technologies. New York : Fordham University Press, 2016.

SMITH, Anna Deavere. Twilight : Los Angeles, 1992. New York : Anchor books, 1994.

STEINGO, Gavin, and Jim SYKES, eds. Remapping Sound Studies. Durham : Duke University Press, 2019.

STERNE, Jonathan, ed. The Sound Studies Reader. New York : Routledge, 2012.

WEHELIYE, Alexander G. Phonographies : Grooves in Sonic Afro-Modernity. Durham : Duke University Press, 2005.

WHITE, Shane. The Sounds of Slavery : Discovering African American History through Songs, Sermons, and Speech. Boston : Beacon Press, 2005.

INDEX

Subjects: Recensions

AUTHORS

CHARLES JOSEPH Université Rennes 2

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Emily C. Burns, Transnational Frontiers: The American West in France

James R. Swensen

REFERENCES

Emily C. Burns, Transnational Frontiers: The American West in France, Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 2018, 230 pages, $45, ISBN-10: 0806160039

1 Transnational Frontiers has a great opening line. “The American West,” writes the author, art historian Emily C. Burns, “is a slippery concept, particularly in international settings.” This initial sentence gets to the heart of the challenge of discussing the West, which has long existed as an idea as much as an actual place. It also touches on the ways in which many of the myths of the West were supported and even shaped abroad. As Burns successfully demonstrates, from beginning to end, this is especially true in France where the West was “not a fixed concept but rather a transnational discourse.”

2 Burns’s text investigates the shifting presence of the West in France during the last decades of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, a period, more or less, framed by Buffalo Bill’s Wild West shows in and around Paris in 1889 and 1905-1906. At that point in time and in that particular place, the West was, as Burns writes, contingent and context-driven and dependent on “national, cultural and individual identities.” Visual representation played a key role in the formation and perpetuation of western tropes and the query at the center of Burns’s argument is “how the imagery of the American West participated in building individual and collective mythologies.” To answer this question, Burns engages visual imagery in a series of case studies that explore the evolving nature of the West through dialogues and conversations, claims and counterclaims, acts and counteracts.

3 Another key element of Burns’s discussion is the “tripartite dialogue” that focuses on the cultural exchange between American, French, and Lakota participants who “performed” the West in France. Indeed, French and American men “played cowboys and Indians” and the Native American performers of the popular Wild West shows not

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only acted out stereotypical roles, but also fought to maintain control over their own representation and movements in Paris, and, by so doing, were able to overcome primitivist types and colonialist overtones. The text also details current events and political uncertainties in France and the United States that shaped these dialogues and played a role in the way visual materials were interpreted.

4 Although Transnational Frontiers is Dr. Burns’s first monograph, it is not her first foray into the field. Through numerous articles and book chapters published over the past few years, she has emerged as an authority on the transatlantic exchanges between the United States and France and, more specifically, on the representation of the West in Paris. This book highlights her talents and abilities as a scholar and writer. It is extensively researched and fully illustrated. Years of exhaustive archival work enrich every page and her arguments are buttressed by detailed footnotes that further map the discourse. The text is approachable and intelligent. Burns’s cultural study is enriched by a wide range of disciplines and textual material from a host of academic voices including historians, literary scholars, anthropologists, cultural geographers, and scholars of race and gender, to name but a few. It also benefits greatly from the writings of Native scholars.

5 While Burns is particularly good at weaving diverse voices into her text, its strength is the way visual materials “participate in larger discursive conversations.” She highlights the work of more well-known artists like Rosa Bonheur and Albert Bierstadt, as well as those whose fame has tarnished over the century, like Solon Borglum. Yet, the discussion is not limited to painting or sculpture. Throughout the book the author integrates the so-called “fine arts” with a host of other media. Some of the finer points of the text, in fact, revolve around the discussion of postcards, toy panoramas, Rookwood vases, posters, photographs, and popular illustration. By “reentangling” these objects, she reveals the various and simultaneous ways in which the West was experienced in turn-of-the-century France. In one example, Burns follows the history of a beaded buckskin jacket once belonging to Oglala performer Itȟúŋkasan Gleška (Spotted Weasel), which came into the possession of Joë Hamman, a French Wild West enthusiast who played both Indian and cowboy throughout his life. The unique article of clothing was featured in photographs and in one of the first Westerns, filmed in France, not in the United States. The passage of the jacket from one owner to another and from one medium to the next is emblematic of the ways in which the meaning of objects tied to the West are malleable but continue to reinforce its myths.

6 Another “reentangling” takes place with the various participants featured in the book. There are, of course, the usual suspects like William F. Cody and Bonheur, an avid admirer of Cody and his performers. Through meticulous research, however, Burns balances these better-known luminaries with a host of others including American artists like Cyrus Dallin and Elbridge Ayer Burbank, and the Native American performers who travelled with Cody on his European tours. By broadening the cast of characters in her narrative, Burns further demonstrates how the myth and lure of the West permeated French society and resonated within a diverse group of individuals.

7 Both reentanglements are clearly on display in one of Burns’s best case studies: the investigation of correspondence between Ištá Ská (Jacob White Eyes), a member of Cody’s troop during the 1905-6 European tour, and Falco de Baroncelli, a French aristocrat and Western fanatic. In chapter four Burns details the post and photocard exchange that took place between these disparate individuals during Ištá Ská’s tour and

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upon his return to the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota. As rich as any visual material, these seemingly pedestrian objects reveal how the realities of life on the reservation ran headlong into romanticized visions held by individuals like Baroncelli.

8 One of the most significant contributions of this book, however, is the inclusion of the Native Americans and the Lakota nation, in particular, within Burns’s “tripartite dialogue.” Understanding how the West was formed in France requires more than simply looking at French and American actors. The broader interaction was not a transnational dialogue, Burns argues, but a multinational engagement. The traveling participants of Cody’s troop played an important role in the transmission of culture and were active participants in the construction of the West in France. Clearly the dynamics of power was not equal, but by employing Anishinaabe scholar Gerald Vizenor’s notion of “survivance,” or continued Native presence and power even under suppression, Burns places Native Americans centrally into the discourse. A key component of returning these individuals to the narrative is returning their names. Thus, Rocky Bear, the popular performer who drew attention everywhere he went in Paris in 1889, is known throughout the text by his rightful name, Íŋyaŋ Matȟo. The same is true for Hinmatóowyalahq’it (Chief Joseph) of the Nez Percé and the Lakota chief Ógla Lúta (Red Shirt). By so doing Burns humanizes these individuals and highlights their agency and autonomy. They become more than stereotypes or “simulated Indians,” but individuals who were participants in their own politics of identity and “contradictory positions.” Burns’s inclusion of the Lakota within the discourse is a sizable achievement and should serve as a model for future scholarship. This is especially true in the current cultural and political environment in which the West continues to act as a metonym for the United States and the US president displays an ongoing insensitivity toward Native Americans.1

9 In all, Burns’s remarkable book should be required reading for anyone interested in the American West and the formation of the myths associated with it. In its ability to bridge disciplines, Transnational Frontiers not only deepens the discourse but provides an excellent example of art history’s ability to create engaging dialogue between textual and visual materials. The West may be a slippery concept but through Burns’s insight, it is possible to gain a greater understanding of the ways it and its enduring myths were appropriated to meet the needs of a diverse group of Americans, Frenchmen, and Native Americans. It demonstrates, once again, that the West was to be found, performed, and embraced well beyond the actual American West.

NOTES

1. Jeet Heer, “Trump Can’t Stop Insulting Native Americans,” The New Republic, 2018: https:// newrepublic.com/minutes/151118/trump-cant-stop-insulting-native-americans

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INDEX

Subjects: Recensions

AUTHORS

JAMES R. SWENSEN Brigham Young University

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Actualité de la recherche

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Melynda Price: “‘When Black Mothers Weep’: Race, Motherhood and Anti-violence Activism in Detroit” May 30th, 2018 – Université Sorbonne Nouvelle

Jeanne Boiteux

1 This conference, which was organized by Hélène Quanquin and Hélène Le Dantec- Lowry, was held on May 30th, 2018, at Université Sorbonne Nouvelle as an opportunity for guest speaker Melynda Price to present her latest work. Price, a professor of law at the University of Kentucky, specializes in African-American studies and is the author of At the Cross: Race, Religion and Citizenship in the Politics of the Death Penalty (2015). Her interests include the intersection of the concepts of race, gender and citizenship, as well as the “politics of punishment,” a term borrowed from the work of sociologist Erik Olin Wright on the American prison system. The paper she presented in May 2018 was inspired by her observation of the contemporary activism of mothers in the Black Lives Matter movement, such as the mothers of victims of police violence Trayvon Martin, Amadou Diallo and Sean Bell. Ms. Price situates these women’s work in the long history of the post-Civil Rights era of black mothers’ activism. This has led her to the Detroit organization Save Our Sons and Daughters (SOSAD), a history of which she presented in her paper, “What Would Mama Do? Save Our Sons and Daughters and Anti-Violence Organizing Among Black Mothers of Murdered Children in Detroit.”

2 Melynda Price started her presentation by describing the July 1986 incident in which Clementine Barfield, who was then at a rally to support the strike led by 7,000 members of the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees in Detroit, lost her son to youth violence. At a gas station, a man opened fire on the car driven by the eldest Barfield son as he was driving his brothers to school. As a result, one of Clementine’s sons was permanently injured, and the other, fatally shot. Up until then, Clementine Barfield had never really felt the impact of the rising tide of violence then endemic in Detroit; she later declared she could have seen the signs, had she paid more

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attention. In the late 1980s, Detroit was but one of many large metropolitan areas whose inner-cities were plagued with drug trafficking and criminal violence, which police crackdowns only compounded. Children and youth were unwitting victims of the war on drugs, and when they were black, their murder often went unacknowledged. It is in this context that black mothers rallying around Clementine Barfield created a multi-pronged anti-violence organization to defend their families.

3 Melynda Price identified the circumstances surrounding the creation of what became SOSAD as representative of larger trends. 1986 was characterized by a reshaping of inner cities, a growing awareness of and concerns for the economic downturn, and their instrumentalization by government officials to rationalize the war on drugs. By the mid-1980s, Detroit had become a largely black city; not only does it occupy a special place in African-American history, but local organizational efforts were replicated in other large cities.

4 Implicit in this study of SOSAD’s contribution to the urban justice movement are the twin issues of impact and representativeness. One of the premises of Ms. Price’s work is that SOSAD is both indebted to earlier black activism and had an impact on the forms that activism could take in the 1990s and early 2000s. From that perspective, at least some features of BLM may be traced back to the movement pioneered by Clementine Barfield and others in 1980s Detroit.

5 The first feature of the organization Melynda Price highlighted was the intentional link its members made between their personal lives and a larger political context. Clementine Barfield’s move to politics stemmed from a very intimate event—the death of her child—but the personal motto to which she clung in the aftermath—“What would mama do?”, which soon became “What are you going to do?”—put her in relation with older black women of her family. She was able to translate her grief into political action precisely because she knew what to do. Ms. Price reminded the audience that church participation has been linked to political participation among black women, and Clementine Barfield could draw upon her personal experience as a community organizer and upon available resources—networks, spaces—that had existed since the pre-Civil Rights era. She first arranged meetings for families affected by youth violence, providing them with support groups to guide them through the mourning process. Soon, the group expanded, became SOSAD, and developed a broader anti-violence agenda. The transition was reportedly intentional—Clementine Barfield and others felt it was possible to move beyond mourning and towards making a change, having an impact on the community at large. It was also, in a way, a transition from remediation to prevention, and that process would need to mobilize an entire community. Melynda Price showed how SOSAD used the language of community, and how that language expresses deeply held beliefs about the nature of their mission. Both parenting and ending violence were apprehended as a collective responsibility; SOSAD members saw themselves as parents to their community, even when they did not have children themselves.

6 Melynda Price gave detailed examples of programs created and sponsored by SOSAD. The organization tried to deal with the different forms violence could take: committees on gun control were created, as were initiatives to prevent drug use. Education may be perhaps singled out as one of the most salient features of SOSAD. As a parent and an activist, Barfield saw it as her responsibility to educate both children and local politicians. She thought it necessary not just to listen to children’s lived experiences as

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witnesses of crime, but also to make people in power aware of the human consequences of this epidemic of violence. Other programs included using gardening as a social justice tool, for both its concrete and symbolic benefits, supporting families through legal proceedings, putting pressure on state officials to pursue offenders, and, most significantly, telling the stories of the murdered children. BLM mothers have had a similar interest in taking back control of the narrative. Once more, this initiative was both inward- and outward-looking: ensuring that these children’s stories did not end with their deaths, and convincing the prosecution that they really were victims. That the status of “victim” is not easily granted to black children and youth highlights the specific issues faced by black anti-violence activists.

7 These outside forces were not the only source of struggle for SOSAD members. Melynda Price also studied the structure and membership of the organization and found that tensions existed between parents who saw their children as victims of drug trafficking, and others whose children were participants in the drug trade. As a woman who also took on leadership roles in her church community, Clementine Barfield ran into conflict with ministers who felt that they were or should be in charge. These, however, were not the chief cause of SOSAD’s decline in the mid-1990s, which Melynda Price identified as a lack of funds. In her survey of post-SOSAD anti-violence activism, she notes that other related groups keep operating in large American cities. Mothers of Murdered Sons, now Mothers of Murdered Children, has a prominent Philadelphia chapter known for helping Trayvon Martin’s mother publicize his death.

8 Towards the end of her talk, Melynda Price went back to considerations about the context in which SOSAD came into existence. She links Clementine Barfield’s activism to a tradition of self-help in African-American communities. This tradition, compounded by the political isolation which Detroit residents experienced in the 1980s, led to the widespread view that change could only come from residents themselves. That it was mothers who led the way is not, according to Price, a surprise. “Black motherist politics” are to be understood as an expression of women’s emotional interconnectedness. Motherhood, and family, more generally, were seen not first and foremost as a biological reality, but as an emotional bond. This non-conformity to white conceptions of family may have shaped the media criticism faced by black mothers, and to which black mothers’ politics also responded. Overcoming stereotypes to become a powerful interest group, black mothers were reacting, in the 1980s, not just to youth violence, but to what they identified at its roots, including the recent economic downturn.

9 In her conclusion, Melynda Price estimated that what happened in Detroit was critical in shaping the national conversation, at a time when local courts and governments were reluctant to handle racial issues. She emphasized not only the concrete forms taken by this brand of anti-violence activism, but also the concepts of justice, fairness and responsibility which SOSAD helped articulate. To her, this case study gives us a new understanding of community responses to drug wars. Ms. Price ended her talk with a reminder that her interest in the project came from her own coming of age in an inner city at the same time period, as well as the experience of her cousin’s death to gun violence.

10 The conference was followed by three detailed responses before the audience was allowed questions. Hélène Le Dantec-Lowry (Université Sorbonne-Nouvelle) highlighted Ms. Price’s choice to focus on Clementine Barfield as a personal entry point into

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SOSAD’s history. She noted that we should also consider the increasing number of black politicians serving in elected positions in Detroit as a factor in the success of anti- violence activism. To hark back to the long tradition of self-help in African-American communities, she cited Peter Medoff and Holly Sklar’s work Streets of Hope (1994), which showcases women’s participation in Boston community organizing. Black women are now receiving increasing recognition for their role as organizers in their communities. Prof. Le Dantec-Lowry also underlined the interesting contrast between the stereotypes mentioned by Melynda Price, including the “welfare queen,” the black matriarch and their “crack babies” with the actual work SOSAD did. She asked the speaker questions about the management of the organization, including issues of funding. Publicity was another matter that came under scrutiny. Barfield became a well-known figure, and went on appearing on talk shows: did this level of publicity have an impact on SOSAD’s influence on policy? Prof. Le Dantec-Lowry added that place, like law—and the failure of local institutions to create or enforce laws—is part of the specific structures of exploitation to be studied in an intersectional perspective. Regarding Melynda Price’s remarks on motherhood as an emotional—rather than biological—connection, she reminded the audience of the way women are perceived as more nurturing, and raised to better deal with emotions. There is a perception of women as mothers, which may explain fathers’ lack of visibility within the organization. Finally, she linked SOSAD’s emphasis on narrative to the larger problems and genesis of African-American history: what is at stake is creating visibility, shedding light, rewriting the narrative.

11 Melynda Price agreed and mentioned the fact that Emmett Till’s mother insisted on an open casket funeral and that the photographs be circulated in the press, specifically as a way to fight back against the erasure associated with lynchings. Black women in particular took to new technologies—like newsletters, and later talk shows—as part of this strategy of publicity and were early adopters of social media platforms like , Vine, and Snapchat. These platforms are those used by BLM activists. However, Prof. Price added that part of it is also linked to traditional black funeral culture. It is a part of black funeral culture that people be handed funeral cards with the person’s name and photographs. The idea behind these is that there should be something for the living to take away. As for budgetary issues, SOSAD’s budget was made up mostly of small donations. At a critical junction, General Motors stepped in and paid their taxes; they also received a few grants from the city.

12 Hélène Quanquin (Université Sorbonne Nouvelle), making bridges to her own work, commented that the biographical approach helps balance uniqueness and representativeness and asked how Clementine Barfield saw her own experience, as well as whether Melynda Price had considered writing a collective biography. She then commented on periodization, raising the central question of how SOSAD can be linked to BLM. Citing her personal work on male abolitionists who became feminist activists as a consequence of intimate connections, she brought to the table the notion of infra- politics, and how resistance could take different, sometimes unexpected forms. Resistance through daily tasks can make us reconsider the domestic space as a political space. Lastly, she asked about the differences and similarities between women and men’s involvement. Were father allies? Did they participate in different ways?

13 Melynda Price noted that fatherhood was indeed important to SOSAD members, and that fathers joined when the initial support groups morphed into the organization. Minutes reveal that some questioned the fact that the spokespeople were mothers.

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Today, fathers are often present at rallies, but their involvement is often not part of the coverage. In the end, it all seems to boil down to a question of what is emphasized—or not—in the mainstream press.

14 Other remarks dealt with families’ political involvement in the 1980s. Comparisons were made to the homeless families movement, which received traction because of the family label that guaranteed that recipients were firmly within the bounds of state benevolence. In the National Alliance for the Mentally Ill, other parents mobilized their identity as family members in different ways. In that sense, we were asked to consider the 1980s as a moment when families became political agents. Melynda Price agreed that black women were responding to certain issues which affected their entire families. They saw work, and the decline of the automobile industry, as one of the roots of Detroit’s problems, alongside drugs, racism, undereducation, and loss of community control on unemployment. Ms. Price argued that the notion of Detroit’s black community as families is often lost, even in the academic discussion, in questions about fathers and the role they played. Fatherlessness has become the sense of what the problem was, and not plant closings.

15 Audience questions followed, dealing with the—in fact non-existent—difference in media coverage of murdered sons and daughters, Melynda Price’s writing practices and background, and her study of the selection of juries and the way outsiders can participate when they are on the “inside”. Throughout the discussion, Detroit was characterized as a very “Southern” northern city, which led participants to consider the matter of racialized lack of resource. Melynda Price was asked to identify what ideals of the African-American family have been articulated, and she mentioned the existence of romanticized narratives surrounding the experience of migration. It is with a lighter pop culture reference to the Twitter feud between singer Kanye West and other black artists that the discussion section concluded, with Melynda Price reminding the audience that “it is not uncommon for black people to have internal conflicts about what the best political solutions are for their concerns, and even what the sources of their concerns are.”

16 Eventually, the debate and the conference ended on considerations on Twitter as the archival material of the future. Certainly, the many varied questions that were asked are a testament to the salience of Melynda Price’s research interests in the current academic climate. Her focus on black women as mothers is part of the broader reassessment of women’s involvement in black social movements. She is similarly breaking new ground with her choice of an approach that connects different types of actors—mothers, ministers, schoolchildren, local politicians and businesses—and reveals the interconnectedness of the networks to which they belonged. As participants noted, such works that contribute to filling the gaps in the history of black social justice movements may be of particular interest to specialists of the BLM movement —“rewriting the narrative” in more ways than one.

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INDEX

Subjects: Actualité de la recherche

AUTHOR

JEANNE BOITEUX Université Sorbonne Nouvelle

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« Passeurs de la littérature américaine en France 1917-1967 » Université Rennes 2 14-15 mars 2019

Christelle Centi

1 Les journées d’études « Passeurs de la littérature américaine en France 1917-1967 », organisées par Benoit Tadié, Anne Reynes-Delobel et Sylvie Bauer dans le cadre d’une collaboration entre l’université d’Aix-Marseille, l’université Paris Nanterre, l’Institut des Amériques de Rennes, les unités de recherche LERMA (EA 853), Centre de Recherches Anglophones CREA (EA 370) et Anglophonie Communautés Ecritures ACE (EA 1796), se sont déroulées les 14 et 15 mars 2019 à l’université Rennes 2. Les échanges portaient sur les personnes ou institutions ayant contribué à la diffusion, la popularisation et la critique de la littérature américaine en France de la fin de la Première Guerre mondiale à la fin des années soixante. La première journée se composait de trois ateliers centrés sur le passage du texte et du contenu : les traducteurs et universitaires, les adaptations et réappropriations, et les poètes ; dans sa conférence plénière, Marc Chénetier, en tant que « découvreur » de littérature, s’est attaché à montrer les limites du terme de « passeur ». La deuxième journée, grâce à deux ateliers centrés sur les éléments concrets de la diffusion qu’étaient tout d’abord les lieux de sociabilité (atelier 4) puis la presse, les agents et les imprimeurs (atelier 5), a donné l’occasion à Dominique Jeannerod de présenter en conférence plénière son projet d’analyse quantitative des revues et collections françaises comme vecteurs de diffusion de la littérature policière américaine.

2 Le premier atelier a permis, à travers les figures de Jean Catel comme découvreur et auteur, d’Edith Wharton comme traductrice et de Jack London comme enjeu de traduction, de prendre la mesure des figures littéraires comme à la fois sujets, acteurs, et objets du mouvement de passage de la littérature et culture des États-Unis, dans une dynamique de simplification et de remise en question permanentes.

3 Anne Reynes a offert, à travers des archives inédites portant sur Jean Catel, une analyse du carrefour d’un réseau culturel États-Unis/France, de ses acteurs, des effets

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de cette relation et des facteurs qui l’orientaient. En tant qu’universitaire, traducteur, spécialiste de Whitman et contributeur au Mercure de France, Catel, médiateur culturel, a participé aux reconfigurations, par les périodiques, des échanges transatlantiques et de la géographie littéraire des années 20. Ces reconfigurations ont permis une dynamique d’assignation des identités culturelles nationales, de canonisation, et d’institutionnalisation d’une certaine littérature américaine, dans un contexte peu favorable puisque les écrivains français, à cette époque, se trouvaient davantage préoccupés par la littérature de masse des États-Unis ou par les récupérations idéalisantes ou idéologisantes qu’il était possible d’en faire (à l’exception d’écrivains comme Cocteau et Soupault).

4 Virginia Ricard, de l’université Bordeaux-Montaigne, s’est intéressée à Edith Wharton comme médiatrice de la culture américaine, contre et avec ses stéréotypes. En tant qu’autrice ayant vécu en France dès 1908 et jusqu’à sa mort, Wharton a joué un rôle ambivalent : tout en peignant à travers House of Mirth un portrait peu flatteur de ses compatriotes (obsédés par l’argent, corrompus), elle a dénoncé, dans un discours nouvellement publié, « France and Its Allies at War », donné le 8 février 1918 (devant un public composé notamment de René Viviani, d’ambassadeurs, d’ecclésiastiques et d’écrivains), la facilité à laquelle les Français cèdent parfois dans leur compréhension des États-Unis et les stéréotypes qu’ils perpétuent.

5 Quant à Jack London, Véronique Béghain, de l’université Bordeaux-Montaigne, a présenté les temporalités d’édition et de traduction de l’auteur, ainsi que la nature kaléidoscopique de son lectorat. Le « passage » de London en France a été l’œuvre de Louis Postif et Paul Guyer, qui ont effectué un travail d’acclimatation (par allègement et clarification d’une langue qu’ils considéraient trop violente et émotive) autant que de diffusion auprès du public français, et ont détenu les droits exclusifs pendant une période d’une longueur exceptionnelle. La figure de Jack London est donc montrée par Véronique Béghain comme une construction conditionnée par notre perception de ce qui est « américain » par rapport à un style purement français, rétroactivement mythologisé, ce qui souligne le travail de filtre des « passeurs » déjà évoqué pour Edith Wharton.

6 La discussion s’est alors dirigée vers cette compétition entre France et Amérique, entre constructions d’un canon « passéiste » et d’une « immaturité » moderne. L’importation des clichés parfois nés localement opère un transfert d’images déjà erronées et pré- filtrées (comme l’a souligné Marc Chénetier), et l’on peut alors observer l’image en train de se constituer et se figer. Les malentendus et chambres d’échos sont redoublés.

7 La conférence plénière de Marc Chénetier, « le passeur de la littérature américaine en France » (Sylvie Bauer), a été l’occasion d’une remise en question du terme de passeur contre le galvaudage contemporain du terme qui en émousse le sens. Mériter de se voir attribuer ce terme n’est pas évident, car surgissent les figures de tous ceux qui en fait de passeurs ne sont qu’autant d’entremetteurs, profiteurs et exploiteurs, profitant de « l’enflure des engouements inversement proportionnels à la solidité des jugements esthétiques ». Le fait d’« exoticiser » pour mieux vendre rejoint alors la tendance actuelle à la marchandisation de la littérature et, par extension, de toute la sphère sociale et culturelle. La liberté des éditeurs devient non existante, puisque selon les mots d’Hannah Arendt, ils sont confrontés à la « dégradante obligation d’être de son temps », dans un cycle où les goûts du public et ce qu’on juge bon de lui proposer s’entraînent mutuellement. C’est la figure individuée et romantique du passeur qui

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parait alors trop dépassée pour correspondre à la réalité contemporaine. Le rôle du véritable « passeur », qui serait davantage un découvreur, serait de faire passer des ombres, les invisibles essentiels dont on ne parle pas, dans un dévouement absolu au littéraire et à la rencontre, au lieu de se contenter d’être un « strict importateur du déjà connu ».

8 Le deuxième atelier, « Adaptations et réappropriations », a permis de poursuivre une réflexion portant sur les modifications du texte et le passage d’un côté de l’Atlantique à l’autre de caractéristiques proprement « américaines » (ou du moins imaginées comme telles). Crystel Pinçonnat, de l’université Aix-Marseille, dans son analyse « Léo Malet ou le roman américain Made in France », a offert une vision du père du roman noir français comme « faussaire » d’une littérature américaine « à la française » à partir de plusieurs composantes : le personnage du privé, un emprunt direct au roman noir, que Malet transforme en journaliste ; et la ville « américaine » ; ce faisant, il adapte deux des « sèmes moteurs caractéristiques du genre », l’enveloppe urbaine et le corps qui la traverse. Ces deux éléments, basés moins sur une réalité américaine que l’image que l’on s’en fait en France à l’époque, sont retravaillés suivant des techniques du mouvement surréaliste que Malet a fréquenté de près avant de basculer du côté du roman noir.

9 Hicham Mazouz, d’Emory University, a proposé une communication portant sur « Jean Genet and Richard Wright : Writing between Mediation and Intertextuality » qui permettait de voir les personnages marginaux de Jean Genet comme une force de contestation de l’hégémonie. En utilisant les textes de Frantz Fanon et de Richard Wright pour montrer la vulnérabilité et les dynamiques de domination à l’œuvre dans Notre Dame des Fleurs, Hicham Mazouz montre que Genet met en scène, en France, une expérience des corps marginaux subissant la violence comme technique d’invisibilisation et d’affirmation de la domination. L’existence du marginal est le problème : si un corps marginal devient visible, il s’expose à la sanction. Le trope du « Flying African » offrait une échappatoire radicale par la fiction.

10 Enfin, Julie Vatin-Corfdir, de l’université Paris Sorbonne, a présenté l’adaptation française des Sorcières de Salem d’Arthur Miller en 1957, dans le contexte du maccarthysme, réalisée par Raymond Rouleau, avec Simone Signoret et Yves Montand dans les rôles du couple Proctor, et s’est attelée à mettre en valeur ses partis pris dans leur contexte. L’adaptation du texte s’y est en effet faite en suivant une dynamique double : la domestication de l’étranger qui permet de rendre le texte acceptable, à travers une traduction qui opère des choix parfois radicaux, et le jeu sur la triple lisibilité intertextuelle des trois couples, les Proctor, les Rosenberg, et les Montand- Signoret, qui avait permis à l’époque de vendre la pièce au public français comme une histoire d’engagement politique.

11 La première journée s’est conclue sur le troisième atelier portant sur les figures du poète. La communication de Mathieu Perrot, de , PA, avait pour titre « When Poetry Happens : la “poésie en action” dans l’œuvre de Jean-Jacques Lebel ». Lebel, un des premiers à avoir traduit Allen Ginsberg et d’autres poètes de la Beat Generation, considérait la poésie comme devant, en tant qu’événement, incarner une forme de soulèvement collectif. Préférant les affinités transnationales à celles régionales ou locales, Lebel incarne une problématisation de la figure du passeur comme celui qui, conscient des convergences, collectionne diverses pratiques pour

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créer une barricade contre l’art institutionnalisé, en ouvrant un passage, un espace, à l’espoir et à la bienveillance humaine.

12 Annick Ettlin, de l’université de Genève, a fait porter son attention sur la figure de Langston Hughes comme poète engagé, et sur la récupération de ce statut par les éditions Seghers pour faire de Hughes une figure universaliste, en aplanissant un engagement déjà jugé peu radical par des revues comme Présence africaine. Les positions politiques des auteurs américains paraissent ainsi être des points d’achoppement pour les passeurs français, qui ont du mal à transplanter d’un continent à l’autre les idées et leur expression dans un contexte différent teinté de visions étroites de ce qu’est la situation américaine, notamment en matière de relations entre communauté afro- américaine et société d’après-guerre.

13 Charlotte Estrade, de l’université Paris-Nanterre, dans sa communication « American Modernist Poetry in Paris from the 1910s to the 1930s : Both to and away from Paris », a présenté les poètes américains vivant à Paris et fonctionnant comme passeurs de leurs propres œuvres et de celles de leurs contemporains. Leurs réseaux et communautés littéraires se formaient selon trois modalités différentes : les salons, l’idée d’écrire dans une langue étrangère, et les magazines. Paris était un épicentre des communautés littéraires : le salon de Gertrude Stein a permis des réunions jusqu’aux années 30, mais cette image de Stein comme passeuse a conduit à se souvenir d’elle comme d’une personnalité permettant la diffusion du travail des autres, plutôt que comme d’une écrivaine. Ezra Pound a tenté de rivaliser avec Stein en constituant son propre salon, fréquenté par des artistes tels que Cocteau, des dadaïstes et des surréalistes. Tandis que la majorité des poètes américains du haut modernisme étaient exilés à Paris, en Italie, et à Londres, Charlotte Estrade remarque qu’ils se tournaient néanmoins vers les États- Unis et souhaitaient la reconnaissance de leurs textes par un public américain.

14 La discussion s’est tournée vers les transformations dans l’action du passage du texte et la tentation d’établir un lien entre rupture de la forme poétique et position politique. D’après Mathieu Perrot, Lebel n’a pas changé la société française, mais a contribué à son échelle à « secouer » certains milieux. Charlotte Estrade ajoute qu’il est possible à travers ces poètes de voir comment une fois une certaine forme de poétique arrivée, le politique est réinjecté. On constate une différence entre vision rétrospective déterministe de certaines rencontres et contingence de l’activité sociable des poètes de l’époque, ainsi qu’entre les projections de l’image des poètes par eux-mêmes et leurs passeurs.

15 Le 15 mars débutait le quatrième atelier, portant sur les sociabilités. Il commençait par une communication d’Aliko Songolo, de l’université du Wisconsin-Madison, sur « Le Salon de Clamart : entre négrophilie et négritude ». Aliko Songolo s’est concentré sur les littératures des États-Unis noirs en rapport avec celle de la France noire, et sur le rôle de Paulette Nardal comme passeuse. Paulette Nardal a été elle-même oubliée ; on a avancé comme raisons de cet oubli l’absence d’écrits romanesques ou poétiques, d’engagement dans le marxisme, et sa fidélité aux idéaux de la République française, mais elle était surtout, d’après Aliko Songolo, femme et féministe avant la lettre. Au fil des années 20, son appartement de la banlieue de Clamart était le lieu, tous les dimanches après-midi, de discussions portant sur la littérature, la philosophie, la politique, et surtout l’image et la place des personnes noires dans la société occidentale. Elle fut également à l’origine de la Revue du monde noir, en 1931, une des premières à accorder une tribune aux noirs du monde entier. Son rôle a été reconnu par Senghor,

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mais la disparition de ses archives dans l’incendie de sa maison pose un réel problème lorsque l’on cherche à dévoiler l’ampleur de son influence. La figure de Paulette Nardal comme lieu de convergence transnational et son statut de femme noire permettent de problématiser la passeuse comme cruciale, omniprésente et invisibilisée.

16 Jamie Korsmo, de l’université de Georgia, a donné une communication sur une institution : « A Brief History Ex Libris : the founding of the American Library Association ». L’American Library est issue d’un réseau de bibliothèques destinées aux soldats américains pendant la Première Guerre mondiale et présent en différents lieux où les troupes étaient basées : Le Mans, Saint-Aignan, Saveney, etc. Jamie Korsmo a eu accès aux archives et aux photographies de l’époque. En 1920, ALA a fait don de fonds (en livres et financiers) pour la création de l’American Library in Paris ; elle fut d’abord un monument à la mémoire d’Alan Seeger, fils du fondateur Charles Seeger et auteur du poème « I Have a Rendezvous with Death ». La bibliothèque a également fondé une revue littéraire, Ex Libris, en 1923 ; originellement censée faire connaitre la littérature américaine contemporaine en Europe, elle a servi de « lieu » de sociabilité et de contact pour les expatriés américains.

17 Giulia Napoleone, de l’université de Rome 3, a exploré la figure de « Nathalie Clifford Barney, médiatrice culturelle, traductrice et mécène ». Son salon du 20 rue Jacob se voulait un espace d’internationalisme, de dialogue et, le vendredi après-midi, un espace physique à cheval entre le public et le privé, transformé en lieu de l’esprit d’une époque, l’entre-deux-guerres. Nathalie Barney, consciente de son rôle de passeuse, présentait les uns aux autres les convives qui pouvaient s’entendre. Giulia Napoleone a établi une infographie montrant l’influence de Nathalie Barney sur des auteurs et autrices majeur.e.s de leur temps, tels qu’Ezra Pound, Rainer Maria Rilke, Djuna Barnes, etc. : à la fois muse et hôtesse d’un temple de l’amitié, elle incarne ce que Pascale Casanova disait de Paris, un « méridien de Greenwich » de la littérature, non pas tant espace physique que fonction.

18 Andrea Pitozzi, de l’université de Bergame, a conclu cet atelier par sa communication sur « le Paris d’Henry Miller », dans laquelle il opère un va-et-vient entre Miller dans Paris et Paris dans les romans de Miller pour poursuivre la réflexion sur les lieux infra et extratextuels du passage. Le Paris de Henry Miller est un Paris du désespoir, de l’ennui et du temps posthume, plongé dans un état perpétuel de semi-conscience, à la fois réel et esthétisé. Sa temporalité est « paradoxale et toujours ouverte ». Paris est également le lieu d’une forme de liberté et de relatif succès pour un auteur longtemps quasi inconnu outre-Atlantique : Henry Miller a vu ses premiers livres traduits en France dans les années 40, et censurés aussitôt, tandis qu’un certain milieu culturel s’attache à le défendre (notamment Georges Bataille et Maurice Blanchot) et à affirmer que la violence et l’obscénité montrent une écriture d’une humanité totale qui se rebelle, d’un homme total qui se laisse aller à la présence du monde.

19 La discussion a permis d’insister sur l’existence de différents espaces qui ne se croisaient pas : les différents salons, les différentes visions de Paris. Les présentations sur le Salon de Clamart et celui de Nathalie Barney se répondent en cela même qu’elles montrent une ségrégation.

20 Dominique Jeannerod dans sa conférence plénière « Passeurs de récits : les revues policières américaines traduites en France (1950-1970) » a montré à travers une analyse quantitative que les revues policières telles que Mystère Magazine, Suspense, Minuit et Le Saint Détective Magazine (toutes traduites de revues policières américaines) de l’après-

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guerre permettent de savoir ce dont les amateurs de littérature policière se nourrissaient, à l’aide d’un moissonnage de données et d’une restitution sous forme quantitative (auteurs, autrices, prévalence de certaines revues, etc.). Le canon de ces revues différait certes du canon littéraire mais également du canon policier produit pour et par les collections sur lesquelles ces revues prenaient appui ; ces revues utilisaient parfois des nouvelles d’auteurs canonisés afin de se légitimer (Mystère Magazine avait ainsi publié, entre autres, une nouvelle d’Apollinaire). Le déclin des collections dans les années 70 a coïncidé avec celui des revues, avec auparavant une dépolitisation et une épuration des contenus, toujours dans une visée de rejeter l’étiquette de littérature de divertissement. C’est en réaction à cette épuration que sera plus tard créé le néo-polar, qui repolitise le genre. C’est aussi l’occasion de dresser le portrait des hommes qui ont servi de passeurs derrière ces structures historiques : Maurice Renault, créateur entre autres de Mystère Magazine, et Igor Maslowski, le critique attitré de la revue. L’étude des revues permet de remettre des auteurs sur notre radar, en faisant une autre histoire du roman noir américain grâce à une autre histoire de l’Amérique.

21 Le cinquième et dernier atelier portait sur les presses, agences et imprimeurs.

22 André Derval, directeur des collections de l’Institut Mémoires de l’Édition Contemporaine à Caen, a dressé un portrait du fonds archivistique et bibliographique en retraçant ses origines. Créé en 1988, l’IMEC est une association visant à conserver les archives des maisons d’édition et permettre la consultation des documents, d’abord dans une salle de lecture à Paris ouverte en 1989, puis dans un bâtiment historique près de Caen, l’Abbaye d’Ardenne, dont la salle de lecture a été ouverte en octobre 2004 suite à l’obtention d’un label européen et la conclusion d’un accord tripartite avec le ministère de la Culture et le Conseil Régional de Basse Normandie. Aucun autre organisme au monde ne contient autant d’archives d’éditeurs : plus de 18 km linéaires d’archives dans l’abbaye, auxquels s’ajoutent 9 km de réserve extérieure.

23 La communication de Fiona McMahon, de l’université de Bourgogne, permet de poursuivre l’enquête sur les structures matérielles du passage de la littérature : « How to Be Modern : The Darantière Press and 1920s print culture in France ». Elle a rappelé l’importance du volume de Jean-Michel Rabaté sur Darantière : Maurice Darantière, les années 20. En tant qu’imprimeur, Maurice Darantière a dirigé son imprimerie à Dijon de 1917 à 1928 à la suite de son père, Victor ; grâce à son inscription dans le réseau local, il a pu remplir une fonction de mécène d’auteurs sans garantie aucune que leurs œuvres pourraient avoir un intérêt commercial. Ses liens avec Adrienne Monnier et la Maison des amis des livres lui ont permis de diminuer la distance séparant les écrivains anglophones des maisons d’édition ; il s’est constitué comme imprimeur décidant de prendre en charge des projets extravagants en langue étrangère, comme l’exotisme du cercle des hauts modernistes, tout en étant loyal à sa coterie française (Adrienne Monnier, et Sylvia Beach, notamment) et en faisant partie d’une certaine frange marginale de la société. Sa collaboration avec Gertrude Stein s’est étendue sur de longues années.

24 Laurence Cossu-Beaumont, dans sa communication sur « L’agence littéraire William et Jenny Bradley, 1923-1982 », est revenue vers de nombreux auteurs et autrices déjà mentionnés, puisqu’elle mettait en valeur le rôle du couple Bradley dans le passage de littérature américaine en France et de littérature française aux États-Unis. La longévité de leur agence fut telle qu’on ne peut citer tous ceux qui ont bénéficié de leur aide.

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Laurence Cossu-Beaumont a souligné le rôle d’accompagnateur de l’agent, qui facilite la vie de l’auteur de manières diverses, avant, pendant et après la production de l’ouvrage. Les réseaux du couple Bradley venaient également de leur présence dans les salons, et du caractère rhizomatique de leur position qui recoupait les trajectoires de nombreux passeurs déjà mentionnés : dans le salon de Barney, on trouvait notamment Rémi de Gourmont, traduit par William Barney ; Jenny Bradley tenait son propre salon les jeudis à son domicile, et était en contact avec Adrienne Monnier. La littérature que les Bradley ont portée était protéiforme, et leurs interlocuteurs incroyablement variés.

25 Enfin, Anne Cadin, de Sorbonne Université, a conclu l’atelier par une étude quantitative et qualitative sur « La presse et ses passeurs méconnus, intermédiaires indispensables à la circulation de la littérature américaine en France dans les années 40 ». Le « moment américain du roman français » est marqué par le passage à un public très vaste, mais également deux divisions : entre les auteurs favorisés par ce qu’on appelle le « prisme Coindreau » et les autres, et entre une littérature qu’on considère comme dégradante (point précurseur de la littérature américaine considérée comme culture de masse) et une littérature en voie de mise au canon littéraire. Dans la presse, des universitaires et des chroniqueurs et chroniqueuses (Raymond Las Vergnas, Thomas Narcejac) s’exprimèrent sur un panorama de la littérature américaine pendant la guerre et tentèrent de théoriser ce phénomène. Des voix s’efforcèrent alors de nuancer le débat pour éviter la politisation outrancière des questionnements liés à la littérature américaine en France.

26 La discussion s’est tournée vers la différence entre passeurs et polémistes : ces derniers, dans les articles de journaux, étalent des idées reçues au nom de combats idéologiques extra-littéraires entre France et États Unis. Les débats journalistiques ne portent pas alors tant sur une idée de la littérature américaine que sur l’effet qu’on s’imagine qu’elle aura sur une France elle aussi mythologisée. Ce phénomène existait auparavant, et se poursuit encore aujourd’hui.

27 Ces deux journées d’étude ont été l’occasion de balayer le champ pluridisciplinaire des passeurs d’Amérique, qui sont des figures aussi diverses que la littérature qu’ils essaient de faire connaître. A travers les passeurs, ce sont également les supports ou obstacles matériels ainsi que les mécanismes de production, de transmission, de diffusion, d’invisibilisation ou de mise en valeur, et de critique et canonisation de la littérature qui sont soulignés : presses, agents littéraires, revues, salons, lieux physiques, lieux de l’esprit et objets matériels sont des éléments qui sont souvent laissés de côté mais ont un grand pouvoir de détermination de ce qui est ou n’est pas donné à voir au public.

INDEX

Thèmes : Actualité de la recherche

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AUTEUR

CHRISTELLE CENTI Université Rennes 2

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Percival Everett: Theory, philosophy and fiction ERIAC (EA 4705), Rouen University May 2nd and 3rd 2019

Anne-Julie Debare

1 This symposium, organized by Anne-Laure Tissut (ERIAC, EA4705), echoes and prolongs the reflections on Percival Everett’s work sparked by a conference that took place in Rouen in 2013 in the presence of the author. While the previous symposium investigated questions about the American West’s identity and representations, this year, Everett scholars sought to highlight the theoretical and philosophical influences perceptible in the work and how they inform Everett’s artistic process as well as the genesis of his novels.

2 French, American and German Everett specialists investigated the use of philosophy and theory as artistic material per se as well as discourses to be prolonged, responded to or thwarted. More broadly, determined structures such as narratives and languages were also under scrutiny during this particularly stimulating conference on one of the most innovative contemporary American novelists.

Everett’s literary response to ontological conundrums, binarism and the limitations of theory

3 For Michel Feith (Nantes University), Everett’s novels shed light on the “deeply philosophical questions” inherent in the representation of animals by blurring the boundaries between the realm of animals and men. Taking on animal representations and metaphors to tackle deeply human ethical, intimate or political situations, Everett’s novels use animal categorization and totems while never fully relying on them and sometimes parodying them thus “shattering definite forms against taxonomies and limiting possibilities”. According to Feith, Everett’s novels put the emphasis on “the imperative to know oneself as animal”, the importance of “playing along with one’s categories, becoming oneself again by mudding identification”. Anthony Stewart (Bucknell University, USA) argued that, by showing Ishmael Kidder’s

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internal conflicts and his experiments with how we make meaning, The Water Cure invites the reader to wonder what kind of moral vocabulary is available to us. Indeed, according to Stewart, The Water Cure’s “lack of resolution” and the inconclusiveness of Everett’s writing reveal both the intrinsic inadequacy of language and conventional divisions. In line with skepticism and pragmatism, Everett’s novel generates a “productive frustration” by shaking perceptual limits and the categories we draw from them, and invites the reader to “embrace [inconclusiveness] as significant in itself” and to “consider its value over distractive certainty” as it forms “a basis for common comprehension”.

4 Judith Roof (Rice University, USA) offered a reading on Erasure, presenting it as a literary response to Journalist Chuck Stone known for his sustained fight against “the conceptual limitations of race conceived as an opposition as well as the conditions such thinking produces and perpetuates”. Roof pointed out how, prolonging Stone’s theoretical basis and his enlightening take on a binarism that still pervades the contemporary “identity politics,” Erasure seeks to baffle “the caucaso-centrism of the reader and his underlying racist projections while reading” and thus “sunders and disperses categorical binaries into the infinite multiplicities that subtend speaking subjects”. In her presentation Christelle Centi (Rennes 2 University) argued that Percival Everett’s novel Watershed is the locus of a tension between attempts at detachment toward Native American violent History and a collective trauma presented in an oblique manner, a tension that enables the text “to constitute and legitimize a marginal intertextuality of Native history, as well as foreground the colonial logocentrism of the United States”. Centi showed how the novel points out “the reification of Native American cultures, as well as the linguistic strategies put in place by the fictional tribe of the book to counteract this hegemony” and how Watershed “ties language, and the institutional knowledge derived from it, back to the buried history of the land”. Shannon Klein (Rice University, USA) offered a reading of Everett’s later works including So Much Blue, American Desert, and Half an Inch of Water in light of the theory of second wave feminism, including the work of Simone de Beauvoir, Germaine Greer, and Betty Friedan. Klein leaned on considerations about the nature of heterosexual relationships and reflections on matrimony and gender struggle within marriage, to examine the nature of the protagonists’ sexual and romantic relationship, thus highlighting how Everett’s writing “lends a needed nuance to both theories and stories”.

5 Annie Lowe’s (Rice University, USA) presentation shed light on Everett’s exploration of logical and mathematical structures to grapple with questions of identity and logic. Lowe argued that, in Percival Everett by Virgil Russell, the text prolongs Gottlob Frege’s theory according to which arithmetic is yet a mere extension of logics and “spin[s] the logical question of identity around a fictional narrative” in order to “plot a quest to make sense of the limits of sense through its own entirely contingent and entirely necessary form as a story”. In her reading of American Desert Melissa Bailar (Rice University, USA) put forward the literary investigation on the limitation of reason in apprehending and making sense of the body in death. The novel’s exploration of the failures of religion and science to grasp death, “suggests that discursive ways of approaching death and the body might yield more than illusory rationality”. The defamiliarization of the reader’s notions of death and laughter to “confront the

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unknown and the fear of it” may well constitute these other discursive forms of knowledge.

Questioning determined structures: subverting genres and language

6 Sylvie Bauer (Rennes 2 University) offered a sharp reading of Assumption and showed how detective novel stereotypes are used by Everett as a matrix that meets the reader’s expectations related to the whodunit to better thwart them and open up the determined structure of the genre. She demonstrated how on a larger scale this process exceeds generic implications and extends to language itself. Bauer showed how in Assumption, Everett’s writing creates an “effet de flottaison” that brings the reader to investigate diegetic truth but also “to tackle questions on the making and unmaking of meaning”. Johannes Kohrs (Freie Universität Berlin, Germany) posited that in Everett’s crime fictions the dead bodies’ “ontological precariousness corresponds with the epistemological instability that characterizes Everett’s storytelling at large”. Kohrs sought to foreground Everett’s “anti-binary and counter-conventional approach to identity and literary representation” and, to do so, showed how those “dubious bodies” in Everett’s fiction are a way to “open up a critical running-commentary on consensual notions of identity and responsibility, relentlessly debunked by Everett’s writing.

7 Derek C. Maus (State University of New York at Potsdam, Germany) showed how Menippean satire provides an analytical strategy that offers interesting interpretive insights on Everett’s work, a work that always strives to reassign in fine the meaning- making process to the reader. Maus offered a close reading of Everett’s most recent work The Book of Training by Colonel Hap Thompson of Roanoke, VA, 1843: Annotated From the Library of John C. Calhoun, arguing the novel to be “a wholly Menippean work, that satirizes not only the bigoted logic that underpinned American chattel slavery, but also the ongoing political/philosophical/social legacy of the Confederacy represented by Calhoun’s marginalia within Thompson’s fictional ‘text on the training of our black animals’”. Clement Ulff (Rouen University) posited that fragmentation and the blurring of boundaries between fiction and autobiography at work in Erasure prompt the readers to reconsider their mode of interpretation as they are “teased toward a proliferation of readings in the text and beyond” to reach a “clarity [that] can be born from fragmentation and obscurity”.

8 Bren Ram (Rice University, USA) offered a reading of Erasure and Percival Everett by Virgil Russel through Roland Barthes’ The Pleasure of the Text and proposed “an exploration of the erotic in narrative, begging the question of desire and what animates readers to enter and complete texts in the first place”. Ram showed how the “frustration of narrative closure” and the “perversion of narrative expectations” at work in Everett’s novels drive both the narrative structure and the reader’s response and pleasure in the act of reading.

9 During the symposium, documentary maker Alexandre Westphal also presented his ongoing documentary project about Percival Everett’s work, Land of stories (provisional title). Weaving together images of interviews, archives, as well as readings of excerpts performed by a fictional doppelganger of the novelist, “which should resound with the recursive figure of the double in his work,” the film will lean on Everett’s interest for satire and pastiche. Westphal tackled preoccupations proper to filmic representation, such as the possibility to translate a style or a writer’s imagination into pictures.

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10 These stimulating presentations led to fruitful and jaunty exchanges over coffee breaks and lunches served in the course of this two-day conference. It was a pleasure witnessing the exchanges and the relationships forged during this symposium, which also fostered the thriving collaboration between Rice University scholars and Rouen University.

11 Link to the programme : http://eriac.univ-rouen.fr/percival-everett-theory- philosophy-and-fiction/

INDEX

Subjects: Actualité de la recherche

AUTHOR

ANNE-JULIE DEBARE Rouen University

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« La machine dans la littérature et les arts visuels du monde anglophone » Journée d’études internationale OVALE, Sorbonne-Université 28 mai 2019

Olivier Hercend

1 Cette journée d’études internationale, organisée par les doctorantes Diane Drouin, Anouk Bottero et Omayyah Al-Shabab, avec le soutien de l’équipe de recherche VALE (EA 4085) et de l’ED IV, à Sorbonne-Université, constituait l’aboutissement du séminaire doctoral du laboratoire OVALE, qui portait cette année sur le thème de « La machine dans la littérature et les arts visuels du monde anglophone ». Fidèles à l’esprit d’ouverture de cette équipe, les contributions alliaient réflexions sur l’art, la science et la société, dans une perspective transdisciplinaire et transatlantique. Loin de la vision étroite de la machine-objet, l’approche englobait toutes les facettes du mécanisme : à la fois comme concept philosophique, dans son rapport d’opposition et de complémentarité avec l’organique et avec l’humain, comme métaphore politique et sociale, et dans son historicité, consubstantielle avec celle des arts et techniques. Comme le rappelait en ouverture Line Cottegnies (Professeure à Sorbonne-Université, directrice-adjointe et représentante pour l’occasion de l’équipe VALE), la pensée de la machine est toujours tributaire d’une vision du monde, de ses rouages, mais également des potentialités créatrices qui l’habitent. En cela, le travail artistique et intellectuel de l’invitée, J.R. Carpenter, représentait une parfaite entrée en matière.

J.R Carpenter : « Mapping Machines : Rewriting the World »

2 Artiste reconnue et docteure de la University of Arts, London, J.R. Carpenter s’est présentée dès l’abord comme engagée dans une œuvre de destabilisation des ordres et des hiérarchies. Canadienne en Angleterre, migrante et descendante de migrants, elle cherche à tracer d’autres lignes que les lignes de force, coloniales, capitalistes ou consuméristes, qui strient les cartes du XXIème siècle. Parlant de son amitié avec une

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« interlocutrice absente », l’artiste Mary Patterson, elle a évoqué leurs dialogues, et ses tentatives paradoxales pour répondre aux questions sans réponse (« unanswerable ») qui étaient nées de ces échanges. Or, ce « sans réponse » défie les tentatives récentes de contrôle de l’espace, qui assignent un code et une série d’informations à chaque point du globe. C’est face à ce catéchisme sans fin de Google Maps qu’elle a choisi d’affirmer l’irréductible épaisseur du concept de « lieu », de « foyer », de « chez-soi » – autant de forces échappant à la traçabilité des méta-données. Dans « Les huit quartiers du Sommeil », elle surimpose à une image satellite les récits, réels ou fictifs, d’habitants de Montréal, confrontant l’espace vécu à la vue verticale et plate de l’image satellite. Sa réflexion, héritière de celles de Richter et Benjamin, et après eux Adorno et Derrida, vise ainsi une restructuration de l’espace, qui passe par une pensée renouvelée du temps. Utilisant depuis les années 1990 les potentialités de l’internet, les « sites-web » et leurs architectures non-linéaires, Carpenter resitue les tentatives récentes d’appropriation des lieux – surveillance satellite, méta-données, gentrification – dans une histoire plus large. D’archive en archive, elle superpose les strates de cartographies, les efforts de modélisation successifs, en détectant les projections, les entreprises de contrôle, mais aussi les erreurs et les rêves humains qui s’y lisent. Son travail récent, « Le plaisir de la côte », réalisé auprès de l’université Paris 8 et des Archives Nationales, prolonge cette veine : elle explore les traces d’une exploration, et fait remonter à la surface le processus d’appropriation par l’homme du territoire. Par ces biais, celle qui affirme être d’abord « collage-artist » brise l’illusion d’un progrès simple des techniques, au profit d’une insistance temporelle, une coexistence des strates, qui est l’histoire secrète des machines cartographiques et de leurs emplois.

Panel 1 : Machines théâtrales.

3 Le premier panel de la journée a vu s’entrecroiser deux aspects complémentaires du théâtre, la machinerie sociale de la performance venant faire contrepoint à l’abstraction des formes. Mylène Maignant, doctorante à l’École normale supérieure de Paris, explorait dans son intervention « Mathematics and Computer Science on Samuel Beckett’s Stage » les potentialités d’outils numériques et de modélisation, pour rendre compte de la mécanique scénique dans les pièces Fin de Partie et Quad de Samuel Beckett. Comme elle l’a précisé en réponse à une question, sa recherche ne visait pas à rendre compte d’une intention auctoriale du dramaturge, mais plutôt, par le biais d’outils nouveaux, à proposer un autre cadre de lecture des didascalies de ces pièces. Stylisant l’espace scénique, changeant les acteurs en carrés de couleurs qui traçaient à vitesse constante des figures géométriques, elle affirmait le parallèle entre l’abstraction croissante du théâtre de Beckett et les découvertes de la cybernétique après la Seconde Guerre mondiale. Reste ce « bruit », mentionné à la fin de sa présentation : ce qu’elle ne pouvait modéliser, et qui semblait constituer la face obscure de sa propre pensée autant que de ses outils. C’est justement sur les conditions matérielles de la représentation, et l’ingénierie scénique, qu’Elise Rale, doctorante à Sorbonne-Université, se penchait dans « Les machines de Broadway ». Analysant la tendance récente à une surenchère d’effets mécaniques dans le théâtre contemporain de Broadway, elle proposait un retour en arrière sur le théâtre américain, ses conditions de production, son rapport à l’architecture et aux arts décoratifs, et en dernières instance son modèle économique. Ces réflexions menaient à une remise en question de l’« effet de réel » dans ce théâtre, à travers les notions d’« hyperréalité » et de « real deal » développées par Umberto Eco :

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plutôt qu’un quelconque naturalisme, le théâtre américain chercherait avant tout à susciter une forme de « plaisir enfantin » et « magique », réalisant l’utopie d’une scène changée en monde. Cette volonté d’oublier les conditions de représentation, cet idéal du mécanisme qui s’efface lui-même pour « faire plus vrai », est une tendance dont Rale proposait de voir les effets au-delà des seules machines-objet, dans le jeu même des acteurs, leur rapport à leur performance et jusqu’à leur propre corps.

Panel 2 : Les machines de la modernité : de l’inquiétude à la fascination esthétique

4 Trois présentations successives retraçaient ici, à travers plus d’un siècle et de l’Amérique à Vladivostock, les élans mécaniques de la modernité. Dans son intervention intitulée « ’Smoothing the ravell’d fleece’: spinning machine between poetry and politics », Tatiana Smoliarova, professeure associée à l’université de Toronto, repartait des racines de la révolution industrielle, pour sonder l’impact langagier et poétique de la mécanisation. Elle se concentrait surtout sur le poème « The Botanic Garden » d’Erasmus Darwin, repérant ce que cette œuvre didactique – qui voulait être pour Linné ce que le poème de Pope « An Essay of Man » avait été pour Newton – avait repris au monde des machines, comme « stock de métaphores » pour décrire la nature. Ce mélange de l’organique et des inventions nouvelles révélait en dernière instance à quel point l’élément langagier se nourrissait de matérialité, et à quel point les instruments de l’homme influaient sur sa perception du monde. L’impact mondial de la révolution industrielle fut ainsi abordé, à la fin de la présentation, à travers la réception en Russie des machines à filer importée du Royaume-Uni, et leur intégration comme métaphores pour parler des conditions de vie dans le pays. Traversant l’atlantique, Pauline Choay-Lescar (Sorbonne-Université) présenta dans « Whitman et les temps modernes » les rapports complexes du poète américain avec le monde des machines. De l’épopée de la conquête du continent à celle, verticale, de l’érection des grattes-ciel, ses textes explorent les potentialités de la technique. A la fois chantre de la technologie, du lien entre l’organique et le mécanique (« I sing the body electric »), et fasciné par les avancées « spirituelles » des transports et des communications, qui recomposaient l’espace et le temps, Whitman n’en remarquait pas moins les facettes plus inquiétantes de la mécanisation. Outils du travailleur et du créateur, les machines semblent à mesure que sa poésie mûrit prendre une autonomie de plus en plus grande, que Choay-Lescar liait avec la disparition progressive du « je » poétique – et l’autonomisation croissante de la machine textuelle, du corps même du poème. Enfin, Tamar Kharatishvili, doctorante à Northwestern University, abordait le XXème siècle dans « Expatriate Modernisms: Machine Aesthetics in Pound, Cendrars and Delaunay-Terk ». Par une lecture des théories d’ Ezra Pound et de T.E. Hulme à la lumière de « La prose du transsibérien » de Cendrars, illustré par Sonia Delaunay-Terk, celle-ci opposait la dynamique d’appropriation et de condensation triomphale des premiers dans les années 1910, à l’impression de perte de repères et à l’esthétique hybride des seconds. Mettant en parallèle le travail de Delaunay-Terk sur le poème et son intérêt pour les halos des lumières électriques, tels qu’elle les peint dans « Prismes électriques », elle proposait une réévaluation, plus ambivalente et plus singulière, du poème, loin de l’exaltation futuriste pour l’ère des machines, et empreint déjà du « doute » qui s’emparerait du modernisme d’après-guerre.

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Panel 3 :Perspectives américaines contemporaines sur la machine

5 Le dernier panel se focalisait sur le monde contemporain, à mi-chemin entre l’idéal d’une origine perdue et la perspective de l’Apocalypse. Dans « L’Âge de cristal (Michael Anderson, 1976), ou la ville-machine et la contre-utopie pastorale », Mehdi Achouche, maître de conférence à l’Université Jean Moulin – Lyon 3, abordait le rapport à l’utopie mécanique dans le cinéma hollywoodien des années 1970. L’allégorie présentée dans le film (Logan’s Run en anglais) reliait l’artificialité des machines et des décors (le film était tourné dans un centre commercial dernier cri) à la décadence de la société. Celle-ci s’était engouffrée dans une version caricaturale du mode de vie consumériste et de l’hédonisme prôné par le mouvement hippie. Il fallait alors un voyage initiatique au couple des héros, vers la clairière édénique qu’était devenue Washington D.C., pour réapprendre les vraies bases de l’éthique américaine : le travail pour obtenir les fruits de la nature, le respect pour les hommes vieux – Abraham Lincoln, et ce sage vieillard qui garde la constitution dans les locaux du Sénat – et les vertus du couple monogame et du mariage. Cette vision conservatrice de l’anticipation, qui signalait selon Achouche le lien très étroit entre la dystopie américaine et les racines utopiques de la fondation du pays, contrastait fortement avec les visions foisonnantes et diverses que proposait Héloïse Thomas, doctorante à l’université Bordeaux Montaigne, dans « Machines in the Anthropocene ». Rappelant la définition géologique puis littéraire de l’« anthropocène », comme scission entre la nature et son exploitation mécanique au sein des systèmes institutionnels du capitalisme et du patriarcat, celle-ci se proposait de définir plus avant la place de la machine dans cette opposition. En effet, si la machine n’est ni purement ennemie ni instrument du salut dans la fiction d’anticipation contemporaine, la question de son usage devient le point de focalisation central. En proposant de revoir l’interaction avec le monde et avec soi-même, d’ouvrir les mécanismes sociaux comme matériels à la créativité, les fictions d’anticipation de la littérature « queer » explorent les hybridations auxquels les interactions entre humain et machines donnent lieu. Prenant l’exemple du recueil Full-metal Indigiqueer de Joshua Whitehead et du roman Blackfish City de Sam J. Miller, Thomas montrait l’irruption du programme dans les mécanismes du langage, et de la machine dans le champ de l’intrigue. Loin d’être révélation finale, l’Apocalypse devenait, au prisme de cette lumière « queer », un champ d’exploration privilégié de l’humain.

Conclusion

6 En effet, à travers les siècles, de la « mule-Jenny » aux perversités futuristes de la science-fiction, la machine s’est présentée à nous lors de cette journée d’études avant tout comme un médiateur symbolique de l’homme au monde et de l’homme à l’homme. Elle est outil, mais aussi signe, sur lequel se trouvent projetés les espoirs et les angoisses, les idéologies et les résistances des individus ainsi que des sociétés dans leur ensemble. Plutôt que de modéliser un champ dans son développement mécanique, il a semblé que nous poursuivions une multitude de pistes, de lignes de fuite vers le passé ou l’avenir rêvé, qui filent le long des filins d’acier, des poutres, des escalators, de ces insondables traînées de fumée qui s’échappent de la locomotive dans le tableau de Turner « Rain, Steam and Speed ». Et toutes, à l’analyse, partaient des mains, des yeux et des esprits des hommes, et se trouvaient inscrites dans le langage, reflet « spirituel » et intersubjectif du monde de la technique.

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INDEX

Subjects: Actualité de la recherche

AUTHOR

OLIVIER HERCEND doctorant, Sorbonne-Université

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« Dorothea Tanning, le modernisme et l’avant-garde transatlantique » Conférence d’Alyce Mahon, Maîtresse de conférences en histoire de l’art moderne et contemporain à l’Université de Cambridge « Giacometti Lab », Institut Giacometti, Paris, 7 juin 2019

Yasna Bozhkova

1 Contrairement à ce que l’on pourrait penser, à l’Institut Giacometti1 sont souvent organisées des expositions ou des conférences qui touchent au domaine de l’art américain et sont susceptibles d’intéresser les anglicistes2. Le 7 juin 2019, Alyce Mahon, Maîtresse de conférences en histoire de l’art moderne et contemporain à l’Université de Cambridge, a donné une conférence en anglais, consacrée au parcours de la peintre surréaliste américaine Dorothea Tanning. Le propos était riche et passionnant. Alyce Mahon est également commissaire de l’exposition Dorothea Tanning, première rétrospective d’envergure consacrée à l’artiste, que le public a pu découvrir au Museo Reina Sofia de Madrid (3 octobre 2018-7 janvier 2019) puis à la Tate Modern de Londres (27 février-6 juin 2019).

2 L’intervention d’Alyce Mahon a porté sur le parcours transatlantique de Tanning, qui a passé une grande partie de sa vie en France, et sur sa façon d’évoluer dans les cercles avant-gardistes, comme en témoignent les dialogues artistiques qu’elle entretient avec d’autres artistes : Leonor Fini, Max Ernst, Marcel Duchamp entre autres. Elle s’est également interrogée sur les raisons pour lesquelles Tanning est souvent marginalisée, voire exclue des expositions portant sur l’art surréaliste. Alyce Mahon y voit deux explications. D’une part, ce serait parce que Tanning crée une forme de surréalisme très personnelle et singulière, qui met à l’épreuve le surréalisme orthodoxe3. Son œuvre continue d’ailleurs à évoluer bien au-delà de la fin du surréalisme « historique » en 1969, devenant progressivement plus abstraite. D’autre part, explique Mahon, ce serait aussi dû au fait que les femmes dans les mouvements avant-gardistes sont souvent marginalisées. En outre, Tanning elle-même avait une certaine réticence envers l’étiquette « femme artiste »4 et envers le féminisme, ce qui complique les lectures féministes de son œuvre : « There is no such thing as a woman artist. You may be a woman and you may be an artist, but the one is a given and the other is you. »

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3 Dans la première partie de sa conférence, Mahon a retracé le parcours biographique de Tanning, revenant notamment sur ses débuts artistiques, telles qu’elle les relate elle- même dans son autobiographie Birthday : née dans la petite ville de Galesburg, dans l’Illinois, où, selon Tanning elle-même, « nothing happens but the wallpaper », elle rêvait déjà à l’âge de sept ans d’être artiste et de vivre à Paris. Après un passage à l’Institut d’art de Chicago, elle s’installe à New York, où elle travaille comme dessinatrice publicitaire et vit un peu à la dérive jusqu’à la découverte, décisive pour elle, de l’exposition Fantastic Art, Dada, Surrealism, organisée par Alfred Barr au MoMA en 1936. Tanning décrit comme une épiphanie cette exposition qui l’initie aux œuvres des surréalistes comme Leonor Fini ou encore Max Ernst, et découvre dans le surréalisme un monde de possibilités infinies. Mahon a expliqué que la réputation médiatique de Leonor Fini, baptisée « a female of the Surrealist species » dans un article de presse de l’époque et célèbre pour son cosmopolitisme et sa remarquable beauté physique, a pu servir de modèle à Tanning. Afin d’illustrer à quel point cette exposition a laissé son empreinte sur l’imagination de l’artiste, Mahon a montré qu’une de ses œuvres beaucoup plus tardives, Pincushion to Serve as Fetish (1965)5, s’inspire de la célèbre œuvre de Meret Oppenheim Object: Breakfast in Fur (1936), qui était présentée dans le cadre de l’exposition et qui fit grande impression sur le public. Selon Mahon, dans les deux œuvres, un objet domestique, une tasse à thé chez Oppenheim et une pelote à épingles chez Tanning, se transforme en fétiche, à travers l’utilisation de matériaux souples pour créer une sensation érotique et une envie de toucher l’objet insolite.

4 Alyce Mahon a insisté ensuite sur l’ironie de l’histoire qui sous-tend la première traversée transatlantique6 de Tanning : impressionnée par l’exposition au MoMA, Tanning prend le bateau en 1939 pour aller en France et rencontrer tous les surréalistes en personne, mais après l’éclatement de la Seconde guerre mondiale elle sera vite forcée de retourner aux États-Unis. Découverte par le galeriste Julien Levy en 1941, elle pourra quand même rencontrer, grâce à lui, les surréalistes qui se sont exilés à New York entre temps. En 1943, son tableau Birthday et sa nouvelle « Blind Date » 7 seront publiés dans la revue surréaliste VVV lancée par André Breton à New York : selon Mahon, l’inclusion de ces œuvres est un choix stratégique dans le repositionnement du surréalisme comme mouvement plus international. En 1944, Tanning aura sa première exposition en solo dans la galerie surréaliste de Levy. Comme l’a souligné Mahon, il était assez exceptionnel pour une artiste encore très peu connue d’avoir une exposition en solo dans la cette célèbre galerie et elle se trouva ainsi tout de suite sur la carte de l’art avant-gardiste.

5 Dans la deuxième partie de sa conférence, Alyce Mahon s’est attardée sur quelques-uns des tableaux les plus marquants de Tanning, en donnant des pistes d’interprétation. Selon elle, si l’on tend souvent à interpréter les œuvres des femmes dans les mouvements avant-gardistes de manière biographique, chez Tanning cette approche s’avère limitée, puisque l’artiste déclarait elle-même : « One of my reasons for painting was really to escape biography. » Elle a insisté sur l’importance du motif de la porte, et notamment des séries de portes qui s’ouvrent à l’infini8, déjà présent dans son plus célèbre autoportrait Birthday de 1942, qui célèbre sa découverte du surréalisme et son entrée dans ce monde de possibilités infinies9. Elle explique que pour Tanning, un tableau doit laisser la porte ouverte à l’imagination et créer des passages d’une réalité à l’autre, tissant une sorte de toile enchantée autour du spectateur.

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6 Alyce Mahon a proposé une lecture très fine et nuancée de la dimension genrée de l’art de Tanning et de la façon dont sa vision se situe par rapport au surréalisme plus « masculin », y compris celui de Max Ernst. D’une part, elle a insisté sur l’importance de l’érotisme chez Tanning, qui donne vie aux phantasmes de la femme. Par exemple, elle a expliqué que dans le tableau The Guest Room (1950-52), Tanning crée des phantasmes qui s’approprient et détournent le fétiche surréaliste de la femme enfant, mais aussi critiquent le climat répressif aux États-Unis pendant les années 1950, et particulièrement l’atmosphère « aseptisée » créée par la censure de l’érotique. D’autre part, Mahon a souligné que Tanning voyait le travail de Max Ernst, notamment, comme un grand hommage au féminin. Elle a également précisé que des tableaux comme Eine Kleine Nachtmusik (1943) et The Guest Room, qui s’approprient la figure de la femme enfant, entretiennent un dialogue avec Ernst et ses représentations d’Alice, notamment dans The Stolen Mirror (1941). Dans sa lecture du tableau Self-Portrait de 1944, Mahon a avancé l’hypothèse que cette œuvre n’est pas, comme l’ont suggéré certains, une représentation de Tanning elle-même rendue insignifiante, voire écrasée, par sa relation avec Ernst et par l’immensité de l’art du peintre ; ce tableau exprimerait plutôt, selon elle, une expérience du sublime dans le désert américain, inspirée par leur séjour à Sedona, dans l’Arizona, et relèverait d’une esthétique qui se situe dans la lignée des tableaux romantiques de Caspar David Friedrich Wanderer above the Sea of Fog et Woman before the Rising Sun. Elle a contesté l’idée selon laquelle les femmes artistes n’auraient pas besoin d’une muse, contrairement aux hommes, en prenant pour exemple le tableau Max in a Blue Boat (1947), où la figure d’Ernst apparaît comme celle d’une muse. Pour Tanning, sa relation avec Ernst se situait dans le cadre d’une égalité acquise entre les sexes : elle voyait Ernst comme un pair, le décrivant même comme un « fellow laboratory worker ».

7 Pour finir, Alyce Mahon s’est attardée sur l’installation Hôtel du Pavot, Chambre 202 (1970-73), l’œuvre la plus monumentale de Tanning, mais aussi la plus surréaliste, selon l’artiste elle-même. Elle a précisé que cette chambre secrète, cet espace surréel qui semble être « partout et nulle part » à la fois, doit en partie son pouvoir de suggestion aux allusions qu’on peut y déceler : interprétée par certains comme une réponse à l’essai de Virginia Woolf A Room of One’s Own, cette œuvre semble s’inspirer de sources hétéroclites, mêlant les influences artistiques, comme le poème en prose de Baudelaire « La Chambre double », la grande installation posthume de Marcel Duchamp Étant donnés, les poupées de Hans Bellmer, et les sources plus populaires, comme le cinéma hollywoodien ou celui de Hitchcock, ainsi qu’une chanson populaire qui raconte l’histoire de la femme d’un gangster qui s’est suicidée dans une chambre portant le numéro 202.

8 Alyce Mahon a conclu son intervention sur l’idée qu’avec son surréalisme idiosyncratique, à la fois américain et transatlantique, et féminin et émancipé sans être féministe, Tanning complique l’histoire du surréalisme comme mouvement qui privilégie les artistes masculins, blancs et européens, et transforme la femme en objet. Elle a également mis l’accent sur l’idée que Tanning résiste à la linéarité, à la fois dans son parcours biographique et dans son œuvre où le labyrinthe occupe une place de choix.

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BIBLIOGRAPHIE

MAHON, Alyce, dir. Dorothea Tanning : Behind the Door, Another Invisible Door. Madrid : Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, 2018.

TANNING, Dorothea. Birthday. Santa Monica : Lapis Press, 1986.

NOTES

1. L’Institut vient de lancer le « Giacometti Lab », un nouvel espace avoisinant qui accueille les programmes pédagogiques de son École des modernités. 2. Parmi les manifestations récentes qui touchent au domaine anglophone, on peut citer l’exposition Flora (5 avril-9 juin 2019), consacrée à une installation très originale créée par un duo d’artistes contemporains américano-suisse, Teresa Hubbard et Alexander Birchler, qui essaient de reconstruire, à travers deux films, le parcours d’une artiste américaine oubliée de l’histoire, Flora Mayo, qui fut l’amante et le modèle de Giacometti. La journée d’études « Le destin des femmes artistes à la période moderne : artistes femmes passées par les académies d’art à Paris au début du XXe siècle » (22 mai 2019) explorait la présence de plusieurs artistes anglo-américaines à Paris, dont par exemple Mina Loy et Berenice Abbott. 3. Mahon a expliqué que Tanning refusait parfois que son art soit considéré comme « surréaliste ». 4. Par exemple, Mahon a précisé que tout au long de sa vie, Tanning refusait de participer à des expositions qui réunissaient uniquement les œuvres d’artistes femmes, à l’exception de sa toute première contribution à une exposition collective, The Exhibition by 31 Women, organisée par Peggy Guggenheim dans sa galerie Art of this Century à New York en 1943, qui était censée n’inclure que 30 femmes, mais fait place à une 31e femme après la découverte de l’art de Tanning. 5. Pour des reproductions des œuvres mentionnées ici, voir le site : https:// www.dorotheatanning.org. 6. Cette traversée transatlantique sera la première de toute une série de migrations, car, comme l’a souligné Mahon, Tanning avait une approche « migrante » de la vie et changeait souvent de résidence avec son mari Max Ernst. 7. Tanning était aussi écrivaine. 8. Le catalogue de l’exposition dont Alyce Mahon est commissaire s’intitule Dorothea Tanning: behind the door, another invisible door. 9. Alyce Mahon a précisé que c’est à Max Ernst qu’on doit le titre de ce tableau. C’est aussi l’occasion de sa première rencontre avec Ernst, qui va voir le tableau sur les conseils de Julien Levy.

INDEX

Thèmes : Actualité de la recherche

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AUTEUR

YASNA BOZHKOVA Université Sorbonne Nouvelle – Paris 3

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« Frontières dans les Amériques » Université Grenoble Alpes, ILCEA4, Laboratoire Pacte, 11-13 juin 2019

Cléa Fortuné

1 Le colloque international transdisciplinaire « Frontières dans les Amériques » s’est tenu à Grenoble du 11 au 13 juin 2019. Le premier d’une série intitulée « Frontières, espaces et pouvoirs », cet événement était organisé par Anne-Laure Amilhat Szary (Université Grenoble Alpes), Pierre-Alexandre Beylier (Université Grenoble Alpes), Gregory Benedetti (Université Grenoble Alpes) et Eric Tabuteau (Université d’Orléans).

2 À travers 12 sessions et 4 conférences plénières d’universitaires, de doctorants et d’acteurs culturels venus de tous horizons géographiques et disciplinaires (géographie, civilisation, histoire, sciences politiques, arts), plusieurs axes de réflexion ont été proposés : les différentes dynamiques qui animent les frontières américaines, leurs mutations, leurs rôles et leurs implications. Si l’Amérique du Sud a tenu une place importante dans ce colloque, ce compte-rendu, loin d’être exhaustif, se concentre ici sur les communications qui ont eu trait à l’Amérique du Nord et qui ont permis de penser les frontières à travers le prisme des services et de l’énergie, de l’histoire et de la culture, ou encore de l’accueil et de la sécurité. Enfin, ce compte-rendu évoquera les ouvrages présentés lors de ce colloque.

Services et énergie : considérations éthiques et juridiques

3 La question du tourisme médical étatsunien vers l’étranger a été abordée par Elisabeth Fauquert dans sa communication intitulée « Patients sans frontières : les déterminants socio-économiques du tourisme médical aux États-Unis ». Ce phénomène, qui date du XIXe siècle, s’est amplifié ces vingt dernières années. Fauquert identifie trois types de tourisme médical : celui de la chirurgie esthétique, celui du contournement pour avoir accès à des médicaments non autorisés aux États-Unis, et le tourisme médical économique pour les patients privés de couverture médicale. Il s’agit d’une industrie lucrative, facilitée par des médiateurs étatsuniens et internationaux. La marchandisation des soins médicaux l’amène à conclure sur une question qui en soulèvera de nouvelles lors de la discussion, à savoir celle des inquiétudes éthiques et

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juridiques engendrées par le tourisme médical (qui pose la question de la santé comme un droit ou un privilège), ainsi que des disparités accrues dans l’accès au soin.

4 C’est également aux inquiétudes éthiques et juridiques que s’est intéressée Lucie Genay dans son intervention intitulée « Nuclear borderlands: the politics of neighboring a nuclear weapon plant ». Elle y a abordé la notion de frontière à l’échelle locale, sous l’angle des confrontations politiques et sociales entre les habitants du Texas Panhandle, où se situe Pantex, site principal d’assemblage et de démantèlement d’armes nucléaires aux États- Unis. Suite à une hausse significative du nombre de cancers parmi les résidents frontaliers de cette usine, certains de ces résidents (les peaceniks) se sont mobilisés pour dénoncer les effets des opérations de Pantex sur la santé des habitants et sur l’environnement. Ils se sont heurtés à d’autres (les cold warriors) qui soutiennent l’usine, principal employeur du comté de Carson et financeur d’œuvres de bienfaisance, notamment lors de célébrations pour la défense de l’environnement comme le Jour de la Terre. Cette confrontation a finalement amenée Genay à poser la question de l’interprétation des amendements quant à la gestion du site, créant une autre confrontation, cette fois entre l’État du Texas et l’État fédéral.

Histoire et culture : Cuba et les États-Unis

5 À travers des approches historiques, Janice Argaillot et Etienne Morales ont proposé deux interventions sur Cuba et ses relations avec les États-Unis. Janice Argaillot, dans sa communication « Cuba : nouvelle frontière ? », s’est interrogée sur la place de l’île en tant que nouvelle frontière dans un monde en reconfiguration. Elle a abordé le lien entre territoire, identité et culture cubaine, qui s’exprime à Cuba mais également au- delà, notamment à Miami, qui a connu un déplacement massif de Cubains. L’attachement de ces derniers à la culture de l’île s’est reproduit sur le sol étatsunien, où la communauté diasporique a gardé des liens étroits avec le territoire d’origine.

6 Dans sa communication « Dans le ciel du détroit de Floride : La frontière Cuba/États- Unis transformée et traversée par l’avion, de 1927 à nos jours », Etienne Morales a abordé Cuba et la notion de frontière à travers une autre perspective originale, à savoir le ciel et les aéroports. Il a montré comment la frontière États-Unis/Cuba a été transformée par les flux aériens au cours du XXe siècle et jusqu’à aujourd’hui. Il a évoqué la dialectique d’ouverture et de fermeture de l’espace aérien, l’imaginaire de la traversée (à savoir comment les passagers sont perçus par les Cubains eux-mêmes et par les Étatsuniens) et les dispositifs frontaliers mis en place. Il est revenu ainsi sur la variété de phénomènes transfrontaliers qui ont façonné la relation entre Cuba et les États-Unis.

Accueil et Sécurité

7 Suite aux attentats du 11 septembre 2001, le phénomène de rebordering s’est accentué en Amérique du Nord. À partir de ce constat, les quatre communications suivantes se sont interrogées sur les conséquences de la fermeture de la frontière États-Unis/ Mexique. L’impact de la sécurisation de la frontière sur les résidents locaux de la ville de Douglas (Arizona) a été abordé par Cléa Fortuné, dans sa présentation « Dispositifs de sécurisation à Douglas, Arizona : quelles conséquences pour les résidents locaux ? » Malgré les mesures sécuritaires imposées par les gouvernements fédéraux successifs

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depuis les années 1990, les relations historiques, économiques et culturelles entre Douglas et sa ville sœur mexicaine, Agua Prieta, se sont toutefois maintenues. Fortuné a ainsi été amenée à interpréter le concept de sécurité comme construit social et politique, dont les définitions à la fois s’opposent et coexistent. Ce qui est considéré comme un enjeu de sécurité pour le gouvernement fédéral ne l’est pas toujours pour les communautés frontalières à l’échelle locale.

8 Lors de sa communication « La scolarisation des mineurs binationaux : une nouvelle forme de coopération transfrontalière États-Unis/Mexique », Isabelle Sinic s’est concentrée, quant à elle, sur l’impact de la fermeture de la frontière sur la scolarisation des mineurs binationaux. Après avoir retracé l’évolution des mouvements migratoires et notamment les migrations de retour vers le Mexique, elle a posé la question des modes de vie frontiérisés des enfants mexicains américains et d’une nouvelle forme de coopération transfrontalière entre les États-Unis et le Mexique. Elle a évoqué des partenariats existants entre les districts scolaires de San Diego et de Tijuana pour la mise en place de programmes scolaires communs, ce qui pourrait mener à une forme d’éducation transnationale.

9 Dans son intervention « Construction des menaces et construction de la migration comme problèmes publics. Le spectacle de la militarisation de la frontière mexicaine vu des États-Unis », Damien Simonneau s’est penché sur la construction des menaces et de la migration comme problèmes publics. Il a expliqué comment la militarisation de la frontière États-Unis/Mexique est mise en spectacle de façon à la fois concrète et symbolique, par des groupes de la société civile comme We Build the Wall au Texas ou encore Build the Border Fence en Arizona. Ces groupes bottom up font passer un message nativiste, xénophobe et politique pour contester les choix fédéraux en matière de mobilité transfrontalière. Ils utilisent ainsi trois opérations : la problématisation des situations de mobilité, qui sont recodées en enjeux de sécurité, puis portées à la connaissance du public par une contestation des choix gouvernementaux. Il a conclu sa présentation en insistant sur le fait qu’il faut également se focaliser sur d’autres acteurs qui recodent les enjeux frontaliers, comme le Sanctuary Movement, faisant le lien avec la présentation suivante.

10 Olivier Richomme, dans sa communication « The Borders Within: California’s sanctuary cities and progressive federalism », a développé en effet le thème des villes sanctuaires en Californie et la question du fédéralisme étatsunien, à travers l’exemple de lois controversées comme SB54, aussi appelée California Values Act. Dans le contexte d’un écart politique croissant en ce qui concerne les politiques migratoires aux États-Unis, cette loi garantit que les ressources financières, de personnel, d’infrastructures locales et étatiques ne seront pas utilisées pour participer aux actions anti-immigration de l’État fédéral, comme les expulsions ou les perquisitions sur les lieux de travail. Cette présentation s’est terminée sur des frontières qui existent à l’intérieur même des États, des villes et des juridictions.

Présentations d’ouvrages

11 À l’occasion de conférences plénières, un certain nombre d’intervenants ont présenté leurs ouvrages parus ou à paraître. Emmanuel Brunet Jailly a exposé le projet de revue Borders in Globalization (BIG). BIG a pour but de comprendre les problématiques posées par les frontières et les régions frontalières dans le monde entier, à travers les

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questions de sécurité, de migration, de gouvernance, de coopérations transfrontalières pour ne mentionner que quelques aspects. Il a fait écho au discours d’ouverture d’Anne-Laure Amilhat Szary en réaffirmant la nécessité de regarder au-delà des frontières (comme, entre autres, les frontières maritimes ou les frontières aéroportuaires) pour analyser leur évolution.

12 Victor Konrad et Guadalupe Correa-Cobrera ont présenté leur ouvrage North American Borders in Comparative Perspective (à paraître, Press) dans lequel ils proposent une approche comparative des caractéristiques des frontières nord et sud des États-Unis. L’ouvrage a pour but d’ouvrir les perspectives et le débat sur les frontières de l’Amérique du Nord en parlant de ses acteurs, de l’ALENA, de Donald Trump, de la gouvernance et de la coopération frontalières, ou encore de l’intégration et de l’évolution des politiques frontalières.

13 Quant à Mathew Longo, il a présenté son ouvrage intitulé The Politics of Borders: Sovereignty, Security, and the Citizen after 9/11, paru en 2017 (Cambridge University Press). Il y détaille ce qu’est une frontière et les hypothèses induites par les définitions proposées. Son livre s’appuie sur l’exemple de la frontière États-Unis/Mexique mais également sur les frontières d’Amérique latine.

14 Enfin, Shepard Fairey était l’invité du festival de street art qui se déroulait à Grenoble à la même période, en partenariat avec l’université Grenoble Alpes. Cet artiste américain – connu notamment grâce à l’affiche « Hope » en soutien à Barack Obama lors de la campagne présidentielle de 2008 – a répondu aux questions du public quant à l’influence du street art sur les frontières.

15 Ce colloque a permis de dégager de nouvelles pistes de réflexion sur des espaces frontaliers en perpétuelle évolution. Suite aux recherches sur le « retour des frontières » (Michel Foucher, 2016)1 à l’échelle mondiale et à leur fermeture notamment en Amérique du Nord, ce colloque a mis en avant la nécessité de travailler à d’autres échelles – notamment régionale et locale – pour comprendre les transformations des frontières elles-mêmes et les mutations qu’elles engendrent pour les communautés transfrontalières.

NOTES

1. Michel Foucher, Le retour des Frontières, Paris, CNRS Editions, 2016.

INDEX

Thèmes : Actualité de la recherche

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AUTEUR

CLÉA FORTUNÉ Université Sorbonne Nouvelle-Paris 3

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“Passages”: The Robert Duncan Centennial Conference in Paris Sorbonne Université, Paris, June 12-14, 2019

Berengere Riou

1 Last June the Sorbonne hosted the Robert Duncan Centennial Conference to celebrate the birth of the poet and take stock of his ever-growing influence both in the field of English studies and in contemporary poetics. The idea for the conference came from the exchanges between the participants of the 2006 “(Re:)Working the Ground” Conference at Buffalo. Among those, Clément Oudart (Sorbonne), Stephen Collis (Simon Fraser University), and James Maynard (University at Buffalo) organized the June 2019 “Passages” Conference together with Hélène Aji (Université Paris Nanterre) and Xavier Kalck (Sorbonne). It lasted three days and featured an impressive cast of international speakers, including renowned and emerging scholars as well as poets, many of whom had been lucky enough to know and work with Robert Duncan. The present report is in no way exhaustive, as there were many simultaneous, equally enticing workshops, not to mention a series of exciting poetry readings in the evenings, but it will present some of the new finding and directions in Duncan studies. It must be added that the number of speakers and attendants, their diversity and shared passion for poetic research, provided a vivid representation of the dynamism of the field.

2 As the title of the conference – “Passages” – implies, the various panels emphasized, first and foremost, the importance of transmission – between Duncan and his masters, between Duncan and his circle, and among those reading Duncan today. Accordingly, the first day started by paying tribute to the H.D.-Duncan connection, with a panel titled “Reading Robert Duncan Reading H.D.,” chaired by Cynthia Hogue and featuring Lara Vetter, Jeanne Heuving and Brian Caraher. The three panelists illuminated not only how H.D.’s poetry had created an “opening” for Duncan (the poem “Heat” “rending open” the poetic ground for him, as is well known), but also how Duncan’s writings, in turn, opened up new doors of interpretation for H.D.’s texts. Lara Vetter gave an illustration of that shared textuality between the two writers, by showing how Duncan’s “The Venice Poem” (written 1948) weaves us back into the “Venus-Venice” transmutation of H.D.’s “Tribute to the Angels” (1945). Brian Caraher reminded us that

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the “place of first permission” for Duncan is, in fact, a “return” (“Often I am permitted to return to a meadow,” CLPP 3), and that, similarly, readers of Duncan find themselves taken within a loop of circular reading that brings them back to H.D. with new sets of poetic associations. For that reason, the reader, Jeanne Heuving argued, must “associate” with the intricate webbing of Duncan’s writing in the H.D. Book, engage with a form of reading that “supplements rather than corrects,” while transgressing chronological and gender orders.

3 Most interesting throughout the conference were the personal anecdotes of those who had encountered Duncan and shared gems of his witticism, such as Brian Caraher recalling Duncan’s passing comment about Henry James at Buffalo in 1979: “he chewed off more than he bit off.” Beyond mere anecdotes, the panelists’ personal memories offered younger scholars a bridge into Duncan’s poetic concerns and methods. In particular, they shed new light on Duncan’s involvement with foreign poetry and poets. Thus, in a workshop titled “Duncan in Paris,” Norma Cole, a student at New College of California in the ’80s and a close associate of Robert Duncan’s, noted, that in the late ’70s-early ’80s, Duncan was never not in conversation with Baudelaire. She went on to examine how his exchanges with French-speaking poets during his stays in France and Belgium – more specifically Jean Daive (whom Cole translated) and Claude Royet- Journoud – informed his inquiry into the power of language(s) and the role of the poet. Vancouver poet and translator Ted Byrne further brought to the audience’s attention Duncan’s theory “du traduire” by restaging his virulent attack on Robin Blaser’s 1965 translation of Les Chimères, which he deemed “unfaithful” to the Hermetic tradition. Byrne showed that Duncan’s anger, followed by the publication of his own “corrective” translations of Nerval, signaled a deeper pondering of the poet’s rights over poetry. Indeed, both poetry and translation are understood by Duncan in terms of “research” and “devotion,” of attentiveness to a pre-existing poetry rather than ex nihilo authority. It is worth noting, as all the speakers did, that Duncan didn’t master French and was well aware of his linguistic limitations. This, however, did not seem to impede his translating enterprise. In fact, his attempts at learning French (as his letters and the exercises in his notebooks testify) seemed, in the words of Clément Oudart, more akin to a form of “brain gymnastics.” Moreover, Oudart argued, Duncan’s seriousness on matters of translation should not lead us to forget his more derivative, Gertrude Stein- inspired play with phonemes across languages, and his delight in mistakes, as exemplified in his “Letters for Denise Levertov: An A Muse Ment” (meant as an homage but misunderstood by Levertov as mockery).

4 This latter dimension of Duncan, which may seem at odds with the large-scale mythopoetic project defined in Fictive Certainties, was studied in more details during the second day of the conference, in a workshop titled “Duncan and some Others,” where Duncan was considered within the tradition of a “poetics of derivation,” in line with the 2012 collection of essays Reading Duncan Reading (Stephen Collis ed.). From such a perspective, Daniel Katz analyzed the poet’s engagement with the more deconstructive elements of modernism in his “Stein Imitations”; sound and visual poet Steve McCaffery offered his “reading of Duncan reading Stein”; Jeff Twitchell-Waas examined Duncan’s ambiguous relationship to Zukofsky and later Objectivists; and Xavier Kalck discussed the “mathematics” of Robert Duncan in parallel with John Taggart’s “Pythagoreanism.” Those papers all challenged what Steve McCaffery called “Duncan’s dream of a holism,” by highlighting the many counter-currents at work in

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his poetics and illustrating the impossibility to ever make him “fit” fully in a single poetic tradition.

5 In the first keynote, Miriam Nichols, who is currently working on a biography of Robin Blaser, addressed precisely that “dream of a holism” so characteristic of Duncan. In a talk titled “Poetry and Polis: Robert Duncan’s Symposium of the Whole,” she tackled the poet’s cosmological ambitions, which she interpreted as his response to “the squalor and stupidity of the American mercantile, industrial and capitalist world” (HDB 28). Duncan proposed poetic “measure” as an alternative to “squalor,” Nichols argued, and the constant syncretism at work in his writing is designed as an attempt to recreate a space of shared “belongingness,” more inclusive than localized cultural memory. In the wake of her critical approach in Radical Affections, Nichols also invited the audience to read Duncan’s poems as “dramas in an ongoing world play” (Radical Affections 138) rather than political or ethical allegories, and she shared such a reading of his “Passages.”

6 The second day of the conference was dedicated to the topics of Duncan and the esoteric and Duncan and philosophy, with enquiries into his relationship with an irreducible multiplicity of intellectual, religious and poetic traditions. In the morning plenary panel, Norman Finkelstein opened up with a discussion of Duncan and Jewish mysticism, in light of what Eric Jacobson calls “the clandestine affinity” between Kabbalah and modernity (Kabbalah and Modernity 48). As Finkelstein pointed out, Duncan’s recurrent evocations of the Zohar in the H.D. Book, especially in “Rites of Participation,” are mediated both by Yeats and by Scholem, and intrinsically related to his deep belief in the magic of language. It is not only the Kabbalistic idea that all things in the universe are interconnected that appealed to Duncan, but also the belief that writing is itself a magical act, and that poems can work as spells. Moreover, the religious anarchism of the Kabbalah suited Duncan’s own “Mystical Anarchism” (Robert Bertholf, The Poetry of Politics, the Politics of Poetry 226), as exemplified in “What Do I Know of the Old Lore” (CLPP 101-2). Lastly, when juxtaposed to the panel “Duncan in Paris,” Finkelstein’s conclusion on Duncan’s affection for Jabès (expressed in his last essay, “The Delirium of Meaning,” 1985) paved the way toward a deeper understanding of Duncan’s very Benjaminian philosophy of poetic language, as both coming before and being echoed in any given human language. Joe Donahue pursued the excursion into the maze of Duncan’s influences with a textual analysis of the poem “Circulations of the Song,” subtitled “After Jalal al-Din Rumi” (CLPP 611), in which Duncan gives a version of Sufi ecstasy infused with the tradition of Western love and his own erotic desire for the classicist Norman Austin. Meanwhile, in a paper titled “Duncan’s Esotericism: A Modern Test,” Peter O’Leary insisted on the function of surrounding voices in Duncan’s poetics, starting with those he overheard when his family was conducting seances: “these first powers… speaking in hushed or deepened voices, or speaking in voices that were not their own…” (CE 146). Those voices, both human and natural, are transmuted into poetry via the alchemic power of imagination, and O’Leary suggested a link between the opaque rustle of sound and the “darkness” praised by Duncan, akin to Victor Hugo’s “bouche d’ombre” from which poetry emerges.

7 In the following workshop, “Duncan Remembered,” Devin Johnston took up O’Leary’s perspective on the dynamic of “contagion” and insisted on the role of “mimicry” as one of the modes of influence dear to Duncan. Johnston placed his talk in an Australian context, evoking Duncan’s experience of the country (notably his delight the “unique

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set of vowel-phones… Australians have”), as well as and his growing ecological focus, reflected in “An Alternate Life” (written 1976-79), and his important friendship with Australian poet Robert Adamson. In that same workshop, Robert Adamson himself charted his history and friendship with Duncan, tracing his admiration back to when he first read him in Donald Allen’s 1960 The New American Poetry. Doing so, Adamson stressed the impact of the anthology – and more specifically of the exemplary Romantic figure of Duncan – on future generations of Australian poets. Another fascinating, biographical and autobiographical, perspective was given by Alice Fahs and Mimi Chubb, the daughter and granddaughter of Ned Fahs, who was Duncan’s first lover, as they only discovered in 2007 through Lisa Jarnot. They gave an account of their research journey to understand this secret family history, and underlined the various ways in which Duncan had absorbed, and defined himself against, the influence of Ned Fahs, a scholar of French and medieval Romance philology who chose to remain closeted his entire life.

8 In a simultaneous workshop, centered on Duncan and philosophy, Elisabeth Joyce illustrated how Duncan’s poetry incorporates Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of Perception, arguing that Duncan endeavors to “represent the emotional essence” (Merleau-Ponty) of his subjects. Robert Kaufman, on the other hand, highlighted Duncan’s often-forgotten indebtedness to the Frankfurt School. He started by reminding the audience of the “Cafeteria Communism” tradition that was blooming at the time Duncan moved to New York City in the late 1930s. Then, using James Maynard’s findings in Robert Duncan and the Pragmatist Sublime (2018) as well as his own archival research, he stressed the prominent role played by two contemporary journals with noted cafeteria-communism roots – Partisan Review and Politics – in shaping Duncan’s political education and guiding his reflection on the meaning of art in society. Those New York years also informed his later, extended dialogues with Celan, Adorno, Benjamin, and other artists and critics within or around the Frankfurt School.

9 Later that day, the discussion moved on to Duncan’s life as a teacher, writer, and colleague, but also canon-maker. Indeed, as Stephan Delbos underlined through a critical scrutiny of the correspondence between Duncan and Donald Allen, the former had a major influence in shaping The New American Poetry (1960). However, Delbos noted, it is important to keep in mind the key tension between academism and counterculture, academism and activism, running through Duncan’s life and work. Most noticeably, the communalist and homoerotic overtones that pervade his letters with Allen – Delbos pinpointed the phrase “community of love” – were highly subversive during the Cold War “Lavender Scare.” Jennifer Moxley focused on the same decade, with an analysis of Duncan’s work while at Black Mountain College. Looking at his two poems “The Dance” and “The Law I Love is Major Mover,” and at his play Medea at Kolchis, she emphasized how much their aesthetics was indebted to the college’s history of interdisciplinarity, and in particular to the influence of Josef Albers and Bauhaus. Nicholas James Wittington turned to another instance of “Duncan at school,” later in life, when he became a faculty member in the experimental graduate program in Poetics at New College of California and a mentor for younger generations of poets-teachers. Among those, Wittington singled out David Meltzer and Diane di Prima, who carried own Duncan’s passion for the Kabbalah and Western Hermeticism. In that same workshop, Edward Alexander also considered the porosity between artistic media and genres during the Black Mountain period and focused more specifically on how it affected the different variants of the post-Black Mountain

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vanguard. He thus argued that movements like Fluxus and Happenings were heirs both to the event-based artistic philosophy of John Cage and to Duncan’s serial open-form composition, as paradoxical as it may seem at first, given Duncan’s belief in authorship and in the physical existence of the poem on page.

10 In the second keynote, Stephen Fredman explored that latter issue in more depth, with an address dedicated to the dissimilarities and similarities between Duncan and David Antin. Fredman used his current work on John Dewey (part of his project “Craving Experience – Poetry and Performance Art in the Wake of John Dewey”) to bridge the apparent opposition between Duncan and Antin via their shared dedication to experience. Fredman drew from his personal knowledge of the two poets to emphasize that although their modes of delivery were very much in contrast with one another – with Antin favoring improvised talk poems while Duncan was obsessed with form and collage – they were both, first and foremost, raconteurs, who viewed the act of poetry-making as itself experiential.

11 The third and last day of the conference started with a panel titled “Duncan Now,” featuring three of the most essential figures in Robert Duncan scholarship: Rachel Blau DuPlessis, Michael Boughn, and James Maynard. Rachel Blau DuPlessis began by examining the strange absence of a Robert Duncan long poem, noting that when Peter Quartermain once suggested to Duncan that “Passages” or “The Structure of Rime” be published as such a work, he was met with a categorical refusal. Yet, she remarked that one can trace in Duncan what Peter Middleton calls “the longing of the long poem.” In particular, Duncan’s use of the serial form in “Passages” and “The Structure of Rime” has consequences that escape the author’s will. Even though those poems do not seek integrity (Duncan explicitly stated that “Passages” are, not is), they create a repetitiveness vibrating toward fullness. Moreover, the H.D. Book does fulfill many of the implicit definitions of a contemporary long poem, and DuPlessis further suggested that Modernism’s long poems paradoxically might have been “too small” for Duncan’s poetic of boundlessness. Then Michael Boughn offered the audience a glimpse into the “poetry wars” of the 1960s and ’70s, emphasizing how vivid those arguments on the essence of poetry were and how they can inspire us today – he mentioned, for instance, the issue of “fun” versus “tedium” that opposed Duncan and Zukofsky in 1978, the former criticizing the latter’s use of mathematical “structuring devices” as lacking in “fun.” Last but not least, James Maynard, one of the inspiring forces behind and throughout the conference, gave an update on the current state of Duncan scholarship. Among upcoming books, he mentioned the release of his paperback edition of Duncan’s Collected Essays (October 2019) and of an art history project titled The Householders – Robert Duncan and Jess by Tara McDowell (September 2019). He also made suggestions as to the types of books to imagine now, in light of the vast amount of poetic and prose material yet to be published, and generously offered his archival support for future projects.

12 That panel was followed by two workshops that brought the audience back to the H.D.- Duncan nexus. The first was dedicated to the H.D. Book , with Stephen Collis hypothesizing an “R.D. Book,” while Jeff Fallis questioned the contemporary relevance of the H.D. Book. In the second one, Jane Augustine provided an enlightening examination of Duncan’s “first hearings of poetry,” as recalled in The Truth & Life of Myth, and which took place before the Miss Keough/H.D. epiphany. She took as a point of departure Duncan’s superimposed memories of his mother reading to him while he

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looked at pictures from a children’s book, which Augustine identified to be one from the twelve-volume collection called “My Book House,” published in Chicago in the 1920s and ’30s and edited by Olive Beaupré Miller. She cited examples of the book’s imagery, both visual and textual, that revealed its influence in awakening Duncan’s poetic sensibility and appetite for myths. Charles Lock then focused on what Duncan called in a letter to Levertov “that need from the sublime,” very much derived from his readings of English eccentric Allen Upward. At the same time Lock commented on the publication history – or rather lack thereof – of both H.D. and Duncan in a British publishing context long stifled by the domineering presence of T.S. Eliot.

13 In the afternoon, the discussion on poetic form continued, with an emphasis on Duncan as poet of difference and multiplicity, constantly defying poetic status quo. Graça Capinha argued that Duncan’s embrace of incompleteness and fracture in his “grand collage” opened “passages” for the renovation of language and society. Michael Heller elaborated on Duncan’s assertion that in relation to Zukofsky and Olson “[he] was to be heretical… working toward a proliferation of meanings… working from interpretations of the text” (A Selected Prose, 138). Through a reading of Tribunals: Passages 31-35, Heller linked that profession of heresy to Duncan’s warlike understanding of poetry (“I make poetry as other men make war,” CE 43), thus reminding us again of the central eris/eros dialectic guiding Duncan’s work. Peter Middleton analyzed some of those conflicts between the poet’s younger and older selves, by sketching a genealogy of Duncan’s interest in code. He observed that Duncan’s initial belief that the “world was a text, the code of many languages, yet to be broken” paradoxically grew more nuanced in the 1960s, at a cultural moment when the world was increasingly explained in terms of codes. Yet, Middleton made clear that, unlike the more skeptical Ashbery who in his 1970 collection, The Double Dream of Spring, feared the disillusion that may follow the decipherment, Duncan did not dismiss the idea that the world was a code but rather complicated it. For instance, in Groundwork: Before the War, he merges in his usual syncretic fashion the discovery of genetics with his initial Theosophical and Kabbalistic understanding of the world as hidden alphabet (“their [the Golden Ones’] alphabet is hidden in the evolution of chemical codes,” CLPP 469).

14 Finally, Michael Palmer delivered a closing keynote symbolically titled “Duncan and the Open,” where he articulated the impossibility to ever conclude on Duncan, due to the eternal play of presence and absence, speech and silence, in poems that are infinitely opened to further interpretations and further inner developments. In that sense, he echoed Rachel Blau DuPlessis’s suggestion that Duncan is very much the heir of the Mallarméan idea that “a book neither begins nor ends: at most, it pretends to” (Mallarmé, Oeuvres 612).

15 Link to conference programme: http://lettres.sorbonne-universite.fr/IMG/pdf/ programmecolloqueduncan-170419.pdf

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BIBLIOGRAPHY

DUNCAN, Robert. Collected Essays and Other Prose. Edited by James Manard. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2014. [CE]

DUNCAN, Robert. The Collected Early Poems and Plays. Edited by Peter Quartermain. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012. [CEPP]

DUNCAN, Robert. The Collected Later Poems and Plays. Edited by Peter Quartermain. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2014. [CLPP]

DUNCAN, Robert. The H.D. Book. Edited by Michael Boughn and Victor Coleman. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011. [HDB]

DUNCAN, Robert. A Selected Prose. New York: New Directions, 1995.

GELPI, Albert, and Robert J. BERTHOLF. Robert Duncan and Denise Levertov: The Poetry of Politics, the Politics of Poetry. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2006.

HUSS, Boaz, Marco PASI, and Kocku VON STUCKRAD, eds. Kabbalah and Modernity: Interpretations, Transformations, Adaptations. Leiden: Brill, 2010.

MALLARMÉ, Stéphane. Œuvres Complètes I. Paris: Gallimard, 1998.

NICHOLS, Miriam. Radical Affections: Essays on the Poetics of Outside. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2010.

INDEX

Subjects: Actualité de la recherche

AUTHOR

BERENGERE RIOU New York University

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“The Legacies of Ursula K. Le Guin: Science, Fiction and Ethics for the Anthropocene” / “Héritages d’Ursula Le Guin : Science, fiction et éthique pour l’Anthropocène” Paris, 18–21 June 2019, Institut du Monde Anglophone, Université de la Sorbonne Nouvelle

David Creuze

1 This international conference1 on the work of American writer Ursula K. Le Guin (1929– 2018), the first of its kind in France, was organized by Sarah Bouttier, Pierre-Louis Patoine, and Christopher Robinson, with the support of the École Polytechnique/ Chaire Arts et Science and the Université Sorbonne Nouvelle/EA 4398 Prismes. Papers were given in the Institut du Monde Anglophone, in Paris.

2 Activities started on Tuesday, June 18, with the projection of Arwen Curry’s film Worlds of Ursula K. Le Guin (2018) in the independent cinema Le Grand Action. It was this biographical documentary first showing in Paris. The conference itself started the next day, with words of welcome given by Sarah Bouttier and Chantal Schütz. The talks were divided into nine panels and three keynotes over three days. If the speakers explored Le Guin’s entire corpus, the novel Always Coming Home, often overlooked by academia, was discussed by several participants and the issue of finding one’s home in the anthropocene was studied in many different papers. The conference concluded on Friday night, June 21, with a public reading of Le Guin’s texts in the bookstore Berkeley Books of Paris.

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Panel 1 ⋅ Anthropocene

3 Chessa Adsit-Morris (University of California, Santa Cruz, United States) opened the conference with a paper titled “Post-Anthropocene Imaginings: Co-creating Imaginative Methodological Practices for Unnamed Epochs to Come.” She discussed the anthropocene concept and its numerous variants, such as the capitalocene, the cthulhucene, the ecocene, etc. She pointed out how such categorizing could conceal problems and proposed ecofeminist and postcolonial science fiction as a tool to make reality clearer. She quoted Le Guin’s short story “She Unnames Them” as an example of how to move away from anthropocentrism by endorsing messiness and breaking away hierarchies. She ended her talk with a presentation of the “Beyond the End of the World” project from the University of Santa Cruz.

4 Brad Tabas (ENSTA Bretagne, France) started his presentation, “In the Dark that Nourishes. A Dark Guide to Dark Times: Ursula Le Guin and Ethics in the Anthropocene,” by mentioning how Le Guin never used the word “anthropocene” publicly, to his knowledge. For him, this absence is significant, as she encountered the term during the conference “Art of Living on a Damaged Planet: Anthropocene” (University of California Santa Cruz, 2014) where she gave a keynote address. He argued her answer to the concept could be found in the trope of darkness in her work, especially in the Earthsea novels. Like Adsit-Morris, he highlighted messiness as a creative concept and discussed the problems of the word “anthropocene,” preferring the expression “becoming a man,” from The Wizard of Earthsea, as a way to learn how to live through the ecological crisis.

5 This first talk of the conference to deliberately focus on Le Guin’s children’s literature, titled “Negotiating ‘Power’ and ‘Balance’ in A Wizard of Earthsea (1968): An Eco-Critical Study” used an ecocritical lens to read A Wizard of Earthsea. Supriya Baijal (Deemed University, India) argued that such a book can help “educate out of the classroom” on ecological issues, as “means to set examples.” She started by a summary of the plot and then focused on the issues of power and balance, comparing the myth of infinite growth with the wizard Ged’s unbridled ambition. She highlighted the need for balance in our keeping of the planet, as shown in Ged’s acceptance of his shadow at the end of the novel.

6 The first quote used by Kim Hendricks (Flemish Research Foundation/KU Leuven, Belgium) in his intervention “Activating the Present: Imagination, Science Fiction and Resistance” came from the Prime Minister of Belgium, Charles Michel: “Nous sommes optimistes, mais réalistes.” This sparked a discussion on the relationship between the future and the present time, as well as dystopia and utopia. He compared two imaginative modes: the extrapolative science fiction of David Brin and what he called the “activating the present” mode of Ursula Le Guin. He did not reject Brin’s science fiction completely but criticized its “purification of the present” necessary to “precipitate the future.” He emphasized how Le Guin’s science fiction allowed her to imagine the present differently without such destructive means.

Panel 2 ⋅ Worlds, Bonds, Beings

7 Eli Lee’s (Independent scholar and editor at Minor Literature[s], ) communication, titled “Another Way to Be”—Navigating the Possibility of Eco-Utopia in Always Coming Home” was the first of many to discuss Ursula Le Guin’s Always

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Coming Home, a book often overlooked by academia. She argued the society presented in the text was an eco-utopia and proceeded to discuss its characteristics. Before that, she contextualized the work by mentioning Le Guin’s previous utopia The Dispossessed, Callenbach’s Ecotopia, and the work of literary critic Darko Suvin. Lee discussed the non-patriarchal, non-hierarchical society showing solidarity with the non-humans in Le Guin’s book, which is presented in an ambiguous manner reminiscent of her previous work.

8 In her talk titled “The Ethics of Time Travel in the Short Fiction of Ursula K. Le Guin,” Katie Stone (Birkbeck, University of London, United Kingdom) retraced how Le Guin used the concept of time in her short fiction. Stne focused on the relationship between humans and non-humans existing on completely different temporalities. She quoted extensively from the story “The Author of the Acacia Seeds and Other Extracts from the Journal of the Association of Therolinguistics” and argued that Le Guin proposed a radical reimagining of this relationship. Can animals make art? Can mountains have agency? Le Guin’s stories are an invitation to consider these questions and effect a transformation of the human reminiscent of Donna Harraway’s Staying with the Trouble.

9 Francis Gene-Rowe (Royal Holloway, University of London, United Kingdom) presented “The Language of the Dusk: Finding Equilibrium in an Ending World.” He started by explaining how the anthropocene concept erased all complexities by simplifying the problem. He emphasized how humanity was both the superpower capable of wrecking the planet but also a helpless victim of itself. He tried to find answers to the problem in Le Guin’s work, focusing on The Lathe of Heaven and The Farthest Shore. He discussed the themes of death and loss—of people, of language, of history, of home—which he linked with both Walter Benjamin’s “angel at the end of time” and Donna Haraway’s notion of “becoming,” in this case with the dead.

Panel 3 · Indigeneity

10 In her presentation titled “Indigeneity and Utopia in Le Guin’s Ekumen,” Arwen Spicer (Clark College, Vancouver, United States) emphasized diversity over unicity—of cultures, of interpretations, of modes of thinking. If she started by pointing out how problematic Le Guin’s position of privilege could be, both as a rich white settler and an adopter of the anthropologist’s stance, Spicer showed that Le Guin defused these problems by having the readers listen to “many voices in the household.” Spicer then talked about utopia and focused on some Ekumen stories. She identified three characteristics: ambiguity, multiculturalism and a progressing league. The first two, she argued, came from the Native American mindset while the third one was a Western trope. She finished by comparing Le Guin’s work with indigenous authors of science fiction.

11 Miranda Iossifidis and Lisa Garforth (Newcastle University, United Kingdom) gave a joint paper titled “Reading Le Guin: Ethnographic Figures and Speculative Sociologies” about their reading of science fiction and their exploration of Le Guin’s worlds as sociologists. Garforth started by discussing Always Coming Home which she termed “a green critical utopia,” using Tom Moylan’s concept of the critical utopia, as found in his book Demand the Impossible. She focused on the character of Pandora, the non- authoritative anthropologist of the book, and her constant worrying. She emphasized the collective work done by Pandora and her “colluding readers.” Iossifidis talked

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about the story “The Matter of Seggri” and compared its fragmentary form with Always Coming Home. She argued Le Guin invited—or provoked—her readers to react creatively to the texts.

12 Stefan Schustereder (Eberhard Karls Universität Tübingen, Germany), in his paper “A Cruel Mirror in Space? A Postcolonial Reading of Ursula Le Guin’s The Word for World is Forest” focused his attention on this novella and discussed its reading in the present time. The issues tackled by the novella include racism, climate change, and colonialism, and he argued they were still as relevant today as they were at the time of publication, the seventies. He emphasized the complexity of the work and rejected a simplistic pitting of colonized against colonizer by discussing the notion of hybridity in the resulting confrontation between the two sides.

Keynote: Julie Phillips (Biographer of Le Guin, Amsterdam, Netherlands) · “Love and Language: Ursula K. Le Guin in Paris”

13 Julie Philips was the first keynote speaker to give her talk. She is an American writer and book critic specializing in biographies. She is currently working on a biography of Ursula K. Le Guin. Her keynote was about the time Ursula Kroeber spent in Paris in the early fifties. She had received a Fulbright scholarship to study in France, which was an “elsewhere beyond realism” for Le Guin, she argued, a place to practice her science fictional and fantastical imaginings. There, she also met her husband Charles Le Guin, an American student of French history, and married him. Their relationship became the focus of Julie Phillips’ talk, with numerous examples of their correspondence and photographs of their time in Paris. The theme of coming home, much talked about during the conference, was first explored in this keynote. Phillips quoted Le Guin as saying this was her “only idea.”

Panel 4 · New Epistemologies

14 David Creuze (University of Lille, France) gave a paper titled “Coming Back Home from the Abyss: Ursula K. Le Guin’s Yin Utopianism,” in which he discussed the method of yin utopianism proposed by Le Guin in her essay “A Non-Euclidean View of California as a Cold Place to Be” and its application in her book Always Coming Home. He emphasized the importance of a dialogical interplay between text and reader to effect utopia and, using Tom Moylan’s concept of critical utopias, discussed the refocusing away from the setting and towards the characters found in Le Guin’s utopia. He finished with a mention of Hans Jonas’s The Responsibility Imperative and suggested that science fiction could be used as a way to give a presence to the as yet unborn future generations.

15 Liesl King’s (York St John University, United Kingdom) talk titled “Moving Slowly with Le Guin—A Philosophy for Survival” focused on how slowness is a necessary quality to survive the anthropocene. She started with a mention of “A Non-Euclidean View of California as a Cold Place to Be” and argued that in her writing Le Guin proposed an alternative to the hot progress mode. She emphasized the theme of returning home and quoted Le Guin as saying “true voyage is return” in The Dispossessed. She found numerous examples spanning Le Guin’s entire career to make her point and highlighted the links between grief, hope, and collective action. She finished her talk with a presentation of her online journal Terra Two: An Ark for Off-World Survival.

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Keynote: Brian Attebery (Idaho State University, Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts, United States) · “Always Coming Home, the Library of America, and the Hinge in Le Guin’s Career”

16 The second keynote speaker of the conference, professor and editor Brian Attebery, talked about Le Guin’s career by focusing on Always Coming Home, the novel—"because there are no other words to better describe the book"—he edited for Library of America. He argued that the yin utopia Always Coming Home, published in 1985, marked an interesting period in Le Guin’s career, at the very center of the decade in which she reconstructed herself as a feminist and wrote several theoretical essays on literature. He compared the “continents on both sides of this island” and explained that in the later period, while never rejecting science fiction and fantasy, Le Guin became more political and self-critical. He dated this period as starting around 1980 and mentioned a symposium held at the University of Chicago in 1979, which included theorists such as Jacques Derrida and Paul Ricœur and ended with a talk by Le Guin.

Panel 5 · Stages of Life

17 Meghann Cassidy (École Polytechnique, France) started her paper, titled “Subjectivity and Childhood in the Earthsea Quartet,” with a striking image, that of the caterpillar transforming into a butterfly. She highlighted the fact that this transformation implied a liquefying process of the caterpillar before its reconfiguration. She then compared the process to adolescence and discussed the issue of identity loss. To do that, she focused on the Earthsea novel The Tombs of Atuan and Le Guin’s thought experiments found therein. She focused on an exploration of the character of Tenar and the naming/unnaming process.

18 In her paper “Redefinition of Human Family Paradigm in Selected Texts of the Hainish Cycle” Patrycja Kurjatto Renard (Université du Littoral Côte d’Opale, France) discussed the author’s thought experiments linked with family structure, not as a literary critic but “simply as a reader of Le Guin.” She focused on two different models found in four short stories, all coming from the Hainish Cycle of science fiction. She described them at length, starting with the “sedoretu” concept, in which families are organized around four parents making two heterosexual and two homosexual couples. She then focused on the sexual segregation in “The Matter of Seggri,” where men are treated as cattle and “reduced to selected body parts.” She argued these stories used tropes from both magical realism and the gothic, and were highly metafictional.

Panel 6 · Utopia

19 After mentioning two of the most important thinkers of utopia, Darko Suvin and Tom Moylan, Dennis Wilson Wise (University of Arizona, United States) compared in his talk, “Unrealizable Ambiguous Utopias: Reading the Dispossessed through Leo Strauss and Plato,” Plato’s utopia in The Republic with Le Guin’s The Dispossessed. He argued, using Leo Strauss’ arguments, that Plato had also written an ambiguous utopia, and that his book was not to be considered as only the blueprint of a perfect society, as is usual. Both works could be read as literary works in their own right, a reading which emphasizes the educational role rather than the pontificating role.

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20 Joshua Abraham Kopin (University of Texas at Austin, United States), in his paper “Fragile, Makeshift, Improbable: Le Guin’s Languages of Fidelity,” discussed the notion of fidelity in Le Guin’s work. Beyond marital fidelity, Le Guin’s fidelity is a promise to the other, a way of associating with clearer utopian promises than the societies she invented, he argued. He discussed Le Guin’s The Dispossessed and its main character, Shevek, in whom he saw the embodiment of a higher ethic of association. The Dispossessed’s utopia is not to be found on Anarres, as is commonly read, but in the actions of Shevek, who “chooses to choose.” Kopin finished by briefly tracking the notion of fidelity in the rest of Le Guin’s corpus.

21 In his talk titled “Revolutionary Rhetoric: ‘Effective Dreams’ and Utopic Potentialities in Ursula Le Guin’s Lathe of Heaven,” Justin Cosner (University of Iowa, United States) discussed how Le Guin’s The Lathe of Heaven deconstructs traditional science fiction and criticizes its heroic utilitarian modes. Its main character’s world-changing dreams are never enough to solve the problems of the world, such as peace and racism. He discussed the problems of responsibility, the call for informed radical action from Le Guin, and quoted extensively from Fredric Jameson and Carl Malmgren.

Panel 7 · Translation/Transmission

22 Read by Julie Phillips, Stephanie Burt’s (Harvard University, United States) paper, titled “Le Guin’s mutants, Le Guin’s gods: X-Men comics, The Lathe of Heaven, and the paradoxical essence of a superhero story,” was about Le Guin’s treatment of the possibility of super or better humans and compared it with how the X-Men comics use superheroes. The main point was the problem of forcing change to the world by some “quick easy fix,” such as we find in The Lathe of Heaven or Chris Claremont’s X-Men: Asgardian Wars, which quotes and discusses Le Guin’s book. Both show how collective problems cannot be resolved only by individual answers, or superheroes easily become supervillains. Both explore the issues of power and responsibility.

23 Maria Skakuj-Puri (Independent scholar and translator, India) presented the work of Polish poet and translator of poetry—by Emily Dickinson and William Shakespeare, among many others—Stanisław Barańczak. She contextualized her talk, titled “Translating Ursula K. le Guin in Communist Poland: Stanisław Barańczak and A Wizard of Earthsea” by giving an account of the history of science fiction publishing in Poland, the life of Barańczak, how censorship functioned at the time, and some of the strategies used by Barańczak to translate Le Guin’s A Wizard of Earthsea. She highlighted the fact that it was the only novel he ever translated. She finished by talking about the latest collected edition of Earthsea stories in Polish, which includes an original preface by Ursula Le Guin.

24 Emily York ( University, United States) presented the work she does in the classroom in her paper, “Le Guin in STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Mathematics) Pedagogies.” Teaching the ethics of technology and science to engineering students, she has used Le Guin’s short stories and essays to great success to offer them a more critical mindset on their future jobs. Her goal is to start conversation by “making them think” about whether technology is accessible to everybody or not, and to make them think about their own power and the responsibility it entails. She emphasized the usefulness of stories and finished by presenting a few of the critical future scenarios made by her students as a final project.

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25 Diégo Antolinos-Basso (Sciences Po Paris, France) and Damien A. Bright (University of Chicago, United States) gave a joint presentation/performance where each read a letter to the other, titled: “Neither Heroism nor Tragedy. Learning to Make Way for New Correspondences between Science and its Questions through Ursula Le Guin’s Writings on Writing.” Their focus was on Le Guin’s essays about writing, especially the book Steering the Craft. Playing with the pun in the title, they argued that Le Guin was not acting as captain of her craft, but as a pirate, playing with her readers’ expectations in her texts. They compared science fiction and science facts and wondered about the common unwillingness of scientists to be involved politically. They finished by discussing the trickster trope.

Panel 8 · Fiction-panier

26 For this first talk in French, titled “Exploration écoféministe de “Sur” : autonomie, nomination, et historiographie,” Noémie Moutel (Université de Caen, France) presented Le Guin’s short story “Sur” and how she has used it both in the classroom and in the ecofeminist collective “Les Cruel·le·s Truel·le·s.” She started by emphasizing how ecofeminism tries to give a postcolonial and feminist response to the challenges of the anthropocene. Le Guin’s work, as a form of “subaltern writing” (écriture des subalternes) is especially well suited for the task, she argued. As an example, she discussed “Sur,” a parody of traditional exploration stories, where an expedition of women from Argentina, Peru, and Chile get to the South Pole and back before any white men can, but do not leave any traces of their passage.

27 In “Raconter d’autres histoires avec Ursula K. Le Guin,” Thierry Drumm (Université Libre de Bruxelles, Belgium) talked about the necessity of cultivating other stories which would break apart the heroic mode by taking the Earthsea novels as examples. The problem of the hero he illustrated by quoting the first lines of Le Guin’s essay “Woman/Wilderness” about “Civilized Man” owning both nature and women. He argued that novels in general, but Le Guin’s in particular, were peopled by normal people instead of heroes, which allowed her to emphasize “power-with” rather than “power-on.” This “subaltern writing” (écriture des subalternes), again, gives readers a vision from below, necessary to have a full comprehension of the world.

Panel 9 · Hors la maison du maître

28 Quentin Dubois (Université Toulouse-Jean-Jaurès, France), in his paper “Ursula Le Guin : une besace chaosmotique dans le Jupiter Space” started by mentioning Le Guin’s essay “The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction” and gave his own translation and understanding of the concept, the “besace chaosmotique.” He proceeded to explain it in detail, by using Felix Guattari, Donna Harraway and Zoe Sofoulis/Sofia. He emphasized the originality of Le Guin’s fiction by contrasting it with the “Jupiter Space,” a concept taken from Sofoulis, of a traditional science fiction obsessed with techno-heroics. Le Guin’s fiction, he argued, offers an ecofeminist alternative.

29 Éliane Beaufils (Université Paris 8, France), in her talk called “Des fictions-paniers aux non-héros contemporains,” was interested in the figure of the hero and how it is deconstructed in Le Guin’s essay “The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction.” In it, Le Guin goes away from the hunter planting its spear in the side of the mammoth—which has become a problematic trope in the anthropocene—and writes about women gathering

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food and other bits and pieces in her bag. This aesthetic change allows Le Guin to tell new kinds of stories, depicting day-to-day activities on cyclical rhythms rather than tall tales with a linear progression. This alternative focus puts the emphasis on process rather than progress. Beaufils finished her intervention by talking about how to translate this idea to the theater, usually understood as the scene of the tragic, and how performance art makes for an interesting possibility.

Keynote: Isabelle Stengers (Université Libre de Bruxelles, Belgium) · “Penser sur le mode SF”

30 For this last keynote of the conference, Belgian philosopher Isabelle Stengers talked about the need to cultivate a science fiction mode of thinking. She discussed at length Ursula Le Guin’s short story “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas,” a perfect utopia based on the premise of a single child suffering for the sake of the whole city, as well as The Dispossessed, “The Author of Acacia Seeds” and others. She focused her discussion on the speculative attitude necessary to make sense of the work and of the world. Imagination—as opposed to the concept of the imaginary—was highlighted as a quality often lacking both in the hard sciences and in the humanities. Le Guin, argued Stengers, discovers collectively, with her readers, a non-theoretical theory of belonging in the world. Stengers ended her talk with the Ekumen from the Hainish books. They are always neutral and do not interfere with the people they visit. Change is never forced, it comes from their life stories. These stories—all our stories, but especially science fiction stories—we need, argued Stengers, to effectuate change.

31 Link to the program: https://litorg.hypotheses.org/le-guin-2019

NOTES

1. I wish to thank Katie Stone for sharing her notes.

INDEX

Subjects: Actualité de la recherche

AUTHOR

DAVID CREUZE Université de Lille

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Perspectives The Birth of a Nation (Nate Parker, 2016) : modèles et contre- modèles

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The Birth of a Nation de Nate Parker, une anti-adaptation ?

Michaël Roy

1 Sur le bandeau d’une traduction française de The Confessions of Nat Turner (Confessions de Nat Turner) publiée en janvier 2017 par les éditions Allia, on lit ceci : « Le récit à l’origine du film The Birth of a Nation de Nate Parker »1. L’affirmation, qui semble faire du film de Nate Parker une adaptation des Confessions, est problématique à plus d’un titre.

2 Confessions de Nat Turner, rappelons-le, est une brochure parue à Baltimore en 1831, peu après la révolte de Nat Turner en Virginie. Long d’une vingtaine de pages dans son édition originale, le texte constitue une source d’information essentielle sur le déroulement de la révolte ainsi que sur la personnalité et les motivations de son instigateur : l’esclave rebelle y livre sa version des faits, à la première personne, dans ce qui s’apparente moins à un « récit d’esclave » (slave narrative) à la Frederick Douglass qu’à une « confession de criminel » (criminal confession) ; le genre a aux États-Unis une longue histoire, au sein de laquelle les Africains-Américains tiennent une place importante (pour ne pas dire prépondérante), au point qu’on a pu faire de la « littérature de potence » (gallows literature) le lieu d’émergence de la voix autobiographique noire (DeLombard). L’existence même des Confessions explique – en partie du moins – la place centrale qu’occupe Nat Turner dans l’histoire et la mémoire américaines par rapport à d’autres figures d’esclaves révoltés moins connues du grand public, tels Gabriel Prosser, Charles Deslondes et Denmark Vesey. Confessions de Nat Turner est toutefois le produit de circonstances particulières : il ne s’agit pas d’un récit écrit par Turner lui-même, mais de la retranscription d’une série d’entretiens menés à l’initiative d’un certain Thomas R. Gray, avocat blanc de Virginie, alors que Turner est en prison et qu’il attend son jugement. Issu d’une famille de propriétaires d’esclaves, Gray est tout sauf un intermédiaire neutre, comme le révèle sa préface aux Confessions, où les rebelles apparaissent en fanatiques assoiffés de sang : No cry for mercy penetrated their flinty bosoms. No acts of remembered kindness made the least impression upon these remorseless murderers. Men, women and children, from hoary age to helpless infancy were involved in the same cruel fate.

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Never did a band of savages do their work of death more unsparingly. (Confessions of Nat Turner 4) C’est peu de dire que Gray oriente la lecture du témoignage de Nat Turner. Il y va de son intérêt personnel, puisque Gray est alors lourdement endetté : il espère tirer profit de cet opuscule, qu’on ne manquera pas de s’arracher dès lors que le caractère sensationnel en est parfaitement établi (Breen, 2015 146-147). On comprend pourquoi la critique s’est longtemps interrogée sur la fiabilité du document : faut-il croire Gray lorsqu’il affirme dans la préface avoir fidèlement rapporté les propos de Turner – « I determined […] to commit his statements to writing, and publish them, with little or no variation, from his own words » (Confessions of Nat Turner 3-4) – ou bien considérer que la voix de l’esclave se trouve déformée dès lors que c’est un « Sudiste raciste blanc » (a white Southern racist) qui la relaie (Fabricant 335) ? Patrick Breen, auteur du dernier ouvrage en date sur la révolte (2015), conclut à partir d’une analyse de la structure des Confessions que celles-ci préservent malgré tout la voix et le point de vue de Nat Turner.

3 Nate Parker entretient pour sa part un rapport ambigu aux Confessions. Dans le dossier de presse de son film de 2016, The Birth of a Nation, il reconnaît s’être familiarisé avec le texte, tout en précisant l’avoir approché avec précaution : « There are many aspects of the supposed confessions that have come under fire. There were no witnesses to the confession and some of the things said seem to be completely out of line with who Turner was by common knowledge ». Le propos est vague, mais il traduit une évidente méfiance à l’endroit des Confessions en général et de Thomas Gray en particulier : « He had every motivation to fabricate the things that were said », ajoute Parker en interview (Yamato). De fait, Parker ne prétend pas adapter les Confessions, et sans doute verrait-il d’un mauvais œil qu’on en fasse le récit « à l’origine » de The Birth of a Nation. Il gomme délibérément la présence intrusive de l’avocat blanc, qui ne figure ni en ouverture ni dans la brève scène d’emprisonnement qui précède l’exécution. L’ensemble du film peut s’interpréter comme une tentative de « rendre sa voix » à Nat Turner (Laurent), ici débarrassée de tout filtre – celui imposé par Thomas Gray, mais aussi celui imposé par William Styron près d’un siècle et demi plus tard. On se rappelle la polémique suscitée par son roman Les Confessions de Nat Turner (la reprise du titre est éloquente) à sa sortie en 1967 : qu’un riche Blanc de Virginie, un WASP dont la grand- mère avait elle-même possédé des esclaves, s’empare d’une figure noire mythique et parle en son nom ne pouvait qu’entraîner la colère d’une partie au moins des intellectuels africains-américains, et ce, en plein mouvement pour les droits civiques. Comme les auteurs de William Styron’s Nat Turner: Ten Black Writers Respond (1968) avant lui, Nate Parker s’est montré extrêmement critique à l’égard des Confessions de Styron : « Styron’s book was a work of fiction; a falsified re-imagining he used to propagate his own misguided and paternalistic ideas of Nat Turner and his motives » (Rezayazdi). Le réalisateur se présente en dépositaire légitime de la parole de Turner, contre ceux qui l’ont usurpée à des fins racistes ou mercenaires.

4 S’il se débarrasse du dispositif dialogique des Confessions de 1831 – dialogique au sens où deux voix s’y font entendre entre la préface et le corps du texte, mais aussi parce que Gray interrompt ponctuellement Turner pour lui poser des questions –, Parker conserve, pour ne pas dire amplifie, un aspect essentiel du document original, à savoir la focalisation sur la figure de Turner. On aurait pu imaginer, pour rompre nettement avec les représentations passées, un traitement choral de la révolte, qui fasse une véritable place à Hark, Will, Nelson et aux autres esclaves mentionnés par Turner. Ce n’est pas le choix opéré par Nate Parker, loin s’en faut : alors même que le titre du film

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annonçait la naissance d’une nation, c’est-à-dire d’une communauté, Parker s’emploie à construire un héros, c’est-à-dire un être singulier, sur lequel toute l’attention du cinéaste est concentrée. La critique a souligné les limites esthétiques et politiques de cette héroïsation exacerbée du personnage : dans un article intitulé « Why We Don’t Need Another Hero (Film): Nate Parker’s The Birth of a Nation », Kenneth Warren regrette que Parker n’ait pas pris davantage de libertés par rapport aux conventions formelles du biopic hollywoodien ; pour l’historienne Vanessa Holden, c’est la dimension collective de la révolte qui est perdue de vue : « By crafting a narrative that depicts a hero made in his own image, Parker fails to explore […] the vast resistive network of “heroes” needed to pull off a violent slave revolt ». Des Confessions de Nat Turner à The Birth of a Nation, le point de vue adopté reste celui de Nat Turner, source de fascination (tantôt morbide, tantôt admirative) pour Thomas Gray comme pour Nate Parker.

5 Mais le parallèle entre le scripteur et le réalisateur s’arrête là car, pour l’essentiel, Parker prend ses distances avec les Confessions. L’un des enjeux de The Birth of a Nation est en effet de rendre la révolte de Nat Turner intelligible pour le spectateur ordinaire, qu’un tel épisode de violence pourrait choquer. Pour que le massacre final paraisse acceptable, tout ce qui a précédé doit y conduire de manière inéluctable. Or le témoignage de Turner ne se prête pas aisément à une telle lecture. Si Parker se détache des Confessions, c’est avant tout parce que ce texte ne lui permet pas de raconter l’histoire qu’il souhaite raconter.

6 D’un point de vue narratif, l’accent est mis dans le film sur l’horreur de la condition d’esclave, avec des images parfois difficilement soutenables. La scène où l’on retire ses dents à un esclave à coups de burin afin de pouvoir le nourrir de force est l’une des plus violentes de tout le corpus cinématographique sur l’esclavage : « [it] is so brutal that it is impossible to convey its power », écrit une journaliste (Page-Kirby). La scène de punition au fouet après un acte de désobéissance de la part de Nat Turner n’est pas moins éprouvante pour le spectateur, figuré à l’écran par la foule des esclaves obligés d’assister à ce spectacle qui doit leur servir de leçon ; la mère () et la grand-mère (Esther Scott) de Nat finissent par détourner le regard lorsque les coups gagnent en intensité. Loin de toute stylisation, Nate Parker fait le choix de montrer, en gros plan si besoin, les corps meurtris des esclaves – la cervelle éclatée d’un fugitif, le visage tuméfié de Cherry Turner (Aja Naomi King), le dos lacéré de Nat. Afin de susciter ces scènes de violence, Parker invente une tournée pendant laquelle Nat Turner aurait eu à prêcher l’obéissance aux esclaves du comté de Southampton : ce dispositif permet de montrer comment, d’une plantation à l’autre, l’esclave ouvre les yeux sur ce qui l’entoure et découvre que la relation de proximité qu’il entretient avec son maître Samuel Turner (Armie Hammer) tient de l’exception plutôt que de la règle. Ainsi la violence de la révolte à la fin de The Birth of a Nation est-elle à la mesure de celle exercée à l’encontre des esclaves tout au long du film. C’est là un point de divergence entre The Birth of a Nation et les Confessions, où l’enchaînement des causes et des effets n’est pas aussi évident. Non seulement Turner n’évoque jamais la violence de l’esclavage dans son témoignage, mais il affirme qu’à la veille de la révolte, il appartenait à un maître qui le traitait bien : « Since the commencement of 1830, I had been living with Mr. Joseph Travis, who was to me a kind master, and placed the greatest confidence in me; in fact, I had no cause to complain of his treatment to me » (Confessions of Nat Turner 11). Y a-t-il eu censure de la part de Gray, qui aurait effacé toute référence explicite à la sombre réalité de l’esclavage et usé du stéréotype du bon maître pour mieux mettre en

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avant – à l’inverse de Parker – la sauvagerie des esclaves ? Cela paraît peu plausible, dans la mesure où les Confessions ont justement pour but de révéler les motifs qui ont poussé Nat Turner à se rebeller : « You have asked me to give a history of the motives which induced me to undertake the late insurrection », dit Turner à Gray en ouverture de son récit (Confessions of Nat Turner 7). Turner ne fait pas de tel ou tel traitement cruel l’élément déclencheur de l’insurrection, ce qui laisse penser que celle-ci est motivée par un refus systémique de l’esclavage comme institution immorale et injuste plutôt que par un désir de vengeance personnelle. C’est ce qu’ont noté plusieurs historiennes et historiens, à l’instar de Patrick Breen – « For Turner, […] slavery as it was provided ample justification for his revolt. A slave need not have experienced the most heinous crimes to reject this system » (Breen, 2016) – et de Leslie Alexander : By all accounts, Turner took up arms against slavery because he believed slavery was morally wrong and violated the law of God. […] This fact is important because it demonstrates that black people not only fought against slavery because of its extreme violence and brutality, but also because they knew in their hearts that slavery was an unjust, exploitative system that violated moral laws. In other words, they fought simply because they wanted to be free. (Alexander)

7 La dimension religieuse de l’acte de révolte occupe une large place dans les Confessions et elle constitue en définitive sa seule justification : Nat Turner se décrit comme un prophète dont les visions divines l’ont convaincu qu’il avait pour mission de mener une révolte d’esclaves. Nate Parker ne reprend que partiellement ces éléments (les visions sont à peine suggérées dans The Birth of a Nation) et rationnalise le schéma qui pousse Turner à l’action en injectant dans son film des scènes de violence nombreuses et répétées. C’est, plus exactement, le viol de sa femme Cherry qui décide Nat à se révolter, ce qui a valu à Parker des critiques d’autant plus vives qu’a refait surface au moment de la sortie du film une affaire de viol dans laquelle le réalisateur avait été impliqué. Selon Leslie Alexander et Salamishah Tillet, Parker se sert de ses personnages féminins – Esther (), la femme de Hark (Colman Domingo), est également victime d’un viol – pour mieux célébrer l’héroïsme viril des protagonistes masculins, défenseurs de femmes silencieuses et impuissantes. Rien de tel ne figure dans les Confessions, même si le viol des esclaves noires par leur maître blanc était une pratique courante.

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8 C’est donc un Nat Turner bien différent que donnent à voir les Confessions et The Birth of a Nation. Tout est fait dans le film pour amener la spectatrice et le spectateur à éprouver de l’empathie pour le personnage. Nat Turner y est digne, généreux, respecté des autres esclaves ; c’est un bon père de famille, touché par l’amour de sa femme et de sa fille. L’injustice et la violence auxquelles il est confronté n’en paraissent que plus intolérables. L’image que Nat Turner donne de lui-même dans les Confessions – à supposer qu’elle n’ait pas été façonnée par Thomas Gray – est plus complexe. En tant que prophète, Turner considère qu’il est différent de ses pairs. Il se tient en marge de la communauté des esclaves et cultive volontairement le mystère : « Having soon discovered to be great, I must appear so, and therefore studiously avoided mixing in society, and wrapped myself in mystery, devoting my time to fasting and prayer » (Confessions of Nat Turner 8-9). Il suscite à l’occasion l’incompréhension des autres esclaves, par exemple lorsqu’il fuit la plantation où il est retenu pour finalement y revenir au prétexte que « l’Esprit » lui aurait dit de « servir son maître ici-bas » (« the Spirit appeared to me and said […] that I should return to the service of my earthly master ») ; il cite à ce propos un passage de la Bible (Luc 12:47) que l’on trouve plus souvent sous la plume des esclavagistes : « For he who knoweth his Master’s will, and doeth it not, shall be beaten with many stripes » (Confessions of Nat Turner 9-10). Enfin décidé à lancer la révolte, il hésite quant à la meilleure façon de mener les opérations, tergiverse au point de s’en rendre malade et de retarder le déclenchement de l’insurrection. À l’opposé du Nat Turner de The Birth of a Nation, figure courageuse qu’une trajectoire clairement définie mène de l’obéissance à la résistance via un certain nombre d’épreuves touchant les siens et lui-même, le Nat Turner des Confessions est un personnage trouble, contradictoire et parfois indécis. Lors de la révolte, il est notable que Nat Turner ne parvienne en fin de compte à faire qu’une seule victime, la jeune Margaret Whitehead ; à plusieurs reprises, ses coups de hache ou d’épée ratent, et c’est Will qui doit achever ses victimes pour lui. Nate Parker montre quant à lui un Nat Turner déterminé surgissant de l’ombre pour porter un coup sec et fatal à son maître (fig. 2)2.

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9 Ce coup, le spectateur l’entend mais ne le voit pas. Alors que Parker a révélé toute l’horreur des sévices imposés aux esclaves et qu’il reprend ce thème à la fin du film lorsqu’est évoqué le mouvement de représailles dont sont victimes des Noirs innocents, la révolte en tant que telle est traitée sur un mode allusif, en une quinzaine de minutes, sur un film de près de deux heures. Parker n’en montre que certains aspects et en écarte d’autres évoqués dans les Confessions. Parce qu’il ne consacre qu’un temps limité à l’épisode insurrectionnel, le cinéaste renonce de fait à représenter le caractère systématique de la révolte, qui voit les rebelles se rendre de maison en maison et tuer les Blancs qui s’y trouvent, femmes et enfants compris ; dans un passage mémorable des Confessions, deux insurgés reviennent sur leurs pas et tuent un nourrisson qu’ils avaient oublié. La radicalité de la révolte vient entre autres de ce qu’elle n’épargne personne. Seuls des hommes semblent trouver la mort, dans The Birth of a Nation, et tous ont commis des actes répréhensibles : Samuel Turner, devenu alcoolique, a fait fouetter Nat et a rendu possible le viol d’Esther ; Jethro (Justin M. Smith), lorsqu’il est tué par Will (Chiké Okonkwo), est au lit avec une très jeune esclave ; Raymond Cobb (Jackie Earle Haley), tué par Nat d’un coup de poignard dans la gorge lors de la confrontation armée à Jerusalem, a participé au viol de Cherry. La logique du « œil pour œil, dent pour dent » est poussée à son comble dans la scène où Will demande à décapiter lui- même un maître dont il dit plus tard avoir eu à subir les coups de fouet. Il ne s’agit plus, comme dans les Confessions, d’un implacable déchaînement de violence visant à supprimer tout individu blanc ayant quelque lien que ce soit avec un système inique, mais d’une juste punition infligée à ceux qui y sont le plus directement impliqués3.

10 Par bien des aspects, The Birth of a Nation se démarque des Confessions, comme pour mieux dire le peu de crédit que Nate Parker accorde au texte retranscrit par Thomas Gray, dont le film est en quelque sorte une « anti-adaptation ». La tonalité étrange, mystique, parfois hallucinée du témoignage cède la place à un récit plus conventionnel, mais paradoxalement présenté par Nate Parker comme plus fidèle à l’esprit de la révolte. Surtout, The Birth of a Nation entend parler de la révolte de Nat Turner sur un mode qui puisse saisir l’attention du grand public, susciter son adhésion et le faire réfléchir – aux dires du cinéaste – à la persistance de l’oppression raciale dans l’Amérique contemporaine. Parker cherche à faire œuvre de pédagogie à travers son

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film, ce qui implique pour lui de s’émanciper du texte qui a justement permis à Nat Turner de passer à la postérité.

BIBLIOGRAPHIE

ALEXANDER, Leslie M. « The Birth of a Nation Is an Epic Fail ». The Nation, 6 octobre 2016, https:// www.thenation.com/article/the-birth-of-a-nation-is-an-epic-fail/. Page consultée le 15 novembre 2018.

« Birth of a Nation (The): A Roundtable ». Civil War History, vol. 64, n° 1, 2018, p. 56-91.

BREEN, Patrick H. « Birth of a Nation, The Historian’s Review: A Scholar Considers Use of The Past in Parker’s Movie-For-Today ». Deadline, 7 octobre 2016, https://deadline.com/2016/10/birth-of- a-nation-historians-review-use-of-past-1201832168/. Page consultée le 15 novembre 2018.

BREEN, Patrick H. The Land Shall Be Deluged in Blood: A New History of the Nat Turner Revolt. New York : Oxford University Press, 2015.

CLARKE, John Henrick, dir. William Styron’s Nat Turner: Ten Black Writers Respond. Boston : Beacon Press, 1968.

Confessions de Nat Turner. Éd. et trad. Michaël Roy. Paris : Allia, 2017.

Confessions of Nat Turner (The), the Leader of the Late Insurrection in Southampton, Va. Baltimore : Thomas R. Gray, 1831.

DELOMBARD, Jeannine Marie. In the Shadow of the Gallows: Race, Crime, and American Civic Identity. Philadelphie : University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014.

FABRICANT, Daniel S. « Thomas R. Gray and William Styron: Finally, a Critical Look at the 1831 Confessions of Nat Turner ». American Journal of Legal History, vol. 37, no 3, 1993, p. 332-361.

HOLDEN, Vanessa. « The Trouble in Nate Parker’s Southampton: The Birth of a Nation, a Review ». Process: A Blog for American History, 6 octobre 2016, http://www.processhistory.org/holden-birth- of-a-nation/. Page consultée le 15 novembre 2018.

LAURENT, Sylvie. « “The Birth of a Nation met en cause la mémoire nationale” des États-Unis ». Mediapart, 14 janvier 2017, https://www.mediapart.fr/journal/culture-idees/140117/birth- nation-met-en-cause-la-memoire-nationale-des-etats-unis?onglet=full. Page consultée le 15 novembre 2018.

PAGE-KIRBY, Kristen. « The Birth of a Nation Is Hard to Watch. Watch Anyway ». Washington Post, 7 octobre 2016, https://www.washingtonpost.com/express/wp/2016/10/07/the-birth-of-a-nation- is-hard-to-watch-watch-anyway/?noredirect=on&utm_term=.1282cfd4974c. Page consultée le 15 novembre 2018.

REZAYAZDI, Soheil. « Five Questions with The Birth of a Nation Director Nate Parker ». Filmmaker Magazine, 25 janvier 2016, https://filmmakermagazine.com/97103-five-questions-with-the-birth- of-a-nation-director-nate-parker/#.WztiUKmkKRt. Page consultée le 15 novembre 2018.

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TILLET, Salamishah. « How The Birth of a Nation Silences Black Women ». New York Times, 12 octobre 2016, https://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/16/movies/how-the-birth-of-a-nation- silences-black-women.html. Page consultée le 15 novembre 2018.

YAMATO, Jen. « The Birth of a Nation: Meet Nate Parker, the Revolutionary Filmmaker Behind the Sundance Smash ». Daily Beast, 28 janvier 2016, https://www.thedailybeast.com/the-birth-of-a- nation-meet-nate-parker-the-revolutionary-filmmaker-behind-the-sundance-smash. Page consultée le 15 novembre 2018.

WARREN, Kenneth W. « Why We Don’t Need Another Hero (Film): Nate Parker’s The Birth of a Nation ». Los Angeles Review of Books, 4 novembre 2016, https://www.lareviewofbooks.org/article/ why-we-dont-need-another-hero-film-nate-parkers-the-birth-of-a-nation. Page consultée le 15 novembre 2018.

NOTES

1. Je suis l’auteur de la traduction, mais le bandeau promotionnel est de la responsabilité de l’éditeur. 2. Après avoir tué Samuel Turner, Nat Turner est certes pris de vomissements, ce qui traduit peu ou prou les hésitations et faiblesses du Turner des Confessions, en même temps que cela humanise le personnage. 3. Pour une analyse similaire, voir « Birth of a Nation » 60.

INDEX

Thèmes : Perspectives

AUTEUR

MICHAËL ROY Université Paris Nanterre, CREA, [email protected]

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Réécrire l’histoire du/au cinéma : The Birth of a Nation de Nate Parker, et l’ombre de D.W. Griffith

Emmanuelle Delanoë-Brun

1 C’est par ses confessions à un avocat venu l’interroger alors qu’il attend d’être jugé que le récit de la rébellion conduite par Nat Turner en Virginie, en août 1831, est passé à la postérité. En 1967, William Styron exhume le récit tombé dans l’oubli, lui emprunte son titre et publie The Confessions of Nat Turner. Succès retentissant, le roman soulève une polémique non moins retentissante alors que Styron, écrivain blanc du Sud, se glisse dans la peau de l’esclave noir et lui emprunte sa voix, pour relater une révolte représentée comme aussi sanglante que brouillonne. Styron y exonère l’aristocratie sudiste des horreurs de l’esclavage, réservées aux petits fermiers blancs cruels, tandis que son héros s’amourache d’une belle du Sud, dans un roman qui brouille dangereusement les enjeux de race et de classe qu’il prétend dénoncer. De fait, Nate Parker ne reprend pas le titre du roman de Styron au moment de porter à l’écran la rébellion de Nat Turner. Mais l’héritage qu’il sollicite en intitulant son film The Birth of a Nation est tout aussi sulfureux : à un siècle de distance, Parker emprunte à D.W. Griffith le titre de la phénoménale épopée que le cinéaste consacrait en 1915 à la naissance de la nation américaine. Bien loin d’un remake, c’est une réponse que Parker fait à son prédécesseur – une réponse en forme de désaveu cinglant, et de correction à la fois idéologique et historique : non, la nation américaine n’est pas née de la réconciliation du Sud et du Nord blancs contre l’abâtardisation noire à laquelle aboutit la guerre de Sécession. Non, elle ne se forge pas dans la séparation stricte des races à laquelle aspire Griffith dans son panégyrique à la cause de la civilisation américaine blanche, pas plus que la citoyenneté américaine ne se conçoit dans la défense armée et encagoulée des intérêts bien compris d’une nation blanche symbolisée par la chevauchée vengeresse du Ku Klux Klan qui clôt le film, chevauchée triomphale qui contribua à relancer le mouvement dans l’Amérique sudiste. Un siècle plus tard, alors qu’en 2016 Hollywood

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essuyait le feu d’une critique de plus en plus virulente envers son incapacité à s’ouvrir à la diversité constitutive de la nation, de l’histoire1, de la citoyenneté américaines, Nate Parker fait de la révolte en Virginie l’événement fondateur d’une nation américaine qu’il propose, tout simplement, de réécrire depuis une perspective africaine- américaine, et d’ouvrir à l’agentivité noire.

2 Le défi est de taille. Mais il est aussi d’une douloureuse actualité. Un siècle après sa sortie, l’onde de choc provoquée par la sortie du film de D.W. Griffith continue de résonner. Parce que le film porte un double héritage, à la fois chef-d’œuvre cinématographique et monument de racisme, le premier ayant longtemps complaisamment éclipsé le second. Naissance d’une nation, c’est l’acte de naissance du cinéma américain : avec son épopée de trois heures, Griffith élève le cinéma au rang d’art et fait la démonstration magistrale des potentialités d’un medium encore jeune. Le film est une prouesse technologique et esthétique longtemps inégalée, une œuvre d’une ambition titanesque qui décline l’histoire d’une nation autour de deux familles que la guerre déchire puis que l’après-guerre réconcilie dans le combat de l’Amérique blanche contre la flétrissure noire2. Destin national et destins individuels s’emmêlent, et le film feuillette les grandes heures du conflit – le déclenchement des hostilités à Bull Run, la bataille d’Atlanta, l’assassinat de Lincoln – pour dévier subrepticement vers la tragédie familiale, quand Flora Cameron (Mae Marsh) se suicide plutôt que de céder aux avances d’un soldat noir qui la poursuit dans les bois, justifiant par le spectacle de la bestialité noire l’émergence d’une force de protection de l’Amérique blanche, et plus particulièrement de ses femmes. Les moyens engagés sont à la démesure de l’ambition cinématographique – budget faramineux, reconstitutions grandeur nature, multiplication des scènes de foule, souci scrupuleux du détail historique, splendeur des costumes et des décors. Et Griffith éblouit les spectateurs par sa maîtrise de la grammaire cinématographique, dont il sait comme personne exploiter l’efficacité, jouant de l’alternance des plans serrés et des plans très larges pour filmer la brutalité de la guerre, feuilletant le montage pour démultiplier le drame alors qu’une famille retranchée subit les assauts d’une milice noire déchaînée et que l’armée du Klan se forme, dans la clandestinité, pour voler à leur secours. On est loin du théâtre filmé, de la staticité qui prévalait jusqu’alors à l’écran ; au contraire, Griffith ouvre l’écran à l’immensité des plans et à leur variété, et fait du cinéma une expérience totale, au service de l’histoire et de la grandeur américaine. Avec Naissance d’une Nation, comme jamais auparavant dans l’art, l’histoire prend vie à l’écran : « It makes the most spectacular production of drama look like the work of village amateurs. It reduces to childishness the biggest things the theatre can do », s’enthousiasme l’écrivain Rupert Hughes dans un livret promotionnel publié en 1915 : For here were hundreds of scenes in place of four or five; thousands of actors in place of a score; armies in landscape instead of squads of supers jostling on a platform among canvas screens. Here was the evolution of a people, the living chronicle of a conflict of statesmen, a civil war, a racial problem rising gradually to a puzzle yet unsolved. Here were social pictures without number, short stories, adventures, romances, tragedies, farces, domestic comedies. Here was a whole art gallery of scenery, of humanity, of still life and life in wildest career. (Hughes)

3 Le film fait, littéralement, événement. En 1915, il est le premier long métrage projeté à la Maison-Blanche, ce qui atteste symboliquement de son impact culturel, politique et artistique. L’Amérique tient son chef-d’œuvre, c’est incontestable, et c’est bien là que le bât blesse. Car la munificence des moyens déployés par Griffith sert un discours

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profondément idéologique, maquillé en vérité historique, que l’immédiateté de l’image mouvante et le scrupule mis à la reconstitution semblent valider. La National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) ne s’y trompe pas, qui se lance dans un long combat pour faire interdire le film, ou du moins en faire couper les scènes les plus abjectes – la poursuite de Flora Cameron, le lynchage de Gus (Walter Long) qui s’ensuit, pour n’en citer que deux. L’organisation naissante se structure, en grande partie, dans le combat mené contre le film dont elle mesure immédiatement le pouvoir de nuisance et la force politique – c’est un autre héritage, paradoxal, du film de Griffith (Stokes). Peine perdue : le film fait un triomphe, en particulier dans les États du Sud où il est accueilli dans la liesse, tant son message semble justifier les politiques de discrimination raciales qui se sont progressivement mises en place après la Reconstruction.

4 Avec Naissance d’une nation, en d’autres termes, le Sud obtient sur la scène culturelle la victoire qui lui a échappé sur la scène historique. Ce faisant, le film fixe durablement à l’écran un registre de représentation raciale très polarisé, aux conséquences politiques évidentes : aux personnages blancs la stature héroïque, le domaine de l’histoire, de l’action, mais aussi des sentiments puissants et délicats, qu’ils éprouvent et suscitent à la fois. Aux personnages noirs la médiocrité et la brutalité des désirs les plus vils, ou bien la servilité, seule échappatoire au registre dominant de la bestialité qui les caractérise – servilité représentative d’un assujettissement consenti à l’évidence de la supériorité blanche, et qui lui sert de caution. Trente ans plus tard, Autant en emporte le vent (Gone with the Wind, Victor Fleming, 1939) reprend le flambeau, consolidant une représentation stéréotypée des personnages noirs en esclaves dociles au service d’une aristocratie bienveillante et éclairée, même quand elle prend les traits d’une chipie (Vivien Leigh) sur laquelle Mammy (Hattie McDaniel), cliché de la grosse nounou noire, doit exercer une autorité non disputée. Les relations entre les deux femmes déclinent le mythe d’une inversion des rapports de pouvoir entre la servante noire et sa maîtresse blanche, validant la fable d’une distribution harmonieuse du contrat social sudiste – et, plus largement, du contrat racial américain. Et si le discours sur l’ignominie noire est oublié dans le film, ce n’est pas tant qu’il n’est plus recevable en 1941, mais plutôt qu’il n’est plus nécessaire : l’affaire est entendue, et la représentation noire à l’écran se départage pour longtemps entre les régimes de l’exotisme sauvage et de la servilité heureuse, du fantasme érotique et de la bouffonnerie comique (Guerrero ; Snead)3. Mais de héros noir de plein droit, il est toujours peu question dans un cinéma qui instrumentalise bien souvent le personnage noir pour en faire le témoin d’une harmonie sociale parfaitement accessible – la fable déclinée par Devine qui vient dîner… (Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner, ) ou Dans la chaleur de la nuit (In the Heat of the Night, ), deux films de 1967 où partage la vedette avec Katherine Hepburn et Spencer Tracy, pour l’un, et , pour l’autre.

5 C’est dire alors si l’entreprise conduite par Nate Parker est ambitieuse et attendue4. L’affront du film de Griffith n’a rien perdu de sa violence un siècle plus tard, quand l’histoire contemporaine frileuse des avancées sociales obtenues de haute lutte semble vouloir repasser les plats d’une idéologie ultraconservatrice et qu’un mouvement comme Black Lives Matter doit rappeler, dans un contexte de violences policières continues et de criminalisation de la population noire, qu’être noir aux États-Unis ne signifie toujours pas tout à fait être citoyen – ni même vraiment sujet – et que l’histoire et la société américaines continuent massivement à vouloir s’écrire en blanc

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(Alexander). C’est tout l’inverse que propose de faire Parker, en réinvestissant le récit mythologique des origines nationales afin de réclamer pour la communauté africaine- américaine sa part du gâteau historique, de lui fournir son épopée tout aussi nationale, ses héros, ses événements fondateurs, et de renverser un régime de représentation encore largement empêtré dans les stéréotypes raciaux. L’opération est autant historique que symbolique : l’enjeu en est une renégociation de la place de la communauté africaine-américaine et de son histoire dans une société dont Parker revendique pleinement les symboles et les codes. L’affiche redouble l’ambition du titre à l’aide d’une iconographie explicite : un drapeau américain y figure, dont les rayures rouges sont dessinées par les silhouettes des révoltés menés par Turner, telle une armée fantomatique sortie de l’ombre sanglante dans laquelle elle a été confinée pour s’inviter enfin dans la lumière. Dans l’angle supérieur gauche, sur fond bleu, le lettrage volontairement suranné du titre sollicite le parallélisme historique avec le film de Griffith, mais la nation dont il est ici question a perdu de sa superbe, la bannière saigne, marquée par la souillure de l’oppression et de la violence libératoire sur laquelle elle s’est forgée. L’histoire américaine est noire, aussi, et son héritage fait tache, mais la révolte tragique de Turner mérite de figurer au panthéon du mythe national, auquel elle fournit son Alamo noir, affirme Nate Parker.

6 Il s’agit alors moins pour l’acteur et réalisateur de faire revivre l’histoire, que de faire histoire, d’initier un changement de paradigme culturel. D’authenticité, il est moins question que de construction symbolique, alors que le film mythifie d’emblée la figure de Nat Turner, mobilisant dans les premières séquences le registre de l’onirisme magique qui fait régulièrement retour. La biographie de l’ancien esclave révolté est largement romancée à partir des quelques sources disponibles. Didactique, elle procure l’occasion de dresser un panorama représentatif de l’« institution particulière » qui régit le Sud et soumet la communauté noire à un régime d’humiliations et de violences, tant psychiques que corporelles. D’un côté, on trouve la violence feutrée de la famille

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de planteurs progressistes dans laquelle grandit le jeune Turner, bientôt arraché à sa mère pour être instruit par une propriétaire insensible au traumatisme qu’elle provoque. Une fillette blanche y joue, tirant par une corde passée autour du cou une autre fillette, noire. Plus tard, la fillette devenue grande se réjouira du cadeau qui lui est fait d’une jeune esclave soumise formée à son service. La bonté s’y révèle participer d’un régime d’humiliation sourde et inconsciente qui instrumentalise les corps noirs pour son loisir et sa prospérité. De l’autre côté, on trouve la brutalité crasse de petits maîtres abjects, qui ne voient dans le corps noir qu’une ressource à exploiter jusqu’à l’épuisement. Il revient alors à Turner, devenu prédicateur pour compléter les revenus de son maître, d’entretenir ses pairs dans l’acceptation de leur sort. Loin d’être cloisonnés, ces deux modes de possession du corps noir ne figurent qu’un nuancier de la violence blanche, plus ou moins assumée, mais toujours exercée, dont le film dresse le réquisitoire. Et il suffit que le propriétaire de Turner veuille retrouver son prestige d’antan en conviant les propriétaires alentours à un banquet, pour que le masque de sa bienveillance tombe : l’obligation faite à Esther (Gabrielle Union), l’épouse de Hark (Colman Domingo), de rejoindre le lit de l’invité qui l’a repérée sera l’un des éléments qui précipitent la révolte, symbole d’une violence supplémentaire exercée sur les femmes noires.

7 Le viol d’Esther redouble celui subi plus tôt par Cherry (Aja Naomi King), la femme de Nat, victime d’une troupe de chasseurs d’esclaves qui la laissent pour morte. De toutes les violences déclinées dans le film, c’est la violence sexuelle qui sert de déclencheur à la rébellion. Une violence dont le film montre d’abord l’impact sur les personnages masculins, dont elle atteint la dignité et attise le désir de vengeance, catalysant le sentiment d’une impuissance insoutenable que seul le passage à l’action libératrice peut renverser. Dans une longue scène émotionnelle, Nat Turner exhorte Cherry à nommer ses agresseurs et lui promet vengeance. Le soir même, quand son propriétaire mande Esther pour son invité, c’est Hark qui s’interpose d’abord, puis Nat qui se confronte à son maître. Représenté d’un point de vue exclusivement masculin, alors que Nat et Hark attendent le retour d’Esther, le viol s’avère d’abord dans le film une injure faite à la masculinité noire, l’indignité ultime qui exige réparation, précipite les colères et les consciences, et finalement accouche le personnage de son devenir héroïque, transforme le prédicateur déchiré en leader sûr de son action. La révolte signe alors moins dans le film le rejet politique du scandale moral que constitue l’esclavage, que le sursaut d’honneur ultime d’une masculinité noire outragée, qui instrumentalise le corps féminin victimisé en catalyseur d’un héroïsme essentiellement viril.

8 En 1915, la tentative de viol de Flora Cameron et son chaste sacrifice fédèrent les héroïsmes masculins blancs, soudains réunis dans la défense de l’honneur de leurs femmes, qu’elles soient du Nord ou du Sud. Chez Griffith, la fin de l’esclavage se traduit d’abord par la libération des pires instincts lubriques chez une population qui aspire à l’ascension sociale sur le mode du pillage et de l’appropriation des femmes, ou de la séduction lascive des hommes. L’héroïsme s’écrit au masculin, dans l’expression de la retenue personnelle et dans la défense des faibles dont les damoiselles en détresses fournissent le symbole efficace. C’est le modèle conservateur et viril du héros guerrier qui triomphe et restaure un ordre assis sur les valeurs de la famille, de la loyauté, de la solidarité et de la supériorité blanche, dont les femmes deviennent l’étendard symbolique. Nate Parker évite habilement les grossièretés de la caricature : le portrait de la communauté blanche que dresse le film manie la nuance, balançant les

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manifestations d’un racisme crasse et d’une violence abjecte avec celles d’une ambivalence maladroite et tourmentée : le propriétaire de Nat (Armie Hammer), tiraillé entre ses aspirations à retrouver un statut social mis à mal par la crise et la tradition de bienveillance dans laquelle sa famille a traité ses esclaves, répugne au spectacle de la violence à laquelle il assiste lors des visites faites dans d’autres plantations. Mais la promesse d’une grandeur retrouvée abrutit sa conscience, calmée à grandes lampées d’alcool. La sœur du propriétaire, maîtresse de plantation éclairée (Penelope Ann Miller), participe à l’éducation de Nat, tout en s’attachant à rappeler l’esclave exceptionnel à sa place. Son tiraillement est d’ordre moins social que philosophique, quand on la voit gagnée par le discours universaliste que Nat puise dans la Bible, ce qui la conduit à l’autoriser à procéder au baptême d’un pauvre Blanc. Le baptême précipite la colère de la communauté blanche, outrée qu’un Noir inverse par son geste les rapports d’autorité entre Blancs et Noirs. Un châtiment s’ensuit, qui soude la communauté esclave dans le soutien de son martyr et parachève le parcours initiatique du héros. Le visage ravagé d’Elizabeth Turner, tourmentée par sa conscience, la main sur la Bible, sert de balise morale au film, au même titre que ceux de Cherry ou de Nancy (Aunjanue Ellis), la mère du leader rebelle, alors que Nat est conduit à l’échafaud. L’héroïsme de Nat est de bout en bout validé par son rapport aux personnages féminins, cantonnés aux activités de support nourricier, de soin, de soutien, et au registre des affects. Mais de bout en bout, c’est aussi leur impuissance qui est mise en scène, impuissance de la maîtresse blanche comme des grands-mères, mères et épouses noires, instrument d’une destinée personnelle et sociale dont elles ne sont jamais actrices, et dont la poursuite est déléguée aux hommes. Le sujet noir est d’abord masculin, forgé dans l’action, la défense de ses droits et de ses femmes, affirme le film. Cette affirmation se cristallise dans la dernière séquence, où un spectateur enfant de la pendaison de Nat, par effet de morphing, devient soldat de l’Union engagé dans la bataille de sa libération sous la bannière étoilée – dernière réponse ironique au film de Griffith, qui faisait de la guerre le moment de la désunion, quand Parker en fait le point d’orgue du film, la naissance du citoyen noir américain.

9 Ainsi, le schéma héroïque qu’épouse le film retrouve le modèle genré profondément conservateur à partir duquel Griffith justifie l’idéologie raciale qui sous-tend son œuvre. L’ironie est d’autant plus frappante que Nate Parker, qui inscrit le viol des femmes noires au centre du parcours héroïque de Nat Turner, a lui-même fait l’objet d’accusations de viol durant ses années à l’université de Penn State. La controverse suscitée par l’exhumation de cette information a coûté au film sa notoriété, aux États- Unis, après des débuts pourtant très prometteurs lors de sa présentation au festival de Sundance en août 2016. Le film de Nate Parker voulait corriger l’histoire et l’histoire cinématographique, l’ouvrir à la perspective noire si longtemps passée sous silence à l’écran, et la nourrir de figures et d’événements fondateurs, en noir, de la nation américaine. Les modalités narratives dans lesquelles la correction s’opère, néanmoins, en s’appuyant sur un schéma héroïque traditionnellement écrit au masculin et paradoxalement peu éloigné du film de Griffith, procèdent d’une hiérarchie des genres qui laisse d’autant plus à désirer qu’elle paraît relever d’un affichage vertueux et d’une instrumentalisation du corps des femmes noires.

10 « […] I cannot separate my blackness and my continuing desire for more representation of the black experience in film from my womanhood, my feminism, my own history of sexual violence, my humanity », écrit l’activiste et universitaire Roxane Gay dans un article du New York Times qu’elle consacre au film (Gay). Un siècle après le triomphe de

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Naissance d’une nation sur les écrans américains, sa réécriture en pamphlet pour un héroïsme historique noir, autour de la révolte de Nat Turner, est accueillie à nouveau dans la controverse. L’attente suscitée par le film et le souffle épique qu’il manie avec talent se heurtent aux nouvelles exigences d’une représentation consciente des travers de ses modèles héroïques, écrits au masculin, sur fond de minoration et d’objectification féminines. Elle se heurte également à une exigence de cohérence portée par les voix de féministes africaines-américaines qui récusent l’instrumentalisation des corps féminins noirs et la caution hypocrite qu’elle apporte à l’idéalisation d’une masculinité héroïque. À un siècle de distance, la sortie du film de Nate Parker laisse entrevoir, au-delà de la réponse cinglante qu’il apporte au film de Griffith, aussi bien la distance parcourue dans la revendication d’une perspective africaine-américaine sur une histoire américaine à réécrire au pluriel, et en couleur, que la distance qu’il reste à parcourir pour s’affranchir de modèles héroïques qui continuent à perpétuer des formes d’oppression symbolique dans les récits mêmes qui prétendent les dénoncer. Par l’ampleur de la réaction, elle témoigne aussi, néanmoins, de l’écho fait à ces nouvelles exigences et d’une réception moins sourde à la légitimité de la critique. Paradoxalement, une fois encore, The Birth of a Nation laisse un héritage de polémique, et de structuration d’un discours critique et militant, à ceci près qu’il a cette fois éclipsé le film qui en est l’occasion, outre-Atlantique. Dans l’intervalle qui sépare ces deux films, on mesure alors combien l’héritage du premier est aussi celui d’une attention politique portée aux objets de l’industrie culturelle, à l’aube du XXe siècle, une attention qui continue de s’affuter, avec efficacité, alors que les enjeux de reconnaissance et de revendication continuent de s’ouvrir à d’autres voix et mettent en lumière des accointances troubles entre la production d’un cinéaste raciste du Sud et celle du chantre d’une révision raciale de l’histoire américaine.

BIBLIOGRAPHIE

ALEXANDER, Michelle. The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness. New York : New Press, 2010.

GAY, Roxane. « Nate Parker and the Limits of Empathy ». New York Times, 19 août 2016, https:// www.nytimes.com/2016/08/21/opinion/sunday/nate-parker-and-the-limits-of-empathy.html. Page consultée le 2 mars 2019.

GLENN, Cerise L., et Landra J. CUNNINGHAM. « The Magical Negro and White Salvation in Film ». Journal of Black Studies, vol. 40, no 2, 2009, p. 135-152.

GUERRERO, Ed. Framing Blackness: The African American Image in Film. Philadelphie : Temple University Press, 1993.

HUGHES, Rupert. « A Tribute to The Birth of a Nation ». Livret promotionnel de The Birth of a Nation de D.W. Griffith. New York : The Epoch Producing Corporation, 1915. https://archive.org/details/ birthofnation00unse/page/n9. Page consultée le 9 avril 2019.

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HUGHEY, Matthew W. « Cinethetic Racism: White Redemption and Black Stereotypes in “Magical Negro” Films ». Social Problems, vol. 56, no 3, 2009, p. 543-577.

SNEAD, James. White Screens, Black Images: Hollywood from the Dark Side. New York : Routledge, 1994.

STOKES, Melvyn. D.W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation: A History of “the Most Controversial Motion Picture of All Time.” New York : Oxford University Press, 2007.

NOTES

1. En janvier 2015, le hashtag #OscarsSoWhite émerge pour protester contre une cérémonie des Oscars qui écarte des nominations les acteurs, réalisateurs, compositeurs, cadreurs, scénaristes noirs, et pour dénoncer un racisme systémique à Hollywood. Un an après, l’absence de nouveau de nominés noirs relance la polémique avec une virulence accrue. 2. « The bringing of the African to America planted the first seed of disunion », déclare le premier carton du film de Griffith. 3. Plus récemment, le stéréotype évolue vers la représentation du « magical negro », personnage bienveillant dont la présence sauve les protagonistes blancs (Hughey ; Glenn et Cunningham). 4. Le film de D.W. Griffith fait un retour remarqué dans les productions récentes de réalisateurs africains-américains. Dans Dear White People (Justin Simien, 2014), Sam White (), étudiante africaine-américaine en cinéma, décide pour son projet de fin d’études de réécrire l’épopée de Griffith en whiteface, grimant des acteurs noirs pour singer les comportements blancs, alors que le blackface fait son retour sur les campus américains : le film affronte avec culot la question des antagonismes et stéréotypes de race aux États-Unis. Spike Lee, dans BlacKkKlansman (2018), rappelle sans détour la crudité de l’idéologie raciste déployée dans Naissance d’une nation, qu’il cite en larges séquences dès l’introduction. L’influence du film sur le Klan, qui y puise son imagerie et son mode d’action, y est également rappelée dans la mention de la scène de « l’inspiration », où Ben Cameron (Henry B. Walthall) a la révélation de l’action à mener pour protéger l’Amérique blanche lorsqu’il voit des enfants blancs effrayer des congénères noirs en se déguisant en fantômes.

INDEX

Thèmes : Perspectives

AUTEUR

EMMANUELLE DELANOË-BRUN Université Paris Diderot, LARCA, [email protected]

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Nat Turner à l’écran : un héritage controversé

Antoine Guégan

1 Depuis la sanglante révolte du 21 août 1831 dans le comté de Southampton en Virginie, le mythe de Nat Turner occupe une place de choix dans la culture américaine. De Thomas R. Gray à William Styron en passant par Harriet Beecher Stowe et William Wells Brown, de nombreux auteurs se sont inspirés de l’histoire de l’esclave rebelle. La publication des Confessions de Nat Turner (The Confessions of Nat Turner) par Styron en 1967 inscrit définitivement Nat Turner dans l’imaginaire national. Nommé dans la prestigieuse liste des bestsellers du New York Times et couronné du prix Pulitzer, le roman rencontre un immense succès critique. L’engouement est tel que la possibilité de l’adapter au cinéma séduit de nombreux producteurs et réalisateurs, malgré la controverse qui accompagne la sortie du livre : la communauté africaine-américaine reproche à Styron, écrivain blanc originaire de Virginie et petit-fils d’une propriétaire d’esclaves, de s’être emparé d’une figure emblématique de la résistance noire1. L’éventualité d’une adaptation cinématographique choque les détracteurs du romancier.

2 Avant même la sortie des Confessions de Nat Turner, des personnalités proches du monde du cinéma comprennent l’intérêt que pourrait susciter le roman de Styron. Dans une lettre datée du 3 novembre 1966 et adressée au réalisateur américain John Huston, la militante féministe Gloria Steinem, estimant qu’il serait le seul capable de mettre en scène cette histoire, écrit : The anthologized article I’m sending along is only the research for a novel Bill [William Styron] is now working on, but I thought might be enough to hook you—as it did me—on the character of Nat Turner. He was the first Negro revolutionary; an intelligent, thoughtful man who came to an intelligent, thoughtful conclusion that violence was the only way out of slavery… and then, in the middle of a bloody insurrection he had planned, found himself unable to kill; or rather, to kill one traumatic time and then no more. (Steinem) Nat Turner répond aux caractéristiques du héros hollywoodien et Steinem, loin de condamner ses actes, le décrit en des termes positifs : complexe, intelligent, réfléchi. Il lui paraît possible d’envisager un film qui rendrait justice à Turner. L’affaire reste

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cependant sans suite. Le 14 septembre 1967, le producteur Jr., fils du réalisateur hollywoodien, tente sa chance à son tour (Stevens). Mais c’est finalement le producteur américain David Wolper qui met la main sur les droits d’adaptation en 1967, pour la somme record de 600 000 dollars (Greenberg 243).

3 Wolper cède les droits à la Twentieth Century Fox, en conservant la casquette de producteur, et fait engager le réalisateur Norman Jewison, bientôt récompensé de l’Oscar du meilleur film pour Dans la chaleur de la nuit (In the Heat of the Night, 1967), œuvre essentielle traitant de la ségrégation, avec Sidney Poitier et Rod Steiger dans les rôles principaux. Jewison est a priori un candidat idéal pour apaiser les tensions grandissantes autour du roman et de sa possible adaptation. La polémique se cristallise en 1968 autour de la parution de William Styron’s Nat Turner: Ten Black Writers Respond, volume collectif réunissant les contributions à charge de dix intellectuels africains- américains. Les griefs se concentrent sur la façon dont Styron traite de la relation entre Nat Turner et Margaret Whitehead, une jeune femme blanche du comté de Southampton, seule personne assassinée par Turner lui-même lors de la rébellion. Les auteurs n’acceptent pas que la sexualité de Turner ne soit exprimée qu’à travers cet amour impossible, et que le romancier ait fait abstraction de sources attestant son mariage avec une esclave (Clarke).

4 C’est dans ce contexte que se diffuse la nouvelle selon laquelle l’adaptation des Confessions serait la nouvelle production à gros budget de la Fox. Sous l’impulsion de la militante Louise Meriwether, est alors formée la Black Anti-Defamation Association (BADA), dont l’acteur Ossie Davis devient le porte-parole. Il s’agit d’empêcher que l’adaptation du roman de Styron ne voie le jour. L’opposition farouche des militants de la BADA ne doit toutefois pas être comprise comme une hostilité face à tout film traitant de l’esclavage : Ossie Davis venait d’être choisi par le réalisateur Herbert J. Biberman pour interpréter le rôle principal dans Esclaves (Slaves, 1969) : relecture marxiste de La Case de l’oncle Tom (Uncle Tom’s Cabin, 1852), le film doit son scénario à John Oliver Killens, romancier noir ayant contribué à William Styron’s Nat Turner: Ten Black Writers Respond. C’est donc bien l’appropriation de l’histoire d’un héros noir par un écrivain blanc qui posait ici problème. Soutenue par le Black Congress, le Black Panther Party, la National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) et le Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), la BADA constitue une sérieuse menace pour la réalisation du film (Greenberg 244). À l’appui de ses critiques, le séquencier d’un scénario préliminaire daté de mars 1968 révèle que l’intrigue repose en partie sur la tension sexuelle croissante entre Nat Turner et Margaret Whitehead. Alors que le héros est sur le point d’être pendu dans la dernière scène, un flashback symbolique rappelle son vif désir envers Margaret, faisant de cette dernière un personnage central (Séquencier).

5 À la suite d’un long bras de fer par médias interposés, Wolper et Jewison rencontrent Meriwether en décembre 1968. Un terrain d’entente est trouvé : la réalisation est confiée à ; le film devra prendra en compte toutes les sources historiques disponibles ; Nat Turner doit être dépeint comme un héros positif et révolutionnaire ; enfin, le titre du film ne pourra pas être celui du roman. L’accord est finalisé et signé au mois de mai 1969, le tournage étant prévu pour le début de l’année suivante. C’est sans compter sur l’annulation du film par la Fox en janvier 1970, qui invoque des restrictions financières. Styron et Wolper accusent le studio d’avoir cédé aux intimidations des groupes de protestation (Ryfle 33). Au même moment, un autre film sur Nat Turner est

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en gestation : une adaptation d’Ol’ Prophet Nat de l’écrivain blanc Daniel Panger (1967) ; le roman, qui met en scène plus fidèlement l’histoire de Turner, a largement été éclipsé par Les Confessions de Nat Turner. Le Daily Variety rapporte dans son édition du 25 janvier 1968 que le producteur Harold Nebenzal a négocié les droits pour une somme allant jusqu’à 50 000 dollars, afin d’en faire une production indépendante qualifiée par le magazine de « Negro film production » (« Ol Prophet »). Le projet, apparemment plus conforme aux demandes de la communauté noire, n’a jamais abouti. Ces deux échecs successifs ne signent pourtant pas la fin des tentatives de porter la révolte de Turner à l’écran.

6 En 1972, les critiques se déchaînent contre Les Négriers (Addio Zio Tom), film italien de Gualtiero Jacopetti et Franco Prosperi montrant les horreurs de l’esclavage avec une intensité rarement égalée auparavant. Le film se rattache au mondo movie, genre proche du documentaire, qui met en avant des scènes très crues et violentes à l’aide d’un montage choc. Les Négriers est une œuvre au mauvais goût assumé et qui demande au spectateur d’avoir le cœur bien accroché. « The most specific and rabid incitement of the race war » : c’est ainsi que la critique décrit le film dans le New Yorker (Kael 163) ; enfonce le clou dans le Chicago Sun-Times : « They have finally done it: made the most disgusting, contemptuous insult to decency ever to masquerade as a documentary » (Ebert). Ted Hunt est l’un des rares à faire une critique positive du film dans le quotidien africain-américain New York Amsterdam News : « this film is probably the first feature length movie to attempt dealing with the facts concerning those atrocities and events characterizing the American Slave Industry » (Hunt).

7 Tourné entre Haïti, la Floride et la Louisiane, sous la forme d’un faux documentaire, Les Négriers raconte le voyage dans le temps de deux journalistes italiens qui débarquent à l’époque de l’esclavage. Leur enquête n’épargne rien aux spectateurs : viols, émasculation, exécutions sommaires, ventes aux enchères, actes de pédophilie, sordides expériences médicales. Afin de donner plus de crédit à ces terribles images, des sources lues par une voix off documentent tout au long du film les scènes, et certains des acteurs incarnent des personnages historiques qui témoignent face caméra.

8 Après les premiers mois d’exploitation du film en Italie, Jacopetti remonte Les Négriers en y intégrant des images d’actualités : les rassemblements des Black Panthers, l’annonce de la mort de Martin Luther King, et des séquences d’émeutes urbaines et de violences policières. Jugées trop subversives et susceptibles d’inciter à l’insurrection, celles-ci sont par la suite censurées dans la version américaine, de même que d’autres séquences fictionnelles faisant le lien entre l’esclavage et la situation des Africains- Américains dans les années 1970. Présente dans le montage italien et américain, la séquence finale des Négriers plonge le spectateur dans un Miami moderne qui reflète les travers de l’American way of life. On y voit un personnage noir, archétype du militant du Black Power, tenant à la main un livre de poche à la couverture rouge orangé. En 1972, le spectateur américain averti n’a aucune difficulté à reconnaître l’ouvrage : il s’agit des Confessions de Nat Turner de William Styron.

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Sur la plage, adossé contre un palmier, l’homme est sans cesse interrompu dans sa lecture du roman par des Blancs qui apparaissent comme les dignes héritiers des planteurs que le film n’a cessé de tourner en ridicule. Excédé, le personnage imagine alors les éléments perturbateurs comme les victimes de la révolte ; une voix off décrit les meurtres commis par Nat Turner et sa bande, dans un univers filmique mêlant l’iconographie de l’esclavage à celle de la bourgeoisie des banlieues américaines contemporaines. Les plans extérieurs montrent d’anciennes maisons de maître à l’abandon tandis que leur intérieur rappelle celui de pavillons modernes. Cette confusion entre passé et présent est au cœur du propos politique des Négriers.

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9 La transgression, dans Les Négriers, est pleinement assumée. En cela, le film se différencie nettement de The Birth of a Nation de Nate Parker (2016), qui lisse le personnage de Nat Turner (interprété par Parker lui-même) et « déradicalise » sa révolte en l’euphémisant et en la présentant comme un acte de vengeance principalement motivé par le viol de femmes noires, plutôt que comme un soulèvement révolutionnaire destiné à mettre un terme à l’esclavage2. Puisant dans les Confessions originales de 1831 autant que dans le roman de Styron, Jacopetti et Prosperi appliquent à la lettre les principes de mise en scène sensationnalistes du mondo movie pour mieux mettre en valeur les aspects les plus violents de l’insurrection : les familles de planteurs sont sauvagement assassinées à coups de hache, un bébé est frappé contre un mur bientôt éclaboussé de sang. Le choix d’une courte focale avec des cadrages en gros plans déformant les visages, le tout sur fond de musique rock, vient souligner la folie meurtrière qui s’est emparée de la bande de Nat Turner. L’une des scènes les plus importantes du film est sans doute la mort de Margaret Whitehead, compte tenu de sa valeur symbolique. Le fantasme est poussé à son paroxysme puisque son assassinat ne semble plus être le fruit de l’imagination du militant noir : on voit, en plan rapproché, les bras d’un homme noir en train de noyer la jeune femme blonde dans l’océan. Le point de vue se rapproche ici de celui de Styron, puisque cette séquence peut se lire comme un commentaire sur l’impossibilité pour un homme noir d’avoir des relations sexuelles avec une Blanche, le meurtre symbolisant l’acte interdit. Trop violent pour son temps, Les Négriers ne pouvait que choquer et susciter la polémique. Il faut pourtant reconnaître que le film, aussi excessif soit-il, met en scène l’esclavage dans toute sa brutalité, de façon courageuse pour l’époque. S’il connaît un succès limité, il n’en a pas moins inspiré Nate Parker plus de quarante ans après sa sortie.

10 En janvier 2016, The Birth of a Nation fait sensation en devenant le premier film entièrement consacré à une révolte d’esclaves (Smith). Bien que le jeune cinéaste ait délibérément choisi de ne pas s’appuyer sur le texte de Styron ou sur les Confessions de 1831, Parker a réutilisé certaines des images des Négriers. Deux exemples suffiront à illustrer notre propos : l’image d’une petite fille jouant avec un enfant esclave qu’elle tient en laisse, comme elle s’amuserait avec un animal de compagnie, évoque chez Parker la prise de conscience de l’objectification des esclaves dès leur plus jeune âge, alors que chez Prosperi et Jacopetti, celle-ci est nettement plus ironique ; ou encore une scène bien plus violente dans laquelle un esclave refusant de se nourrir est tenu de force par un homme tandis qu’un autre, à l’aide d’un burin, lui brise les dents avant de lui enfoncer un entonnoir dans la gorge et d’y glisser une pâture peu ragoûtante. Dans

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les deux cas est révélée l’importance pour les maîtres de maintenir leurs biens en vie, quitte à nier leur humanité.

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En haut, Les Négriers ; en bas, The Birth of a Nation

11 La fin de The Birth of a Nation est tout aussi éloquente. Pied de nez à La Case de l’oncle Tom et ses nombreuses adaptations cinématographiques (à commencer par celle d’Edwin S. Porter en 1903) et à Styron, elle célèbre la sexualité des Noirs. Turner est sur le point d’être pendu, lorsque lui apparaît sa femme noire arborant des ailes blanches, les bras grand ouverts pour l’accueillir au Paradis ; la scène semble détourner l’apparition d’Eva St. Clare en ange gardien chez Porter (Eva est la petite fille blanche secourue par Tom qui, avant de mourir, deviendra sa maîtresse et sa meilleure amie) et elle offre un contrepoint au projet d’adaptation des Confessions de Styron, qui prévoyait un flashback sur Margaret Whitehead au moment de la pendaison. Vraie trouvaille, cette scène traduit la volonté de Nate Parker de dénoncer les stéréotypes raciaux si communs dans les films sur l’esclavage, en même temps qu’elle rend à l’esclave la possibilité d’entretenir des relations amoureuses.

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En haut, la mort de Tom et l’apparition de l’ange Eva chez Porter ; en bas, la femme de Nat Turner l’attendant aux portes du Paradis chez Parker

12 Au-delà de la réactualisation de ces plans, c’est toujours le lien entre passé historique et actualité contemporaine qui fonde le discours politique des deux films. C’est bien ce que montre l’échec de la tentative d’adaptation des Confessions de Nat Turner de William Styron, dans un contexte où les Africains-Américains se réapproprient l’histoire de l’esclavage. De la même façon, la représentation de l’esclavage fait écho au présent dans Les Négriers et The Birth of a Nation. Pour Jacopetti et Prosperi, la ségrégation étant dans la continuité de la période esclavagiste, il fallait que les Noirs se soulèvent de nouveau. Chez Parker, les sévices infligés aux esclaves évoquent quant à eux les violences policières aujourd’hui exercées contre les Noirs et dénoncées par les militants du mouvement Black Lives Matter. Cependant, Parker ne montre pas la révolte dans toute sa violence afin de faire de Turner un homme exemplaire dont l’acte de résistance se justifie par l’oppression dont il est victime. Le cinéaste fait de Nat Turner un modèle pour une jeunesse qui ne le connaît pas nécessairement.

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13 L’œuvre cinématographique la plus aboutie sur Nat Turner est sans doute le documentaire que lui a consacré le réalisateur indépendant africain-américain Charles Burnett en 2003. Fruit d’une longue réflexion entre Burnett, le producteur Frank Christopher et l’historien Kenneth S. Greenberg, Nat Turner: A Troublesome Property prend ses distances avec les codes et le ton des documentaires à la Ken Burns, dont la forme est jugée trop classique (Kapsis 127). Revendiquant une approche postmoderne, le film mêle reconstitution de la révolte, entretiens, images d’archives, voix off et images du tournage du film. Nat Turner: A Troublesome Property analyse avec finesse l’héritage controversé de Nat Turner et la façon dont ce personnage continue d’imprégner la mémoire collective américaine. Une longue partie du documentaire est consacrée à William Styron – lui-même interrogé – et à la polémique provoquée par son roman. Nat Turner: A Troublesome Property ne prend pas parti, mais montre comment le mythe de Nat Turner est sans cesse réactualisé et accordé aux enjeux et débats de diverses époques. C’est là toute la force de ce film.

BIBLIOGRAPHIE

CLARKE, John Henrik, dir. William Styron’s Nat Turner: Ten Black Writers Respond. Boston : Beacon Press, 1968.

« dossier Nat Turner (Le) ». Un certain regard, 11 janvier 1970. Office national de radiodiffusion télévision française. https://www.ina.fr/video/CPF86655124. Page consultée le 15 novembre 2018.

EBERT, Roger. « Farewell Uncle Tom ». The Chicago Sun-Times, 14 novembre 1971, https:// www.rogerebert.com/reviews/farewell-uncle-tom-1972. Page consultée le 15 novembre 2018.

GREENBERG, Kenneth S. « Epilogue: Nat Turner in Hollywood ». Nat Turner: A Slave Rebellion in History and Memory. Dir. Kenneth Greenberg. Oxford : Oxford University Press, 2003, p. 243-249.

HUNT, Ted. « Farewell Uncle Tom: A Movie on Slavery Is Ready for Debut Here ». New York Amsterdam News, 14 octobre 1972.

KAEL, Pauline. « The Current Cinema: Notes on Black Movies ». The New Yorker, 2 décembre 1972.

KAPSIS, Robert E., dir. Charles Burnett: Interviews. Jackson : University Press of Mississippi, 2011.

« Ol Prophet, 2d Film Planned On Nat Turner’s Life ». Daily Variety, 25 janvier 1968.

RYFLE, Steve. « Nat Turner’s Hollywood Rebellion ». Cineaste, vol. 42, no. 1, 2016, p. 31-33.

Séquencier de The Confessions of Nat Turner, 21 mars 1968, Papers, folder 77. F-846, Margaret Herrick Library, AMPAS, Beverly Hills, Californie.

SMITH, Nigel N. « The Birth of a Nation Trailer: Sundance Sensation Sets Sights on Oscars ». The Guardian, 15 avril 2016, https://www.theguardian.com/film/2016/apr/15/birth-of-a-nation- trailer-sundance-film-festival-oscars. Page consultée le 15 novembre 2018.

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STEINEM, Gloria. Lettre à John Huston, 3 novembre 1966, John Huston Papers, Miscellaneous f. 1355, Margaret Herrick Library, Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, Beverly Hills, Californie.

STEVENS, George, Jr. Lettre à William Styron, 14 septembre 1967, George Stevens Papers, 274f-3224, Margaret Herrick Library, Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, Beverly Hills, Californie.

NOTES

1. Le débat ne s’est pas arrêté à la frontière américaine. Le 11 janvier 1971, l’ORTF diffuse « Le dossier Nat Turner », une émission qui oppose William Styron et l’écrivain africain-américain William Gardner Smith sur les principales polémiques qui ont divisé les États-Unis. 2. Voir à ce sujet la contribution de Michaël Roy sur The Birth of a Nation dans le même numéro.

INDEX

Thèmes : Perspectives

AUTEUR

ANTOINE GUÉGAN Université Paris-Est Marne-la-Vallée, LISAA, [email protected]

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Trans'Arts

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“Ernst Haas, la couleur visionnaire,” at Les Douches La Galerie (Paris)

Guillaume Mouleux

1 From September 6 to November 9, 2019, the art gallery Les Douches in Paris will be hosting “Ernst Haas, la couleur visionnaire,” its second exhibition dedicated to one of the pioneers of color art photography, following the one which had already been held there in 2015. The exhibit is composed of thirty-one posthumous chromogenic prints authenticated by the artist’s son, Alex Haas; all are based on color photographs taken between 1952 and 1981 in various places in the United States and Europe, including two in France – one in Caen, the other in Paris. Most of these pictures have never been displayed before, and in most cases the titles happen to be limited to the most basic pieces of information: the place (most often the city but in some cases only the country) and the year in which the picture was taken, resulting in the coexistence of two different “New York, 1952” displayed side by side. Not only does this minimal naming process contribute to anonymize the (few) human models as well as the least easily identifiable precise places, but it also seems to favor the subjective punctum over the informed studium, as the spectators are left entirely free (or, it could be said, are left on their own) to interpret each picture and focus their attention on one detail or another, with little to no guidance to be expected from the labels.

2 Divided into two separate rooms, both located at the second floor of a building which used to be a public shower facility, the exhibit manages to make the most of the space available – which, in the case of Les Douches, can be said to be in a very decent average for a Paris art gallery. A clever arrangement of the works creates a link between the two separate spaces, for instance when the picture of a swimming man taken in Greece in the second room echoes that of a New York female swimmer previously seen in the main room (“The Swimmer, Greece, 1972;” “New York, 1981”). In addition to the vivid and spectacular colors, Haas’s use of contrasts and shadows stands out, and his masterful exploitation and diversion of the technical limitations of the photographical device when confronted with speed or artificial lights results in pictures whose deliberate blurriness eventually borders on abstraction (“Lights of New York, 1972;” “Traffic, New York, 1963”); in the gallery, this paradoxical feeling of chaotically frozen

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movements contrasts all the more with the stillness of the seven small-format black and white photographs by Minnesota artist Tom Arndt, which the most curious visitors may find in an isolated corner.

3 But the most striking aspect in Haas’s works lies in the superimposition of images. The use of rearview mirrors (“New York, 1973;” “USA, 1979;” “Western Skies Motel, New Mexico, USA, 1978”) is a clever, natural and sometimes very subtle1 manner to introduce insets, while the depiction of television screens (“New York, 1974;” ”New York, 1975;” “California, 1975”) even more obviously tends toward the domain of the meta-image. In other cases, direct or indirect reflections are exploited as a manner to assert the photographical medium's ability to render the very experience of viewing, with all its distortions and imperfections (“Third Avenue Reflection, New York City, USA, 1952;” “Caen, France, 1976”). The technical processes used are sometimes difficult to identity for the profane eye though, and Marilyn Monroe’s crossfade-like ghostly appearance over a New York building will undoubtedly remain a doubly iconic yet unexplained dream-like vision to most viewers (“New York, 1978”). In yet other instances, the observers paradoxically appear to be invited into the picture by the very prominence in the foreground of an obstacle supposed to hinder their perception, such as a decorated shop window, or a grid separating them from a passionate kiss, playfully turning the viewer into a voyeur (“London, 1960;” “USA, c. 1970”). Such superimpositions of various distinct images within the same frame illustrate Haas’s self-professed “fascination in transforming [obvious reality] into a subjective point of view2,” while incidentally yet another (originally unplanned) layer is added when the images of the visitors are reflected in the framing glasses, attracting further attention to similar or comparable effects within the pictures themselves.

4 The use of such natural effects by Haas seems a reassuring reply to Walter Benjamin’s concern that the mechanical reproduction inherent to photography could question the “hic et nunc” of the work of art, its unique presence in space and time: instead of depreciating or even annihilating this uniqueness, Haas's art displaces it to the creative moment when the shutter button is pressed, as the use of ephemeral reflections confers an absolute originality even to pictures of the most unchangeable cityscapes; the physical, printed image is not, then, necessarily to be seen as an intrinsic piece of art, but rather as the closest possible material testimony of a moment of living art (that of the shot selection), affirming the operator’s central position over all further mechanical steps involved. In the age of advanced computers, graphic editor software and digital cameras, such an exhibition is also a reminder that photography is not only a conceptual art to be admired but also a craft whose mastery does not actually require such state-of-the-art devices based on new technologies which, at best, were in their infancy in Haas’s lifetime. The photographer’s choice to give a prominent place to cityscapes, architectural elements and machines is reminiscent of the Precisionist painters, although the neutrally descriptive nature of the titles strongly differs from the movement’s tendency to deliver messages through ironic names; however, Haas’s tendency to favor patterns and his carefully elaborate framing also both differ from the pictorial neutrality and almost documentary nature of the “new color” movement which would emerge in the 1970s, a difference which likely hindered the recognition of Haas’s more symbolic and lyrical approach.3

5 Obviously, the exhibition does not offer a comprehensive review of Haas’s career, but neither does it claim to. The selection of works is not only coherent, it also manages to

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cover a wide array of themes while spanning no less than three decades, in spite of what seems a slight overrepresentation of works from the 1970s – perhaps precisely in order to contrast Haas’s works with the dominant trends in photography during that period of time. However, the limits inherent to an art gallery are sometimes felt. While the press release insists on the rareness of most of the pictures on display, no detail is provided within the exhibition as to the previous circulation (or absence thereof) of each photograph. Such a silence potentially reinforces the innocence of the viewer’s eye in front of the works (a process consistent with the neutral and often minimalistic titles), but also paradoxically contributes to perpetuate the gap between the learned and unlearned viewers in an apparent contradiction with the egalitarian effect induced by the sobriety of most names.4 Some may, of course, object that the vocation of a photography-oriented art gallery is to sell reproductions, not to take the role of a comprehensive educational institution; there is, however, a case to be made that providing more details could easily provide a sales argument, especially in the case of Haas, whose well-deserved place in the history of photography is still to be made. The rarest pictures of a renowned artist of course only need to be publicized as such to be instantly endowed with a sense of attractiveness; as for photographs which have already been used in the past (such as “Third Avenue Reflection, New York City, USA, 1952,” which is mentioned in the press release as first introduced to a general audience through Haas’s photographical essay “Images of a Magic City” published in Life in 19535), they do not lose their prestige for such – precisely due to the radiation of the copies on the original, even if the notion of original should be relativized by the number of prints available:6 this is where iconic pictures join the cult of icons, in favor of which Saint Basil the Great argued over 1,500 years ago that the prestige of an original model “is not cloven in two, nor the glory divided” by the multiplication of reproductions, precisely “because the honor paid to the image passes on to the prototype” – a principle not unlike that upon which the career of Andy Warhol, himself a Byzantine Catholic, has largely rested.

6 In spite of this limited shortcoming which is however bound to be somehow frustrating to the scholarly-minded viewer, the exhibition as a whole appears true to Haas’s vision of color photography as a “philosophy of seeing” which is “not journalism, but a visual poetry.”7 It also stands as a testimony to how the Austrian-born photographer, although not recognized as an inspiration by the following generation of emblematic color photographers such as William Eggleston, had decidedly paved the way for the recognition of color photography as a genuine art form.

7 Link to the exhibition’s website: http://www.lesdoucheslagalerie.com/en/expositions/ presentation/87/la-couleur-visionnaire

NOTES

1. In some cases, the edges of the mirror are so indistinct that the very process used has to be guessed by the viewer. 2. https://www.bbc.com/news/in-pictures-14104149

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3. Introduction by Virginie Chardin to Ernst Haas, Arles: Actes Sud, 2010, unpaginated. 4. Although it may be assumed that the most minimalistic names indicate the lack of circulation of the photograph prior to the artist’s death in 1986, this offers no clue as to any possible previous posthumous circulation. 5. Ernst Haas, “Images of a Magic City, part II.” In Life, September 21st 1953, p. 125. 6. Most of the photographs in the exhibition are part of limited series of either 25 or 30 authenticated copies. 7. Press release by the MoMA for the “Ernst Haas – Color Photography” exhibition, August 4, 1962, available online at https://www.moma.org/documents/moma_press-release_326283.pdf

INDEX

Subjects: Trans’Arts

AUTHOR

GUILLAUME MOULEUX Guillaume Mouleux est docteur en langue et cultures des sociétés anglophones de l’Université Paris-Diderot/Paris-Sorbonne-Cité. Spécialiste de l’image dans la société, l’histoire et les arts des Etats-Unis, il a notamment contribué à l’ouvrage collectif L’Amérique des images, histoire et culture visuelles des Etats-Unis dirigé par François Brunet (Hazan, 2013). Actuellement traducteur indépendant et chargé de cours à temps partiel, il a enseigné aux universités Paris-Diderot, Paris X-Nanterre et actuellement à Paris-Est Marne-la-Vallée et Cergy-Pontoise.

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Là où réside la mémoire : Sally Mann au Jeu de Paume Sally Mann : Mille et un passages, 18/06/2019 – 22/09/2019, Jeu de Paume (Paris)

Faustine Rondin

1 Les salles qui accueillent la rétrospective dédiée à l'œuvre de la photographe américaine Sally Mann sont baignées d'une douce lumière qui donne aux visiteurs le sentiment de marcher à l'ombre des arbres un jour d'été et qui confère à l'exposition une atmosphère semblable à celle d'un songe. L'impression de promenade au crépuscule est renforcée par le titre même de l'exposition qui insiste sur la notion de passage, notamment celui du temps, au cœur de cette rétrospective. Mais plus que son passage, ce sont ses traces qui semblent intéresser Mann, qui traque et capture les cicatrices, les indices, les empreintes, les souvenirs qu'il laisse sur les corps et sur les paysages. Les photographies de Mann oscillent entre tendresse et cruauté, beauté des paysages et violence du passé. Mann produit ainsi un corpus qui regorge de tensions intrinsèques à l'expérience de la vie, reflète à la fois les dissonances propres à sa terre natale (le Sud des États-Unis) mais aussi celles des « passages » de toute existence humaine. À travers le prisme du particulier, Mann interroge l'universel. La lumière tamisée qui nous accompagne le long du voyage photographique – et littéraire – que Mann nous propose est à la fois ode et requiem. Si, comme l'indique Mann, son Sud « est hanté par la mort », elle la dérange pour mieux interroger le paysage dans un acte qui vise à « faire rendre ses fantômes à la terre » (catalogue de l’exposition, 2019, 116 & 42).

2 La rétrospective itinérante présentée au Jeu de Paume est la plus importante jamais consacrée à la production artistique de Mann. Elle s'articule autour d'un lieu, le Sud des États-Unis, terre mystérieuse, magnétique et hostile. Les deux commissaires de l'exposition, Sarah Greenough et Sarah Kennel, ont choisi de scinder l'œuvre de Mann en cinq séries : « La famille », « La terre », « L'ultime et pleine mesure », « Demeure avec moi », « Ce qui reste ». Le fleuve, lieu de passage par excellence, fait office de fil conducteur. Les cours d'eau élaborent une géographie sinueuse qui devient métaphore

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méandrique de la vie et de la mort. L'œuvre de Mann se découvre, se lit, comme un poème liquide.

3 Les clichés consacrés à sa famille – publiés pour la plupart dans l'ouvrage Immediate Family en 1992 – constituent, sans doute, le pan le plus connu de l'œuvre de Mann – notamment parce que leur publication coïncide avec les « guerres culturelles » (des débats de société sur divers sujets tels que le rôle de l'art, l'homosexualité ou encore l'avortement) qui ont ébranlé les États-Unis dans les années 1990. Mann brosse un portrait de la vie domestique dépourvue des stéréotypes généralement liés à l'enfance. Elle photographie ses trois enfants, Jessie, Emmett et Virginia, dans un état prélapsaire : nus, insouciants, libres. L'iconographie religieuse tient une place importante dans cette série comme le démontrent des clichés tels que The Ditch (1987), Trumpet Flowers (1991) ou Emmett Floating at Camp (1991). Mais la photographe dépeint également l'enfance dans toute sa complexité : monde énigmatique fait de joies et de peurs, ponctué d'instants de grâce voués à disparaître (Jessie at Nine, 1991). Elle ne nous donne pas à voir les traditionnels rites de passage que sont les anniversaires ou les communions, mais d'autres pratiques, d'autres « cérémonies » pourrait-on dire pour emprunter un terme à Diane Arbus, non moins constitutives du monde de l'enfance : les blessures, les jeux de rôles (qui s'expriment à travers les poses empruntées au monde des adultes et les déguisements, comme c'est le cas, par exemple, dans Gorjus, 1989), les siestes, les bouderies.

4 Peu à peu, les corps abdiquent au profit des paysages. Mann sillonne le Sud pour capturer les champs de bataille de la guerre de Sécession, les marais, ou l'itinéraire d'Emmett Till, que Drew Gilpin Faust, qualifie de « pèlerinage visuel » ou encore de « rédemption photographique » (ibid. 132). Le vocabulaire sacré que la critique utilise montre bien à quel point il est important pour Mann de mettre le Sud face à son passé douloureux : sa photographie ne rachète pas les actes commis mais fait persister leur souvenir. Les clichés deviennent des injonctions, presque des prières : le passé ne doit pas se répéter mais ne doit pas non plus s'oublier.

5 La nature est le témoin silencieux de l'histoire, à l'image de cet arbre dont le tronc est entaillé horizontalement. Bien que l'arbre soit un sujet pictural classique, celui que Mann choisit d'immortaliser a la particularité d'être doté d'un certain anthropomorphisme. La cicatrice, seul élément net de la composition, donne l'impression que l'arbre est doté d’une bouche. Ses contours sombres semblent évoquer le sang coagulé. Mann opte pour le vignettage : les bords de la photographie sont assombris et permettent de se concentrer encore davantage sur cet arbre. La périphérie fuligineuse et le flou qui s'étale autour du tronc comme une brume ont pour effet de créer un vortex et confèrent au sujet une qualité onirique. Si la nature impassible est la gardienne mutique de la mémoire, la photographie, elle, permet de construire un passage, d'ouvrir une brèche, entre l'ici et l'ailleurs, le présent et le passé.

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Sally Mann, Deep South, Untitled (Scarred Tree), 1998, Gelatin silver print

National Gallery of Art, Washington, Alfred H. Moses and Fern M. Schad Fund © Sally Mann

6 Pour réaliser la majorité de ses clichés, Sally Mann, équipée de son encombrante chambre (8x10), a fait le choix d'utiliser un procédé inventé au XIXe siècle : le collodion humide. Le film qui clôt l'exposition, intitulé “Sally Mann: Collodion and the Angel of Uncertainty” (en référence à Proust et à « son ange de la certitude »), présente la photographe dans son atelier aux allures de laboratoire, doté de « collections de chimie ésotériques et explosives » (Hilton Als, 249). Mann y manipule la plaque de verre, qu’elle enduit de liquide sirupeux (le collodion) et qu’elle incline avec dextérité pour répandre le produit, un rituel qu’elle qualifie elle-même d’« expérience presque religieuse » (ibid. 251). Mais tandis que ses prédécesseurs utilisaient ce procédé pour obtenir une image dépourvue de défauts, Mann les accueille, prenant le parti, très tôt dans sa carrière, de travailler à partir de matériel défectueux, d'objectifs abîmés et de papier périmé. Le résultat obtenu, fruit de son travail mais aussi, dans une certaine mesure, du hasard, contient souvent stries, éraflures, éclaboussures. Ce n'est pas seulement l'aspect esthétique qui intéresse Mann mais la production de sens apportée par ces imperfections : les stries qui rayent certains clichés rappellent les échanges de tirs nourris entre les états confédérés et l'Union, les grains de poussière déposés sur une autre plaque forment des étoiles, c’est-à-dire des astres morts, tandis que les bordures noires inégales qui grignotent certains tirages font figure de présages funestes, qui simulent le passé. La photographe repousse sans cesse les limites de sa technique en créant des paysages inquiétants, d'un noir profond, qui tendent vers l'abstraction, comme nous pouvons le constater avec, par exemple, la série « Blackwater » où la nature photographiée devient une géométrie complexe. Les

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photographies, dont la lisibilité est difficile, deviennent des énigmes que le visiteur doit prendre le temps de déchiffrer.

7 L'exposition se poursuit par les photographies émouvantes de Virginia « Gee-Gee » Carter (morte à l'âge de 100 ans en 1994), femme afro-américaine qui, durant cinquante ans, a travaillé au service de la famille Munger (les parents de Sally Mann). Deux larges panneaux regroupent pêle-mêle soixante-dix photographies qui retracent la vie de Gee Gee. Ces clichés, de type amateur, dont certains ont probablement été glanés auprès de la famille de Virginia (comme semble le démontrer le film diffusé au centre de la pièce où l'on peut voir Mann entourée de deux des petites filles de Gee Gee), sont un hommage à celle qui a joué un rôle essentiel dans la vie de Sally Mann. En effet, cette femme adorée lui a permis d'amorcer une réflexion sur la nature des rapports qui unissent les blancs et les noirs dans le Sud. Cette série dédiée à Gee Gee vient alors dialoguer avec les monumentaux portraits d'hommes afro-américains (Janssen, Ronald, Stephen, Anton) réalisés entre 2006 et 2015, la série « Blackwater » (2008-2012) et les églises afro-américaines (2008-2016). Mann tente de réconcilier, de créer une voie (voire, une voix), un « passage » entre blancs et noirs à travers les corps (ceux de Gee Gee et de son homonyme, Virginia, la fille de Mann, et les portraits d'hommes afro- américains) mais également à travers les paysages qui portent encore la marque, les stigmates, de l'esclavage et de la ségrégation. Cependant, ce sont les lieux qui incarnent une forme de résistance que Mann choisit de capturer : les marais où s'enfonçaient, au péril de leur vie, les esclaves en quête de liberté et les églises (Beulah Baptist, First Baptist Church of Goshen ou encore Payne's Chapel United Methodist qui disparaît sous l'épaisse végétation) où ils s'échappaient grâce à leur foi. Ces églises, exemples d'architecture vernaculaire (photographiés avec une pellicule orthochromatique) sont, contrairement à la plupart des clichés de Mann, tirés sur un papier périmé de petit format (d'où la diversité des teintes obtenues). La disposition de ces photographies, présentées en groupes, convoquent à l'esprit les châteaux d'eau et silos à grain immortalisés par le couple Becher. L'église devient un motif qui se répète mais, plus que le bâtiment, c'est son interaction avec la lumière qui interpelle. À la différence des Becher qui composaient un catalogue scientifique, Mann dresse un inventaire où point la nécessité d'entreprendre une quête spirituelle, une quête vers l'Autre. Il faut s'approcher au plus près des images pour remarquer que les édifices sont souvent délabrés, parfois abandonnés, mais demeurent malgré tout. Cette déréliction apparente est contrebalancée par la lumière aveuglante qui inonde les clichés et permet aux églises de retrouver leur fonction première de sanctuaires. Ces oasis pâles, lovées dans des écrins de verdure luxuriante, revêtent une dimension surnaturelle, quasi divine.

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Sally Mann, St. Paul African Methodist Episcopal, 2008-2016, Gelatin silver print

Collection of the artist © Sally Mann

8 La dernière section, intitulée What Remains (Ce qui reste) en référence au Canto LXXXI d'Ezra Pound (Canto qui appartient à The Pisan Cantos publiés en 1948) aborde à nouveau le thème de la famille, sous un angle radicalement différent. Les paysages édéniques de l'enfance, la maison de vacances, les rivières lumineuses, ont disparu au profit de corps fragmentés. Ces clichés sont autant de memento mori qui enregistrent le passage du temps à même la peau. Les visages flous de ses enfants, devenus de jeunes adultes, remplissent le cadre et le débordent. Les deux triptyques présentés lors de l'exposition évoquent les photographies post-mortem en vogue au XIXe siècle, une époque à laquelle le dernier portrait du défunt figurait souvent aux côtés des vivants dans l'album de famille. Sally Mann ausculte aussi son propre visage et ses variations dans une série d'autoportraits (ambrotypes) réalisés suite à un grave accident de cheval (2006) qui l'empêche de se mouvoir à sa guise. Ce visage, parfois empreint de douleur, devient presque étranger à la photographe d'où la multitude d'expressions, de masques, qu'elle nous livre. Mann se livre à un travail d'introspection et se pose la question de son identité. Enfin, elle explore le corps de Larry, son mari, atteint de dystrophie musculaire, à travers une série de clichés d’un genre très éloigné de la photographie médicale. Elle isole différentes parties de son corps (ses jambes, son buste, son dos) et les transforme en autant de blasons dédiés à l'être aimé. Au-delà des méditations inéluctables que son travail engendre sur la maladie, la vieillesse et la mortalité, ses clichés sont avant tout des actes d'amour, conjurant la peur de l'oubli. Cette obsession du temps qui passe se retrouve également dans les nombreuses références littéraires qui viennent nourrir son travail. Les photographies du corps de Larry sont accompagnées de citations de Vladimir Nabokov (Speak, Memory, 1951), ou

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encore de T. S. Eliot (Four Quartets, publiés entre 1936 et 1942) et de Eudora Welty (The Ponder Heart, 1953). Mais, d'une façon plus large, le travail de Mann est imprégné de littérature, comme le soulignent aussi le titre de l'exposition emprunté à un poème de John Glenday, « Landscape with Flying Man » (Paysage avec homme volant) ou encore son autobiographie, Hold Still : A Memoir with Photographs, publiée en 2015. L'écriture photographique de Mann s'inscrit dans une filiation d'artistes qui ont tous contemplé, disséqué, médité sur le passage inexorable du temps.

9 « Faulkner de la chambre noire » (ibid. 20), selon Hilton Als, Sally Mann est une conteuse d'histoires. Elle s'empare aussi bien de la petite histoire que de la grande. Mais si son œuvre nous touche autant, c'est parce qu'elle parvient à lui conférer une portée universelle en abordant des thèmes existentiels tels que la vie, la mort, la peur, la haine, l'amour. Quand elle se penche sur la question raciale qui a déchiré le Sud (et le déchire, parfois, encore), elle interroge notre rapport à l'autre. On perçoit chez Mann une responsabilité morale vis-à-vis d'autrui, ce qui rejoint la vision du visage de Levinas pour qui « la relation au visage est d'emblée éthique » (Levinas, 1982, 81). Quand elle photographie les ruines, les églises afro-américaines, les champs de bataille, elle ravive la mémoire et nous exhorte à ne pas oublier. Quand elle fait des portraits de ses proches, elle nous montre que le temps, à l'instar des nombreux cours d'eau qui traversent son œuvre, ne suspend jamais sa course. Elle associe à l'un des clichés de Larry une citation de Nabokov, extraite de son autobiographie Speak, Memory : « Notre existence n’est qu’un bref éclat de lumière entre deux éternités d’obscurité » (Our existence is but a brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness). À travers les fantômes qu'elle ressuscite et à travers les fantômes à venir, Mann nous montre là où réside la mémoire, « Dove sta memoria » pour reprendre les mots de Pound : dans notre capacité à aimer. Sally Mann nous offre une magistrale leçon d'humilité : comme le suggère le titre même de l'exposition, ne sommes-nous pas que de « passage » ?

Autour de l'exposition

10 « Sally Mann : l'image élégiaque. » Intervenants : Etienne Hatt, Clara Chichin, Géraldine Chouard et Héloïse Conésa. Mis en ligne le 15/07/2019. Page consultée le 18/07/2019. http://lemagazine.jeudepaume.org/2019/07/sally-mann/

BIBLIOGRAPHIE

NABOKOV, Vladimir. Speak, Memory : An Autobiography Revisited. London : Penguin Books, 1998 (1967).

LEVINAS, Emmanuel. Éthique et infini. Paris : Fayard/France Culture, 1982.

MANN, Sally. Immediate Family. London : Phaidon, 1992.

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Sally Mann : Mille et un passages, catalogue d’exposition. Sous la direction de Sarah GREENOUGH et Sarah KENNEL. Avec des essais de Hilton ALS, Malcolm DANIEL et Drew Gilpin FAUST. Paris : Editions Xavier Barral, 2019.

INDEX

Thèmes : Trans’Arts

AUTEUR

FAUSTINE RONDIN Université de Caen

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Sally Mann’s “A Thousand Crossings” at the Musée du Jeu de Paume

Mary-Elaine Jenkins

1 About a year after seeing it at its first home at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC, I had the pleasure of seeing the Sally Mann exhibit “A Thousand Crossings” at Paris’s Musée du Jeu de Paume in July 2019. An artist myself (musician) with very deep Southern roots (13th generation South Carolinian), I have been rattled by Mann’s work since I first saw it. The images felt familiar, relevant, giving me a sense of déjà-vu. Seeing them at the Jeu de Paume was even more surreal, a ringing reminder of home in the center of Paris.

2 “A Thousand Crossings” allows us to follow Mann’s footsteps from her iconic early photographs of her children, to her focal shift to Southern landscapes and battlefields and her adaption of the nineteenth-century wet plate collodion process, to her most recent work: a white woman’s reckoning with her own history vis-a-vis the African American experience in the South. Though it spans decades and includes a wide spectrum of Mann’s work, it is not, in fact, intended as a retrospective, as Sarah Greenough, senior curator and head of the department of photographs of the National Gallery of Art, and co-curator of this exhibit (with Sarah Kennel, the Byrne Family Curator of Photography at the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, Massachusetts) points out in her introductory lecture for the exhibit (Greenough). Instead, it serves to highlight the significance of the American South—its staggering beauty coupled with its tumultuous history of violence, racism, suffering, and oppression—as Mann’s most beguiling and transcendent muse. It inspires her, sustains her, and challenges her to ask the most difficult questions about her history. Throughout her decades of photos, the South is ever-present; it is woven into the DNA of her work.

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(1) Deep South, Untitled (Fontainebleau), 1998, Sally Mann Sally Mann/National Gallery of Art, Washington (All Rights Reserved)

3 Looking at these different phases of her photographs of the land that nourished her and shaped her, the “Southern-ness” of Mann’s work is one of the most conspicuous ribbons that run through it. But what about it is particularly Southern? And why is it relevant in France?

4 In her bestselling 2015 memoir, Hold Still, Mann states: “Southern artists [...] have long been known for their susceptibility to myth and their obsession with place, family, death, and the past. Many of us appear inescapably preoccupied with our historical predicament and uniqueness […]” (Mann 240).

5 Along with this obsession with our past, the South and its art have, more often than not and in varying degrees, elements of darkness, of foreboding. We are drawn to it, and how could we not be? As Mann notes in Hold Still: It’s not that we Southerners are exactly in love with death, but there is no question that, given our history, we’re on a first-name basis with it. And such familiarity often lends Southern art a tinge of sorrow, of finitude and mourning. Think of the blues, for example, or early jazz; think of Faulkner, Welty, O’Connor […].” (Mann 82)

6 It’s true: Southerners are, by nature, fixated on their past, and the complicated, dark history we share: of slavery; of the degradation of Southerners after a bitter defeat; of the aftermath of a cruel societal system that came crumbling down, leaving torn vestiges of an impoverished land and people in its wake; and of our forebears, black and white alike, who doggedly clung to this place and forged their lives here. The land is veritably howling with this history. Mann believes, as many Southerners do, that this legacy and these voices are seeping up through the ground. Take, for example, “Deep South, Untitled (#9),” which depicts the ruins of the Windsor Mansion, a Greek revival Mississippi property built by slave labor (“National Register of Historic Places”). The

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timeless image with its blurred edges is a living allegory of the downfall of this system and what it left behind.

(2) Deep South, Untitled (#9), 1998, Sally Mann Sally Mann/Virginia Museum of Fine Arts (All Rights Reserved)

7 Mann’s photographs of the Southern landscape—in several iterations: her journeys through the Deep South in the “The Land” section, her battlefields series in “Last Measure,” and her swamp series in “Abide With Me”—make up an essential part of the exhibit. As she turned her focus away from her family and toward the land, she set out from her home in Rockbridge County, Virginia, on trips deeper south to Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana in her Suburban, which, more often than not, doubled as her hotel and (full of “esoteric and explosive chemicals”) her darkroom.

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(3) Sally Mann’s mobile darkroom From Hold Still (229), Courtesy Kim Rushing (All Rights Reserved)

8 She was looking to this land, through her waiting lens, to reveal the scars of its past. “For me,” she writes, “the Deep South was haunted by the souls of the millions of African Americans who built that part of the country with their hands and with the sweat and blood of their backs. I was moving among shades, aware, always, of their presence” (Mann 234).

9 A story that has haunted her since childhood is that of Emmett Till, a 14-year-old black boy visiting from Chicago who was kidnapped and murdered near Money, Mississippi, in 1955 for allegedly making a pass at a white woman. Till’s beaten, naked body was thrown into the Tallahatchie River, tethered to a cotton gin fan with barbed wire. His mother insisted on an open-casket funeral so that his ruined body could be seen by all, a testament to the injustice. Mann named her first-born child for him.

10 There is a series of photos in the exhibit through which Mann makes a sort of memorial to the murdered Till. Led by a local friend, she moved along the Tallahatchie, tracing the sites of his last hours. One of these photos, “Deep South, Untitled (Bridge on Tallahatchie),” is a view of the Black Bayou Bridge in Glendora, Mississippi, the site where his body was thrown into the river. The photo depicts a typical rural Southern scene: rickety old bridge, muddy river overhung with brush. Yet there is something truly unnerving about it: a hand-like branch reaches into the picture, with off-shooting smaller branches reminiscent of curling, grasping fingers. The river from which his body was pulled is vignetted, crowded on either side by dark trees, losing focus as the eye goes outward, while on the bottom left of the image appear marks created by the development process, chemical specks moving out from a long drip, resembling tears, or blood.

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(4) Deep South, Untitled (Bridge on Tallahatchie), 1998, Sally Mann Sally Mann/Markel Corporate Art Collection (All Rights Reserved)

11 As she moved around this area, Mann stopped at one point on the riverbank, and recalled bemoaning that a place with such a sorrowful history of injustice and violence seemed... nondescript. However, when she set up her camera at the edge of the water, the land spoke. This image, “Deep South, Untitled (Emmett Till River Bank),” is flooded with light, the reflections of the trees in the river and the grass on the bank awash in that light, and in focus is an ugly, ragged split in the earth. In Hold Still, Mann writes that as she took the photo, she could feel that there was something different about this place, and this picture and this piece of wrecked earth are a symbol and a testament to the violence this river saw: “There was, in fact, something mysterious about the spot; I could see it and feel it, and when I released the shutter I asked for forgiveness from Emmett Till” (Mann 236).

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(5) Deep South, Untitled (Emmett Till River Bank), 1998, Sally Mann Sally Mann/Peabody Essex Museum, Salem, Massachusetts (All Rights Reserved)

12 “A Thousand Crossings” explores this concept of the interplay between land and memory once again in Mann’s battlefields series, begun in the early 2000s. In these photos, which appear in the section of the exhibit entitled “Last Measure,” Mann photographed sites of some of the bloodiest battles of the American Civil War: Antietam (the bloodiest in American history), Manassas, Fredericksburg, Cold Harbor, and the Wilderness. Through these photographs, Mann asks “Does the earth remember? Do these fields, upon which unspeakable carnage occurred, where unknowable numbers of bodies are buried, bear witness in some way?” (Mann 411).

13 These pictures are the most striking in the exhibit. Though most of them were shot in the blaring afternoon sun, the negatives were developed in a way that makes them very dark and softly focused, the skies swirling, simmering, rippling in places. She shot them close to the ground in an attempt to capture the view of a dying soldier, felled in one of these battles, absorbing with his remaining senses his surroundings in the midst of enormous destruction and loss of human life. The plots of land where these battles took place, today ordinary, green, and peopled by tourists, become through Mann’s lens dark, alarming, and cataclysmic, visions almost apocalyptic in nature. “She believed,” says Dr. Greenough, “[…] that the only way to connect the latent energy that lingers in a site charged with historical suffering was through an act of imagination and fiction” (Greenough 0:28).

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(6) Battlefields, Antietam (Black Sun), Sally Mann Sally Mann/Edwynn Houk Gallery, New York (All Rights Reserved)

14 Mann’s beloved wet plate collodion processing, in all its allegorical glory, plays its part magnificently in these photos. The process, invented in the nineteenth century, was used by Civil War photographers, making it historically significant to Mann’s series. The fact that it was also used to bind soldiers’ wounds gives it even more symbolic relevance. The nature of the process, such as beginning with spotlessly clean glass plates and proper handling of the viscous chemical, creates enormous room for flaws in the negative. Bits of dust on the glass or an area where the chemical pooled create effects such as swirls, streaks, specks, or other blemishes. Rather than taking pains to avoid these abnormalities, as her predecessors would have done, Mann embraced them and gave them a kind of agency to manipulate her pictures in dramatic, meaningful ways. She writes that, in contrast to Proust’s narrator in Swann’s Way, who prayed for a visit from “the angel of certainty,” Mann prayed for what she called “the angel of uncertainty,” who worked her way into the process and gave the images marked anomalies that helped illuminate the drama of their symbolism (Mann 224).

15 In “Battlefields, Antietam (Black Sun),” “Battlefields, Antietam (Cornfield),” and “Battlefields, Fredericksburg (Cedar Trees),” the collodion formed in a way on the surface to suggest fire or smoke. In “Battlefields, Antietam (Starry Night),” light spots across the image look like bullet holes; in “Battlefields, Cold Harbor (Battle),” short, thin fading lines across the image seem to suggest flying bullets. Tears in the emulsion and imperfections in the antique glass used to make the negatives give the viewer the sense that these images have been pulled from time, from memory. The chaotic darkness and nebulousness of them remove you from the middle of a sunny field, where your car is nearby and you are safely reading a plaque about the hideous Battle of Antietam, and place you right in the middle of the horror.

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(7) Battlefields, Antietam (Cornfield), 2001, Sally Mann Sally Mann/Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Richmond, The National Endowment for the Arts Fund for American Art (All Rights Reserved)

(8) Battlefields, Fredericksburg (Cedar Trees), 2001, Sally Mann Sally Mann/Waterman / Kislinger Family (All Rights Reserved)

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(9) Battlefields, Antietam (Starry Night), 2001, Sally Mann Sally Mann/Alan Kirshner and Deborah Mihaloff Art Collection (All Rights Reserved)

(10) Battlefields, Cold Harbor (Battle), 2003, Sally Mann Sally Mann/National Gallery of Art, Washington (All Rights Reserved)

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16 In her writing, Mann has borrowed the statement from her friend, Canadian novelist Niall Mackenzie, that “we Southern artists […] display a conspicuous willingness to use doses of romanticism that would be fatal to anyone else” (Mann 240). Southerners are predisposed to this romanticism, sentimentality, even mysticism. It stems from an idea that our surroundings are alive with the past, electric with the energies of those who came before. Not in a ghostly way (though we love a good ghost story), but, as Mann might put it, in a “metaphorically resonant” way.

17 True to her roots, Mann was guided by these particularly Southern principles as she moved through the landscapes, through the decades. She was determined to make the land “give up its ghosts.” And the ghosts are there, visible in these images. The land does indeed carry these scars, as does the collective Southern memory. Those who share that past live among its relics, both material and societal.

18 Another facet of her work that is uniquely derivative of Mann’s Southern identity is her lifelong grappling with exactly that. How do you reconcile your blood-quickening love of a place, a place where you absolutely belong, with its painful history? And how can you come to terms with the part you and your people played in it?

19 For me, one of the most moving experiences in “A Thousand Crossings” was the homage paid to Virginia “Gee-Gee” Carter, in the section entitled “Abide With Me,” in which Mann set out to examine how race and history had shaped her own childhood and adolescence. Carter worked for Mann’s family (the Mungers) from the time Mann was a small child into Carter’s old age—nearly 50 years. Mann writes: “Down here, you can’t throw a dead cat without hitting an older, well-off white person raised by a black woman, and every damn one of them will earnestly insist that a reciprocal and equal love was exchanged between them” (Mann 243). She insists, however, that this type of love did exist between her and Carter, the granddaughter of a former slave and the daughter of a woman who was most likely raped by a white man, as Mann writes in Hold Still (Mann 257). Carter was, in a sense, Mann’s custodial parent and, from childhood, Mann felt secure in what she said was Carter’s unconditional love.

20 In this part of “Abide With Me,” Mann examines the unasked questions, her own obliviousness of the world around her in the Virginia of her youth, a world alive with what she calls “the fundamental paradox of the South: that a white elite, determined to segregate the two races in public, based their stunningly intimate domestic arrangements on an erasure of that segregation in private” (Mann 243).

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(11) At Segregated Drinking Fountain, Mobile, Alabama, 1956, Gordon Parks Gordon Parks/ The Gordon Parks Foundation (All Rights Reserved)

21 The Mungers were liberal intellectuals, supporters of the civil rights movement, and yet they played a highly typical role in the caste-like system that fundamentally oppressed African Americans. Mann recalls becoming aware of this paradox, years later, reading Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom at boarding school in Vermont: “It wounded me, then and there, with the great sadness and tragedy of our American life, with the truth of all that I had not seen, had not known, and had not asked” (Mann 263).

22 The exhibit includes photos Mann took of Carter in the late 1980s and early 90s, including a few of Carter with Mann’s young daughter Virginia, who was named after Carter. The images have a poignant tenderness to them, particularly “The Two #4,” taken from above as the two are napping, both of their hands raised skyward, a delicate light on the older Virginia’s white hair and arthritic hands, and young Virginia’s face. In the context of “Abide With Me,” these photos are odes to Carter’s quiet dignity, strength, and perseverance in the face of the pain and toil in a place and time fundamentally inhospitable to her. Through Mann’s lens, this often takes shape in her focus on Carter’s immense physicality—strong, capable, and proud. She has, since childhood, had a fascination with Carter’s size 13 feet. This is visible in “The Two Virginias #3,” where young Virginia sits on Carter’s lap, her tiny feet dangling above Carter’s massive, nearly 100-year-old feet. We see this physicality again in “The Two Virginias #1,” where the young Virginia rests against the powerful leg of her elderly namesake, Carter’s hand, long-nailed and weathered by age, resting on the child’s head.

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(12) The Two Virginias #4, 1991, Sally Mann Sally Mann/Collection of The Estée Lauder Companies Inc. (All Rights Reserved)

(13) The Two Virginias #3, 1991, Sally Mann Sally Mann/Gagosian Gallery, New York (All rights Reserved)

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(14) The Two Virginias #1, 1988, Sally Mann Sally Mann/Gagosian Gallery, New York (All Rights Reserved

23 How does “A Thousand Crossings” translate across continents? Why is it relevant in France? Firstly, Jeu de Paume, as an institution, is a champion of American photography and has endeavored consistently to bring it to a French audience. The work of Dorothea Lange, Richard Avedon, Vivian Maier, and Diane Arbus, among a slew of others, have all been part of the programming over the past years. Presumably, one of the reasons for this is to help people understand the American experience. Visiting the Dorothea Lange exhibit at the Jeu de Paume last year offered me a startling new perspective on WWII-era Japanese internment camps, thanks to the showcase on her work for the War Relocation Authority. We can read about the history of place or spend time there, but art holds the key to the heart of a culture, and photography is such an immediate and evocative medium. In an (easily accessible) instant, we are transported, intimate details are revealed to us, and the feel of moments and movements are accessible in a way they are not through prose or even sound.

24 How might a French viewer relate to Sally Mann’s photos? For one, the French know what it means to endure military defeat and occupation. In Hold Still, Mann quotes the British military historian Sir John Keegan: The thing about that South is that it retains for Europeans a trace of cultural familiarity, as the rest of the country does not. […] Class system, yes; history, yes; but more important, I suspect, is the lingering aftermath of defeat. Europe is a continent of defeated nations. […] America has never known the tread of occupation, the return of beaten men. The South is the exception. Pain is a dimension of old civilizations. The South has it. The rest of the United States does not. (Mann 81)

25 French visitors to the exhibit might also relate to Mann’s fervent belief in the land as “vessel for memory,” as Dr. Greenough puts it. Do Parisians have this sense, for

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example, walking through the streets that ran with blood during the Revolution, where Nazi boots tread during their occupation, that the place itself vibrates with these histories? Walk outside the Musée du Jeu de Paume, for example, and you are in the Place de la Concorde, where the infamous guillotine executed the monarchy and changed the course of French history. Victor Hugo describes in Les Misérables (1862) the site of the Battle of Waterloo: The blast of battle is still present in this courtyard; you can still see its horrors; the violence of the conflict has been fossilized here; there’s life here, there’s death here; it happened only yesterday. The walls are still in their final throes, the stones are falling, the breaches are howling, the holes are gaping wounds; the trees hang down and shudder, and seem to be trying to get away. (Hugo 330) Hugo would agree with Mann that the land does, indeed, remember.

26 When I first saw “A Thousand Crossings” in its entirety, I felt tenderness for her children, immense sorrow for all the suffering that has taken place in our land, impressed with the beauty of the landscapes, familiar as I am, as a native of the South Carolina Lowcountry, with the “radical light of the South” and its “profligate physical beauty,” to which Mann has often referred. The aesthetic felt like an embodiment of something elusive and unnamable that I am always seeking in art—my own and that of others. That exquisite clash of darkness and light, lingering mysticism rooted in historical conflict, a palpable search for transcendence. This imperfect land, beautiful and harsh, difficult and tender, rife with contradictions, is perhaps my own muse as well. “I weep for the great heart of the South,” Mann writes, “the flawed human heart” (Mann 228). So do I. And so now do many Jeu de Paume visitors, I imagine.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

GREENOUGH, Sarah. “Introduction to the Exhibition—Sally Mann: A Thousand Crossings.” National Gallery of Art, 21 May 2018. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zyEoRgZXI4I. Accessed 1 October 2019.

HUGO, Victor. The Essential Victor Hugo. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004.

MANN, Sally. Hold Still: A Memoir with Photographs. New York: Little, Brown and Company, 2015.

"National Register of Historic Places Inventory—Nomination Form (Windsor Ruins).” Mississippi Department of Archives and History, 17 June 1971. https://www.apps.mdah.ms.gov/nom/prop/ 3600.pdf. Accessed 1 October 2019.

INDEX

Subjects: Trans’Arts

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AUTHOR

MARY-ELAINE JENKINS Mary-Elaine Jenkins is a musician living in New York City. Her debut album, Hold Still, was released in September 2018. Ironically, the title track was written years before discovering Sally Mann's work and reading her 2015 memoir of the same name. She holds a B.A. in international affairs from the George Washington University.

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La boîte à musique

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Leaving the Building: Elvis, Celebrity, Biography, and the Limits of Psychological Autopsy

Mark Duffett and Paula Hearsum

Elvis was unhappy. He’d failed in his ambition to become a serious movie actor. His Las Vegas appearances, after just a year, were already boring him. He was isolated, not going anywhere without his bodyguards. And relations were strained with his wife. Not that I ever knew Elvis. I just knew this from reading some books. Edwin Newman in Elvis and Nixon

1 In the mockumentary Elvis and Nixon, long-time NBC newsman Edwin Newman makes a cameo appearance billed as a “legendary TV journalist.” With an air of insider experience, he says that in 1970 Elvis Presley was “unhappy,” but then he comically undermines himself by adding that he knows as much “from reading some books.” Presley continues to inspire an avalanche of published writing, approached only perhaps by the Beatles and (for surveys see Torgoff, 1982; Duffett, 1999). The singer’s ever-expanding library now includes biographies, buddy books, fictional accounts, fan memoires, themed photo collections, tour guides, and recipe books (Hinds, 2001). There is even an educational tome in the popular For Dummies how-to series (Doll). One of the questions repeatedly posed by such volumes is how and why the Memphis legend actually died. This article probes the limits of one particular mode of biographic investigation—psychological autopsy—and considers its relationship to the way in which fans have sought to understand their hero. Using Elvis as a case study, we aim to prompt wider discussion about the efficacy of psychological autopsy as a means of understanding popular individuals. If psychological autopsy is so compromised, why does it remain popular? Our discussion will develop in two parts. The first examines how psychological autopsy departs from objectivity and is

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problematic as theory. The second asks why fans are still interested in discussing why Elvis died, even though psychological autopsy necessarily lacks methodological rigor.

Diagnosing Fatal “Psychache”

2 Invented by the pioneering psychologist Edwin Shneidman, psychological autopsy is an approach used in clinical practice to understand the role played by an individual’s mental predisposition in his or her final days. In 1956—the same year the Elvis burst across the radio airwaves, TV sets, newspapers and cinema screens—the 31-year-old Gengerelli-trained psychologist worked as an intern at the VA West Los Angeles CA hospital (Shneidman, 2001). He was asked by the hospital’s Chief to write letters of condolence to two women whose husbands had committed suicide. After examining hospital records and talking to nurses, Shneidman looked into case files at the Coroner’s office. Along with a death certificate, police report, autopsy report and photograph, in one he discovered a genuine suicide note. His fascination with the note caused him to borrow around 200 similar documents from the Coroner’s records within a week. Soon he extended his first comparative investigation to over 700 such notes. As Shneidman explained: The fulcrum moment of my suicidological life was not when I came across several hundred suicide notes in a coroner’s vault while on an errand for the director of the VA hospital, but rather a few minutes later, in the instant when I had a glimmering that their vast potential could be immeasurably increased if I did not read them, but compared them, in a controlled blind experiment, with simulated suicide notes that might be elicited from matched non-suicidal persons. (Shneidman, 1991 247)

3 Shneidman’s comparative approach to suicide and its antecedents formed the basis of a research paradigm that has been described as “contemporary suicidology” (Shore 15). One of its central methodologies is psychological autopsy (Shneidman and Farberow 80). The phrase describes a practice available to those who assess deaths that might equally have been the result of negligence, accident or suicide.1 Alongside any documents about the dead person, psychological autopsies employ interviews with family, friends and associates to try and reconstruct their state of mind. In part, it can be thought of as the pursuit of oral history in the service of illuminating an individual subject’s deteriorating mood and will to live.

4 Shneidman’s method was formalized in a sixteen-question checklist (1976). We categorized Shneidman’s questions into three groups. The first group broadly gathers evidence about the subject’s life history. Beyond identifying basic information about the victim and details of his or her death, Shneidman suggested recording details of the victim’s biographic world: personality, lifestyle, inter-personal relationships, siblings, marriage, medical illnesses, medical treatment, psychotherapy, previous suicide attempts. In a second category of investigation, Shneidman suggested focusing on the victim’s approach to death: the “death history” in his or her family (fatal illnesses, suicides, ages of death), recent history of and reactions to stress, role of possible triggers (alcohol and drugs), relevant thoughts (fantasies, dreams, comments, premonitions, fears), and assessment of intentionality. Finally, Shneidman advocated including the reactions of informants: were the victim’s friends surprised at what happened or did they expect it? The schema can therefore be divided into three categories relating to the victim’s life history, inner world, and the conditioned

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expectations of his or her friends. All three aspects are commonly raised in discussions about the deteriorating moods of depressed subjects.

5 While psychological autopsy began as a psychiatric methodology, the approach has been widely adopted to create accounts of the last days of celebrity figures. Accounts can take the form of, amongst other things, articles, paperbacks and television documentaries. Sometimes they are presented as novels or biopics. 2 In these various formats, clinical psychologists and others have attempted to reconstruct the last days of famous subjects and assess any propensity towards self-destruction. It is not surprising that Shneidman’s approach has been used in attempts to understand celebrity and formed the methodological basis of a number of popular biographies; both the level of public interest and commercial stakes can be very high (Gregory and Gregory).

6 Elvis Presley is not the only celebrity to become a subject for psychological autopsy, but he is one of the highest in public profile.3 While he officially died of “cardiac arrhythmia” (irregular heartbeat), that is not a sufficient explanation for his passing. His medical autopsy was not, moreover, made available to the public (Lacy 90). Few of the facts of Elvis’s August 1977 demise are now in doubt, but precisely what killed him remains subject to endless speculation.4 Joel Williamson’s recent Elvis biography stated: “An amazing array of wild theories sprang up to explain Elvis’s untimely death” (16). The whole gamut included the notion that the singer died of heart failure, an overdose, drug interactions (“polypharmacy”), suicide, or bone cancer. Two paperbacks, Parker’s Elvis: Murdered by the mob and Urbaney’s Who Murdered Elvis?, suggest that the singer was dispatched by someone else. In some popular accounts, he even escapes death and finds another life away from the spotlight (Denisoff and Plasketes). The “What really happened?” question is not just significant in itself, but instead it has implications for Elvis’s public reputation. For example, if he had really died unexpectedly of a heart attack, nobody, including the singer himself, would actually be to blame (Williamson 13). In effect, Elvis therefore represents a paradigm case of “equivocal death.”

7 In 2011, the practicing medical hypnoanalyst Ronan J. William published A Psychological Autopsy of Elvis Presley. Subtitling his book “The role of suggestion in the etiology of “psychosomatic disorders,” William discussed two syndromes that emerged from the work of John Scott. The abstract of Scott’s 1991 article in Medical Hypnoanalysis explained: One condition discussed is the walking zombie syndrome. This is an allusion to the fact that the individuals have suffered death-like experiences themselves, or have experienced death in the loss of a loved one. In short, some part of the mind has accepted the suggestion of death. They continue to walk around, but act as if “they have no life in them.” They often wear dark clothing, have low energy, and are withdrawn and quiet. In the Ponce de Leon syndrome, the emotional development is arrested at an immature stage, and the subject sees the self as child-like and incapable of success. (Scott 45) Drawing on an analysis of his subject’s personal beliefs and insecurities, William reads the singer’s life as an example of these two syndromes. They offer theoretical frameworks that guide the author in his task of selection, omission and construction from the material available. Clinical psychologist Dr. Peter Whitmer’s The Inner Elvis, in contrast, offers itself as a “psychological biography” of the singer. It shows how Presley’s “creative powers and destructive demons stemmed from being the proto- typical childhood trauma victim—having lost his twin at birth” (x). Other direct

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psychological autopsies about Elvis include Goldman (1991) and Parker (1994). Together they demonstrate that psychological autopsy is pursued in a variety of different ways.

8 A number of overview books, such as Thompson and Coles’ The Death of Elvis: What really happened (1991), have also hit the marketplace aiming to present fresh evidence and to adjudicate between the different perspectives. Reviewing Thompson and Coles’ work, Dave Marsh explained: At the very least, The Death of Elvis serves the extremely useful purpose of debunking both the gushing nonsense about bone cancer to which many fans still cling and the stupidities of the Elvis suicide theory Goldman has recently retailed. (Marsh xiii) Though relatively few in number, some books specifically designed to attempt to decide between other accounts of Elvis’s life (including his final days) are increasingly common. Patrick Lacy’s volume Elvis Decoded: A guide to deciphering the myths and misinformation (2006) is an example of such research, specifically designed for the fan market.

Five Significant Problems with Psychological Autopsy

9 Hjelmeland et al. (2012) suggested Shneidman’s methodology was compromised by significant issues: problems which could emerge in relation to both the interviewers, interviewees, how long the interviews happen after the person’s death, standardizing the diagnostic process, and inferring suicide from evidence of mental disorder. Loosely inspired by their critique, the rest of this section explores five significant problems with psychological autopsy in the context of celebrity biography. The first is that there is no fixed, singular method. The second suggests that part of what therefore happens is that readers are asked to trust the investigator. The third is that friends’ testimonies can be an unreliable source of evidence. A fourth is that psychological autopsies, in the context of celebrity biography, also draw on published sources. Fifth, the method is exposed as essentially flawed because it necessarily rests on asking its readers to accept questionable inferences. After these five problems are outlined, the section finishes by examining the way in which psychological autopsies draw on shared frames of reference—celebrity biography, dark descent tropes, known aspects of the subject’s image—to persuade biography readers.

10 In the context of celebrity biography, the first issue confronting psychological autopsy is that of method. Unlike a “real” medical autopsy, there is no singular agreed method to follow for the correct creation of a psychological autopsy, an issue further exacerbated by the “open season” approach of commercial biographers, some of whom aim to deductively test a priori propositions, and none of whom sign up to any kind of shared methodological fiat. All forms of psychological autopsy are problematic, but some forms especially so. What such studies therefore rely upon are the justifications, reputation and professional credentials of the writer.

11 The second issue facing psychological autopsy is that it asks readers to trust the investigator and what they say about the rigor of their particular approach. In theory, psychological autopsy appears to put practicing psychiatrists ahead of standard biographers. After all, they have the professional knowledge and experience necessary to definitively diagnose mental disorders. If the author is a psychiatric expert, we are more likely to trust his or her diagnosis of the mental state of the musician.

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Psychological autopsy therefore confronts its readers with the limits to this trust. As part, for example, of Albert Goldman’s efforts to provide an accumulation of circumstantial evidence which demonstrated that Elvis took his own life, Elvis: The Last 24 Hours claimed, “Elvis was chronically depressed and constantly seeking relief from his troubles in some sort of [prescription drug-induced] oblivion that mimics death” (1991 172). Goldman was a professor of English at Columbia University, not a practicing psychiatrist or even a theoretical psychologist. He did not have the professional standing to make pronouncements about his subject’s state of mind. Conversely, the esteem in which we might hold colleagues from psychiatry in relation to psychological autopsy should be tempered by a recognition that—at least when they write popular books or participate in media documentaries—they are also engaged in meeting the demands of a commercial audience.5 Psychiatric experts are not just inductively piecing together clues to the deteriorating mood of one individual person here; they are systematically profiling their famous case subjects in relation to a stock of theoretical and experiential knowledge about what their (supposedly) suicidal individuals say and do that has been gathered across a whole career. In addition, psychological autopsies are often performed by those outside of the psychiatric profession. If clinical versions tend to temper any hint of a sensationalist delivery, variants of the subgenre have bordered on scandal. A good example of the former is Albert Goldman's lesser known, second biography of Elvis Presley, Elvis: The Last 24 Hours (1991), a paperback in which the author controversially claimed that the star deliberately committed suicide.

12 Possessing medical credentials does not guarantee that an investigator’s account is unbiased. Dr. George Nichopoulos became Elvis’s main personal physician in his final decade. According to The New York Times, “Dr. Nick” administered 19,000 pills, including placebos, to Elvis during the singer’s last 31 months of life (“Presley’s Doctor”). The book When Doctors Kill reports that in 1980 Nichopoulos was indicted on 14 counts of over-prescribing drugs to Memphis celebrities, and has since had his medical license suspended at least twice (Perper 213). In one of the most interesting of the recent contributions to the controversy over Elvis’s death, the opioid drugs expert and medical research Dr. Forest Tennant—who had re-examined Dr. Nichopoulos’s case on behalf of a defense attorney—argued that Elvis died of gradual complications from a series of traumatic blows to the head: Progress in modern pain management finally has provided us with enough scientific knowledge about traumatic brain injury (TBI), autoimmune disease, and pain to unravel his medical history. After piecing the evidence together, it is quite clear to me that Elvis’s major disabling medical problems stemmed from multiple head injuries that led to an autoimmune inflammatory disorder with subsequent central pain. (Tennant 45)

13 As his evidence, Tennant mentioned four occasions when Elvis fell over in public—two in 1956, one in 1958 and the last in 1967—to which he added that there may have been further such incidents due to a lifestyle that included “rugged” sports, fast bikes and drug overdoses. As a medical professional, Tennant claimed that in his view such episodes could well have caused increasing autoimmune problems and a consequent spiral of physiological consequences and complications. What was interesting, though, was the evidence he gave: Some of the post-trauma symptoms include memory loss, obsessive-compulsive traits, and irrational or illogical behavior. Elvis demonstrated many of these obsessive-compulsive and erratic behaviors at different times. For example, he gave luxurious gifts to strangers, took spur-of-the-moment flights across country, and

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waged an imaginary campaign against illegal drug dealers. On one occasion in 1970, he impulsively flew to Washington, DC, and called on President Richard Nixon without a prior appointment. He got a “spur-of-the-moment” facelift in 1975. His expenses soared to about $500,000 per month, and his entertainment group was essentially bankrupt just before his death due to his lavish, irrational expenditures. (Tennant 52) Tennant’s interpretation therefore draws on erratic moments in the star’s life history to infer evidence of a creeping medical problem. By ruling out suicide and replacing it with accident, his theory suggests that Elvis had no existential “psychache,” and that neither the singer nor the infamous Dr. Nichopolous were to blame. Even given Dr. Tennant’s professional standing, to locate Elvis’s impulsive behavior as a result of head trauma rather than personality disposition or celebrity privilege, however, seems rather hard to accept.

14 A third problem for psychological autopsy is whether the testimonies of close friends can be fully trusted in revealing sufficient evidence about the subject’s state of mind. In 1994 James Selkin argued, “Psychological autopsy is to suicidology as an interview is to the developing science of psychology” (74). Indeed, psychological autopsy is characterized by the methodological difficulties of using a qualitative method – the interview – in the context in the creation of a deeply personal “psycho-biographic” account. Discussing her view of oral history, Joanna Bornat explained, “There will be bias, partiality, silence, some revelation and much forgetting, but that is the nature of oral history, and for some people its very interest and significance” (240). Celebrity psychological autopsies have obvious problems here. For various reasons, Elvis “insiders” may have tended towards bias, not least to protect their friend’s or their own reputations, or for financial gain (Williamson 10).6 Taking a distanced stance, the rock critic Dave Marsh dismissed their books as “sheer junk” (xiii). We need not go as far as Marsh to acknowledge that they have created situated, partial and performative accounts. Their evidence does not represent a crystal clear window on the objective reality of Elvis’s troubled mind, but instead an attempt to recapture a series of unique and different encounters with the star. This means that not only is the psychological profiler engaged in a process of interpretation and theorizing; each of the informants does those same things too. Their books reflect the impossibility of innocent and unmediated expression: There is no life without theory. In this sense the “buddy books” are not immune from inter-textual interpretations of Elvis’s life. No biographer is innocent… Insider accounts set themselves up against other representations. They aim to “set the record straight.” So these books go beyond Elvis to draw on the ideas that previous writers have had about him. The earliest popular books, like Hopkins and Goldman, are therefore outposts on the map. Furthermore, social identity is relational. Elvis Presley was a sensitive man with a highly diverse set of friends. Whether they were intelligent eccentrics like Larry Geller or unreconstructed Southern toughs like Red West, he met each of them on their own particular level. If any reader ever actually befriended the King, it would be likely that they too would come away with a slightly different account. This suggests that Elvis’s friends did not reproduce him. Instead they inevitably added something new of their own. (Duffett, 1999 7)

15 In this context, the information received will depend on the interviewees selected, what they were asked, when they were asked it, to what extent their perceptions had been inflected by shared representations, and what agenda they held as stakeholders in the whole process. A good set of examples here are accounts based on interview testimony by Dr. Nichopoulos (Booth; Breo; Nichopoulos). Because Nichopoulos is both

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medically trained and has been derided by many fans and commentators as a pharmaceutical enabler, his interview statements are likely to offer very different evidence in a psychological autopsy from those by others like Joe Esposito, George Klein and Billy Smith, who were also part of Elvis’s inner circle. If such issues were not enough, psychological autopsy interviews raise a significant phenomenological problem: they rely on the interviewees and investigator to translate depressed and suicidal states of mind that they themselves may never have experienced. Part of the problem is that the investigator is attempting to categorize and label an absent person with a psychological disorder on the basis of a partial picture built up from second- hand evidence provided by non-professionals (Canter 1282).

16 The fourth problem for psychological autopsy is easy to understand: if fresh interviews with the celebrity’s inner circles have their problems, information produced by other people—with all the issues of reliability implied—can be used, frequently either to provide central evidence or fill gaps. In the credits at the end of his piece, for example, Dr. Forest Tennant explains: Most material, other than information directly derived from Elvis Presley's files and records, is from the detailed book, Down at the End of Lonely Street: The Life and Death of Elvis Presley, written by Peter and Pat Broeske. This work was written in 1997 and contains detailed information after years of investigation by these two authors. (Tennant 55) Even though Tennant’s theory ran counter to the claim made in the title of the commercial biography that he drew upon, his diagnosis was based on evidence not from second-hand sources, but from third.

17 The fifth, and perhaps most significant problem for psychological autopsy is that it presents a “depth model” of the mind which depends on the acceptance of questionable inferences. The method relies on a leap from external indications of the mood, attitude and utterances of the star to a diagnosis of his or her deteriorating inner state of mind. In 2001, Shneidman summarized this conceptual schema: “I believe that suicide is essentially a drama in the mind, where the suicidal drama is almost always driven by psychological pain, the pain of negative emotions—what I call psychache. Psychache is at the dark heart of suicide; no psychache, no suicide” (2001 200). Perhaps the most significant problem for psychological autopsy in general therefore reflects the need to prove a link between the individual’s mental disorder and suicidal act. In order to make this inference with any degree of consistency, the same procedures have to be followed each time. As Selkin explains: One of the reasons that many psychological autopsies terminate inconclusively is that no decision rules have been established for the procedure. An investigator could conclude that a death was suicide on the basis of a single significant clue, whereas another investigator would presume accident (the legal approach) unless 3 or even 13 suicidal clues were present. An investigator who lacks pre-established criteria for identifying a death as suicide or accident is inviting confusion and ambivalence. (Selkin 75) The issue here, therefore, is that while psychology purports to be a science of mind, psychological autopsy cannot be a scientific procedure. Even when one procedure is consistently and repeatedly followed, the process rarely leads to firm conclusions of its own accord. In terms of the victim’s life history, one of the biggest concerns is that the accumulation of circumstantial evidence can never sufficiently prove a particular of cause of death. Common correlation is not the same as certain cause. In other words, many mental disorders do not end in suicide. Also, up to 10% of suicides happen in spite

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of the victim having no observable mental disorder. Given the ontological, empirical and representational complexity of its subject matter, psychological autopsy primarily rests on an a priori assumption that connects reported memories of the star’s final words and behavior with a theory of how suicide happens. The central problem with Shneidman’s notion of “psychache” is, as Hjelmeland et al. state, “psychopathology never is a sufficient cause of suicide, although it might be a contributory one.”

18 If psychological autopsy misses its mark in all these ways, how does it establish any persuasive purchase on the reader? It is crucial to understand that in the case of celebrity biography, the methodology essentially operates in the wake of a shared understanding existing parameters. In the final part of this section, the approach will be understood as operating within established frames which are shared by the celebrity’s audience. These frames include ideas about celebrity biography, dark descent tropes, and common understandings of the subject’s celebrity image. What is interesting here is that the psychological autopsies of celebrity musicians in particular do not just talk about their lives, but can also discuss their creative labor. Consider this example, in which Peter Whitmer considers Elvis’s interest in the gospel genre: Elvis’s disintegration continued. His midnight pilgrimage to the funeral home where his mother’s body had been embalmed can be regarded as a dramatic form of “death rehearsal”. […] By the same token, Gospel music, more a part of Elvis’s life and concerts in his later years, is a musical way of stating that it is O.K. to die. (Whitmer 412)

19 Whitmer’s musical diagnosis is not entirely accurate. Elvis had been fascinated by gospel before he recorded a note. In the early 1950s he attended the gospel all-nighters at the Ellis Auditorium in Memphis. He auditioned for the Songfellows quartet in July 1953 and recorded an unreleased country-gospel number (“Satisfied”) the next year during his short tenure at Sun Records (Brown 23). His first gospel release for RCA, the Peace in the Valley EP, was recorded one year after “Heartbreak Hotel.” Elvis associated himself with gospel long before it became a centerpiece of his 1970s live shows. Whitmer’s words have a certain weight, however, in relation to authenticity. According to Allan Moore, authenticity in popular music is not something that is inherent in a song or its performance, but rather a social construct that is applied to the music. Moore located three different forms of ascribed authenticity. First-person authenticity is the presentation of an impression that the music is offered unmediated as a personal expression of its writer or performer. Second-person authenticity occurs when listeners believe that the music has validated their lives and spoken for them. Third- person authenticity is successful when a performer is taken as genuinely portraying the world of an absent other. In this context, not only is Elvis framed by fans and commentators as having first person authenticity; psychological autopsies that mention his work also enhance this first person perspective.7 In other words, because we assume that Elvis’s music—at least in its 1950s and 1970s incarnations—to some extent reflected his life, we also read that life through the filter of the music.

20 For “psychological biographer” Peter Whitmer, the issue of Elvis’s (pre)occupation extends to a concern for music in general as a way that the singer found love: With [his twin] Jesse’s death…xxx he knew that deep down an essential part of him was missing. He would attempt to fill the void of amniotic sensory joy left in him. Especially with music—the sounds that once triggered his first sensations of human connectedness—he would try and try again to recapture the basic, primal experience he had once shared with Jess. For Elvis Presley, with his twin dead and buried, music could never be just an area of interest, a hobby, or even a gift. It

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would be more than a driving force within him. Music, quite quickly in the developing Elvis, would go beyond passion to become compulsion. Music and communicating through music would define him and shape his relationships, helping some, impairing others. Given his natural talent, music, he sensed, could be his vehicle. (Whitmer 41) Whitmer’s words are reminiscent of those of the fictional Dr. Fred Richman who, in the coda to Psycho (Alfred Hitchcock, 1960), discusses Norman’s imagined relationship to Mrs. Bates with what one commentator called “an almost sadistic glee” (Greven 77). The actor cast as Dr. Richman, Simon Oakland, was better known for playing TV tough guys, including Sergeant Steve Necclo in Decoy (1957) and Commander Herman Cossler in The Silent Service (1958). To portray the psychiatrist as a wisecracking jock implied that his explanation was simplistic and redundant. Just as audiences had already discovered that Norman dressed as his mother and killed people, so Whitmer’s readers already knew that Elvis lost his twin at birth and had a passion for music. Any connection between the two facts is impossible to prove on a scientific level, but makes a relatively comfortable “fit” in terms of the singer’s myth. After all, we sense that the Presley’s were a family bonded by loss, and that music offered an immediate opportunity for Elvis to build social bonds.

21 It is easy to say that after his mother died, Elvis Presley pursued a two-decade experiment in finding love, and that while he found communal joy through music, and that eventually his experiment failed so the singer committed a slow suicide. This explanation is mythic; both simplistic and satisfying. Its explanatory power depends on connecting some well-known aspects of Elvis’s story with explanations that are easily understood (Ilott). To cloak such explanations in the language of science may make them sound more persuasive, but they still depend on inferences on our part. Ultimately, then, psychological autopsy brings the imprimatur of professional clinical psychological practice to a method that is not scientific, but partial, “it provides the opportunity to cloak an investigation concerned with the soft data of attitudes and feelings in the mantle of exactitude conveyed by medical and physical science, as in the use of the term ‘autopsy’” (Selkin 74). What this “cloaking” consist in, crucially, are existing shared understandings of the celebrity’s image.

22 In January 1956 Elvis Presley burst across the firmament of American popular culture with the first single that he recorded for RCA, “Heartbreak Hotel.” Written by steel guitarist Tommy Durden and Florida schoolteacher Mae Boren Axton, its composition was based upon a news story in The about a man who had committed suicide by jumping from a window. His suicide note read, “I walk a lonely street.” The song was a product of its time. Americans, both young and old, were defining themselves as outsiders, individuals and rebels. One of the biggest youth cultural phenomena of the previous year had been the rise of the “live fast, die young” actor James Dean. In March he debuted in the magnificent East of Eden (Elia Kazan, 1955). In October the more contemporary Rebel Without A Cause (, 1955) set a new standard in the expression of teenage angst. Its opening was preceded by the news that Dean’s lifeless body had been pulled from the crumpled wreckage of his Porsche Spyder. Dean’s speed-induced accident both affirmed his troubled persona, and added an air of melancholy, mystery and romance.

23 Elvis took a tip from Dean. He served up his own sultry version of death at the end of lonely street with his first major label single. In doing so he contributed to the extended spate of “death discs” and “splatter platters” aimed at adolescents that

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reached well into the next decade (Plopper and Ness). Elvis Presley’s performance, of course, was a carefully calculated and soulfully expressed pose. On the single’s picture cover, he wore a -style raincoat, complete with collar turned up like Humphrey Bogart in The Big Sleep (, 1946). The rain that fell on the singer was, of course, meant to convey his desperate state of mind. “Heartbreak Hotel” was a brilliant piece of theatre. It inflected his image with a gloomy undertow for decades to come: in the context of a charismatic performer who had, in part, an existentially entrapped public persona, it was easy to conclude that his private life was like that too – plagued by guilt about his twin brother’s death and his father’s imprisonment, crushed by the parasitic machinations of his manager, stressed by the formulaic scripts offered by Hollywood, demands of his fans and tell-all exposé written by his bodyguards (Dunleavy), and finally devastated by the death of his mother and exit of his wife. The issue with such well-known information is that Elvis’s celebrity image can be seen in two ways: as something that offers clues about his demise or something that misdirects our understandings of his death. In theory, psychological autopsy could be help us to pursue a completely independent course of understanding, but this would be to underestimate the power of a priori frames of reference in shaping commercial discussion.

Appropriating Autopsy: Establishing Closure or Extending Expertise?

24 Celebrity biographies based on psychological autopsy are primarily commodities. Martin Torgoff, who ghostwrote Elvis’s step-mother Dee Stanley’s account (Presley), gave some insights on the process in a later book chapter titled After The Flood, where he explained that writers were vulnerable to “commercial pressures to sensationalize and reveal… [because] people will say or print anything about Elvis, do anything to make a buck” (1982, 20). As if to verify this, Torgoff described how his own manuscript had been edited down so that “the gossip and anecdotal elements of the book were now showcased over the analytical and factual because ‘that’s what people want to read’” (36). He added: I began to wonder to what degree other Elvis books had been effected by the editorial process, how what had been communicated about the man was either gussied up or watered down, and the implications of this were driven home to me in symbolic terms on the afternoon I was shown the [doctored photo] design for the book cover. (Torgoff 36) Given that psychological autopsies can be consumed by fan audiences, one possibility is that they are shaped to offer a form of psychological “closure” for individuals in the audience who sense a personal relationship to the star concerned.

25 Parasocial interaction is an idea that was named in the 1950s and suggests media audience members personally respond to cues offered by performers in the media (Horton and Wohl). In this formulation, fandom represents a role on one side of a pseudo-relationship that at worst can be seen as a form of genuine, unrequited response to the false promises offered by celebrities. Psychologists have continued to pursue and refine Horton and Wohl’s ideas (Giles; Stever, 2013). This explanation is, however, highly problematic. Elvis did have a coterie of “superfans,” like Cricket Coulter and Sue Wiegert, for example, who regularly talked to their hero in person at the Graceland gates, rather than just writing fan mail (Free; Wiegert). These superfans

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were, however, exceptional. Though comparatively few people met Elvis in person, all had an understanding about what he was like. However, parasocial interaction relies on a notion of personal attachment that has been disputed in relation to celebrity. A media and cultural studies approach has also been used to challenge the assumptions which undergird the theory (Duffett, 2014; Duffett and Hearsum).

26 The assumptions of parasocial interaction and related ideas define psychological autopsies as an aid to personal closure for grieving fans. When we interviewed the author of one fictionalized account of a troubled rock star’s mysterious last days, however, he said that he had received no indication that fans drew on his account to develop a sense of closure about the musician (Myers). Fandom can instead be a quest to understand the context and personalities of inspirational figures or appreciate their creative skills. While everybody fantasizes, and our fantasies can include celebrities, fans are not exceptional and not just dreamers. Not only do they socially network with real people, but they also understand their heroes as powerful, socially valued figures who cannot meet everyone at once. Consequently, while fans prize their heroes as people and experience a connection in relation to them, they are not entrapped by roles that defines their identities as dupes. Perhaps the most significant blow to the parasocial interaction idea is that fans have a strong sense of the realities of their own lives. They are highly cognizant that their star is not actually with them. This has consequences for how we understand the function of psychological autopsies.

27 Many music publications are aimed at a general readership of which fans make up only a subsection. Given this commercial pressure to sensationalize the truth, scandalous accounts have sometimes been boycotted by fan audiences. Albert Goldman’s infamous biography Elvis (1981) is a case in point. Fans publically burned Goldman’s book and dismissed it as a set of twisted and fabricated interpretations that missed the truth of a life in favor of outrageous claims about their hero. Despite this, the book was so popular that Avon Books bought the reprint rights for $1 million (Walters 27). Goldman's account did not sell to dedicated Elvis fans, disproving the stereotype that they are indiscrimate consumers who will buy anything they encounter bearing their star’s name (Jenkins). Dedicated fans may have dismissed Goldman's Elvis biography, but—even though they are not indiscriminate consumers—they do form a steady market for different types of written account; some of the most dedicated Elvis fans are also dedicated Elvis book collectors.

28 Recent music research has suggested that music fans have a tendency to mythologize and “sanctify” their deceased heroes. Chris Partridge, for example, has claimed that Elvis fans have transfigured their hero “from a bloated, paranoid drug addict who died in less than seraphic circumstances into the glorious and blessed ‘Dead Elvis,’ the Christian avatar, the American saint, the prophet who walked amongst us for a while” (239). Jennifer Otter Bickerdike’s work offers a parallel example: “The more the martyr myth is circulated, the more we [the fans] invest, with money, time and attention, regardless of validity” (63). Claims like these reduce music fans to dreamers, willfully blinded and deluded by their loyalty to their hero to a point where they embrace convenient myths and flatly ignore the truth. If the ontological and epistemological assumptions of psychological autopsy have limited purchase on any substantive claims to truth, the next logical question is that of what purpose this literary subgenre actually serves. Is fan knowledge simply a matter of clinging to myths? After all, fans do not necessarily make the cause of Elvis’s death a central topic of discussion (Duffett,

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2012), but sometimes explore why it happened in their attempts to establish empathy for his suffering and to restore dignity to his story.

29 In reality, dedicated Elvis fans are not worshippers who walk around with rose-tinted spectacles. They may actually know more about the details of the demise of their star than the researchers making such claims. To understand what is happening, it is worth examining two fan pursuits: increasing Elvis’s fan base—a practice known as “boosting” (Duffett, 2012)—and to getting closer to the hero. Boosting, the practice of promoting a star’s public profile in order to reach more potential followers, in part shapes how fans talk about Elvis. In the compilation, Elvis: Remembered by His Fans, for example, one fan wrote, “The doctors who wrote the prescriptions should be held accountable” (Abrahamian 65). This view suggests Elvis was not entirely to blame for his untimely death. It is not, however, a “sanctification” because it does not suggest that Elvis was free of addiction to medical prescriptions. In other words, the star—who Christopher Partridge uncharitably speaks of as “a bloated, paranoid drug addict who died in less than seraphic circumstances”—is not transfigured as a saint, but perceived as a victim with distinctly human failings. Closeness is no longer simply physical now (Elvis is dead, after all), but it includes the kind of understanding that comes from acquiring more detailed knowledge. Rather than simply conspiring to mythologize, fans wish to know the truth: to get as close as is currently possible to a picture of what happened—a picture that is, necessarily, provisional and constantly evolving both for them as individuals and for their community. Fans therefore collect facts and interpretations about the life of their hero. Reading psychological autopsies can be seen as a practice that adds to their gradually accumulating stock of knowledge. They have therefore pursued goals on two fronts: maintaining the icon’s reputation in public, while seeking out the frankest details of his life and demise to enhance their own understanding.8

30 Learning more and more allows dedicated Elvis fans to assist less experienced enthusiasts in making or assessing interpretations, to accumulate cultural capital that can be deployed within the fan community (Fiske, 1992), and to adjudicate between different claims offered in the media, or pursue vernacular theories. To this end, fans themselves constantly compare, contrast and piece together evidence about the end of Elvis’s life. His inner circle of friends, relatives, and co-workers have been interviewed on many occasions by newspapers, magazines, fan clubs, television stations and websites. They offer opinions like this one, which Elvis’s drummer Ronnie Tutt made to an Australian fan club: He needed to go around the world [on tour]. He needed a complete change back from that [routinized management] mentality that we discussed earlier. And I think that’s part of the thing—I personally feel that in a way he died of boredom. He had very little to look forward to. I saw it in his life too. I had dinner with him. I saw the girl that was with him. She was just there for the ride. She didn’t care about him in my opinion, in my observation. When you’ve surrounded yourself with people like that, then I think… He didn’t know how to become seriously depressed, because he wasn't that kind of person - I think it had a major effect on him. Another part of the tragedy is that he was trapped in the image that he had created. (Deelen) Comparing such statements allows fans to assemble their own stock of knowledge that enhances their understanding of the Memphis superstar. Anything that fans find like this is part of an ongoing quest for greater knowledge, one that puts aside myths, commercial imperatives, and other extraneous considerations in a search for a more honest and satisfying explanation.

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31 In this piece we have suggested psychological autopsy is a deeply flawed methodology, but we all use stories to explain things. Elvis remains, as per the title of John Fiske’s essay, “a body of controversy” (Fiske, 1993). When it comes to the historic events of August 1977, his story never quite settles, it seems, precisely because the imagination of it is our own, a death that cannot be reduced to a static stock of facts or a simplified system of myths. His “equivocal death” that has much at stake because it potentially says a lot about his life. The process of assembling psychological autopsies does not therefore stop with clinical experts or commercial products, but is an open-ended practice pursued by those who consume Elvis information. In her 1978 memoir, Elvis: For The Good Times, superfan Sue Wiegert offered a relatively nuanced, four-page testimony from registered nurse Carole Neely outlining some key aspects of the icon’s medical condition: anxiety, insomnia, high blood pressure, twisted colon, prescription drug intake, glaucoma and cardiac congestion. This, we suggest, was not simply for prurient or voyeuristic interest, or even because findings from Elvis’s autopsy were kept secret. It was, rather, to respond to theories that cast his life in a negative light. Rather than cynically assuming Presley’s pharmaceutical descent was an indication of flawed character (selfishness, hypocrisy and indulgence), Neely casts his story as a tragedy, ending it by saying, “A broken heart can be fatal, loneliness can kill” (Wiegert 6). In her reading, Elvis neglected his health because he could not feel love in his life. Fans like Wiegert and Neely use a variant of Shneidman’s approach to offer an interpretation of their hero’s passing, not necessarily for reasons that are related to personal “closure” or mass commerce—Wiegert’s memoire is self-published by the Blue Hawaiians for Elvis fan club—but because it helps fans both understand and support their hero as a talented and flawed individual.

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NOTES

1. Other methods of investigating causes of death include final scene investigations, sometimes called “Equivocal Death Analysis,” a method that some researchers see as more likely to produce conclusive results (Selkin), while others see as less conclusive (Canter). 2. For example, the feature film Last Days (Van Sant, 2006) portrays the descent of Kurt Cobain and Ben Myers’ 2014 novel Richard offers a portrait of the disintegrating inner world of the Manic Street Preachers’ guitarist Richey Evans. 3. In 1962 a suicide investigation team examined the death of Marilyn Monroe. The panel concluded that she was subject to depression and mood swings, and in conjunction with her autopsy report, her death was a probable suicide (Nickell and Fischer 264). In popular music, amongst other musicians, the Nirvana frontman Kurt Cobain has been subjected to various psychological autopsies, usually, in his case, aiming to decide whether the death was a suicide or murder. For example, alongside Nick Broomfield’s artfully shambling film documentary Kurt and Courtney (1998), there have been various paperbacks including Ian Halperin and Max Wallace’s two books Who Killed Kurt Cobain? (1998) and Love & Death: The murder of Kurt Cobain (2000). 4. A good example here is the title of the book that Elvis was reading when he died (Lacy 22). If such factual information has already become lost to the historical record, there is little hope for piecing together Elvis’s inner world. 5. One relevant example is “celebrity worship syndrome” (McCutcheon, Lange, and Houran), the pathologizing label given to an invented disorder that seemed perhaps more connected with media stereotypes and mass cultural thinking than any immediate precedents from the discipline of psychology (Stever, 2011). 6. Many of the Elvis “buddy books” were co-written with commercial writers such as journalists who translated the reminiscences of the Memphis Mafia into acceptable commodities. In a parallel case, describing Broomfield’s documentary Kurt and Courtney (1998), Jennifer Otter Bickerdike (117) noted that “what grabs the viewer is the seeming unending utilization of Cobain as a means to gain individual fame and identity.”

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7. The irony here, of course, is that Elvis was not a songwriter; it is his soulful performance that is convincing. 8. A parallel example of this collective, dualistic approach was the fandom’s historic approach to the bootleg circulation of the CBS TV special, Elvis In Concert, which was filmed during his final US concert tour in June 1977 and broadcast within months of his death. Although the peaks of his vocal performance reached their usual high standard, CBS footage showed Elvis looking very ill and out of shape. His estate released a CD of the material in 1992, but they tried to keep the footage out of circulation and did not pursue a DVD release. Bootleg versions were circulated, however, within Elvis fan clubs. Club members knew that Elvis in Concert might repel would-be fans. They did not, however, shun it themselves, as they knew it was a window on the life of a man that they loved. Now the concert surfaces regularly on YouTube.

INDEX

Subjects: La boîte à musique

AUTHORS

MARK DUFFETT University of Chester, UK

PAULA HEARSUM University of Brighton, UK

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