Narrated Communities – Narrated Realities Internationale Forschungen zur Allgemeinen und Vergleichenden Literaturwissenschaft

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Francis Claudon (Paris-Est Créteil Val de Marne University) Rüdiger Görner (Queen Mary, University of London) Achim Hölter (University of Vienna) Klaus Ley (Johannes Gutenburg University of Mainz) John A. McCarthy (Vanderbilt University) Alfred Noe (University of Vienna) Manfred Pfister (Free University of Berlin) Sven H. Rossel (University of Vienna)

VOLUME 183

The titles published in this series are listed at brill.com/favl Narrated Communities – Narrated Realities

Narration as Cognitive Processing and Cultural Practice

Edited by

Hermann Blume Christoph Leitgeb Michael Rössner

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This book is printed on acid-free paper. Contents

Editors’ Introduction 7

A Sociological Perspective on Science and Narration

Jochen Gläser Stones, Mortar, Building: Knowledge Production and Community Building in Narratives in Science 17

Narrated Realities

Narration and Abstraction in Natural Sciences Klaus Mecke Narratives in Physics: Quantitative Metaphors and formula ∈ Tropes? 31 Michael Böhler “Render Innocuous the Abstraction We Fear”: Johann Wolfgang Goethe in the Epochal Conflict between Scientific Knowledge and Narrative Knowing 51 Arianna Borrelli Between Logos and Mythos: Narratives of “Naturalness” in Today’s Particle Physics Community 69

Narration, Fiction and the Entangled Human Sciences Bernd Bösel Philosophy as an “Introduction to a General Science of Revolution”? On Peter Sloterdijk’s Narrative-Evocative Philosophizing 87 Brigitte Boothe Narrative Persuasion and Narrative Irritation in Psychotherapy: Bio- graphical Narratives, Deferred Dramaturgy and Narrative Affirmation 101 Christoph Leitgeb Narrating the Uncanny – Uncanny Narration: Freud’s Essay and Theories of Fiction 115 Narrated Communities

Narration, Memory and Identity

Elena Messner Literature and (Ethno-)Nationalist Narratives in the (Post-)Yugo- slav Region 129 Dorothee Birke Doris Lessing’s “Alfred and Emily” and the Ethics of Narrated Memory 141 Aura Heydenreich Closed Timelike Curves: Gödel’s Solution for Einstein’s Field Equa- tions in the General Theory of Relativity and Bach’s “The Musical Offering” as Configuration Models for Narrative Identity Construc- tions in Richard Powers’s “The Time of Our Singing” 153

Translating Narrations into Different Cultures and Media Michael Rössner Translatio/ns of Identity-Building Narratives: The Character of “El Cid” in Spanish and Latin American Texts from the 12th to the 20th Century 173 Antonio Baldassarre The Politics of Images: Considerations on French Nineteenth-Century Orientalist Art (ca. 1800–ca. 1880) as a Paradigm of Narration and Translation 185

Notes on Contributors 249 Index of Names 255 Editors’ Introduction

Culture studies have tried new approaches to answer the basic questions of how people perceive social reality and how they assume identities within communities. For those approaches, narration (both in everyday conver- sation and in fiction) ranks among the most fundamental cultural tech- niques. The very concept of narration seems to be indispensable when basic patterns of socio-cultural orientation are discussed. Anthropological theo- ries even tied the beginning of humanity’s history to the invention of nar- ration as a means of (re)presentation. But despite its tremendous scope, the concept of narration has yet to be sufficiently mined. It is true that literary studies have developed elaborated knowledge about narrative forms and strategies, especially by analyzing canonized, aesthetic texts. But culture studies still need to exhaust the possibilities of describing socio-cultural practices from the perspective of narration. Narrations constitute both realities and identities. In order to convey the full meaning of this diagnosis, Narrated Communities – Narrated Reali­ ties focuses primarily on how narratives function, rather than on how they are structured. Its authors try to encompass the various scientific and schol- arly fields in which concepts of narration are at stake. Culture studies can continue to ask where most studies in literature start losing interest: How do narratives – communicated either orally or by means of other media – affect social practices that are not part of the literary landscape? Narration as a form of communication provides a temporal structure for actions and events, allowing for the perspective of a meaningful end. Narrative psychology views this as a basic form of cognitive processing. Sys- tematic rationality provides the common paradigmatic schemes that enable our mind to link events and objects to conceptual categories. But it is only in the process of narration that events, actors and actions are put into a per- spective to satisfy our human need for meaning. Not “reality” as such, only narrated reality has the kind of structural coherence, temporal organization and semantic integration that is essential for the development and commu- nication of identity, knowledge and orientation in a socio-cultural context. Collective identity is thus based not only on an “imagined commu- nity” (Benedict Anderson), but also on a “narrated community”. Cultural communities both develop and stabilize according to collective narratives. A group sharing the same narratives not only becomes a “community of memory” (A. Assmann, H. Welzer) but, in terms of narratology, also a “community of fiction” (W. Iser). The members of this community are all involved in the same narrative constructs that establish the prevailing reality. 8 Hermann Blume · Christoph Leitgeb · Michael Rössner

Hence, it is not only for the sake of theory that this book raises the issue of categorical boundaries between social reality and fiction, and between factual and fictional narratives. What is considered “fictitious” or “real” no longer separates narratives and the “outside” they refer to, but rather, different narratives. Narration is not only made up and controlled by what people think; narration also makes up and controls people’s thoughts. But who plays the role of the nar- rator, and who takes these stories for granted and for real? These questions have important political dimensions, for whoever can dominate narration has the power to create unique versions of reality.

A Sociological Perspective on Science and Narration Neither scholars nor scientists can possibly describe the subject of narra- tion and pretend that the problems involved do not affect their description. Jochen Gläser illustrates this right at the beginning of the book. He adopts a sociological perspective on three types of scientific storytelling he depicts as “stones, mortar and building”. Scholars and scientists not only use forms of narration in order to convey the results of their research, they also engage in other forms of storytelling such as the “war story” about career, peers and opponents. In narrations, they draw maps of their respective fields of knowledge; in narrations, they specify their subject and its identity. In nar- rations, they report to their sponsors and compete for asset allocation. The very mixture of narratives in scientific practice could serve as a tool to ex- amine the specifics of how scientific disciplines communicate.

Narrated Realities Narration and Abstraction in Natural Sciences These aspects of scientific communication and narration are not circum- stantial. Narrations have a basic function even in supposedly “strict” scienc- es like mathematics and physics. Narrations are at the very core of scientific methodology and abstraction. As physicist Klaus Mecke points out in his essay, physical quantities include both numbers and a narration. The latter is rendered conventional to the extent that it loses the abundance of associa- tions narrations usually have. Numbers obtained by the act of measuring are the epitome of sameness and allow transmission of quantifiable terms to new areas of experience. The scientific approach to measure and compare with numbers therefore depends on narrative specifications and has a meta- phorical quality. What Klaus Mecke describes as a correlation between abstraction and narration from the point of view of a physicist has inspired a long tradition. Editors’ Introduction 9

Michael Böhler describes some of its repercussions in the history of literature with the example of J.W. Goethe, whom he quotes in the title of his essay “… render innocuous the abstraction we fear.” Goethe’s opposition to Isaac Newton with regards to color theory was not so much a conflict between poet and scientist. It was rather fuelled by his bias for a traditional culture of narrative knowledge as compared to an emerging modern culture of em- pirical knowledge. For Goethe the act of cognition itself took the form of a narrative, more exactly a “quest” in the style of a courtly romance. “Observe – contemplate – deliberate – connect – theorize”: these are the stations or transitions of a journey from seeing to knowing. Jean-François Lyotard’s concept of how knowledge is formed by narration (in his Report on Knowledge, better known as The Modern Condition) also stresses that knowledge generates a social bond. In a way similar to Goethe’s and referring to the German concept of “Bildung”, he blends ideas such as savoir-faire, savoir-vivre, and savoir-écouter into a general concept of “savoir”. Goethe’s resistance against modern scientific abstraction could well be expressed in a concept like “naturalness”. Yet, as Arianna Borrelli points out in her essay, this very concept is also essential for modern particle physics. In this theory, “naturalness” determines how to keep the numbers and numeri- cal values of parameters limited, without sacrificing measurement readings and accepting that values for parameters differ too much. Philosophers of science emphasize that this “naturalness” should not be confused with sim- plicity, and physicists often refer to it as an “aesthetic” or “philosophical” concept. Within modern particle physics, “naturalness” can therefore be best understood as a fluid narrative element. High-energy research has redesigned and altered the concept throughout its history without losing the perception that “naturalness” is a distinctive and desirable trait of their theories. Narration, Fiction and the Entangled Human Sciences If narration is important to establish what is “real” in the outside world, it is also intrinsic to what is considered to be “real” inside each one of us. Whenever men or women think about themselves, they are entangled in narrations. The importance of narration may be a surprise regarding natural sciences, but it hardly comes as a surprise in humanities. Analytic philosophy and some schools in psychology nevertheless tried to distance themselves from narration as a means of cognition in order to adopt a more scientific approach: Their very determination was to free mankind from its entanglement in narration. In his essay, Bernd Bösel shows how and why Peter Sloterdijk chose to develop his philosophical thinking into the op- posite direction. For him, the purpose of philosophy lies in the influence it 10 Hermann Blume · Christoph Leitgeb · Michael Rössner exercises on the art of thinking. This is why he stresses the proactive com- munication of the philosophical author with his readers in the tradition of Nietzsche and the much older tradition of philosophical dialogue. Sloterdi- jk thus reinforces narration as a philosophical approach to the art of living. Psychology is arguably the discipline that challenged distinctions be- tween “outside” and “inside”, “science” and “humanities”, “reality” and “symbol” to the utmost. From the perspective of a practicing psychoanalyst, Brigitte Boothe ex- plains why the fictionalization of autobiographical memories and of auto- biographical narrative is an intensely researched phenomenon: (1) Narrative self-assurance is organized in the context of personal preference and rel- evance systems. (2) It answers to the narratives of parents, which actively mold the child as a person. (3) Infant first-hand experiences unfold their unconscious effectiveness only later. (4) Narrative self-assurance draws on culturally distinct patterns. (5) In regressive states of mind-blocking envi- ronmental signals and during a loss of orientation and control, invented and hallucinated events are held for real, e.g., in dreams and psychopathic seizures. This inability to distinguish what is fictitious and what is real has also been a major concern of Freud’s poststructuralist reception in France, mainly in the discussion of his essay on the uncanny. Theories of the uncan- ny have therefore linked their subject to a theory of fiction and narration. Even though it cannot be easily expressed in a simple narration because it runs counter to “naturalness”, “[…] the uncanny seems to be bound up with a compulsion to tell, a compulsive storytelling” (Nicholas Royle). In his essay, Christoph Leitgeb looks into how this connection can be made from within Wolfgang Iser’s theory of fiction. In this theory, fictitious narration imposes the purposes of a speech-act on the material of the “imaginary”. The “imaginary” is the very concept Lacan used to interpret Freud by link- ing the structures of the subconscious and language.

Narrated Communities Narration, Memory and Identity After Marcel Proust, Maurice Maeterlinck and Maurice Halbwachs, a long tradition of sociology and culture studies has investigated how remember- ing and narrating are entwined. Narration selects and combines elements, shaping both the subjective and collective memories of communities. Jan and Aleida Assmann have distinguished a “functional memory” and its dynamics from a “storage memory” that piles up resources like in a depot. The underlying process of selection, actualization and repression is not only Editors’ Introduction 11 characteristic for individual, but also for “collective” memories – be they written, staged or otherwise institutionalized. Furthermore, new identities are invented and tried out in narrations, raising the questions: How do communities and their narratives remember the rifts within their identi- ties? How do they obscure those rifts in their narrations in order to make them forget? Two case studies contextualize this theoretical interdependence of nar- ration and history by elaborating on both its political and biographical consequences. In Ex-Yugoslavia, the dismantling of what used to be a com- mon cultural memory and the construction of a “new, patriotic literature” preceded the wars and the break-up of its political union. Elena Messner shows how literary narrations established new frames of perception, legiti- mized violence and helped construct the future wartime-enemy. She also shows how another set of literary narrations opposed these tendencies by means of irony, parody and satire. The aim of these texts was to deconstruct the make-believe “naturalness” of ethnic and confessional identities and their animosities. Dorothee Birke examines a very daring narrative in which Doris Lessing has addressed the problem of how to deconstruct what has become a his- torical narration. In her autobiographical writing Alfred and Emily, Lessing uncovers the inherent possibilities of history in an inquiry into the lives of her parents and her own childhood. Whereas the second part of her work is a fairly conventional memoir, the first part narrates her parents’ lives as they might have been – if World War I had not taken place and if they had not married each other. As Lessing explains in her preface, this counterfactual move is meant as an act of redemptive empathy. It deletes the trauma of the war and retells her parents’ lives in a story that imagines a fulfillment they were denied in the actual world. Alfred and Emily thus provides a par- ticularly intriguing case study for the challenges of distinguishing fact and fiction in the narration of memory as far as contemporary autobiographical writing is concerned. In his novel The Time of Our Singing, Richard Powers chose an even more sophisticated approach in terms of the scientific concepts involved. Aura Heydenreich demonstrates how in this novel narration functions as a means of arbitrating different discourses. Powers translates the conception of recursive time loops (Gödel’s proposal to solve Einstein’s field equations of his general theory of relativity) into a model of narrative structures. Re- ferring to Paul Ricœur’s proposal of a “crossed reference” between history and narrative fiction, it is possible to see how the novel subsequently en- twines a specific temporal structure and the identities of its characters. It thus breaks up the confinements of an over simple narration of identity and 12 Hermann Blume · Christoph Leitgeb · Michael Rössner race and portrays the gradual development of a hybrid community in the United States of the sixties.

Translating Narrations into Different Cultures and Media If stories have the power to coin identities, that very fact will constitute the need to translate those stories whenever different cultures meet. Research into narrative cultures might wonder if there are still semiotic traditions as distinct as the ones Tzvetan Todorov described in his book on The Con­ quest of America. What is the outcome when narrations are translated into a different culture? How is it possible to interpret the ensuing processes of homogenization, hybridization and (or) suppression? Case studies enacting a culturally sensitive concept of translation should not only look out for examples from geographically distinct cultures, but also from differing historical settings and discourses. Michael Rössner de- velops both perspectives in his analysis of narratives of El Cid. The Poema de Mio Cid is in fact the only medieval poem in Spanish language that survived the centuries. This might be the reason why it has been chosen repeatedly as a founding narration of Spanish and Spanish-American com- munities. In the beginning the poem itself does not primarily deal with heroism and the founding of a community, but rather with how personal vengeance is substituted by juridical decisions to justify the state’s monop- oly of coercion. Nevertheless, already in Golden Age literature (16th and 17th c.), the Cid appears more as a hero of the Spanish Reconquista than as a model of self-control and submission. After the independence of Spanish-American countries, in the search for founding narratives the Cid is sometimes re- ferred to in a more radical way. Eduardo Gutiérrez portrays his gaucho-out- law who takes personal vengeance as a way of translating the new dignity of Argentine people. And last but not least, in 1961 the story was translated in Anthony Mann’s film El Cid – with enthusiastic support by Francisco Franco – as a modern tale about what seems to be an anticipation of the clash of civilizations. Translations into different media and symbolic systems play an eminent role not only in this example. The problem of how narrations are imple- mented across media in music, visual arts and films stretches the concept of translation to its margins. Narration here is not only subject to the transla- tion across media but acts itself as a translator. Within the cognitive process, narrations serve as media to translate concepts into perceptions and percep- tions into concepts. They develop a sensual plasticity that fits situations and calls for emphatic identification. How narrations are translated in terms of Editors’ Introduction 13 a trans-cultural practice is inseparably connected to how narrations serve as media to translate theoretical knowledge and empirical perception. Musical symbolism is often included in the paintings which emerged when nineteenth-century French artists encountered the “Orient”. From the point of view of an art historian, Antonio Baldassarre shows that “orien- talism” in these pictures is a complex narration and not a uniform discourse at all. An in-depth examination reveals a diversity and intricacy in which the only common denominator seems to be the fact that the orientalist art- ists were – as representatives of a hegemonic culture – “outsiders” – despite their particular relationship to the “orient”. Eugène Delacroix and Jean- Auguste-Dominique Ingres are two of the many prominent examples. The visual language used by French nineteenth-century orientalist artists referred in a double-bind manner to both what they supposed to be orient “narratives” and to modes of translation dependent on their own cultural traditions and contexts. Only this background makes their specific agendas towards their peers and towards the consumers of their art comprehensible. The socio-cultural setting of these processes is therefore particularly inter- esting, answering the following questions: Which cultural “narratives” are really encountered in orientalist art and what primary needs are satisfied by what seems to be a process of translation? Is the process of producing (and consuming) such art in itself a mode of contemplation, of acquisition, or even of artistic appropriation in the interest of specific agendas of French domestic and foreign policy? Inherently all cultural systems depend on symbolic interactions by ac- tors who share the hybridity of their identities. Orientalism is just one strat- egy to react to the diversity of their realities. In cultural or socio-economic crisis, however, the prevailing routines of master narratives lose their valid- ity, a latent competition of different narratives about reality surfaces and competes in various media about how to interpret a situation yet unex- plained (e.g., Europe as a community of shared memory, gender issues, fi- nancial crisis, global warming and nuclear energy). This is when translation processes turn out to be of vital importance: They negotiate meanings and identities across different cultures and media, redefining competing narra- tives and enforcing their accounts of what is to be perceived as “real”. These translation processes and the narratives they transform still have yet to get the scholarly attention they deserve.

*

The editorial team wishes to express its gratitude to Mary Brezovich (Vienna), who read the articles most carefully and improved their style.

A Sociological Perspective on Science and Narration

Stones, Mortar, Building Knowledge Production and Community Building in Narratives in Science Jochen G l ä s e r (Berlin)

Narratives in science simultaneously contribute to the production of scientific knowl- edge and help building the scientific community’s identity. These twin functions of production and identity building are discussed for three major kinds of narratives in scientific communities. Publications can be seen as the core narratives in science. ‘Shop floor stories’ communicate informal knowledge and help understand publications. The community’s knowledge can be regarded as a story of its past work leading up to the present state of knowledge, which in turn defines future work. The observation that narratives are field-specific suggests that their analysis may provide a valuable resource for comparative research in the sociology of science.

Among the many reasons why we tell each other stories, the conference leading to this volume emphasized community building and the narrative construction of reality. My chapter will focus on the former reason. Com- munity building is based on the insight that communities are held together by collective identities. Sociologically speaking, communities can be un- derstood as identity-based collectives, i.e. as collectives whose social order – the mutual adjustment of members’ actions – is achieved by the perception of having something in common with others and acting according to this perceived commonality (Gläser 2007). The continued existence of a com- munity would then depend on the continuation of its identity, which in turn is achieved by narratives. We create, maintain and change collective identities primarily by telling each other stories that express what we have in common with other community members and how these commonalities shape our actions. This stream of narratives does not involve all community members all the time; it only needs to be kept alive for every (potential) member to be able to tap into it and to align their individual identities with the community’s collective identity. Narratives fulfill their community-building function by imparting knowledge.1 This makes scientific communities a very interesting object for studying narratives. Scientific communities belong to the small sub- set of communities whose identity is based on joint collective production,

1 I use the concept “narrative” here for any representation of sequenced events (e.g. Linde 2001: 160; Georgakopoulou 2006: 123). 18 Jochen Gläser and among those to the even smaller sub-set of communities that produce knowledge (Gläser 2006).2 Since collectively producing knowledge requires communicating it, the question arises whether these communications in- clude narratives, and what forms these narratives take. If narratives are indeed a part of the communal production of knowledge, the theme of this volume suggests a further question: Do the same narratives contribute to the explicit and rational enterprise of producing new knowledge and to the implicit and only partly rational construction of the scientific community’s identity? With this chapter, I suggest that this is indeed the case. Narratives in science have productive functions in that they transport the material for the production process and support the mutual adjustment of individual practices as well as the collective adjustment of aims and approaches. The very same narratives also contribute to identity building by constructing both the narrators and their audiences as members of communities, namely as those who can tell, are addressed by, and can properly understand the narratives. As support for my argument, I discuss the twin functions of produc- tion and identity building in three major kinds of narratives in scientific communities. Publications (1) can be seen as the core narratives in science. “Shop floor stories” (2) – informally communicated narratives about local events of knowledge production as experienced by community members – communicate informal knowledge and help understand publications. The community’s knowledge (3) can be regarded as a story of its past work leading up to the present state of knowledge, which in turn defines future work. As a conclusion, I will discuss potential productive contributions of narrative analyses to the sociology of science and the sociology of community.

Publications

Publications are a ubiquitous feature of all scientific research. Regardless of their widely differing research practices, researchers in all fields in the sciences, social sciences and humanities publish their findings. The varia- tion of research practices is reflected in the differences in frequency, form, length, genre, language and style of publication. What one publishes and

2 Throughout this article, “science” is used with the meaning of the German word “Wissenschaft,” i.e., as including all fields of the sciences, social sciences, and humanities. The concept “scientific community” is commonly used in this broad sense. Knowledge Production and Community Building in Narratives in Science 19 how one publishes is very much a matter of the field one works in. But publish we must. The unquestioned necessity to publish is a consequence of the central role of publications for the knowledge production and identity of scientific communities. Publications are so important for research because they solve a specific functional problem of scientific communities. Membership of a scientific community depends on individual perception. One is a mem- ber if – which also means: as long as – one assumes to be a member, and behaves accordingly. Participation in a community’s production process emerges from a researcher’s autonomous decision to use a community’s knowledge to derive a problem from it, to solve that problem, and to offer the solution to the community. Since these decisions are made locally and need not to be communicated to the community, membership is difficult to observe. For the communal production to work, however, all members must be able to use the knowledge of all other members. How can this be achieved? Researchers who solved a problem have only a very imprecise notion of their audience, which consists of those to whom this solution is important. They know some of their colleagues personally and can imagine that still other colleagues whom they don’t know might work on similar problems and would need to know, too. There are likely to be others still whom nobody thinks of at the moment but who would want to know be- cause they could use the new knowledge. Thus, the target audience of any new knowledge is not fully known to anyone, which raises the problem of how to communicate it. This problem is solved by the formal publication, which is addressed to an unknown and potentially unlimited audience because it can be read by anybody who buys a journal or book. Researchers imagine their community of fellow produc- ers and publish in order to reach all of them.3 The few commonalities of all scientific publications derive from this productive function. Publications contain claims for new relevant knowl- edge, which can be made only on the basis of an account of the exist- ing knowledge. As for relevance, an argument must be made why the new knowledge helps the further communal production along. Beyond these commonalities we see an enormous diversity of publications, with prefer- ence given to different types by different disciplines.4

3 On “imagined communities,” see Anderson (1991). 4 See Laudel and Gläser (2006) on the variety of publication types that were submit- ted when the Australian National University asked its academics to submit their four best publications for an evaluation. 20 Jochen Gläser

Within this universe of publications, those reporting empirical work contain a narrative describing that work. This applies to the predominant publication type of modern natural science, the experimental article. After more than three centuries of refinement, this narrative is highly schema- tized and often intertwined with a logical argument, which makes it dif- ficult to recognize. The first publications that reported experimental results were indeed narratives of the author’s actions and experiences in the laboratory (Shapin 1984; Dear 1985). This “plot” has survived to the present day but has be- come highly stylized in the process (Holmes 1991). The changes in the style of scientific narratives can be seen as responses to the vastly increased density and speed of individual and communal production. Today, we read highly compressed communications that relate the outcomes of past actions to a reconstruction of the community’s current knowledge. Since findings are publishable only if the gap in knowledge that motivated the research still exists at the time of publication (i.e. has not been closed by colleagues in the meantime), an experimental article fuses a logical argument and a representation of a temporal sequence by stating: “We currently don’t know X … In order to learn X, we conducted the following experiments some time ago … Our results provide X.” The narrative also supplants what hap- pened by what is important to the imagined readers. Thus, the original mo- tivation of the research is often omitted because it might not have anything to do with the gap in knowledge that is described in the current article and would be irrelevant in all these cases. Failed experiments or attempts that would look like detours in retrospect are not reported. Reasons for method- ological decisions provided in an article might not be the reasons why the decision was made in the first place, and the researchers who performed all the actions are omitted from the story (Knorr-Cetina 1981: 94–135 Lynch 1985: 150–155, for first occurrences of these new publication practices see Holmes 1991). Owing to their role as building blocks of communal knowledge pro- duction, publications are also central to the identity of researchers as members of a knowledge-producing collectivity. The self-perception of being a researcher crucially depends on offering new knowledge to the community. We can still feel like researchers without publishing for some time. We can attempt to feel like researchers because we read everything the community publishes and have conversations with colleagues about it. We can deceive ourselves by constantly working on manuscripts we in- tend to publish “sometime later.” The public statement about membership, however, is based on publications that meet the standards of the scientific community. Knowledge Production and Community Building in Narratives in Science 21

Taken together, a community’s publications represent its collective production process and thus the phenomenon on which the community’s identity is built. The community’s identity is created by its members’ per- ception of collectively advancing a shared body of knowledge, a process that is reflected by publications building on each other. Together, publications represent the joint subject matter of work, which also serves as store of ma- terials and tools as well as intermediate product. The individual narratives in publications also help in building a collec- tive identity because they refer to one another and thereby help identify the collective. We already saw that authors must use the narratives of others for justifying the newness and relevance of their own narrative, and for identifying the material they used for building their contribution. With these references, each author points to other researchers who contributed to the communal knowledge, thereby identifying a collective of researchers to which they belong. The way in which membership is established through cross-referencing varies among disciplines. In a comparison of publications from five research areas, Hargens (2000: 858–860) identified characteristic series of referenc- es to other publications – “orienting reference lists” – in their introduc- tions. These orienting reference lists position a publication in the research of its field by pointing to other relevant work including broader perspec- tives, empirical findings, topics, or approaches. Hargens found orienting reference lists to occur most frequently in the social sciences, less frequently in the natural sciences and only rarely in the literary sciences field. He drew the conclusion that social scientists need to work harder to convince their colleagues of the relevance of their narrative. He also found another characteristic pattern in the social science publications. Often these publi- cations contain not only one but two perspectives, which are compared in the paper. The authors from the natural sciences mostly refer to empirical findings of others. This indicates that their perception of their field emerges from descriptions of previous empirical work rather than assessments of theories. Natural science papers also lack explicit attempts to convince readers of their relevance. The perspective that makes the publication relevant is tac- itly assumed to be shared by authors and readers. These differences among publications are simultaneously differences in the ways in which communities produce knowledge and in the ways in which they form collective identities. By representing both individual and collective perspectives on the community’s knowledge, publications simultaneously position the contributions and the contributors in their re- spective context (knowledge and community, respectively). The variation 22 Jochen Gläser of publication practices among communities indicates that the identities of knowledge-producing communities are likely to vary as widely as the practices of producing and publishing that knowledge.

Shop Floor Stories

For want of a better phrase, I use “shop floor stories” for those ad hoc narratives that are embedded in the informal communication between re- searchers. As on every shop floor, these stories are as ubiquitous as they are important. They are “small stories,” a term which in narrative analysis is “employed as an umbrella-term that covers a gamut of under-represented narrative activities, such as tellings of ongoing events, future or hypotheti- cal events, shared (known) events, but also allusions of tellings, deferrals of tellings, and refusals to tell” (Georgakopoulou 2006: 123). Researchers love to talk to each other about their own research (at least about those bits they want to reveal at the time), their own and others’ pub- lications, the reliability of new data and methods, or the plans and achieve- ments of their colleagues. This “gossip” is part of the everyday conversation at work and of exchanges between researchers at all opportunities. It is a major part of conferences. Shop floor stories provide researchers with up- to-date information about what’s going on in other laboratories or research groups. They also provide important information that is not included in publications. The following story is told by a physicist in an interview con- ducted by Harry Collins:

Then there was this rumour that ‘S’ had seen ‘T’’s paper and decided that the statistics were absolute junk, and refused to publish it, and ‘T’ wanted him to publish it and he wouldn’t publish it, and then when ‘S’ went on vacation, the other editor ‘V’ let it go past because he decided it was making too much noise. Interview sequence, quoted in Collins (1982: 106)

This story addressed not only the relationship between colleagues but also the reliability of a publication. Other narratives communicate knowl- edge that is necessary for lab work. Researchers who want to repeat an experiment whose description has been published are well-advised to con- tact the authors of the publication and to ask them what they actually did in the laboratory. If somebody wants to breed a new species of laboratory animals, they will seek advice from colleagues who have been working with these animals for a while. These conversations will not always be completely open. Researchers often see each other as competitors and consider care- fully what they tell each other. Knowledge Production and Community Building in Narratives in Science 23

Shop floor stories communicate unpublished knowledge, know-how, and evaluations of publications and their authors. They contain additional in- formation that is important for the listeners’ own work, and often are much more current than publications. The latter is important to researchers because their work is aimed at a moving target. Research must contribute new knowl- edge, and must therefore always be conducted with up-to-date information. At the same time, shop floor stories contribute to identity building of scientific communities and their members. The most important message for building identities is of course that they who hear the shop floor stories belong to the shop floor. The membership and partly even the status of a researcher in a community can be established by the shop floor stories (or, more generally, the gossip) they hear and can contribute. The content of stories also contributes to identity building. The narra- tives and discussions constantly refresh information about who is a member of the community and what members do. In the following example mem- bership is associated with observing certain standards.

Smith: I should do the whole sequencing but I don’t have enough time. Wilson: But these guys from England only put their amino acid analysis in their paper, that’s bad manners. … Smith: And its dangerous because there is definite variance between pig and ovine sequence and you cannot deduce the sequence from the amino acid anal- ysis (IV, 37). Excerpt from field notes, provided by Latour and Woolgar (1986: 158)

This exchange addresses questions of belonging by establishing who pro- duces relevant knowledge, how they produce knowledge, and how this knowledge should be produced. The “guys from England” only conducted an amino acid analysis, which is “bad manners.” Smith sequenced part of his protein and thinks he should sequence all of it. Smith, Wilson and the “guys from England” appear to belong to the same community because they produce knowledge that is relevant to each other’s work, which is why the reliability of this knowledge matters. Such communications are implicit statements about membership, which refresh both the community’s collec- tive identity and the participants’ individual identities. Although at first glance most “shop floor stories” are nothing more than gossip, many of them have both productive and identity-building func- tions. As we have seen, the core narratives – the publications – decontex- tualize the actions in the laboratory they describe. They are the central building blocks, but understanding and using them requires background knowledge. Shop floor stories provide the necessary context – both for the production of knowledge and for identity building. 24 Jochen Gläser

The Community’s Knowledge

Having explored the productive and identity-building functions of formal and informal communications by individual researchers, we can now move to the collective level of scientific communities and ask about their narra- tives. Rouse (1990) suggested that a community’s evolving body of knowl- edge can be understood as a narrative. He states that for individual scientific projects to make sense, they need “a coherent narrative in which present work is situated as an intelligible response to the history of successes and failures which led up to it, a response which also points to some anticipated conclusion” (ibid.: 186). This narrative is constantly rewritten as individual contributions to it appear (ibid.: 187, 191), an observation that was empiri- cally confirmed by a bibliometric analysis (Noyons and van Raan 1998). We can follow Rouse and consider the current scientific knowledge as a community’s narrative about what it has researched so far, is currently researching, and is likely to research in the future. However, this narrative is highly stylized, too. The constant rewriting of the community’s narrative includes the removal of all previous research that is currently considered to be wrong or obsolete. The community forgets about all this, which is why the current knowledge is not a representation of all steps that led to it. The current scientific knowledge is the result of a historical process, which itself is not represented. It is the history of science that provides these full historical narratives. The productive function of the community’s narrative, then, is to pro- vide the producing collective with the current state of its product, which serves as the frame of reference and resource for individual producers. We already saw how publications situate themselves in that narrative by refer- encing other publications. Since it functions as frame of reference for indi- vidual contributions that is constantly rewritten by these contributions, the community’s knowledge provides a structure that enables the adjustment of individual action to each other, and thereby the social order of scientific communities (Gläser 2006). Again, the structure of this narrative varies in interesting ways among scientific communities. One variation concerns the age of the literature that is referred to by current publications. In his analysis of the literature of five fields, Hargens compared the density of references to foundational and current publications. He found that the natural sciences referred dispropor- tionally frequently to the current literature, while the social sciences refer more frequently to foundational documents. The publications in the liter- ary science field show less interest in the current literature than any other field (Hargens 2000: 852–855). This indicates that disciplines differ in the Knowledge Production and Community Building in Narratives in Science 25 ways in which they build on previous knowledge. Natural science com- munities build knowledge by replacing old findings with new ones, which requires clear, universal and agreed-upon criteria for the utility and quality of new contributions. If such criteria are lacking, or if they depend on spe- cific theories and approaches, older and more recent contributions are more likely to coexist, and the foundational documents of different approaches become important as sources of criteria for relevance and quality. The community’s knowledge is the most important narrative for build- ing its collective identity. Communities are identity-based structures. Their social order is based on their members’ perception of having something in common, which in the case of scientific communities is the members’ joint work on the community’s knowledge. The knowledge is the subject matter of the joint work, which means that it also represents an implicit descrip- tion of the common production task – it is this knowledge that is to be expanded and improved. Which parts of the community’s knowledge are actually shared in the sense that there is agreement on them again varies among communities, as was already suggested by the varying referencing patterns mentioned above. Levitt and Nass (1989) analyzed physics and sociology textbooks and found that physics textbooks were much more homogenous with regard to content and structure (the sequence in which topics were presented) than sociology textbooks. However, disagreement cannot be taken as indicating a weaker identity of a field. To the contrary, sociologists and members of many other communities with low agreement on perspectives see the multiplicity of perspectives (and the tolerance for them) as a defining property of the field, a response to the complexity of the field’s empirical object, and thus as a condition for progress. Physicists, on the other hand, would see the agree- ment on theories as part of their identity, and a condition for progress. Thus, a community’s identity is reflexive in that it refers not only to the jointly produced knowledge but also more generally to properties of the community’s empirical objects and approaches to investigating them.

Conclusion

The aim of my discussion of productive and identity-building functions of narratives in scientific communities was to demonstrate that the stories researchers tell each other always have both functions and can be sepa- rated only analytically. The reason for this double function is the nature of scientific communities as knowledge-producing communities. In these communities, stories can simultaneously be part of the production process 26 Jochen Gläser

(because they communicate knowledge) and hold the community together by creating its collective identity. The little comparative material we have shows that production and iden- tity construction are field-specific processes. Clearly, we lack comparative studies on structures and functions of narratives in different communities. But why would such an analysis of narratives be important? I can give answers to this question from both the sociology of community perspec- tive and the sociology of science perspective. The sociology of communi- ty knows far too little about the construction of collective identities by communities and about the impact these identities have on community members’ actions. The investigation of scientific communities contributes to this knowledge. In particular, it contributes to the understanding of the particular sub-type of communities that manages to combine productive and identity-building functions in its stories. Since the internet provides an infrastructure for knowledge-producing communities and indeed has fostered the emergence of such communities, the analysis of this type of community attracts increasing attention (Benkler 2002). The sociology of science can use the analysis of narratives to address one of its traditional and increasingly pressing questions from a new perspec- tive. The knowledge of the sociology of science community includes the following story: We have known for a long time that theories of scientific development require linking knowledge production and knowledge to the interaction patterns and social structures of communities. This can be done only by comparative analyses. Since sociology of science cannot understand the contents of other fields, it cannot integrate them in its analyses and explanations. Therefore, sociologists of science need to work with abstract properties of scientific knowledge – the epistemic properties of research practices and fields. This has been attempted by the sociology of science since the ’60s. First attempts were too coarse in that they were based on binary distinctions such as “hard” versus “soft” sciences or “basic” versus “applied” research. These basic distinctions do not provide enough specific information to enable causal analyses of field-specific changes. Further- more, neither these simple nor the more advanced frameworks proposed by Whitley (2000 [1984] and Knorr-Cetina (1999) have ever been operation- alized, i.e. linked to a protocol for empirical identification of the relevant properties. This story about one research tradition in the sociology of science leads to the conclusion that we should at least attempt to utilize analyses of nar- rative forms in science for the comparative description of epistemic proper- ties. In light of what has been done for other narratives and what has been attempted already in the analysis of scientific publications, a comparative Knowledge Production and Community Building in Narratives in Science 27 framework for narrative forms in science does not seem impossible. If we take into account the esoteric narrative forms used by researchers to com- municate their findings, it seems unlikely that the forms used to analyze fictional narratives would constitute a suitable starting point. Nevertheless, however we go about it, developing a framework adapted to the productive and identity-building functions of narratives in science would be a valuable endeavor.

References

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Latour, Bruno and Woolgar, Steve (1986 [1979]): Laboratory Life: The Con­ struction of Scientific Facts (Princeton: Princeton University Press). Laudel, Grit and Gläser, Jochen (2006): ‘Tensions between evaluations and communication practices’, Journal of Higher Education Policy and Man­ agement, 28.3, 289–295. Levitt, Barbara and Nass, Clifford (1989): ‘The Lid on the Garbage Can: Institutional Constraints on Decision Making in the Technical Core of College-Text Publishers’, Administrative Science Quarterly, 34.2, 190 –207. Linde, Charlotte (2001): ‘Narrative and social tacit knowledge’, Journal of Knowledge Management, 5.2, 160–170. Lynch, Michael (1985): Art and Artifact in Laboratory Science: A Study of Shop Work and Shop Talk in a Research Laboratory (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul). Noyons, Ed C.M. and Raan, Anthony F.J. van (1998): ‘Monitoring scien- tific developments from a dynamic perspective: Self-organized structur- ing to map neural network research’, Journal of the American Society for Information Science, 49.1, 68–81. Rouse, Joseph (1990): ‘The Narrative Reconstruction of Science’, Inquiry, 33, 179–196. Shapin, Steven (1984): ‘Pump and Circumstance: Robert Boyle’s Literary Technology’, Social Studies of Science, 14, 481–520. Whitley, Richard (2000 [1984]): The Intellectual and Social Organization of the Sciences (Oxford: Clarendon Press). Narrated Realities

Narration and Abstraction in Natural Sciences

Narratives in Physics Quantitative Metaphors and formula ∈ Tropes? Klaus M e c k e (Erlangen-Nuremberg)

Metaphors are important cognitive concepts that carry meaning between different realms of experience by asserting a similarity. Physics has found a genuinely unique way of connecting different fields of experience and constituting equivalence: measure- ment. A physical quantity (‘energy’, force’, ‘current’) is a quantitative metaphor that uses a measurement narrative to transfer from a field of experience onto singular events in nature. Equal number is the tertium comparationis allowing a relation between quantitative metaphors which would otherwise be absolutely disconnected realms: ‘curvature’ is ‘energy’ (Einstein’s law of gravity), force’ is ‘momentum flow’ (Newton’s law of motion), ‘electric current’ is ‘magnetic circulation’ (Maxwell’s law of electro­ dynamics). Laws of nature can so be understood as synonymous quantitative meta- phors, where the redundancy of experiences, i.e. equivalent meaning of quantitative metaphors is discovered solely by equal numbers of performed measurement narratives.

‘One should not spoil such things with words’, remarks the Captain in Goethe’s ‘Elective Affinities’ and continues in ‘sign language’:

“[…] Suppose an A connected so closely with a B, that all sorts of means, even violence, have been made use of to separate them, without effect. Then suppose a C in exactly the same position with respect to D. Bring the two pairs into con- tact; A will fling himself on D, C on B, without its being possible to say which had first left its first connection, or made the first move toward the second.”1

What is it that the Captain would spoil with words and for which he has to use other signs? What do we understand by ‘sign language’? What do we understand by ‘formulae’? Is it enough for ‘sign language’ to use symbols as, for example, the Captain uses ‘A’ and ‘B’ instead of the names ‘Eduard’ and ‘Charlotte’? Is it necessary to use numbers or other mathematical signs as in A = 5, for example? Is ‘formula ∈ tropes’ a sensible formula or does the experience of nature need to be codified, as in that most famous of formulas E = mc2? In the following, I argue that, in physics, signs without numbers do not make sense, and that numbers without narrative are meaningless.

1 ‘The Elective Affinities’ in The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, ed. by Kuno Francke, vol. II, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, translated by James Anthony Froude and R. Dillon Boylan (New York: German Publication So- ciety, 1913–1914). [accessed 2 September 2014]. 32 Klaus Mecke

Signs can be interchanged at will, not, however, a narrative that gives rise to a number and not the synonymy of narratives that becomes apparent through numbers. In order to explore the epistemological function of ‘sign language’, we first have to go back a step and take a closer look at what the experience of nature is and what it has to do with metaphor. The German word for an experience – Erlebnis – already indicates that phenomena are always related to living – lebende – people, who perceive and act and who are capable of language. Concepts function due to the independence and per­ sistence of experiences. We all understand the concepts ‘sun’, ‘cow’ and ‘milk’ because collective memory has taught them to us and, over millen- nia, the sun has continued to appear in the sky as a yellow disc and cows have continued to produce a drinkable white liquid. The natural variation of singular events is reflected in the indistinctness of the concept: what we term ‘milk’ is impossible to ascertain with precision and equivalence is, indeed, not defined. Nevertheless, we recognise certain unchanging phenomena as events – independent of the context, time or location of the observing party. Only two aspects of this naïve definition of a concept will be important in what follows. Concepts are based on the ‘persistence’ of experiences of nature that enables us to identify a ‘equivalence’ between singular events. At first glance, neither aspect has much to do with ‘sign language’ or even mathematics, rather they form the natural basis for concept formation of every sort. The very definition of equivalence is, however, the number, since ‘equality’ is, in set theory, the defining feature of the number and not some additional or secondary characteristic. Yet in order to apply the concept ‘number’ to an event, there has to be a measurement narrative. Let us ob- serve, for example, a herd of cows. They can be counted by walking the entire herd through a gate and making a tally for each cow on a piece of paper on which the numbers 1 to, let us say, 100 are written. The last tally made then gives the concept ‘five’, for example, as the number of cows in the herd. If the experiment is repeated the next day, a number is obtained whose equality to the previous concept ‘five’ can be ascertained with cer- tainty. Because the concept of the number is unequivocal, ‘persistence’ has taken on a precise meaning. In contrast to the concepts ‘cow’ and ‘milk’, with the concept ‘number’ it is possible to state with precision whether it is the same and has remained unchanged by, for example, time, place or context. The possibility of numerical measurement in persistent experi- ences, i.e. the determination of equivalence, allows a completely new type of ‘transfer’ or, in other words, of metaphor – this is the central thesis of this paper. Quantitative Metaphors and formula ∈ Tropes? 33

Quantitative Metaphors: Measurement Narratives

In Friedrich Nietzsche’s unpublished papers, a text was found ‘On Truth and Lie in an Extra-Moral Sense’ that, due to its radical critique of knowl- edge and language, became an influential text in the 20th century:

What is a word? The portrayal of a nerve stimulus in sounds. […] We believe that we know something about the things themselves when we talk about trees, colors, snow and flowers, and yet we possess nothing but metaphors for things which do not correspond in the slightest to the original entities. […] every word immediately becomes a concept precisely because it is not intended to serve as a reminder of the unique, entirely individualized primal experience to which it owes its existence, but because it has to fit at one and the same time countless more or less similar cases which, strictly speaking, are never equal or, in other words, are always unequal. Every concept comes into being through the equa- tion of non-equal things. […] What then is truth? A mobile army of metaphors, metonymies, anthropomorphisms, in short, a sum of human relations which have been poetically and rhetorically intensified, transferred, decorated and which, after lengthy use, seem firm, canonical and binding to a people: truths are illusions that are no longer remembered as being illusions, metaphors that have become worn and stripped of their sensuous force, coins that have lost their design and are now considered only as metal and no longer as coins.2

For Nietzsche then, concepts are already metaphors because they trans- fer meaning onto singular events. Here they will be termed type 1 metaphors in order to distinguish them from the term metaphor as it has been under- stood – in ongoing modification – since Aristotle. Essentially this under- standing is based on one concept being transferred onto another, which is why in what follows, these classical metaphors will be termed type 2 meta­ phors. In his Poetics, Aristotle defined metaphors in the sense of shortened analogies:

[Metaphor] is the transference of a name […] on the grounds of analogy. […] As old age is to life, so evening is to day; accordingly, the poet will call evening the ‘old age of the day’ or, like Empedocles, age the ‘evening of life’ or the ‘sunset of life’.

Here a ‘tertium comparationis’ makes the improper use of the image- giving concept possible. Achilles is no lion, he is ‘merely’ like one – measured

2 Friedrich Nietzsche, ‘On Truth and Lie in an Extra-Moral Sense’, in Friedrich Nietzsche, Writings from the Early Notebooks, ed. by Raymond Geuss and Alexander Nehamas, translated by Ladislaus Löb (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), pp. 253–264. 34 Klaus Mecke against ‘courage’ as the tertium comparationis. The term ‘lion’ is used im- properly in the metaphor ‘Achilles is a lion’. Is ‘green quark’ therefore sim- ply a risky metaphor, similar to ‘green fingers’? What then is the tertium comparationis? For many physicists, ‘green quark’ is no metaphorical turn of phrase but rather a description of nature. For others, a ‘green quark’ is completely incomprehensible and cannot even be recognized as synaesthe- sia, as in a ‘green smell’. In his Büchner Prize acceptance speech, Paul Celan pointed out that ‘the black milk of daybreak’ was not a metaphor but a description of nature, and that the experience of ‘trading milk on the black market at daybreak’ constituted the framework for understanding. I want to focus here solely on this discernable epistemological function of metaphor and disregard it as a stylistic literary tool. I will also not go into current theory of metaphor in all its variously differentiated forms and instead merely refer as a frame of reference to the conceptual metaphors used in the constitution of theory as proposed by George Lakoff and Mark Johnson.3 According to Aristotle, a metaphor can be understood as a form of analogy that transfers a concept from one field of experience into another through the use of a similarity. Two criteria are important here: two differ- ent fields of experience are present and there is a ‘resemblance’, ‘similarity’ or ‘equivalence of meaning’ that enables a transfer between these fields of experience. The metaphor is thus a cognitive method for seeing ‘the similar in the different’. As a rule, metaphor works through recourse to culturally transmitted knowledge. Collective memory allows an association between such different fields of experience as a ship on water and a camel in the desert. Physics has – at least since Galileo Galilei – found a genuinely unique way of connecting different fields of experience and constituting similarity: measurement. Since then, the core of any natural science has been not just observation, association, comparison (on the basis of knowledge accumu- lated over time) and concluding, but rather the concrete action of creating a ‘scale’ and ‘applying’ this to what is being observed, to events. This opera- tion can then be applied in different fields of experience and the agreement between the values given by the scale constitutes transferability of meaning between one field of experience and another. Let us take, for example, the term ‘attraction’, the apparent subject of the quote from the ‘Elective Affinities’. Bodies attract one another, become ‘glued’ together even, and metaphorically we speak of the attraction be-

3 George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, Metaphors We Live By (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980). Quantitative Metaphors and formula ∈ Tropes? 35 tween people. If we were to observe the pace at which this kind of process of attraction proceeds, then the length of time could be measured using a clock. The quicker the attraction happens, the stronger it appears to be. Through the measurement narrative of the ‘clock’, the field of experience ‘time’ is linked to the experience ‘attraction’ and, through the measurement narrative, the ‘similar’ is the ‘length’ of the process. ‘Instant glue’ can thus become a metaphor for a particularly good and strong attraction. I will now take a closer look at this epistemologically similar function of metaphor and measurement, namely the transfer of meaning from one field of experi- ence to another through the comparison of something similar. We have to be somewhat cautious when using the term ‘metaphor’. In the phrase ‘the milk is white’, we would understand the use of ‘white’ not as a metaphor but as the description of a property. But if we were to say ‘this quark is green’, it is not clear which property is being referred to without further explanation. Arguably, both ‘quark’ and ‘green’ are being used met- aphorically and clearly do not mean what they do in an everyday context, to which ‘milk’ and ‘white’ belong. However, this metaphorical usage is incomprehensible without knowledge of the specific physical context. If we now hone in on the two criteria of a metaphor – ‘transfer’ and ‘similarity’ – then ‘the milk is white’ is also metaphorical speech: ‘white’ is not, first of all, a property of liquids or of bodies in general, but of light. Only light appears to us unequivocally in a particular color, whilst we can alter the color of milk at will by, for example, shining different colored bulbs on it. From the point of view of physics, we are using a particular measurement narrative (illuminate milk with sunlight and observe the col- or of the reflected light) to transfer a property from one field of experience (light) to the field of experience of bodies (milk). Since this measurement narrative corresponds to a traditional context and since the eye is no lon- ger considered a measuring instrument, in the collective wisdom of seeing humans, ‘white’ has become a property of the liquid ‘milk’ and has ‘died’ as a metaphor. In order to grasp ‘the milk is white’ as a metaphor again, we have to become aware that in dealing with liquid bodies (haptic experience) and light (optical experience), we are dealing with two different fields of experience that only ‘come together’ through humans’ natural environment and their natural measuring instrument, the eye. It is in this epistemologi- cal sense that I want to understand ‘the milk is white’ as a metaphor, even though stylistically it is certainly not one. Nevertheless, I want to use the term metaphor in order to make it clear that ‘white’ is not a property of a thing, just as Achilles is not a lion. ‘Properties’ and ‘things’ are ontologi- cal categories of a realistic world view that are unnecessary at this level of reflection on cognitive processes in physics. ‘The milk is white’ is simply the 36 Klaus Mecke transfer of the optical experience (measurement) of ‘white’ onto the haptic experience (measurement) of ‘liquid’. Central to every measurement is the use of a scale from which a nu- merical reading can be taken. But are numbers not the death of metaphor? Physicists are fascinated by numbers for, through their exactness, the un- equal comes to light. But what does number have to do with metaphor? When a concept, i.e. a type 1 metaphor, is defined by an instruction to read from a scale, then I propose calling this a quantitative metaphor. Every physical quantity is a quantitative metaphor that uses a measurement narrative to transfer from a field of experience onto singular events. ‘Tem- perature’, ‘color’, ‘weight’, even ‘distance’ and ‘duration’ are quantitative metaphors created through measurement narratives: ‘time’ is that which is displayed to me by a clock; ‘color’ is that which is displayed to me by a spectrometer; ‘force’ is that which is displayed to me by a dynamometer. In the heartbeat, the eye and the muscles, the human body possesses excellent measuring instruments for ‘time’, ‘color’ and ‘force’. This can now be sum- marized as a formula: physical quantity = number + measurement narrative When I speak of ‘time’, ‘force’ or ‘color’ in the following, I am referring to the respective field of experience that, through a measurement narrative (natural or technological), is furnished with a scale, i.e. numerical values can be assigned to it. The metaphorical content then no longer lies in the numerical value, but rather in the unit designated by the field of experience, the measurement narrative and the scale. This can be summarized in the formula: physical unit = measurement narrative Well-known examples of this are ‘metre’, ‘second’, ‘kilogram’ but also ‘Newton’, ‘volt’ and ‘Celsius’. For these units, we can introduce symbols that stand for the unit – the measurement narrative – and become fixed through convention. Well-known examples are m for ‘metre’, s for ‘second’ and kg for ‘kilogram’. A quantitative metaphor, i.e. a physical quantity that is de- fined by a measurement narrative and can be assigned a number through the action of measuring, is also marked by a symbol, e.g. x for ‘position’, t for ‘time’ and F for ‘force’. In this way, x = 5m becomes shorthand for the quantitative metaphor ‘the distance is five metres’. The measurement narrative, or the transfer process involved in a quantitative metaphor, only becomes apparent when we ask what ‘5 Kelvin’ or ‘6 Fahrenheit’ actually means. The actual meaning of a quantitative metaphor is often grotesque, for what does a man’s name (Kelvin) have to do with temperature? What Quantitative Metaphors and formula ∈ Tropes? 37 matters in any formula is not therefore the symbol, but rather the transfer of a number through a measurement narrative. Introducing this kind of symbol can open up a treacherous epistemolog- ical trap. The symbols suggest that physical quantities are objective proper- ties of things in a world that can be determined ever more precisely through measurement. From this perspective, units are simply definitions of mea- surement narratives capable of grasping a thing’s physical properties ever more accurately. This naïve realism would provide a wonderful explanation for the persistence of experiences, but it is neither a necessary prerequisite for nor consequence of an objective knowledge of nature. Most fields of experience allow neither their persistent (or independent) quantitative formulation nor quantitative metaphors. For example, ‘ship of the desert’ may employ a technological instrument in the comparison but not, however, a scale. At first glance it is thus not a quantitative metaphor. ‘Achilles is a lion’ is a classical metaphor which, on closer inspection, is also a quantitative metaphor. ‘Achilles is a cow’ or ‘Achilles is a rabbit’ lessens the transfer of courage or strength somewhat. Let us imagine that we were to compare the courage (strength) of those animals being assigned to people and to put them in order from, for example, rabbit to cow to lion. Conven- tion allows us to agree on, say, 100 animals, numbered through from 1 to 100. Now it is enough to just say ‘Achilles is a 10’ or ‘Achilles is an 84’ on the animal scale. Of course, the rhetorical metaphorical value is lost in this mathematization, the metaphor is dead. Epistemologically, however, ‘Achilles is an 84’ corresponds to the original metaphor, which has been rendered quantitative simply through the convention of the scale, through a measurement narrative. In principle, this kind of procedure is possible for a large number of metaphors. Indeed, this kind of animal scale is not unusual. There are, for example, ‘bird song clocks’, ‘flower clocks’ and ‘blos- som calendars’. We use ‘light as a feather’ and ‘to weigh a ton’. We can even modify our ‘ship of the desert’ to give a ‘tanker of the desert’, a ‘sailing din- ghy of the desert’ or a ‘schooner of the desert’. The degree of rocking motion associated with each can be re-ordered and re-quantified. But how worthwhile is this kind of procedure? Naturally the answer depends on the specific interests that a metaphor is to serve. For the natural sciences, that interest lies is the search for constant numerical relationships, since we are interested in the persistence of experiences. In our experience, scales based on subjective human assessment (animal scale, ship of the des- ert) are subject to greater fluctuation than scales stemming from insensate nature (flower clock) or indeed scales deriving from inert matter. In the history of physics therefore, the most persistent scales possible were sought through conventions around particular technical procedures. The conven- 38 Klaus Mecke tion of what ‘temperature’ is, i.e. how ‘temperature’ should be measured, has thus shifted from the crook of a healthy man’s arm to the consistency of butter to the expansion of a thin, liquid column of mercury, still prevalent today. What remained unchanged throughout these different measurement narratives was the number’s metaphorical significance as the tertium‘ com­ parationis’ that enabled a comparison and a transfer. The metaphoric process involving a measurement narrative described above may be based on convention, but it is not subjective or arbitrary, since the measurement narrative, through a concrete action, always results in a number. This is set by persistent and independent nature and not by the measuring party or the measurement narrative. In the action of measuring, i.e. in implementing the measurement narrative, the resistant nature of the world becomes manifest. This coupling of measurement narratives to phe- nomena, to singular events, is central to physical knowledge. Only by car- rying out the measurement narrative, only through action, does a number emerge and is the measurement narrative rendered quantitative. The result of the measurement is not subject to the whim of the measurer but is an expression of nature. Often enough a measuring event is a happening; an unexpected event that goes against expectation and experience. Here the resistance of the world shows itself, which a scientist has learned to accept and which is constitutive of natural science’s success in using quantitative metaphors to describe phenomena. Physical quantities are number and narrative, in which number repre- sents the rigorous, precise part. In the measurement narrative, however, there remains an indeterminacy or unsharpness familiar from linguistic phenomena: misunderstandings, ambiguities, vagaries, … Cultural influ- ence and historical traditions also determine how measurement narratives are read. The measured number is nevertheless incorruptible and lays bare the indeterminacies of a measurement narrative. Thus far we have been dealing with physical quantities that are concepts attended by numbers. Drawing on Nietzsche we have termed them type 1 quantitative metaphors, in order to underline the process by which a mea- surement narrative is transferred onto singular events through the concrete action of measurement. Yet on the basis of their quantitative character, we can also transfer measurement narratives onto other measurement narratives. This is already hinted at in the metaphors ‘warm colors’, ‘pitch’ (in Ger- man: Tonhöhe or lit. ‘tone height’) and ‘luminosity’ (in German: Licht­stärke or lit. ‘light strength’). Here different fields of experience come into contact through comparison: perception of color and measurement of temperature, perception of sound and measurement of height, perception of brightness and measurement of energy. If scales are introduced for these measure- Quantitative Metaphors and formula ∈ Tropes? 39 ment narratives, then the numerical value permits these type 2 quantitative metaphors. Every comparison derives from numbers, even when these are not made explicit. Every comparison is a more or less of something, i.e. a bigger or smaller, a higher or lower on a scale. ‘High notes’ are perceived sounds where the measurement narrative ‘number of oscillations’ results in a high value; our ear is a good measuring instrument for this and, through habit and convention, we no longer need to take an exact reading from a scale in order to differentiate ‘high’ from ‘low’ notes. Synonymous quantitative metaphors: laws of nature Natural science has, it seems to me, two fascinating and complemen- tary aspects: the discovery of diversity of possible events and the ordering of experiences. The first happens when an explorer sets off for unknown waters or -con tinents, goes into the jungle and finds new species; or when an optician invents a telescope and suddenly sees galaxies; or when a physicist builds a particle accelerator and discovers quarks. The broadening of human ex- perience is a fascinating aspect of natural science; through technological achievements stars and galaxies, atoms and quarks become observable. Since these new phenomena must also be labelled, a series of fine meta- phors emerge through physical research and technological invention, for example ‘ship of the desert’ or ‘coil spring’ (in German: Spiralfeder – lit. ‘spiral feather’). Some of these new concepts can become viable quantitative metaphors. Concepts are suddenly given double meanings, rendering them challenging mystery words in a game of ‘teapot’: ‘current’ for electricity and the flow of the stream; ‘field’ for magnetic pull and the grass that sways in the wind. This diversity of phenomena leads to ever new ontological meta- phors, which label phenomena as new things in the world and which we will have to look at in more detail below since they guide a mathematiza- tion of the experience of nature. The second fascinating aspect of natural science is the discovery of laws of nature that give order to a phenomenon’s diversity and reveal redundan- cies. In laws of nature we see that which initially appears to be different is in fact equal. The value in proposing physical quantities as ‘quantitative meta- phors’ turns out to be the new possibilities of transfer resulting from the number. The attempt should now be made to formulate an epistemology of physics based on metaphor. This discovery of the identical in synonymous quantitative metaphors will now be examined in more detail. To start with we will be guided by Friedrich Nietzsche’s ‘On Truth and Lie in an Extra- Moral Sense’: 40 Klaus Mecke

Anybody who is used to such reflections has certainly felt a deep dis- trust of any idealism of this kind every time he clearly recognized the eter- nal consistency, ubiquity and infallibility of the laws of nature. He has concluded that in nature, as far as we can penetrate to the heights of the telescopic world or the depths of the microscopic, everything is so certain, complete, infinite, regular and without gaps that science will be able to dig in these shafts successfully for ever, and all its findings will harmonize and not contradict each other. How little this resembles a product of the imagi- nation: for if it were that, it would necessarily betray the illusion and the unreality at some point. Against this it must be said, first: if we all still had different sense perceptions; if we could only perceive now as a bird, now as a worm, now as a plant; or if one of us saw the same stimulus as red, another as blue, and a third even heard it as a sound; then nobody would talk about such a regularity of nature but would understand it only as a highly subjec- tive construct. And second: what is a law of nature really to us? Let us imagine that two men – one blind and one disabled – are sitting by a stream. The blind man puts his hand into the water and feels the ‘force’ of the flowing water. Through touch he surveys the flow, the eddies and rapids and, using the numerical measurements, he compiles a map of the local distribution of force in the stream. The disabled man remains seated and observes the streamlines, the floating leaves, how they come up against rocks, turn, speed up and slow down. He too draws a map, not of the forces but rather of the velocity or momentum currents, i.e. of the numbers ob- tained according to the measurement narrative ‘momentum current’. With amazement they realize that their maps are equivalent, i. e. that map of forces sensed = map of momentum currents observed When the same part of nature is observed or surveyed through touch, with different words and images being used, it should nevertheless come as no surprise that some descriptions, by no means all, are redundant. In speaking different languages we need a dictionary to translate words that mean the same thing. What is astonishing about the equivalence of quan- titative metaphors lies, therefore, not in the equivalence of what seems dif- ferent, but in the possible variety of perceptions of the same. Yet this results from the diversity of nature, which has evolved so many different sensory organs and fields of experience, and from the human capacity to create nu- merous measuring instruments and speak numerous languages. If a law of nature is the discovery of the same in different perceptions, then we must be able to find it in all possible contexts of these perceptions. Whether we observe the change in momentum of the water or a stone, or whether we measure the force of the flowing water or the force with which Quantitative Metaphors and formula ∈ Tropes? 41 we throw the stone, for the law of nature it should be immaterial whether, as the expression of synonymous measurement narratives, ‘force’ or ‘mo- mentum current’ is used. Isaac Newton recognized that force F, measured by a ‘muscular instrument’ (e.g. a coil spring) and momentum current dp/ dt, which Galileo’s measuring specification for velocity and time rendered measurable, are always proportional to one another, irrespective of the body the measurements were taken on. He thus formulated the Newtonian law of motion ‘force’ = ‘momentum current’ as the universal expression of the equality of the two measurement narra- tives ‘force’ and ‘momentum current’. If we use symbols for the physical quantities, then we can also write F =dp/dt’ for the law of motion. Another well-known example is the relation between ‘voltage’ U and ‘current’ I in a conductor discovered by Simon Ohm, namely, ‘voltage’ = ‘current’. Here too it becomes clear that what is meant is not the literal meaning of ‘voltage’ or ‘current’, but rather the metaphorical meaning given by the measurement narrative. Laws in natural science thus discover that some type 2 quantitative met- aphors are, in fact, synonymous. This is at the heart of this epistemological understanding of physics as a metaphorical process. The crucial difference between this and transfers between languages or the use, for example, of automobile as a synonym for car, is that the transfer between ‘force’ and ‘momentum current’ is only possible on the basis of a number, i.e. on the basis of the quantitative nature of the metaphors ‘force’ and ‘momentum current’. Synonymous quantitative metaphors are only possible with type 1 quan- titative metaphors, since equality is only given by numerical value. But not every type 2 quantitative metaphor is also a synonymous quantitative metaphor. Thus, for example, Ohm’s law ‘voltage corresponds to current’ is a type 2 quantitative metaphor, since it transfers one type 1 quantitative metaphor (‘voltage’) onto another quantitative metaphor (‘current’). But it is not a law of nature, i.e. not a synonymous quantitative metaphor, since other quantitative relationships are possible: there are contexts and materi- als for which deviations from Ohm’s law can be found. In contrast, the Newtonian law of motion ‘force = momentum current’ is found no matter which bodies, gasses or liquids the measurement narra- tives are applied to. We will call this kind of type 2 quantitative metaphor, where agreement is invariably found, ‘synonymous quantitative metaphors’. 42 Klaus Mecke

Therefore we must differentiate between actual synonyms – the so-called fundamental laws of nature – and simple type 2 quantitative metaphors, which are only possible for specific situations and phenomena. The equality of the number makes it possible to discover an equivalence of quantitative metaphors that is constituted solely through the agreement of the numbers. Calling laws of nature synonymous quantitative metaphors draws attention to the fact that laws of nature are founded neither on their mathematical formulae, nor are they ontological definitions in a world of things. Rather they are an expression of redundant perceptions cast in quantitative concepts. So seen, laws of nature explain very little, since they express what is ‘merely’ redundant and thus, given the diversity of phenomena, provide a meagre tally of that which is the same. The motion of a stone is contingent upon it being thrown. The law of motion, i.e. the synonymous quantitative metaphor ‘force = momentum current’, only determines how it must travel after it has been let go of. This is quite a lot for the behavior of a stone, but then again not much in the face of the diversity of possible phenomena. It is interesting, however, that there are unpredictable consequences of different measurement narratives, namely laws of nature that express what remains the same, i.e. equal. Physics, and probably all the natural sciences, are based on the aston- ishing observation of the persistence over time of this kind of equality of numbers, which we call laws of nature. Most are hidden and not as obvious as the number of cows in a herd. This has led to the centuries-long search for this kind of equality of numbers in variable observations, a search we call natural science. Thinking this metaphorical approach to its logical conclusion, we can no longer speak of objects and their properties, but only of fields of experi- ence and the transfer of experience through measurement narratives. Only when this narrative corresponds to natural human experience, i.e. is given by the natural senses in a natural environment, are the transferred mean- ings understood to be the properties of objects, giving rise to the myth of the ‘real thing’.

Mathematical-Ontological Metaphors: Model Narratives

A key phenomenon is the experience of ‘materiality’ in nature: we expe- rience bodies, particles, objects, things. Through our sensory organs we primarily experience mediated properties, e.g. solid, liquid, gas. These phe- nomena, together with identity constructions based on memory, allow us Quantitative Metaphors and formula ∈ Tropes? 43 an experience of things: solids as ‘bodies’, gasses as ‘ether’. ‘Stone’ and ‘air’ are still considered familiar concepts for describing that which we meet in nature, the things of the world. ‘Bodies’, ‘particles’, ‘fields’ and ‘ether’ are already abstract concepts that encompass whole classes of things but which are still familiar from everyday speech. ‘Quarks’ and ‘quanta’, distributions and ‘state vectors’ are, however, concepts accessible to very few people al- though, like ‘stone’ and ‘particle’, they are simply describing things in the world or a class of things abstracted from the singular. I would like to term them all ‘ontological metaphors’ since they do not describe any (measur- able) property, are not a measured quantity or a quantitative metaphor, and instead describe entities that can be more or less definitely characterized us- ing more or fewer measured quantities. A ‘stone’ extends in space, is solid, has a particular weight, a particular texture, … As with type 1 quantitative metaphors, we have to narrate what a stone is, what properties it has and transfer this narrative onto a phenomenon. In contrast, it is not a measure- ment narrative leading to a number but a model narrative that constitutes a ‘thing’, that draws together and explains our observations. We can trans- fer the (type 1) quantitative metaphors used in the measurement narrative onto the mathematical-ontological metaphors of the model narrative and, in doing so, create (type 2) quantitative metaphors in the sense of abridged analogies: ‘white milk’ or ‘the stone weighs 5 kg’ mean that the milk is like ‘something’ from which white can be measured, and that the stone is like ‘something’ that, when weighed, gives the number 5, when the measure- ment narrative ‘kg’ is used. Usually, this metaphorical process is understand as the ascription of properties to things, since the metaphors have become so familiar to us that they are dead. ‘The quark is green’ transfers the measurement narrative of the chromodynamic color-charge ‘green’ onto a constituent of protons that has shown itself to be point-like in scattering experiments and is charac- terized through a range of other measurement narratives such as ‘charge’, ‘spin’ and ‘mass’. As with ‘stone’, in everyday speech ‘quark’ is initially an ontological metaphor for a range of observable properties. Clearly there are ontological metaphors that can also have meaning in mathematical language, such as ‘point particle’ or ‘field’, and some that are utilized only in everyday language, ‘stone’ or ‘quark’, for example. In mathematical language, a point particle becomes, like a point in space, a real function r(t), which gives its trajectory, i.e. its position r in terms of time t. As with an entity that is continuously changing in space, a field is described in mathematical language as a function F(r) of positions r, where the target quantity F can be mathematical objects such as scalars, vectors or tensors. Often the mathematical character of an ontological metaphor 44 Klaus Mecke becomes clear when an addition defines more precisely what is understood mathematically by ‘particle’ or ‘field’: point-particle, vector-field, quantum- field. Indeed, these model narratives are much more detailed for portraying all aspects of the mathematical model of a thing. In our context it is im- portant that these narratives are used metaphorically, i.e. ‘the milk is a fluid’ and the ‘stone is an inert body’ are not to be understood in an actual but in a metaphorical sense. This metaphorical process is the mathematiza­ tion of the experience of nature, i.e. it represents mathematical modelling in physics. Here the necessary stories are model narratives, in contrast to the measurement narratives of quantitative metaphors. I would like to term ontological metaphors that can be translated into formal mathematical language mathematical-ontological metaphors, in order to differentiate them from ‘stone’ and ‘milk’. Whether an ontological metaphor will permit mathematization is not initially apparent. There have been numerous attempts to introduce ma- terial objects into model narratives of nature where it was not, however, possible to allocate measured quantities to them in such as way that math- ematical modelling consistently described the mathematical-ontological metaphor. Therefore, there have also been ontological metaphors that van- ished again: ‘caloric’, ‘ether’, ‘N-rays’, ‘partons’ and maybe even ‘strings’. The ‘quark’ or the ‘quant of the chromodynamic field’ is, in contrast, a successful mathematical-ontological metaphor that stands for an object that extends in space (‘field’) but that also appears particle-like (‘quant’) and takes on particular values of quantitative metaphors, especially ‘color- charge’, ‘spin’, and ‘extent’. Mathematical-ontological metaphors constitute a new world in a new language: the mathematical model. By being transferred onto mathematical objects they create a stage on which a mathematical play can be performed. The metaphorical character of physical properties becomes especially clear now when, for example, we speak of the ‘velocity of a point-particle’. We understood the ‘velocity’ of a stone as a quantitative metaphor that applies a measurement narrative to that which is described as a ‘stone’ in nature. Indeed, ‘velocity’ is not a property of the object ‘stone’ but a linguistic means of connecting a measurement narrative to an ontological metaphor, which is rendered as a number through this action. As such it does not mat- ter whether the connection is related to an everyday description of a natural object or a formal linguistic description of a mathematical object. The ‘ve- locity of a point-particle’ has no actual meaning, only a metaphorical one where the measurement narrative ‘velocity’ is applied to the mathematical- ontological metaphor ‘point-particle’. Quantitative Metaphors and formula ∈ Tropes? 45

If an mathematical-ontological metaphor is used to describe an object, then a measurement narrative can be understood not just as an action, as an actual measurement, but also as a mathematical operation in a formal world, as a remodelling of the mathematical object. Thus measuring the velocity of a ‘point particle’ becomes, in the mathematical world, the for- mation of a differential quotient dr(t)/dt of the point particle r(t). Through the action of measuring in nature, quantitative metaphors be- come ‘measured quantities’, i.e. numbers with a unit. Through the action of measuring in the mathematical world, quantitative metaphors become ‘state quantities’, i.e. mathematical objects with a unit. State quantities are not measured quantities, since they are not only numbers but also carry a series of mathematical structures. Hence the measured quantity ‘position’ is simply a number, whereas the state quantity ‘position’ is a continuous and differentiable function r(t). It is quantitative metaphors that are the tertium comparationis of meta- phors such as ‘point particle’ or ‘the stone is a point particle’. The number permits the comparison of measurement narratives for different objects, be they illustrative objects in nature or mathematical objects in a formal lan- guage. If the values given by the measurement narratives for the object in nature and the mathematical object always agree, then the transfer of one concept onto the other is possible: the stone is a point particle. The literal meaning would be abstruse. Mathematical-ontological metaphors may allow the mathematization of the experience of nature, but it is quantitative metaphors that enable a connection and a comparison between the mathematical model and nature. What then are ‘green quarks’? The color of quarks has nothing to do with the color of visible things. It has its origin in the metaphorical play with color mixing, with the overlapping of green, red and blue light result- ing in the appearance of white. The color of a quark is a metaphor for the attraction between ternary poles, for a three-way ‘polarity’. We are familiar with the reciprocal attraction between positive and neg- ative electrical charges. If you bring a positive (+) and a negative (–) charge together in a unit, the charges cancel each other out and the unit appears neutral. Added together, + and – give 0, i.e. a non-charged particle. In contrast to the positive and negative binary poles of electrical interaction, various experiments involving protons (number of jets in high-energy par- ticle collisions) have established that there is strong interaction from three different sources, and that when these three ‘charges’ are brought together, the result is a non-charged, i.e. neutral particle. This ‘trinity’ was remi- niscent of ‘additive color mixing’, where three different primary colors – ‘red’, ‘blue’ and ‘green’ – are mixed together to produce ‘white’, i.e. the 46 Klaus Mecke neutral color. On the basis of this analogy, the observed sources of this strong interaction were named after the three colors, resulting in terms like ‘red-charged’ particles, for example. The color does not therefore describe any visual property, but rather the ‘color-charges’ of a ‘color-interaction’ that cause a ‘chromodynamic’ of the particles. Their measurable sources are described as ‘red’, ‘blue’ and ‘green’ because together, the three different sources cancel each other out and externally, no interaction is visible, i.e. they appear neutral. What is important here is that this metaphorical process is based on measurement narratives. The three colors ‘red’, ‘blue’ and ‘green’ are terms for marks on a scale in, for example, polarization measurements in heavy ion scattering experiments. They are quantitative metaphors whose values can be compared to other measurements and then transferred onto the measured constituents of the proton, the so-called quarks. It is only in mea- suring these quantitative metaphors that an ontological metaphor is consti- tuted as the carrier of these properties. A ‘quark’ is that which appears as ‘color charged’, ‘spin carrying’ and ‘point-like’ in measurements on protons. Whilst quantitative metaphors as measurement narratives for physi- cal quantities offer an experimental approach to phenomena, mathemat- ical-ontological metaphors lead to a mathematization. This goes hand in hand with an ordering of phenomena, but also with a reduction to a finite number of degrees of freedom. In mathematical modelling, the diversity of phenomena is reduced to equations of motion of state quantities. This mathematical transfer process is justified through quantitative metaphors, whose numerical values permit comparisons between the not actually com- parable. Ontological metaphors order quantitative metaphors in that they can grasp them as properties of an object. Thus ‘position’, ‘velocity’ and ‘color’ are not simply measured quantities, but measurements of ‘something’. This something, the identity of the object, allows the different measurements to relate to one another as properties of the present state of the unchanging thing. A ‘point particle’ corresponds to a function r(t) in the mathematical world. Through measurement narratives for this mathematical-ontological metaphor, quantitative metaphors become mathematical quantities that can be derived from the function r(t). Thus, for example, the ‘position’ of a point particle corresponds to the value of r(t) itself, the ‘velocity’ v(t) to the differential quotient v(r)=dr(t)/dt and the ‘force’ acting on a point particle becomes a function F(r(t)) of r(t). Key here is that all these quantitative metaphors have become, through mathematical language, derived quanti- ties of the mathematical-ontological metaphor ‘point particle’. Quantitative Metaphors and formula ∈ Tropes? 47

The crucial point is that this must be the case for all possible point par- ticles and not just for one concrete example where the function r(t) attains particular numbers. In order to mean a particular point particle, one would have to choose a concrete function r(t) from the set of all possible func- tions. In this case, we would say that the ‘point particle’ is in the particular state r(t). The particular values of all measurement quantities can be derived from the state of the ‘point particle’ and compared to the measurements carried out on ‘things’ in the world. How does one get to a mathematical description of ‘state’? The math- ematical-ontological metaphor guides the mathematization, but the meta- phor itself is guided by relations between quantitative metaphors. If we take a stone, for example, then the measurement quantities position x and time t are always in a specific relation. In this case, due to the monotony of time measurement, this can even be expressed as the function x = r(t). This relation or function is the mathematical form of the ontological metaphor ‘particle’, which thereby becomes the mathematical-ontological metaphor ‘point particle’. This origin of the metaphor ‘point particle’ in measurement quantities is the reason why the metaphor ‘point particle’ can put the mea- surement quantities as derived quantities in order. Thus far, laws of nature have been understood as synonymous quantita- tive metaphors. Key here was the identity that the equality of the number made clear. Mathematical structures of objects were of little importance. These only became relevant through mathematical-ontological metaphors, which resulted in the diversity of measurement quantities being reduced to state quantities. What happens to laws of nature during the mathematiza- tion of nature? Synonymous quantitative metaphors become equations or formulae between mathematical-ontological metaphors, i.e. between math- ematical objects. Equations are the mathematical, symbolic expressions of a law of nature. Formulae can take on different forms depending on which symbols are used for quantitative metaphors; the law of nature remains the same regardless. That ‘force’ and ‘momentum current’ are synonymous quantitative met- aphors becomes, when transferred to a ‘stone’, Newton’s equation of motion F(r) = m dv/dt as the mathematized form of the law of motion ‘force=momentum current’. Despite the different ontological metaphors and mathematical notations, the core of the law of nature remains the redundancy of the two measure- ment narratives for ‘force’ and ‘momentum current’, a redundancy that was first discovered through a quantitative comparison of the measured numbers. 48 Klaus Mecke

formula ∈ Tropes? Physics and Poetry

In spite of numbers, which have almost silenced narrative in physics, the metaphor in physical research cannot be made to vanish. Perhaps meta- phors are so important as a heuristic tool for new discoveries in physics because the entire cognitive process in physics was a metaphorical one that was both enabled by the number and, at the same time, hidden by it. Be- cause formulae are mathematical metaphors, they can also be used rhetori- cally and literarily. Physical quantities and formulae are thus to be viewed as a new type of trope that can open up nature. Through measurement narratives, ‘green quarks’ has a link to nature and can, at the same time, have a literary function as a metaphor. Through measurement it has been observed that a ‘proton’ is comprised of three dif- ferently color-charged quarks. Externally no color interaction is visible, i.e. the proton is color-neutral, in other words white. With some justification we can say that a proton is white quark. Friedrich Nietzsche noted that:

The drive to create metaphors, that fundamental drive of man which cannot be calculated away for a single moment because in the process man himself would be calculated away, is not truly defeated but barely tamed by construct- ing for itself, out of its own evaporated products, the concepts, a world as regu- lar and rigid as a prison fortress. It seeks a new territory and a new channel for this operation, which it finds in myth and in art as a whole. It continually confuses the conceptual categories and cells by introducing new transferences, metaphors and metonymies, and it continually reveals the desire to make the existing world of waking man as colorful, irregular, free of consequences, in- coherent, delightful and eternally new, as the world of dreams. […] For the liberated intellect, the huge structure of concepts, to whose beams and boards needy man clings all his life in order to survive, is only a scaffolding and a toy with which to perform its boldest tricks: by smashing, jumbling up and iron- ically reassembling this structure, joining the most alien elements and separat- ing the closest, it demonstrates that it can do without those makeshift resources of neediness and is now guided not by concepts but by intuitions. […] There are eras in which rational man and intuitive man stand side by side, the one fearful of intuition, the other scornful of abstraction. The latter is just as irrational as the former is inartistic.

The diversity and singularity of phenomena is based on the multiplicity of that which is not determined by laws of nature. Freedom and historicity are, therefore, possible natural phenomena that comply with the laws of nature. Traditionally, the philosophy of science considers René Descartes’ Discourse de la méthode as the foundation of natural science. If, however, you understand measurement narratives to be a significant epistemologi- Quantitative Metaphors and formula ∈ Tropes? 49 cal practice in experimental physics, then you also have to comprehend Giovanni Battista Vico’s Prinzipi as a foundational text for all the natural sciences. Knowledge in science is based not only on conceptual clarity and Cartesian mathematization, but also on human history. Talk of the two cultures of the humanities and the sciences thus becomes untenable. What physics reveals as the fundamental laws of nature are not the di- versity of occurrences and also not predictions for the future, but only that which remains the same. Naturally it is an enormous scientific achievement to have found the constant in natural processes. However, the other fasci- nating thing in science is the discovery of the fantastic diversity of phenom- ena: the forms of life, the interplay of motion, the fashioning of material. This is perhaps the scientific reasoning behind Charlotte’s ‘moral’ argument in the Elective Affinities:

These comparisons are pleasant and entertaining; and who is there that does not like playing with analogies? But man is raised very many steps above these elements; and if he has been somewhat liberal with such fine words as Election and Elective Affinities, he will do well to turn back again into himself, and take the opportunity of considering carefully the value and meaning of such expressions.

(Translation: Joanna White, London)

“Render Innocuous the Abstraction We Fear” Johann Wolfgang Goethe in the Epochal Conflict between Scientific Knowledge and Narrative Knowing Michael B ö h l e r (Zurich)

Within the framework of the conference the present article argues that the controversial territories Goethe every so often trespasses are not so much those between science and poetry – as often put forward, but rather a twilight zone between a traditional culture of narrative knowing and a modern culture of scientific knowledge, a distinction set forth by Lyotard (The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, 1979). In fact, if we examine more closely the forms and means of representation Goethe uses in his dealings with sci- entific objects, we find that to an astonishingly high degree they exhibit the characteristics which Lyotard considers symptomatic of pre-modern “narrative knowledge”, namely a mixture of various discourse functions such as savoir-faire, savoir-vivre, and savoir-écouter, with the corresponding criteria of usefulness, of justice or happiness, and of aesthetic ap- peal instead of the exclusive ‘true’/‘false’ criterion of modern science discourse.

Demon Abstraction

The expression in the title quotation “… render innocuous the abstraction we fear”1 circumscribes something akin to an apotropaic act, comparable to the utterance of a spell to protect against harm. But what is the ‘abstraction’ whispered of here as if it were a dread calamity? Who are ‘we’ who fear it? And why and how must this, paradoxically, almost corporeally graspable calamity be rendered “innocuous”? The phrase occurs in the foreword to the “Didactic Part” of Goethe’s Theory of Colors. It forms the conclusion to an extended discussion of the conception and construction of the treatise. And at the same time the pas- sage serves as an epistemological theorem stating the correlation between “pure” experience and theory-supported knowledge. It reads:

But here we must remark that, although we have adhered throughout to actual experience, and taken it throughout as our basis, yet we could not avoid stat- ing the theoretical ideas that gave rise to the arrangement and structure of our work [this alludes to the breaking down of colors into ‘physiological’, ‘physical’, and ‘chemical’ categories, MB].2

1 „… die Abstraktion, vor der wir uns fürchten, unschädlich [machen].“ (Goethe, Zur Farbenlehre, 1991: 14) 2 „Hier aber ist zu bemerken, daß, ob man sich gleich überall an die Erfahrungen gehalten, sie überall zum Grunde gelegt, doch die theoretische Ansicht nicht 52 Michael Böhler

Goethe continues, with a generalizing turn that acts simultaneously as a methodological critique:

Yet sometimes an extremely odd demand is made, though never met even by those who make it, namely, that experience should be presented without any theoretical bond and left to the reader or student to form by himself whatever conviction he likes. For simply to look at a thing cannot advance us.3

And now follows something that is highly typical of Goethe, characteristic of his tendency to think in transitions: a processual description of the act of cognition, which he conceives as a series of progressive transformations, perhaps even transfigurations: “Every observation passes over into contem- plation, every contemplation into deliberation, every deliberation into a making of connections; so that we can say that with every attentive look at the world we are already theorizing.”4 To this point, we could say that Goethe is simply, by recalling its et- ymology, connecting the concept theory /theorize back to Plato’s θεωρία/ ϑεωρεῖν, the contemplative gaze, and in so doing simultaneously describing, in the sequence ‘observation – contemplation – deliberation – connection,’ the genetic process whereby a simple instance of visual perception becomes progressively – one might say ever more spiritually – charged. Then, how- ever, he continues:

But to do this, to carry it out with awareness, with self-knowledge, with free- dom, and, to avail ourselves of a bold expression, with irony: for this, a certain dexterity is needed, if the abstraction we fear is to be rendered innocuous and the results we hope for from experience are to become truly vital and useful.5

These sentences read almost like a scientific credo in nuce accompanied by the “deliver us from [the] evil” of ominous abstraction. Yet, if we follow

verschwiegen werden konnte, welche den Anlaß zu jener Aufstellung und Anord- nung gegeben.“ (Ibid.) 3 „Ist es doch eine höchst wunderliche Forderung, die wohl manchmal gemacht, aber auch selbst von denen, die sie machen, nicht erfüllt wird: Erfahrungen solle man ohne irgend ein theoretisches Band vortragen, und dem Leser, dem Schüler über­lassen, sich selbst nach Belieben irgendeine Überzeugung zu bilden. Denn das bloße Anblicken einer Sache kann uns nicht fördern.“ (Ibid.) 4 „Jedes Ansehen geht über in ein Betrachten, jedes Betrachten in ein Sinnen, jedes Sinnen in ein Verknüpfen, und so kann man sagen, daß wir schon bei jedem auf- merksamen Blick in die Welt theoretisieren.“ (Ibid.) 5 „Dieses aber mit Bewußtsein, mit Selbstkenntnis, mit Freiheit, und um uns eines ge- wagten Wortes zu bedienen, mit Ironie zu tun und vorzunehmen, eine solche Ge- wandtheit ist nötig, wenn die Abstraktion, vor der wir uns fürchten, unschädlich, und das Erfahrungsresultat, das wir hoffen, recht lebendig und nützlich werden soll.“ (Ibid.) “Render Innocuous the Abstraction We Fear” 53 the course of the argument more closely, we find that it moves in a direc- tion that contradicts our conventional understanding of ‘abstraction.’ The starting point of the discussion is, as we saw, the polemic against an empiri- cism of experiences juxtaposed to each other without resort to concepts or attention to context, as well as a plea for what Goethe calls a “theoretical bond.” A “theoretical bond,” however, can only be understood as a bundling of indivi­dual experiences under generalized concepts or categories or cor- relations, and so as abstraction in the usual sense. Thus it seems here at first glance that, according to Goethe’s under­ standing, the isolating individual experience is an abstraction, that is, a ‘separating out’ or ‘dragging away’ – in the original sense of the Latin ab- stractio / abstrahere – a removal from the contexts within which the experi- ences are situated. Hence Goethean “abstraction” seems capable of moving in two directions: (a) Directed against an isolating, even atomizing, radical empiricism of a mere amassing of facts, it would have the negative significance of tearing the individual instance and its perception, or experience, out of the con- textual whole. To prevent this a “theoretical bond” is needed. Under this aspect, the passage could be read without much difficulty as a paraphrase of the second part of Kant’s dictum in the introduction to the “Idea of a Transcen­dental Logic” in the Critique of Pure Reason: “Thoughts without content are empty, intuitions without concepts are blind.”6 At the same time – and this at first glance is untypical of our understanding of theory – the “theoretical bond” is not purely and simply a means to the discovery of truth, to a recognition of context or the interdependence of objects, but is also a social bond or, more exactly, a pedagogical-didactical bond. For what Goethe also obviously opposes here is a procedure whereby it is left “to the reader or student to form by himself [italics MB] whatever conviction he likes.” Thus the theoretical bond not only binds the observed objects to each other, it also consolidates the observing subjects, the cognoscenti and their adepts. This idea will remain important for the further course of my argument. (b) Yet what Goethe means by that “abstraction we fear” is not just, nor even so much, the radical-empirical isolation we have just mentioned, but rather something he does not specify more precisely here in this passage – and this too is typical of apotropaic speech-acts – something he rather glosses over or circumvents with “dexterity” in order to steer directly toward the “vital and useful” “results” of “experience.”

6 „Gedanken ohne Inhalt sind leer, Anschauungen ohne Begriffe sind blind.“ (Kant 1968: 3, 98) 54 Michael Böhler

We might note here, proleptically, that Goethe in this passage describes the act of cognition in the form of a narrative, more exactly a journey tale or even a ‘quest’ in the style of a courtly romance: ‘observe – contemplate – deliberate – ­connect – theorize’: these are the stations or transitions of a journey from seeing to knowing. And ‘awareness – self-knowledge – free- dom – irony – dexterity’ are the intellectual powers, faculties (or even weap- ons) that bring us to our goal. And if in this narrative of knowing we also wish to lift the helmet of our opponent (none other than this ominous “abstraction we fear”) and assign him a face – here I condense the narrative on my part – we will find him incarnated as follows some 800 pages later in the “Materials for the History of the Theory of Colors”:

[He] was a well-organized, healthy, even-tempered man, without passions, without desires. His intellect was of a constructive nature and that in the most abstract sense, so that the higher mathematics was given to him as the very faculty by which he sought to construct his inner world and master the outer. We do not presume to pass judgement on this his chief merit, and readily admit that his true talent lies beyond our scope; [...] On the practical side, by contrast, the side of experience, he moves much closer to us. Here he enters a world with which we too are familiar and in which we are competent to judge his modus operandi as well as his success; all the more so, since it is an altogether uncontested truth that, as purely and surely as mathematics can be treated in itself, it nevertheless falls instantly into dangers at every step on the ground of experience, and – just like every other applied maxim – can lead to error, indeed make error egregious, and incur future em- barrassments.7

The informed reader will have guessed that this caricature of an ut- terly passionless abstract-construc­tivist, a man without desires or perhaps

7 „[Er] war ein wohlorganisierter, gesunder, wohltemperierter Mann, ohne Leiden- schaft, ohne Begierden. Sein Geist war konstruktiver Natur und zwar im abstraktes- ten Sinne; daher war die höhere Mathematik ihm als das eigentliche Organ gegeben, durch das er seine innere Welt aufzubauen und die äußere zu gewältigen [sic! MB] such- te. Wir maßen uns über dieses sein Hauptverdienst kein Urteil an und gestehen gern zu, daß sein eigentliches Talent außer unserm Gesichtskreise liegt; […] Von der praktischen, von der Erfahrungsseite rückt er uns dagegen schon nä- her. Hier tritt er in eine Welt ein, die wir auch kennen, in der wir seine Verfah- rungsart und seinen Sukzeß zu beurteilen vermögen, um so mehr, als es überhaupt eine unbestrittne Wahrheit ist, daß, so rein und sicher die Mathematik in sich selbst behandelt werden kann, sie doch auf dem Erfahrungsboden sogleich bei je- dem Schritte periklitiert und ebenso gut, wie jede andere ausgeübte Maxime, zum Irrtum verleiten, ja den Irrtum ungeheuer machen und sich künftige Beschämun- gen vorbereiten kann.“ (Goethe, Zur Farbenlehre, 1991: 844–845) “Render Innocuous the Abstraction We Fear” 55 even drives, whose sole faculty for the task of comprehending the world is higher mathematics – a Polyphemus of formulas and equations – that this caricature can only be directed at Isaac Newton, Goethe’s chief antagonist in color theory (Adler 1984), to whose personality he here – and this too is highly untypical – dedicates a roughly eight-page character portrait, or rather psychopathogram. It is Newton and his monomathematical broad- sword that stand behind the “abstraction we fear.” They are to be “rendered innocuous” with the fencing foil that is the “dexterity” of awareness, self- knowledge, freedom, and irony. There are not a few who see Goethe as “The Man of la Mancha” in this ‘quest’ for true knowledge concerning light and color, see his theory of colors as a quixotism of the first order. Thus, for example, the physiologist Emil Du Bois-Reymond, who in his famous rectoral speech Goethe and No End (1883) characterized The Theory of Colors as the “stillborn dalliance of an auto­didactic dilettante,”8 and believed he had uttered the final condem- nation of Goethe as scientist: “From Darwinism, which with its concept of abiogenesis borders on the Kant-Laplace theory; from the emergence of man out of chaos through the mathematically determined play of atoms from eternity to eternity; from the ending of the world in ice – from these images, which our generation contemplates as unsentimentally as it has ac- customed itself to the horrors of railway travel – Goethe would have turned away with a shudder.”9 Nor, for his part, was Goethe at a loss for obstinately defiant hyperboles when it came to “his” science, especially the Theory of Colors. Thus in one of his conversations with Friedrich Soret, the young Genevan private scholar, physicist, and numismatist, on 30 December 1823:

“But say yourself,” continued he, “ have I not had sufficient reason to feel proud, when for twenty years I have been forced to own to myself that the great New- ton, and all mathematicians and august calculators with him, have fallen into a decided error respecting the theory of colours; and that I, amongst millions, am the only one who knows the truth on this important subject? With this feeling

8 „todtgeborene Spielerei eines autodidaktischen Dilettanten“ (Du Bois-Reymond 1883: 29). 9 „Vom Darwinismus, der durch die Urzeugung an die Kant-Laplacesche Theorie grenzt, von der Entstehung des Menschen aus dem Chaos durch das von Ewig- keit zu Ewigkeit mathema­tisch bestimmte Spiel der Atome, von dem eisigen Welt­ ende – von diesen Bildern, welche unser Geschlecht so unfühlend ins Auge faßt, wie es sich an die Schrecknisse des Eisenbahnfahrens gewöhnte – hätte Goethe sich schaudernd abgewandt.“ (Ibid., 35) – Cf. in addition: Böhler, ‘Nachwort’, in Goethe 1977, 289–290. 56 Michael Böhler

of superiority, it was possible for me to bear with the stupid pretensions of my opponents. People endeavoured to attack me and my theory in every way, and to render my ideas ridiculous; but, nevertheless, I rejoiced exceedingly over my completed work. All the attacks of my adversaries only serve to expose to me the weakness of mankind.” – While Goethe spoke thus, with such a force and a fluency of expression as I have not the power to reproduce with perfect truth, his eyes sparkled with unusual fire; an expression of triumph was observable in them; whilst an ironical smile played upon his lips. The features of his fine countenance were more imposing than ever.” (Goethe 1850: I, 109–110)10

And six years later, in a conversation with Johann Peter Eckermann on 19 February 1829, the latter reports:

During half a life he had been annoyed by the most senseless opposition on every side, and it was natural enough that he should always find himself in a sort of irritable polemic position, and be always fully armed for a passionate conflict. […] “As for what I have done as a poet,” he would repeatedly say to me, “I take no pride in it whatever. Excellent poets have lived at the same time with myself, poets more excellent have lived before me, and others will come after me. But that in my century I am the only person who knows the truth in the difficult science of colours – of that, I say, I am not a little proud, and here I have a con- sciousness of a superiority to many.” (Goethe 1850: II, 145)11

10 „‚Aber sagen Sie selbst,‘ fuhr er fort, ‚konnte ich nicht stolz sein, wenn ich mir seit zwanzig Jahren gestehen mußte, daß der große Newton und alle Mathematiker und erhabenen Rechner mit ihm in Bezug auf die Farbenlehre sich in einem ent- schiedenen Irrthum befänden, und daß ich unter Millionen der einzige sei, der in diesem großen Naturgegenstande allein das Rechte wisse? Mit diesem Gefühl der Superiorität war es mir denn möglich, die stupide Anmaßlichkeit meiner Gegner zu ertragen. Man suchte mich und meine Lehre auf alle Weise anzufeinden und meine Ideen lächerlich zu machen, aber ich hatte nichtsdestoweniger über mein vollendetes Werk eine große Freude. Alle Angriffe meiner Gegner dienten mir nur, um die Menschen in ihrer Schwäche zu sehen.‘ / Während Goethe so mit einer Kraft und einem Reichthum des Ausdrucks sprach, wie ich in ganzer Wahrheit wiederzugeben nicht im Stande bin, glänzten seine Augen von einem außerordent- lichen Feuer. Man sah darin den Ausdruck des Triumphs, während ein ironisches Lächeln um seine Lippen spielte. Die Züge seines schönen Gesichts waren impo- santer als je.“ (Eckermann 1868: 3. Theil, 21–22) 11 „Ein halbes Leben hindurch tönte ihm der unverständigste Widerspruch von allen Seiten entgegen, und so war es denn wohl natürlich, daß er sich immer in einer Art von gereiztem kriegerischen Zustande und zu leidenschaftlicher Opposition stets gerüstet befinden mußte. […] ‚Auf alles, was ich als Poet geleistet habe,‘ pflegte er wiederholt zu sagen, ‚bil- de ich mir gar nichts ein. Es haben treffliche Dichter mit mir gelebt, es lebten noch trefflichere vor mir, und es werden ihrer nach mir sein. Daß ich aber “Render Innocuous the Abstraction We Fear” 57

It is probably no great exaggeration on my part to claim that there is hardly a single other figure of modern European cultural history who is more of a will-o’-the-wisp than Goethe in the contiguous and overlapping zones of science and literature, poetry and knowledge, poetry as knowledge, knowl- edge as poetry. And the assessment of his achievements has fluctuated cor- respondingly wildly in subsequent scientific discourses and in the various cultural milieus. In all of this it is mostly the aspect of allocation toward one or another, or a third, category that stands in the foreground (Böhler 1984). Of course the multiplicity of diverging appraisals of Goethe’s contribu- tion to science has to do, on the one hand, with the phenomenal breadth of his scientific interest and his prolific productivity in a broad range of disciplines such as botany, morphology, geology, meteorology, color theory, etc. (The so-called Leopoldina Edition of Goethe’s writings in the area of natural science, completed just a year ago, contains 11 volumes of text and another 18 of commentary for a total of more than 16,000 pages.12) On the other hand, it might be a false approach from the start to speak of contiguous and overlapping zones of science and literature, poetry and knowledge, in order to grasp the phenomenon ‘Goethe and the natural sci- ences.’ For this already presumes a differentiation and systemic autonomy of knowledge- and speech-cultures that eventually had not yet cristallized, let alone become finalized, and with regard to which Goethe represented a specific type of knowledge-culture, indeed polemically championed such a type. And then it becomes problematic to seek, under such auspices of an ex post perspective, the “scientific” in the poetic works and the “poetic” in the scientific writings. But what sort of approach should we choose to adequately describe those opaque zones of knowledge and poetry, literature and natural science, in Goethe? As is very well known, in the course of the “turn” in cultural stud- ies of the last two decades a whole disciplinary line has developed that takes the relationship of literature and knowledge, of literature to knowledge, and of knowledge in literature as its special project and has already produced a wealth of contributions (Klausnitzer 2008; Köppe 2011; Geiger 2006), including such as relate to Goethe (Stiening 2011).

in meinem Jahrhundert in der schwierigen Wissenschaft der Farbenlehre der einzige bin, der das Rechte weiß, darauf thue ich mir etwas zugute, und ich habe daher ein Bewußtsein der Superiorität über viele.‘“ (Eckermann 1868: 2. Theil, 59) 12 [accessed 3 Sep- tember 2014]. 58 Michael Böhler

Scientific Knowledge versus Narrative Knowledge

In the specific context of the question of the narrativity of knowledge posed by this conference, however, I think it especially fruitful to take support from a theoretical essay that might at first glance seem rather remote from the subject. I am speaking of Jean-François Lyotard’s Report on Knowledge, a commissioned report for the government of Quebec’s Council of Univer- sities which he compiled in 1979 under the title Rapport sur les problèmes du savoir dans les sociétés industrielles les plus développées, fait au Président du Conseil des Universités auprès du Gouvernement du Québec (Lyotard 1979a) and subsequently published under the better known title La condition post­ moderne. Rapport sur le savoir (Lyotard 1979b; Lyotard 1984). Lyotard’s approach is fruitful because he starts with a broad concept of knowledge that is not predefined exclusively from the perspective of science, but rather includes the latter merely as a subset.13 Under ‘knowledge’, then, Lyotard does not simply understand an ensemble of denotative statements to be judged solely according to the ‘true’/‘false’ criterion in the framework of a language game among experts that has been regulated with normative precision. Instead ideas such as savoir-faire, savoir-vivre, and savoir-écouter blend into the concept savoir, with the corresponding criteria of useful- ness, of justice and/or happiness (ethical sagacity), and of audial or visual beauty.14 So understood, such knowledge produces not only ‘good’ (‘true’) denotative statements, but also ‘good’ prescriptive as well as evaluative state- ments. It rests not merely on cognitive skills to the strict exclusion of others, but allows for the activity of various discourse functions: those of cogni- tion, decision, evaluation, reformulation (à connaître, à décider, à évaluer, à transformer) – one is minded of our introductory citation from Goethe. The result is that this knowledge coincides with a “formation” – in the origi- nal typescript of the report for the Council of the Universities of Quebec,

13 «Le savoir en général ne se réduit pas à la science, ni même à la connaissance. La connaissance serait l’ensemble des énoncés dénotant ou décrivant des objets, à l’exclusion de tous autres énoncés, et susceptibles d’être déclarés vrais ou faux. La science serait un sous-ensemble de la connaissance.» (Lyotard 1979b: 36; Lyotard 1984: 18) 14 «Mais par le terme de savoir on n’entend pas seulement, tant s’en faut, un ensemble d’énoncés dénotatifs, il s’y mêle les idées de savoir-faire, de savoir-vivre, de savoir- écouter, etc. Il s’agit alors d’une compétence qui excède la détermination et l’application du seul critère de la verité, et qui s’étend à celles des critères d’efficience (qualification technique), de justice et/ou de bonheur (sagesse éthique), de beauté sonore, chromatique (sensibilité auditive, visuelle), etc.» (Lyotard 1979b: 36–37; Lyotard 1984: 18–19) “Render Innocuous the Abstraction We Fear” 59

Lyotard explicitly added in parentheses “(German Bildung)”, with the word Bildung underlined; in the book text the parenthetical reference is omit- ted, and the German translation of the book reads simply Bildung [English ‘formation,’ ‘education,’ ‘culture’] without any allusion to Lyotard’s refer- ence to the German concept term.15 “Formation” therefore as both forma formans and forma formata – in Goethean terminology: “Minted form that lives and living grows” (Goethe 1983: 231).16 As all observers, according to Lyotard, agree, this form of traditional knowledge – and with this I come to the heart of the matter – articu- lates itself chiefly through use of the “account” récit( ), the narrative form, so that we can speak of a veritable “narrative knowledge” (savoir narratif ) as an entirely specific knowledge-culture.17 It is evident from a culture- historical perspective that “narrative knowledge” belongs more properly to pre-modern societies – Lyotard draws his stock of examples preponderantly from ethnological sources. But at the same time he emphasizes that even modern, purely scientific knowledge requires narrative, and thus he speaks of a “return of the narrative in the non-narrative” (retour du narratif dans le non-narratif ) (Lyotard 1979b: 49; Lyotard 1984: 27). Scientific knowledge, Lyotard says, is in fact dependent for its social legitimation and for its basis in what he calls “the social bond” (le lien social) on narrative knowledge or more specifically its structures of expression. For “[s]cientific knowledge cannot know and make known that it is the true knowledge without resort- ing to the other, narrative, kind of knowledge, which from its point of view is no knowledge at all. Without such recourse it would be in the position of

15 «Ainsi compris, le savoir est ce qui rend quelqu’un capable de proférer de «bons» énoncés dénotatifs, mais aussi de «bons» énoncés prescriptifs, de «bons» énoncés évaluatifs... Il ne consiste pas dans une compétence portante sur telle sorte d’énoncés, par exemple cognitifs, à l’exclusion des autres. Il permet au contraire de «bonnes» performances au sujet de plusieurs objets de discours: à connaître, à décider, à évaluer, à transformer… De là résulte l’un de ses principaux traits: il coïncide avec une «formation» [original typoscript of the Rapport pour le conseil des universités in parenthesis «(allemand Bildung)», (Lyotard 1979a: 26)] étendue des compétences, il est la forme unique incarnée dans un sujet que composent les diverses sortes de compétence qui le constituent.» (Lyotard 1979b: 36–37; Lyotard 1984: 18–19) 16 „Geprägte Form die lebend sich entwickelt.“ (Goethe 1988: 501) 17 «On peut dire que tous les obervateurs, quel que soit le scénario qu’ils proposent pour dramatiser et comprendre l’écart entre cet état coutumier du savoir et celui qui est le sien à l’âge des sciences, s’accordent sur un fait, la prééminence de la forme narrative dans la formulation du savoir traditionnel. […] Le récit est la forme par excellence de ce savoir, et ceci en plusieur sens.» (Lyotard 1979b: 38; Lyotard 1984: 19) 60 Michael Böhler presupposing its own validity and would be stooping to what it condemns: begging the question, proceeding on prejudice. But does it not fall into the same trap by using narrative as its authority?” In short, this dilemma is “an endless torment” (Lyotard 1984: 29).18 And are we not reminded here of Goethe’s abhorrence of “the abstraction we fear”?

Legitimation and Transformation of Knowledge

And with this return to the opening theme we come to my thesis: that the charged field in which Goethe moves is not so much that between science and poetry per se, but rather a twilight zone of conflict between the tra- ditional culture of narrative knowledge and a modern culture of scientific knowledge. The sentence quoted in the introduction – “But to do this, to carry it out with awareness, with self-knowledge, with freedom, and […] with irony: for this, a certain dexterity is needed, if the abstraction we fear is to be rendered innocuous and the results we hope for from experience are to become truly vital and useful” – this statement of principle would accordingly amount to nothing less than a program to transfer knowledge from a purely scientific sphere into a culture of narrative knowing. Or to say it differently, to integrate ‘scientific knowledge’savoir ( scientifique) into savoir-faire, savoir-vivre, savoir-écouter, thereby legitimating it within what Husserl has called the “lifeworld” (Lebenswelt). In fact, if we examine more closely the forms and means of representa- tion Goethe uses in his dealings with scientific objects, we find that to an astonishingly high degree they exhibit the characteristics which Lyotard considers symptomatic of “narrative knowledge.” At the same time we note that it is often precisely those forms and representational means which – in the eyes of his positivistic enemies – attest to Goethe’s “dilettantism”. As, for instance, in the case of his provocative thesis “that the history of science is science itself”: “We cannot gain a full recognition of what we possess until we have learned to recognize what others before us have possessed.” 19

18 «Le savoir scientifique ne peut savoir et faire savoir qu’il est le vrai savoir sans recourir à l’autre savoir, le récit, qui est pour lui le non-savoir, faute de quoi il est obligé de se présupposer lui-même et tombe ainsi dans ce qu’il condamne, la pétition de principe, le préjugé. Mais n’y tombe-t-il pas aussi en s’autorisant du récit ? […] C’est un tourment continuel.» (Lyotard 1979b: 51) 19 „Äußerten wir oben, daß die Geschichte des Menschen den Menschen darstelle, so läßt sich hier auch wohl behaupten, daß die Geschichte der Wissenschaft die Wissenschaft selbst sei. Man kann dasjenige, was man besitzt, nicht rein erkennen, bis man das, was andre vor uns besessen, zu erkennen weiß.“ (Goethe 1991: 16) “Render Innocuous the Abstraction We Fear” 61

The rationale that we cannot gain a full recognition of what we possess until we have learned to recognize what others before us have possessed might actually halfway accord with a (modern) science that operates ac- cording to the falsification principle; for what is acknowledged as valid knowledge requires as its dialectical background the negative transparency of a knowledge that has been pronounced surpassed. It is, however, pre- cisely this negation of the knowledge of predecessors as science’s means of forward propulsion that Goethe refuses to acknowledge, so that it comes as no surprise that in the process of explaining this idea he breaks out into a renewed tirade against Newton:

We cannot truly and honestly rejoice in the merits of our own time if we do not know how to appreciate the merits of the past. But it was not possible to write or even to prepare a history of color theory as long as the Newtonian theory held sway. For no aristocratic conceit has ever looked down with such intoler- able presumption upon those who did not belong to its guild as the Newtonian school has always done in its denial of validity regarding all that was achieved before itself and was being achieved alongside it.20

According to Lyotard it is one of the four characteristics of a narrative culture of knowledge that the narrator of knowledge does not pose or un- derstand himself as (possibly the sole) subject or emitter of this knowledge, but rather sees himself simultaneously in the role of “narratee,” the hearer or receiver of a quasi collective, handed-down narrative of knowledge: “[…] the narrator’s only claim to competence for telling the story is the fact that he has heard it himself. The current narratee gains potential access to the same authority simply by listening” (Lyotard 1984: 20–21).21 In Goethe it reads thus:

We have a right to demand of anyone who claims to transmit the history of any body of knowledge that he inform us how the phenomena gradually became known and what was imagined, conjectured, opined, and thought about them.

20 „Man wird sich an den Vorzügen seiner Zeit nicht wahrhaft und redlich freuen, wenn man die Vorzüge der Vergangenheit nicht zu würdigen versteht. Aber eine Geschichte der Farbenlehre zu schreiben oder auch nur vorzubereiten war unmög- lich, solange die Newtonische Lehre bestand. Denn kein aristokratischer Dünkel hat jemals mit solchem unerträglichen Übermute auf diejenigen herabgesehen, die nicht zu seiner Gilde gehörten, als die Newtonische Schule von jeher über alles abgesprochen hat, was vor ihr geleistet war und neben ihr geleistet ward. (Goethe 1991: 16–17) 21 «[…] le narrateur ne prétend tirer sa compétence à raconter l’histoire que d’en avoir été l’auditeur. Le narrataire actuel, en l’écoutant, accède potentiellement à la même autorité.» (Lyotard 1979b: 39) 62 Michael Böhler

To convey all this in its coherence entails great difficulties, and to write a his- tory is always a dubious enterprise. For even with the most honest of intentions we run the risk of being dishonest, and indeed anyone who undertakes such a portrayal declares in advance that he will place much in the light and much in shadow.22

Knowledge in a narrative knowledge-culture – we can thus conclude – is the narrative of its genesis and handing-down. To this belongs the require- ment – and this corresponds to the first characteristic of Lyotard’s schema (Lyotard 1979b: 38; Lyotard 1984: 19–20) – that the narrative contain he- roes who represent and champion the socially normative knowledge-exper- tise and who are also, of course, opposed by villains. And in this perspective what else is Goethe’s Theory of Color, in its text-structural and rhetorical character, than the epic of light and darkness and color with clearly distin- guished figures of light as well as obscurantists. Allow me to conclude with two last characteristics of narrative knowledge- culture as defined by Lyotard. The narrative form “[…] unlike the developed forms of the discourse of knowledge, lends itself to a great variety of language games. Denotative statements […] easily slip in; so do deontic statements […] Interrogative statements are implied […] evaluative statements also enter in, etc.” (Lyotard 1984: 20). A “tightly woven web” (un tissu serré), “ordered by the unified viewpoint characteristic of this kind of knowledge” (ordonnées en une perspective d’ensemble) (Lyotard 1979b: 39). Goethe provides the example of such a language game, rather untypical of scientific texts, at the very beginning of Theory of Colors, where he first speaks of Newton and prefaces this with an intricate self-reflexive figure of speech followed by a complex allegory:

Since, however, the second part of our work [he means the polemic argument against Newtonian optics under the telling title “The Unmasking of Newton’s Theory” ] may appear somewhat dry in its content and perhaps too vehement and passionate in its delivery, the reader will allow us an amusing parable as

22 „Von demjenigen nun, der die Geschichte irgendeines Wissens überliefern will, können wir mit Recht verlangen, daß er uns Nachricht gebe, wie die Phänomene nach und nach bekannt geworden, was man darüber phantasiert, gewähnt, ge- meint und gedacht habe. Dieses alles im Zusammenhange vorzutragen, hat große Schwierigkeiten, und eine Geschichte zu schreiben ist immer eine bedenkliche Sa- che. Denn bei dem redlichsten Vorsatz kommt man in Gefahr unredlich zu sein; ja wer eine solche Darstellung unternimmt erklärt zum voraus, daß er manches ins Licht, manches in Schatten setzen werde.“ (Goethe 1991: 17) 23 „Da aber der zweite Teil unsres Werkes seinem Inhalte nach trocken, der Ausfüh- rung nach vielleicht zu heftig und leidenschaftlich scheinen möchte, so erlaube “Render Innocuous the Abstraction We Fear” 63

a prelude to that more serious matter and as a sort of apology for the vigorous treatment alluded to.23

Yet, what Goethe calls “an amusing parable” is rather an almost Kafkaesqe allegory – casually bristling with spite and not shrinking even from sex- ism – of Newton’s optical theory as a delapidated castle with countless added chambers that has ‘grown long in the tooth’ after many vendettas, yet still thinks itself a maiden and is visited by pilgrims (perhaps Goethe sees this as an example of the irony mentioned in the introductory quote). We can observe the transformation or translation of scientific knowl- edge into narrative knowledge in an almost ideal – so to speak experimen- tal – arrangement by juxtaposing and comparing Goethe’s writings on the metamorphosis of plants in three states of representational aggregation: In the first place, his 1790 scientific treatise Attempt to Explain the Metamor­ phosis of Plants; secondly, his poem The Metamorphosis of Plants of 1798, a classical elegy in distichs; and, thirdly, his own biographical commentary in the Morphological Notebooks of 1817. Due to time constraints I shall refrain here from a systematic differen- tial analysis and highlight just one – yet fundamental – aspect of the poem The Metamorphosis of Plants: For here – in addition to the aforementioned three characteristics in Lyotard’s “pragmatics of narrative knowledge” – we find the fourth, namely “its effect on time” (son incidence sur le temps): “Narrative form follows a rhythm; it is the synthesis of meter beating time in regular periods and of accent modifying the length or amplitude of cer- tain of those periods” (Lyotard 1979b: 41; Lyotard 1984: 21). It has at its disposal a “vibratory musical property of narrative” (propriété vibratoire et musicale) (ibid.). Of course this relation to time is valid for all narrative forms – Lessing’s Laocoon waves to us from a distance – but in the classical didactic elegy it is of course autopoietically accentuated besides. Goethe himself alludes to this in a letter to his friend Carl Ludwig von Knebel, the translator of Lucretius’ De Rerum Natura, at the beginning of July 1798: “Enclosed you will find an attempt to represent the observation of nature, if not poetically, then at least rhythmically.”24 The phrase “to represent the observation of nature rhythmically” is effectively the most succinct for- mulation imaginable for the transformation of scientific knowledge into narrative knowledge.

man uns hier ein heiteres Gleichnis, um jenen ernsteren Stoff vorzubereiten und jene lebhafte Behandlung einigermaßen zu entschuldigen.“ (Goethe 1991: 14–15) 24 „Beyliegend erhältst du einen Versuch das Anschauen der Natur, wo nicht poetisch doch wenigstens rhythmisch darzustellen.“ (Goethe 1893: IV, 13, 200) 64 Michael Böhler

In the Metamorphosis of Plants this happens by virtue of the fact that an earlier somewhat dry treatise divided into 123 paragraphs, namely the Attempt to Explain the Metamorphosis of Plants, which painstakingly details the individual parts of plants and various botanical phenomena with an equally high level of rigid classificatory systematics, is converted into – bet- ter yet: set in motion by – the lively narrative of a dynamic process of be- coming: textologically, so to speak, the metamorphosis of representational principles of scientific knowledge into those of narrative knowledge. The poem is situationally arranged as a garden scene, a Garden of Eden, where, however, it is not seduction that is the problem, but bewilderment with respect to the primordial chaos of a multiplicity of flowers:

Overwhelming, beloved, you find all this mixture of thousands, Riot of flowers let loose over the garden’s expanse Many names you take in, and always the last to be spoken Drives out the one heard before, barbarous both to your ear. All the shapes are akin and none is quite like the other; So to a secret law surely that chorus must point, To a sacred enigma. Dear friend, how I wish I were able All at once to pass on, happy, the word that unlocks! Growing consider the plant and see how by gradual phases Slowly evolved, it forms, rises to blossom and fruit. (Goethe 1983: 155)25

And now over the remainder of the eighty-verse poem plays one of those films that depict in time-lapse or fast motion a morphogenetic process that in reality elapses very slowly, all interspersed with commentary, inferences, moral lore, similes etc. – in Lyotard’s terminology, with denotative state- ments as well as deontic, interrogative, and evaluative statements belonging to the realm of savoir-faire, savoir-vivre, and savoir-écouter – all in all, with language games typical of narrative knowing. “Growing consider the plant”: In this phrase – as one may say without great exaggeration – Goethe’s whole program, “to represent the observation of nature rhythmically,” is fully expressed in nuce, and with the hexametric

25 „Dich verwirret, Geliebte, die tausendfältige Mischung / Dieses Blumengewühls über den Garten umher; / Viele Namen hörest du an, und immer verdränget / Mit barbarischem Klang einer den andern im Ohr. / Alle Gestalten sind ähnlich, und keine gleichet der andern; / Und so deutet das Chor auf ein geheimes Gesetz, / Auf ein heiliges Rätsel. O könnt’ ich dir, liebliche Freundin, / Überliefern sogleich glücklich das lösende Wort! / Werdend betrachte sie nun, wie nach und nach sich die Pflanze, / Stufenweise geführt, bilde zu Blüten und Frucht.“ (Goethe 1987: 420–421) “Render Innocuous the Abstraction We Fear” 65 flow of elegiac distichs it likewise accords with Lyotard’s stipulation of the “vibratory musical property of narrative.” The metrically induced inversion of the regular German prose word order is also very striking syntactically: The strongly accented “growing” werdend( ) placed at the head of the hex- ameter is at first glance clearly connected contentually with the described object “plant” (and it is usually translated so, monosemically). But “grow- ing” can also – understood adverbially with the imperative “consider” (be­ trachte) – be applied to the addressed beloved in the process of considering and listening/reading. And finally, “growing” describes the progressive un- folding of the elegiac narrative. Thus we have a tripartite morphogenesis: a) of the described object, b) of the considering listener/reader, c) of the narrative text. Together they make up a morphogenetic ἱερὸς γάμος (sacred marriage), something Goethe alludes to toward the end of the poem:

In a circular cluster, all counted and yet without number, Smaller leaves take their place, next to a similar leaf. Pushed close up to the hub now, the harbouring calyx develops Which to the highest of forms rises in colourful crowns. Thus in fulness of being does Nature now glory, resplendent, Limb to limb having joined, all her gradations displayed. Time after time you wonder [...] (p. 157) [...] And how Amor at last blessed it with blossom and fruit. Think how variously Nature, the quietly forming, unfolding, Lent to our feelings now this, now that so different mode! Also rejoice in this day. Because love, our holiest blessing, Looks for the consummate fruit, marriage of minds, in the end, One perception of things, that together, concerted in seeing, Both to the higher world, truly conjoined, find their way. (Goethe 1983: 159)26

In complete accord with Lyotard’s thesis, the text also generates a lien so­ cial, a social bond, in its narrative process, and does so in growing rings: As

26 „[…] Rings im Kreise stellet sich nun, gezählet und ohne / Zahl, das kleinere Blatt neben dem ähnlichen hin. / Um die Achse gedrängt entscheidet der bergende Kelch sich, / Der zur höchsten Gestalt farbige Kronen entläßt. / Also prangt die Natur in hoher, voller Erscheinung, / Und sie zeiget, gereiht, Glieder an Glieder gestuft. / Immer staunst du aufs neue […][…] Und wie Amor zuletzt Blüten und Früchte gezeugt. / Denke, wie mannigfach bald die, bald jene Gestalten, / Still entfaltend, Natur unsern Gefühlen geliehn! / Freue dich auch des heutigen Tags! Die heilige Liebe / Strebt zu der höchsten Frucht gleicher Gesinnungen auf, / Gleicher Ansicht der Dinge damit in harmonischem Anschaun / Sich verbinde das Paar, finde die höhere Welt.“ (Goethe 1987: 422–423) 66 Michael Böhler nucleus, the love bond between speaker and listener, which is thematized in the poem itself and later on referred to in the biographical notes to the Morphological Notebooks: “This poem was highly welcome to the actual be- loved who had the right to refer the sweet images to herself; and I too felt very happy when the vivid parable increased and completed our beauti- ful, perfect affection.”27 Then there is the bond of the fairly narrow circle Goethe calls upon in the same passage, where he off-handedly dashes off a small Kulturphilo­sophie with respect to science and poetry and juxtaposes the “abstract [! MB] gardening” of his botanical research to an aesthetics of horticulture:

I heard similar strains from other quarters; no one anywhere would allow that science and poetry could be united. They forgot that science had developed out of poetry and did not consider that with a shift in the times the two might well meet as friends again, to mutual advantage, on a higher level. Lady friends who already on earlier occasions would gladly have drawn me from the lonely mountains and the contemplation of rigid crags were by no means content with my abstract gardening either. Plants and flowers should stand out in form, color, and scent, yet now they vanished to a ghostly silhou- ette. And so I tried to entice these benevolent minds to sympathy by means of an elegy, which may be granted a place here, where in the context of scientific presentation it might become more intelligible than if it were inserted in a series of tender and passionate poems. [The poem follows, MB.]28

And beyond this, we too, as willing readers, are ultimately included in the growing rings, brought into the association of the “social bond.” Thus the

27 „Höchst willkommen war dieses Gedicht der eigentlich Geliebten, welche das Recht hatte, die lieblichen Bilder auf sich zu beziehen; und auch ich fühlte mich sehr glücklich, als das lebendige Gleichnis unsere schöne vollkommene Neigung steigerte und vollendete.“ (Goethe 1987: 423) 28 „Von andern Seiten her vernahm ich ähnliche Klänge, nirgends wollte man zuge- ben, daß Wissenschaft und Poesie vereinbar seien. Man vergaß, daß Wissenschaft sich aus Poesie entwickelt habe, man bedachte nicht, daß, nach einem Umschwung von Zeiten, beide sich wieder freundlich, zu beiderseitigem Vorteil, auf höherer Stelle, gar wohl wieder begegnen könnten. / Freundinnen, welche mich schon frü- her den einsamen Gebirgen, der Betrachtung starrer Felsen gern entzogen hätten, waren auch mit meiner abstrakten Gärtnerei keineswegs zufrieden. Pflanzen und Blumen sollten sich durch Gestalt, Farbe, Geruch auszeichnen, nun verschwanden sie aber zu einem gespensterhaften Schemen. Da versuchte ich diese wohlwollenden Gemüter zur Teilnahme durch eine Elegie zu locken, der ein Platz hier gegönnt sein möge, wo sie, im Zusammenhang wissenschaftlicher Darstellung, verständ­licher werden dürfte, als eingeschaltet in eine Folge zärtlicher und leidenschaftlicher Poesien.“ (Goethe 1987: 420) “Render Innocuous the Abstraction We Fear” 67

“theoretical bond” in the observation of nature that we took as our start- ing point in the title passage here becomes the rhythmical bond of bound language, which as “social bond” incorporates the beloved and Goethe’s lady friends, put in an ill humor by his “abstract gardening,” and hopefully ourselves as well through my own gardening.

(Translation: Robert E. Goodwin, Skidmore College)

References

Adler, Jeremy D. (1984): ‘Goethe und Newton: Ansätze zu einer Neuorien­ tierung am Beispiel der chemi­schen Verwandtschaft’, in Goethe im Kontext: Kunst und Humanität, Naturwissenschaft und Politik von der Aufklärung bis zur Restauration, ed. by Wolfgang Wittkowski (Tübin- gen: Niemeyer Verlag), pp. 300–309. Böhler, Michael (1984): ‘Naturwissenschaft und Dichtung bei Goethe’, in Goethe im Kontext: Kunst und Humanität, Naturwissenschaft und Politik von der Aufklärung bis zur Restauration, ed. by Wolfgang Wittkowski (Tübingen: Niemeyer Verlag), pp. 313–335. Du Bois-Reymond, Emil Heinrich (1883): Goethe und kein Ende. Rede (Leipzig: Verlag von Veit & Comp.) [accessed 3 September 2014]. Eckermann, Johann Peter (1868): Gespräche mit Goethe in den letzten Jahren seines Lebens, in drei Theilen, 3rd ed. (Leipzig: F. A. Brockhaus). Geiger, Daniel (2006): Wissen und Narration. Der Kern des Wissensmanage­ ments (Berlin: Erich Schmidt). Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von (1850): Conversations of Goethe with Ecker­ mann and Soret, transl. by John Oxenford, 2 vols (London: Smith, Elder and Co.) — (1893): Briefe, in Goethes Werke, Herausgegeben im Auftrag der Großher­ zogin Sophie von Sachsen (Weimar: Hermann Böhlau), IV. Abteilung, vol. 13. — (1977): Schriften zur Naturwissenschaft, ed. by Michael Böhler (Stutt- gart: Philipp Reclam). — (1983): Selected poems, ed. by Christopher Middleton, transl. by Michael Hamburger (Cambridge, Mass.: Suhrkamp/Insel Publishers Boston). — (1987): Schriften zur Morphologie, ed. by Dorothea Kuhn, in Sämtliche Werke. Briefe, Tagebücher und Gespräche (Frankfurt a. M.: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag), I. Abteilung, vol. 24. 68 Michael Böhler

— (1988): Gedichte 1800–1832, ed. by Karl Eibl, in Sämtliche Werke. Briefe, Tagebücher und Gespräche (Frankfurt a. M.: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag), I. Abteilung, vol. 2. — (1991): Zur Farbenlehre, ed. by Manfred Wenzel, in Sämtliche Werke. Briefe, Tagebücher und Gespräche (Frankfurt a. M.: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag), I. Abteilung, vol. 23/1. Kant, Immanuel (1968): Kritik der reinen Vernunft, in Werke in zehn Bän­ den, ed. by Wilhelm Weischedel (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buch- gesellschaft), vol. 3. Klausnitzer, Ralf, ed. (2008): Literatur und Wissen. Zugänge – Modelle – Analysen, De Gruyter-Studienbuch (Berlin: De Gruyter). Köppe, Tilmann, ed. (2011): Literatur und Wissen. Theoretisch-methodische Zugänge, Linguae & litterae, 4 (Berlin: De Gruyter). Lyotard, Jean-François (1979a): Rapport sur les problèmes du savoir dans les sociétés industrielles les plus développées, fait au Président du Conseil des Universités auprès du Gouvernement du Québec. [accessed 3 September 2014]. — (1979b): La condition postmoderne. Rapport sur le savoir, Collection «Cri­ tique», (Paris: Les éditions de minuit). — (1984): The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, transl. from the French by Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi, Theory and His- tory of Literature, 10 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press). — (1999): Das postmoderne Wissen. Ein Bericht, transl. from the French by Otto Pfersmann, 4th ed. (Wien: Passagen Verlag). Stiening, Gideon (2011): ‘“Und das Ganze belebt, so wie das Einzelne, sei”: Zum Verhältnis von Wissen und Literatur am Beispiel von Goethes “Die Metamorphose der Pflanzen”’‚ in Literatur und Wissen: Theoretisch- methodische Zugänge, ed. by Tilmann Köppe, Linguae & litterae, 4, (Berlin: De Gruyter), pp. 192–213. Between Logos and Mythos Narratives of “Naturalness” in Today’s Particle Physics Community Arianna B o r r e l l i (Berlin)

At the core of today’s particle physics stands the Standard Model, a theory whose pre- dictions have so far not been contradicted by any experimental result. Despite this suc- cess in the last decades high-energy physicists have been speculating about and looking for a “new physics” beyond the Standard Model, and a motivation for this search is the “naturalness problem”. This problem is neither an experimental anomaly nor a math- ematical incoherence, but rather a non-compelling argument which physicists describe as “aesthetic” or “philosophical”. In fact, the naturalness problem is best understood as a hybrid narrative combining words, formulas, numbers and analogies. This narrative is in some respects like a myth: it can be formulated in different, non-equivalent ways, which physicists however perceive as telling the same story of instability and disharmo- ny, and it represents a shared belief helping define the high-energy-physics community.

Introduction

Narratives appear in different forms in the world of science, and the most immediate example is how scientists structure their past, present and future as a tale of progress in which the lives and deeds of “great scientists” are em- bedded. Yet these are not the only stories that play a role in scientific prac- tice. The present study will focus on tales which are told not of scientists and discoveries, but of abstract notions, such as particle masses, symmetries, energy or the universe. Narratives of this kind usually reach the broader public through science popularization, as for example, the story of “the universe expanding at larger or smaller velocity” or “the Higgs boson giving mass to all other particles”. However, most of these stories originally circu- lated within the physics community, and I shall argue that they represent a constitutive element of research practice in today’s high-energy physics and cosmology, serving both to guide and motivate work and to promote the cohesion of the community. The example to be discussed is linked to the term “naturalness” as used in particle physics, and I shall also suggest that, within the broad category of narrative, tales like this one might be likened to myths. In the next section I discuss some research results which serve to set the stage for my analysis. In sections 3 to 5 I introduce and discuss the naturalness narrative and its functions in present-day high-energy physics. The final section summarizes the results and in particular the functional similarities between the naturalness narrative and myths. 70 Arianna Borrelli

Narratives and Scientific Knowledge Some Preliminary Remarks

A clear-cut distinction between scientific knowledge and its popularized version is often assumed. Suggestive verbal statements such as “expansion of the universe” or “mechanisms of mass generation” are perceived as sim- plifications having little to do with “real” scientific knowledge, which is supposedly expressed in complex logical-mathematical constructs provid- ing exact, testable experimental predictions – and in which narratives and suggestive imagery have no place. Philosophers, sociologists and historians of science have questioned the validity of this ideal picture under many aspects, relativizing the role of mathematical theories and logical frame- works in the process of knowledge construction in the natural sciences and underscoring the independent epistemic role of experimental practices and of cultural and social factors (for microphysics, see especially: Ga lison 1997, Kaiser 2005, Pickering 1984). In this context, the role of language both in shaping scientific discourses and in linking them to their broader cultural context has been acknowledged (Golinski 1990, Kay 2000). The issue has been studied more in depth for the life sciences, where historians have un- derscored the productive role of “vague” ideas, such as that of the “book of life” in the construction of scientific meaning and its validation within and without the scientific community. In her historical study on the notion of “gene”, Evelyn Fox Keller has convincingly argued that no coherent defini- tion of the concept exists and that while many of the characteristics usually ascribed to it are in contrast with research results, nevertheless, the term “gene” remains central to research. As she notes, “paradoxically, gene talk continues to have obvious and undeniable uses” (Keller 2000: 138, italics in the original). What is “gene talk” for, then?

Like the rest of us, scientists are language-speaking actors. The words they use play a crucial (and, more often than not, indispensable) role in motivating them to act, in directing their attention, in framing their questions, and in guiding their experimental efforts. By their words, their very landscapes of possibility are shaped. [...] Don’t scientists require great precision in the language they use? Well, yes and no [...] Some flexibility in terminology is necessary for the construction of bridges between these different contexts [...] In other words, the construction of scientific meaning depends on the very possibility of words taking on different meanings in different contexts – that is, it depends on lin- guistic imprecision. (Keller 2000: 139–141)

Peter Galison presented a similar argument for the fragmentation of mi- crophysics, whose subcultures communicate with each other only in “trad- Narratives of “Naturalness” in Today’s Particle Physics Community 71 ing zones” analogous to those known to anthropologists, where a “pidgin” between different languages serves to construct shared meanings between different cultures (Galison 1997). Neither Keller nor Galison speak of nar- ratives, but other authors have suggested that such a notion might be useful in understanding aspects of the epistemic dynamics of the sciences and even of pure mathematics (Doxiadis/Mazur 2012, Plotnitsky 2005). I have recently argued that narratives have an essential role in shaping the theo- retical practices of contemporary high-energy physics, and that the idea of theory as a coherent mathematical construct is being supplanted by hybrid constructs (“theoretical cores”) in which both mathematics and narratives – as well as other elements – are present (Borrelli 2012, Borrelli 2014). It is from this point of view that we shall now approach particle physics.

Particle Physics and the Naturalness Narrative

Particle physics is concerned with interactions taking place over very small distances and, since small distances are regarded as corresponding to high energies, the discipline is also referred to as “high-energy physics”. In the world view of particle physicists, it is assumed that different kinds of phe- nomena take place at different energy scales, so that building particle accel- erators capable of reaching increasingly higher energies appears a promising strategy for discovering new physics beyond that described by the “Standard Model”, a theory which emerged in the 1970s and has since been regarded as the most successful model of particle phenomena (Pickering 1984). The energy scale typical for electroweak events described by the Standard Mod- el is that of the mass of the Higgs boson (ca. 100 Giga-electronVolt [GeV]). The energy which is considered the upper limit of validity for the Standard Model is the “Planck scale”, i.e. 1019 GeV, at which quantum gravitational effects – not included in the Standard Model – are expected to appear. However, physicists are convinced that “new physics” might appear al- ready at energies accessible to the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), a particle accelerator which started operating at CERN (Geneva) in 2010 at energies of the order of magnitude of 1000 GeV. One of the reasons most often brought forward to justify the belief in new physics at the (relatively) low energy scale of the LHC is that the Standard Model suffers from prob- lems of “naturalness”, “hierarchy” or “fine-tuning”. As with the case of the term “gene”, diverging descriptions of “naturalness” and “hierarchy” exist, but nonetheless “naturalness talk” serves various functions within the high-energy physics community. In “naturalness talk”, numbers take centre stage. In general, two or more quantities are shown to have numeri- 72 Arianna Borrelli cal values which are widely different, and this difference is claimed to be “unnatural”, prompting the question: what’s behind it? For example, two similar particles have widely diverging masses. Or in a formula two very large numbers compensate each other to give as a result a very small value. Or a parameter turns out to be almost, but not quite, equal to zero. Or two parameters are mutually dependent, and small changes in the first one give rise to big jumps in the second one. In many cases one of the quantities is the mass of the Higgs boson. The difference in magnitude of the two values is not in itself problematic, it just appears “unnatural”. It may seem strange that scientists attribute so much significance to the specific numbers featured in their computations – the term “numerology” may come to mind – and, before discussing concrete examples of natu- ralness talk, it is worth pausing to discuss why numerical values may ap- pear significant. It is a fact that extracting numerical predictions from the Standard Model is problematic: when performing numerical computations with this theory, divergent – and therefore mathematically meaningless – expressions appear which have to be formally taken out (“subtracted”) from the computation to obtain finite – and empirically successful – re- sults (Brown 1993). The procedure to perform these so-called subtractions goes by the name of “renormalization”, and it remains open to discussion whether its steps may be defined in a mathematically rigorous way or not. Regardless of its formal status, renormalization has some very important consequences for the practice of particle physics: when computing with the Standard Model, the values of parameters (masses, charges) can be inserted in the formulas only in the final steps of the computation, i.e. when the divergences are “subtracted”. Moreover, different methods of subtraction exist which have to deliver the same final result. As a consequence of this procedure, relationships between independent input parameters may ap- pear, so that the connection between the mathematical structure of the Standard Model and the numerical values of its parameters and predic- tions displays a complexity unprecedented in physical theory. It is from this background that the naturalness/hierarchy problem can acquire utmost sig- nificance in the eyes of physicists. Today, the naturalness/hierarchy problem is never in itself the subject of research papers, but it is often mentioned to provide a framework and a motivation for the topic at hand. The reference may amount to only a few words, or to a more detailed discussion involving more than one version of the issue, as in the following quote by the physicist Mikhail Shifman:

There are rather many free parameters in the standard model [...] A complete lack of any semblance of universality in this sector is striking. Masses span Narratives of “Naturalness” in Today’s Particle Physics Community 73

the interval from ~ 10-2eV (for neutrinos) to ~ 200 GeV for t quarks – thirteen orders of magnitude. This is not the end of the story, however. Indeed, it is widely believed that the only natural scale in physics is set by the Planck mass

MP which determines the strength (or should I say, weakness?) of gravity inter- actions at low energies and the energy scale at which gravity becomes strong, 19 MP ~ 10 GeV. [...] If the natural scale of all masses is indeed set by MP, then the hierarchy problem becomes awful. Not only are the masses in the matter sector scattered over thirteen orders of magnitude, they are extremely small in

the scale of MP. Even if we accept for the time being that our understanding of physics is not ripe enough to explain the mass hierarchy, the next question to ask is whether or not this hierarchy is stable. [...] This is not the case [...] for the Higgs mass [whose] quantum corrections are quadratically divergent and, therefore, apparently drag [the value of the Higgs mass] toward the Planck scale, if there is no natural cut-off at a much lower scale. (Later I will say more about “naturalness.”) This is a bad situation. There are two ways out: new phys-

ics at a scale much lower than MP [...] or extreme fine-tuning. The latter would mean that although each successive quantum correction produces a huge shift in mass, the shifts cancel in the total sum to a very high accuracy, so that the resulting overall shift is small or absent. Such a scenario is usually called ‘un- natural’. The criterion of naturalness is aesthetic, or, if you wish, philosophic. If you do not like it you can ignore it. Most people like it. (Shifman 2012: 3–4) I have chosen this quote as representative of naturalness/hierarchy talk because it contains a number of different, but connected examples of lack of naturalness and at the same time strongly appeals to the intuition and to the emotions of scientists. In a crescendo the author mentions the “strik- ing” differences between the free parameters of the Standard Model and a hypothetical “natural” energy scale; he refers to a specific kind of divergent terms (“quadratic divergences”) appearing in the renormalization of the Higgs mass, claiming that they “drag” it upwards to that high “natural” scale; he rejects as “unnatural” the fine-tuning necessary to eliminate those divergences and keep the Higgs mass at its correct value. These arguments are physically and mathematically distinct, but all can be fit into a nar- rative that juxtaposes a numerical inequality perceived as unstable to its hypothetical, desirable stabilization. Since the terms “naturalness” and “hi- erarchy” are inextricably linked, I shall for simplicity from now on refer to this narrative as the “naturalness narrative”. Central to it is an impression of unnaturalness conveyed by presenting numerical values as products of a time-based process. The masses are “scattered” over a broad range of values, the Higgs mass is “dragged” upwards, “huge shifts” in mass are “produced” and then “cancelled” through “fine- tuning”. This last term (“fine-tuning”) is almost invariably used in these contexts and expresses in itself a continu- ing process of balance between stability and instability. Significantly, Shif- man underscores how the criterion of naturalness is subjective, thus leaving 74 Arianna Borrelli the reader apparently free to judge by him- or herself, but at the same time appealing to him or her to embrace what is the accepted view in the com- munity (“If you do not like it you can ignore it. Most people like it”). Fi- nally, the term “natural” clearly hints at the opposite of a purely subjective impression, and its use can be placed in a long tradition of appeals to the “moral authority of nature” (Daston/Vidal 2004).

Variants of the Naturalness Narrative

The different themes present in Shifman’s text are often presented sepa- rately. For example, a very popular variant of the narrative focuses on the “quadratic divergences” appearing in the renormalization of the Higgs mass. In his textbook, Binétruy (2006) assumes, as is usually done, that the Standard model is valid only up to a very high energy (a “cut-off”) and states that this “leads to the well-known problem of quadratic divergences” in the Higgs mass (Binétruy 2006: 8–9). To demonstrate this fact, he com- putes the first steps of renormalization and shows that, if the Higgs mass has to have its correct value after subtracting the “quadratically divergent” terms, then a certain parameter “must be adjusted to more than 30 orders of magnitude. This is to most people an intolerable fine tuning. [...] Such a fine tuning goes against the prejudice that the observable properties of a theory (masses, charges...) are stable under small variations of the funda- mental parameters [...]. One talks of the naturalness of a theory to describe such behaviour” (Binétruy 2006: 9). Fine-tuning the parameter is neither theoretically nor empirically problematic. Nonetheless, as in Shifman’s ac- count, the situation is represented as an unstable one, in need of repair. Like Shifman, Binétruy explicitly notes that the criterion of naturalness is noncompelling (a “prejudice”), while thoroughly subscribing to it. Some authors – and especially theorists – are fully aware that not all variants of the narratives are equivalent, and find some – but not all – unacceptable. James Wells (2009) writes:

The Hierarchy Problem is often expressed as a question: Why is the weak scale (~ 102 GeV) so much lighter than the Planck scale (~ 1018 GeV)? It is a bit un- inspiring when phrased this way, since it begs the question of why we should be concerned at all about a big difference in scales. Blue whales are much larger than nanoarchaeum equitans but we do not believe nature must reveal a dra- matic new concept for us to understand it. [...] Quadratic divergences of the Higgs boson self-energy, which so many people make a fuss about, are not even there if I use dimensional regularization. The theory is happy, healthy, and in no need of any fixes. (Wells 2009: 38) Narratives of “Naturalness” in Today’s Particle Physics Community 75

However, after criticizing too simplistic naturalness arguments, Wells goes on to state that “Th[e] viewpoint that the Standard Model is com- plete can be challenged right at the outset”, since the theory should be seen as valid only up to a cut-off. He proceeds with a more theoretically refined computation exploiting the properties of renormalization to show that the assumption of a cut-off “would then need the coefficient c [...] to be fine-tuned to an extraordinary small and unnatural value [...]. The concern about how this can be so is the Hierarchy Problem” (Wells 2009: 39). Thus, in the end, the naturalness narrative finds its expression. Much simpler variants are instead found in texts by experimentalists, like the one by Fabiola Gianotti (2006):

The hierarchy problem is the huge gap, 17 orders of magnitude, between two

fundamental scales of physics: the electroweak scale and the gravity scale MPlanck. One of the consequences is that, if no new physics exists between these two

scales [...] then the Higgs mass (mH) diverges, unless it is unnaturally fine-tuned.

New physics to stabilize mH is already needed at the TeV scale, a well-known problem that has motivated the construction of the LHC and has been addressed by several theories beyond the S[tandard] M[odel]. (Gianotti 2006: 1642)

Here, the mass of the Higgs boson is not simply drawn upward, but even diverges – no small difference for a theorist! Another variant of the naturalness narrative tells of numbers which are almost, but not quite, zero:

The physical principle of naturalness as articulated by ’t Hooft [(’t Hooft 1980)] states that a small parameter is natural only when a symmetry is gained as it is set to zero. [...] The apparent violation of this principle in the value of the Higgs mass is known as ‘the gauge hierarchy problem.’ (Seiberg 1993: 469)

This variant allows connecting the naturalness narrative to the neigh- boring discipline of cosmology through the issue of the cosmological con- stant, a parameter of general relativity which experimental data show to be almost, but not quite, equal to zero:

Fine tuning appears in many areas of particle physics and cosmology, such as the standard model (SM) hierarchy problem and the cosmological constant problem. These problems imply that the Universe we live in is a very atypi- cal scenario of the theories we use to describe it. The contortion required to reproduce observation makes such theories seem unnatural, motivating many studies of beyond the standard model (BSM) physics. (Athron/Miller 2007: 1)

Here, the time-based process through which the unnatural numbers are generated is assimilated into a “contortion”, offering the immediate bodily feeling of an untenable position. The narrative of unstable inequalities and 76 Arianna Borrelli their desired stabilization can be expressed in many different ways accord- ing to the interests and background of the individual physicists, yet the community is ready to accept all of these narratives as equivalent. Indeed, the strength of the naturalness narrative is largely due to its flexibility, which allows it to become a unifying factor in the high-energy community and to bridge the gap between theorists and experimenters. At the same time, the naturalness narrative defines access to the particle community, as those who belong to it are expected to share a perception of unnaturalness when confronted with certain numerical constellations.

The Emergence of the Naturalness Narrative as a Guideline for Theoretical Research

The previous sections have endeavored to sketch the main features and functions of the naturalness narrative in high-energy physics. One may now ask: how did this complex constellation come to be? Attempting to trace the emergence of the naturalness narrative leads into a maze of paral- lel routes which intersect and partially merge, like trying to find the “ori- gin” of some ancient legend. In the following pages, I shall sketch a few salient episodes of what is in retrospect seen as the “history of naturalness”. My aim is to illustrate how the construction of the naturalness narrative went hand in hand with the development of theoretical research in particle physics, often serving as a guideline and inspiration. Already in the early 1970s, as theorists were becoming aware of the intricacies of renormaliza- tion, some authors had speculated that formalism might provide a means of “naturally” explaining relationships between otherwise seemingly indepen- dent parameters, such as different masses (Borrelli 2012). The connection between “naturalness” and the quadratic divergences of the Higgs mass was however introduced by Leonard Susskind in 1979:

Aside from subjective aesthetic argument, there exists [in the Standard Model] a real difficulty connected with the quadratic mass divergences [of the Higgs field]. These divergences violate a concept of naturalness which requires the observable properties of a theory to be stable against minute variations of the fundamental parameters. (Susskind 1979: 2619)

Susskind performed the simple computation we saw in Binétruy (and which Wells criticized) and concluded that in it a parameter “must be ad- justed to the 38th decimal place. [...] Such adjustments are unnatural and will be assumed absent in the correct theory” (Susskind 1979: 2619). Suss- kind used this argument to promote his own alternative to the Standard Narratives of “Naturalness” in Today’s Particle Physics Community 77

Model, a theory later known as “technicolor”, but his naturalness idea, al- though very sketchy and clearly non-compelling, was soon appropriated by other authors. In 1980 Gerard ’t Hooft, at the time already a prominent theoretician, introduced his own version of naturalness as a criterion of general applicability linked to symmetry, and not to a very specific techni- cal issue, as in Susskind’s paper:

We now conjecture that the following dogma should be followed: at any energy

scale μ, a physical parameter or set of physical parameters αi(μ) is allowed to

be very small only if the replacement αi(μ) = 0 would increase the symmetry of the system. In what follows this is what we mean by naturalness. (’t Hooft 1980: 136)

Here, too, a time-based narrative was present: a parameter is set to zero, and a symmetry change does (or does not) occur. The arbitrariness of the criterion is underscored by calling it a “dogma”. In his paper, ’t Hooft never discussed quadratic divergences, but soon Martin Veltman, ’t Hooft’s for- mer PhD supervisor and collaborator, combined and expanded Susskind’s and ’t Hooft’s proposals, introducing yet another variant of naturalness (Veltman 1981):

This criterion [of naturalness] is that radiative corrections are supposed to be of the same order (or much smaller) than the actually observed values [...] Sym- metries may be important here too; radiative corrections may be made small if there is a symmetry guaranteeing this smallness. (Veltman 1981: 446)

Veltman was also the first one to suggest that a possible solution to the naturalness problem of the Standard Model could be offered by recently developed theories displaying a new kind of symmetry: “supersymmetry” (Veltman 1981: 451). Soon, naturalness and supersymmetry became closely linked, and they have remained so until today. At the same time, though, the question of naturalness became connected with the variety (“hierar- chy”) of energy scales present in fundamental physics. Already in 1984 Haim Harari wrote:

Hierarchy problem and fine tuning: These may count as two problems or one problem depending on one’s point of view. In any way of looking at it, we have here a mismatch between different energy scales. Assuming that there is an important energy scale beyond the Standard Model (be it the Planck mass or a somewhat lower energy scale of some other type of new physics), it is difficult to understand how particles with masses corresponding to the low-energy scales of the standard model can survive enormous self-energy corrections. (Harari 1984: 161) 78 Arianna Borrelli

Because of the naturalness argument, physicists expected evidence of new physics from the LEP experiment (1989–2000), but they were dis- appointed. Yet the naturalness narrative lived on, spawning new variants. Since experimental data imposed some fine-tuning also on supersymmetric models, authors started developing “measures of fine-tuning” to establish how much fine-tuning should be regarded as acceptable (Anderson/Castaño 19950; Athron/Miller 2007). In the late 1990s some theorists proposed a radically new approach to solving the “hierarchy problem”: bringing the Planck scale down to the electroweak one:

We propose a new framework for solving the hierarchy problem which does not rely on either supersymmetry or technicolor. In this framework, the gravita- tional and gauge interactions become united at the weak scale, which we take as the only fundamental short distance scale in nature. [...] The Planck scale […] is not a fundamental scale; its enormity is simply a consequence of the large size of the new dimensions. (Arkani-Hamed/Dimopoulos/Dvali 1998: 263)

Since the beginning of the new millennium, an increasing number of models of new physics has been formulated and, despite the technical va- riety which they display, most of them are presented by their authors and perceived by the community as embedded in the naturalness narrative and offering a solution to it. At the same time, the LHC has been built in the hope of finding evidence of new physics, so that the naturalness narra- tive has served to unify the high-energy community also by providing a powerful, if non-compelling argument to motivate both theoretical and experimental research. The narrative eventually made it also into popular scientific literature, since it is simple enough to appeal to a wide audience and thus serve as a motivation for fundamental research also outside of the scientific community. The narrative can for example be connected to the opposition between hierarchy and democracy or to hidden family tensions, as is the case in the following passages, which are taken from two very suc- cessful popular science books written by prominent practising researchers:

[P]article physics seems hierarchical rather than democratic. The four forces span a large range of strengths [...] The various masses in physics also form a hierarchy. [...] This makes a beautiful but puzzling picture. Why is nature so hierarchical? [...] This problem is generally referred to as the hierarchy problem and we hope that the LHC will shed light on it [...] The hierarchy problem contains two challenges. The first is to determine what sets the constants, what makes ratios large. The second is how they stay there. This stability is puz- zling, because quantum mechanics has a strange tendency to pull all the masses together toward the value of the Planck mass. We don’t need to explore why here, but the result is as if some of the dials we use to tune the constants were connected by rubber bands that are steadily tightening. (Smolin 2006: 70–71) Narratives of “Naturalness” in Today’s Particle Physics Community 79

The problem is not that the Standard Model’s predictions disagree with experi- mental results [...] Experiments at the colliders at CERN, SLAC and Fermilab have all confirmed with exquisite precision the Standard Model predictions [...] However, even the most idyllic-seeming families can reveal undercurrents of tensions when investigated more closely. Despite well-coordinated behavior and a happy, harmonious appearance, a devastating hidden family secret can be lurking underneath. The Standard Model has just such a skeleton in the closet. Everything agrees with prediction if you uncritically assume the strength of the electromagnetic force, the strength of the weak force, and the gauge boson masses take the values that have been measured in experiments. But we’ll soon see that the mass parameter (the weak scale mass that determines the elemen- tary particle masses), though very well measured, is ten billion times, or sixteen orders of magnitude, lower than the mass that physicists would expect from general theoretical considerations. Any physicists who would have guessed the value of the weak scale mass based on high-energy theory would have gotten it (and therefore all particle masses) completely wrong. (Randall 2005: 241–242) We may note that in both quotes the authors, although they are patently discussing what the high-energy physics community usually refers to as “naturalness”, avoid using that term and rather speak only of “hierarchy”. This is probably because in common speech “naturalness” is too heavily loaded with other connotations. In Randall’s quote it is also interesting to remark how the physicists’ community is portrayed as so united, that all physicists would share the same guesses.

Myth and Fundamental Physical Research

In the previous pages I have argued that narratives are present in research practices of particle physics and that they fulfil various functions. I now wish to go a step further and suggest that the naturalness narrative displays similarities to myth. It is far from my intention to refer to any specific theory of myths among the many available, and I shall only restrict myself to characterize “myth” through some generic features and functions usually attributed to it (Schrempp 2002, Segal 2004). First of all the naturalness narrative is populated by actors which are not human or human-like beings, but rather abstract, often cosmic entities, as is often the case in creation myths. The pattern of this narrative is very simple, as in myths, but can be told in a large number of more or less complex variants depending on the storyteller and intended audience. Despite punctual critiques, the variants are not perceived by the community as concurring, but rather as parallel, equivalent versions of the same idea. In its simplicity, the naturalness narra- tive has a very strong emotional appeal, both because it excites the intuition 80 Arianna Borrelli and curiosity of scientists and because it promises the discovery of “new physics” to those who accept its premises. In this sense, the myth of natural- ness also represents a shared tradition which holds together and motivates the community and which is never challenged, while at the same time be- ing explicitly characterized as a “prejudice”, “dogma” or a purely “aesthetic” and “philosophical” problem, i.e. all paradigmatic terms denoting the op- posite of what the physics community usually regards as scientific knowl- edge. Sharing the “prejudice” is not logically compelling, but high-energy physicists – and especially theorists – do. The mere fact of describing an allegedly subjective feeling as a “naturalness problem” points in the opposite direction, i.e. towards the most objective element in science: nature. The fact that subcultures of the high-energy physics community can adapt the details of the narrative to their specific needs unifies them also in a practi- cal sense, because it allows them to communicate. Finally, one very impor- tant function of the naturalness myth is to provide a stimulus and flexible guideline for creativity in theoretical research at the individual level. Like many other mythical narratives from fundamental research, this one, too, can appeal to the lay audience and has found its way into popularization. Using the notion of myth to make sense of fundamental physical re- search may at first appear provocative, since “myth” is often regarded as the opposite of scientific knowledge. However, many theories of myth relativize this opposition and let “mythical thinking” appear as a possible comple- ment to the “logical” world view usually associated with modern science. In his monograph “The ancient mythology of modern science” (2012), the scholar of mythology Gregory Schrempp has analyzed a significant amount of popular scientific literature and convincingly argued that one can find there the “strategies characteristic of traditional mythologies”, such as “sto- rytelling, heroizing, speculative origin scenarios, microcosm/macrocosm analogies, bold celestial imagery, and reading of moral lessons in the struc- ture of the cosmos” (Schrempp 2002: 227). Schrempp only studied popular science writing and, although he states that his analysis does not refer to the “core” of science, he argues for a flowing transition between science and its popularization:

[I]n focusing on the popularizing of science I attempt to pick up science at those points, admittedly beyond precise location, at which it starts to become – dominantly – something else, a something else that by virtue of my background in mythology I think I recognize. (Schrempp 2002: 5)

Like Schrempp, Claude Levi-Strauss, too, suggested that popular sci- ence writing shares features with mythology. In the preface to his “Histoire de lynx” (1991, English translation 1995) he wrote that “mythical think- Narratives of “Naturalness” in Today’s Particle Physics Community 81 ing” is found in scientific popularization because it is necessary for the broad public to come to terms with modern science:

We are told that an electron pulsates seven million times per second, can be at once wave and corpuscle, and exists simultaneously here and elsewhere; [...] that at the other end of the cosmic ladder, our universe has a known diameter of ten billion light-years and our galaxy and its neighbors move in it at the speed of six hundred kilometers per second [...] These propositions make sense to the scientists who doesn’t feel the need to translate his formulas into ordinary lan- guage, but any layperson even only slightly prone to intellectual honesty must confess that these are for him empty words, corresponding to nothing concrete or nothing from which he could as much as formulate an idea. Consequently, scientists imagine events to help us bridge the chasm that has formed between microscopic experience and truth inaccessible to ordinary language. Big Bang, expanding universe, and so on all partake of a mythical character to the point at which, as I have shown for myths, thought engaged in one of these construc- tions immediately generates its opposite. Thus, we have notions of a universe that, according to some calculations, is doomed to expand endlessly or, accord- ing to others, to contract to the point of annihilation [...] A supernatural word thus exists again for humans. Though physicists’ calculations and experiments demonstrate its reality, these experiments take on meaning only when tran- scribed in mathematical language. [...] For the man in the street, for all of us, this world remains out of reach, except through the means of ancient modes of thinking that the scientist consents to restore for our use (and sometimes, regrettably, for his own). (Levi-Strauss 1995: xiii-xiv)

Here, Levi-Strauss assumed that scientists would not (or should not) need myths for themselves, but – as shown in section 2 – the claim of a sharp distinction between the “language” of the scientific community and that of the rest of the world is hardly tenable. It appears indeed possible that scientists may need mythical thinking not only to communicate with the broader public, but also to pursue their own trade. It is this thesis which I have tried to make plausible with my analysis of the naturalness narrative. Like a myth, the naturalness story emerged from a complex socio-cultural constellation and came to fulfil various functions. And, like a myth, it may quietly drift into oblivion when the constellation changes. Indeed, after the first run of the LHC failed to deliver evidence of new physics “naturally” expected, some voices started wondering about the naturalness criterion, noting how it had never been regarded as a compelling scientific argument. One may ask whether in the next times a new story will come to take its place. 82 Arianna Borrelli

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Narration, Fiction and the Entangled Human Sciences

Philosophy as an “Introduction to a General Science of Revolution”? On Peter Sloterdijk’s Narrative-Evocative Philosophizing Bernd B ö s e l (Vienna)

In 1953, Wilhelm Schapp’s Entangled in Stories established “entanglement” as a philo- sophical category by showing how every existence is embedded in an inextricable and world-encompassing web of stories. In 1983, with his Critique of Cynical Reason, Peter Sloterdijk gained prominence as a thinker who challenges this situation by passionately looking for ways of de-tanglement through a highly self-aware use of language. As a self-confessed “narrative and evocative philosopher,” he appeals to the human “ability for revolution of self-commencing against being commenced.” This article traces the dramatic core in Sloterdijk’s writings – which culminates in his suggestion to re-define philosophy as an “Introduction to a General Science of Revolution” – and discusses how Sloterdijk deals with the inevitable tensions arising in his stance toward philo- sophical narration.

Entangled in Stories

A short time after the end of the post-war era, a small book was published in Germany under the suggestive title Entangled in Stories – On the Being of Man and Thing. With this work Wilhelm Schapp, a former student of Edmund Husserl, established himself with what can be called an insid- ers’ tip amongst philoso­phers. Accordingly, the book has been reprinted numerous times. In decidedly unacademic fashion, Schapp follows a far- reaching conviction: All human as well as worldly affairs are only accessible through stories. And these accesses do not leave open any exits – all of us are, together but each one singularly, entangled in a plenitude of stories, which themselves are entangled in an inextricable web of background tales, the horizon of which is the Weltgeschichte, the all-encompassing “world story” (in contrast to historians’ “world history”). The image of being entangled, developed by Schapp rather monomania- cally, conveys a certain air of fatefulness. Regarding the year of its publica- tion (1953) and the fact that Schapp does not delve into the contemporary circumstances of the book, one cannot help but wonder in what way per- sonal entanglements in German history gave its author cause to reflect on what he calls “being-entangled-in-stories” (In-Geschichten-Verstricktsein) in general. It is also conspicuous that the book has nothing to say about the possibilities of what could easily be dubbed “detanglement.” Occasionally some hints are dropped as to how an individual learns to cope with his or 88 Bernd Bösel her own entanglements. After all, one can “loosen;” one can “immerse” oneself so deeply in one’s own stories that new stories may arise out of them (Schapp 2012: 126). An “art of storytelling” flashes up at the end of the book (ibid.: 205), like a glimpse into the capability to bond one’s own entanglements with those of others in a way that a feeling of bonding can emerge, within a vision of universal connection. But Schapp credits only apostles and missionaries with this capability; only they are said to know, via narrative nodes, how to “build bridges for accesses to the world story that they are proclaiming” (ibid.: 206). Strikingly, Schapp does not men- tion philosophers or intellectuals here, even though they had, in modern times at the latest, learned this art from men of faith and certainly can be seen as their successors in telling what Lyotard later on called “grand nar- ratives.” Apart from Hegel as the only exception, Schapp does not trust intellectuals to be able to address a “‘We’ that is included in a world story.” Those who wish to learn something about grand narratives – probably even with a revolutionary purpose – will be disappointed by Schapp’s book. Nevertheless, if one takes seriously the philosophical primacy of being- entangled-in-stories, one is obliged to ask the question of how and when the being-entangled of those who are doing philosophy is being addressed (and, moreover, the possible common entanglements of author and read- er). Might it not for good reasons be said that philosophical texts only get significant reception when they give an audience insight into their own entanglements? And probably even point to possible ways out of them? A philosophical work that desires to be read and understood must, at least in one register, be able to emphatically tell its audience something about hu- mans’ situativeness, which more often than not seems desperate and with- out alternatives. It has to be able to give something to think – otherwise it will be put aside as something irrelevant. But at the same time, an author might (as it is common practice in philosophy) keep his or her own nar- rative situation implicit or tell so little about it that next to nothing is re- vealed. Analytical philosophers tend to blame the common use of language for the feeling of being-entangled. The clarification and simplification of everyday speech would then be the mandatory remedy – but one side effect would be the loss of the capability to narrate, because narration has a lot to do with inexactitudes, imponderabilities, ambiguities. To cut this dimen- sion out of narration would lead to a situation where people would have as little to tell about their lives as those personal data sheets that we all know from job applications. Apart from that, contemporary philosophers usually restrain illumina- tion of their own being-entangled to the utmost impersonal: the “desid- erata” of discur­sive work, the “problems” and “questions” that can never be On Peter Sloterdijk’s Narrative-Evocative Philosophizing 89 answered exhaustive­ly, so that naturally there always remains something to be said and done. About the deeper motivations of those who are thus talk- ing and writing, next to nothing is ever revealed.

Confessions

In contrast to this, Nietzsche’s remark on how every great philosophy is an involuntary confession of its author (KSA 5, 19) might inspire a vision: Would an even greater philosophy not make this confession as explicit as possible? But what would have to be done to provide such insights to fellow travelers while a philosopher is still on his or her way? Would it have to be some kind of non-confessional theory of confession? Instead of returning to the usual suspects who have elevated their willingness to confess to the level of philosophical virtue (Augustine, Rousseau), I will take a look into the work of Peter Sloterdijk, who has much to offer regarding the issue of philosophical narration. His writing style differs massively from that of his academic colleagues, as it often incorporates rhetoric and literary devices, therefore lacking the methodical zeal or analytic strictness that is common in German as well as in English academia. In Neither Sun nor Death he states: “As far as I can, I will defend myself against the obligation to choose between philosophy and poetry” (2011: 158). Fittingly, his first big suc- cess, Critique of Cynical Reason, was followed by a philosophical novel (Der Zauberbaum); a few years later he co-edited (with Thomas Macho) a two- volume reader of Gnosticism which deliberately mixed ancient and modern as well as theoretical and literary texts; and the second volume of his Spheres trilogy, Globes, is sometimes regarded as another philosophical novel inso- far as it tells the story of the “globe” as a metaphysical figure that lived a long and prospering life in Western thought until its demise in modernity. Apart from that, Sloterdijk organizes his public lectures like they were liter- ary texts. Nevertheless, I will not give an account of the tales that Sloterdijk has told and retold in his many books, because this would inevitably lead into questions of how truthful Sloterdijk arranges historical facts or how fictional he gets when he seemingly just relates little known details from the history of thought; and as important as these questions may be, they could not be answered appropriately in just one short text. I also will not account for the crossing of the literary and the philosophical in Sloterdijk’s texts.1 Instead, I want to explore how Sloterdijk uses his abilities as a philosophical writer to evoke some kind of passionate response from his readers.

1 For this topic, see Efraín Kristal (2012). 90 Bernd Bösel

When in 1988 Sloterdijk held his Frankfurt Lectures on Poetics, he coined the term “coming-to-the-world” to address the specifically human difficulty of intervening into an ongoing narrative as “a notorious late start- er.” It arises primarily out of the fact that humans only belatedly develop consciousness and the faculty of speech, which results in an inability to narrate or even recall anything about their own beginnings:

‘Man’ is the animal who narrates, because he is that being which is sentenced to begin anew and first has to orientate himself in the world, without being able to actively witness his ‘real’ beginnings. It is his fate to be unable to begin with himself as the speechless animal that once got wind of openness, and instead to only adopt himself from that moment on when I am given to me by language. Therefore he plugs the starting hole with stories and starts getting entangled in stories – because he is that being which does not possess his beginnings. (1988: 39; translated by the author)

Without referring to Schapp, Sloterdijk uses the term “entanglement” as well2 – and shortly after this passage he conveys something about his own entangle­ments in the political and atmospheric history of post-war Germany, which leads to his existential statement that one can be forsaken by tradition. In Versprechen auf Deutsch, he elaborates further on this when he confesses how the survival of the “tonal tradition of Hitler’s state” in the early years of the post-war era (Sloterdijk was born in 1947) made and still makes him feel like he actually was a war child: “I believe that post-war children like me feel the gnostic shock more vividly than those who were delivered gently and nurtured calmly – because their mothers carry less aftershock of escape and agony with them” (1990: 17). This unsettledness may have led to a general distrust of worldly affairs. In the 1970s, Sloterdijk read through masses of German biographies, thus “learning to link my personal zero hour to the national and world texts both in forward and backward directions – very loosely at first, of course, but still sufficiently to allow for a vague localization of my own life within the contem­po­rary course of events” (ibid.: 49). This ability of narrative connection opens up the chance to maybe not quite escape one’s being-entangled, but to transfer it into wider circles. In the case, however, that one feels entirely abandoned by any agree- able collective history that would allow for a serene commitment, there inevitably has to arise a passion of beginning anew and by oneself, says

2 Also, a chapter of You must change your life is subtitled “How the Spirit of Perfection Entangles the Practising in Stories” (2013: 243–270), again without any reference to Schapp. On Peter Sloterdijk’s Narrative-Evocative Philosophizing 91

Sloterdijk. For him, the resistance against “toxic traditions” sets free “the greatest and most dangerous quality” of humans: the “ability for revolution of self-commencing against being commenced” (1988: 46). This personal revolution struggles for an atmospheric detoxication or, as it might be put with Schapp in mind, for an inversion of entanglement into detanglement – not through outward action, but the power of narration. Not to repeat anymore what common language wants us to say, but to speak differently, to tell things differently, from different perspectives and in different voices. To put language on a different track, so that life itself may take a new turn.

The Renaissance of Narrative-Evocative Philosophizing

Concerning this narrative orientation of philosophy, Plato set the early and still holding standards. And once again it was Nietzsche who most clearly analyzed what the Platonic dialogue had accomplished to gain its opulence. Basically it had absorbed all earlier literary genres – “produced by blend- ing all existent styles and forms, it hovers in between tale, lyric and drama, between poetry and prose, and thereby has also broken through that old strict law of a consistent form of language” (KSA 1, 631; translated by the author). When Nietzsche, moreover, argues that Plato thereby invented the genre of the novel,3 one has to take into account his strong dislike of this literary form. In his view, poetry had to bear the expense of this Platonic variety of styles and forms; from then on, dialectics prevailed, and what that meant for philosophical writing styles is widely known. In Neither Sun nor Death, Sloterdijk ties in with these Nietzschean mus- ings and bemoans the depletion of philosophical language as well. Further- more (and departing from Nietzsche’s idiosyncrasy and instead following a hint from Georg Lukács), he describes the novel as “a form of speech for those who don’t possess the truth” – more paradoxically, prose is sup- posed to “say the truth about our condition in the absence of truth, or at least in view of a blocked access to it” (1999: 99). From Plato via Lukács to Sloterdijk and beyond, we can find a negative conception of truth; and in order to cope with (and maybe enjoy) this negativity one has to resort to a narrative genre that is defined precisely by its formal and stylistic plurality. And because there is no truth to be found by this method and moreover the search for it transforms into the genuine purpose, one can only enforce

3 Compare Margaret Anne Doody, The True Story of the Novel (1996), and her adop- tion of Nietzsche’s hypothesis. 92 Bernd Bösel truthfulness, meaning some certainty that one is searching in an appropri- ate way – for example by venturing into openness instead of remaining in one’s all too homely enclosures. Platonic revolution, as Sloterdijk brings the discussion to the point, corresponds to the search or quest as a form of life. This trope of a life-filling search can help to clarify the narrative function of philosophy. Without any doubt a distinction is necessary to keep philo- sophical narrations apart from literary and historical ones. A promising cue can be found in Sloterdijk’s essay on Nietzsche, Thinker on Stage. In the book-opening “Note,” a thesis on the transformative power of philosophi- cal (self-)illumination is presented. It might be extended to the power of narrative philosophizing in general:

If the dramatic structure of enlightenment is borne in mind – if, therefore, rational thought assimilates its own phenomenological characteristic into its reflections – the tiresome theoretical self-misunderstanding that characterizes modern philosophy will collapse. […] If enlightenment does occur, it does so not through a dictatorship of lucidity but as the dramatic self-illumination of existence. (1989: xxv–xxvi)

The dramatic turn that Sloterdijk aims at here seems to have much in common with the performative turn in the humanities and social sciences. Dramaturgy of course has been an intrinsic part of philosophy from its beginnings. Plato’s dialogues did not remain solitary cases; Aristotle wrote dialogues as well (unfortunately they are all lost), and in Latin antiquity as well as in the Renaissance and even at the heights of the Enlightenment, a multitude of dialogical texts can be found, some of them written by excep- tional authors like Giordano Bruno or Lord Shaftesbury and still entirely readable.4 Nevertheless, the dramatic impetus seems to have been lost in most of these examples. Plato’s standard remained unmatched, with one possible exception, namely Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra. In fact, its title character is not only, as it is repeatedly said, Nietzsche’s “mouthpiece.” Much more than that, Zarathustra is conceived as a suffering and acting and decidedly dramatic character that goes through a complex develop- ment.5 Now Sloterdijk wants us to understand “enlightenment” in general as a “dramatic self-illumination” of mind and of consciously lived existence – and at least in this sense he has been sticking to the concept of enlighten-

4 For a history of philosophical dialogue as a genre, see Hösle (2006). 5 For a concise interpretation of Zarathustra’s “drama” with a focus on performance theory, see Böhler (2010). On Peter Sloterdijk’s Narrative-Evocative Philosophizing 93 ment from Critique of Cynical Reason up to his newest writings. Only if conceived as an act of illumination, as a psychodrama of a life that bethinks its surroundings, its time, its entanglements in stories, does enlightenment stop being misunderstood as that long-gone and deservedly perished era. If one accepts this description, then one has to conclude that philosophy, as the main discipline of Enlightenment, was especially concerned (and has remai­ned so until now) with enabling these dramatic self-illuminations. And because this doubtlessly is valid even for pre-enlightenment philoso- phy, the concept of enlightenment should even more so be released from its historical restraints. Sloterdijk’s writings are so deeply pervaded by this motif of (philosophi- cal, not esoterical) awakening of the mind, that it permeates even when he seemingly only picks up a discourse to weave it further or to give it a new turn. That one can, for better or for worse, feel affected by Sloterdijk’s texts is not at all a random effect that comes or goes with a certain topic; on the contrary, these polyvalent excitations are due to a conscious strategy of writing that has to be called evocative in the fullest sense of the term.6 Aiming less for a specific effect than provocation does, evocation allows its audience a much wider space of affective vibrancy. At the least, and rather vaguely, it calls forth the feeling of being affected much more deeply than one can explain or elaborate on after just one reading. The purpose of narrative-evocative philosophizing therefore can be de- termined as enabling a dramatic self-illumination that survives the dura- tion of the narration itself – thereby extending to life itself, probably even transforming life. In You must change your life Sloterdijk finally made explicit what he calls the “absolute imperative” that lies at the core of his evoca- tions. Whoever might still be asking why Sloterdijk, among contemporary philosophers, is enjoying such enormous success would be well advised to grapple with the stakes, rules and risks of such a deliberately evocative writ- ing routine.

Philosophical Re-Tuning and Gnostic Dramatization

It may have become obvious by now that the narrative virtue of Platonic writing resides not only in its stylistic finesse and dramaturgic brilliance, but also in its intention of affecting its audience in such a way that they will choose to adopt the philosophical way of life that is fulfilling precisely

6 I am following Sloterdijk’s self-description as a representative of the “narrative and evocative philosopher” type (1999: 294). 94 Bernd Bösel because it never comes to an end but rather remains an infinite quest. In contrast to a long tradition of conceiving of philosophy as discursive mas- tership exclusively, several authors like Paul Rabbow in Germany or Pierre Hadot and Michel Foucault in France have called into attention that phi- losophy in its beginnings was thought of and lived as an ethically, morally and politically motivated form of life. Sloterdijk frequently refers to these authors in order to fight against the analytical and methodical hegemony of academic philosophy; and like few German philosophers have ever done before, he emphasizes that gaiety is the essential mood of a life-conforming philosophy. That this is not just true for the Hellenistic era becomes ap- parent when we focus on the political responsibility of the citizens of the Greek polis. Especially the epochal founding of the Academy by Plato has to be understood as the paragon for the philosophical project that Sloterdijk now defines as “civilizational pedagogy.” Its goal was nothing less than to “invoke a change of mind and spirit” in order to “transform confused chil- dren of the city into adult cosmopolitans, intrinsic barbarians into civilized men of law, inebriated opinion holders into sober friends of knowledge, miserable slaves of passion into joyful masters of their souls” (2009b: 23). And this cosmopolitan maturity was only to be gained if one would subject oneself to a skillful conversion or transformation program – Plato called this periagogé, the turning around of the soul.7 Nevertheless, this program was still based on a rather rigid ontology that would remain indifferent to the scale of human projects. This only changed with the triumph of the grand narratives of Gnosticism. Sloterdijk addressed this topic around 1990, and nowhere else is his attentiveness to evocative speaking and writing more clearly visible than here. No wonder then that he delved into Gnostic texts in order to find (psycho-)techniques that could be adopted for a narrative and evocative philosophy. In his in- troduction to Weltrevolution der Seele (co-edited with cultural scientist Thomas Macho), Sloterdijk points out that “it was the oriental tales of fall and salvation, of error and illumination” that forced the rather static Greek ontology “to open up to drama” (1993: 39). Sloterdijk interprets this as a revolution within the history of thought insofar as the first philosophy of event arose by it. Only with Gnosticism was a world-en­compassing drama, in which at the same time the individual plays a decisive role, moved into the focus of the philosophical way of life. Now the shaping of one’s self was not just something individually joyful

7 Sloterdijk (2013: 300) refers to Pierre Hadot, who transferred the term “epistrophé” from its original religious meaning to this philosophical context. On Peter Sloterdijk’s Narrative-Evocative Philosophizing 95 and politically valuable; much more than that, the conversion of the in- dividual improved the winning chance of the constructive forces on the whole. It might not be entirely surprising that this revolutionary interpre- tive pattern was remembered in the technological era with its massive and potentially irreparable intrusions into the ecosphere. Therefore Sloterdijk and Macho could draw on many contemporary neognostic sources and find in them a classical narrative structure that is applicable for modern spiritual conditions: that is, the existential three-stage tale of fall, conversion and rise of the soul – within a world that has become a problem in itself. Tellingly, the very real fear of anthropogenic world destruction stands at the center of Critique of Cynical Reason, the work that made Sloterdijk famous. Moreover, this fear can be seen as the motivational core of this polemically charged, grand-scale challenge to contemporary human and social sciences. Obviously following Günther Anders in this, an Austrian philosopher of technology who himself wrote in a narrative-evocative style, Sloterdijk meditates on the question of which attitude philosophers can adopt when having to accept the atom bomb (and with it the political- military “doomsday machine” as a whole) as the new agent of history (see 1987: 128–133). Reflecting these dire circumstances leads to a reckoning with Western tradition. Sloterdijk diagnoses “rampant irrationalism” here and attributes it to a “world-historical process of induration” (ibid.: 324f.), which alone made the suicidal logic of escalation possible. Only a new real- ity principle, based on a process of softening and relaxation, could point a way out of this. With regard to the paragon of counter-hegemonic kyni- cism – that is, Diogenes of Sinope – Sloterdijk coins a term that only at first might seem paradoxical: “enthusiastic tranquility” (ibid.: 541). With the vision and the practicing of a salutary kynicism in mind that is opposed to modern cynical induration and embitterment, Sloterdijk points a way to a conversion or transformation of the soul. Overcoming modern cynicism clearly is the goal of this periagogic drama. It is not by chance that one can find in each and every of Sloterdijk’s texts ironical verbal barbs against theories that in his intuition are the result of embitterment and resentment (and so many of them are aimed at the Frankfurt School that one has to ask if maybe his own resentments are raising their hands). For this task of detecting resentful atmospheres especially in the highest floors of mind, Nietzsche has given us the defining cues. And because of this, the dramatic purpose of Sloterdijk’s philosophical writing can be decoded as a continuation of Nietzsche’s psychological intentions – that is, to promote the overcoming of resentment, so that one day we may breath, feel and think in a truly unburdened way. 96 Bernd Bösel

Revolutions and Open Ends

In his interview with Carlos Oliveira, Selbstversuch, Sloterdijk determines philo­sophy in a passing remark (that is nevertheless congruent to his other texts) as an “introduction to a general science of revolution” (1996: 64). To this motif of a fundamental turnover he has stayed true ever since. You must change your life proves this not only by its title but also in all of its lengthy content. However one can get the impression that the topic of revolution has now been completely nar­rowed down to the individualistic level, as the image of the “planet of the practi­sing” shows. It remains quite unclear how this self-occupa­tion is thought to bring about the global solidarity that Sloterdijk frequently wishes for. The collective “relaxation,” still demanded as a remedy in the Criti­que of Cynical Reason, has now given way to an in- dividualized “vertical” self-exertion of constantly reach­ing for higher and better results. It is hard to decide whether this is still subver­sive or whether this performance orientation does not rather support the neo­libe­ral restruc- turing of the relations between world and self. In any case, this ethics of ceaseless self-improvement is a long way from Diogenes’ cynical way of life.8 So is there a growing timidity to be detected to really go through with revolutionary passion, apart from individualistic life-changings? Often Sloter­dijk’s texts end in rhetorical brilliance while remaining ethically and politically on vague and undecided terms. Symptomatic for this is the clos- ing of the Spheres trilogy. After about 2500 pages of text, it ends with a fictional “Conversation about the Oxymoron” between a macro-historian, a literary critic and a theologian, all of whom can be discerned as aspects of their inventor. While they are waiting for the trilogy’s author who sure enough, like Godot, will not appear, these figures raise professional con- cerns over the Spheres project. They agree upon the literary critic’s assess- ment who feels that the trilogy’s poetic verve goes along with a “cooperation with skepticism”:

A critique of prose is put into operation that expands to a critique of the 20th century altogether. Was it not the faulted teachers of the saeculum with their prosaic discourses of the masses, of decisive battles and the final aims of history who helped prepare such pragmatic exterminisms as would become the epoch’s distinctive mark? (2004: 862; translated by the author)

The power of prose is assessed as potentially ultra-destructive, which is why there might be good reasons to prefer “a cool style.” Does one of the ad-

8 Compare van Tuinen (2012). On Peter Sloterdijk’s Narrative-Evocative Philosophizing 97 mittedly most potent writers of philosophical prose living admit here to a feeling of uneasiness in regard to this power and step back from it in order not to unwittingly incite new extremisms? The phrase “a cool style” might be surprising, because Sloterdijk’s prose does not seem cool at all within the environment of German theory production. But of course he means the comparison to evocative philo- sophical prose of the times when philosophies of history still made history. Nowadays one might rather speak of (to adopt the rhetorical figure of the oxymoron that stands at the center of the fictional conversation) a “warm- cool” style in regard to Sloterdijk’s prose, who at most times knows how to temper his language. If one also were to moderate revolutionary pathos to an oxymoron, one might land at either “conser­vative-revolutionary” or “revolutionary-conservative.” It may be possible to dedu­ce from the differ- ence between these word combinations something about Sloterdijk’s politi- cal stance. There was some controversy after his speech about the “human zoo” in 1999, when some critics tried to attribute Sloterdijk with a fondness for a new kind of conservative revolution. But a sober re-reading of the text in question makes it hard to sustain these accusations. What might rather be appropriate is the adjective “revolutionary-conservative,” if one is to un- derstand by it the adherence to the aims of the liberal phase of the French revolution. To adhere to the “communist hypothesis,” like Alain Badiou (2010) does amongst others, is far from Sloterdijk’s intention, as Rage and Time clearly shows. Thus, the designation of You must change your life as an “Enlightenment-conservative enterprise” (2013: 6) can also be applied to the whole of Sloterdijk’s writings. Concluding the opus magnum with a “Conversation about the Oxymo- ron” certainly serves a purpose; it certainly gives a hint at how Sloterdijk organizes revolutionary passions as a writer. The theologian embodies the gnostic impulse that may be said to lie at the heart of all religions: to trans- form one’s life and then stick to it. But Sloterdijk does not put much trust in religions; in fact he defines them in You must change your life as misinter- preted spiritual systems of exercise (see 2013: 83–108). One must therefore contain their coercive trans­for­mational impetus in worldly immanence. This means that they have to be under­stood as approaches to deal with the problems of human advancement. In order to describe these developmental risks, the macro-historian is needed, who in turn has to rely on narrative language. And because everything depends here on how the audience of this narrative description is affected, there has got to be some­one who is able to give professional criticism: so the literary critic enters the stage. It’s not a long way then from religion to feuilleton. Gnostic-revolutionary pa- thos is historicized and then aesthetically judged – and therefore it is not 98 Bernd Bösel surprising that the real author of this philosophical grand narrative is un- able to appear authentically. Accordingly, the grand narrative does not lead into clear political stanc- es. Instead it conveys a sharpened feeling that globalization also means that we have to increasingly be aware of the atmospheres that we live in and shape constantly by our way of living. Without going into details – which apparently will have to be done by a new generation of thinkers – Sloterdijk does give strong hints at the necessity of what he tentatively (and follow- ing some fascinating remarks by ano­ther border crosser of literature and philosophy, Hermann Broch) calls an “ethics of atmospheres” (2004: 190). A central piece of this ethics would be the detec­tion of “toxic atmospheres” (ibid.: 189) that are effused by political or mass-medial propaganda or by collective contagion processes. As Nigel Thrift fitting­ly puts it, this project is concerned with “the instigation of regimes in detoxi­ca­tion” (2012: 142). Sloterdijk suggests that this atmospheric ethics is the only way by which the traditional forms of ethics might regain their vigor (2004: 88).9 Again, this detoxication process has, at least from a philosophical point of view, much to do with the power of narration: of not telling the same and possib­ly toxic stories over and over again. But this power has to be evoked. Now Slo­ter­dijk understands more than most writers of his generation how to organize his philosophical narrations up to a point where his audience may feel addressed personally, like he was saying: All of this has contributed to your existence. In his best texts he inspires the feeling that each and every one is not only affected by this story, but moreover is invited to intervene in it, to tell it forth and to give it its long overdue narrative turnover; in the terminology of the Spheres project, it’s all about reminding ourselves of our ability to actively create (atmo)spheres of living, to create new spaces so that we might not feel as confined as we do when we just reflect our entanglements in stories that we did not yet have a chance to tell ourselves. And it is precisely in this sense that Sloterdijk uses and evokes what can be called an individualized revolutionary pathos. For his vision of philosophy as a general science of revolution, this may be a good starting point; but the

9 He admits that the standard set by this “ethics of atmospheres” should be applied to his book itself, which of course might be extended to all of his writings. Unfor- tunately the taxation debate that Sloterdijk started a few years ago (2009a) does not give a good example of atmospheric sensibility, as his translator Wieland Hoban (2012) demonstrates in a well-informed analysis. It is also one of the rare occasions when Sloterdijk tried to affirmatively pin the term “revolution” down to a political project. He was rather ill-advised to do so, which in retrospect gives his skeptical creed at the end of the Spheres trilogy an even stronger emphasis. On Peter Sloterdijk’s Narrative-Evocative Philosophizing 99 question remains of who will deliver a full-scale revolutionary theory that can also be put into practice under the prevailing conditions in the age of globalization.

References

Badiou, Alain (2010): The Communist Hypothesis(London: Verso). Böhler, Arno (2010): ‘The Time of Drama in Nietzsche and Deleuze: A Life as Performative Interaction’, Deleuze Studies, vol. 4 (2010), issue 1 (Edinburgh University Press), 70–82. Doody, Margaret Anne (1996): The True Story of the Novel (New Bruns- wick: Rutgers University Press). Hoban, Wieland (2012): ‘The Language of Give and Take: Sloterdijk’s Sty- listic Methods’, in Sloterdijk Now, ed. by Stuart Elden (Cambridge: Pol- ity Press), pp. 114–132. Hösle, Vittorio (2006): Der philosophische Dialog (Munich: Beck). Kristal, Efraín (2012): ‘Literature in Sloterdijk’s Philosophy’, in Sloterdijk Now, ed. by Stuart Elden (Cambridge: Polity Press), pp. 147–164. Nietzsche, Friedrich (KSA): Sämtliche Werke. Kritische Studienausgabe in 15 Bänden, ed. by Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari (Munich: dtv 1980). Schapp, Wilhelm (2012 [1953]): In Geschichten verstrickt. Zum Sein von Ding und Mensch (Freiburg im Breisgau: Klostermann). English title: Entangled in Stories – On the Being of Man and Thing. Sloterdijk, Peter (1987 [1983]): Critique of Cynical Reason (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press). — (1988): Zur Welt kommen – Zur Sprache kommen (Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp). — (1989 [1986]): Thinker on Stage: Nietzsche’s Materialism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press). — (1990): Versprechen auf Deutsch. Rede über das eigene Land (Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp). — (1993): ‚Die wahre Irrlehre‘, in Weltrevolution der Seele. Eine Lese- und Arbeitsbuch der Gnosis, ed. by Thomas H. Macho and Peter Sloterdijk (Munich: Artemis & Winkler), pp. 17–54. — and Oliveira, Carlos (1996): Selbstversuch (Munich: Hanser). — and Heinrichs, Hans-Jürgen (1999): Die Sonne und der Tod. Dialogische Untersuchungen (Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp). — (2004): Sphären III. Schäume (Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp). 100 Bernd Bösel

— (2009a): ‘Die Revolution der gebenden Hand’, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, 13 June 2009. — (2009b): Philosophische Temperamente (Munich: Diederichs). — (2010 [2006]): Rage and Time. A Psychopolitical Investigation (New York: Columbia University Press). — (2011 [2009]): Neither Sun nor Death, with Hans-Jürgen Heinrichs (New York: Semiotext(e)). — (2013 [2009]): You must change your life (Cambridge: Polity Press.) Thrift, Nigel (2012): ‘Peter Sloterdijk and the Philosopher’s Stone’, in Sloter­ dijk Now, ed. by Stuart Elden (Cambridge: Polity Press), pp. 133–146. Tuinen, Sjoerd van (2012): ‘From Psychopolitics to Cosmopolitics: The Problem of Ressentiment’, in Sloterdijk Now, ed. by Stuart Elden (Cam- bridge: Polity Press), pp. 37–57. Narrative Persuasion and Narrative Irritation in Psychotherapy Biographical Narratives, Deferred Dramaturgy and Narrative Affirmation Brigitte Boothe (Zurich)

Biographical narrators in psychotherapy reckon with affirmative reactions of their au- dience to their personal perspective. Psychoanalysis is sensitive to narrative persuasion and prepared to explore in depth linguistic processes of representation, as well as com- municative enactments. The personal perspective communicated by a patient through her biographical depictions may produce in the interlocutor a sense of alienation and aversion rather than of goodwill and empathy. In this case, the patient and the therapist are faced with the task of using this potential for irritation as a space of taking chances.

For the formation of an auspicious relationship in psychotherapy, it is cru- cial that the therapist is in a position to take on other perspectives. One of the therapist’s competencies is being able to enter into the narrative cosmos of the patient. The patient’s narratives pertain to the narrator, who speaks on her own account. The narrator brings about the imaginative act of appro- priation, whilst at the same time claiming to remain true to the facts. The “autobiographical pact” (Lejeune 1989) is in operation in this account. The narrator evokes biographical experiences in deferred dramaturgy; in doing so, her preferences and what she considers relevant are asserted. Through transferring the listener into the setting, stories set up an initial dynamic, opening up a horizon of expectation for listeners and including him in the progress of a sequential development that is headed towards a more or less favorable ending. The listeners are invited to put himselfes in the ‘then and there’ of what is being narrated. The narrator seeks to win the other for his or her cause and has her or him share the narrator’s value judgements. This is made evident in the following example of a narrative of outrage (Günth­ ner 2000 has carried out an extensive analysis of the communication of ac- cusation and indignation), produced by the psychotherapy patient Amalie in the 221st psychotherapy session. Amalie (118th narrative, 221st therapy session, Zürchner Erzählarchiv jakob, Original Ulm Textbank):

A Stupid Schoolmaster

I was at a concert yesterday evening and I was sitting there next to this stupid schoolmaster who knows exactly who I am 102 Brigitte Boothe

firstly he does sport at our school comes to the teachers’ lounge, greets us and and recently he was also in a study group with me as well and yesterday evening he was spreading his tentacles in all directions and by chance I was sitting next to him but he acted as if he didn’t know me I was so annoyed by this that I moved somewhere else after the interval it was quite crowded at the front there anyway then I got so annoyed that the whole concert was a wash I didn’t want to stay went home and put a record on I got more out of it

Right at the beginning, Amalie disqualifies the person sitting next to her at the concert as a stupid schoolmaster. The stupid schoolmaster is im- polite: yesterday evening he was spreading his tentacles in all directions, but he ignored Amalie, although he should know her. And he is egotistical, since he who is spreading his tentacles in all directions is, at the same time, granting an audience through his assured demeanor; albeit as a laughable tentacled creature. Amalie’s narrative is an appeal to her listener to expend goodwill, resonance and sympathetic partisanship. She demands that her portrayal of the biographical event be believed. In everyday verbal narra- tives, listeners usually express affirmation through short nonverbal signals of sympathy and emotional support. In the professional communication of psychotherapy, and in particular of psychoanalysis, there is an obligation to exercise therapeutic neutrality and abstinence; the restraint demanded in psychoanalysis compels the therapist to, by and large, renounce the affirma- tive resonance habitual to everyday interaction. Stories that express outrage make this renunciation of communicative resonance more difficult; even Amalie’s psychoanalyst communicates a subtle affirmative echo. The narra- tive is presented by the narrator as authentic, and this claim to authenticity is discreetly taken up by the analyst. The latter’s communicative reserve makes it possible, at the opportune moment, to create distance to the narra- tive partisanship so that the narrator can respond to her own constructions in a reflexive manner. Narrators reckon with the willingness of their audience to share their personal perspective. This narrative opinion-forming process is oriented to- wards the egocentric impulse. It arises from an intuition about what the world would be like if there was strong support for one’s own concerns Narrative Persuasion and Narrative Irritation in Psychotherapy 103

(Boothe 2011). Narrative transformation of the world has taken place. The narrative appropriation of what has happened points to a Then and There that are configured, retrospectively, from an egocentric perspective and converted into representational dynamics.

The Scenic Structure of Experience, the Narrative Turn in Psychoanalysis and Discursive Realities

From early on, psychoanalysis was sensitive to the narrative appropriation of that which had taken place as a construction of experience. Through de- tailed research into the literature on Freud’s works (1897) in the context of the so-called ‘seduction theory’ and its relativization since 1897, Flitner & Merle (1989) found that ‘psychic reality’ and the ‘scenic structure of experi- ence’ were relevant as terms as early as the 1890s (Flitner & Merle 1989: 252). At the – psychologically and psychophysically important – level of regulating one’s own condition and cognitive organization, narrative struc- turing is a central moment (Sarbin 1986: 9). Psychoanalysis cleared the path for the complex analysis of linguistic processes of representation, as well as for interactive and communicative enactments. Schafer (1995) and Spence (1982) became the most prominent representatives of the narrative turn in psychoanalysis. Rather than factual or historical truth, the per- sonal or ‘psychic’ truth of the narrator moved to become the focus of thera- peutic attention. This standpoint has certain parallels to the constructivist paradigm: ‘In the discourse of social science and culture studies in recent years’, Deppermann (1998, 86; here translated by Joanna White) writes, ‘modernity’s fundamental difference between … “authentic” and “staged”, “real” and “fictional”, “sincere” and “insincere” increasingly [loses] its clear contours …’ In constructivism, ‘discursive realities are created that do not reflect past facts or psychic conditions.’ A constructivist understanding of psychotherapeutic action would favour the primacy of ‘psychic truth’ when dealing with patients’ narratives. Indeed, ‘discursive realities’ as psychic truth are granted a key position in the therapeutic conversation. The discur- sive representational space is then the construction of reality that is binding for the therapist-patient dyad. Whilst for the professional listener – psychologist or psychoanalyst – the biographical narrative may refer back to the author, for the narrator it is a valid portrayal of her life world. Usually narrators try to remain true to the facts; something also demanded by the listener. The readiness on the part of the listener to believe and provide resonance cannot be stretched at 104 Brigitte Boothe will. Its exploitation will be taken badly. But in everyday communication or in the psychotherapeutic context it is rare for narrators to engage in explicit self-monitoring as they narrate, meaning that self-initiated corrections are seldom; as are those initiated by others, since the therapeutic listener can- not check adherence to the facts, not having been witness to the factual reference. In psychotherapy, the narrator’s mental state and motivational dynam- ics evoke interest in the professional listener. The professional listener reck- ons with defence mechanisms on the part of the narrator as a response to a psychic challenge (Müller-Pozzi 2002, 20); defence mechanisms sabotage a patient’s readiness to perceive something, actualize it through memory, and act on in a goal-oriented way. These unconscious processes serve to preserve or restore mental, psychosocial and psychophysical functioning and supply temporary protection from adverse stimuli. Defence provides temporary relief, but diminishes the successful exploration of the self and the situ- ation, and does not eliminate the tension that arises from conflict. With the aid of the defence mechanism of devaluing the schoolmaster as stupid, Amalie avoids the potential pain of confronting the antagonist’s disregard and indifference. Psychoanalytically oriented therapists listen to a narrator’s narrative constructions and to the ‘discursive realities’ they create. However, the ‘reli- ability’ of narrators and narratives also matters (Fludernik 2005; Nünning, A. 1999; Nünning, V. 2010; Zerweck 2004), in particular when, in the context of unreliable narratives, the professional therapist-patient relation- ship is subject to irritation and strain.

Alienating Narratives

Narratives can sometimes provoke distanced responses such as scepticism, mistrust or disbelief. Here the narrative is under suspicion. This is tradition- ally the case with narratives by people who are considered to be paranoid. Their narratives, in which they are persecuted, stalked and caused egregious harm, are considered so implausible that they cannot be believed. Narra- tives by people whose experiences go against expectation to such a great extent are assessed as delusions, as misconstructions of reality. Narratives of extraordinary experiences, for example exceptionally early childhood memories, meet with a critical reception. Spectacular and scandalizing bio- graphical narratives may make a great impression, are revealing about the mental, but not the factual world of the narrator. In empirical research into credibility (Nawratil 2006), cases of informal conversation from everyday Narrative Persuasion and Narrative Irritation in Psychotherapy 105 life or the psychotherapeutic context rarely feature. Narrative, as a genre of communication, also plays no systematic role. It should be mentioned that, as shown by current research findings (Nawratil 2006, 217–220), highly developed expertise and long years of professional experience are also no guarantee against errors of judgement.

A Scandal and its Unsettling Influence

The following will deal with an initial session with a psychotherapist that carries a high potential for irritation and alienation. The patient later can- cels the second scheduled session without giving a specific reason for the cancellation. For this reason, the narrative thematization of the self by the person seeking advice is only revealing in parts. The sixty-year old woman with the pseudonym Martha consulted the psychoanalytic unit of the uni- versity’s Psychological Institute because she was going through a crisis. She told her story, which was lacking in plausibility and transparency, in a non- stop, agitated narrative flow. The protagonist and scandalous figure was a male antagonist who made an impression as both morally dubious and as fascinating. Outrage communication also played a large role here. The therapist responded to the speech and narrative offered in part in a reserved manner and at a sceptical distance. In the participants’ communication, no fully developed ‘coordinated action’ took place, i.e. agreeing on and real- izing the shared conversational undertaking, namely a ‘psychotherapeutic first consultation’, as a joint project (Deppermann 2007, 8).

The opening At the start, the interlocutors discuss financial and administrative matters. The therapist leads the conversation here. She then explicitly proceeds to call on the patient (P) to explain the information taken in the secretary’s office and written down on the institute’s registration form, information which the therapist has not yet understood. The therapist (T) quotes the notes made by secretary word for word.

T: so and now – perhaps we can get on to? speaking? about you? – and namely, um, you talked? to the secretary? P: hmm T: and there you said, well, I, we have this short form? P: you have T: and you wrote a little bit on there about why you have come to +our P: hmm+ 106 Brigitte Boothe

T: office? +and on it P: hmm+ T: it says that you: um, are concerned! because an acquaintance of your husband you thought was dead? P: hmm T: has made himself at home in your flat P: yes something like that +you could say T: hmm+ sounds to me? not quite clear? P: yes:? it +is T: and so I would+ be happy? if you could expand on that a little bit.

Right at the outset the therapist expresses non-understanding, inviting her to expand on it. This establishes a definite reference frame for Martha. She acknowledges the task, launches into the declaration with well! and declares that the situation has affected her in the extreme. That which has taken hold of her took place on a specific date, st1 July, when her life was turned upside down – how it happened remains open at first. The cause was the male person cited as being the acquaintance of her husband she thought was dead. The therapist says that to me? what she has heard is not quite clear? She does not say: That sounds interesting, you are making me curious! That would be an option when reacting in a fascinated manner to the scandal, as in gossip (Bergmann 1987).

Introducing the antagonist Max, the antagonist, is introduced as a person of public interest, as a re- spected, well-situated man who became a homeless fugitive from police and creditors. In the following, Martha describes the relationship between Max and her husband: A casual business acquaintance as you would normally find in the branch. A the same time she concedes that there was the oc- casional private encounter and informal meeting between the two couples. The sensational news of Max’s sudden disappearance breaks in on this non- chalant indifference. P only finds out the exact details from third parties or from her husband, sometimes after the event or from the paper: Max a pen- niless, delinquent bankrupt, on the run from an international police inves- tigation, begging colleagues, including her husband, for money, taken in by a female colleague as yet unknown to P, vanishing without warning from there too. In dramatic vignettes, P reproduces passages of dialogue between herself and her husband in the style of direct speech. Invariably, the short dialogue opens with the husband speaking, passing on a new rumor about Max. P reacts to this with a question or, in an attitude of critical reserve to- wards Max, offering corrective instruction. The scene always ends with P’s assurance that the matter has been dropped through lack of interest. P posi- Narrative Persuasion and Narrative Irritation in Psychotherapy 107 tions herself as an uninvolved external observer, continuously stressing her own disinterest: and after that I didn’t bother about it at all? and and! um, I didn’t? also? the case was closed for me? – The uninvolved external perspective leads to an expectation of concise, summarizing factual information. Yet the dramatic vignettes and the dramatic repetition of the cry Max vanished! communicate the opposite impression: The narrator appears very involved and is always open to hearing any new information.

A local public scandal What is more, these assurances of disinterest and indifference are at odds with the style of scandalized speech that characterizes the entire first ses- sion. Through no action of her own, Martha is affected by a scandal that has aroused the public interest. In the initial session, Martha paints a pic- ture of this scandal. This leads to the enactment of a communicative situ- ation that Nawratil, with Neckel (1986), has described as a ‘scandal triad’: ‘… the scandalizer (who is accused publicly of a transgression of interest to the public), the scandalized (someone who publicly denounces this trans- gression) and a, or rather several, third parties, to whom the scandalous event is reported and who, in turn, display some kind of reaction’ (Neckel 1986, 585; translated here by Joanna White). Neckel and Nawratil make these remarks in conjunction with political scandal but the triad can be transferred to scandal in a local social setting. Martha introduces the antag- onist as the scandalizer, draws herself as the scandalized and seeks to elicit a positive reaction to this scandalization from her interlocutor. For this she employs the ‘power of selective definition’ (Nawratil 2006, 204), asserting her own normative values in the process of representation and disregard- ing other horizons of meaning. Content ‘that supports one’s own view’ is highlighted at the expense of that which ‘runs counter to one’s own view’ (Nawratil 2006, 210; translated here by Joanna White). In the scandalized portrayal, ‘actors with a different view of things [enjoy] only limited oppor- tunities … to present their own position free from distortion. Instead they are reported on in a fragmentary and evaluative manner’ (Nawratil, 210; translated here by Joanna White). This becomes obvious with Martha. Sec- tions of dialogue featuring word-for-word quotes are exceedingly frequent. Her own utterances are always delivered with aplomb. In general, Martha proceeds ‘on the offensive’ in that she gives ‘her own side as positive an im- age as possible’ whilst ascribing ‘negative qualities to her opposite’ (Naw- ratil, 211; translated here by Joanna White). She questions the competence and credibility of the scandalizer (Nawratil 212). Martha’s style is expan- sive, dramatically urgent, and characterized by her continuous retention of 108 Brigitte Boothe the floor. She does not pause in speech, raises her voice at the end of clauses, and launches into dramatic vignettes, quotations of dialogue and detailed descriptions without pausing for breath. She repeatedly introduces lengthy descriptions and commentaries into episodic narratives before once again taking up the narrative development. There is no reduction in the tempo of speech, nor a shift to a reflexive mode of speaking. Martha’s episodic narrative displays characteristics of unreliable nar- ration (Nünning 1999): The narrative construction of events begins. The listener is primed to concur; the staging, however, moves from events to rambling descriptions with no clear purpose, then back to dramatic events, but lacking in connections to what came before. Thus the listener, in her uncertainty, searches for orientation whilst being subjected to a continuous stream of speech that is striving towards new dramatic high points. In place of emotionally engaged interest, the listener experiences irritation and dis- tance. No opportunity arises for making the narrative the object of shared exploration and reflection, since the lack of signals marking the end of the turn means that the narrative dynamic is left hanging; it remains the nar- rator’s turn, who presents new material without transition. Retrospectively, we have the possibility of analyzing Martha’s narrative. However, we must limit ourselves to one example and, furthermore, this example must be separated from the speech context, which itself is organized as a narrative.

This person was standing there in front of me As an example, a passage of speech is presented in which Martha describes how Max, following an absence shrouded in mystery, turns up at her front door unannounced. It is a narrative comprising expansive preliminaries and the subsequent portrayal of the surprise visit Max pays to the couple’s pri- vate home. Max is invited to stay for the time being, is looked after, and is invited to a social gathering. […] P: and, um, on the first! of July my husband came home and we were had an invitation? to Aargau? and he said I’ll come home early? we’ll go so that we’re there at five, half six?, to an elderly, aunt’s who is already seventy-five and she’s always pleased when someone calls and we visit her now and then T: hmm P: so we’d arranged that? then she said “yes! she’ll put on the barbecue? in the garden” so I said “yes? I’ll bring some meat and you know how it is”. my husband gets home at about two? had just said? he’ll do “this and that? and then we’ll go early? we have about an hour?, and: then we’ll also be home early” – he’s been home for less than half an hour and the doorbell rings, then I said “hmm, that’s probably? the kids from upstairs again?”, and then Narrative Persuasion and Narrative Irritation in Psychotherapy 109

I go up? and then I see a man through the glass window? with a rucksack? or? then I thought that belongs to the people? upstairs? again? T: hmm P: and: um, then I open the door? this person? is standing there in front of me, you wouldn’t! believe it, I nearly, I had to hold fast to something? ev- erything went black? T: hmm, hmm P: and this person’s appearance? I mean, sure? he can’t shave and can’t; but a beard! long hair, everything, yes, filthy? really:, I clung? to the door and I said “everything’s! going black?” I say, “where have you? come from!” T: hmm P: he says “yes, I’m here now?” than I say “yes, come in?!” or? – I called my husband? “Peter! Peter! Come here?!” and naturally he says “Hello:?! where have you come from?!” and so and: then I said “sit down?” and um “you must drink something?” and so. and then um, he said “yes?” so I say “why didn’t you call? or, a send a card? / or got in touch?” or, then he says “so you know, no-one must know that I’m here” T: hmm P: hmm? and then I said “so come in? take off your coat?” no? and um my husband said “so where are you? sleeping?” he says “well” last? night he slept in a kind of small tent on the Rigi! up there T: hmm P: in the woods or +somewhere T: hmm+ P: and then um, straight away my husband “you can sleep here! we have a big flat? and um hmm that’ll work?” and then I said “yes so, that will work? we can when I have visitors I have a folding bed and in the living room we have a bed?!” no / um he can he’ll have hmm shower and toilet he can use the ones at the front? and um then um we set that up?! and um because my husband said “I am so! happy that it’s you and that you we always? maybe not always but often!? spoke about you and the last thing we heard was that you had been seen on a pilgrimage.” and: then um he said “yes? that’s pos- sible” because in France? back then he had also preached in a church? and and spoken ans so and it’s normal? for pilgrims because now I’ve looking into that a bit? T: hmm P: into pilgrimage – more intensively than before T: hmm P: and then? – um so what shall we do now this evening we’ve been invited we said “to Daniela’s, in the garden! that’s uncom- and she’s uncomplicated? we can certainly take him with us” I called? and said “is it okay for you?” and she said “no no! it doesn’t matter in the garden you can bring another two three people with you that’s fine by me” T: hmm P: then his we! first of all, um, three! bags for the rubbish, he threw everything away it stank? T: hmm 110 Brigitte Boothe

P: it was really! disgusting good, it’s not my business but in any case three! full rubbish bags then we put him under the shower? here you have a show-/ first of all. Underwear? and my husband got him out a shirt and um every- thing? so that he had? yes, yes I couldn’t? wash?! it straight away? +no? T: hmm hmm P: in any case he had we first we took care of him, and then we took him with us to the evening and um, yes? I mean he told us a bit? but he never:? said very much … …

Max enters the first person narrator’s visual field as an apparition both gruesome and fascinating and immediately and urgently asserts his pres- ence I’m here now. Max is welcomed and treated with ceremony. Through Martha’s transformative efforts, the wild apparition is given a civilised ap- pearance. He uses the couple’s new home as a hiding place. The narrative gives no indication of whether he values and appreciates the two people themselves; they in turn greet and treat him as if he does their home a great honour. The missing person’s arrival is also celebrated in an external context at the gathering at the aunt’s garden. The narrative puts Martha’s relationship to Max in a new light. In the narrative, the ego-figure’s behaviour is in no way indifferent to Max. On the contrary, Max’s appearance floors her. Without, however, rendering her speechless. She is the enthusiastic initiator, actor and organiser. Max has chosen Martha’s home as a discreet (no-one must know) hiding place. This is greeted with pleasure and hospitality, as if it were an honour and a privilege to accommodate Max. The world should know about it. Discre- tion is not guaranteed. The couple were always talking about Max, we are told in the narrative. There then follows a correction to not always, but often. This clearly contrasts with the numerous previous protestations of indifference. The correction to not always, but often is supposed to lessen that contrast, but in fact renders it all the more obvious. The narrative is effective but has various problems of plausibility. Max is always being spotted, but has to hide. How does that add up? Max has to hide but is taken along to a social occasion. How does that add up? Max arrives with only a rucksack but the rubbish to be got rid of fills several bags. How does that add up? Defence strategies such as denial and negation become obvious: It is the dysfunctional attempt to fend off the powerful effect exerted by a figure with a prominent public profile who, at the same time, sabotaged bourgeois order and who seems to fascinate everybody. The point of therapeutic work would be to trace this defence and what motivates it. Martha’s remarks were made within the reference frame of an invitation to explain her con- cerns to a therapeutic interlocutor. Yet the therapist does not become the Narrative Persuasion and Narrative Irritation in Psychotherapy 111 involved third-party of the scandal triad, remaining instead at a reserved distance. Martha claims to be spreading neither sensation, scandal nor gos- sip. Rather, through no action of her own, an event is foisted upon her that has a malign hold on her, as she expresses in the final part of the conversa- tion. This malign and unhappy hold has robbed her of her peace of mind and of her harmonious relationship with her husband; at the end she thus thematizes the problem that is related to psychotherapy. The therapist sug- gests taking up this problem in a second session. The patient agrees without reserve, but then does not avail herself of the opportunity and it is not heard from again.

Narrative as a Linguistic Medium of Deferred Action: A Modelling and Evaluative Appropriation of Experience, with the Inclusion of a Latent Regulatory Dynamic

The narrator’s preferences and what they consider relevant are operative in narrative. For the narrator, the narrative enactment of events has an ac- tualizing, socially-integrative, wish-oriented and coping function (Boothe 2011). Martha agitatedly actualizes the story of an encounter which she cannot put behind her. In the service of social integration she presents her- self to the psychoanalytic listener as calm and indifferent, but also as a helpful hostess. The presentation certainly suffers from a lack of plausibility, wish motifs, which find no conscious acceptance, presumably in the area of erotic fascination, push to the fore all too clearly; the continual assurances of her own disinterest as a defence strategy add to the listener’s impression here. Martha is striving for form and shape, for a portrayal that will grant her deferred dramaturgy and reassured safety. Coping has not yet been achieved; this deferred coping would be the subject of therapy. The therapist actively engages with the patient’s distress and individual concerns. Ideally, the therapist is transparent when making arrangements, suggesting treatment and in reaching decisions. In the process, judgement, reflexivity and critical intelligence are demanded from the patient. The therapist allows his personal and professional authority to be tested and critically examined by the patient. In turn, the therapist expects the patient to summon up the courage for self-disclosure. At stake is a relationship based on trust and with prospects (Boothe & Grimmer 2005; Grimmer 2006). Conveying confidence on the part of the therapist depends on giv- ing emotional credit to the patient, which is established quickly and is often at work unconsciously in interaction with them (Streeck 2004). 112 Brigitte Boothe

Psychotherapeutic Initial Contact as a Challenge

Patients who engage in psychotherapeutic treatment find themselves in a precarious situation during the initial session. Given their psychic burden, they feel obliged to make contact with a professional source of assistance and must immediately commit to disclosing themselves to a stranger. For the therapist, the initial session serves to become attuned to the personal perspective of the person seeking advice, to her individual situation and her conflict dynamics. All this can turn out to be a demanding challenge. It is clear that the many demands made on the therapist and the patient favour the occurrence of irritation in this initial session. The personal perspec- tive communicated by a patient through her biographical depictions may produce in the interlocutor a sense of alienation and aversion rather than of goodwill and empathy. In this case, the patient and the therapist are faced with the task of using this potential for irritation as a space of taking chances. It is in this sense that irritation and alienating narratives also open up opportunities. (Translation: Joanna White, London)

References

Bergmann, Jörg R. (1987): Klatsch. Zur Sozialform der diskreten Indiskretion (Berlin and New York: de Gruyter). Boothe, Brigitte (2011): Das Narrativ. Biografisches Erzählen im psycho­ therapeutischen Prozess (Stuttgart: Schattauer). — and Grimmer, Bernhard (2005): ‘Die therapeutische Beziehung aus psychoanalytischer Sicht’, in Die therapeutische Beziehung, ed. by Wulf Rössler, (Berlin: Springer), pp. 37–58. Deppermann, Arnulf (1998): ‘Argumentieren über Aufrichtigkeit: Die rhe- torische Funktion einer “Kommunikationsvoraussetzung”’, in Neuere Entwicklungen in der Gesprächsforschung, ed. by Alexander Brock and Martin Hartung (Tübingen: Narr), pp. 85–105. — (2007): Grammatik und Semantik aus gesprächsanalytischer Sicht, Lin- guistik – Impulse & Tendenzen, 14 (Berlin: de Gruyter). Flitner, Elisabeth and Merle, Philippe (1989): ‘“Solange kein Fall bis zum Ende durchschaut ist…”: Die Psychoanalyse im Konflikt mit Freuds Verführungstheorie’, Forum der Psychoanalyse, 5, 249–262. Fludernik, Monika (2005): ‘Unreliability vs. Discordance. Kritische Be- trachtungen zum literaturwissenschaftlichen Konzept der erzähle- Narrative Persuasion and Narrative Irritation in Psychotherapy 113

rischen Unzuverlässigkeit’, in Was stimmt denn jetzt? Unzuverlässiges Erzählen in Literatur und Film, ed. by Fabienne Liptay and Yvonne Wolf (Munich: Text & Kritik). Freud, Sigmund (1897): Brief an Wilhelm Fließ vom 21. September 1897. [accessed 08 September 2014]. Günthner, Susanne (2000): Vorwurfsaktivitäten in der Alltagsinteraktion: Grammatische, prosodische, rhetorisch-stilistische und interaktive Verfah­ ren bei der Konstitution kommunikativer Muster und Gattungen (Tübin- gen: Niemeyer). Lejeune, Philippe (1989): ‘Der autobiographische Pakt’, in Die Autobiogra­ phie. Zu Form und Geschichte einer literarischen Gattung, ed. by Günter Niggl, Wege der Forschung, 565 (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buch- gesellschaft), pp. 214–257. Müller-Pozzi, Heinz (2002): Psychoanalytisches Denken – Eine Einführung (Bern: Huber). Nawratil, Ute (2006): Glaubwürdigkeit in der sozialen Kommunikation. [accessed 08 Sep­ tember 2014]. Neckel, Sighard (1986): ‘Das Stellhölzchen der Macht. Zur Soziologie des politischen Skandals’, Leviathan, 14 (1986), 581–605. Nünning, Ansgar (1999): ‘Unreliable, compared to what? Towards a Cog- nitive Theory of Unreliable Narration. Prolegomena and Hypotheses’, in Grenzüberschreitungen: Narratologie im Kontext/Transcending Bound­ aries: Narratology in Context, ed. by Walter Grünzweig and Andreas Solbach (Tübingen: Narr), pp. 53–73. Nünning, Vera (2010): Kulturwissenschaftliche Gedächtnisforschung und Narrationen. Lecture given on 28 April at the 60th Lindau Psychothera- py Week 2010. [accessed 08 September 2014]. Sarbin, Theodore (Ed.) (1986): Narrative Psychology: The storied nature of human conduct (London: Praeger). Schafer, Roy (1995): Erzähltes Leben: Narration und Dialog in der Psycho­ nalyse (Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta). Spence, Donald P. (1982): Narrative Truth and Historical Truth (New York: Norton). Streeck, Ulrich (2004): Auf den ersten Blick: Psychotherapeutische Bezie­ hungen unter dem Mikroskop (Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta). Zerweck, Bernd (2004): ‘Unzuverlässigkeit, erzählerische’, in Metzler Lexi­ kon Literatur- und Kulturtheorie, ed. by Ansgar Nünning (Stuttgart and Weimar: Metzler), pp. 681–682.

Narrating the Uncanny – Uncanny Narration Freud’s Essay and Theories of Fiction Christoph L e i t g e b (Vienna)

The uncanny “seems to be bound up with […] a compulsive storytelling” (Royle), while at the same time resisting to be put into words. This essay investigates how the uncanny is linked to narration. The investigation starts off with a survey of how early theories of the uncanny (Freud, Jentsch) implicitly deal with narrative fiction and how these deal- ings were radicalized and made explicit by French deconstruction (Cixous, Kofman). A change of perspective then focuses on a theory of fiction (Iser) and its repercussions on a theory of the uncanny. This double approach tries to make a case for introducing speech- act-theory into the analyses of the uncanny. The conclusion of the essay thus tests this stipulation, interpreting a scholarly text on the uncanny events of 9/11 as an example.

The strait-laced narrator is a recurring figure within the literature of the -un canny. Following the pattern of Thomas Mann’s Dr. Phil Serenus Zeitblom, he finds himself in a quandary. This narrator, frequently a scientist, feels overwhelmed by his fascination with the uncanny. The uncanny urges him to tell its story, but at the same time the story somehow resists being told. It comes as no surprise then that scholarly theories about the uncanny – who feels uncanny about what and why – invariably deal with narration, either implicitly or explicitly. “The uncanny seems to be bound up with a compul- sion to tell, a compulsive storytelling.”1 The question of how a theory of the uncanny connects to a theory of narration often becomes entangled with a second, more general question: How does the original framework of a theory of the uncanny, i.e., psycho- analysis, relate to a philosophy of language? Is psychoanalysis a scientific metalanguage describing a certain type of storytelling or is it itself a certain type of storytelling? Even though it is quite clear that answering the second question will not directly impose solutions for a theory of the uncanny (and vice versa), the attempt to answer these questions produces seeming plausi- bilities about what the “essence” of the uncanny could be.

Jentsch and Freud

In one of the first theories of the uncanny, “On the Psychology of the Un- canny” by Ernst Jentsch (1906), the writer warns the reader right at the top not to assume “that the spirit of language is a particularly acute psy-

1 Nicholas Royle, The uncanny(Manchester etc.: Manchester Univ. Press, 2003), p. 12. 116 Christoph Leitgeb chologist”.2 Jentsch only indirectly connects this general statement about psychology with his further conception of the uncanny: According to him, objects will appear to be uncanny if their appearance cannot be classified into conventional linguistic categories. “Intellectual uncertainty”3 pre- vents establishing what a later linguistic tradition calls “frames”.4 The con- sequence is a crisis of linguistic representation. Jentsch’s example for the uncanny is E.T.A Hoffmann’s novella “The Sandman” (1816) and its -de scription of the doll Olympia, which blurs the categories of dead and alive. Freud’s essay on the uncanny (1919)5 further complicates Jentsch’s thoughts on how the uncanny and language depend on each other. Freud uses the etymological ambiguity of German “heimlich”, the meaning of which points both to “homey” and “secretive” only as a means of collecting evidence. In the end, the uncanny for Freud is not just a problem of lin- guistic representation, but a reaction of a psychic apparatus. The uncanny is the recurring of a repressed drive; its surfacing from the unconscious causes anxiety. For Freud, the core of the uncanny in “The Sandman” is not the doll Olympia, but the motif of being robbed of one’s eyes, which Freud interprets as a symbol of the repressed fear of castration. Freud gives a different reason than Jentsch for the urge and the anguish in narrating the uncanny. His explanation does not stress the experience that linguistic categories seem to be inadequate, but rather, the resistance of consciousness to recall the repressed. And yet, Freud admits that something in “The Sandman” resists the “interest” of his psychoanalytic description. This “something” calls for “an aesthetic investigation”6, in which language returns as a main topic. This something also justifies Freud’s use of fiction in the first place and why he does not quote case stories or dreams as evi- dence for a psychoanalytic theory of the uncanny. Instead, Freud highlights a paradox that is symptomatic of the tricky relationship between narration

2 Ernst Jentsch, On the Psychology of the Uncanny, translated by Roy Sellars. [accessed 08 September 2014], p. 2. Germ.: Ernst Jentsch, ‘Zur Psychologie des Unheim­ lichen’, Psychiatrisch-Neurologische Wochenschrift, 8.22; 8.23 (1906), pp. 195–198, pp. 203–205 (p. 195). 3 Ibid., p. 4. 4 Cf. Jean Aitchison, Wörter im Kopf: Eine Einführung in das mentale Lexikon (Tübin- gen: Niemeyer, 1997). 5 Sigmund Freud, ‘Das Unheimliche’, in: Sigmund Freud, Der Moses des Michelan­ gelo (Frankfurt a. M.: Fischer Taschenbuch, 2004), pp. 137–172. 6 Ibid., p. 166. Cf. Sarah Kofman, ‘The Double is /and the Devil: The Uncanniness of “The Sandman”’, in Literature in psychoanalysis: A reader, ed. by Steven Vine (Basingstoke etc.: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), p. 68–83 (p. 69). Narrating the Uncanny – Uncanny Narration 117 and the uncanny: “Much in poetry is not uncanny, what would be uncanny if it happened in life […] there are many possibilities in poetry to achieve uncanny effects which do not exist in life.”7 In recent theories of the uncanny, this interference of the uncanny, its nar- ration and its psychoanalytical description sometimes appears to be almost inextricable and unexplainable. In essence, these theories somehow overgen- eralize the argument put forward by Jentsch. The uncanny uncertainty about linguistic categories, they maintain, will always backfire on the distinction of language and metalanguage. Taking this as a given, these theories posit the foregone conclusion that the uncanny cannot be properly defined because a person, when confronted with the uncanny, will lack the words to describe it. Since the uncanny is a concept for the impossibility to define concepts, it appears to be self-evident that the uncanny should be no proper concept itself. Some of the deceiving self-evidence of this reasoning is due to a (over) generalization of the philosophical impact of Freud’s essay in France.

Kofman and Cixous

In the beginning of the 1970s, translation and interpretation of psycho- analysis in France repeatedly discussed Freud’s essay on the uncanny.8 This tradition highlights the liberties Freud took when reading E.T.A. Hoff- mann’s novella, acting like another narrator rather than a psychoanalyst. Yet within his theory of the uncanny, Freud’s reference to a text of fiction is not the only starting point to deconstruct the scientific claims of psycho- analysis from the perspective of the uncanny. There is more than one aspect to how both psychoanalysis and the uncanny depend on language. In the early ’60s Jacques Lacan’s Seminar X9 contradicted Freud’s early view on anxiety, explaining it instead as the result of an experience in which the formation of the subject in its relation to language is disturbed. In the ’60s and ’70s Louis Vax and Tzvetan Todorov made use of Freud’s essay to ex- plain the poetics of fantastic literature.10 And over a period of two decades – from “La double séance” (1970)11 to La carte postale. De Socrate à Freud et

7 Freud, ‘Unheimliche’, p. 169. 8 Cf. Anneleen Masschelein, The Unconcept (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2011), pp. 91–92. 9 Jacques Lacan, Das Seminar. Buch X: Die Angst, 1962–1963 (Vienna etc.: Turia + Kant, 2010). 10 Tzvetan Todorov, Einführung in die fantastische Literatur (München: Hanser, 1972). 11 Jacques Derrida, ‘Die doppelte Seance’, in Jacques Derrida, Dissemination, ed. by Peter Engelmann, transl. by Hans-Dieter Gondek (Vienna: Passagen, 1995), pp. 193–322. Fr.: in Jacques Derrida, La Dissémination (Paris: Seuil, 1972). 118 Christoph Leitgeb au-delà (1980)12 to Spectres de Marx (1993)13 – Jacques Derrida reflected on the correlation of the uncanny compulsion to repeat and iterability in sig- nification. This perspective linked Freud’s essay on “The Uncanny” to “Be- yond the Pleasure Principle”, i.e., to Freud’s concept of the death instinct. All these approaches are reference points for Sarah Kofman and Hélène Cixous in their exploration of how Freud’s essay connects with a theory of fiction. Kofman’s “Le Double e(s)t le diable. L’inquietante étrangeté de L’homme au sable” (1973)14 quotes Freud’s reflections on fiction: The nar- rator in fiction multiplies possibilities to give an uncanny impression when he leaves the reader in the dark about the requirements he has chosen for his fictious world.15 Despite these considerations, however, Freud does not analyze the complexity and ambiguity of narrative strategies in “The Sandman”. In Kofman’s interpretation, E.T.A Hoffmann’s novella does not give an uncanny impression because of the specific motifs it quotes, but because of the specific form in which its narrative reflects on fiction and narration. As a child, Nathanael secretly observes how his father and Coppelius try to make alchemical procreation work. Kofman points out the anal- ogy to Freud’s “primal scene”, but also stresses that the scene stages a birth out of a head, a birth from fiction.16 In Jentsch’s interpretation, the uncertainty whether the doll Olimpia was living or dead is crucial for its uncanny effect. Kofman interprets the doll as “just another mani- festation of a doubling”17, in which the death instinct shows. The poet- protagonist Nathanael prefers the lifeless doll to his living fiancée Clara, because Olimpia acquires life only in his imagination. Quite the contrary, philistine Clara, who rejects his fictions, appears to be a lifeless machine. On Nathanael at least, fiction has greater impact than life. It starts off as a mere representation of life and then gradually begins to replace it.18 In his interpretation, says Kofman, Freud fails to connect narcissism and doubling with literary “creation”.19

12 Jacques Derrida, Die Postkarte: Von Sokrates bis an Freud und jenseits (Berlin: Brinkmann und Bose, 1987). (Fr.: Flammarion.) 13 Jacques Derrida, Marx’ Gespenster (Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp, 2004). (Fr.: édi- tions Galilée, 1993). 14 Kofman, ‘Double’. Fr.: Revue Francaise de psychanalyse, 38 (1974), pp. 25–56. 15 Freud, ‘Unheimliche’, p. 171; cf. Kofman, ‘Double’, p. 71. 16 Ibid., p. 81. 17 Kofman, ‘Double’, p. 77. 18 Cf. ibid., p. 77. 19 Ibid., pp. 78–79. Narrating the Uncanny – Uncanny Narration 119

For Kofman, Freud puts too much weight on a thematic approach to “The Sandman” and thus distorts his interpretation by neglecting its self- reflexive narrative structure.20

[…] Freud, by making a thematic reading of the text, by extracting from it an ultimate signified, the castration complex, responsible for the effect produced, seems trapped within the ‘traditional logic of the sign.’ He turns the text into a paradigmatic illustration of a truth exterior and anterior to it.21

Kofman anticipates a possible objection. In her own argument, “death in- stinct” and the “compulsion to repeat” also serve as ultimate signifieds to hedge in the ambiguities of fiction in “The Sandman”. Kofman wants to refute this objection by arguing that these signifieds themselves refer to a more complex structure of the sign. Kofman’s approach fundamentally differs from Hélène Cixous’s es- say “La fiction et ses fantômes. Une lecture de l’Unheimliche de Freud” (1972). 22 For Cixous, the uncanny unsettles the distinction of language and metalanguage from the beginning,23 which is why she does not even attempt to define the uncanny as a concept. Instead, she emphasizes the fictional and uncanny character of Freud’s own scientific writing.

Freud’s own text, here, functions like a fiction: the long work on personal pul- sations, the dramatic redistribution upon such and such an approach, the sus- pense and surprises and impasses; all of that seems a part of the special work of fiction, and the “author” takes advantage of the narrator’s privileges to which the analyst cannot consent.24

Freud’s narrative itself turns out to be a “reserve of the repressed,” which should attract analysis exactly when and where the fictional character of this narrative tries to avoid it.25 “Unheimliche [sic!] is only the other side

20 Cf. ibid., p. 71. 21 Ibid., p. 81. 22 Hélène Cixous, ‘Fiction and Its Phantoms: A Reading of Freud’s Das Unheimliche (‘The Uncanny’)’, New Literary History, 7 (1976) Nr. 3, pp. 525–548. (Fr.: Poetique, 10; Germ.: ‘Die Fiktion und ihre Geister: Eine Lektüre von Freuds Das Unheim- liche’, in Orte des Unheimlichen: Die Faszination verborgenen Grauens in Litera­ tur und bildender Kunst, ed. by Klaus Herding and Gerlinde Gehrig (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck und Ruprecht, 2006), pp. 37–59. 23 Cf. Masschelein, Unconcept, p. 101: “At each moment, the text performs and per- verts the very issues that are being explored in Freud’s essay, making it very difficult to neatly summarize its ideas or to entangle the associative semantic chains.” 24 Cixous, ‘Fiction’, pp. 531–532. (Germ.: p. 43.) 25 Ibid., p. 546. (Germ. p. 57.) 120 Christoph Leitgeb of the repetition of Heimliche [sic!]”. So cites Cixous Freud’s quotation of Schelling in order to determine this structure in fiction as well: “[…] and this repetition is two-faced: that which emerges and that which is repelled. The same is true for the text which pushes forth and repels until it reaches an arbitrary end.”26 Implicit author and the reader of Freud’s essay fight in vain for a grip on both aspects of the text, trying to control it and not want- ing to be led astray by fictions, which add more riddles than explanations. “A moving anguish emanates from these incessant additions.”27 Instead of defining the uncanniness of fiction, Cixous exhibits its struc- ture, its open and hidden intentions by dramatizing her reading of Freud’s text: “On the stage and the stage of the stage, the relationship between Freud’s discovery concerning scientific truth and the mechanics of fiction may be brought out.”28 Apart from the elusive “author”, her description reconstructs a myriad of subjects in charge of the text. The intentions ap- pearing in and rejected by the text appear as actors on its stage like ghosts; they play before an anonymous, yet compelled audience. When Freud’s text as a whole is considered, it seems to be acting all by itself. “This text proceeds as its own metaphor.”29 Cixous demonstrates how the motifs analyzed by Freud in order to determine the essence of the un- canny metalinguistically describe Freud’s own narration. Theses motifs in- clude the robbing of eyes and the evil eye, the maze, the ghost, the double and, yet again, the doll. As a “sovereign but capricious stage-setter”, Freud puts a “puppet theatre” in motion, staging “real dolls or fake dolls, real and simulated life”.30 Freud’s essay appears to be the “great Gathering in which members form a unity, which is always dismembered since each preserves an independent activity.”31 Like Kofman, Cixous here makes a connection between “fiction” and “death drive”: “‘Fiction’ is a secretion of death, […] a doll, a hybrid body composed of language and silence that, in the move- ment which turns it and which it turns, invents doubles, and death.”32 Cixous’s main interest in Freud’s essay is how levels and meta-levels of analysis turn out to be indistinguishable. A distanced, secluded and ana- lytic stance on the subject of the uncanny seems to be untenable. The re- sulting “intellectual uncertainty” (implicitly) links this approach not only

26 Ibid., p. 545. (Germ.: p. 56.) 27 Ibid., p. 544. 28 Ibid., p. 531. (Germ.: p. 43.) 29 Ibid., p. 526. (Germ.: pp. 37–38.) 30 Ibid., p. 525. (Germ.: p. 37.) 31 Ibid., p. 544. (Germ.: p. 55.) 32 Ibid., p. 548. (Germ.: p. 59.) Narrating the Uncanny – Uncanny Narration 121 to Jentsch’s original concept of the uncanny, but also to the concepts of dissemination, trace or volatility of the signified, as they are programmatic for postmodernist philosophy. The uncanny, as Anneleen Masschelein sums it up, is more than just another literary effect: “It is the effect par excellence that incorporates and reveals the ‘essence’ [sic!] of literature at the end of the twentieth century and that places it at the heart [sic!] of philosophy or theory.”33 Instead of expanding on the metaphysic undertone of this post- modernist generalization of the uncanny here, the uncanny will be coupled with yet another theory of fiction.

Lacan and Iser

The French readings of Freud’s essay were well translated and received in English-speaking countries, but much less so in the scholarly realm of Ger- man-speaking countries. This is why to my knowledge it has not yet been asked, if and how specific theories of fiction in the German tradition can be linked to the topic of the uncanny. Wolfgang Iser34 is one of the examples that come to mind. His approach does not define “fiction” in contrast to the “real”, but in a field of tension between the “real” and the “imaginary”. He thus emphasizes a term that Lacan introduced in his seminar “L’angoisse” (1962, 1963) into the discussion of the uncanny. Iser cites Lacan35, but does not expand on a psychoanalytic perspective of the “imaginary”. He develops his concept outlining a tradition from Coleridge and Sartre to Castoradis and tries to distinguish it from terms such as German “Einbildungskraft”, “imagination” and “fantasy”, which specify human capacities.36 It is precisely for this reason that Iser’s “imagi- nary” remains suitable for connection with Lacan’s view of the concept, despite their different theoretical setting. In his seminar on anxiety, Lacan uses the concept of the imaginary to show how anxiety results from a disrupted self-definition of the subject in its relation to language. According to Lacan, desire generates a realm of the imaginary, in which the subject’s self constructs its own image in the mirror of an imagined Other. Only in this process can a person start to be aware of itself as a possible subject of future speech acts. According to Lacan, it is essential for this realm of the imaginary that its separation from reality

33 Masschelein, Unconcept, p. 123. 34 Wolfgang Iser, Das Fiktive und das Imaginäre (Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp, 1993). 35 Ibid., pp. 352, 354–355. 36 Ibid., pp. 20–21. 122 Christoph Leitgeb remains obvious. Something situated in this realm should not appear in reality.37 If this happens nonetheless, the very principle of the subject’s self- constitution is called into question. Anxiety arises when a subject has made up something to refer to in an imaginary realm and meets this something for real.38 For the tradition he examines, Iser also maintains that the imaginary is the “other side” of the place “where the real is packed” – although strictly speaking the “real” for him is what Lacan would call the “symbolic”. The concepts of the “imaginary” quoted by Iser have in common that they refer to the “other” side of a reality already captured and enshrined in established categories. Sartre, for example, emphasizes negation as “the unconditional principle, of any imagination.” The imaginary must free itself from the real, “in one word, negate it.”39 Iser refers to this antagonism of “real” and “imaginary” in his concept of “fiction”, defining it as a mediating “act of intention”.40 The very function of fiction is to translate the possibilities of the imaginary back into “reality” by tying the imaginary to the defined intention of a speech act.

Just as the fictionalizing act outstrips the determinacy of the real, so it provides the imaginary with the determinacy that it would not otherwise possess. In so doing, it enables the imaginary to take on an essential quality of the real, for determinacy is a minimal definition of reality. This is not, of course, to say that the imaginary is real, although it certainly assumes an appearance of reality in the way it intrudes into and acts upon the given world.41

It is worth a try to apply Iser’s distinction of the “imaginary” and the “fictive” to Lacan’s interpretation of Freud’s essay on the uncanny. If it were

37 Lacan, Angst, p. 58. Cf. also Friedrich Kittler, ‘“Das Phantom unseres Ichs” und die Literaturpsychologie: E.T. A. Hoffmann – Freud – Lacan’, in Urszenen: Litera­ turwissenschaft als Diskursanalyse und Diskurskritik, ed. by Friedrich A. Kittler and Horst Turk (Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp, 1977), pp. 139–166. 38 Cf. Lacan, Angst, p. 147: “[…] I posed for you this essential distinction between two registers of the world, the place where the real hurries onto this stage of the Other where man as subject has to constitute himself, to take his place as the one who carries the word, but who can only carry it in a structure which however truly it is established is a structure of fiction.” (Translation: Cormac Gallagher: The-Sem- inar-of Jaques-Lacan-X-l_angoisse.pdf, pp. 103–104). Lacan does not distinguish the terms “fiction” and “imaginary” as systematically as Iser. 39 The quotations of Sartre in Iser, Fiktive (Germ.), p. 343. 40 Iser, Fiktive (Germ.), p. 20. 41 Translation: Wolfgang Iser, The Fictive and the Imaginary(London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993), p. 3. (Germ.: Iser, Fiktive, p. 22.) Narrating the Uncanny – Uncanny Narration 123 possible to translate the psychoanalytic perspective into a narratologist’s point of view, the uncanny would appear to be a specific disruption of the realm of the imaginary within the realm of fiction: If fiction suddenly ap- pears to be real apart from the purposes of the speech act of its author and reader, the imaginary it refers to would remain as a shadow. This is why the effect of the uncanny will show, the separation of the imaginary and the real being short-circuited without the obvious mediation of the purposes of a fictional speech act. If fiction, according to Iser, “leads the real to the imaginary and the imaginary to the real”42, that would explain the kinship Freud has found between the uncanny and fictive narration. Every focus on the interdependence of reality and fiction will create its own phantoms. This connection with the uncanny also appears in various concepts of fiction that Iser analyzes because they theorize on the interde- pendence of science and narration. One example is how empiricism had to give up an over simplistic concept, which only thought of fiction in terms of deception. Iser gives the example of Jeremy Bentham, who maintained that indeterminate objects would exist “as such”, but their attributed char- acteristics would be fictions. This perspective on fiction allows for a specific appearance of the uncanny: It facilitates the apparition of the cat in “Alice in Wonderland”, which shows off a grin more real than the animal.

Towards a Speech Act Theory of the Uncanny

How do narratives express the anxiety of a particular public? What do the traditional motifs of the uncanny refer to in those stories? Are these motifs evidence of repression and anxiety or a conventional means of lustful cop- ing with or even political instrumentalization of anxiety? Ultimately, the ambition of a theory of the uncanny should be to contribute to a methodol- ogy to address questions like these. The confrontation of a French poststructuralist interpretation of Freud’s essay with Iser’s theory of fiction suggests the hypothesis that the link be- tween the uncanny and fiction should be described through the theory of speech acts. This conclusion may be surprising in view of Derrida’s argu- ment with Searle.43 Yet a reading of Freud’s essay as indebted to deconstruc- tion as Cixous’s can be interpreted as a reconstruction of different speech acts, as a continuous framing (even if the reconstruction of the all-encom- passing frame is dismissed in her essay).

42 Ibid., p. 4. (Germ. Iser, p. 23.) 43 Cf. Jacques Derrida, Limited inc. (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1988). 124 Christoph Leitgeb

This emphasis on speech act theory 44 assumes that the uncanny and narrative fiction are as fundamentally coupled as Freud and the reception of his essay seem to suggest. When examining what phenomena of the un- canny tell about culture, it is not enough to look for the motifs collected by Freud and others (repetition, doll, double, maze, etc.) and give them symbolic meaning. Rather, it is essential to analyze the use of those motifs relating to their specific purposes in speech acts. This conclusion is directed against a tendency within the reception of Freud’s essay to further undermine the distinction between language and metalanguage with regards to the uncanny. Ideally, an analysis of the uncan- ny in narrative fiction should be able to distinguish at least three speech acts: • to talk or write uncanny (i.e. to create a fictive narrative subject in such a way that it has an uncanny effect; to compose a narration in such a way that it unsettles the position of the implicit author and/or the reader), • to talk about the uncanny (e.g. by using motifs and conventions, the myths of the uncanny when referring to an event in narration) • and, finally, to conduct a philosophical discourse on the phenomenon.

A Narration of 9/11

Nicholas Royle’s account of 9/11 could be read as a paradigmatic narrative of an uncanny event. It can thus illustrate the advantages of insisting on the distinction between uncanny narrating and a description of the uncanny, even when applied to an example which sets out to make this process more difficult. For a start, it seems practicable to distinguish two purposes of the text. The first one is to convey the uncanny feeling evoked by the historic events, in which an international audience was faced with a reality consid- ered to be imaginary. The second one is to give an example of the range of motifs unfolded by a theory of the uncanny. This second purpose is part of a narrative that speaks about the uncanny, but will not necessarily produce it.

The uncanny aspects of what happened can perhaps readily be evoked: on 9.11 (the numerical abbreviation of the month and day, according to US dating convention, but also, by chance, the telephone number of the US emergency

44 Speech act theory also could explain some of the kinship of the uncanny and laugh- ter. Iser was part of the discussion group linked to “Poetik und Hermeneutik” which tried to promote a speech act theory of irony. The “third party” this group saw involved in every ironic speech act, the “victim of irony”, will feel uncanny about the ironic speech act when first guessing that there are hidden meanings, but not yet fully understanding the ironic communication. Narrating the Uncanny – Uncanny Narration 125

service), this extraordinary double-building was destroyed, “live on television”, by hijackers acting out the enormity of a death drive, of a double and more than double death drive. The appalling apparent accident of a plane flying into a skyscraper was followed minutes later by its uncanny repetition, another plane crashing into the other skyscraper, immediately disconfirming (and yet still, in that moment, incredibly) any sense of the merely “accidental”. As the twin tow- ers collapsed “live” on television, and the images of this collapse were repeat- edly screened over the hours that followed, a sense of the uncanny seemed all pervading: Is this real? Is this really happening? Surely it’s a film? Is this “our” apocalypse, now? Thousands of people were murdered in the attacks of that day: at least some of them, an uncountable number, buried alive.45

Is it possible for a narration to evoke the anxiety connected with what hap- pened on 9/11 by just stressing that the recollection of it contains all the motifs of the uncanny? Royle seems to suggest that any narration which contains the full catalogue of uncanny motifs is per se as uncanny as the event it is referring to. But how much of its plausibility does this example for the uncanny owe to the stereotypes attributed to the event by collective memory, easily recognized by an international audience? The text certainly presupposes a reader who is familiar with either the event itself or the images transmitted by the media directly after the disas- ter. A person learning about 9/11 for the first time will not experience an uncanny quality in this text, in spite of all its uncanny motifs. The narra- tion only has an uncanny effect if the reader cannot see the narrator shape his motifs to fit the event. On the contrary, to have this effect, the event has to force those motifs onto the reader behind the narrator’s back. Is Royle’s narration of 9/11 uncanny after all? To answer this question, it is important to identify and keep apart those two purposes that are linked within the narration: to summon the memory of the events and to given an example of a theoretical question which concerns the uncanny. But even under the second objective, the text might produce the effect of the un- canny – in the moment when the reader suddenly notices how those images of 9/11 unexpectedly “fit”. They seem to confront the imaginary within a theory of the uncanny with something real, as if another narrator apart from Royle was trying to give the ultimate example.46

45 Royle: The uncanny, pp. VII, VIII (Preface). 46 The strike on the world trade centre had a similar effect of uncanny repetition on Austrian author Josef Haslinger, whose novel Opernball was published just before 9/11 and described a fictive terrorist attack. Haslinger coped with this short-cir- cuiting of the real and the fictive by publicly apologizing to American tourists in Vienna. 126 Christoph Leitgeb

Not only Royle, but also the strait-laced narrator, who does not feel up to his own narration of the uncanny, benefits from simultaneously writ- ing uncanny, writing about the uncanny and theorizing the uncanny. The scholarly Dr. phil. Serenus Zeitblom in Dr. Faustus comments on the word “coldness”:

“Life and experience can lend individual words a certain accent that estranges them entirely from their everyday meaning and lends them an aura of dread that no one who has not met them in their most horrifying context can ever understand.”47

A theory of the uncanny should be able to name the purposes of the speech act, which often discusses anxiety and the uncanny with the help of such a figure.

47 Thomas Mann, Doctor Faustus: The life of the German composer Adrian Leverkühn as told by a friend, tansl. by John E. Woods (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1997), p. 8. Narrated Communities

Narration, Memory and Identity

Literature and (Ethno-)Nationalist Narratives in the (Post-)Yugoslav Region Elena M e s s n e r (Vienna)

In the article I will focus on the latest developments in (Post-)Yugoslav literature, looking at literary and political trends since the 1980s, focusing especially on the latest developments in Bosnian-Croatian contemporary anti-war literature. This ar- ticle offers some answers to the question of how ethno-nationalist narratives have been deconstructed in the Bosnian literature of the last decades. In all republics of the former Yugoslavia, the nationalist literature since the 1980s participated in the construction of ethno-religious identities which supported the production of exclu- sively nationalist thinking. – “Inter-ethnic hatred” became a dominant topic, whilst the main project of anti-war literature was to subvert models of exclusive (ethno-) national identity.

Linguistic and cultural affinity as well as socio-historical developments have served as a basis for permanent, reciprocal influence among South Slavic cultural areas for centuries – even after the recent wars and the politi- cal disintegration of the common state. Yugoslavia – as a (supra-)national (or pan-South Slavic) idea – was first articulated in the 1830s and 1840s. At that time, it was in the minds of only a small group of intellectuals, who fought for allegiance among South Slavs. From the very beginning, this idea competed with various particularistic national movements (Serbian, Croatian, Slovenian, Macedonian, Bosnian and also Bulgarian). Yugoslavia as a political entity and state ultimately existed in two “versions” – as a kingdom from 1918 to 1941, and then as a socialist republic after the Sec- ond World War. The socialist Yugoslavia dissolved violently in the 1990s, but already before the political dissolution of the state, the popularity of the supra-national Yugoslav idea had faded. Through the centuries, literature and other cultural products have al- ways reflected the social and political impact of both the national and the competing supra-national ideas. In this article I will focus only on the latest developments in Yugoslav and Post-Yugoslav literature, looking at literary and political trends since the 1980s and focusing even more on contemporary anti-war literature up to the present day. The presence of ethno-nationalist narratives in literature published in Yugoslavia increased dramatically in the 1980s, and consequently, “anti-narratives” were pro- duced as well. The main aim of my article will be to give some answers to the question of how these ethno-nationalist narratives have been con- structed and deconstructed in the literature of the last decades. 130 Elena Messner

Yugoslavian Socialist Versus Nationalist Narratives in Yugoslav Literature Since the 1970s

Looking at partisan films and novels from socialist Yugoslavia, one can see how the leaders of the country wanted to emphasize a socialist Yugoslav culture of remembrance, which tried to include people from Croatia, Bos- nia, Serbia, Montenegro, Slovenia, and Macedonia as unified fighters in the anti-fascist resistance. It cannot be described in all – often paradoxal and ambivalent details – how a process of integration or disintegration was promoted. That’s why I will just give a short introduction to this complex process. Socialist Yugoslavian political elites offered a grand, uniting narrative that was historically inaccurate, but was aligned with the socialist ideol- ogy of “brotherhood and unity”. The slogan focused on the collectivization of the Yugoslav people, which had enabled the struggle against fascism; it promoted loyalty to Yugoslavia and implicitly forbade the differentia- tion between victims and offenders in Yugoslavia itself, a country which experienced a civil war over the course of World War II. Historical facts that contradicted this unifying narrative were suppressed, which meant that information regarding the Croatian fascist regime (“Ustaše”), a mari- onette regime of Nazi Germany, or other groups which partly or entirely collaborated with the Nazis, like the Slovenian “Domobranci” or the Serbi- an royalist group of “Četniks”, was not officially to be discussed, although it stayed an important topic since the end of the war. Instead, a socialist, partisan literature often chose as its theme the great founding event of the state throughout the partisan struggle. Often these texts were written by the partisans themselves, among them Vladimir Nazor, Dobrica Ćosić, Branko Ćopić, Oskar Davičo, Mihailo Lalić or Ciril Kosmač (see Wachtel 1998: 151). In contrast to the socialist state ideology (“brotherhood and unity”) a politicized literature increasingly participated in the reinforcement and reconstruction of a specific (ethno-)national collective memory (i.e., Croa- tian, Slovenian and Serbian instead of a “Yugoslav” collective memory), it was promoted in the 1970s and especially in the 1980s after the death of Tito. This development began in the 1960s and continued throughout the 1970s, as the power of the separate republics (Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia, Serbia, Macedonia, Montenegro) grew and the federal government slowly lost influence (see Wachtel 1998: 174); it escalated when the president of Yugoslavia, Tito, died in 1980. In the second half of the 1980s, a “phase of implementation of new perceptions” (Sundhaussen 2007: 385) took place. Extremely patriarchal, clerical and national oriented writers, politicians Literature and (Ethno-)Nationalist Narratives in the (Post-)Yugoslav Region 131 and journalists made and/or followed this “trend”. The “dismantling of the Yugoslav culture of memory and historiography” (Sundhaussen 2007: 420) especially in Serbia, Croatia and Bosnia became the main project of a new “patriotic” literature. On the one hand, the discussion of topics which were secret and forbidden under socialism was now absolutely justified. But ini- tial trends towards a greater liberalization (e.g., de-collectivization) quickly lost their subversive potential in the wake of rising nationalism, culminat- ing mostly in highly problematic historical revisionism. The questioning of belonging to Yugoslavia was followed by the problematic reliance on a very dogmatic concept of “ethno-national” identities, and the project Yugoslavia was staged as a threatening construct that endangered the “pure” homoge- neity of one’s national identity. This, logically, implicitly meant that other ethnic groups, with which one had to live together in this multi-ethnic (or “supra-national”) state, were shown as a threat. In a rising number of nov- els, inter-ethnic hatred, mostly presented as a “natural” phenomenon, and “ancient” wars and violence between South Slavic ethnic groups became popular topics. I shall illustrate just a couple of examples. For a detailed analysis I rec- ommend the study Making a Nation, Breaking a Nation. Literature and Cultural Politics in Yugoslavia (1998) by Andrew Baruch Wachtel, which not only analyzes all mentioned novels in detail by focusing on the question of political ideas presented in this prose, but also gives an overview of their quite successful reception. According to Wachtel, in Serbia, nationalist novels became the most popular genre in the 1980s. These novels very of- ten expressed the national self-conception of Serbs as the sacrificed victims of Yugoslavism and mostly depicted traumatizing relationships between the different (religious or ethnic) South Slavic groups living in Yugoslavia, dominated by violence and hatred. Famous examples are Vuk Drašković’s novel Nož [Knife], describing ethnic/religious hatred in Bosnia, or work by Dobrica Ćosić. In 1989, shortly before the breakout of the wars, the most extreme na- tionalist books were published in Serbia. Slobodan Selenić’s Timor mortis, for example, presents the Croatian massacre of Serbs during the Second World War as the culmination of long-term patterns. The novel’s central features are the retreading of inter-ethnic hatred and the call for revenge. Vojislav Lubarda’s Vaznesenje [The Ascension], published the same year, of- fers a description of violent Serbian-Muslim relations in Bosnia, with an ideological point of view that is very transparent: Bosnian Muslims are shown as a group that has always hated and murdered Serbs; Bosnia is not a multicultural microcosm of Yugoslavia, but rather a site of hatred and disaster (see Wachtel 1998: 197–226). 132 Elena Messner

Similar narratives can be found in Croatian nationalist literature. The most prominent Croatian nationalist writer is Ivan Aralica, leading figure in (ultra-)conservative circles and the Croatian “father of the nation”. While his first novels in the 1960s were unsuccessful and products of “socialist realism”, he slowly grew in importance during the 1970s. His books at that time, as Andrew Wachtel points out, mostly perform the clash be- tween Christianity and Islam, offer contemporary versions of the “blood and ground” narrative, glorify the patriarchal peasant life and promote the Croatian national idea (see Wachtel 2006: 107). Later novels, which he published after Croatia’s independence, present Serbians or Yugoslavian partisans as primitive, evil killers, and offer a vision of Serbian-Croatian hatred as “natural”. As illustrated, the idea of a supra-national Yugoslavism (mythologized by a socialist partisan literature) completely collapsed in literature in the 1970s and 1980s and was mostly replaced by nationalist ideas and nar- ratives about inter-ethnic hatred. This discourse, which increased dra- matically in the 1980s and 1990s, had positive effects for nationalist intellectuals in Serbia, Croatia and Bosnia. Economically, politically and culturally, it “paid off” quite well. Nationalist intellectuals and authors, almost exclusively men, were honored with prizes, celebrated and often be- came politicians. Aralica was praised as the greatest living Croatian writer after the election of Franjo Tuđman as president of the newly independent Croatia. He became a member of the Croatian Academy of Arts, Senator of the Croatian Parliament and an official member of the Tuđman’s “Polit- buro” (see Wachtel 2006: 108–110). In 1992 the Serbian nationalist writer Dobrica ćosić became the president of the “rest” of Yugoslavia (although only until 1993). The above-mentioned novels were all very popular best- sellers. Conversely, anti-nationalist literature and its authors were forced into the (political and cultural) opposition and were marginalized in the literary field. At any given time, writers and artists in the former Yugoslavia were able to select from a deep well of conflicting narratives, which they could re- actualize in literature or film and use as projections. Many of them chose the affirmation of conservative, fundamentally religious, nationalist or sometimes racist narratives for (psycho-)social, political and economic rea- sons. As the historian Holm Sundhaussen points out, the role of nationalist art and cultural production was often overstated especially in international scientific and journalistic discourse. However, the role of this nationalist literary production was to provide cultural and historical meanings and patterns of perception which legitimized violence and participated in the construction of the enemy. This includes the creation and promotion of Literature and (Ethno-)Nationalist Narratives in the (Post-)Yugoslav Region 133 scapegoat theories, conspiracy theories, fantasies of defense and self-victim- ization, clichés of heroes and the mythologizing of the nation (see Sund- haussen 2007: 445 and 446).

Disturbing “Anti-Narratives” in Anti-War Literature since the 1990s

In all republics of the former Yugoslavia, the nationalist literature partic- ipated in the construction of ethno-religious identities which supported the production of exclusively nationalist thinking. As mentioned earlier, “inter-ethnic hatred” became a dominant topic. Yet, the main project of anti-war literature was to subvert those models of exclusive (ethno-)national identity. It is not surprising then that the topic of “inter-ethnic hatred” was exchanged by the topic of “inter-ethnic friendship”, and that the idea of ethnic differences was deconstructed or at least clearly ignored. This specific literature criticized the regimes, subverted national and re- ligious myths and was produced all over (Ex-)Yugoslavia. It was distributed and read not only in the various single successor states, but throughout former Yugoslavia. This production of anti-war and anti-nationalist litera- ture in Bosnia, Croatia and Serbia inevitably seeks a balance between aes- thetics and political engagement, as Enver Kazaz points out in his essay on Bosnian prose (see Kazaz 2004: 137–166). By addressing the whole region through their critical texts, this group of authors differed greatly from the national-conservative ones, who exclusively addressed an audience “of their own”, describing the “others” so negatively that they can hardly be consid- ered as potential readers. Miranda Jakiša and Sylvia Sasse posit that literature about the Yugo- slav wars remarkably often reflects the “contingency” (as opposed to the commonly postulated “naturalness”) of enmity. Jakiša and Sasse combine this thought with the question, whether Post-Yugoslav authors refused to reproduce narratives which legitimate war and violence and thus decided to oppose the fact that art often (re-)produces the “great” (national and religious) narratives (see Jakiša/Sasse 2009: 221–237). Some examples of the production of this literature shall be presented to give an answer to this question. I will analyze novels from different periods since the 1990s, with a focus on an often neglected segment of the Bosnian war: the conflict be- tween Croats and Bosniaks, a topic which had a great impact on (Bosnian-) Croatian contemporary literature. Besides the internationally best-known Croatian-Bosnian writer Miljen- ko Jergović, who fled from Sarajevo to Zagreb in 1993 and literally “im- 134 Elena Messner ported” the topic of the Bosnian war into Croatian literature (although he never wrote prose about the “front” or combat, because his topic was mostly the civic experience of the war), the first Croatian writer who reflected the horror of the Bosnian war in a politically and literarily remarkable text was Josip Mlakić. His first novel, which won several prizes in Croatia, was also one of the (till then very rare) anti-war documents that focused on the Croatian-Bosniak war from 1993–1995. In his novel “Kad magle stanu” [When the fog disappears], published in 2000, Mlakić uses a quite conven- tional frame in order to stage the war memories of his main protagonist: The soldier Jakov, who fought in the war, is supposed to heal from his de- pression in a psychiatric clinic. Jakov is given the task to write a therapeutic war diary. This diary reflects the action at the war front in short “images”, as Jakov, the narrator of the diary, titles his memories and stories. The treat- ment fails, in part because of the doctor, who follows highly questionable methods. His therapy mainly involves showing his patients, based on their diaries, that they suffer from irrational guilt, because violence is part of war and was completely legitimate and necessary. The fragmentary memories of Jakov re-tell the war experiences of a group of Bosnian-Croat soldiers at the front, fighting against Bosniak units, with occasional attacks by Serbian paramilitary troops. In the center of the novel is a murder: the (Croatian) soldier Jakov kills his former (Bosniak) friend. The group of soldiers is drawn very heterogeneously. Crude humor, vul- gar language and male power games keep the group of soldiers together, although only briefly. Similar to the work of Faruk Šehić, one of the most famous Bosniak writers of war poetry and war prose, alcohol and drugs, growing brutalization and psychological or physical violence within the group are shown as consequences of the soldiers’ anxiety and the military’s hierarchical structure. Within this small community, violence is experi- enced not only from the enemy but also from people of “one’s own”. The central murder, which Jakov commits, does not happen during combat. He is in fact tricked by one of “his own”. A soldier in his group makes him believe that his friend, a captured Bosniak soldier of the “other side”, who happens to be his pre-war best friend, would have slept with his wife, so Jakov kills him. Once he understands he has been the victim of a brutal joke, already deeply traumatized and having persistent nightmares connected both to the experience of war and his personal drama, Jakov takes revenge and executes his “comrade” with several shots. Mlakić’s novel, as Davor Beganović points out, transfers the traumas of war to a mental institution; it shows how the description of the experience of war and its traumatic consequences pushes people to the edge. The author uses non- linear and “disturbed” narratives, grotesque elements, intertextuality and Literature and (Ethno-)Nationalist Narratives in the (Post-)Yugoslav Region 135

(quasi-)documentary material. The text also provides an apocalyptic image of the male body (see Beganović 2009: 201–205). One of the politically most relevant issues discussed in the book is the concept of an “enemy” based on national or religious affiliation. Repeat- edly, the deep aversion of enmity based on nationalist or ethnic “hatred” is staged in the book. It becomes a key element that contradicts nationalistic justification of violence and heroic tales of war. Significantly, scapegoating and conspiracy theories are ignored in this narration; self-victimization is contrasted with the resolution to simplify dichotomous victim-perpetrator constellations; the defense fantasies and stereotypical tales of war heroes are replaced by male characters (soldiers) who repeatedly re-live panic attacks, but also experience “inter-ethnical” friendship. The first person narrator of the novel is a marginalized protagonist, an anti-hero who experiences ma- nipulations through a collective identity. He replaces the binary opposition us/them (friend/enemy) by denying any collective and especially exclusive ethno-national identity. The fact that he kills his pre-war (Bosniak) friend is not linked to a heroic tale of the great warrior killing the dangerous en- emy for his country, but rather, leads to the complete psychic destruction and traumatization of the protagonist. The lack of an explicit presentation of ethnic conflicts in the novel and their replacement with the presentation of psychosocial conflicts, and the replacement of the heroic war (through an anti-hero who refuses to be ma- nipulated for “national needs”) are crucial moments for Bosnian anti-war literature in general. This important “anti-narrative” therefore is the link that connects this novel with the next example. In 2005 Boris Dežulović, a Croatian author, published the novel “Jebo sad hiljadu dinara” [Fuck a thousand dinars], a black-humored anti-war satire. In the novel two groups of six soldiers from Croatian and Bosniak forces fight against each other in the Herzegovinian part of Bosnia. The plot involves only one single day and follows the rules of a comedy of er- rors. Both the Bosniak and Croat leaders get the idea for their group to slip into the uniforms of the enemy to fulfill their secret mission (spying on the others). When the two groups meet, great confusion follows. As the Croatian critic Jagna Pogačnik puts it, in that moment the most important question for any war in the world is – who is the enemy and who is a friend? Here, the question is even harder to resolve because the soldiers grew up in neighboring towns, so they are quite similar in their look, speak and habits. The novel then offers many stories about the private lives of the soldiers, which all refer to a “golden” period of the 1980s and are connected to each other somehow, mostly in a humorous way. Consequently, the dichotomous division into us/them or enemy/friend is satirically unmasked as ridiculous 136 Elena Messner

(Pogačnik 2006: 75–96), a crucial moment in the deconstruction of tra- ditional concepts of exclusive national identity, as we already have seen in Mlakić’s novel. The soldiers in “Jebo sad hiljadu dinara” share anecdotes, memories, jokes and mini-stories about famous or at least popular people from the region: the nymphomaniac “bitch” who deflowered most young men of the town, the folk singer, the local hooligan, the small-town gangster, the football referee who in the war suddenly becomes a real judge, the fraudu- lent Chinese shopkeeper who claims to sell the ears and fingers of all war enemies to all parties (in fact they are only tails of pigs). The satirical stories about these protagonists are reminiscences of the life which the soldiers shared before the war, clearly revealing the absurdity of the sudden “en- mity” between former neighbors. The naive and simple soldiers and their heroic stories are constantly exposed as lies, heroic tales are mocked, and thus, the mythologizing of one great nation and its armed defenders are implicitly presented as ridiculous. The absurdity of an enormous cultural and ethnic distinction between different religious or ethnic groups in Bosnia is laid bare by the genre of comedy of errors. A core scene in the novel is the first meeting of the two troops, both groups wearing the uniforms of the enemy soldiers, yet believ- ing that the others are part of their own troops. A long scene follows, con- sisting mainly of dialogues among the protagonists, speaking of course the same language. Soon afterwards every other “socio-cultural” difference is denied in this scene, especially when the soldiers tell each other, handshak- ing all the time: “Well, luckily we didn’t shoot at you, you’re all ours, we are all yours.” While they are wearing the wrong uniforms, any cultural, religious, political or ethnic “otherness” becomes invisible. Dežulović’s sat- ire therefore shows the contradictory construction of cultural “otherness”, which (not only, but especially in Bosnia and in the Yugoslav wars) became one of the dominant narratives that was propagated by political elites and used as legitimation for the use of violence. Economic and political (territo- rial) interests could easily be hidden behind more “noble” reasons for war, such as cultural, religious or ethnic differences. A comedy of errors typically culminates in a happy resolution of the “dramatic” conflict. In this novel, corresponding with the brutal reality of the civil war, all the protagonists are dead in the end. They die because of an error one of them makes. Again, as in Mlakić’s story, the author describes no heroic dying of a hero in combat, but a quite non-heroic dying caused by an “unhappy coincidence”. So in the end, the use of violence in the novel is dissolved from the question of belonging to a specific ethnic group and is instead shown as a psychosocial problem. Literature and (Ethno-)Nationalist Narratives in the (Post-)Yugoslav Region 137

An internationally prominent example of another anti-war novel is “Freelander” [Freelander], published in Croatia in 2008. The novel reflects typical themes of the Bosnian-Croatian author Miljenko Jergović, who again pursues his project of exploring collective and individual identities, or more precisely, stages the deconstruction of the formation of religious and ethno-national identity. The main character in “Freelander” makes a road trip from Zagreb to Sarajevo, which happens to be his last life-threatening struggle in search for himself. Adum is a Croat born and raised in Sarajevo who left his town as a child. He never really was treated or felt like a “real Croat”, and therefore he wishes to be “more Croatian”, to belong to an ethno-national group with no doubts. The openly more racist than nationalist character of the main protago- nist is connected to the repressed knowledge of Adum (which is constantly emerging to the surface), that no “identity” or “culture” is “homogeneous”. But instead of living his hybrid identity proudly (his name is Muslim, he was born in Bosnia and talks with a Bosnian accent), he constantly tries to define himself differently than what would correspond to his biogra- phy. The protagonist re-lives a final “tour de force” through his psyche and through the Bosnian landscape – driving his beloved car “Freelander”. The grotesque road novel closes in Sarajevo where Adum dies. Although highly paranoid and extremely racist, Adum still somehow manages to gain the sympathy of the reader. In his ambivalence he is the ideal protagonist: Adum is proud to be able to forget things he does not like. A satirical trick by the author: Adum is a former history teacher. This is one of many games the author plays so that he can point out the problematic construction of the great national and religious narratives: Only by forgetting contradictory historical develop- ments (i.e., ignoring migration processes which happened on the Balkans, in Europe and world-wide) can one believe in an ethnically “homogeneous nation”. Such a belief includes an essentialist concept of culture, which can be associated with highly problematic “blood and ground” narratives. Novels like the three presented (Jergović, Dežulović or Mlakić), as well as many others, offer radical alternatives to nationalist literary pro- duction. What connects those stories is not only their anti-war engage- ment, but also the deconstruction of the traditional and normative religious and national narratives. This is followed by the negation of the concept of a war hero who fights (and therefore kills) for national or religious unity. In this sense, they break with two dominant tradi- tions of war novels and narratives retold in the literary production in former Yugoslavia: they are not compatible with heroic (socialist) stories about unified partisan (war) heroes, and they are even less compatible with 138 Elena Messner the (war) heroes of the nationalist literature, which arose in Yugoslavia in the 1980s. They are radically anti-militarist and anti-nationalist, mostly employing grotesque humor and “disturbing” narrative strategies, although written in a transparent, “readable” neorealistic way. They always offer a clear political “message” and openly fight the ideas of collectivization and myth of the warrior as national hero (especially Mlakić), of “natural” inter- ethnic hatred (especially Dežulović) or normative ethno-national identity (especially Jergović). This type of literature is written by a generation that could grow (thanks to politically engaged persons in the literary field, such as publishers, edi- tors, critics, festivals, etc.) only with the improved opportunities for pub- lication and the growing media attention. This literature has developed parallel to a right-wing scene, which is still strongly associated with con- servative academies and universities in Bosnia, Croatia and Serbia. As this anti-war literature is distributed throughout the whole ex-Yugoslav area, it reaches a much larger audience than the nationalist texts that are not read outside their countries. We can therefore finish with an – maybe too optimistic – ­conclusion: Although we can see the increasing social irrel- evance of literature in this region, we can also note the fact that literature continues to be a relevant (critical) medium of political observation which is able to offer “alternative” narrated realities and which takes profite out of its supra-national aim: it has a supra-national public and therefor a wider reception than strongly nationalist authors.

References

Beganović, Davor (2009): ‘Das Trauma des Kriegers’, in Zwischen Apo­ kalypse und Alltag: Kriegsnarrative des 20. und 21. Jahrhunderts, ed. by Natalia Borissova, Susi K. Frank and Andreas Kraft (Bielefeld: Tran- script), pp. 201–205. Jakiša, Miranda/Sasse, Sylvia (2009): ‘Kontingente Feindschaft? Die Jugo- slawienkriege bei David Albahari und Miljenko Jergović’, in Zwischen Apokalypse und Alltag. Kriegsnarrative des 20. und 21. Jahrhunderts, ed. by Natalia Borissova, Susi K. Frank and Andreas Kraft (Bielefeld: Tran- script), pp. 221–237. Kazaz, Enver (2004): ‘Prizori uhodanog užasa’ [Scenes of horror], Sara­ jevske sveske, No. 5, 137–166. Literature and (Ethno-)Nationalist Narratives in the (Post-)Yugoslav Region 139

Pogačnik, Jagna (2006): ‘Novi hrvatski roman. Jedno moguće skeniranje stanja’ [One possible overview. The New Croatian novel], Sarajevske sveske, No. 13, 75–96. Sundhaussen, Holm (2007): Geschichte Serbiens: 19.–21. Jahrhundert (Vienna: Böhlau). Wachtel, Andrew Baruch (1998): Making a Nation, Breaking a Nation: Lit­ erature and Cultural Politics in Yugoslavia (Stanford: Stanford University Press). — (2006): Remaining Relevant after Communism: The Role of the Writer in Eastern Europe (Chicago: University of Chicago Press).

Doris Lessing’s “Alfred and Emily” and the Ethics of Narrated Memory Dorothee B i r k e (Freiburg /Br.)

This contribution considers the ethical implications of Doris Lessing’s Alfred and Emily (2008), an innovative work that can be labelled as a counterfactual (auto)biography. In retelling her parents’ history as a “what if” narrative (what if World War I had not taken place?), Lessing positions her narrative as an ethical project, an attempt to fic- tionally repair lives that were damaged in reality. This focus on the redemptive value of storytelling is in accord with tendencies summed up as the so-called ‘ethical turn’, a revival of interest in the social and moral role of the storyteller. The analysis shows that although in some ways counterfactuality serves as a means of promoting an ethical stance in Alfred and Emily, in others it proves to be a stumbling stone – in particular, it reflects a problematic assumption of interpretive authority on the part of the storyteller. Lessing’s text thus serves as a particularly intriguing case study for the ethical chal- lenges facing the narration of memory in contemporary life-writing.

In 2008, the Nobel prize-winning author Doris Lessing published what she declared was going to be her last book: Alfred and Emily, a work that reads like a postscript from an author with a life-long interest in autobiographical writing. It goes back into her family’s past, as Lessing writes about her par- ents, Alfred Tayler and Emily McVeagh. What makes the book original is that Lessing does not tell Alfred and Emily’s lives as they really happened, but imagines a counterfactual scenario: what would their lives have been like if World War I had not taken place? And what if they had never mar- ried, but been free to realize other plans? There is a sharp divide between the counterfactual first part of the book and a second part, in which Lessing goes back into a more conventional autobiographical mode and describes her parents as she actually saw them in her childhood. Some of the episodes in this part are already familiar to readers of Lessing’s earlier autobiography Under My Skin, which was published in 1994. In her foreword, Lessing characterizes the project as aiming at a kind of imaginary wish-fulfilment on behalf of her parents. The counterfactual plot, she says, is an attempt to “give them [her parents] lives as might have been if there had been no World War One” (2008: vii). The war, she fur- ther explains, “did them both in”. Her father lost a leg and never wholly recovered from the trauma of the trenches; her mother lost her first fiancé and the drive to go on with her chosen profession, nursing. By giving her parents their “heart’s desire” in the alternate lives she imagines for them, Lessing writes, she is also trying to liberate herself from the “monstrous legacy” of the war, which “squatted over my childhood” (2008: viii). 142 Dorothee Birke

The book’s publishers, HarperCollins, have done their part to promote the cathartic value of this project. The blurb on the back cover reads, “This is Lessing, trying to lay to rest the ghosts of war and its terrible legacy. Triumphantly, with the publication of Alfred and Emily, she has done just that.” Some reviewers have followed the cues provided by these paratextual elements: Blake Morrison, in his review for the Guardian, describes the book as undertaking “not life writing so much as the righting of lives” (Morrison 2008). Fellow novelist A.S. Byatt suggests yet another evocative formula in her review in the Financial Times, also chosen by the publisher as a paratext for the back cover of the Harper Perennial edition from 2009: “Alfred and Emily makes us think about the moral and emotional power of different ways of telling a story.” Invocations of the ‘moral power of storytelling’ have, with the so-called ethical turn, made a triumphant come-back in literary studies as well as in literary criticism.1 Lessing’s work is surely particularly amenable to ethi- cal assessments: she is known for her socially engaged and critical writing and her ongoing exploration of oppressive power structures and alterna- tive models of social experience.2 From her take on the realist genre of the bildungsroman in the Children of Violence series (1952–1969) to her for- ays into science fiction and utopian writing in the Canopus in Argos cycle (1979–1973), Lessing has experimented with a multitude of forms in order to explore these main themes. In her autobiographical nonfiction, in turn, she has probed her own life, critically examined the roots of her own politi- cal engagement as a (controversial) feminist and (former) communist. All these different parts of her oeuvre are linked by Lessing’s declared belief in the special role of the writer, the teller of stories, as charged with a particu- lar social responsibility (see Pickering 1990: 15). Alfred and Emily’s investment in storytelling as a moral project, seen in this context, is unsurprising: it fits in perfectly with Lessing’s life-long preoccupations, down to the development of yet another innovative format. At the same time, however, the book’s particular take on the writer’s role is ambivalent. In fact, some critics have been unconvinced by Lessing’s stated benevolent intentions, interpreting the book as a way of getting back at her parents, and especially her mother: as Daryl Cumber Dance argues, her “revision of [her] mother[…]’s life is clearly retributive” (Dance 2010: 15). Caroline Moore sees the work as continuing rather than resolving a painful

1 See for example the special issues on ethical criticism in Style (1998/32.2), the Euro­ pean Journal of English Studies (2003/7.2) and New Literary History (2003/34.1). 2 A detailed discussion of how Lessing employs alternate worlds in her fiction is pro- vided by Krebs (2000). Doris Lessing’s “Alfred and Emily” and the Ethics of Narrated Memory 143 grappling with a dysfunctional mother-daughter relationship: “Rewriting the past is a work of escape, an urgent but never-ending imperative, but one in which closure is always impossible” (Moore 2008). Lessing scholar Virginia Tiger, in a similar vein, finds the book “confounding as well as ex- asperating” (2009: 23) and notes its failure to imagine a “happy alternative life” for Emily as well as the “psychological climate of pain” pervading the whole narrative (ibid.: 24). The widely differing assessments of the moral value of Lessing’s project, I want to argue in this paper, can be directly traced back to tensions inher- ent in the form she has chosen: the counterfactual format in combination with an (auto)biographical approach. In the following, I will trace the dif- ferent ways in which the work could be seen as undertaking an ethical project, and I will situate these attempts within a larger context of contem- porary trends in factual and fictional life-writing. Lessing’s work, at least at first sight, seems to be a typical example of a general trend towards a fusion of fictional and nonfictional genres. In life-writing, such a fusion manifests itself in names for subgenres such as “autofiction”, and is generally seen in the context of a postmodernist under- standing of the double constructedness of memory and of the written life narrative. Just as memory involves an act of (re)construction influenced by the present of the remembering self (see Neumann 2008: 137), so does the process of shaping a life narrative involve acts of selection and the adoption of particular perspectives. Alfred and Emily has been read in the context of this larger trend in life writing: Virgina Tiger, for example, argues that its “hybrid form […] demonstrates, once again, how porous is the frontier between fact and fiction” (2009: 22). This description of the form as hybrid, however, does not do full jus- tice to the particular character of the counterfactual. ‘Counterfactual’, af- ter all, is not the same as ‘fictional’, even though the two concepts are sometimes used interchangeably. A narrative can contain counterfactual elements without being fictional, and many fictional plots do not contain counterfactual elements. A counterfactual plot as I understand it here in- volves a “hypothetical alteration to a sequence of events in the past” and thus “constructs a binary hierarchy of events in which fact is contrasted with a hypothetical counterfact” (Dannenberg 2008: 250). In other words, a description of the counterfactual ‘what would have happened if’ scenario also, implicitly or explicitly, involves the reference to a ‘factual’ sequence of events from which this description deviates. Unless the “ontological hier­ archy” (ibid.: 120–121) suggested by the counterfactual is in some way sub- verted, then, such a plot tends to cement rather than blur the distinction between fact and fiction. 144 Dorothee Birke

For the set-up of Alfred and Emily, this means two things: firstly, the representation of the book’s first part (“Alfred and Emily: a novella”) as counterfactual has the consequence of strengthening the second part’s (“Al- fred and Emily; Two Lives”) status as a ‘factual’ counterpart which relates ‘what really happened’. Fact and fiction, then, are not so much fused as jux- taposed in the book. Second, although the first part is labelled “a novella”, the boundaries set by the counterfactual scenario suggest that its license to invention is curbed in specific ways. Lessing, as I will show, does not merely aim at creating a more pleasant version of her parents’ actual lives, but she presents her story as an examination of the causes and circumstances which marred ‘real’ Alfred and Emily’s lives. Such an analytic function is a main purpose of counterfactual thinking as employed in everyday circumstances, but also by some historians and social scientists who want to investigate questions of causality and agency.3 A first ethically relevant aspect of the employment of the counterfac- tual is its showcasing of the attempt to stay as faithful as possible to the parents’ actual characters and visions. Lessing represents herself more as an archeologist who reconstructs a structure from known materials than as an architect who gets to imagine and create something completely new. She embeds the two main parts in an elaborate paratextual apparatus, includ- ing the already-mentioned foreword, in which she introduces her project; an “Explanation” that gives some details on how the counterfactual part reworked facts from her parents’ lives; and some documentary material, including photographs from the family album as well as an encyclopedia entry about the Royal Hospital in London, where Alfred and Emily’s real- life courtship began.

Part One Docu- Part Two Expla- Foreword Alfred and Emily: mentary Alfred and Emily; nation a Novella Material two lives

Figure 1 – The Structure of Alfred and Emily

3 For discussions of the fruitfulness of the counterfactual method in the histori- cal and social sciences see the contributions in Wenzlhuemer (2009) and Lebow (2011). For a very accessible introduction to psychological research into counter- factual thinking as a cognitive strategy in everyday life, see Roese (2005). Christ (2011) discusses how the counterfactual is used as an instrument of political analy- sis and criticism in (feminist) utopian fiction. Doris Lessing’s “Alfred and Emily” and the Ethics of Narrated Memory 145

Especially by including the short part called “Explanation”, in which she details how she has drawn on actual people and events for her counter- factual inventions, Lessing exhibits a careful attitude towards reconstruct- ing her parents’ lives. The inclusion of a kaleidoscope of raw materials in the part following the “Explanation” implies a claim to transparency, as if the reader were invited to assess and approve each step of the reconstruc- tion process. The use of the counterfactual plotline seems to suggest that it is possible to change a few parameters only, and then to have the scenarios play themselves out as in a scientific experiment. The storyteller herself, in turn, recedes to the background in part one: by imagining her parents’ lives without their marriage, Lessing in effect deletes herself from history, and can now, in the first part, figure as a more distanced, but benevolent archeologist who puts together a new version of their lives (I will come back to this point). While in Under My Skin, the parents mainly represent a repressive, unhappy environment from which the young Doris must free herself, here she turns to a more compassionate exploration of their respec- tive potential and aspirations. The analytic potential of the counterfactual is also central to another ethically relevant aspect: the narrative of the two individuals’ alternate lives has obvious social and political implications. First, there is of course the diagnosis of war as doing irreparable damage to a whole society. As Less- ing writes in Under My Skin: “How thoroughly we have all forgotten the damage that war did Europe, but we are still living with it. Perhaps if ‘The Flower of Europe’ (as they used to be called) had not been killed, we would not now in Europe be living with such second-rateness, such muddle and incompetence?” (1995: 9). Her book can be seen as a follow-up exploration of this idea. The alternate Alfred and Emily of the “novella” are examples of a more self-assured, prosperous life without the war. Lessing stops short, however, of proposing a utopian version of English society without vio- lence: war remains a possibility and people voice opinions such as: “If you ask me a war would do us all the good in the world. We’re soft and rotten, like a pear that’s gone past its best” (Lessing 2009: 132). The lesson seems to be that it takes the experience of a war to make people realize its destructive power. In any case, Alfred and Emily clearly connects with some of Less- ing’s earlier work in exploring the psycho-social causes and consequences of violence, and the complex relations between individual and collective lives. A second important larger social concern is Lessing’s feminist agenda, which surfaces in the alternate life she imagines for her mother. Emily’s story is very different from Alfred’s, which is told as a sequence of achieve- ments: marriage, landownership, children, social reputation. Alternate Em- ily, by contrast, marries, gives up her job, is widowed, then drifts for a 146 Dorothee Birke while, and only gradually finds a new role as an educator and founder of schools. She remains childless and does not remarry. This, as I have indicat- ed, has been seen as an expression of personal spite by some reviewers, but I think it can just as adequately be seen as a consequence of Lessing’s interest in the ways in which social structures shape individual lives. Her difficulty in imagining a happy alternate life for her mother reflects a critique of the limited choices available to women in the first half of the 20th century. Lessing does acknowledge her mother’s unusual gifts, but also suggests that the role of housewife and mother was not compatible with the ambition of employing those gifts. The root of Emily’s problems, then, is not reducible to the war in the same way that Alfred’s is: she is doubly handicapped, by the experience of the war but also by being a woman. The notion of a conventional gender-specific happy ending – marrying the right man – is exposed as an illusion: alternate Emily does marry for love, but is subsequently unfulfilled by the task of being a perfect housewife and hostess. The success story Lessing imagines for her mother only begins after she is widowed, and comes at the price of being unable to settle into a new relationship. Again, I would see this less as an expression of spite on the part of Lessing than as her acknowledgment of heteronormative limitations on individual biographies, of the fact that a man could plan on finding a partner who would support his main project, but a woman could not. The process of finding her own path in life after her husband’s death is described as arduous, but ultimately alternate Emily, through philan- thropic work, achieves a public standing that few women at the time had. Even her death is imagined as a semi-public event: “Emily McVeagh saw some boys tormenting a dog and went to remonstrate. They turned on her. It was believed that her shock at this was more the reason for her heart- attack than the blow she received on her head. She was seventy-three years old. Hundreds of people came to her funeral” (Lessing 2008: 138). Daryl Cumber Dance interprets this violent alternate death as an act of retribu- tion on the part of the daughter, who imagines her mother dying “in an effort to control and chastise others” (2010: 17), and certainly the gruesome detail is unsettling.4 One could also, however, more benevolently say that alternate Emily dies in consequence of an (albeit small) act of civil courage. Instead of a long and possibly lonely aging process, her daughter imagines a poignant end for a still forceful personality, and in her last sentence high- lights that her mother has achieved a claim to commemoration by her peers. The ethical value of the counterfactual “novella”, then, I would say, can more adequately be described in terms of social criticism than of individual

4 Virginia Tiger even labels it “authorial homicide” (2009: 24). Doris Lessing’s “Alfred and Emily” and the Ethics of Narrated Memory 147 redemption through storytelling, and in this sense I would defend it against the critique of its reviewers. All the same I do think they have a point: the book has aspects I, too, find problematic from an ethical point of view. I am troubled not so much by the impression that Lessing seeks to exact a late revenge on her mother, but by what I see as a lack of attention to the issue of authority and to the problem of speaking for another person – or, in the words of the feminist narrative theorist Susan Lanser, to voice itself as a “trope of identity and power” (Lanser 1992: 3). Obviously, this is a central problem in life-writing in general, insofar as this kind of writing usually involves representing real-life people, who have little or no control over the images that are thus produced and circulated. It seems to me that Lessing, sensitive as she is with regard to other ethical issues in her project, in this respect acts like the proverbial bull in the china shop. The key factor here is, again, the relation between the counterfactual and the ‘factual’ part. As mentioned, in the long second part of the book, Lessing returns to a fairly conventional autobiographical mode and describes how she saw her parents in her youth and early adulthood. The overall impression is rather dreary: the story is dominated by instances of illness, of depression, of economical failure, and of quarrels within the family. What contributes to the bleakness of this second narrative is the fact that it is situated after the first, counterfactual part. This was my personal impression when read- ing the book, but it also fits with psychological research on counterfactual thinking: one major finding is that different kinds of counterfactuals tend to have different emotional effects. ‘Downward counterfactuals’ – think- ing about how things might have been worse – generally make people feel better about what actually happened. ‘Upward counterfactuals’ have the opposite effect: pondering what might have been better makes the actual outcome appear in a more unfavorable light.5 This effect is also character- istic for the reading experience provided by Alfred and Emily, insofar as the counterfactual first part colors the way in which the parents appear in the second part of the book: because they are so active and mainly content in the first part, they seem all the more miserable and disappointed in the second one. The juxtaposition of the two parts is not in itself without analytic value: for example, it becomes clear that precisely those characteristics that made Alfred and Emily such well-respected and valuable members of the com- munity in the counterfactual England of the first part were unhelpful in their real lives on the African farm. Both Lessing’s parents are too reliant

5 This summary of psychological research on emotional effects of counterfactuals is based on Roese (2005: 16–20). 148 Dorothee Birke on government authority to go after their success aggressively and indepen- dently. Also, especially Emily is too mired in the codes and conventions of the English middle class to ever be happy in a home in rural Africa. The double narrative, in this sense, serves to explore how an individual’s social conditioning can lead to success in one context, but be an obstacle in an- other one. While this aspect certainly adds a layer of complexity to the narrative that unfolds in the second part of the book, there is a curious focus on those details that emphasize the negative evaluation of the parents’ lives as domi- nated by failure and decline, while details that might point towards differ- ing evaluations receive short shrift. Even the positive things that are said about the parents in the second part are immediately related to the overall narrative of failure. For example, there is one sentence that describes Less- ing’s mother as “this superbly healthy, energetic woman, who […] helped her invalid husband choose a farm in uncharted, unworked wilderness, got the house built from materials she had never seen and knew nothing about […]” (2008: 156–157). Instead of describing any of these achievements at length, however, Lessing focuses on events like her mother’s nervous break- down after the first few months in Africa. These are the events, clearly, that defined the relationship between mother and daughter and fostered the daughter’s wish to get away from her parents, away from their farm and from their life. Her late turning back to her (now dead) parents in Alfred and Emily is framed as an offer of reparation and as representing a far more mature position than that of the rebellious teenager who needed to renounce her parents. But at the same time, curiously, it also ultimately cements the child’s view of her parents’ lives as irredeemable failures. Even more problematically, in conjunction with the self-representation of the bi- ographer as archeologist, it does so from a position that claims much greater interpretive authority than the child’s ever could. The assumption of interpretive authority is also strengthened by a sec- ond effect of the book’s particular format: because part one is so carefully framed as the counterfactual version of events, part two more insistently ap- pears as a straight-forward account of ‘the way things really were’. Part one, written in an authorial third-person voice and with a linear plot, conveys the idea of narrative distance and artifice. Part two, by contrast, contains a number of authenticity markers: a first-person voice with many reflections on the differences between the narrating and the narrated self; the inser- tion of more black-and-white photographs; the division into snapshot-like episodes. It implies a more personal appeal to its readership, as if we were invited to sit down with Lessing, leaf through her family album, listen to her memories and her associations. We are invited to consider ‘what it felt Doris Lessing’s “Alfred and Emily” and the Ethics of Narrated Memory 149 like’ to be this child (little Doris),6 and to be this adult (remembering and narrating Doris), and the conflicting views and emotions that characterize Doris Lessing’s changing stance towards her parents. What is absent from all this is the parents’ own version of the story: any attempt to recreate it (be it from letters or diaries or other documents), or, even better, the acknowl- edgement that, in fact, it cannot be recreated. Especially in conjunction with the second part, the counterfactual mode of the first part, then, cements rather than questions one particular reading of the parents’ lives. It is a bit jarring how Lessing turns around the relation between herself and her parents: as an author, the child has now become the creator – very obviously in the case of the alternate parents in the first part, less obviously but more insidiously so in the case of the second part. In her foreword, she does ask herself the question how they might have reacted to her narrative: “If I could meet Alfred Tayler and Em- ily McVeagh now, as I have written them, as they might have been had the Great War not happened, I hope they would approve the lives I have given them” (Lessing 2008: viii). If one looks closely, the strange thing about this quote is that Lessing does not desire the approval of her actual parents, but of the versions she herself has created. A similar exercise of authorial power is performed with regard to the usage of names: as Dance (2010: 16) points out, in calling them ‘Alfred’ and ‘Emily’, Lessing restored the origi- nal names that her parents themselves had chosen to discard.7 The book, in this respect, establishes a version of their lives at the expense of the actual parents’ stated intentions – and, one may suspect, their own experiences. A.S. Byatt’s comment that the book “makes us think about the moral and emotional power of different ways of telling a story” thus takes on a sinister ring, which was surely not intended by the person who chose it as an adver- tisement for the book jacket. In sum, then, I see the book’s most serious limitation in the fact that it does not address or reflect the ambivalent role of the storyteller herself, of the power she wields and of the responsibilities this entails. That the fiction- alized life narrative is compartmentalized in part one of the book, and thus

6 The American literary critic James Wood has recently argued that it should be the main object of narrative fiction to convey to the reader how certain experiences feel (2008: 180). Memoirs, especially when focussing on traumatic events, could be seen as contributing to the same project of evoking a vivid subjectivity and inviting empathy. 7 “When Emily went to Persia, she dropped her first name Emily, which she never liked, and began using her middle name Maude […]. She also insisted that her hus- band replace Alfred with the name Michael. It was by these names that the couple was known in Persia and Southern Rhodesia.” (Dance 2010: 16) 150 Dorothee Birke presented as ‘counterfactual’ in relation to part two, is part of the problem. In this light, Lessing’s ‘writing herself out’ of her parents’ story in part one appears less as an act of self-denial than as giving her the opportunity to re-position herself behind the curtain, so to speak, and to have the last word as the narrator of her family’s lives, both alternate and actual. I do not mean to disparage Doris Lessing or her book. If there are nov- elists who can make the claim that their storytelling has ethical value, Lessing certainly has to be counted among them, especially for her many explorations of gender roles and of the origin and consequence of violence in Western societies. With Alfred and Emily, she has, yet another time, tackled big issues, and she has done so in an original and intriguing way. The claims the book makes for the moral power of storytelling are highly relevant to our times: similar claims are explored in many contemporary works of fiction and non-fiction, works such as Ian McEwan’s Atonement, Jonathan Safran Foer’s Everything Is Illuminated, and many others. Alfred and Emily is an ambivalent project by one of the most versatile contempo- rary authors writing in English. Its mixed reception exposes some of the uncomfortable issues connected with the question of the power and respon- sibility of the storyteller.

References

Byatt, A.S. (2008): ‘The Mother of her Dreams’, Financial Times, 10 May 2008. [accessed 9 September 2014]. Christ, Birte (2011): ‘“If I Were a Man”: Functions of the Counterfactual in Feminist Fiction’, in Counterfactual Thinking – Counterfactual Writing, ed. by Dorothee Birke, Michael Butter, Tilmann Köppe (Berlin and Boston: de Gruyter), pp. 190–211. Dance, Daryl Cumber (2010): ‘Emily and Anne: Doris Lessing’s and Jamai- ca Kincaid’s Portraits of the Mothers They Remember and the Mothers that Might Have Been’, Journal of West Indian Literature, 19.1, 1–21. Dannenberg, Hilary P. (2008): Coincidence and Counterfactuality: Plotting Time and Space in Narrative Fiction (Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press). Krebs, Claudia (2000): Doris Lessings Darstellung alternativer Welten: Eine Untersuchung im Kontext des zeitgenössischen Romans (Trier: W VT). Doris Lessing’s “Alfred and Emily” and the Ethics of Narrated Memory 151

Lanser, Susan Sniader (1992): Fictions of Authority: Women Writers and Narrative Voice (Ithaca and London: Cornell UP). Lebow, Richard Ned (2011): ‘Counterfactuals, Contingency, and Causa- tion’, in Counterfactual Thinking – Counterfactual Writing, ed. by Doro­ thee Birke, Michael Butter, Tilmann Köppe (Berlin and Boston: de Gruyter), pp. 150–169. Lessing, Doris (2008): Alfred and Emily (London etc.: Harper Perennial). — (1994): Under My Skin: Volume One of My Autobiography, to 1949 (New York: HarperCollins). Moore, Caroline (2008): ‘Doris Lessing’s Rewriting of her Parents’ Past’, The Telegraph, 15 May 2008. [accessed 9 September 2014]. Morrison, Blake (2008): ‘The Righting of Lives’, The Guardian, 17 May 2008. [accessed 9 September 2014]. Neumann, Birgit (2008): ‘What Makes Literature Valuable: Fictions of Meta-Memory and Ethics of Remembering’, in Ethics in Culture: The Dissemination of Value through Literature and Other Media, ed. by Astrid Erll, Herbert Grabes, Ansgar Nünning (Berlin: de Gruyter), pp. 131–152. Pickering, Jean (1990): Understanding Doris Lessing (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press). Roese, Neal (2005): If Only: How to Turn Regret into Opportunity (New York: Broadway). Tiger, Virginia (2009): ‘Life Story: Doris, Alfred and Emily’, Doris Lessing Studies 28.1, 22–24. Wenzlhuemer, Roland (2009): ‘Counterfactual Thinking as a Scientific Method’, special issue of Historical Social Research, 34.2. Wood, James (2008): How Fiction Works (London: Cape).

Closed Timelike Curves Gödel’s Solution for Einstein’s Field Equations in the General Theory of Relativity and Bach’s “The Musical Offering” as Configuration Models for Narrative Identity Constructions in Richard Powers’s “The Time of Our Singing” Aura H e y d e n r e i c h (Erlangen-Nuremberg)

R. Powers’ novel The Time of Our Singing situates the problematics of narrative identity on a field of tension between continuity and change and exposes them in a narrative structure that builds on physics and on the artistic constructions of music. Regarding the physics, it is mainly Kurt Gödel’s model of Closed Timelike Curves as a solution to Einstein’s field equations in the theory of general relativity that functions as structural template, as well as the principles of time dilation and space contraction. With respect to music, the procedures of the fugue and the canon that are employed in J.S. Bach’s contrapuntal compositions as well as in The Musical Offering: augmentation and dimi- nution, function as structural references. The goal is to show how the configuration of the novel, inspired by both music and physics, gives rise to identity-constructing ele- ments for a hybrid community. The analytical foils, which serve as a background for the analysis of identity formation in defiance of racial discrimination, are Ricœur’s concept of the narrative identity and Girard’s studies on mimetic desire.

New York, spring 1949. David Strom, a German-Jewish physicist at Co- lumbia University, is on his way to the Metropolitan Museum of Art. This Sunday field trip is an initiation rite that David celebrates in honor of his sons, Jonah and Joseph. Strom, whose chief occupation is to give lectures on Einstein’s theory of relativity, explains to his sons that the conception of time as linearly organized is obsolete. Furthermore he explains that the term “now” cannot be defined by two observers from two different frames of reference simultaneously, because it is not time which is a constant point of reference, but the speed of light. The relativity of simultaneity is too hard to grasp for the children. Nevertheless, Joseph asks: if everyone understands something different under “now”, how are we able to make appointments? Is the Newtonian concept of time not necessary as social convention? This ability to question conventions as normative grounds cannot be rehearsed too early on. The boys will need it in relation to the social projections they will be subjected to. This already announces the second aporia of the novel: Jonah and Joseph do not find it easy to identify with the cultural communi- ties that surround them, as their father is a German Jew and their mother, Delia Daley, is African-American. Their marriage, legally performed in New York in 1941, constitutes a felony in three quarters of the remaining 154 Aura Heydenreich states. The acceptance of the African-American and white communities to- wards those members who in terms of their heritage represent a joint project is not to be taken for granted. That is the dilemma with which the sons are confronted: they belong to both the white and the black communities and thus subvert the legitimacy of demarcations that function as mechanisms of identity formation. Their mother and father dared to cross that line and their marriage ended in Delia’s death and David’s tragic isolation. Does the spiritual strength of their love nonetheless have the power to open up new ways of thinking for a future in which such a union would be recognized? Can art function as mediation in this matter? The museum scene ends in a concert, a cantus firmus, a new initiation experience that leaves Joseph and Jonah deeply impressed. The scene in the museum introduces the three main themes of the novel that will be at the forefront of this essay: firstly, the aporia of time in physics, secondly, the aporia of identity with regards to the hybrid background of the sons, and thirdly, music. I would like to show how the problematics of identity, situated on a field of tension between continuity and change, are exposed in a narrative structure that builds on the principles of physics and on the artistic constructions of music. Both contexts are embedded in the biogra- phies of David and Delia, shape the narrative form of the novel, and show similarities between each other. With respect to music, the basic procedures of the fugue and the canon that are employed in J. S. Bach’s contrapuntal compositions in general as well as in The Musical Offering specifically – aug- mentation, diminution, inversion, and crab canon – are cited in the novel. Regarding the physics, it is mainly Kurt Gödel’s model of Closed Timelike Curves as cosmological solution to Einstein’s field equations in the theory of relativity, as well as the principles of time dilation and space contraction that function as references.1 The similarities between music and physics are to be understood solely on the level of narrative technique. This idea arguably found its inception in Douglas Hofstadter’s Pulitzer Prize-winning book, Gödel, Escher, Bach,2 which also served as a pretext to Richard Powers’s The Gold Bug Variations.3 In his text, Hofstadter describes

1 This essay would not have existed in this form without the inspiring conversations with friends and colleagues. I owe Antje Kley, who in October 2010 organized a conference in Erlangen on Richard Powers, the initial incentive to engage with Powers’s work. I would like to thank Klaus Mecke for the inspiring conversations on the science historical context of Kurt Gödel’s theory, and Christine Lubkoll for suggesting René Girard’s theory of sacrifice. My thanks also go to Jasper Verlinden for the translation into English. 2 Cf. Douglas R. Hofstadter, Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid (New York: Basic Books, 1979). Closed Timelike Curves 155 analogies as information-bearing isomorphisms between the mechanisms of music and those of formal logic. Indeed, prior research has already indicated the importance of the physical conceptions of time for the temporal structure of the novel: Joseph Dewey limits the concept of time that David is working on to quantum theory.4 The problem of Closed Timelike Curves, as is to be shown, however, is a consequence of the general theory of relativity. Heinz Ickstadt refers to Einstein’s legacy and interprets the polytemporal structure of the novel as a possibility for the simultaneous realization of the past and the future which anticipates the prospect of a peaceful formation of a hybrid community.5 Yulia Kozyrakis brings the recursive pattern of themes, scenes, and tropes in the novel back to the form of the rondo. The physical background of the recursive tem- poral narrative concept of the novel, however, is not considered in this reading.6 Meike Reher locates the technique of counterpoint in the novel and points towards the narratives of the sons and those of the parents as contrapuntally interweaved themes.7 Neither Gödel’s cosmological model nor Bach’s The Mu­ sical Offering have as of yet been identified as structural templates for the text. My analysis builds on the findings of previous research and additionally asserts that both the physical and the musical model, as information-bearing isomor- phisms, shape the narrative structure of the novel. The goal is to show how the narrative configuration of the novel, inspired by both music and physics, gives rise to identity-constructing elements for the yet to be developed hybrid community. The analytical foils, which serve as a background for the analysis of the aporia of identity formation, are Paul Ricœur’s concept of the narrative identity8 of oneself as another9 and René Girard’s studies on mimetic desire.10

3 Cf. Barry Lewis, ‘Thirty Two Short Paragraphs about The Gold Bug Variations,’ in Intersections: Essays on Richard Powers, ed. by Stephen J. Burn (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008), pp. 45–66. 4 Joseph Dewey, ‘Little Knots, Tied in the Clothing of time, The Time of our Sing- ing as a Dual Time Narrative’, in Intersections, ed. by Stephen J. Burn, pp. 198–214. 5 Heinz Ickstadt, ‘Surviving the Particular? Uni(versali)ty and Multiplicity in the Novels of Richard Powers’, European Journal of American Studies, 1 (2007), 1–13, 8–11. Cf. also Heinz Ickstadt, ‘A-synchronous Messaging: The Multiple Functions of Richard Powers’s Fictions’, in Ideas of Order: Narrative Patterns in the Novels of Richard Powers, ed. by Antje Kley and Jan D. Kucharzweski (Würzburg: Winter, 2012), pp. 23–44. 6 Yulia Kozyrakis, ‘Sightless Sound: Music and Racial Self-fashioning in Richard Powers’s The Time of Our Singing’, in Kley/Kucharzweski, pp. 175–194. 7 Meike Reher, Die Darstellung von Musik im zeitgenössischen englischen und ameri­ kanischen Bildungsroman (Frankfurt a. M. etc.: Peter Lang, 2010), pp. 262–286. 8 Paul Ricœur, Time and Narrative, vol. 3 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), pp. 244–274. 9 Paul Ricœur, Oneself as Another (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), pp. 113–168. 10 René Girard, Violence and the Sacred (New York: Continuum 2005). 156 Aura Heydenreich

David Strom functions as a representative for the physics, and for the music, it is Delia Strom who sacrificed her own career in order to dedicate herself to the musical education of her children. She herself does not see it as a sacrifice, but rather as a gift. This already announces the ambivalence of the sacrificial theme as offering or victim and alludes to those musical templates whose principles of composition work as a structural model for the narrative configuration of the novel: J.S.Bach’s The Musical Offering. Bach wrote this quodlibet, a collection of counterpoint phrases, on the occasion of his visit to Frederick II, who presented the composer with the challenge of a complex theme. In its entirety, the work is comprised of two fugues, ten canons, and one sonata, all variations on the royal thema regium.11 The double dilemma, the one of time and the one of identity, consoli- dates in the two main themes of the novel, which, as in a musical composi- tion, are established first as exposition and then as variations in a variety of voices and narrative arrangements. In fact, the first four chapters correspond with the structural model of a Bachian fugue: typical for the beginning of a fugue is that the voices do not enter simultaneously, but successively. Two elements play a specific role here: the theme (subject) and the counter theme (countersubject or counterpoint). The leading voice sounds the theme in the tonic key. Then the accompanying voice answers by offering the theme in the dominant. Finally, an additional voice appears with the counter theme or countersubject.12 Once the theme has appeared in all the voices, we can speak of a first development, the exposition. The main theme of the novel is already contained in the opening scene: John Dowland’s “Time Stands Still” sung by Jonah on the occasion of the America’s Next Voice singing competition. In the novel, this theme has the function of a cantus firmus, a central melody that forms the basis for a polyphonic counterpoint composi- tion. In addition to the thematics of time, that of identity is treated in the expository chapter as well, as the decisive question posed to the sons after the concert is: “What exactly are you boys?”13 (TS 6). Joseph, the homo­

11 On the structure and composition of The Musical Offering, see Johann Sebastian Bach, Kanons, Musikalisches Opfer BWV 1071–1079. Neue Bach-Ausgabe, series VIII, vol. 1, Kritischer Bericht/Critical Commentary, ed. by Christian Wolff (Kassel: Bärenreiter, 1976). 12 A clear formal definition of the fugue is hard to give. The definition offered here is derived from the prototype of Bach’s fugal creations. Cf. Emil Platen, ‘Fuge’, in Die Musik in Geschichte und Gegenwart (Kassel etc.: Bärenreiter et al., 1995): Sachteil, Bd. 3, pp. 930–958 (p. 931). 13 Richard Powers, The Time of Our Singing (London: Vintage, 2004), p. 6. Further citations from the novel will be offered in the text. Closed Timelike Curves 157 diegetic narrator, comments: “The question we grew up on. The question no Strom ever figured out how to read, let alone answer” (TS 6). The difficulty of this identity question is expressed in Jonah’s ambivalent response. The song that Jonah then cites: the beginning of Schubert’s Winterreise, “Fremd bin ich eingezogen” [“As a stranger I arrived”] (TS 6), only sketches out a preliminary attempt at answering the question posed by the novel as a whole. And at the same time, it mirrors the inclusion/exclusion dilemma that the children are surrendered to. The second chapter, which forms the second part of the exposition, in- troduces the theme of time stasis from the perspective of relativity theory. This way, the father offers, as countersubject to the leading voice, a varia- tion of the main theme in a physical sense: he is working on a solution to Einstein’s field equations in the general theory of relativity provided by the mathematician Kurt Gödel. It concerns a cosmological solution whereby the universe is rotating and containing Closed Timelike Curves.14 In Gödel’s universe, linear time flow and the absolutely sequential order of past, pres- ent, and future are obsolete. Time stands still. Furthermore, the second chapter also contains the counter theme of identity, offered in the dominant by the voice of the countersubject, the mother Delia. She is introduced in context of the family’s regular evening activity of improvising riddle canons. The mother provides the theme, the father has one measure to respond with an appropriate counterpoint that courts and modifies the theme, whereupon the children continue the varia- tions with their own ideas. The only rule in this family game of canons is that, every voice expresses the dilemma of the family as a whole, i.e., the lack of acceptance from their communities of origin: “But where will they build their nest?” (TS 11). If we compare the opening arrangement of the novel with the exposition of a fugue, we recognize structural parallels: the first chapter is dominated by the voices of the brothers, the second by the father as countersubject to the leading voice and by the mother as counter- subject varying the counter theme of identity. This is followed by a “free voice” passage titled, “My Brother’s Face,” and lastly, the coming together of point and counterpoint in the interlude. Both themes are tightly conducted towards a narrative event that func- tions as an initiation experience for the founding of the Strom family: Mar- ian Anderson’s art song concert, Easter 1939, which had to be held in front of the Abraham Lincoln Memorial in Washington, because, as an African

14 Kurt Gödel, ‘An Example of a New Type of Cosmological Solutions of Einstein’s Field Equations of Gravitation’, Review of Modern Physics, 21.3 (1949), 447–450. 158 Aura Heydenreich

American, she was excluded from performing on stage. The concert drew an audience of 75,000 and counts as one of the key events in the African- American civil rights movement. Delia and David both attend the concert. Their love of music seals their union and encourages them to enter into marriage. At the same time, the exposition also fills a narrative purpose, because this is where the stage is set for the narrative development. The story of the Strom family is told in twofold strands, each with its own temporal structure. His own story and that of his brother are prospectively told by Joseph as homodiegetic narrator. The story of the parents oscillates between retrospective heterodiegetic narration and time loops. The retrospective narration can be found in the story of the mother, which begins with the decisive event of her death in a domestic fire and goes backwards towards her childhood. The recurring time loops, however, find their point of de- parture in the spacetime of Marian Anderson’s art song concert. Six times, the storyline returns in time loops to these events: to the concert as the foundation of the marriage, to the death of the mother as its brutal end. At the same time, love and death are condensed into the contrapuntal theme of the countersubject in the dilemma of community identity: “The bird and fish can fall in love. But where will they build their nest?” In contrast to the cantus firmus, the counter theme does not immediately appear in full when first mentioned in the narrative. In the second chapter of the exposition, only the second part of the Jewish proverb finds a voice, in the representa- tion of the musical riddle canons. The circle only closes as the first part of the counter theme appears thirteen chapters later at the mother’s funeral: as the theme of a quodlibet that the father performs in remembrance of the family’s evening ritual. Joseph’s narrative voice describes his father’s piece as “our musical offering” (TS 144). Not only the structure, but also the title of The Musical Offering is used in the novel to thematize its central problematic: the construction of iden- tity in a new society which unites African and white Americans. As an adult, Ruth, Joseph and Jonah’s sister, investigates the circumstances of her mother’s death. Her research points towards a lynching, but this hy- pothesis is never confirmed. What does become clear is that the authori- ties prematurely ended their investigations because the victim was black. The responses from both communities to David and Delia’s marriage show that the novel is not only implicating the white community in this poten- tial lynching, from whose perspective, Delia, as David’s companion in the public sphere, is only visible as a nanny at best. The people from Delia’s immediate environment, too, respond to her transgression with isolation and expulsion. Closed Timelike Curves 159

These societal responses correspond with René Girard’s cultural theo- retical findings in Violence and the Sacred. According to him, it is a deeply embedded idea in the traditional mentality of a society that a violentless or- der can only be guaranteed by maintaining clear hierarchical differences.15 Delia and David commit the “crime” of ignoring these differences and ef- fecting a loss of differentiation. Both communities thus feel threatened in their self-conception – constituted through differentiation – and in their sense of security. The instinctive consequence is an arbitrary outbreak of violence. The one guilty of the offense, i.e., the one causing the loss of differentiation, will be cast out of the community. This sacrifice sets an- ex ample meant to discourage any repetition of the offense. Through the death of the sacrifice, a fundamental difference is introduced that restabilizes the system. Whether Delia’s death is a result of this mechanism is left open in the text. That society punishes her for her venture, however, is made appar- ent through her expulsion which is never retracted. According to Girard though, the death of the sacrifice also paradoxically leads to a retroactive glorification of the victim, because it guarantees the stability of the order. In the novel, the image of the mother is not only deified, but also her legacy, namely music, is functionalized.

“Time Stands Still” The Common Theme of Music, Physics and Narrative Identity

To demonstrate the difficulties of identity formation in a new communi- ty of whites and blacks, the author undergirds the novel with a narrative model in which the legacy of the mother, i.e., music, and the legacy of the father, i.e., physics, embellish each other contrapuntally and sound out in harmony. In order to weave together the four disparate fields – music, phys- ics, identity, and narration – they are underscored with a common denomi- nator: time. The connections between time, physics, music, identity, and narration are illustrated through the main musical theme: John Dowland’s “Time Stands Still.”

Time stands still with gazing on her face, Stand still and gaze for minutes, hours, and years to her give place. All other things shall change, but she remains the same, Till heavens changed have their course and time hath lost his name. (TS 3)

15 Girard, Violence and the Sacred, p. 106. 160 Aura Heydenreich

In The Musicalization of Fiction,16 Werner Wolf differentiates between the formal organizations of the concept of the “theme” in music and lit- erature. He finds the difference to lie in the fact that the musical theme, as recognizable sequences of notes, recurs partly unaltered and partly strong- ly varied, and is thus established on the level of the signifier. The theme of a literary work, however, does not operate as a sequence of symbols, but as an abstract mental concept that performs its integrative function on the level of the signified. The medium of literature cannot tolerate as many recurrences of signifiers that are felt to be redundant.17 Powers’s novel combines both. Just as Frederick the Great’s thema regium in The Musi­ cal Offering, “Time Stands Still,” the main musical theme of the novel, is repeated thirteen times throughout the text.18 In terms of its content, the song reflects all the aporias that are conceptually problematized in the novel. Furthermore, it autopoetologically thematizes its aesthetic and conceptual problems. Already in the first line of the first stanza, the main theme of the novel appears: the standstill of time. It is an aporetic problem within physics, a problem whose mathematical solution postulates a universe which will open up new possibilities of thinking, e.g., time travel. Secondly, the first line represents the meta-aesthetic reflection of the narrative concept: how can a narrative identity as expression of temporality be constituted in a fictional universe in which time stands still? The second line of the song works as a reflection on the thematic-con- ceptual problem of the novel: how can the beloved departed mother be offered a memorial? How can an artwork be created that evokes the bitter price of exclusion that Delia had to pay for her courage? The line meta- aesthetically reflects on how the legacy of the mother, i.e., music, can shape the aesthetic organization of a literary text that makes visible the thought

16 Werner Wolf, The Musicalization of Fiction: A Study in the Theory and History of Intermediality (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1999). I am basing my analysis on Werner Wolf’s intermedial theoretical approach, because it is located at the intersection between music theory and narratology, and because it is the latter that also of- fers a methodical approach that allows for the illucidation of the physical-literary practice. 17 Ibid., p. 19. 18 Barry Lewis has shown that in Powers’s novel The Gold Bug Variations, which is based on Bach’s Goldberg Variations, there are also structural parallels to be found between the recurrence of the musical theme in Bach and the literary theme varia- tions in the narrative. See Barry Lewis, ‘Vertical Perfection, Horizontal Inevitabil- ity in Richard Powers’s The Gold Bug Variations’, in Kley/Kucharzweski, pp. 45–66 (p. 50). Closed Timelike Curves 161 prohibitions of the society which contributed to Delia’s tragic fate. In the third line, the central idea of the narrative conception of identity – which will be analyzed with Ricœur’s theory – is finally concentrated in nuce: “All other things shall change, but she remains the same.” It is the paradox of permanence within change, the idea that identity exists in continuation, both due and in spite of dynamic change. The question the novel asks, both in terms of content and aesthetic organization, is: How can the peril- ous project of building a new society be made plausible not as an abrupt change, but as a continuous transition that could gradually find social ac- ceptance? With which methods can a work of art be created, so that its aesthetic foundation can make permanence and continuous transformation simultaneously conceivable? The fourth line of the song contains the peril- ous quintessence of the narrative experiment and names the price that has to be paid. This line, “Till heavens changed have their course and time hath lost his name,” identifies the risk involved: Time, the fundamental a priori which undergirds the thinking of any cosmological order, will lose its intui- tively understood essence. It will change to make room for the perpetuation of the fundamentally transient, for the appreciation of a human life, for the glorification of a human sacrifice, for its aesthetic sanctification. In its aesthetic design, the novel offers impressive answers to all these questions. The analysis of the main musical theme has shown that time constitutes the foundation for all the other central themes of the novel. Music, physics, and identity are narratively represented primarily in their temporal dimension. The aporias of the measurement of time were already considered by Au- gustine, as Ricœur’s Time and Narrative indicates with the example of the enactment of a melody.19 Through this melody, it becomes clear that it is impossible to perceive the “now”: In that moment in which it is spoken, it has already passed. In order to solve this dilemma, Augustine suggests the concept of a threefold present: the present of the past as memory, the present of the present as duration, the present of the future as expecta- tion. Hereby, a psychological concept of time is introduced that is hard to reconcile with the cosmological one. This is why Ricœur connects the Au- gustinian aporia of time with his Aristotelian theory of emplotment (mise en intrigue). His examination extends to the problem of narrative identity, which is intended to give evidence on how narrative emplotment bridges the aporia of the incompatibility of psychological and cosmological time through an interweaving of references between history and fiction.

19 Paul Ricœur, Time and Narrative, Vol. 1 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), pp. 7–16. 162 Aura Heydenreich

Gödel’s Closed Timelike Curves The Cosmological Model

Powers’s novel proposes an analogous concept which is obtained from the general theory of relativity: the concept of Closed Timelike Curves. They constitute a mathematical solution to Einstein’s field equations, but their effect is the same. Gödel’s cosmological concept of time is no longer com- patible with the intuitive, human concept of time. This is why in the novel, it is equated with a process that is already familiar to human perception, that of the canon perpetuum in music. To discuss the physical implications of this cosmological model, I will permit myself a brief excursion into theoretical physics. Joseph organizes his father David’s legacy and gives his notes to a colleague for review. This colleague reveals to Joseph that his father’s research in the significance of the time loops in Gödel’s universe had been valid.20 In the general theory of relativity, space and time are no longer sepa- rate. The dimension of time joins the three dimensions of space and thus becomes a four-dimensional space-time continuum. This spacetime is determined by a four-dimensional multiplicity M of events and a met- ric g defined thereon. The central equations of the general theory of relativity are Einstein’s field equations. They determine the relationship between spacetime geometry and the distribution of mass and energy in the universe: Gμν[gμν] = 8πTμν, in which Gμν is the Einstein tensor, and Tμν the momentum-energy tensor. The Einstein tensor indicates the in- formation about the spacetime geometry. The momentum-energy tensor describes the density distribution of matter and energy in the universe. The right and the left side of the equation are in constant interaction: the spacetime geometry determines how matter and energy have to move. The distribution of mass and energy, for their part, influence the geom- etry of spacetime. Every solution of the Einstein equation yields a valid spacetime and mass-energy distribution. Gödel’s 1949 solution resulted in a universe that rotates instead of expands. Additionally, it allowed for Closed Timelike Curves. Just as you can leave a point on a sphere, move westwards, and return to your starting point, the curved spacetime, too, allows the movement of an observer into the future and their arrival in the past.

20 The representation of the cosmological solution of Kurt Gödel follows Chris Smeenk and Christian Wütrich, ‘Time Travel and Time Machines’, in The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy of Time, ed. by Craig Callender (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), pp. 577–632. Closed Timelike Curves 163

Progression and Recursion as Concepts of Temporal Narrative Identity

In what follows, it will be illustrated with the use of Ricœur’s analytical framework how the intersections between the formal organizations of mu- sic and physics lead to a conception of a temporal narrative identity for the yet-to-be-established community of whites and blacks. Already, a fundamental analogy can be established between the three models: Bach’s compositional challenge in The Musical Offering was to ex- ecute a pre-given theme with the counterpoint technique in such a way that the melodic and harmonic, the horizontal and the vertical dimensions come together in harmony. Gödel’s cosmological model shows that every observ- er who follows his world line of chronological linearity and continually be- takes himself into the future will arrive at his journey’s point of departure in the past. Time stands still, linearity paradoxically emerges as cyclicality. Powers’s novel, too, demonstrates, as already shown, this double pattern of progression and recursion: the chronological-linear and prospective narra- tive strand of the homodiegetic narrator is connected to the retrospective repetitive-recursive mode of narration of the heterodiegetic narrator. The structure of the novel suspends these aporias in a model of dissonant conso- nance: on the one hand, it is structured through the teleological principle of the melody, of the musical composition that strives towards an ending – a climactic finale, the stretto. On the other hand, the novel is structured ac- cording to the Closed Timelike Curves model, the model of Bach’s canon perpetuus. What functional relevance do the dialectics between progression and recursion have for the solution of the aporia of identity construction? Ac- cording to Ricœur, linear time is an identity threatening factor that can only be dissipated when “we can posit, at the base of [...] the uninterrupted continuity, a principle of permanence in time”. 21 The strongest criterion of permanence is that of structure, as it confirms the relational character of identity, defined as “the possibility of conceiving […] change as happening to something which does not change”.22 The dilemma of identity is solvable when it is undergirded with a structure that allows for permanence and change simultaneously.23 This is the function of the Closed Timelike Curves which enable the dialectic between progression and recursion.

21 Ricœur, Oneself as Another, p. 117. 22 Ibid., p. 118. 23 Ibid. 164 Aura Heydenreich

How do they contribute to the formation of an identity model? To tease out the dialectics of narrative identity, Ricœur differentiates between two terms: firstly, that of identity as sameness in the sense of the unchanging self, the idem, recognizable and invariable throughout time. This would corre- spond with the first musical theme of the novel: “Time Stands Still;” second- ly, the term of identity as selfhood in the sense of ipse, of selfhood as ipseity, which underlies a conception of identity that presupposes the changeability and mutability in time.24 This corresponds with the musical counterpoint of the novel, the Jewish proverb of the bird and the fish, to which the same question receives variations of thirteen different existential answers. Analogously to the DNA-double helix structure of the genetic code – which in connection with Bach’s Goldberg Variations 25 shapes the composi- tion of the novel The Gold Bug Variations– I want to show how both the physical and the musical structural models, through isomorphic procedures, allow for the organization of a combinational system that is preserved in spite of constant variation. The Closed Timelike Curves as structural model underlie the narration and produce recurring patterns – in the discours, in the histoire, on a macro- and a micro-level – that skillfully replicate the plu- ridimensionality, simultaneity, and spatialization of Bach’s polyphonic tech- nique. On the other hand, the variation of the counterpoint in the form of a riddle canon shows how a temporal identity is constituted and how it func- tions narratively. The novel offers thirteen conflicting answers to this ques- tion and thus names the aporias of identity formation. I cite two variations: The bird and the fish can fall in love, but they share no word remotely like nest. (TS 231) The bird and the fish can fall in love, but their only working nest will be the grave. (TS 470) As one can see in this case as well, there is an invariant dimension – love as a firm foundation for marriage – and an unstable variable that continually questions the acceptance of the community, as well as this marriage’s very right to exist. What is interesting is that the time loop model, here on the micro-narrative level, is taken up as method: Yulia Kozyrakis has shown that the development of this theme corresponds with the structural scheme of a serial rondo, ABACADAFAG, in which the first verse always appears unaltered, but is continually modified and contextualized by the second verse.26

24 Ibid., pp. 113–168. 25 Jay Labinger, ‘Encoding an Infinite Message: Richard Powers’s The Gold Bug Vari- ations’, Configurations, 3.1 (1995), 79–93. 26 Yulia Kozyrakis, ‘Sightless Sound’, in Kley/Kucharzweski, pp. 175–194. Closed Timelike Curves 165

Reversibility, Nonsubstitutability, Similitude Ricœur’s Dialectical Identity Conception

However, every community builds its identity according to the identity principle of sameness. Hereby, the inalterability of one’s self in distinction from the other is emphasized and defended through rites and traditions. The novel laments that whites and blacks do not form their concept of identity on the dialectic between the self and the other. This is the next step in Ricœur’s conception of narrative identity: the dialectic of oneself as another. Ricœur displays this step analytically into three elements: “revers- ibility, nonsubstitutability, similitude”.27 The first idea is reversibility which manifests itself in the semantic communicational code of the lovers: when I address the beloved with “you,” they understand “I” for themselves. If they address me with “you,” I feel implicated in the first person. From the per- spective of linguistic communication, the roles of the sender and addressee are reversible.28 The persons themselves are, however, not interchangeable, not when they come from different backgrounds: Jewish-German, African- American. In this regard, Ricœur speaks of nonsubstitutability. The com- municative acts of Delia and David are constantly affected by the dilemma of the reversibility of their roles as lovers and the nonsubstitutability of their roles as members of their own communities. The attempt at substi- tutability, at a crossing over from one community into the other, entails a dedifferentiation and a break with the conventional hierarchies for both communities. The generation of Jonah and Joseph as well, is, in its lifestyle and identity formation, concretely confronted with this dilemma of dedif- ferentiation. Delia’s and David’s educational project is risky, because Jonah, Joseph, and Ruth represent the commonalities between both communities and thus threaten all distinctions. Joseph as narrator laconically comments: “Our whole lives were a violation” (TS 68). Yet a way out of this dilemma is provided through the concept of similitude. Jonah and Joseph have the privilege, after all, not only to experience difference, but also similitude. Even when initially only asymmetries exist between the self and the other, it is still possible, according to Ricœur, to search for equality in passing through inequality.29 This is the vision of the future imagined by Delia and David. Against the binary mode of thinking that only recognizes demarcation and differentiation, the novel posits a far more complex model of similitude. This does not simply entail the assimilation of one commu-

27 Ricœur, Oneself as Another, pp. 192–193. 28 Ibid. 29 Ibid., p. 192. 166 Aura Heydenreich nity by the other, but rather a willingness to be open towards each other, to recognize mutual influences, and to emphasize the continual crossovers that transcend demarcations. In order to go down this path, it is necessary to step out of one’s own system, to engage in second-order observation. This is made possible through artistic representation, which has the function of self-reflection in the sense of intersubjective transgression. On the one hand, on the level of the plot, the novel shows what historically is sanctioned. On the other hand, it aesthetically realizes the new mode of thinking, opened up by the intermental exchange between Delia and David. Through the aesthetic process, The Time of Our Singing performatively enacts that which sounds socially utopian, but can be literarily realized. Models and examples for this can be found in the legacies of the parents: the mother’s art, namely music, and the father’s science, namely theoretical physics. The original dilemma, the aporia of time, appears in this context as a solution. It is the com- mon denominator between music and physics, to determine analogies as information-bearing isomorphisms which can be demonstrated by the nar- rative.30 A whole string of compositional techniques that function, both in Bach’s The Musical Offering as in the art of the fugue in general, as a means of augmentation and condensation, find their counterparts in the physical principles of the theory of relativity, as well as in the narrative organization of the novel. This can be illustrated through four processes: reversibility, time dilation, space contraction, and rotation.

Reversibility, Time Dilation, Space Contraction, Rotation in Music and Physics

Formally, Bach’s crab canon can function as a structural principle for the technique of the simultaneously prospective and retrospective narration. In this model, the first voice develops linearly, progressively. The second, imitating voice starts simultaneously and moves in reverse, from finish to start. Thus the two voices meet in the middle. In physics, this phenomenon is known as reversibility. An important effect of the special theory of relativity is the phenom- enon of time dilation. In music, we speak of augmentation, the lengthening of the note values. In The Musical Offering, Bach uses this technique in the Canon a 2 – Per augmentationem. In an augmented melody, the note values

30 Hofstadter, Gödel, Escher, Bach, p. 158. Closed Timelike Curves 167 are twice as long as in the initial version, and the melody itself thus takes twice as long. The original experience of David and Delia’s first meeting during the concert at the Lincoln Memorial is repetitively represented in the novel: twice in the dramatic mode of “showing.” The aspect of duration plays an important role, as the narrated time amounts to four pages in the first scene and eight in the second. Just as with Bach, we get the doubled note values of augmentation. The relativity of simultaneity, which David explains to his sons in the initiation scene, is responsible for both the time dilation and for the sec- ond effect of the special theory of relativity, i.e., the Lorentz contraction. This phenomenon, also called the length contraction, states that a moving observer measures a shorter distance between two points in space than an observer at rest.31 Musically, an isomorphism could be established to the technique of diminution, the shortening of tone-values. Bach uses diminu- tion in the three-voiced Ricercar of The Musical Offering: the increasingly compressed rhythm leads to a halving of the note values. Jonah’s partici- pation in the musical competition with “Time Stands Still” takes up five pages in the exposition when told from the perspective of the remembering self, the observer at rest (TS 3–8). Two hundred pages later, the same scene told from the perspective of the remembered self, the moving observer, only takes up two and a half pages (TS 214–216). Thirdly, the suspension of absolute simultaneity and the introduction of the principle of the constan- cy of the speed of light allow for the observer of each frame of reference to measure their own proper time, which is one of the preconditions for the possibility of time travel in Gödel’s model. These undergird the fourth information-bearing isomorphism, i.e., rotation. In Bach’s The Musical Of­ fering it finds its counterpart in the technique of the canon perpetuum. As I have already mentioned, the key event that led to the marriage of the parents is told six times in the novel, meaning that the novel returns six times to the same space in time loops. The narrative account in the exposition depicts them in the mode of “telling” and describes Delia’s and David’s paths on two different world lines up until the Anderson concert in 1939. The fourth repetition is presented retrospectively and internally focalized through David. The scene of the action is the same place as before, Washington, but this time, the dominating voice is that of Martin Luther King who held his famous speech there, “I have a dream,” in 1963. In the fifth repetition, Joseph is the leading voice, accompanied by his nephews,

31 A generally comprehensible account of both effects can be found in Albert Ein- stein, Über die spezielle und allgemeine Relativitätstheorie (Berlin: Springer 2009), pp. 11–25. 168 Aura Heydenreich

Ruth’s children, at the 1995 Million Man March. On this occasion, Ode, the youngest nephew, disappears, and in the very last chapter we learn that he went into the past through a time loop and met David and Delia. At this point, the scene from 1939 is told again, the causal time curve closes, and it turns out that the figure that brought Delia and David together – which was mentioned in the first account but then remained unidentified – was Ode, their grandchild. Through the rotational model, progression and recursion are conjoined, and personal time is embedded within the historical and mythical time. The Closed Timelike Curves model allows for the legitimization of the mar- riage, not based on the traditions of previous generations, but on the basis of the belief in the future of following generations, in name of a vision that is deemed utopian by their contemporaries but is symbolized by Ode. Through the Closed Timelike Curves, the physical, the musical, and the lit- erary become possible. The single events that appear contingently through- out the story each gain meaning retroactively through the emplotment, to the extent that they contribute to the identity formation. This is what hap- pens with the contingent event of the death of the mother. Following Hannah Arendt, Ricœur understands identity as a category of action. Action is complemented with the question of how the temporal dimension of identity ascription can be represented. Ricœur’s answer is that the question concerning the identity of a person can only be answered through narration. This occurs through the description of the self as both the reading and writing of one’s own life, through the description of the colorful fabric of stories from which we are constituted.32 These identity sto- ries only come into existence in conversation with the historical and fiction- al narratives that we are provided with in our cultural environment. In the case of Jonah and Joseph Strom it is the reception of mythical narrations: of Orpheus, Aeneas, and the canonical literary texts that provide the titles for the chapters that narrate their biographies, i.e., “My Brother as Othello,” “My Brother as Faust.” The chapters that are told in time loops are titled with historical-chronological circumstances that are of crucial importance to the establishing of the community: Marian Anderson’s concert (1939), Martin Luther King’s speech (1963), the Million Man March (1995). The model of simultaneous progression and recursion also becomes clear here, on the level of the representation of historical events. The retrospectively narrated time loops show how a community constitutes itself by continu- ally retelling the events and narratives that are regarded as testimonies of their own founding history, like in a canon perpetuum.

32 Ricœur, Time and Narrative, Vol. 3, p. 247. Closed Timelike Curves 169

The ending of Richard Powers’s novel is enacted through a tripartite -fi nal movement that imitates the musical technique of the stretto, the impres- sive, virtuoso finale of a composition. In the novel, thereby, the theme and counter theme are, first of all, brought together on the level of the signifier. Secondly, the seemingly incompatible fields of music and physics are con- densed on a conceptual level by the realization of a fundamental similitude, which offers a key to the solution of the aporia of identity. In the musical stretto, Joseph, as a music teacher in an African-American school, conducts the choir that his nephew, Ruth’s son, leads vocally:

“We stayed in the swell, working our favorite rondo form […] But as we crested one last time, I heard […] my brother singing Dowland. The tune came from a life ago. The words from yesterday: Bird and fish can fall in love. […] But where will they build their nest? Ruth’s voice went through me like death.” (TS 610)

In the closing rondo, the thematic commitments intersect, linking point and counterpoint, sameness and selfhood. At the end of the novel, the scene of Delia and David’s first meeting at the Anderson concert is told again. The theme of identity undergoes through Ode a new and last variation as a paradoxical future-oriented uto- pia in the past, which opens up a vision for the grandparents. Accordingly, the counterpoint as well goes through a last variation here:

“The bird and the fish can make a bish. The fish and the bird can make a fird.” (TS 631)

Thus these hybrid configurations from bird and fish – bish and fird – do not yield any semantic possibility for referentiality, no common language. Or do they? These hybrid word constructions symbolize the hybrid iden- tity of the children and grandchildren in this family.33 Once again it is Ode, this time in the physical stretto, who provides the keyword for this. He alone understands the message that his grandfather offers the future generations on his deathbed: “Tell her there is another wavelength ev- eryplace you point your telescope” (566). Ode explains the fundamental analogy as such:

33 On this point, my argument coincides with Heinz Ickstadt’s, who reads this sense from the perspective of Dewey: “This pivotal moment, […] on which Powers rests his narrative mediation between cultures, and which is also a meditation on hy- bridity.” Ickstadt, ‘Surviving the Particular?’, p. 9. 170 Aura Heydenreich

“Mama, wavelength’s like color, right?” […] “But pitch is wavelength, too?” […] “Of course. The message was for him, her child. Not beyond color; into it. Not or; and. And new ands all the time. Continuous new frequencies.” […] “More wavelengths than there are planets.” […] “A different one everywhere you point your telescope.” (TS 627)

Colors are waves of light. Musical tones are waves of sound. Light waves and sound waves are both radiation, both part of a continuum wave spec- trum. What separates them is only the waves’ length and the increasing or decreasing frequency. They do merge, however. There is no dichotomous difference. The dialectic between difference and continuum that I have analyzed structurally on the organizational level of the novel is mirrored on the level of content. Jonah and Joseph carry this basic idea of the similitude in the thinking of the self as another within themselves by birth. Through the composition of a family chronicle which draws its narrative procedures from two opposing fields that are combined through isomorphical analo- gies, Powers succeeds in narratively constellating the identity of the Strom family, in which the self is only made possible through the other, and the other is only constituted as a condition of the self. The result is not a nar- ration in which whites are presented as agents and African Americans as victims. That would have been one-sided and asymmetrical. The positions are configured quite differently: the lack of complexity of the models with which both communities operate in order to construct their own identities is seen as deplorable. The one-sided thinking of both communities – the whites as well as the African Americans, who are neither of them willing to see themselves as the other, and are thus not capable of integrating a person who by birth belongs to both groups – is lamented. Translating Narrations into Different Cultures and Media

Translatio/ns of Identity-Building Narratives The Character of “El Cid” in Spanish and Latin American Texts from the 12th to the 20th Century Michael R ö s s n e r (Munich/Vienna)

The Poema de Mio Cid has been chosen repeatedly for founding narrations although the poem itself deals not primarily with heroism and the founding of a community, the main topic being the conflict between the Cid and King Alfonso. However, the Cid, although suffering unjust treatment, never acts as a rebel. He even renounces to his right of feud and submits his case to a tribunal presided by the king. By doing so, the poem translates quite another story into the form of a heroic poem: the creation of the State’s monopoly of coercion and therefore of the modern State of Law. Nevertheless, already in Golden Age literature, the Cid appears as hero of the Spanish Reconquista and after the Independence of Spanish-American countries, also in founding narratives of new-born nations – and in 1961, in Anthony Mann’s film El Cid his life is translated in an astonishingly modern story about the clash of civilizations.

Evidence strongly suggests that humans in all cultures come to cast their own identity in some sort of narrative form. We are inveterate storytellers. (Owen Flanagan, Consciousness Reconsidered)1

Narration, as we understand it in this volume, is at the base of both hu- man understanding of the world (“narrated realities”) and the formation of collective identities (“narrated communities”); this article will deal more closely with the second variant. While the role of narration in scientific re- search might need a detailed explanation, do we really have to prove the im- portance of narration for the formation of collective identities? What Owen Flanagan shows for the individual – that humans cast their own identity in some sort of narrative form – can obviously be asserted for communi- ties, too. The fact that narratives are constitutional for collective memory and therefore also for collective identities seems rather obvious in the light of recent investigations on cultural memory (Assmann) and the means of construction of collective identities (Anderson and others). However, such narrations are nothing stable. First and foremost, col- lectivity-founding narratives have to be constantly translated in order to remain valid – translated between generations, between groups, to the out- side and back to the narrated collectivity itself. And, as we have shown

1 (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992), p. 198. 174 Michael Rössner in our volume on cultural translation (Translatio/n2), such translations – which always consist of de- and re-contextualizations – necessarily lead to negotiations between these contexts and thus do not leave their object unaltered. Therefore, the same narrative may serve quite opposite positions and be used in completely different ideological embeddings, but in each case there will be a conflictual negotiation with the remnants of earlier contexts. That is what I intend to show in this article, taking as an example the narrative of the Spanish “national hero” El Cid. As far as literature in itself has a prominent role in the formation of such narratives, it is not surprising that the epic, the most noble genre (after – or together with – tragedy) according to Aristotle,3 serves as the main vehicle to conserve such narratives and pass them down to future gen- erations. However, epics created intentionally to construct or at least codify such a collective narrative, as for instance Virgil’s Aeneid or the “national epics” of the Renaissance period like Luis de Camões’s Os Lusíadas, have to be distinguished from those – mostly anonymous – medieval poems which were chosen much later to serve this function, in the context of the search for the “origins” of the late 18th and the 19th century.4 The selection of such texts for the construction of a national narrative is not initially based on its content, but simply on its old origin, thereby revealing the prestige of the national language, a language which has already acquired literary dignity at an earlier stage of history. Only in a second step do people try to find a relation between its content, the actual narrative, and the community- founding narrative of the relevant “narrated community.” This is certainly true for the Poema or Cantar de Mio Cid, the only medieval heroic poem in Spanish (or Castilian language) that has been conserved until our days in an (almost) complete version. This “uniqueness”

2 Rössner/Italiano 2012. 3 See Aristotle, Poetics, Part V. 4 See for instance Herder’s Abhandlung über den Ursprung der Sprache (1772) (Trea- tise on the Origin of Language) and his Auszug aus einem Briefwechsel über Ossian und die Lieder alter Völker (On the Effect of Poetic Art on the Ethics of Peoples in Ancient and Modern Times) published in 1773. In his “Preisschrift” Ueber die Würkung der Dichtkunst auf die Sitten der Völker in alten und neuen Zeiten (1778) (On the Impact of the Poetry on the Customs of the People in Ancient and Pres- ent Times) he wrotes: “A poet is the c r e a t o r of the nation around him, he gives them a world to s e e and has their souls in his hand to l e a d them to that world.” [Emphases in the original: “Ein Dichter ist S c h ö p f e r eines Volkes um sich: er gibt ihnen eine Welt zu s e h e n und hat ihre Seelen in seiner Hand, sie dahin zu f ü h r e n .”) Herder, Sämmtliche Werke, ed. by Bernhard Suphan, 33 vols. (Berlin 1877–1913), vol. VIII, pp. 334–436 (p. 433).] Translatio/ns of Identity-Building Narratives 175 was probably one of the reasons why this 12th century epic was chosen as “document of origin” for the Spanish/Castilian culture and the character of “Mio Cid” used for identity-building narratives of the Spanish and even of some Spanish-American societies after their independence.5 Such a repeated and differentiated utilization is quite usual and can be observed in various national literatures. Arguably, epic poems qualify particularly for construction processes of collective memory because of the venerable age of the genre and its proximity to historiography. They enhance the construction of mythical origins for a community in forma- tion. The oldest text referring to Mio Cid’s story, however, the anonymous Cantar de mio Cid (around 1140, but perhaps only around 12005) does not primarily tell a history of origin like the poems of Antiquity, the Iliad or the Aeneid, or even the Chanson de Roland (when it goes back to Charlemagne and the battle of Roncesvalles as a battle of Christianity against the Moors). No ethnic, national or religious group could adopt this story easily as its founding narrative, because the battles of the Cid against the Moors are only of secondary importance. First of all, there are battles against almost everyone, even against Chris- tian princes. Secondly, the Cid’s most loyal vassals are Moors themselves, and finally, it is not the description of the battles itself which seems to be of interest to the author. Much more important are the lists of loot sent to the king, described with almost notarial precision. The true conflict is not be- tween Christians and Moors. Rather, in the first part at least, it seems to be between king and vassal, as in the French poems about rebellious knights (Renaud de Montauban, Doon de Mayence). This opposition is expressed in the recurring exclamation: “God, what a good vassal, if he had a good lord!” (v.019)7. At the outmost, we could define the conflict as the opposi- tion between Rodrigo Díaz el Cid as a Castilian “newcomer” and the old families of Asturian and Leonese nobility. The poem starts with the narration of the Cid’s unjustified banishment from the Christian lands, which forces him to pass the frontier with a few loyal friends and to try to survive in the zone which is disputed between various Christian and Moorish warlords. However, although Rodrigo Díaz de Vivar suffers a series of injustices, he never rebels directly against unjust rule. On the contrary, after each victory he sends an (exactly described) part

5 Cf. Duggan 1989: 2. 6 Cf. the discussion in Duggan 1989: 5–15. 7 English text translated by Matthew Bailey, quoted from the University of Texas, [accessed 10 Sep- tember 2014] 176 Michael Rössner of the loot to King Alfonso of Castile and therefore, step by step, induces the king to withdraw the ban.8 At the end of the first part of the poem (the Cantar del destierro), after Rodrigo has conquered Valencia and become one of the richest knights of Castile, a meeting with the king is organized and official reconciliation takes place. King Alfonso orders the Cid’s two daughters to marry two members of the old Leonese nobility, thereby raising their father’s position in the hierarchy of the court. Although the Cid is not happy about this marriage because he is quite aware of the materialistic motives of his sons- in-law-to-be, he submits to the king’s will without rebellion. He presents the two bridegrooms with invaluable swords and horses and celebrates a magnificent wedding at Valencia (Part 2, the Cantar de las bodas). The two sons-in-law prove their cowardice in a battle against the Moors and before the Cid’s escaped lion. Ashamed and full of resentment, they ride back to their homes with their wives and the Cid’s gifts. In the third and last part (the Cantar de la afrenta de Corpes), the two traitors rid themselves of their wives, beating them savagely and leaving them naked and defenseless in the dark wood of Corpes, abandoned to the wild animals. Fortunately, the Cid’s nephew saves the women and brings them back to their father’s court in Valencia. Feudal law would now entitle the Cid to declare a feud against his sons-in-law, invade their territories and take revenge. Instead, he asks the king to call for a diet where the Cid, in the form of a juridical-rhetorical master, first asks for and then gets back the swords and horses he had given the sons-in-law as presents. Next, he claims the return of the financial dowry, and finally, the Cid pleads against the men because of the defilement of his daughters. Three of the Cid’s vassals back him, revealing the stories of the men’s cowardice during their stay in Valencia. The vassals challenge the infantes and their brother, who is insult- ing the Cid. The king settles this litigation only indirectly by permitting the duel. The three infantes are defeated, dishonored and lose all their wealth, but not their lives; the Cid’s daughters marry members of the royal families of Navarra and Aragón. Through this narrative, the text translates not the foundation of a com- munity, but a quite different process which is highly important for the de- velopment of a modern state of law: the waiver of personal revenge – in the form of a feud allowed by the legal principles of that time – in favor

8 Neuschäfer (Neuschäfer 1964: 21) refers to this attitude when he argues against those who see “realistic” aspects in the Cantar de Mio Cid that the ideological basis of the poem should be defined as “unerreichbares” “Ideal des selbstlosen Vasallen” (unattainable ideal of the disinterested vassal). Translatio/ns of Identity-Building Narratives 177 of the monopoly of violence of the State, a conflict which also reflects the opposition between Germanic customary law (where feuds had quite an important role) and statutory law influenced by Roman law.9 The central narrative of the poem seems therefore to be a different kind of narrative of origins than the “national” fight against the Moors in the Reconquista. It is rather the narrative of the origin of the modern State of Law, which replaces private revenge with judicial pursuit of one’s rights. However, already in the literature of the “Golden Age” (Siglo de Oro, 16th and 17th centuries), the Cid appears more as a hero of the Reconquista than as a model for self-control and acceptance of authorities. This might be due to the lack of access to the poem itself. Only one copy of the manu- script existed, which was reputed lost for a long time and was published for the very first time in 1779 by Tomás Antonio Sánchez. It is therefore rather unclear, if and to what degree Golden Age writers could in fact read the Cantar’s text, and it is highly understandable that in those centuries, people preferred other elements of the Cid’s life and adventures – elements which could be found in the huge number of romances, short poetic narrations of partly popular origin. Quite a lot of these octosyllabic poems deal with the Cid as protagonist, but many of them with adventures taking place long be- fore the years described in the Cantar: his love for Doña Jimena, or the oath of Santa Gadea, which presents the Cid as a kind of judge who obliges the young King Alfonso to an oath of cleansing, as he suspects him of ordering the killing of his brother Sancho, and so on. These romances also contain the basis for the plot of Pierre Corneille’s famous drama on the Cid’s love story with Jimena, whose father the Cid has to kill in order to save the honor of his own family. Corneille’s tragicom- edy Le Cid (1636) translates (in the meaning of cultural translation10) two dramas by Guillén de Castro, written in 1605 and 1615 respectively, which deal with the Cid’s youth (Mocedades del Cid) prior to the events described in the Cantar. In these comedias, the love story and the heroic deeds of the young protagonist are at the center of the plot. Furthermore, the Cid’s fig-

9 Menéndez Pidal 1955: 20 ascertains that such a conflict existed generally in those times and associates it with the tensions between Castile keeping to the Germanic customary law and León trying to impose the Visigothic code “Fuero Juzgo” in- fluenced by Roman law in all parts of the kingdom. On the other hand, Germanic elements remain even in the king’s decision not to punish the wrongdoers, but to allow an ordeal by battle. 10 This approach of cultural translation (translatio/n) appears – even if only implic- itly – in the recent Corneille critique – see for instance Christophe Couderc, ‘Cor- neille traducteur de Lope de Vega: le cas de La Suite du Menteur’, Revista de Lenguas Modernas, 14 (2011), 137–145; for the concept itself, see Rössner/Italiano 2012. 178 Michael Rössner ure is linked to legendary elements. While in the Cantar, it is in a dream that the angel Gabriel announces to the Cid he will always be victorious, in Guillén’s drama, the Cid appears as a kind of saint when he eats with a leper. They eat from the same plate and the Cid lets the leper drink from his bottle. Immediately afterwards, the leper appears to him as Saint Lazarus and announces to him that he will become “un Capitán milagroso,” a mi- raculous captain, victorious even after his death (and therefore with some Christological aspects): “sólo a tí/ los humanos te han de ver/ después de muerto vencer” (Mocedades del Cid I, Jornada tercera, vv. 449–451). The Cid’s charitable actions (no fear of contagion, and in sharp contrast to the attitude of the other characters who execrate the leper, his horrible appear- ance and his fetidness) are reminiscent of the typical actions of saints in contemporary comedias de santos. Furthermore, Lazarus’s prophecy seems to promote him to the class of saints who are “milagroso,” as they can per- form miracles and will be victorious after their death by interfering in the profane world. This almost sacred aspect of the Cid’s figure might be one of the reasons why the Cid becomes again an important reference at the beginning of the 20th century for the so-called “Regeneracionistas.” After the catastro- phe of the Spanish-American War and the loss of all overseas territories in 1898, this group of Spanish intellectuals longed for a re-interpretation of the Spanish founding narrative, going back to the traditions before the conquista of the Americas. However, it is precisely in the Americas where we can find already dur- ing the 19th century, after the first war of independence, the same recourse to the Cid as national hero within a foundational narrative. Such is the case for Argentina, where in 1910, the centennial of Argentina’s independence, a literary text was defined as the “national epic”11: Martín Fierro by José Hernández, an epic poem in short verses and in an artificial dialect present- ing the protagonist as a poor gaucho prosecuted by corrupt authorities, and at the same time as minstrel of his own life story. Obviously, at first glance there seems to be hardly any parallel between this text and the Cantar de mio Cid, not only because of the dialect, the different narrational point of view and the quite different verse and rhythm, but above all because Mar- tín Fierro is no hero at all, but simply a victim – and even then, a victim with not exclusively positive elements of character. On second glance how- ever, there are indeed some parallels. While Argentine Romantic writers depicted the gauchos as savage, violent people hindering the desired cultural

11 By the poet and essayist Leopoldo Lugones in his essay El payador (1913). Translatio/ns of Identity-Building Narratives 179 and civilizing progress, in Hernández’s poem they appear more as innocent victims of the corruption accompanying civilization (and European immi- gration) – a civilization threatening their freedom with its system of taxes, legal restrictions and compulsory recruitment, forcing them to become “il- legal” and therefore pushing them to escape and pass the “frontier” to the territory of “wild Indians.”12 Spatially speaking, there are also parallels between the gaucho’s conflict situation and that of Castilian knights in opposition to the Leonese nobility at the court, exemplified by the ban that forces the Cid to cross the frontier between the Christian state and the Muslim territories. And there is even a parallel with the Cid’s decision to opt for the state of law and against re- bellion – at least in the second part of Martin Fierro when the protagonist, after his terrifying experiences with the Indians (described in the poem as brutal, primitive and violent, almost animal-like people), returns as a “refined” man, now willing to integrate himself into civilized society – and therefore into the state of law. The rebellious gaucho claiming anarchical freedom submits himself at the end to the ordre public, the state order of the young republic. The poem closes with “educational” songs directed to the gaucho’s sons in which he invites them to remain in civilization and its system of rights despite its imperfections and injustices. A certain parallel is therefore certainly present, albeit nowhere explicitly and most probably not intended by José Hernández. Martín Fierro is no victorious hero like the Cid. He is a loser, not a leader, but a lone warrior. Nevertheless, he will become the “model for identification” offered to immigrants in the first decennia of the 20th century in order for them to become “real Argentin- ians.”13 A much more explicit reference to the narrative of the Cid can be found twenty years later in a popular novel exploiting the immense popularity of Hernández’s poem: Eduardo Gutiérrez’s Juan Moreira. Here the author presents the heroic gaucho Juan Moreira explicitly as a “second Cid.” How- ever, in this case, the narrative shows the exact opposite structure as to the question of rebellion and/or submission under the state of law: Moreira is in fact a rebel. After suffering various cases of injustice and humiliation, he turns into an avenger, kills the traitor who has slandered him and the sheriff who is secretly in love with his wife and therefore persecuting him. Nonetheless, Moreira always kills “de buena ley,” in a fair duel, in which he even tries to get wounded at the beginning in order to give his opponent a

12 This is exposed in more detail in Rössner 2001. 13 As for the use of the gaucho character as identification model and therefore as hero of a – not very clear – national narrative, see Rössner 2001. 180 Michael Rössner chance. In the end, he lives as “gaucho matrero,” an outlaw in a permanent struggle against police and army, and serves as a kind of incarnation of the “old virtues” of liberty now at risk because of European immigration and centralized bureaucracy. Nevertheless, there are also some parallels with the character of the me- dieval knight. Moreira shows the same magnanimity as the Cid (at least the Cid’s figure in the profane saint’s version), and he has also the role of a lov- ing father. He cures the wounds of the soldiers he defeats, he implores the patrols trying to catch him to renounce combat as he does not want to kill any more people, and the only thing that can pluck his heartstrings is his little son whom Moreira – being an outlaw – can only rarely meet for short moments. There are also some Christological elements in the plot which might recall similar elements in the Cid narrative. His death scene is a good example for a translation and recontextualization of these aspects: Moreira is murdered through treason, and is impaled in the position of the crucified Christ – but on the wall of a brothel. The last chapter contains the explicit reference to the myth of the Cid. It portrays the late hero’s attributes, presenting his knife with the words: “Juan Moreira’s dagger is worth lying side by side with the Cid’s sword in a museum” (La daga de Moreira es digna de figurar en un museo al lado de la espada del Cid …). This sentence seems to affirm the equality of Argentine culture in comparison with the Spanish mother country. The narrative of origin is therefore not formed by recourse to an “archaic work” from local cultures, but by borrowing an element from the “old” culture of the former colonial mother country in order to affirm that the chivalrous virtues repre- sented by the Cid for Spain are now genuinely Argentinean ones. And yet, although victorious in each and every combat, in the end Juan Moreira is also a loser. He shows his heroic grandeur precisely in his indi- vidual struggle against an unjust order of law, not by submitting to it as the Cid did. One could ask at this point if the choice of such an inverting translatio/n of the narrative of origin could be the expression of one of the reasons for quite a lot of problems in the history of Argentina: exaggerated individualism.14 During the 20th century, the Cid’s story was translated repeatedly in new contexts – first by the already mentioned “Generation of 98,” a group of writers searching for a new start after Spain’s loss of the last overseas col- onies by referring to the history of Spain before the Hapsburg dynasty and through a mythical transfiguration of the central region of Castile. One can

14 As for instance, José Mármol in his novel Amalia (1852) suggests when he exposes the incapacity of his fellow compatriots to act solidarily. Translatio/ns of Identity-Building Narratives 181 even find repercussions of this identification with the “Spain of the Cid” in academic criticism, for instance, in Menéndez Pidal’s thesis of realism throughout the poem, which was only contested in 1948 by Leo Spitzer. A second new context appeared during the Spanish Civil War, when Franco and his supporters portrayed the Caudillo as a second Cid and defender of Christian Spain against the new Moors – the Republican troops which burned churches and monasteries. We can find traces of this new contextualization even in 1961, when the narrative of the Cid was translated into the language of Hollywood – in Anthony Mann’s film El Cid, shot in Spain with the support of Spain’s head of state. However, the Cid appears here not only from the Franco perspective as “Savior of the Occident,” but also as a politician aiming at a reconciliation of religious and ethnic groups. In the first scene, he liberates Moorish prisoners who react by submitting themselves to the liege service of the Castilian king and become the Cid’s most loyal allies. After the ban from Castile, when the Cid is preparing the conquest of Valencia together with these allies, the goal of such a reconciliation of religions for Spain is explicitly mentioned. During a meal with his Moorish friends, the Cid observes the fraternization between Christian and Moorish knights and asks his ally, the Emir of Zaragoza: “How can anyone say this is wrong?” And the Emir answers: “They will say so – on both sides,” and the Cid fin- ishes with an almost post-modern hybrid (and politically correct) sentence: “We have so much to give to each other – and to Spain” (Mann 1961, 02:05:16–34). Although more than 50 years old, the film presents – at the very begin- ning and in the end – an astonishingly modern setting for another narra- tive, the threat to Western civilization by fundamentalist Islam, a sort of “clash of civilizations” long before Huntington coined the phrase. In the very first scene of the film, the Moroccan King Ben Jussuf appears as a hate- and warmonger who plans the invasion of Christian Spain and the conquest of Europe, even of the whole world with fanatic Jihadists. His speech before the Muslim rulers of Spain is quite clear: “The prophet has commanded us. Rule the world! Where in all your land of Spain is the glory of Allah? When men speak of you they speak of poets, music-makers, doctors, scientists. Where are your warriors? You call yourselves sons of the Prophet? You have become women! Burn your books! Make warriors of your poets! Let your doctors invent you poisons for your arrows! Let your scientists invent you war-machines. And then – kill!” He reaches a theatri- cal climax with: “[I] will sweep up from Africa and thus the empire of the one God, the true god Allah will spread, first, across Spain, then, across Europe, then, the whole world …” (Mann 1961, 7’10’’–8’13’’). The last 182 Michael Rössner scene of the film shows the Cid, already dead, but tied to his horse, leading the Christian army against the Moorish besiegers. Dead but still fighting, he rides Ben Jussuf down, marking the triumph of Christian civilization over the Jihadists in their black burka-style clothes, but also completing the Cid’s Christological legend, as the voice from the off comments: “And thus the Cid rode out of the gates of history and into legend” (Mann 1961, 02:53:15 – 02:58:08). The Cid is played by Charlton Heston, the style of the film is American, and the sites of the film are in Franco’s Spain, which had recently con- cluded treaties with the US administration concerning military bases that allowed the country to overcome international isolation after World War II. However, if one were to upload the mentioned scenes to the Internet today without indicating their origin, they could be taken for propaganda clips created after 9/11 with the intention of showing the historical foundations of the ever-lasting antagonism between Western civilization and Islam. In order to get an iconic experience of Huntington’s “clash of civilizations,” the narrated community “Western civilization” could use – with very little translating effort – the same narrative which originally had translated quite a different story in the medieval Cid poem: the story of the order of peace (Reichsfriedensordnung or Landfriedensordnung) imposed by the central power in order to restrain the feuding and to prepare the modern state of law in a medieval kingdom. It is however quite clear that the style of the film and its romantic implications (the love story between Jimena/ Sophia Loren and the Cid/Charlton Heston) appear slightly out-of-date, and, more importantly, that the Christological aspect of the Cid-Savior does not chime together with the 21st century situation of a secularist West- ern civilization allegedly opposed to a fundamentalist Islam. So it has be- come clear even in this last example that the same narrative may serve quite opposite positions and be used in completely different ideological embed- dings – but in each case there will be a conflictual negotiation with the remnants of earlier contexts. Translatio/ns of Identity-Building Narratives 183

References

AA.VV. (2007), El Cid: Poesía y teatro, Cuadernos de Teatro Clásico 23, (Madrid: Teatro Clásico). Deyermond, Alan (1982): ‘The Close of the «Cantar de Mio Cid»: Epic- Tradition and Individual Variation’, in The Medieval Alexander Legend And Romance Epic. Essays in honour of David J.A. Ross (Millwood, New York etc.: Kraus International Publications), pp. 11–18. Duggan, Joseph J. (1989): The “Cantar de mio Cid”: Poetic Creation in its Economic and Social Contexts (New York: Cambridge University Press). Hinojosa, Eduardo de (1899): ‘El derecho en el Poema des Cid’, in Ho­ menaje a Menéndez y Pelayo (Madrid: Librería General de Victoriano Suárez), I, pp. 541–581. Hook, David (1980), ‘On Certain Correspondences between the Poema de Mio Cid and Contemporary Legal Instruments’, Iberoromania, new se- ries, no. 11, 31–53. López Estrada, Francisco (1982): Panorama crítico dobre el Poema del Cid (Madrid: Castalia). Mann, Anthony (1961): El Cid (DVD of the film), DVA (Koch Media, Digital remastered), DVM020014D. Menéndez Pidal, Ramón (1955): Castilla. La tradición. El idioma (Madrid: Austral). Neuschäfer, Hansjörg (ed.) (1964): El Cantar de mio Cid (Munich: Eidos), with the essay: ‘Der selbstlose Held. Überlegungen zur Form der Idea- lität im Cid’, pp. 7–22. Richthofen, Erich von (1960): ‘La Justice dans l’épilogue de la Chanson de Roland et du Poème du Cid’, Cahiers de Civilisation Médiévale, 3, 76–78. Rössner, Michael (2001): ‚Der Gaucho als argentinische Identitätsfigur zwischen Politik, Literatur und Sport von den Unabhängigkeitskriegen bis zum Fußball-WM-Maskottchen‘, in: Kultur-Diskurs. Kontinuität und Wandel der Diskussion um Identitäten in Lateinamerika im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert, ed. by Michael Riekenberg, Stefan Rinke and Peer Schmidt (Stuttgart: Heinz), pp. 85–102. — and Italiano, Federico (2012): Translatio/n: Narration, Media and the Staging of Differences (Bielefeld: Transcript). Zahareas, Anthony (1964): ‘The Cid’s Legal Action at the Court of Toledo’, Romanic Review, 55, 161–172.

The Politics of Images Considerations on French Nineteenth-Century Orientalist Art (ca.1800 – ca.1880) as a Paradigm of Narration and Translation Antonio Baldassarre (Lucerne)

This paper combines the analysis that emerged from the encounters between nine- teenth-century French artists and the “Orient” with considerations on methodologi- cal issues that – almost inevitably – arise when dealing with visual source material in such a context. Regarding the latter topic, the perspective includes visual sources “narrating” twentieth-century and current Western perceptions of the “Orient.” The in-depth examination of these encounters reveals many points of mutual reference. Visual language and the corresponding codes and symbols realized by French nine- teenth-century orientalist artists referred, in a double-bind manner, to both supposed orient “narratives” and modes of translation dependent on their own cultural traditions and contexts amalgamated with specific agendas, not only of a political but also of an artistic nature.1

Proömium ante rem

In Turkish we have a special tense that allows us to distinguish hearsay from what we’ve seen with our own eyes; when we are relating dreams, fairy tales, or past events we could not have witnessed, we use this tense. Orhan Pamuk2 … we anthropologists should perhaps not think of representation in the first place as some enabling capacity of the human mind […] but, more modestly, as something that we actually do, as our praxis. This would help us to realize that our ways of making the Other are ways of making ourselves. Johannes Fabian3 The brush the painter employs should be dipped in reason, as someone says about Aristotle’s writing implement. It should leave behind more to think about than just what it reveals to the eye … Johann Joachim Winckelmann4

Objects of French nineteenth-century visual culture with Oriental or Is- lamic subject matter offer a rich opportunity to study the way in which the “Oriental Other” was approached within a Western environment and what sort of mechanisms have been at work within the processes of convergence. Moreover, these objects deliver insights into Western European social and political power structures and the state of knowledge at the time, as well as into the divergence drawn in the representations of the “Oriental Other” 186 Antonio Baldassarre in a Western milieu. Finally the items produced in this framework provide insights into what Marc Augé called the imaginary of a society which – ac- cording to him – is created as a result of the symbiosis between the official “myths” and the private “dreams.”5 Although formal-visual and iconographic analysis of the visual source material and aspects of its materiality is crucial for the exploration of the topic of this paper, it only forms the basis of a closer examination of the well-documented receptiveness for Orient subjects in Western European cultures. This analysis takes the visual representations circulating within culture as constructions of imaginaries and as a way of expression in its own right, i.e. to symbolize the world through collectively shared images.6 For the “image” is, as Gottfried Boehm has convincingly argued, “not simply some new topic, but rather concerns a different mode of thinking which is capable of revealing the long-neglected cognitive possibilities inherent in non-verbal representations.”7 Even though I share with Boehm the conviction that images are able to endow sense and meaning by themselves, I am uneasy about too strong a

1 I would like to express my sincere gratitude to Zdravko Blažeković, Diane Glazer, Richard Leppert and Debra Pring. They read several versions of this manuscript and their comments were decisive concerning the improvement of the present final version. English translations provided in this article are by myself unless otherwise stated. Some of the ideas and considerations as explored in this paper have partially and within different contexts been discussed in papers which I have published over the last three years and to which I will refer accordingly. However, some implicit self-citations are unavoidable. 2 Orhan Pamuk, Istanbul: Memories and the City (New York: Vintage, 2006), p. 8. 3 Johannes Fabian, ‘Presence and Representation: The Other and Anthropological Writings’, Critical Inquiry, 16 (1990), 753–772 (p. 756). 4 “Der Pinsel, den der Künstler führet, soll im Verstand getunckt seyn, wie jemand von dem Schreibe-Griffel des Aristoteles gesaget hat: Er soll mehr zu dencken hinterlassen, als was er dem Auge gezeiget […]”. Johann Joachim Winckelmann, Gedanken über die Nachahmung der griechischen Werke in der Malerey und Bildhauer­ kunst (1756, 2nd, enlarged ed.) (Stuttgart: Reclam, 2013), p. 49; English translation quoted after, Johann Joachim Winckelmann on art, architecture, and archaeology, ed. and transl. David R. Carter (Rochester, N.Y.: Camden House, 2013), p. 55. 5 Marc Augé, La guerre des rêves (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1997), pp. 77–87. 6 See Hans Belting, ‘Blickwechsel mit Bildern’, in Bilderfragen: Die Bildwissen­ schaften im Aufbruch, ed. by Hans Belting (Munich: Wilhelm Fink Verlag, 2007), pp. 49–75 (pp. 50–51). 7 “Denn das ‘Bild’ ist nicht irgend ein neues Thema, es betrifft vielmehr eine andere Art des Denkens, das sich imstande zeigt, die lange gering geschätzten kognitiven Mög- lichkeiten, die in nicht verbalen Repräsentationen liegen zu verdeutlichen”. Gott­fried Boehm, ‘Iconic Turn. Ein Brief’, in Belting (ed.), Bilderfragen, p. 27–36 (p. 27). The Politics of Images 187 reduction to hermeneutics and a strictly immanentist approach when the analysis of visual culture does not explicitly involve the social and political dimensions and functions. These functions, of course, do not lie outside the visual but are part of its potential narratives as embodied in the dialectics of its material nature (the picture) and its immaterial content (the image) and its connection to the context of human culture. Such a perspective does not imply a throwback to the strongly logocentric methodology as developed by Erwin Panofsky, in whose analysis images substantially are treated like pictures (and not as images) and ultimately, as “illustrations” or “models”, i.e. instances of a certain and supposed zeitgeist.8 Rather the analysis of visual culture must be comprised of reflection of human culture including not only the functions, roles, modes etc. that society allows the visual to perform, but also the impact of the visual on society and its role in social communication. Thus, the following considerations will methodologically adopt a kind of middle course that, on the one hand, classifies the image as defined by Boehm as a meaningful act9 and which, on the other, takes into account the position of the social and political power of the visual as introduced by William J. Thomas Mitchell into the discourse on new approaches in visual culture.10

Framing the Topic

The intensified interest of Western European artists and artisans in matters of Islamic culture has a long tradition significantly influenced by both solid trading and diplomatic links and the strong presence of Islamic culture on the Iberian Peninsula and the Balkans.11 The circumstances of political and economical history left numerous traces in visual culture. The engagement

8 See Erwin Panofsky, Studies in Iconology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1939). 9 See Boehm, ‘Iconic Turn. Ein Brief’, p. 29, and Gottfried Boehm, Wie Bilder Sinn erzeugen. Die Macht des Zeigens (Berlin: University Press, 2007). 10 See William J. Thomas Mitchell, ‘What is an Image?’, New Literary History, 15.3 (1984), 503–537, ‘The Pictorial Turn’, Artforum (1992), 89–94; ‘What is Visual Culture?’, in: Meaning in the Visual Arts: Views from the Outside. A Centennial Com­ memoration of Erwin Panofsky (1892–1968), ed. by Irving Levin (Princeton, N. J.: Princeton University Press, 1995), pp. 207–217; and What do Pictures Want? The Lives and Loves of Images (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005). 11 Venise et l’Orient, 828–1797 (exhibition cataloge), ed. by Stefano Carboni (Paris: Gallimard, 2006); Olivia Remie Constable, Trade and traders in Muslim Spain: the commercial realignment of the Iberian peninsula, 900–1500 (Cambridge etc.: 188 Antonio Baldassarre was, however, not unilateral. From very early on one can observe processes of translation and acquisition of Western visual culture in the East.12 The manifold contacts between East and West have left profound traces in the European memory, especially in the form of anxiety fantasies influ- enced in particular by the increasing military and cultural clashes between the newly emerging Ottoman power and the European peoples. These anxiety fantasies are especially tangible in the flood of so-called “Turk lit- erature” that essentially functioned as a call to arms against the “enemies of faith.”13 The printed documents were often accompanied by woodcuts depicting marauding and murdering Turks. The interpretations placed upon the Western-European visual imagi- nations of the East created narratives and agendas which were part of a continuously changing socio-cultural matrix, meaning that there is not one single history of the Western European reception of Eastern cultures but rather many, i.e. the Oriental subject “takes on a variety of forms and roles in the nineteenth century, encompassing a broad array of artistic produc- tion.”14 The diversity is strongly dependent upon the inner structure of the European matrix, organized according to not only “time, geographical lo-

Cambridge University Press, 1994); Leonard P. Harvey, Muslims in Spain: 1500 to 1614 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005; Harry T. Norris, Islam in the Balkans: religion and society between Europe and the Arab world (Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press, 1993); Ottoman and Habsburg legacies in the Balkans: language and religion to the North and to the South of the Danube River, ed. by Christian Voß (Munich: Sagner, 2010). For a general discussion on the relation- ship between modern Europe and the Ottoman Empire see Europa und die Türken in der Renaissance, ed. by Bodo Guthmüller and Wilhelm Kühlmann (Göttingen: Niemeyer, 2000), and The Turk and Islam in the Western Eye, 1450–1750. Visual Imagery before Orientalism, ed. by James G. Harper (Farnham: Ashgate, 2011). 12 Two remarkable exhibitions have recently raised awareness of the mutual and fruit- ful exchange between the East and West. See Sehnsucht Persien (exhibition cata- loge), ed. by Axel Langer (Zurich: Museum Rietberg and Scheidegger & Spiess, 2013), and Interwoven Globe: The Worldwide Textile Trade, 1500–1800 (exhibition cataloge), ed. by Amelia Peck (New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, and New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2013). See also Antonio Baldassarre, ‘Be- fore “Orientalism”: Rembrandt’s Musical Allegory (1626)’, invited paper presenta- tion, delivered at the 2013 International Academic Symposium on Chinese Musical Iconography, Hangzhou, 25–27 October 2013 (publication forthcoming). 13 For further details see Zoran Konstantinović, ‘Tirk oder Griech: Zur Kontami- nation ihrer Epitheta’, in Europäischer Völkerspiegel. Imagologischethnographische Studien zu den Völkertrafeln des frühen 18. Jahrhunderts, ed. by Franz K. Stanzel (Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag C. Winter, 1999), pp. 299–314. 14 Frederick N. Bohrer, ‘Inventing Assyria: Exoticism and Reception in Nineteenth- Century England and France’, The Art Bulletin, 80.2 (1998), 336–56 (p. 336). The Politics of Images 189 cation, and worldliness of experience,”15 but also with respect to processes of nation and identity formation. Such a multi-dimensional grid is a helpful way to approach the production and reception of French nineteenth-centu- ry visual culture with Oriental subject matter to achieve an understanding that takes an in-depth approach toward the remarkable insights explored in Edward Said’s seminal study Orientalism (published in 1978) but also looks beyond those original conclusions.16 Despite the at times justifiable criti- cism Said’s study received in subsequent years,17 his achievements raised a new awareness of the rather twisted Western concept of the East and the mechanism of its fabrication based on material dating from the Western European industrial age and the age of Western European imperialism. The anchoring of Said’s theory within this specific period of Western European history clearly reveals that his interpretative method can only be applied cautiously and certainly not in a generalized manner.18 Quite problematic is Said’s understanding of the “East” and “West” as rather uniform and monolithic entities. In contrast, John MacKenzie, has reasoned that

the arts of empire and Orientalism require a different approach to their under- standing, a clearer periodisation, a closer relationship to event, mood, fashion and changing intellectual context, an effort to comprehend authorial influence and audience reaction, and above all the multiple readings to which they can be subjected.19

Moreover it should be emphasized that French visual sources with Ori- entalized subject matter were related thematically rather than stylistically, covering a very wide range of styles and artistic forms as well as a dispo- sition of heterogeneous concerns and discourses up to approximately the 1880s.20 The establishment of the Société des Peintres Orientalistes Français in 1893 was an effort to truss this heterogeneity. Its principle aim was – as stated by Léonce Bénédite (1856–1925), one of the society’s founding mem- bers and its first president – not the achievement of a stylistically united school but rather

15 Harper, Introduction to The Turk and Islam in the Western Eye, 1450–1750, p. 8. 16 Edward Said, Orientalism (1978) (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2003), p. 2. 17 See for instance Ibn Warraq, Defending the West. A Critique of Edward Said’s Ori­ entalism (Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 2007). 18 See for instance Harper, The Turk and Islam in the Western Eye, 1450–1750. 19 John MacKenzie, Orientalism: History, Theory and the Arts (Manchester: Manches- ter University Press, 1995), p. 39. 20 The vastness of the topic is remarkably presented in the exhibition cataloge by Donald A. Rosenthal, Orientalism, the Near East in French Painting, 1800–1880 (Rochester, N.Y.: Memorial Art Gallery of the University of Rochester, 1982). 190 Antonio Baldassarre

to further the state of knowledge concerning the countries and native races of the Near and Middle East, as well as the Far East, to foster a critical approach to the study of their ancient arts and civilizations and to give impetus to a re- vival of interest in their local industries.21

Nevertheless, this institutionalization – as is often the case – resulted in the loss, to a large extent, of the innovative power of the movement and began to narrow its motivic broadness and stylistic language. This is the reason for the chosen timeframe of these considerations which does not go beyond the period of this institutionalization of “Orientalist art.” In addition, the emphasis on features of visual culture of French prov- enance is neither arbitrarily chosen nor accidental. As the “capital of the nineteenth-century”22 Paris (alongside, arguably, London) was the center of the nineteenth century production and reception of art with Oriental- ized subject matter particularly because of a displayed expansion policy and a forced development of industry (including progress in transporta- tion and the development of steamships and railways). Although once geo- graphically distanced from France, the Orient became an integral part of French visible, audible and perceptible “material civilization and culture”23 at latest with Napoleon Bonaparte’s (1769–1821)24campaign in Egypt and Syria (1798–1801), eventually culminating in the sophistication of the Sec- ond Empire (1852–70) under the rule of Napoleon III (1808–73) and the Third Republic. The particular presence of the East in French nineteenth- century culture is also tangible in the popularity of the song Partant pour la Syrie [Departing for Syria] that incorporates a sort of imperialist attitude. The fame of the song, inspired by Napoleon’s Egyptian Campaign and believed to be set to music by Hortense de Beauharnais (1783–1837)25 –

21 Quoted in Lynne Thornton, The Orientalists: painter-travellers (Paris: ACR Édition, 1994), p. 15. As far as the Société des Peintres Orientalistes Français is concerned see Pierre Sanchez and Stéphane Richemond, La société des peintres orientalistes français (1889–1943) (Dijon: Éd. l’Échelle de Jacob, 2008). 22 Title of the exposé in Walter Benjamin, Passagen-Werk, 2 vols, ed. by Rolf Tiedemann (Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp, 1982), English as The arcades project, transl. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press, 1999), pp. 77–88. 23 Said, Orientalism (1978), p. 2. 24 Charles François, Journal du capitaine François dit le dromadaire d’Égypte 1792–1830, ed. by Jacques Jourquin (Paris: Tallandier, 2003); Juan Ricardo Cole, Napoleon’s Egypt: invading the Middle East (Cairo: American University in Cairo Press, 2008). 25 Concerning the life and achievements of Hortense de Beauharnais see Antonio Baldassarre, ‘Music, Painting, and Domestic Life: Hortense de Beauharnais in Arenenberg’, Music in Art. International Journal for Music Iconography, VXXIII/1–2 (1998), 49–61. The Politics of Images 191

Napoleon’s step-daughter and the mother of Napoleon III – on words by Alexandre de Laborde (1773–1842) around 1807, was particularly due to its chivalric agenda glorifying the aspirations of the young and handsome crusader knight Dunois. The song was immensely popular throughout the First Empire and among Bonapartists during the Restoration of the Bour- bons, as well as during the period of the Second Empire. In the latter period it even achieved the status of a national anthem (although never officially ratified as such) whereas the “Marseillaise” was authoritatively forbidden. Beyond the material presence, the “Orient” has also been inscribed into France’s mythological founding history for centuries as revealed by Phara- mond, the legendary king of the Franks. In the Carolingian Liber Historiae Francorum – also known as Gesta Francorum – by an anonymous writer of the eighth century Pharamond was claimed to have lived in the fifth cen- tury and connected to the alleged Trojan origin of the Franks,26 clearly es- tablishing “a specific past for a particular group of people.”27 Consequently, the legendary Frankish king was presented in sixteenth-, seventeenth- and eighteenth-century visual culture often crowned with an oriental-like tur- ban. “Though the ancient Trojans are unlikely to have dressed like ‘stage Turks,’ the costume generically signified Eastern origins.”28

French Nineteenth-Century Visual Politics and the Power of Visual Memory

As far as French nineteenth-century visual politics are concerned, prob- ably one of the most illustrative examples of Said’s notion of Orientalism in which the East was portrayed as a place of repression, lawlessness and barbarism that could only benefit from the imposition of Western rule, is the large-size canvas Bonaparte visitant les pestiférés de Jaffa le 11 mars 1799 [Bonaparte Visiting the Plague Victims of Jaffa on 11 March 1799] (fig. 1) of Antoine-Jean Gros (1771–1835), painted in 1804 and commissioned by Na- poleon Bonaparte himself.29 Gros was well acquainted with Napoleon since

26 Liber Historiae Francorum (Monumenta Germaniae Historica, Scriptores rerum Merovingicarum II), ed. by Bruno Krusch (Hannover: Hahn, 1888). 27 Rosamond McKitterick, History and Memory in the Carolingian World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), p. 8. 28 Harper, Introduction to The Turk and Islam in the Western Eye, 1450–1750, p. 11. 29 David O’Brien, ‘Antoine-Jean Gros in Italy’, The Burlington Magazine, 137.1111 (1995), 651–660 (p. 659). 192 Antonio Baldassarre

Fig. 1: Antoine-Jean Gros, Bonaparte visitant les pestiférés de Jaffa le 11 mars 1799, 1804, oil on canvas, 715 × 523 cm. Paris: Musée du Louvre (inv.-no.: 5064).

1796 through his encounter with him in Milan. The canvas Bonaparte au Pont d’Arcole of 179630 was the first in a series of iconic and propagandistic portraits of Napoleon created by Gros31 that had a remarkably powerful im- pact because it also circulated in an engraved version.32 Bonaparte visitant les pestiférés de Jaffa was clearly influenced by the aforementioned campaign in Egypt and Syria of Napoleon and enunciates in an affirmative and explicit manner the agenda of Orientalism, reveal-

30 Oil on canvas, 130.0 × 94.0 cm. Versailles: Musée national du Château de Ver- sailles (inv.-no.: MV 6314). 31 In addition to the canvas depicting Napoleon in the plague house of Jaffa this series also includes Gros’s, Le combat de Nazareth (1801, oil on canvas, 136.1 × 196.4 cm. Nantes: Musée des Beaux-Arts, inv.-no.: 1005); Napoléon sur le champ de bataille d’Eylau, le 9 février 1807 (1808, oil on canvas, 521.0 × 784.0 cm. Paris: Musée du Louvre, inv.-no.: 5067); and Bonaparte haranguant l’armée avant la bataille des Pyramides, 21 juillet 1798 (1810, oil on canvas, 389.0 × 505.0 cm. Versailles: Musée national du Château de Versailles, inv.-no.: MV 1496). 32 See Achille Bertarelli, Iconografia napoleonica, 1796–1799: ritratti di Bonaparte incisi in Italia ed all’estero da originali italiani (Milan: U. Allegretti, 1903), pp. 25–26; Edgar Munhall, ‘Portraits of Napoleon’, Yale French Studies, 26 (1960), 3–20. The Politics of Images 193 ing Gros as a “passionate propagandist for Bonaparte.”33 The painter never experienced the Orient first hand – as was true for many Orientalist artists during this period. The idea that firsthand experiences as the valid method of fieldwork in order to understand different peoples and cultures was just beginning to emerge. The reception of ancient Greek culture in eighteenth- century Weimar Classicism, for instance, as reflected in the writings of Johann Joachim Winckelmann, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Johann Gottfried Herder, Friedrich Schiller and Christoph Martin Wieland, was based substantially on an imagined and idealized image of ancient Greek culture with no immediate contact with it. Rather, the link to ancient Greek culture was the result of complex transformation and translation processes activated by experiences and insights acquired by the exposure to excavated ancient Roman assets on the Italian peninsula. Even ethnological research as established in the nineteenth century was conducted by so-called “arm- chair anthropologists” (in its earliest stages at least), including that by such eminent and influential scholars as Edward Burnett Taylor (1832–1917) and James George Frazer (1854–1941). They based their research on travel- ogues, photographs and similar material collected by missionaries, traders, explorers, or colonial officials.34 Gros’ canvas belongs to the tradition of history painting, a genre gener- ally assumed to be the most obviously narrative in nature. This notion was, however, strongly brought into question by Ivan Nagel who called the idea that “images are able to narrate” an “old, venerated” but “again fashion- able idea” and considered such a methodological conviction the “first and most lasting fall of European aesthetics of the art of painting.”35 Such a notion challenges the blanket applicability of iconological interpretation (i.e. the analysis of the “inherit meaning” of the depiction or – adopting a term of postmodernist scholarship – its narrative structures) as introduced by Aby Warburg and significantly further developed by Fritz Saxl and Er- win Panofsky.36 Yet, already at an early stage of iconological interpretation,

33 O’Brien, ‘Antoine-Jean Gros in Italy’, p. 651. 34 Anthropology and Photography, 1860–1920, ed. by Elizabeth Edwards (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1992). 35 “Die altverehrte, wieder modisch gewordene These, dass Bilder‘ erzählen’, stammt vom ersten und bleibendsten Sündenfall der europäischen Ästhetik der Malkunst ab.” Ivan Nagel, Gemälde und Drama: Giotto, Masaccio, Leonardo (Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp, 2009), pp. 15–16 (emphasis original). 36 See, for instance, Aby Warburg, ‘Italienische Kunst und internazionale [sic!] Astro­ logie im Palazzo Schiafanoja zu Ferrara’, in Atti del X. congresso internazionale di storia dell’arte in Roma. L’Italia e l’arte straniera, Rome, 1922 (Reprint Nendeln: Kraus, 1978), pp. 179–193; Fritz Saxl, ‘A Battle Scene without a Hero’, Journal of 194 Antonio Baldassarre

Panofsky called for caution conceding that “[t]here is admittedly some dan- ger that iconology will behave, not like ethnology as opposed to ethnogra- phy, but like astrology as opposed to astrography.”37 Gros based the narrative of his painting on the accounts of René-Nicolas Dufriche, baron Desgenettes (1762–1837) – the principal doctor of Napoleon’s army in Egypt and Syria – who reported the onset of the plague in the French army at the time of the brutal capture of Jaffa, during which Napo- leon ordered the carnage of thousands of Muslim soldiers.38 He is present in Gros’ canvas – standing on the left immediately behind Napoleon – as are other individuals who would have been known to the French viewers of the painting.39 The technique of presenting portraits of existent individuals is an effective means to convey authenticity within an imagined space. For the pictorial arrangement in general and the architectural setting and the Oriental dresses of the figures in particular are purely fictitious, borne of the collectively shared imagination in the period during which the artist worked. They have the function of supporting and enhancing the agenda of presenting Napoleon as a “king thaumaturge,” working within the frame- work of then-popular history painting and referring to both Christian nar- ratives and the divining touch of the king capable of performing miracles. The pose of touching the sore, which clearly implies the storylines of Jesus raising Lazarus from the dead, is, indeed, not mentioned in any his- torical reports about the siege of Jaffa. Its function is to create visual pro- paganda by incorporating Napoleon in the Western European narrative of the toucher des écrouelles, the “miraculous royal touch.” This tradition has been associated with French and English kings since the first millen- nium and was still the practice with Louis XVI, the last French king before the French Revolution.40 Thus Gros’ painting emerges as a work within the carefully prepared propaganda policy of Napoleon to become the Em- peror of the French in 1804, presenting the emperor-to-be as a successful

the Warburg and Courtauld Institutions, III (1939/40), 70–87; Erwin Panofsky, ‘Titian’s Allegory of Prudence: A Postscript’, originally published in collaboration with Fritz Saxl as ‘A Late Antique Religious Symbol in Works by Holbein and Titian’, Burlington Magazine, XLIX (1926), 177–181, reprinted in Erwin Panof­ sky, Meaning in the Visual Arts (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1955), pp. 146–168. 37 Ibid., p. 32. 38 René Desgenettes, Histoire médicale de l’armée d’Orient (Paris: Croullebois, 1830, 2nd ed.), p. 50. Further information on this reference is provided in Wal- ter Friedlaender, ‘Napoleon as “Roi Thaumaturge”’, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, 3/4 (1941–1942), 139–141, particularly p. 139 where Friedlaender quotes from a note of Gros. Regarding the massacre of Jaffa see The Politics of Images 195

Fig. 2: Antoine-Jean Gros, Les Pestiférés de Jaffa, ca. 1804, pencil, 49.0 × 67.8 cm. Paris: Musée du Louvre, Cabinet des dessins, Fonds des dessins et miniatures (inv.-no.: RF 2015, Recto). commander not only endowed with the miraculous royal touch associated with the former French kings but also with the capacity of controlling the Orient and therefore providing France with a glorious future. This is par- ticularly evident when taking into account the significant transformation of the earlier pencil sketch that Gros produced for the commission (fig. 2). The presentation of Bonaparte carrying the body of a wounded or dead soldier obviously “lacked the decorum appropriate to Bonaparte’s imperial pretensions in 1804,”41 which forced an intentional and precisely calculated change of the pictorial narrative in the final painted version.

Véronique Nahoum-Grappe, ‘The anthropology of extreme violence: the crime of desecration’, International Social Science Journal, 54.174 (2002), 549–557. 39 The canvas also includes Marshal Jean-Baptiste Bessières (1768–1813; with a hand- kerchief standing behind Napoleon on the right side) and the Commissary Gen- eral Jean-Pierre-Paulin-Hector Daure (1774–1846; behind Bessières). See Yvonne Hibbott, ‘Bonaparte Visiting the Plague-stricken at Jaffa’ by Antoine Jean Gros (1771–1835)’, The British Medical Journal, 1.5642 (1969), 501–502. 40 Friedlaender, ‘Napoleon as “Roi Thaumaturge”,’ p. 140. 41 O’Brien, ‘Antoine-Jean Gros in Italy’, p. 660. 196 Antonio Baldassarre

The enormous need of Napoleon to put himself visually in line with the former glorious history of France to justify his own sovereignty in the eyes of his French fellow countrymen and of European society in general is also displayed in the well- known portrait painted by Gros’ teacher Jacques- Louis David (1748–1825) in 1812 (fig. 3) who was a highly influential artist of French neoclassicism and awarded the title “First Painter of the Emperor” in 1804.42 This portrait performs a highly symbolically-charged political function. It was commissioned by Alexan- der Douglas (1811–1863), the tenth Duke of Ham- ilton. He hoped that Na- poleon would support his plan to restore the Stuarts to the British throne with which the Hamilton family was closely related for cen- turies. Given Napoleon’s general “avoidance of ac- tual portrait sitting,”43 the canvas turns out to be an expression of the painter’s Fig. 3: Jacques-Louis David, The Emperor Napoleon in ability to translate the nar- His Study at the Tuileries, 1812, oil on canvas, 203.9 × rative of an idealistic image 125.1 cm. Washington, DC: National Gallery of Art, into a politically powerful Samuel H. Kress Collection (inv.-no.: 1961.9.15). visual icon. The painting’s specific agenda is to assimilate the non-noble French general Napoleon into the French royal lineage. Such an approach was exactly in line with Napoleon’s conviction that the first and foremost task of the artist is to offer a convincingly idealized representation of his

42 “Premier Peintre de L’Empereur”, Charles Paul Landon, Nouvelles des arts, peinture, sculpture, architecture et gravure (Paris: C.P. Landon, 1804), p. 92. 43 Munhall, ‘Portraits of Napoleon’, p. 3. The Politics of Images 197 subject. “What do you need a model for,” he declared, “who cares whether or not the busts of Alexander resemble him? It is enough if we have an im- age of him which conforms to his genius.”44 Against this background one has to assess Napoleon’s famous statement addressed to David after having examined the painter’s iconic and giant Sacre de l’empereur Napoléon Ier et couronnement de l’impératrice Joséphine dans la cathédrale Notre-Dame de Paris, le 2 décembre 1804 [The Consecration of the Emperor Napoleon and the Coronation of Empress Joséphine on 2 December 1804]:45

It is well, very well, David, you have entirely read my mind, you have made me a French knight. I am grateful to you for conveying for centuries to come the proof of affection that I wanted to give to her [Joséphine de Beauharnais, Empress of France] who shares with me the pains of government.46

The visual agenda in David’s The Emperor Napoleon in His Study at the Tuileries is highlighted by the fact that the portrait is in essence a visual quotation of the no less significant large-scale portrait of Louis XIV (1638– 1715) painted by Hyacinthe Rigaud (1659–1743) in 170147 as I have already

44 “Qu’avez vous besoin de modele [sic!]? […] Qui se soucie de savoir si les bustes d’Alexandre sont ressemblants? II suffit que nous ayons de lui une image conforme à son genie [sic!].” Quoted in Richard Cantinelli, Jacques-Louis David, 1748–1825 (Paris and Brussels: Les Éditions G. van Oest, 1930), p. 69. Such a notion has a long tradition. Giovanni Paolo Lomazzo (1538–1600), for instance, already demanded in his Trattato dell’arte della pittura, scoltura et architettura of 1584 that portraits should display kings and princes with an awe-inspiring habitus, and not primarily care about the true appearance of the person portrayed. “[…] l’Imperatore, sopra tutto, sì come ogni Rè & Principe, vuol maestà, & haver un’aria a tanto grado conforme, si che spiri nobilita, & gravità; ancora che naturalmente non fosse tale. Conciosia che al pittore conviene che sempre accresca nelle faccie grandezza, & maestà, coprendo il difetto del naturale, come si vede che hanno fatto gl’antichi pittori i quali solevano sempre dissimilare, & anco nascondere le imperfettioni naturali con l’arte.” Giovanni Paolo Lomazzo, Trattato dell’arte della pittura, scoltura et architettura (Milan: Paolo Got- tardo Pontio, 1585), p. 433. See also Enrico Castelnuovo, ‘Il significato del ritratto pittorico nella società’, in Storia d’Italia (Turin: Einaudi, 1973), V/2, pp. 1033–1094. 45 Oil on canvas, 1806–1807, 621.0 × 979.0 cm. Paris: Musée du Louvre (inv.-no.: 3699). 46 “C’est bien, très-bien, David, vous avez deviné toute ma pensée; vous m’avez fait che- valier français. Je vous sais gré d’avoir transmis aux siècles à venir la preuve d’affec- tion, que j’ai voulu donner à celle [Joséphine de Beauharnais, Impératrice de France] qui partage avec moi les peines du gouvernement.” Quoted in Archives de l’art fran­ çais, ed. by Anatole de Montaiglon (Paris: Dumoulin, 1855–1856), vol. 4, p. 34, note 1. 47 Hyacinthe Rigaud, Louis XIV, 1701, oil on canvas, 279.0 × 190.0 cm. Paris: Musée du Louvre (inv.-no.: 7492). 198 Antonio Baldassarre

Fig. 4: School of Bonifazio de’ Pitati, La résurrection de Lazare, late 16th century, oil on wood, 183.0 × 282.0 cm. Paris: Musée du Louvre (inv.-no.: 118). argued elsewhere.48 The inter-textual references not only include the royal heraldic bees (on the chair’s arm-rest) and the fleurs-de-lys of the House of the Bourbon (on the chair’s seat) but also extend to the rather unusual leg position. All these and more are strategically placed by David to imply a connection between Napoleon and the monarchy of royal absolutism. Inter-textual references are important means to affirm, extend and/or reject a specific narrative within a given socio-cultural framework, and they apply to all expressions and products of human consciousness. The term “text” is therefore understood in its broadest sense as an object of human expression implying signs and structures of signs with discursive functions and stimulating interpretation. The power of signs is that inter-textual vi- sual references may be substantially based on the visual memory, a reposi- tory of non-verbal and collectively shared visual memories. Inter-textual dispositions are also present in Gros’ depiction of the plague of Jaffa by its reference to the sixteenth century depiction ofLa résurrection de Lazare [The resurrection of Lazarus] created in the school of Bonifazio de’ Pitati (fig. 4) as already suggested by Lee Johnson in 1970.49

48 See Antonio Baldassarre, ‘The Jester of Musicology or The Place and Function of music iconography in Institutions of Higher Education’, Music in Art. International Journal for Music Iconography, XXXV/1–2 (2010), 9–35. The Politics of Images 199

The Lazarus painting was removed from its original place in San Luigi dei Francesi in Rome and included in the collection of the Louvre in 1803 or 1804.50 After its arrival in Paris the painting became a point of reference for numerous contemporary artists, among them not only Gros but also Eugène Delacroix and Jean Louis Théodore Géricault.51 As far as Gros’ painting is concerned, the soldier suffering from plague and touched by Napoleon as well as the figure of the officer covering parts of his face with a handkerchief (which is – as already mentioned – a por- trait of Marshal Jean-Baptiste Bessières) seem to refer directly to the Italian Renaissance painting.52 In so doing Gros explicitly inscribes his Napoleonic propaganda into a narrative that is directly referring to the Christian narra- tive of Jesus as the thaumaturge. In this context the allusions to the Orient are no longer functioning as purely decorative props but rather they are es- sential within the overall agenda. This agenda attempts to present Napoleon to the French viewer as the leading political figure who not only performs miracles but also offers marvelous things to the Orient that was perceived by the Western viewer as a generally backward society which was often syn- onymous with an absence of civilization. Thus Gros’ portrait of Napoleon stylizes the emperor as being not only capable of performing miracles but also as generous enough to do this for the less advanced, less capable Ori- ent. The unique position of Napoleon in Gros’ depiction – as Roy Howard Brown has reasoned – is also visually highlighted.53 The central positioning of Napoleon within the image area and the particular distribution of light as well as the exceptional design of the “background orthogonals”54 are formal and stylistic means to direct the viewer’s full attention precisely on Napoleon, casting no doubts as to the “commanding role of the leader.”55 Later Gros employed a similar strategy in his canvas Napoléon sur le champ de bataille d’Eylau, le 9 février 1807 [Napoleon on the battlefield of Eylau on

49 Lee Johnson, ‘A Copy after Van Dyck by Géricault’, The Burlington Magazine, 112.813 (1970), 793–797 (p. 794, note 10). 50 Louis Hautecœur, Catalogue des Peintures exposées dans les galeries, II: École Ita­ lienne et École Espagnole (Paris: Musées Nationaux, Palais du Louvre, 1926), 13 and 36, and Marie-Louise Blumer, ‘Catalogue des Peintures Transportées d’Italie en France de 1796 à 1814’, Bulletin de la Société de l’Histoire de l’Art Français, II (1936), 244–348 (p. 265). 51 Lee Johnson, ‘A Copy after Van Dyck by Géricault’, p. 794, note 10. 52 Ibid. 53 See Roy Howard Brown, ‘The Formation of Delacroix’s Hero between 1822 and 1831’, The Art Bulletin, 66.2 (1984), 237–254 (p. 238). 54 Ibid. 55 Ibid. 200 Antonio Baldassarre

9 February 1807] presenting the General-Emperor consoling the suffering soldiers with a gesture as if he were blessing them.56 Moreover, the position of Napoleon in Gros’ Jaffa-canvas resembles the famous Apollo Belvedere as convincingly suggested by David O’Brien (fig. 5),57 most probably because of Apollo’s association with healing and his divine status. Ennio Quirino Visconti (1751– 1818), the eminent papal Prefect of Antiquities al- leged that the sculpture of Apollo Belvedere was commissioned by the peo- ple of ancient Athens af- ter the plague during the Peloponnesian war.58 It is very likely that Gros was acquainted with Visconti and his theory because of his involvement in the “Commission des art,” the committee appointed by Napoleon during his Italian campaign of 1796 in order to loot Italian art museums and collections for France. In general, Napoleon was very well aware of the particular impact of the visual, and strategi- cally employed it for his political agendas. Sharing Fig. 5: Apollo Belvedere, after Leochares, ca. 120– with, for instance, Louis 140 (copy of a bronze original of ca. 350–325 BCE), XIV the awareness of the white marble, 224 cm. Vatican City: Musei Vaticani. remarkable impact of the arts regarding the fabrication of a powerful political image,59 Napoleon emphatically declared: “More than anyone I appreciate the true services

56 See note 31. 57 O’Brien, ‘Antoine-Jean Gros in Italy’, p. 660. 58 Ibid. The Politics of Images 201 the arts and the sciences render the state.”60 This may explain why he even generously financed the engraving of the aforementioned “Arcole” portrait as executed by Gros in 1797. The print of this portrait turned out to be “a huge success, for it was issued in numerous editions and copies. Bonaparte’s interest in the engraving reveals […] his sensitivity to the power of the printed image as propaganda. […] Through prints he could reach beyond the Salon public.”61 They were, as were the tons of decorated plates pro- duced in the periods of Restoration and the Second Empire and decorated with motifs of scenes from Napoleon’s heroic life as previously executed in painting, “effective supporters of Napoleonic propaganda, both at the local and national level.”62 In addition Gros’ portrait of Napoleon in Jaffa is steeped in the Post- revolutionary doctrine of the traits de courage et d’humanité [traits of courage and humanity] which – in essence – reflects the significant changes in the military system of the period. Following the French Revolution, men of all social classes were called to army service so that

by 1793, the army was more genuinely representative than ever before of the whole of French society, both socially and geographically. Because most of these men had enlisted or been promoted since 1789, they were fired with patri- otic and revolutionary sentiment that made the mentalité of the revolutionary army utterly different from that of its royal predecessor.63

59 See for instance the numerous instances in Louis XIV, Mémoires, ed. as Mémoires du Louis XIV by Charles Dreyss, 2 vols (Paris: Didier & Cie, 1860) and as Louis XIV, Mémoires by Jean Longnon (Paris: Jules Tallandier, 1927; Reprint Paris: Tallandier, 2001). Further valuable insights into this topic are provided by Peter Burke, The fabrication of Louis XIV (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1992). 60 “J’apprécie plus que personne les services réels que rendent à l’état les arts et les sciences.” Lettre au Directoire du 4 Brumaire an V (25 October 1796) as quoted in Jean-Joseph-Stanislas-Albe Damas Hinard, Dictionnaire – Napoléon ou Recueil alphabétique des opinions et jugements de l’empereur Napoléon Ier (Paris: Plon frères, 1854, 2nd ed.), p. 48. Concerning Napoleon’s intense interest in the arts as a means of power see Annie Jourdan, Napoléon. Héros, imperator, mécène (Paris: Aubier, 1998), and Raoul Girardet, Mythes et mythologies politique (Paris: Seuil, 1986), pp. 71–72. 61 O’Brien, ‘Antoine-Jean Gros in Italy’, p. 655. 62 “[…] un support efficace de propagande bonapartiste, tant au niveau local que national.” Philippe Hamman, ‘Une entreprise de propagande bonapartiste: les as- siettes à décors de Sarreguemines (1836–1870)’, Revue d’histoire moderne et contem­ poraine, 53.3 (2006), 139–164 (p. 140). 63 , ‘Naked History: The Rhetoric of Military Paintings in Postrevolutionary France’, The Art Bulletin, 75/2 (1993), 235–258 (p. 251) (emphasis original). 202 Antonio Baldassarre

Based on the authorization by the National Convention on 25 September 179364 actions of courage and humanity of any soldier were required to be reported to the highest administrative bodies so that awards and recogni- tions could be made appropriately. Léonard Bourdon (1754–1807), a mem- ber of the Comité d’instruction publique expressed this policy as follows:

It has been painful for us to observe that, when a virtuous action common to several defenders of the homeland is reported, it appears important to send us the name of the officer while the names of soldiers are forgotten. We will take neces- sary measures to correct this oversight, which seems to belong to the injustices of the Old Regime and is so opposed to the principles of the Revolution.65

William Olander66 has discussed the artistic influence of the traits de courage et d’humanité which not only affected prints, national celebrations and engravings in newspapers but also paintings of which Gros’ “Jaffa por- trait” is only one of many. It presents Napoleon along the lines of this “Re- publican military propaganda”67 as an ordinary individual highly decorated with successful military operations and with a record proving his humani- tarianism. By placing the theme of French humanitarianism prominently almost in the center of his canvas – a scene blatantly dominated by the French flag in the middle arch –, Gros obscures and overwrites the facts – as mentioned above – concerning the massacre Napoleon and the French army performed among the Muslims when seizing Jaffa. Three years prior Gros composed the canvas Le combat de Nazareth (1801)68 in which the ideology of the traits de courage et d’humanité is even more explicitly stated by simultaneously depicting the themes of courage and humanity of the French army.69 The ambiguous and harsh criticism directed particularly at the sketch of this canvas as exhibited at the Salon of 1801 centers on it be- ing a crossover between genre and history painting traditions70 and may

64 Archives Nationales, F21 1022, dossier 1, pièce 17, ‘Extrait du procès-verbaux de la Convention nationale, séance du 4 vendémiaire an II’, as mentioned in Locke Siegfried, ‘Naked History’, p. 251, note 74. 65 Quoted in Locke Siegfried, ‘Naked History’, p. 251. 66 William Olander, Pour transmettre à la postérité: French Painting and Revolution, 1774–1795 (Ph.D. dissertation, New York University, 1983), pp. 312–317. 67 Locke Siegfried, ‘Naked History’, p. 252. 68 See note 31. 69 For an in-depths analysis of this canvas in the context of both the doctrine of traits de courage et d’humanité and the reactions it caused see Locke Siegfried, ‘Naked History’. 70 See for instance Jean-Baptiste Boutard, ‘Variétés, Salon de l’an IX [no.] VII’, Journal des débats et loix du pouvoir législatif, et les actes du gouvernement, 1–2 vendémiaire The Politics of Images 203 have affected, in my opinion, the rather explicit return to “the lofty realm of history painting”71 in the “Jaffa canvas,” probably giving expression to Gros’ attempt to secure himself a prominent place in this influential and important painting tradition. In summary it can be said that Gros’ portrait of Napoleon in Jaffa and similar depictions clearly functioned as glorification of the supremacy of Western or French civilization and its “moral codes” respectively, disguis- ing the actual barbarism of the West. Instead, and as a necessary means to enhance the glorification of Western civilization, the East was presented as the site of barbarism and despotism. Within this policy, pictorial material is chiefly useful due to the particular power of visual communication. Vi- sual objects are not only epistemological sources that may refer to historical “facts” and “events”72 but to a high extent they also transport manifold interpretations and generate meaning.73 In other words: visual sources of any kind enfold beyond their material existence a highly structuring power, actively participating in the forming of specific narratives of reality and his- tory. As written texts they not only represent histories and realities but also create them,74 and “as a non-verbal medium” they provide far more than only being “suitable as a supplement and corrective to written sources.”75 They function as logos – as such referring to Boehm’s idea. Gros’ portrait of Napoleon in Jaffa furthermore transports the ideology that based on the achievements of the French Revolution and on individual virtues, individu- als finally became able to move beyond set social boundaries – Napoleon was not the first but is the most prominent and model-like example of

an X [23–24 September 1801], 2–4 (pp. 2–3); and Philippe Chéry: ‘Beaux-Arts. Peinture. Aux artistes qui ne déshonorent pas ce titre’, Journal des bâtiments civils, 23 frimaire an X (14 December 1801), 385–392 (p. 387). 71 Locke Siegfried, ‘Naked History’, p. 250. 72 The term “facts” and “events” are enclosed in quotation marks due to their highly problematic status within the concept of history. See Richard J. Evans, In Defence of History (London: Granta Books, 1997); Chris Lorenz, Konstruktion der Vergan­ genheit (Cologne etc.: Böhlau, 1997). 73 See Paul Gerhard, ‘Visual History’ (version 2.0), in: Docupedia-Zeitgeschichte, 29.10.2012, online: 1–20 (13) [accessed: 15 September 2014]. 74 Gabrielle M. Spiegel, ‘History, Historicism and the Social Logic of the Text in the Middle Ages’, Speculum, 65.1 (1990), 59–86; Pierre Bourdieu, Les règles de l’art. Genèse et structure du champ littéraire (Paris: Éditions du seuil, 1992). 75 Brigitte Tolkemitt, introduction to Historische Bildkunde. Probleme – Wege – Bei­ spiele, ed. by Brigitte Tolkemitt and Rainer Wohlfeil (Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 1991), pp. 7–14 (p. 9). 204 Antonio Baldassarre this social mobility which was essentially not possible prior to the French Revolution:76 Born on 15 August 1769 as the second of thirteen children of a Corsican family that socially belonged to the minor gentry, Napoleon climbed the social ladder in the army during the French Revolution. He proved to be a first-rank military and political talent increased his popular- ity and eventually provided him the opportunity to crown himself Emperor of the French in 1804.

The Present Imaginarium on the East and the “Iconology of Sight”

Though all the aspects discussed in the context of the analysis of Gros’ Les Pestiférés de Jaffa were clearly manifest prior to the invention of pho- tography and the corresponding new forms of image transformation and manipulation procedures, photographs prove to be an interesting subject for further reflection on the nature of visual objects of any kind by virtue of their inherent force not only to rewrite and overwrite but also to emphati- cally write realities and histories by tactically employing strategies of nar- ration and translation. Although at the cost of a brief digression, it seems worthwhile at this point to take a look forward to the powerful impact of visual imagery in the history of the twentieth- and twenty-first centuries. The main purpose of such an extension of the focus is the enlargement of reflection and to

76 See Norbert Elias Die höfische Gesellschaft. Untersuchungen zur Soziologie des König­ tums und der höfischen Aristokratie(1933) (Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp, 1983). Ac- cording to Elias it was Louis XIV who had significantly shaped the new courtly society (p. 124) in which the king not only functioned as the political ruler but also as the supreme authority of an extremely sophisticated system of societal prestige values on which the entire court life was organized and controlled. The immediate practical and utility values of any object and action were superimposed by their societal prestige value so that the value of prestige and not the serviceableness and utility pervasively controlled social and political life. The king only had the authority to penetrate the system in order to keep the balance of the system and to maintain his prominent position. To achieve this goal the king ruled his country with a so- phisticated system based on favor which often did not respect the principles of the traditional feudal system of power based on birth. Favor, however, was a flexible instrument of power. “His hand alone would bestow lordly gifts / His choice alone distribute lands and honors,” as Laco says about Othon (an allegorical representation of Louis XIV) in Pierre Corneille’s stage play Othon of 1664 (Pierre Corneille, Othon, in Moot Plays of Corneille, transl. into English blank verse and with introduction by Lacy Lockert (Nashville: The Vanderbilt University Press, 1959), p. 276). The Politics of Images 205 link these considerations with matters referring to the “iconology of sight.” Moreover the discussion will take into account issues concerning the sup- posed authenticity of photography mainly determined by the technical prerequisites of its genesis that leads “le sense commune” (“the common sense”)77 – to quote from Roland Barthes’ early essay on photography – to believe that photographs cannot lie – a notion that was already at work with regard to history paintings when taking into account the strong urge for vérité historique [historical truth] – a political program exposed to the art- ists by the French government with respect to the presentation of historic events.78 The following reflection consciously emanates from the Western perspec- tive on photography, and these insights of research on photography based on the Euro-American experience cannot necessarily be directly applied to non- Western photography traditions.79 For “each medium is subject to a cultural practice and enfolds its medial conciseness only in the context of cultural practices in which it is used.”80 This notion finds credence in the remarkable studies of Stephen Sprague, Judith M. Gutman, Christopher Pinney, and Mohini Chandra – to name a few of many.81 Rather the “Euro-American perspective” taken in the following considerations is justified in order to un-

77 Roland Barthes, ‘Le message photographique’, Communications, 1.4 (1961), reprin- ted in Roland Barthes, Œuvre complètes, 3 vols, ed. by Éric Marty (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1993), pp. 938–948 (p. 939). 78 For further details on this topic see Locke Siegfried, ‘Naked History’, pp. 238–246. 79 Instances in this respect are the theories as developed in, for example, Walter Benja- min, Das Kunstwerk im Zeitalter seiner technischen Reproduzierbarkeit: Drei Studien zur Kunstsoziologie (1935/36) (Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp, 1963); Pierre Bourdieu et al., Un art moyen: Essai sur les usages sociaux de la photographie (Paris: Les Édi- tions de Minuit, 1965); Roland Barthes, La chambre claire: note sur la photographie (Paris: Gallimard, 1980); Susan Sontag, On Photography (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1977); and Michael J. Shapiro, The politics of representation: writing practices in biography, photography, and policy analysis (Madison WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1988). 80 Tobias Wendl, ‘“God never sleep.” Fotografie, Tod und Erinnerung’, in Snap me one! Studiofotografien in Afrika(exhibition catalogue), ed. by Tobias Wendl and Heike Behrend (Munich: Prestl, 1998), pp. 42–50 (p. 42). 81 Stephen Sprague, ‘Yoruba Photography: How the Yoruba see themselves’, Afri­ can Arts, 12.1 (1978), 52–59; Judith M. Gutman, Through Indian Eyes. 19th and Early 20th Century Photography from India (New York and Oxford: Oxford Uni- versity Press, 1992); Christopher Pinney, Camera Indica. The Social Life of Indian Photographs (London: Reaktion Books, 1997); Mohini Chandra, ‘Pacific Album. Vernacular Photography of the Fiji Indian Diaspora’, History of Photography, 24.3 (2000), 236–242. 206 Antonio Baldassarre derstand the mechanisms of the visual imaginarium regarding the “Oriental Other” as transmitted by photography in the Euro-American matrix that – in a similar way – continues the history of transforming the East. Concerning the possible objection that the shift regarding the material- ity of a visual object (paintings vs. photography, in the case here) has effects on the visual content and meaning, and thus considerations made on the basis of photography cannot generally be applied to other visual genres, I would like to reply with a notion by Mitchell as explored in his consider- ations on realism in the digital picture. According to Mitchell the idea that the material character of an image necessarily correlates “with the mean- ing of an image, with the image’s effects on the senses, with its impact on the body and mind of the viewers belongs to the great myths of our time.” This idea “is based on a mistaken understanding of concreteness, on a kind of vulgarly technical determinism that claims that the ontology of a me- dium is adequately determined by assessing its materiality and its techno- semiotic character.”82 In other words: as important as the materiality, i.e. the physical nature, of a medium may be it does not fully determine the meaning mediated by the medium and the effects caused by this mediation unless the physical nature has transformed itself into an essential part of the medium as is the case with flags or tattoos, for instance.83 The medium and not the material is the message – to adopt in a slightly enlarged manner a famous statement by Marshall McLuhan in the first chapter of his book Understanding Media, published in 1964.84 Another myth that entwines around photography is the notion that photographs are in principle more susceptible to manipulation than any other medium. This myth is rooted in an exaggerated and false fantasy of the “genuine” image. Each product of human consciousness is – emphati- cally spoken – a product of manipulation for – as Mitchell rightly empha-

82 William J. Thomas Mitchell, ‘Realismus im digitalen Bild’, in Bilderfragen. Die Bildwissenschaften im Aufbruch, ed. by Hans Belting (Munich: Wilhelm Fink Ver- lag, 2007), pp. 237–255 (p. 241). 83 Tom Holert, ‘Heterologien des Nationalen. Zur Mentalität und Medialität der Flagge – Mali 2013’, in Heterotopien. Perspektiven der intermedialen Ästhetik, ed. by Nadja Elia-Borer et al. (Bielefeld: transcript, 2013), pp. 327–350; Debra Pring, ‘Kate’s Butterflies: Defining the object and materials in music iconology’, paper presented at the conference of the International Association of Music Libraries, Archives and Documentation Centres (IAML), Vienna, 28 July – 2 August 2013 (publication in process); I would like to thank Debra Pring for having provided a copy of her paper. 84 Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extension of Men (New York: Mc- Graw-Hill, 1964). The Politics of Images 207 sizes – “the concept of the ‘genuine’ image is an ideological phantasm.”85 Having said this it is not refuted that manipulation and tricks cannot and do not assume a role in the production of photographs (as they do in any other techniques of image production) but such a view embeds the dan- gerous reductionism to assess photographs on the basis of their physical characteristics instead of being involved in concerns about the meanings they create as social practices within a given socio-cultural matrix, as with paintings, sculptures or other items of visual culture. A remarkable instance in this respect is the worldwide intense debate that a single photo recently caused. The bone of contention was the magical and almost too perfect looking light that illuminates, in a manner reminis- cent of Rembrandt, the faces in the photo of the Swedish photographer Paul Hansen which was awarded World Press Photo of the Year 2013 (fig. 6).

Fig. 6: Paul Hansen, Funeral in Gaza, 20. November 2012, photograph for the Swedish Newspaper Dagens Nyheter, © Dagens Nyheter, 2012.

The photo was taken on 20 November 2012 in Gaza City and shows the two-year-old Suhaib Hijazi and her brother Muhammed who was about to celebrate his fourth birthday. They are carried to the mosque for a burial ceremony, as a consequence of having been killed by an Israeli missile strike in which their father also lost his life.

85 Mitchell, ‘Realismus im digitalen Bild’, p. 243. 208 Antonio Baldassarre

Though the aforementioned debate was ignited by the highly artificial and thus unnatural light color, in the course of the argument it became obvious that the underlying issue was the expectation of the viewer that apparently realistic photographs have to include a high level of authen- ticity. This idea of authenticity was and still is strongly associated with the requirements initially imposed on twentieth-century war photogra- phy to present the truth and with roots in the ideological phantasm that the photographic document faithfully represents the world. Such a notion may have been strongly influenced by the fact that when photography was invented in the mid-nineteenth century the two “faculties” in charge of imbuing images with either a cult or aesthetic value, i.e. religion or art, remained remarkably indifferent towards the new medium. According to Ilka Brändle, photography was

quasi placed into a symbolic vacuum […] and instead occupied by, on the one hand, the natural sciences […] and, on the other hand, by diametrically op- posed tendencies (inter alia by so-called ‘ghost photography’). In addition, a photographic memory culture was developed within the private space that ini- tially was based on the tradition of bourgeois portrait painting but eventually followed its own dynamics up to the snapshot photo.86

Among the first persons to criticize Hansen’s photo as a fake was Neal Krawetz, the eminent forensic image analyst. On his The Hacker Factor Blog Krawetz argued that the picture is greatly manipulated and composed of different photos.87 Challenged by this charge, Hansen outlined in an interview that in

the post-process toning and balancing of the uneven light in the alleyway, I developed the raw file with different density to use the natural light instead of dodging and burning. In effect to recreate what the eye sees and get a larger dynamic range.88

86 “Quasi in ein symbolisches Vakuum hinein platziert, wurde die Fotografie stattdes- sen einerseits von den Naturwissenschaften […] und andererseits von diesen dia- metral entgegen gesetzten Tendenzen (u.a. durch so genannte ‘Geisterfotografien’) für sich in Anspruch genommen. Daneben entwickelte sich im privaten Bereich eine fotografische Erinnerungskultur, welche sich zunächst noch an der Tradition des gemalten bürgerlichen Porträts orientiert, dann jedoch einer eigenen Dynamik bis hin zum Schnappschussfoto folgte.” Ilka Brändle, ‘Das Foto als Bildobjekt. Aspekte einer Medienanthropologie’, in Bilderfragen. Die Bildwissenschaften im Aufbruch, ed. by Hans Belting (Munich: Wilhelm Fink Verlag, 2007), pp. 83–100 (p. 83). 87 [accessed: 15 September 2014]. The Politics of Images 209

The debate over Hansen’s photograph has touched a wide range of dif- ferent questions and concerns. Limiting them to issues concerning the vast topic of veracity and its standards (almost exclusively linked to issues of the technical manipulation) undermines the importance of what is really at stake, i.e. the visual representation and translation of conflicts in the Middle East in the media and its effects. Another case that allows further discussion concerns the photograph by the Associated Press photographer Huynh Cong ‘Nick’ Ut. It achieved a status similar to Robert Capa’s famous yet highly controversial Falling Soldier89 within the pictorial landscape of human cruelty.90 Ut’s photograph shows the terrified naked Phan Thi Kim Phúc running with other hor- rified children after a napalm attack by the US-allied South Vietnamese army during the Vietnam War in 1972.91 After its first publication on the front page of The New York Timeson 9 June 1972 the photograph made a broad impact on the US protest movement during the Vietnam War.92 This impact is, however, hardly the result of a spontaneous and random photo- graphic event but rather of a consciously calculated framing of the image aimed at evoking specific reactions as the selection process and the process- ing of the original shot clearly prove.93 Particularly the processing of Ut’s

88 ‘Photographer says his 2013 [sic!] World Press Photo of the Year is not a fake, judges agree’, in: news.com.au [accessed: 23 September 2014]. 89 See Philip Knightley, The First Casualty From the Crimea to Vietnam: The War Correspondent as Hero, Propagandist, and Myth Maker (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1975), pp. 209–212; Caroline Brothers, War and Photography: A Cultural History (London: Rout- ledge, 1997), pp. 58–60; Mario Brotóns Jordá, Retazos de una época de inquietudes (Alcoy: self-published, 1995, 2nd ed.); Robert Capa: Photographs, ed. by Cornell Capa and Richard Whelan (New York: Aperture, 1996); Jorge Levinski, The Camera at War: A History of War Photography from 1848 to the Present Day (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1978). 90 For a discussion of Capa’s Falling Soldier see also Baldassarre, ‘The Jester of Musi- cology’, p. 27. 91 Unfortunately a reproduction of Ut’s photograph cannot be provided here because the costs to receive reproduction rights were unexpectedly high. The picture can, however, easily be accessed on various websites, such as [accessed: 23 September 2014]. 92 Brady Priest et al., ‘Three Images: The Effects of Photojournalism on the Protest Movement during the Vietnam War’, [accessed: 23 September 2014]. 93 Gerhard Paul, ‘Die Geschichte hinter dem Foto: Authentizität, Ikonisierung und Über- schreibung eines Bildes aus dem Vietnamkrieg’, Zeithistorische Forschungen/Studies in Contemporary History, online-edition, 2.2 (2005), 7–9 [accessed: 23 September 2014]. 210 Antonio Baldassarre selected original image 7a is illustrative in this respect.94 Almost a third of the original’s right part was completely cut out which shows photographers engaged with their equipment instead of rushing to help the children. Such a pictorial narrative provides critical indications about the behavior of the media and thus was not suitable for the public. The cutting transformed the picture not only into a political icon but also furnished it with a highly aestheticized narrative satisfying the desire for the naked body in pain – a key pictorial topos in Christian visual culture strongly inscribed in the Euro-American visual memory. Susan Sontag convincingly argued that “it seems that the appetite for showing bodies in pain is as keen, almost, as the desire for ones that show bodies naked. For many centuries, in Chris- tian art, depictions of hell offered both of these elemental satisfactions.”95 Without wanting to go on too much about this notion one could also argue that depictions of the crucifixion of Jesus serve the identical fetishization of the naked body in pain to which Ut’s photograph of Phan Thi Kim Phúc alludes when taking into account the position of her arms. Basically, the modification and transformation that the original shot underwent were part of a deliberately calculated intention to stimulate as well as satisfy spe- cific desired reactions – quite similar to Gros’ painting of Napoleon in Jaffa as discussed above. Such intended reactions, however, are only able to en- fold an effect beyond their material character due to their referential nature, which is to say that they presuppose an already existing pictorial virtual library, a collection of immaterial images or what can be summarized as “embodied memories” according to Paul Connerton’s insights.96 A final case for further consideration is the decision of the US govern- ment to classify more than 50 images of the death of al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden as secret and thus not accessible to the public, in order to avoid anti-American reactions.97 This decision was unanimously seconded by the

94 Also in this case no reproduction can be provided because of very high costs. The picture can, however, be accessed on various websites, such as [accessed: 14 May 2013]. 95 Susan Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2003), p. 41. 96 Paul Connerton, Bodily Practices. How Societies Remember (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), pp. 72–104. See also William J. Thomas Mitchell, ‘Picto- rial Turn: Eine Antwort’, in: Bilderfragen: Die Bildwissenschaften im Aufbruch, ed. by Hans Belting (Munich: Wilhelm Fink Verlag, 2007), pp. 37–46 (p. 39). 97 Martha Raddatz et al., ‘Release bin Laden death photos? CIA director thinks it will happen’, abc News, 3 May 2011, [accessed: 23 September 2014]. The Politics of Images 211

Fig. 7: Pete Souza and The White House, PresidentBarack Obama and Vice-President Joe Biden with members of the National Security Team in the Situation Room of the White House, 1 May 2011.

U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit. The event that proved to be politically crucial for the fundamentals of US-American self- identity was visually documented with an image that quickly became iconic because of its powerful narrative (fig. 7).98 It shows President Barack Obama and Vice-President Joe Biden with members of the National Security Team in the Situation Room of the White House receiving “an update on the mission against Osama bin Laden” on 1 May 2011, “the day bin Laden was killed” by the American SEAL team “in Abbottabad, Pakistan.”99 This image taken by the White House photographer Pete Souza, is the only officially approved visual evidence of Osama bin Laden’s death. It

98 Referring to [accessed: 23 September 2014] the “image is a work of an em- ployee of the Executive Office of the President of the United States, taken or made as part of that person’s official duties. As a work of the U.S. federal government, the image is in the public domain.” Attempts over months to receive also official approval by the White House for reproducing this picture within this article was unfortunately without results. The inquiries remained unanswered. Thus the picture is reproduced based on its legal status as being part of the public domain. 99 [accessed: 23 September 2014]. 212 Antonio Baldassarre satisfies the conditions necessary to establish evidential authority for the majority of viewers by the symbolically charged space and the set-up of those people involved. The most influential and powerful individuals in US-American public consciousness are gathered in one of the most secure rooms of the nation. Thus the picture endows the viewer with one of those rare glances into the epicenter of US power and offers the viewer the chance to feel part of the historic event which is enforced by the image’s snap-shot like character. This quality is amplified by the quite disturbing narrative deployed by the rather dramatic appearance of the Secretary of State Hill- ary Clinton – the only woman present in addition to Audrey F. Tomason, the Director for Counterterrorism, a rather enigmatic subject in Obama’s administration but important enough to witness the depicted event at first hand. Clinton seems the only person who is visibly expressing emotional involvement – if not personal attachment. The highly meaningful degree of her vivid expression became a publicly discussed issue and forced her to a rather vexing statement: “I am somewhat sheepishly concerned that it was my preventing one of my early spring allergic coughs. So, it may have no great meaning whatsoever.”100 Analyzing the image, the press and public reaction and the agendas involved in such a visual narrative Justin Vaughn and Stacy Michaelson claim that “this quickly iconic photograph serves […] as a rhetorical tool that reinforces ongoing gendered notions of the American presidency. By enhancing the president’s masculinity (and calling attention to the femininity of the most powerful female member of the government),” the photograph “becomes the latest in a long line of images that certify the patriarchal nature of the chief executive.”101 It visualizes, in sum, what Pierre Bourdieu identified as the symbolic violence of patriarchal power.102 One could even go so far to argue that the contrasting juxtaposition be- tween the males who react fairly unemotionally to what they see and thus stress the constructed concept of masculinity, and Clinton’s emotional

100 Huma Khan, ‘Hillary Clinton Explains Famous Osama bin Laden Raid Photo’, abc News, 5 May 2011, [accessed: 23 September 2014]. 101 Justin S. Vaughn and Stacy Michaelson, ‘It’s A Man’s World. Masculinity in Pop Culture Portrayals of the President’, in Women and the White House: Gender, Popu­ lar Culture, and Presidential Politics, ed. by Justin S. Vaughn and Lilly L. Goren (Lexington, KT: The University of Kentucky Press, 2013), pp. 135–162 (p. 137). 102 Pierre Bourdieu, ‘Die männliche Herrschaft’, in Ein alltägliches Spiel: Geschlechter­ konstruktion in der sozialen Praxis, ed. by Irene Dölling and Beate Krais (Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp, 1997), pp. 152–217 (p. 215). The Politics of Images 213 involvement representing the culturally gendered construction of femi- ninity, are essential for the image’s basic yet paradoxical narrative. That narrative is one of proving the death of a visibly not present yet in the image’s pictorial language and setting strategically organized omnipresent person. They are as vital as the obscured document lying on the laptop in front of Clinton that serves to enhance the official and authentic nature of the photograph, as vital as with the above mentioned mysterious Audrey F. Tomason, whose obscure identity became the subject of much investi- gative research after the publication of the Situation Room photo.103 De- spite all attempts Tomason is still a person unknown to the public – and her Wikipedia article void of valuable information disappeared as fast as it was published online briefly after the rumor mill about her identity was set in motion.104 Clinton’s explanatory statement above is an understandable yet unsuc- cessful attempt to escape both reduction of her role to the stereotypical female and the powerful narrative transmitted by the image. This narrative, one could further argue, is beyond its obvious manifestation of testoster- one-saturated structures and valuation patterns as Vaughn and Michael- son reasoned, another example in the long line of visual history that serve the powerful rhetoric of the hegemony of the West and its cultural and moral values over the East. It is enforced by the consciously and carefully staged absence or omission of the imagined body of the “Oriental Other.” Paradoxically, it is the intense gazes of the depicted people who attentively follow the events on a non-visible source of information which make the viewers of the photo believe that they are themselves directly witnessing the non-visible events. The photograph ultimately draws its unique and impos- ing expressiveness from the spectacular amalgamation of symbolic and real violence against the others, the female and the oriental – due to which the question whether the picture really confirms the death of Osama bin Laden turns out to be a relatively minor matter. The considerations surrounding the photographs of Hansen, Ut and Souza show that there is much more at stake beyond reputation and ethi- cal integrity: basically, the dogma of authenticity and the question to what extent pictures are really capable of encapsulating and transmitting specific narratives on reality which – as discussed above – Nagel, for instance, de-

103 Sarah Anne Hughes, ‘Audrey Tomason: Who is the Situation Room mystery wom- an?’, in: Washington Post, 4 May 2011, [accessed: 23 September 2014]. 104 See ibid. 214 Antonio Baldassarre cisively called into question with respect to history painting.105 The debate not only concerns photographs but any visual expression of human con- sciousness, although the invention of photography was crucial insofar as its physical characteristics prepared the ground for what Alan Trachtenberg called the “idea of photo camera” that “has so implanted itself that our very imagination of the past takes the snapshot as its notion of adequacy, the equivalent of having been there.”106 It is, however, noteworthy to mention that specific pictorial characteristics of photography such as the “photo- graphic gaze” were introduced into painting prior to the development of the photography technology.107 Since Plato’s famous allegory of the cave as set forth in the seventh book of his Politeia (The Republic) time and again the crucial relationship between reality and its image has been debated as part of the discourse on imitation, emulation and invention of reality. In-depth consideration of this subject clearly reveals that both the production and reception of images teeter between authenticity and fiction as images are, as any other expres- sion of human consciousness, the product of human projections. According to Immanuel Kant reality (i.e. “the thing-in-itself”) cannot be seen apart from the way one does in fact see it, which is to say that one can never reach reality beyond the boundaries of experiences. Thus, reality is, for Kant, in essence the result of how human beings experience the outside but not the outside itself which lingers to be in principle unknowable.108 In sum, visual objects are windows enlightening human experiences and imaginary and they provide snapshots of social and political power structures and conditions – and they necessarily need a medium to be transported into the imaginary of history and reality. For “media make readable, audible, visible, perceptible, all that but with the tendency to delete themselves and their constitutive contribution to these sensibilities” and they cannot be reduced to “forms of presentations as theater or film, nor to techniques […] or symbolism […] but are in all of them virulent.”109

105 See Nagel, Gemälde und Drama. 106 Alan Trachtenberg, ‘Albums of War: On Reading Civil War Photographs’, Repre­ sentations, 9 (1985), 1–32 (p. 1) (emphasis original). 107 See Before Photography: Painting and the Invention of Photography (exhibition cata- logue), ed. by Peter Galassi (Boston: New York Graphic Society, 1981); Dominique de Font-Réaulx, Peinture & photographie: les enjeux d’une rencontre, 1839–1914 (Paris: Flammarion, 2012). 108 See Immanuel Kant, Kritik der reinen Vernunft (first ed. 1781, and second rev. and enlarged ed. 1787), ed. by Heiner Klemme (Hamburg: Meiner, 1998), ed. based on the first and second original editions), particularly the introduction to the second edition, pp. 15–40. The Politics of Images 215

By such a perspective the focus inevitably shifts to the complicity of body and gaze on which images rely and by which their potential to enfold sense and meaning is constituted. Hans Belting has drawn attention to an exceptionally important phenomenon:

With their surfaces that catch our eyes media move in front of the world like an opaque screen. However, images are created on this side of the medium, in our view. They are placed neither simply ‘there’, on the canvas or the photo, nor ‘here’ in the mind of the viewer. The view generates images in the interval between ‘here’ and ‘there’.110

In other words: images are created by the involvement of body and medium and regulated by a continuous exchange of views. Behind this constellation images have no existence as images; they need to behave like bodies and look like them to be images.

Western visual media reproduce the entire spectrum of our views that they ‘put into picture’ in such a way that we see our everyday view practices reflected in them. Because of this complicity they lure our gazes or reject them and fool them, which is to say that they behave like bodies towards other bodies. In front of such media our views feel ‘in company.’ They attract our views even if they do not simulate a looking counterpart but stimulate us with a motive of desire that exerts a stimulus on us. This may be an object of which we would like to take possession at least by our view. Even blank spaces in images are at- tractive for us because the view wishes to see more as it can see and is thereby thrown back on itself […] Exchanging views with images that are not able to throw a glance, is an achievement of imagination.111

109 “Medien machen lesbar, hörbar, sichtbar, wahrnehmbar, all das aber mit der Ten- denz, sich selbst und ihre konstitutive Beteiligung an diesen Sinnlichkeiten zu lö- schen […] Medien sind nicht auf Präsentationsformen wie Theater und Film, nicht auf Techniken […] nicht auf Symboliken […] reduzierbar und doch in all dem virulent.” Claus Pias et al., preface to Kursbuch Medienkultur: Die maßgeblichen Theorien von Brecht bis Baudrillard (Stuttgart: Deutsche Verlagsanstalt, 1999), pp. 8–11 (p. 10). 110 “Mit ihren Oberflächen, die unseren Blick auf sich ziehen, scheiben sich Medien wie ein opaker Bildschirm vor die Welt. Aber Bilder entstehen diesseits des Me- diums, in unserem Blick. Sie lassen sich weder alleine ‘dort’, auf Leinwand oder Foto, noch ‘hier’ im Kopf des Betrachters verorten. Der Blick erzeugt die Bilder im Intervall zwischen ‘hier’ und ‘dort’.” Belting, ‘Blickwechsel mit Bildern’, p. 59 (emphasis original). 111 “Die westlichen Bildermedien bilden das ganze Spektrum unserer Blick ab, die sie so ‘ins Bild setzen’, dass wir darin unsere Blickpraxis im Alltag gespiegelt sehen. 216 Antonio Baldassarre

The glance is the agent that is capable of suggesting an encounter be- tween viewer and image and therefore provokes traditional iconology to consider a paradigm shift, moving away from an “iconology of the object” towards an “iconology of the view and visual imagination.” In this respect imagination is understood in close association with “the faculty of image making and visualization.”112 Such a perspective would also free the object from its physical imprisonment and to hallow an understanding of it as an active and important agent within specific socio-cultural discourses, dis- closing social and political agendas with explicit purposes. The highly expressive nature of The White House photo – to turn to it once more – is precisely due to the aforementioned discourse created be- tween the image and the viewer, since the setting of the photo makes the viewer see something that she/he in fact does not see but is made to believe is being seen because the depicted people emphatically perform on her/ his behalf the act of viewing of the reputedly occurring events. The White House photograph is, as Gros’ canvas portrait of Napoleon in Jaffa, an ar- tifact – a being-in-the-world item demanding to be received and to affirm power and the validity of a specific value system.

“I could not deem myself a slave” Western Imaginary of Oriental Despotism and the Case of Delacroix

The paintings Scène des massacres de Scio [The Massacre at Chios] (fig. 8) and La Mort de Sardanapale [The Death of Sardanapalus] (fig. 11) of Eugène Delacroix (1812–1868) are revealing instances of the above-explored theo- retical framework, expressing the nineteenth-century French imaginary of the cruel and despotic East. Notably, both paintings were executed before Delacroix’s exposure to the Orient during his journey to Morocco in 1832 the main purpose of which was, however, not a keen interest in the Orient

In dieser Komplizenschaft locken sie unsere blicke an oder weisen sie ab und füh- ren sie in die Irre, was heißt, verhalten sich wie Körper gegenüber anderen Körpern. Vor solchen Medien fühlt sich unserer Blick ‘in Gesellschaft’. Sie ziehen unseren Blick auch dann an, wenn sie kein blickendes Gegenüber simulieren, sondern uns mit einem Motiv des Verlangens stimulieren, das einen Reiz auf uns ausübt. Das kann ein Ding sein, dessen wir uns wenigstens im Blick bemächtigen wollen. Auch Leerstellen in Bildern haben für uns einen Reiz, denn hier will der Blick mehr sehen, als er sehen kann, und wird dabei auf sich selbst zurückgeworfen. […] Der Blicktausch mit Bildern, die keine Blicke werfen können, ist eine Leistung der Imagination.” Belting, ‘Blickwechsel mit Bildern’, pp. 66–67. 112 Mary Warnock, Imagination (London: Faber and Faber, 1976), p. 10. The Politics of Images 217

Fig. 8: Eugène Delacroix, Scène des massacres de Scio; familles grecques attendant la mor ou l’esclavage, Salon de 1824, oil on canvas, 419.0 × 354.0 cm. Paris Musée du Louvre (inv.-no.: 3823). and its cultures as such but rather to get away from the boredom he expe- rienced in Paris.113 However, and particularly with respect to the execution of La Mort de Sardanapale, he may have been – as will be discussed further

113 See Hubert Wellington, introduction to The Journal of Eugène Delacroix, transl. by Lucy Norton (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1980), p. xv. 218 Antonio Baldassarre below – inspired by visual and verbal accounts of his friends, Jules-Rob- ert Auguste (1789–1850) and Charles-Émile-Callande de Champmartin (1797–1883). Auguste was awarded the prestigious Prix de Rome for sculp- ture in 1810 and took advantage of it not only to stay in Rome but also to extend his journey from 1815 to 1817, “discovering […] Dalmatia and Greece” as well as “Asia Minor, Syria, and Egypt.”114 He played as Camille Bernard has explored “an important role in Delacroix’s pursuit of oriental subjects”115 insofar as “Delacroix often went to Auguste’s home and stu- dio […] where they copied costumes draped on mannequins or models. Auguste, in turn, paid visits to Delacroix’s studio bringing costumes and accessories for Delacroix to use in his various oriental pictures and particu- larly in preparation of his Massacre of Chios.”116 Champmartin also visited the Orient (1826–1827) and witnessed the massacre of the Janissaries (a class of slave to the Sublime Port that formed an influential elite corps in the administration and the army117) by Sultan Mahmud II at Constanti- nople in June 1826118 of which he later produced a large-scale painting.119 Delacroix’s two paintings seem to continue the discourse on Ottoman despotism as it had emerged in earlier centuries. This discourse furthermore fits with the interest of the French Romantic movement in subjects of hu- man pathos, unruly force, and emotional contradictions. In the eighteenth century the concept of “despotism” was unequivocally and exclusively un- derstood as an “inherently Oriental form of government” as popularized by Montesquieu in his Lettres persanes [Persian Letters] and De l’esprit des loix [The Spirits of the Law], published in 1721 and 1748 respectively (Da- vid Hume’s favorable 1748 description of the “Turks” as characterized by “integrity, gravity, and bravery” was an exception rather than the rule).120 According to Montesquieu, in the Orient, “despotism is, so to speak, natu-

114 René Huyghe, Delacroix (London: Thames and Hudson, 1963), p. 120. 115 Camille Bernard, ‘Some Aspects of Delacroix’s Orientalism’, in The Bulletin of the Cleveland Museum of Art, 58.4 (1971), pp. 123–127 (p. 123). 116 Ibid., p. 125. Bernard’s notion of the influence of Auguste regarding the execution of the Massacre at Chios is also mentioned in René Huyghe, Delacroix, p. 121. 117 David Nicolle, The Janissaries (London: Osprey Publishing, 1995). 118 Patrick Kinross, The Ottoman Centuries: The Rise and Fall of the Turkish Empire (London: Perennial, 1977), pp. 456–457. 119 Le massacre des Janissaires, 1828, oil on canvas, 472.0 × 628.0 cm. Rochefort (France): Musée d’art et d’histoire (inv.-no.: D 53). 120 David Hume, Of National Characters (1748), in: The Philosophical Works of David Human, 4 vols (Boston et al.: Little, Brown and Company, 1854), vol. 3, p. 225. 121 “[…] la partie du monde où le Despotisme est, pour ainsi dire, naturalisé, qui est l’Asie.” Charles-Louis de Secondat, Baron de La Brède et de Montesquieu, De l’es­ prit des loix (Geneva: Barillot & fils, 1748), vol. 2 (livre 5ème, ch. XIV), p. 99. The Politics of Images 219 ralized”121 as a governmental form related to a society without law being predicated on the equality of subjects in anxiety and powerlessness.122 This notion not only implied “Oriental wickedness and corruption”123 but also established the imagination of the “West as rational, democratic, modern and progressive, against the idea of the East as despotic, primitive, tradi- tional and barbaric”­ 124 – strongly linked to the centuries-old “sacred duty” to defend Christian values of Western culture against “barbarism.” A strik- ing document in this instance is the so-called Confessio Augustana, the key confession of faith of the Lutheran Church which was presented to emperor Charles V at the Diet of Augsburg on 25 June 1530 and that continues to be one of the chief confessional writings of the Lutheran Church. It unmis- takably cites the duty “to make war against the Turks” as a good example of true Christian faith.125 Such documents and the Heerpredigt wider den Türken [Army Sermon against the Turks] written by Martin Luther in 1529 under the impression of the first siege of Vienna led by Sultan Suleiman the Magnificent (1494–1566) during the same year126 as well as numer- ous other writings are part of these widespread and still highly influential anxiety fantasies in the history of the Euro-American memory. However, Luther’s attitude towards the Ottoman Empire was ambiguous and primar- ily shaped by a political and not religious agenda. In order to avoid any sup- port of papacy and of catholic royal dynasties he exhorted his followers not to act in their spirit and not to join the combating against the Ottomans.127

122 See Saïd Amir Arjomand, ‘Coffeehouses, Guilds and Oriental Despotism Govern- ment and Civil Society in Late 18th to Early 19th Century Istanbul and Isfahan, and as seen from Paris and London’, European Journal of Sociology, 45.1 (2004), 23–42. See also Joan-Pau Rubiés, ‘Oriental despotism and European Orientalism: Botero to Montesquieu’, Journal of early modern history: contacts, comparisons, con­ trasts, 9.1–2 (2005), 109–180, and Ina Baghidiantz McCabe, Orientalism in Early Modern France: Eurasian Trade, Exoticism and Ancien Regime (Oxford and New York: Berg, 2008), pp. 257–290. 123 Asli Çirakman, ‘From tyranny to despotism: the Enlightenment’s unenlightened image of the Turks’, International Journal of Middle East Studies, 33.1 (2001), 49–68 (p. 56). 124 Leti Volpp, ‘Excesses of Culture: On Asian American Citizenship and Identity’, Asian American Law Journal, 17.1 (2010), 63–81. 125 See article XXI ‘Of the Worship of the Saints’ in Confessio Augustana. 126 Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, shelf-no.: Catech. 443 m#Beibd.1, 127 For further details on this topic see Ehrenfried Hermann, Türke und Osmanenreich in der Vorstellung der Zeitgenossen Luthers (PhD Dissertation, Universität Freiburg/ Br., 1961), Siegfried Raeder, ‘Luther und die Türken’, in: Luther-Handbuch, ed. by Albrecht Beutel (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2005), pp. 224–231; Athina Lux- utt, ‘Luther und der Islam: beten und büßen statt reden und kämpfen’, Spiegel der Forschung, 28.2 (2011) (Justus-Liebig-Universität Gießen), 61–71. 220 Antonio Baldassarre

Delacroix’s Massacre at Chios with the clear presentation of the Otto- man as the aggressor and the Greeks as frightened and browbeaten victims was exhibited at the Salon of 1824. Its hastily executed acquisition for the royal collection of King Charles X that was completed against all prevailing laws, reveals both the particular importance of painting and the increas- ingly evident struggle between public and private patronage linked with the growing loss of royal hegemony on the fostering of and control over art production during French Restoration.128 Delacroix’s impressively large canvas belongs to the context of the then ongoing Greek uprising against the Ottoman Empire. Numerous people in Western Europe and the United States enthusiastically welcomed this struggle for independence. In numerous European countries so-called Greek Committees were founded in order to provide aid and support to the Greeks.129 Samuel Gridley Howe (1801–1876), the American physician, Thomas Gordon (1788–1841), a Scottish Major-General in the British Army and famous historian, and George Gordon, Lord Byron (1788–1824) – to name a few of many – traveled to Greece to support the war of indepen- dence against the Ottomans (where Byron died in Messolonghi130 because of wrongly treated hypothermia).131 The third verse of Lord Byron’s poemThe Isles of Greece gives expression to the agenda that was widely shared in Europe concerning the significance of the Greek War of Independence: The mountains look on Marathon And Marathon looks on the sea; And musing there an hour alone, I dream’d that Greece might yet be free For, standing on the Persians’ grave, I could not deem myself a slave.132

128 Elisabeth A. Fraser, ‘Uncivil Alliances: Delacroix, the Private Collector, and the Public’, Oxford Art Journal, 21.1 (1998), 89–103. 129 On this subject see Natalie Klein, “L’humanité, le christianisme, et la liberté”: die interna­ tionale phihellenischen Vereinsbewegungen der 1820er Jahre (Mainz: von Zabern, 2000). 130 The Greek city of Messolonghi occupies an extraordinary position in the national memory of Greece as the symbol of the nineteenth-century Greek resistance to the Ottoman Empire, and it was later, in 1937, awarded the honorary title “Ιερα Πόλη” (“Holy City”) by King Georgios II. 131 See Byron Blackstone, ‘Byron and Islam: the triple Eros’, Journal of European Stud­ ies, 4.4 (1974), 325–363, Davis J. Howarth, Lord Byron and other eccentrics in the war of independence (London: Collins, 1976), and Fiona MacCarthy, Byron: Life and Legend (London: John Murray, 2002). 132 The Works of Lord Byron: with his letters and journals, and his life, ed. by Thomas Moore (London: John Murry, 1833), vol. XV, p. 321. The Politics of Images 221

Percy Bysshe Shelly (1792–1822), Byron’s compatriot, and the German theologian Karl David Ilgen (1763–1834) expressed their support for the Greek cause even more straightforwardly than Lord Byron had done in his poem. While Shelley claimed that “We are all Greeks. Our laws, our literature, our religion, our arts have their root in Greece”133 – clearly refer- ring to the ancient, independent Greece and its cultural impact on Western civilization – , Ilgen declared: “We Germans see ourselves in the Greeks. They remind us of the time we escaped the yoke of the French.”134 The latently arrogant and chauvinistic undertone which is often pres- ent in such statements must be considered as part of the Western Euro- pean “imago” of the Ottoman Empire as a substantially backward society. Leicester Fitzgerald Charles Stanhope, the 5th Earl of Harrington (1784– 1862) may provide an illustrative example in this instance. From 1823 to 1824 he served as an agent of the Greek Committee in England, spent some months in Greece and was decisive in persuading the Greek committees in Germany and Switzerland not to suspend their help for, and support of, the Greek cause. In his letter to John Bowring, the secretary of the Greek Committee in England, written in Berne (Switzerland) on 10 October 1823 he reports that he succeeded in convincing the Greek Committee in Zurich that “the grand object” of the English Greek Committee “is to give freedom and knowledge to Greece”135 and affirmed that “to communicate knowl- edge to the Greeks was an object the Committee had near at heart. From this source spring order, morality, freedom and power.”136 For most of the Europeans and Americans, Greece’s desire to gain in- dependence meant freedom from the imagined Ottoman cruelty and des- potism and, at the same time, it provided (particularly for a majority of Europe’s intellectual elite) a welcome deviation from the often dictatorial

133 Shelley in the preface to the verse drama Hellas (1821) quoted after The Complete Poetical Work of Percy Bysshe Shelley, ed. by Thomas Hutchinson (London et al.: Oxford University Press, 1943), p. 447. 134 “Wir Deutschen sehen in den Griechen uns selbst. Sie erinnern uns an die Zeit, als wir dem Joch der Franzosen entflohen.” Quoted in Maria Efthymiou, ‘Messo­ longi’, in Europäische Erinnerungsorte 2: Das Haus Europa, ed. by Pim den Boer et al. (Munich: Oldenbourg Verlag, 2011), p. 432. 135 Leicester Stanhope, Earl of Harrington, Greece, in 1823 and 1824: Being a Series of Letters, and Other Documents, on the Greek Revolution, Written During a Visit to that Country (London: Sherwood, Gilbert, and Pier 1825), p. 6. 136 Ibid., p. 7. For further details about the Greek Committee in London and the im- pact of Leicester Stanhope see William St. Clair, That Greece might still be free: the Philhellenes in the War of Independence (1972) (Cambridge: Open Book Publishers, 2008, new, rev. and corrected ed.), pp. 155–163. 222 Antonio Baldassarre and repressive regimes established throughout Europe after the failure of the revolutionary visions of the French Revolution and the restoring of the Ancien Régime at the Congress in Vienna (1814–1815). Even the suppos- edly liberal-minded England was ruled with a large number of emergency laws during this period, restricting any form of freedom as paradigmati- cally testified by the so-called Peterloo Massacre of 1819137 that the afore- mentioned Shelly harshly condemned because of the incredible violence of the ruling power.138 The political development after Napoleon’s defeat gave rise to the estab- lishment of the juste milieu, a conscious antithesis to the spirit of the French Revolution and the Napoleonic system to which in France Victor Cousin (1792–1867) and Benjamin Constant (1767–1830) made significant contri- butions with their philosophical and political writings.139 The restoration of the Bourbon Dynasty to the French throne led essentially to the return of a regime that was not only linked to but also symbolically committed to the resumption of royal authority and its privileges as in the Ancien Régime – clearly bent on erasing “over twenty-five years of French cultural and political history.”140 The Greek fight for freedom that eventually was successfully concluded with the London Protocol in 1830 and the London Conference of 1832 “united all artistic camps in France.”141 Referring to the influential exhibi-

137 See Robert Poole, ‘“By the Law or the Sword’: Peterloo Revisited”’, History, 91.302 (2006), 254–276; Ian Hernon, Riot!: Civil Insurrection from Peterloo to the Present Day (London: Pluto Press, 2006), pp. 21–38. 138 See Shelly’s poem The Masque of Anarchy that was published only posthumously in 1832 (London: Bradbury and Evans) because of political reasons. 139 Vincent E. Starzinger, The Politics of the Center: The Juste Milieu in Theory and Prac­ tice, France and England, 1815–1848 (New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction Publish- ers, 1991, new ed.). As far as the development of the juste milieu is concerned see Frankreich 1800: Gesellschaft, Kultur, Mentalitäten, ed. by Gudrun Gersmann and Hubertus Kohle (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag, 1990). 140 Fraser, ‘Uncivil Alliances: Delacroix, the Private Collector, and the Public’, p. 100. 141 Paul Joannides, ‘Colin, Delacroix, Byron and the Greek War of Independence’, The Burlington Magazine, 125.965 (1983), 495–500 (p. 495). Other impressive examples of French philhellene paintings include: Alexandre Colin, Le Giaour (1826, oil on canvas, 99.1 × 81.3 cm, private collection); Eugène Delacroix, La Grèce sur les ruines de Missolonghi (1826, oil on canvas, 208.0 × 147.0 cm, Bordeaux: Musée des Beaux- Arts), The Combat of the Giaour and Hassan (1826, oil on canvas, 58.0 × 71.0 cm, Chicago: Art Institute of Chicago), and Combat du Giaour et du Pacha (1835, oil on canvas, 74.0 × 60.0 cm, Paris: Petit Palais); Ary Scheffer Jeune Grec défendant son père blessé (1827, oil on canvas, 45.0 × 37.0 cm, Athens: Musée Benaki) and Les femmes souliotes, 1827, oil on canvas, 261.0 × 359.0 cm, Paris: Musée du Louvre); The Politics of Images 223 tion of the 1824 Salon – in which Delacroix’s Massacre was exhibited – Alexandre Dumas (the elder) recalled some forty years later

All eyes were turned towards Greece. The memories of our youth made ​​pro- paganda and recruited men, money, poetry, paintings, concerts. One sang, painted, wrote poetry, begged in favor of the Greeks. Whoever dared to declare himself Turkophile would have risked to be stoned to death as Saint Stephen. Delacroix exhibited his famous Massacre of Scio.142

The general philhellenic enthusiasm accounted for not only an intense artistic production of Greek subject matter in French nineteenth-century art143 but also for special events of support, such as the Expositions au profit des Grecs organized by the Galerie Lebrun in Paris in 1826 in which Delac- roix’s La Grèce sur les ruines de Missolonghi [Greece on the Ruins of Missolong­ hi] was exhibited for the first time.144 Moreover the explicit philhellenism gave rise to strong political and anti-Ottoman and anti-Islamic rhetoric referring to century-old mythemes. A particularly telling example is found

Louis Dupré, The Greek Rebellion, the standard bearer in Salona on Easter day 1821, color lithograph by Lemercier for Voyage à Athènes et à Constantinople, ou collection de portraits, de vues et de costumes grecs et ottomans, peints sur les lieux d’après nature, lith­ ographiés et coloriés par L. Dupré, élève de David (Paris: Dondey-Dupré, 1825), written and illustrated by Dupré (Paris: Bibliothèque des Art Decoratifs, Archives Charmet). 142 “Tous les regards étaient tournés vers la Grèce. Les souvenirs de notre jeunesse faisaient de la propagande, et recrutaient hommes, argent, poésies, peintures, concerts. On chantait, on peignait, on versifiait, on quêtait en faveur des Grecs. Quiconque se fût déclaré turcophile eût risqué d’être lapidé comme saint Etienne. Delacroix exposa son fameux Massacre de Scio”, Alexandre Dumas (père), ‘Eugène Delacroix, Le Monde illustré, 7.332 (22 August 1863), 123–126 (p. 123) (column 3); incorporated in Alexandre Dumas, Mes mémoires, 1863 (Paris: Calmann-Lévy, 1870, new ed.), vol. 9, pp. 33–44 (p. 38) (emphasis original). 143 See in particular Nina Athanassoglou-Kallmyer, French Images from the Greek War of Independence, 1821–1830. Art and Politics under the Restoration (New Haven, CT, and London: Yale University Press, 1989); Francis Haskell, ‘Chios, the Mas- sacres, and Delacroix’, in Chios: A Conference at the Homereion in Chios, 1984, ed. by John Boardman and C. E. Vaphopoulou-Richardson (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986), pp. 335–358. 144 For further information on the activities of the Galerie Lebrun in favor of the Greek cause see Valérie Bajou, ‘Les expositions de la galerie Lebrun en 1826’, in La Grèce en révolte: Delacroix et le peintres français, 1815–1848 (exhibition cata- logue), ed. by Anne de Margerie (Paris: Réunion des Musées Nationaux, 1996), pp. 51–58; Catherine Martin, ‘L’exposition en faveur des Grecs à la galerie Lebrun ou le ‹Salon› de 1826. Une organisation non officielle pour en événement devenu official’, Recherches en Histoire de l’art, 3 (2004), 91–104. 224 Antonio Baldassarre in the influential French political and literary newspaper Le Constitutionnel of 20 June 1826:

We knew that the war in the East was that of the Gospel against the Qur’an, of civilization against barbarism, of the lights against darkness, of freedom against oppression, today we learn that the interest that all European societal classes take in this sacred cause, is the war of nations against the cabinets.145

And François-René de Chateaubriand (1768–1848), the eminent French writer, politician and historian, claimed:

The dominance of the Cross in Constantinople is a thousand times better to the peoples than the Crescent. All the elements of morality and social politics are present in Christianity, all the seeds of social destruction lie in the religion of Muhammad.146

These and similar contemporary statements, express the then widespread attitudes and sympathetic commitments regarding the Greek cause which, for instance, ensured Byron and Delacroix an important place in Greek national memory. Their virtues were eventually emphatically endorsed by highly symbolically charged acts: on the one hand, the acquisition of the 1856 version of Delacroix’s Épisode de la guerre en Grèce [Episode of the war in Greece] by the National Gallery in Athens in 1979147 and, on the other hand, the 2008 inauguration of Byron’s death day of 19 April as a national commemoration day by the Greek parliament.148 However, it is worth clarifying that the strength of feeling Western Eu- ropeans and Americans had expressed for the Greek cause was an ambigu- ous business and was not a response to the Greek people in general. The so-called Phanariotes149 – the term denotes both, in particular the wealthy

145 “On savait que la guerre de l’Orient était celle de l’Évangile contre l’Alcoran, de la civilisation contre la barbarie, des lumières contre les ténèbres, de la liberté contre l’oppression, l’intérêt que toutes les classes de la société européenne prennent à cette cause sacrée nous apprend aujourd’hui qu’elle est celle des nations contre les cabinets.” Le Constitutionnel, 20 June 1826. 146 “Mieux vaut mille fois pour les peuples, la domination de la Croix à Constantinople que celle du Croissant. Tous les éléments de la morale et de la société politique sont au fond du christianisme, tous les germes de la destruction sociale sont dans la religion de Mahomet.” François-René de Chateaubriand, Mémoires d’Outre-tombe (Brussels: Société Typographique Belge, 1849), vol. 4, pp. 415–416. 147 Eugène Delacroix, Une épisode de la guerre en Grèce, 1856, oil on canvas, 65.7×81.6 cm (Athens: National Gallery). 148 See Martin Wainwright, ‘Greeks honour fallen hero Byron with a day of his own’, The Guardian, 18 October 2008. The Politics of Images 225 and very influential Greek community of merchants named after the Is- tanbul quarter where they mostly lived and where the seat of the Ecumeni- cal Patriarchate of Constantinople was established in 1601, and in general Greeks in the service of the Ottoman Empire – were equated with the “Turks” since they fostered strong and close relationships with the ruling Ottoman power.150 These relationships were visually emphasized by similar attire or customs, for instance. Equating parts of Greek population and Ottomans is strikingly visible in the so-called “Völkertafel” (i.e. “Tableau of Nationalities”) most probably created around 1730/40 in Styria, Austria (fig. 9).151 The different preserved versions of this panel not only provide pictorial depictions of the different European tribes but also a brief verbal “descrip- tion of the European peoples and their characteristics” – according to the panel’s heading. In this respect the “nature and character” of the “Tirk oder Grieche” [“the Turk or Greek”] are characterized according to the prevail- ing opinion as “lazy” and “self-absorbed” as well as a “tyrant” and a “liar- devil” performing “deceitful politics” and eventually dying while executing “fraud.”152 This attitude is part of the old and still effective tradition of ima- gology, i.e. “to attribute specific characteristics of even characters to differ- ent societies, races or ‘nations’”153 – a tradition that is still deeply anchored in the European history of mentality as strikingly mirrored in the picture postcard The Perfect European Should Be … (fig. 10) with cartoons drawn by J. N. Hughes-Wilson and available since 1995 when the European Com- munity consisted of 15 member states. Regarding the Phanariote’s stance concerning the Greek war of in- dependence they were divided. While several families participated in it, causing the general loss of their privileged position within the Ottoman

149 For further details on this topic see Hans Walther Held, Die Phanarioten: ihre allmähliche Entwicklung zur fürstlichen Aristokratie bis zu deren Untergang 1821 (Elberfeld: Wuppertaler, 1920); Joëlle Dalegre, Grecs et Ottomans 1453–1923. De la chute de Constantinople à la fin de l’Empire Ottoman(Paris: L’Harmattan, 2002). 150 See Konstantinović, ‘“Tirk oder Griech”. Zur Kontamination ihrer Epitheta’, pp. 308–310. 151 See Franz K. Stanzel, Europäer. Ein imagologischer Essay (Heidelberg: Universi- tätsverlag C. Winter, 1998), and Europäischer Völkerspiegel: Imagologisch-ethnogra­ phische Studien zu den Völkertrafeln des frühen 18. Jahrhunderts, ed. by Franz K. Stanzel, (Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag C. Winter, 1999). 152 Verbal descriptions as associated with the “Turk or Greek” on the Völkertafel (see fig. 9). 153 Joep Leerssen, ‘Imagology: History and method’, in Imagology: The Cultural and Literary Representation of National Characters: a Critical Survey, ed. by Manfred Beller and Joseph Theodoor Leerssen (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2007), pp. 17–32 (p. 17). 226 Antonio Baldassarre

Fig. 9: Unknown artist, Völkertafel, ca. 1730/40, oil on canvas, 104.0 × 126 cm. Vienna: Österreichisches Museum für Volkskunde (inv.-no.: 30.905), photo: Birgit&Peter Kainz, facsimile digital. apparatus of power, others behaved extremely cautiously regarding the idea of an independent nation state. In The Massacre at Chios Delacroix highlighted the crucial relationship between the imagined Greece as “the fostering nurse of civilization” – to quote from Rev. Thomas Smart Hughes’s An Address to the People of Eng­ land in the Cause of the Greeks154 – and the surmised dreadful Ottoman empire by a cleverly-designed and captivating pictorial juxtaposition: the individuals in the picture’s foreground – presented in a manner that violates

154 Thomas Smart Hughes,An Address to the People of England in the Cause of the Greeks (London: Simpkin and Marshall, 1822), p. 9. The statement’s full context is as follows: “Greece […] that land, the fostering nurse of civilization, where the spirit of antiquity still seems to linger amidst its olive groves, its myrtle bowers, and the precious relics of its splendid edifices; where both sacred and profane history unite in forming the most interesting associations; where Socrates taught the lessons of his incomparable ethics, and a still greater than Socrates disclosed the mysteries of the ‘unknown God’ to those that sat in darkness.” The Politics of Images 227

Fig. 10: J. N. Hughes-Wilson, The Perfect European Should Be ,… cartoons, picture postcard, © WPI Whiteway Publications Ltd.

“classical bodily decorum”155 – are displayed as a collective group of fright- ened, suffering and injured beings dominated by a lone mounted “Turk” symbolizing the “arch-enemy, whose triumph threatened all that Western European philhellenism held dear.”156 The subject of the “Turk mounted on horseback” was particularly attractive to Delacroix as mirrored by the nu- merous sketches, drawings and paintings he created throughout his artistic career.157 Of particular interest in the context of the present discussion con- cerning the Scène des massacres de Scio, is a canvas by Delacroix preserved at the Oskar Reinhart Collection in Winterthur (Switzerland) entitled Scène de la guerre en Grèce, that was executed in 1827, three years after the Chios- canvas.158 It depicts a member of the Ottoman military elite corps of the

155 Fraser, ‘Uncivil Alliances: Delacroix, the Private Collector, and the Public’, p. 89. 156 Brown, ‘The Formation of Delacroix’s Hero between 1822 and 1831’, p. 241. 157 Charles Martine and Léon Marotte, Eugène Delacroix: 70 aquarelles, dessins, croquis (Paris: Helleu et Sergent, 1928); Loys Delteil, Eugene Delacroix: The Graphic Work a Catalogue Raisonne, transl. and rev. Susan Strauber (San Francisco, CA: Alan Wofsy Fine Arts, 1996), and Lee Johnson, The paintings of Eugène Delacroix: a criti­ cal catalogue 1816–1863, 7 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1981–2002). 158 Scène de la guerre en Grèce, 1827, oil on canvas, 65.0 × 81.5 cm. Winterthur (Swit- zerland): Oskar Reinhart Collection. 228 Antonio Baldassarre

Janissaries mounted on horseback in an attack during the Greek War of Independence. A close examination of the collective group of the Massacre at Chios reveals a bewildering and disturbing “fragmentation and obscuring of bod- ies”159 which elicited intense discussion (as observed, for instance, by Alex- andre Dumas)160 and severe criticism.161 Stendhal voiced his criticisms as follows: With the best will in the world, I cannot admire M.[onsieu] Delacroix and his Massacre at Chios (No. 450). This work always makes me think of a picture originally intended to represent a plague that the artist then turned into a Mas- sacre at Chios after reading the newspaper reports.162 And an anonymous commentator of Le Mercure du dix-neuvième siècle identifying himself simply as “L’Amateur sans Prétention” [“The Amateur without Pretension”] felt overtly disgusted “not by the horrors of the subject but by the hideous aspect of the painting” and went on to question some paragraphs later, “why does he [Delacroix] give it an even more hideous air with those clashing touches of a brush that heap colors one next to anoth- er, without uniting them or establishing any harmonious relation among them?”163 Equally puzzling to contemporary audiences was the refusal to

159 See Margaret MacNamidhe, ‘Delécluze’s Response to Delacroix’s Scenes from the Massacres at Chios (1824)’, The Art Bulletin, 89.1 (2007), 63–81 (p. 63). See also Günter Busch, ‘Ikonographische Ambivalenz bei Delacroix: Zur Entstehungsge- schichte der “Szenen aus dem Massaker von Chios”’, in Stil und Überlieferung in der Kunst des Abendlandes (Akten des 21. Internationalen Kongresses für Kunstge- schichte in Bonn 1964), 3 vols (Berlin: Mann, 1967), vol. 3, pp. 143–148. 160 In his Mémoires Dumas describes that “autour duquel [le Massacre de Scio] se grou- paient, pour discuter, les peintres de tous les partis” (“around which [the Massacre of Scio] painters of all schools were gathered to discuss”). Alexandre Dumas, Mes mémoires (1863) (Paris: Calmann-Lévy, 1870, new ed.), vol. 4, p. 119. 161 For a comprehensive discussion on the comments and criticism Delacroix’s art caused in the 1820s see Elisabeth A. Fraser, Interpreting Delacroix in the 1820s: Readings in the Art Criticism and Politics of Restoration France (PhD thesis, Yale University, 1993). 162 “J’ai beau faire, je ne puis admirer M. Delacroix et son massacre de Scio (n° 450). Cet ouvrage me semble toujours un ouvrage destiné originairement à représenter une peste, et dont l’auteur, sur les récits des gazettes, a fait un massacre de Scio.” Review of the 1824 Salon at the Musée Royal by Stendhal (pseudonym of Marie- Henri Beyle, 1783–1842), Journal de Paris, no. 282, 9 October 1824, p. 3. 163 “[…] non pas par les horreurs du sujet, mais par l’aspect hideux du tableau […] pourquoi lui [Delacroix] prêter un air encore plus hideux avec ces touches heurtées d’un pinceau qui entasse les couleurs les unes auprès des autres sans les unir et leur donner aucune harmonie entres elles?” ‘Salon de 1824, Septième Article’, in Le Mercure du dix-neuvième siècle, vol. 7 (1824), pp. 199 and 202. The Politics of Images 229 depict the massacre as a heroic action and instead imparting a message of passive resignation. This may explain the ironic statement of Gros who qualified the canvas as “massacre of painting.”164 Roy Howard Brown has broadly discussed the visual genesis of the different figures in Delacroix’s painting based on extensive analysis of the various preserved sources. He convincingly argued that the arrangement of the group in the foreground is of archetypical nature.165 These figures include the “Christ-like, half-naked wounded Greek patriot reclining on the breast of his mate”166 occupying a large section of the picture’s bottom part and – in essence – suggesting a “modernized” version of the Pietà narrative, a well-known subject in Christian art.167 Taking into account the very powerful juxtaposition formed by the Pietà narrative and the nar- rative of the aggressive and infidel despot as presented by the dominating horseman, Delacroix’s painting functions – whether intended or not by the artist is beside the point for the visual discourse the canvas enfolds between the medium and the gaze – as a visual agent of the then influ- ential philhellenism and the prevalent hostility to the Ottoman Empire, enforced by placing everyone but the imaginary “Turk” on foot or sitting and thus emphasizing the Ottoman’s commanding presence, i.e. wielding power over his subjects. The painting therefore not only visualizes aspects of a specific cultural and political milieu but also actively operates in the structuring of this setting. Probably the most intriguing aspect of the canvas is how Delacroix guides the view to a scene far behind the group in the front, yet – in- terestingly enough – formally situated in the very center of the composi- tion. The scene presents in quite a blurred manner a group of fighting and wounded individuals and attracts the view insofar as it essentially reveals a blank space within the image which is substantially disconnected in two respects from the painting’s foreground: stylistically and narratively. Dela- croix seems to imply the technique of making the viewer wish to see more than can be seen, thus forcing the viewer to rely on imagination.168 This technique incorporates at its heart the idea of voyeurism – an idea that will be further explored at the end of this paper.

164 ‘Le massacre de la peinture.’ Quoted in Le nu modern au Salon (1799–1853), revue de presse, ed. by Dominique Massonaud (Grenoble: ELLUG, 2005), p. 89. 165 Brown, ‘The Formation of Delacroix’s Hero between 1822 and 1831’. 166 Ibid., p. 240. 167 Regarding the contemporary reception of this central male figure see MacNamidhe, ‘Delécluze’s Response to Delacroix’s “Scenes from the Massacre at Chios” 1824)’. 168 See Belting, ‘Blickwechsel mit Bildern’, p. 67. 230 Antonio Baldassarre

Equally important are other formal and structural strategies such as the chosen physical dimensions of the painting. The massive size of the canvas stresses the emphasis of the embodied narratives and simulates supposedly realistic proportions as is also the case with Delacroix’s La Morte de Sar­ danapale, exhibited at the Salon of 1827 (fig. 11).

Fig. 11: Eugène Delacroix, La Morte de Sardanapale, Salon de 1827, oil on canvas, 392.0 × 496.0 cm. Paris: Musée du Louvre (inv.-no.: R.F. 2346).

The painting provides a monumental portrait of the lastAssyrian king Sardanapalus who has been considered as a prototype of bad life-style hab- its since Aristotle,169 and as an effeminate debaucher according to Ctesias of Cnidos.170 According to different legends Sardanapalus used to wear

169 See Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics I/3, 1095b. 170 Ctesias of Cnidus’ Persica in which he gives a detailed account of Sardanapalus is lost but its content was preserved in both later anthologies and the writings of Diodorus Siculus, a Greek historian who was active between 60 and 30 BC and whose writings were the main source of Lord Byron’s play Sardanapalus. Regarding the development of the Sardanapalus topic from Classical times to Romanticism see Eckart Frahm, ‘Images of Ashurbanipal in later tradition’, Eretz-Israel: Archaeological, Historical and Geographical Studies (Hayim and Miriam Tadmor Volume), 27 (2003), 37–48. The Politics of Images 231 women’s clothing and spent most of his life in the harem of his palace spin- ning fine fabric until he was dethroned. Effeminacy was a chief Western European stereotype associated with Ottoman culture and linked with de- generation. In the Western European concept the combination of both con- sequently resulted in decline. “Nothing remains of those plenteous stores and provisions of War,” noted – already two centuries prior – Paul Rycaut in The History of the Present State of the Ottoman Empire of 1665,

nor that Regiment and Discipline continued in peace, none of that ancient observation of their Laws and Religion, nor that love and respect to the Militia, which is now become degenerate, soft and effeminate.171

Consequently the Völkertafel as discussed above describes the “Turk or Greek” as “tender” or “affectionate” (in contrast to the “masculine” Span- iard, for instance), refers to his attire as “effeminate” and associates “the cat”172 as his most distinctive counterpart in fauna which is archetypically often associated with the feminine in European imaginary.173 The character of Sardanapalus also stimulated Lord Byron’s fantasy and imagination to write The Tragedy of Sardanapalus (1821) that is in essence a re-writing of Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra (1607). Byron’s play was of great impact not only on general nineteenth-century reception of the subject in question but also on Delacroix’s canvas in addition to Shake- speare as a source,174 yet only in indirect ways with no explicit references to

171 Paul Rycaut, The History of the Present State of the Ottoman Empire: Containing the Maxims of the Turkish Polity, the Most Material Points of the Mahometan Religion, Their Sects and Heresies, Their Convents and Religious Votaries. Their Military ­Dis cipline, with an Exact Computation of Their Forces Both by Sea and Land…(1665) (London: C. Brome, 1686), pp. 322–323 (spelling original). 172 Verbal descriptions as associated with the “Turk or Greek” on the Völkertafel (see fig. 9). 173 In the nineteenth century the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, for in- stance, regarded the woman as a dangerous cat of predatory cunning suppleness that hides the claws with gloves, and a paradigmatic example of twentieth-century visual culture is the 1942 released US-American movie Cat People and its modi- fied 1982 remake. See Friedrich Nietzsche, Jenseits von Gut und Böse. Vorspiel einer Philosophie der Zukunft (1886), in: Kritische Studienausgabe, 15 vols, ed. by Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari (Munich and Berlin: Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag and Walter de Gruyter, 1999), vol. 5, p. 178. 174 Regarding Delacroix’s references to Byron see: Johnson, The Paintings of Eugène Delacroix, vol. 1, pp. 114–121, Jack J. Spector, The Death of Sardanapalus (New York: Viking, 1974), pp. 59–73. The popularity of the subject in the nineteenth century is also mirrored in the fact that the topic was proposed to Giuseppe Verdi in the early 1840s. See Giuseppe Verdi. Lettere 1843–1900, ed. by Antonio Baldas- sarre and Matthias von Orelli (Bern etc.: Peter Lang, 2009), pp. 32 and 57–58. 232 Antonio Baldassarre these literary sources.175 This fact becomes very evident when taking into account the paragraphs Delacroix provided for the catalogue of the 1828 Salon at which his La Morte de Sardanapale was exhibited:

The rebels besiege his [Sardanapalus’] palace […] Lying on a superb bed atop an immense pyre. Sardanapalus gives the order to his eunuchs and palace of- ficers to slaughter his wives, his pages, even his horses and favorite dogs: none of these objects that have served his pleasure should survive him […] Aischeh, a Bactrian, wishing not to die at the hand of a slave, hanged herself from the columns bracing the vault […] Baleah, Sardanapalus’ cupbearer, finally lit the pyre and then threw himself upon it.176

Nonetheless, in those days literature as well as visual knowledge as offered by books and prints and not basically archeological remains served as the principle basis of artistic inspiration and imagination.177 Referring to Dela- croix, Théophile Gautier (1811–1872), the eminent French art critic and novelist, remembered in his old age:

In those days painting and poetry fraternized. The artist read the poets and the poets visited the artists. We found Shakespeare, Dante, Goethe, Lord Byron and Walter Scott in the studio as well as in the study. There were as many splashes of color as there were blots of ink in the margins of those beautiful books which we endlessly perused. Imagination, already excited, was further fired by reading those foreign works, so rich in color so free and powerful in fantasy.178

Regarding Byron’s influence in France see Edmond Estève, Byron et le romantisme français: essai sur la fortune et l’influence de l’œuvre de Byron en France de 1812 à 1850 (Paris: PhD thesis, Université de Paris; published Paris: Librairie Hachette, 1907). 175 See Lee Johnson, ‘The Etruscan Sources of Delacroix’s Death of Sardanapalus’, The Art Bulletin, 42.4 (1960), 296–300 (p. 296); Bohrer, ‘Inventing Assyria’, p. 339. 176 Explication des ouvrages de peinture, sculpture, gravure, lithographie, et architecture des artistes vivans exposé au Musée Royal des Art (Paris: Ballard, 1827), 234 (empha- sis original). 177 The topic of Delacroix’s sources for his oriental inspired art is the subject of broad considerations. In this respect see, for instance, Johnson, ‘The Etruscan Sourc- es of Delacroix’s Death of Sardanapalus’; Bernard, ‘Some Aspects of Delacroix’s Orientalism’; Lee Johnson, ‘Towards Delacroix’s Oriental Sources’, The Burling­ ton Magazine, 120.900 (1978), 144–151; Bohrer, ‘Inventing Assyria’; Lee Johnson, ‘Two Orientalist Water-Colours by Delacroix’, The Burlington Magazine, 144.1189 (2002), 226–228. 178 “En ce temps-là, la peinture et la poésie fraternisaient. Les artistes lisaient les poètes et les poëtes visitaient les artistes. On trouvait Shakespeare, Dante, Goethe, lord Byron et Walter Scott dans l’atelier comme dans le cabinet d’étude. Il y avait autant de lâches The Politics of Images 233

It is both conspicuous and telling that Delacroix avoided the inclu- sion of actual archeological discoveries in his paintings although in the 1820s information has already circulated in Europe that remains of the great, once nebulous world of Sardanapalus had been located.179 Delacroix instead held on to familiar and highly esteemed models such as Greek and Roman remains and – with respect to his Death of Sardanapalus – Etruscan relics. The latter sources “enjoyed much the same official -sta tus as Greek and Roman antiquities” and were “included with them on an equal footing under the highly respected generic heading: Antique.”180 Delacroix’s restraint may be a remnant of the artist’s early training with Pierre-Narcisse Guérin (1774–1833) in the then almost exclusively pre- dominant neoclassical style of Jacques-Louis David drawing inspiration from the visual culture of ancient Greece and Rome. Delacroix continued to be highly reluctant to incorporate non-classical sources even when the sensational exhibition of Assyrian objects at the Louvre in 1847 enthusi- astically enchanted most of Paris. The exhibition was not only emphati- cally celebrated but also immediately incorporated in a specific nationalist agenda as a symbolical representation of the strength and stability of the French kingdom ruled by Louis-Philippe I, the last King of France and the “Roi Citoyen”, that was, in fact, on the verge of collapsing: “The Assyrian monarch,” L’Illustration, the leading illustrated French newspaper empha- sized, “set foot on the banks of the Seine. A new, more worthy, home has been destined for him, the palace of our kings: the Louvre opened his door leaves to him.”181 Delacroix’s lack of interest in or affection for Assyrian discoveries is also very evident in the laconic statement he made after a museum visit with his cousin Guillaume-Auguste Lamey (1772–1861)182

de couleur que de taches d’encre sur les marges de ces beaux livres sans cesse feuilletés. Les imaginations, déjà bien excitées par elles-mêmes, se surchauffaient à la lecture de ces œuvres étrangères d’un coloris si riche, d’une fantaisie si libre et si puissante.” Théophile Gautier, Histoire de Romantisme (Paris: Charpentier, 1874), pp. 204–205. 179 For a full discussion on the history and impact of French and English nineteenth- century excavation in Mesopotamia see Bohrer, ‘Inventing Assyria’. 180 Johnson, ‘The Etruscan Sources of Delacroix’s Death of Sardanapalus’, p. 299. 181 “Le monarque assyrien mit le pied sur le rivage de la Seine. Une habitation nou- velle, plus digne de lui, le palais de nos rois, lui avait été destinée: le Louvre lui ouvrit ses portes à deux battants.” ‘Musée de Ninive’, L’Illustration, 15 May 1847, pp. 167–70 (p. 168). 182 Strictly spoken, Lamey was not a cousin of Delacroix but married to Delac- roix’s cousin Alexandrine Pascot (before 1819–1856). After her death in 1856 Dela­croix and Lamey developed a close relationship as strikingly evidenced by Delacroix calling him “bon cousin” (“good cousin”). In addition, Delacroix 234 Antonio Baldassarre in 1858. While Lamey proved to be “very impressed with the Assyrian antiquities,”183 as Delacroix noted in his journal, he says not a single word about his own experiences. Such an attitude is, however, totally consistent with Delacroix’s tech- nique that imbues his images with a multiplicity of meanings, offering a passionate composition of the East, fully in line with his principle of being by and large “passionately in love with passion,”184 to quote a comment on Delacroix’s art expressed by Charles Baudelaire (1821–1867). Moreover, de- tailed realism was not Delacroix’s business. “Cold exactitude is not art,”185 according to his conviction, for it dampens “the viewers imagination” and lessens “the effect of painting.”186 The result of such an approach is an imaginary yet persuasive panopti- con of a Western conception of the East consisting of visual references to a “variety of ancient and contemporary cultures”187 translated into a West- ern pictorial language that was accessible to the imaginary viewer of Dela­ croix’s art. As I have discussed elsewhere, this viewer surrounded himself with Oriental items, either imported or brought back from their own or others’ travels and of which the Maison de Pierre Loti in Rochefort and Leighton House in London are salient examples.188 The obvious mixture of violence, sexuality and cruelty in Delacroix’s portrait of Sardanapalus thus not only realizes artistic requirements of an aesthetics shaped by con- victions of French Romanticism but also satisfies the heterogeneity of the Western audience.

supported the publication of Lamey’s theater plays and poems and the lat- ter’s candidacy for the Legion of Honor which was, however, not successful. 183 “[…] très frappé des antiquités assyriennes.” Eugène Delacroix, Journal d’Eugène Delacroix, 3 vols, ed. by Paul Flat and René Piot (Paris: Plon & Nourrit, 1893– 1895), vol. 3, p. 336 (20 June 1858). 184 “[…] passionnément amoureux de la passion.” Charles Baudelaire, “L’œuvre et la vie d’Eugène Delacroix”, published in three parts with the title “Au rédacteur. A propos d’Eugène Delacroix” in: L’Opinion nationale, 2 September, 14 and 22 No- vember 1863. Quoted after Charles Baudelaire, L’Art Romantique, ed. by Jacques Crépet (Paris: Louis Conard, 1925), p. 8. 185 “La froide exactitude n’est pas l’art.” Delacroix, Journal, vol. 2, p. 12 (18 July 1850). 186 Jennifer W. Olmsted, ‘The Sultan’s Authority: Delacroix, Painting, and Politics at the Salon of 1845’, The Art Bulletin, 91.1 (2009), 83–106 (p. 92). See also Michele Hannoosh, Painting and the “Journal” of Eugène Delacroix (Princeton, NJ: Princ- eton University Press, 1995), pp. 55–92. 187 Bohrer, ‘Inventing Assyria’, p. 339. 188 See Antonio Baldassarre, ‘Being Engaged, Not Informed: French “Orientalists” Revisited’, Music in Art: International Journal for Music Icongraphy, XXXVIII/1–2, 64–87 (pp. 65–66). The Politics of Images 235

Delacroix’s Sardanapalus furthermore presents the “hero” with a nega- tive aura of power, reclining on a giant bed in the midst of his devastated harem, palace and empire observing the slaughtering of his wives and pages he initiated and awaiting his own death. In Western imagery the Oriental throne couch or bed was not only a metaphor of political power but implic- itly evoked images associated with sexual power and sensualism so stereo- typical linked with the Orient for which the harem served as a pars pro toto metaphor – a discourse to which I will come back shortly. The posture of Sardanapalus is, moreover, silhou- etted against de- pictions of heroes charged with a pos- itive agenda and explicitly inverts the visual tradition of contemporary French portraiture of powerful and charismatic lead- ers. Iconologically these are usually presented either standing upright as, for instance, in Fig. 12: Horace Vernet, Louis-Philippe, accompagné de ses fils, sortant à the portraits of cheval du château de Versailles, oil on canvas, 367.0 × 394.0 cm. Ver- Napoleon by Da- sailles: Musée national du Château de Versailles (inv.-no.: MV 5218). vid above (fig. 3) and of Charles X (1757–1836) by François Gérard (1770–1837) executed in 1825,189 or – even more impressively – mounted on horseback as mir- rored, for example, by the above mentioned famous portrait Napoléon sur le champ de bataille d’Eylau, le 9 février 1807 by Gros or the enormous canvas Louis-Philippe, accompagné de ses fils, sortant à cheval du château de Versailles [Louis-Philippe, accompanied by his sons, leaving Versailles on horses] executed by Horace Vernet (1789–1863) in 1846 (fig. 12).

189 Charles X en habits de sacre, oil on canvas, 259.0 cm × 183.0 cm. Madrid: Museo del Prado (inv.-no.: P03221). A miniature of this painting is preserved at the Metro­ politan Museum of Art, New York: Henry Bone, after François Gérard, Charles X (1757–1836), 1829, enamel, 3.64 × 2.6 cm (inv.-no.: 28.80.523). 236 Antonio Baldassarre

The aura of negative power in Delacroix’s Sardanapalus is enforced by the fact that the painting is jammed with luxurious objects express- ing sensual and voluptuous greed and representing the king as a substan- tially listless individual. The Middle Ages regarded “luxuria” as one of the seven deadly sins and ostentatious luxury had been considered a symbol of moral and social corruption since the eighteenth century.190 Listlessness or apathy, on the other hand, was viewed in Western European discourse as an illness, particularly associated with melancholy and was linked to the stereotypical understanding of Islamic faith as promoting fatalistic at- titudes. Generally, listlessness and fatalism contradicted with the concept of fortschritt that emerged as a concept within the context of the philoso- phy of Enlightenment and that strongly shaped Western mentality from then on. Max Weber was among the prominent twentieth-century intel- lectuals that strongly endorsed the notion of Islam as significantly shaped by fatalistic convictions in his comparative study The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism.191 Mohssen Massarrat has pointed out that origi- nating from this seminal study of Weber

it is a matter of course of social research to over-stylize a specific Christian ethics as the ultimate basis of the Enlightenment, the ratio and the industrial revolution and simultaneously to deny, upon reversion, Buddhism and Islam such a capability.192

190 See Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Discours sur les Sciences et les Arts (1750) (Paris: Librairie Générale Française, 2004). 191 Max Weber, Die protestantische Ethik und der Geist des Kapitalismus (1904) (Tübin- gen: J.C.B. Mohr, 1934). For Maxime Rodinson it was first and foremost Weber who established the view of Islamic “fatalism” being responsible for the obstruction of Muslim societies and the “listlessness” of Muslims (Maxime Rodinson, Islam et Capitalisme (Paris: Seuil, 1966). For a further discussion on this topic see Moham- mad Nafissi, ‘Reframing Orientalism: Weber and Islam’, Economy and Society, 27.1 (1998), 97–118, and Gabriel Acevedo, ‘Islamic Fatalism and the Clash of Civili- zations: An Appraisal of a Contentious and Dubious Theory’, Social Forces, 86.4 (2008), 1711–1752. 192 “Seit Max Webers Werk Protestantische Ethik und der Geist des Kapitalismus aus dem Jahr 1912 gehört es zu den Selbstverständlichkeiten sozialwissenschaftlicher Abhandlungen, eine spezifisch christliche Ethik zur entscheidenden Grundlage der Aufklärung, der Ratio und der industriellen Revolution hochzustilisieren und gleichzeitig im Umkehrschluß beispielsweise dem Buddhismus und dem Islam eine derartige Fähigkeit abzusprechen.” Mohssen Massarrat, ‘Islamischer Ori- ent und christlicher Okzident: Gegenseitige Feindbilder und Perspektiven einer Kultur des Friedens’, Osnabrücker Jahrbuch Frieden und Wissenschaft, VI (1999), 197–212 (p. 199). The Politics of Images 237

Altogether Delacroix’s pictorial vision of Sardanapalus sharply con- trasted with nineteenth-century bourgeois self-assessment as a social class characterized by dynamic, progression and prosperity. The paradoxical nar- rative of the painting thus offered the loophole of identifying the ruthless Sardanapalus with tropes of Orientalism, i.e. despotism and fatalism. This narrative was in line with Delacroix’s own view of France as the protector of Christian civilization as he maintained in his judgment of France’s con- quest of Algiers: “The vengeance of an affront to our dignity would change the face of North Africa and establish the empire of law in place of a brutal despotism.”193 This view was in accordance with the public opinion that regarded France’s involvement in North Africa as an essential geopolitical means to gain leadership over Britain.194 Helpful in this context was surely the placement of Delacroix’s painting in the visual tradition of large-sized history and mythological painting of sometimes violent and martial sub- ject matter, modeled by such artists as Anne-Louis Girodet-Trioson, Pierre- Narcisse Guérin, and Théodore Géricault (figs 13–14). It is, by the way, witnessed that Delacroix served as a model for Géricault’s Le Radeau de La Méduse [The Raft of the Medusa] with whom he was on friendly terms.195 John Lambertson offers a different reading of Delacroix’s La Morte de Sardanapale.196 Based on a comparative analysis that takes into account the intertextual relations between Delacroix’s canvas and the aforemen- tioned large-size and earlier executed painting Le massacre des Janissaires by Champmartin,197 Lambertson reads Delacroix and Champmartin’s paint- ings as a criticism of “the bloody excesses of absolute royal authority as Charles X, crowned in an elaborate and anachronistic medieval ceremony, was pursuing reactionary policies to restore noble and clerical power.”198 In

193 “La vengeance d’un affront fait à notre dignité aura changé la face du nord d’Afrique et établi l’empire de nos lois à la place d’un despotisme brutal.” Archive Nationales, FN 21, 752 quoted in Raymond Escholier, Delacroix, peintre, graveur, écrivain, 3 vol. (Paris: Floury, 1926–1929), vol. 3, p. 27. Claiming as Olmsted that Delacroix significantly revised or even rejected this view some ten years later when he criti- cized the French colonization of Algeria is only partially correct since the later criti- cism as referring to the French ruling does not compensate for the earlier derogatory notion directed to the Ottomans. See Olmsted, ‘The Sultan’s Authority’, p. 94. 194 Hugh A. C. Collingham, The July Monarchy: A Political History of France 1830– 1848 (New York: Longman, 1988), p. 253. 195 See John P. Lambertson, ‘Delacroix’s “Sardanapalus”, Champmartin’s “Janissaries,” and Liberalism in the late Restoration’ Oxford Art Journal, 25.2 (2002), 67–85 (p. 69). 196 Ibid, pp. 67–85. 197 See note 119. 198 Lambertson, ‘Delacroix’s “Sardanapalus”’, p. 79. 238 Antonio Baldassarre

Fig. 13: Anne-Louis Girodet-Trioson, La révolte du Caire, 21 octobre 1798, 1810, oil on canvas, 365.0 × 500.0 cm, Versailles: Musée national du château de Versailles (inv.-no.: MV 1497). this reading the stereotypical image of the despotic oriental ruler covertly points to the sovereignty of the French king. Charles X was known for both his dissipated lifestyle as a young man and his ultra-reactionary beliefs, as well as his strong sympathy for the Ultra-Royalists, the party of the extreme reactionaries which he led for a certain period. Lambertson’s argument is strongly convincing as the liberal Delacroix dealt with the subject of royal and clerical depravity in two novels he wrote at an early age and by far in a more explicit manner than in the Sardanapalus painting.199 Taking into ac- count a letter Delacroix wrote to his friend Charles-Louis-Raymond Soulier (1792–1866) and in which he himself connected the portrait of Sardanapa­ lus with his Massacre de Scio, accomplished three years earlier, the paintings of Champmartin and Delacroix thus “offered the French public criticisms of Charles X’s absolutist pretentions by implicitly comparing them to

199 Eugène Delacroix, Alfred (ca. 1814) published in Jean Marchand, ‘Delacroix fut écrivain avant d’être peintre’, Nouvelles littéraires, artistiques et scientifiques, 1302 (1952), no pagination; and Les dangers de la cour (1816), ed. by Jean Marchand after the manuscript (Avignon: Aubanel, 1960). See also Nina Athanassoglou-Kallmyer, Delacroix: Prints, Politics, and Satire, 1814–1822 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1991), p. 15. The Politics of Images 239

Fig. 14: Théodore Géricault, Le Radeau de La Méduse, 1818–19, oil on canvas, 491.0 × 716.0 cm. Paris: Musée du Louvre (inv.-no.: 4884).

Oriental barbarism.”200 Lambertson’s interpretation – no matter how well developed and convincing it may be – does not erase the strong presence of stereotypes in Western imagery concerning the Orient, rather it underlines their remarkably discursive force. Solely on the interlay of this strong anti- Orient visual rhetoric both Delacroix and Champmartin’s paintings seem to be able to operate as the artists’ liberal and anti-absolutist visual agenda. “The juxtaposition of ancient and modern despots held a prophetic lesson […] that absolutist repression would lead to revolt, cultural disorder, and the fall of dynasties.”201

Seeing the Unseen –“Making Ourselves”

As mentioned there was a pronounced enthusiasm for Orientalist objects in the nineteenth century which satisfied the Western longing for the locus exoticus – a topic also extensively explored in eighteenth- and nineteenth-

200 Lambertson, ‘Delacroix’s “Sardanapalus”’, p. 81. 201 Ibid., p. 85. 240 Antonio Baldassarre century music.202 Thus, the Western appropriation of the East is more com- plex. Reducing this story to the attempt to produce a consciously negative image of the East solely connected to the Western agenda of imperialism pro- duces a dangerous and a-historic conclusion. Bringing the East into Western homes symbolized a plethora of attitudes and agendas oscillating between the expression of imperialistic attitudes, economic wealth and cosmopolitism, on the one hand, and the satisfaction of pure consumption behaviors and sensa- tionalism on the other. In this respect the Western public was aware that their images and ideas about the East and their translation within the visual arts were not always the product of mimesis or ethnographic efforts but to a large extent the product of Western imagination and its translation strategies. One of many telling pieces of evidences in this respect is Victor Hugo’s justifica- tion of his interest in the Orient as outlined in the preface of Les Orientales published in 1829, in which he qualifies this interest as the imaginary prod- uct of “an idea he made up in a rather ridiculous manner last summer when watching the sunset.”203 To the same extent, it is very unlikely that anybody in the nineteenth century read the canvas The Snake Charmer by Jean-Léon Gérôme (1824–1904) as an accurate depiction of the East (fig. 15). It, how- ever, embodies, as does Hugo’s collection of poems and the numerous visual items of Orientalist artists do, the force of “make-believe,” inviting the con- sumer to “construct a narrative” 204 and requiring the viewer “to participate – even in imagination and as silent witnesses – in the events” as presented.205 Gérôme’s painting had quite a remarkable history. Adolphe Goupil (1806–1893), the eminent art dealer and the artist’s father-in-law, sold it soon after its completion on 5 October 1880 to the New York collector Al- bert Spencer206 for the sum of 75,000 French francs who resold it to Alfred Corning Clark (one of the heirs of the Singer sewing machine legacy) for US $19,500 in 1888.207 Later the painting was given the status of an icon of

202 See Ralph Locke, Musical exoticism: images and reflections (Cambridge etc.: Cam- bridge University Press, 2009). 203 “Si donc aujourd’hui quelqu’un lui demande à quoi bon ces Orientales ? qui a pu lui inspirer de s’aller promener en Orient pendant tout un volume ? que signifie ce livre inutile de pure poésie, jeté au milieu des préoccupations graves du public et au seuil d’une session ? où est l’opportunité ? à quoi rime l’Orient ?… II répondra qu’il n’en sait rien, que c’est une idée qui lui a pris; et qui lui a pris d’une façon assez ridi- cule, l’été passé, en allant voir coucher le soleil.” Victor Hugo, Les Orientales (Paris: C. Gosselin, 1829), p. iv. 204 Gregory Currie, ‘Visual Fictions’, The Philosophical Quarterly, 41.163 (1991), 129– 143 (p. 140). 205 Ibid., p. 143. 206 See the auction Catalogue of the Albert Spencer Collection of Foreign Paintings, ed. by Ortgies & Co. and R. Somerville (New York, 1888), p. 66. The Politics of Images 241

Fig. 15: Jean-Léon Gérôme, The Snake Charmer, ca. 1879, oil on canvas, 84.0 x 122.0 cm. Williamstown, Mass.: Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute (inv.-no.: 1955.51). visual Orientalism because it was chosen as the cover image for the Vintage books edition of Said’s study Orientalism in 1979.208 It is reported that Said himself proposed Gérôme’s painting for this particular purpose.209 The painting assembles elements from different cultural contexts and geographical sites with which Gérôme was acquainted visually through different sources, including black-and-white photographs of tile work at Topkapı Palace in Istanbul. These photographs, however, do not explain the very proper reproduction of the color in Gérôme’s painting210 – a fact which becomes even more obscure when taking into account that Gérôme surely had no access to the harem, “the forbidden place” to men, and thus provides the paradoxical attempt to make “visible what is by definition unseen.”211

207 Jori Finkel, ‘Jean-Léon Gérôme’s “The Snake Charmer”: A Twisted History’,Los Angeles Times, 13 June 2010. 208 Said, Orientalism. 209 Finkel, ‘Jean-Léon Gérôme’s “The Snake Charmer”’. 210 Walter B. Denny, ‘Quotations in and out of Context: Ottoman Turkish Art and European Orientalist Painting’, in Muqarnas, 10 (Essays in Honor of Oleg Grabor) (1993), 219–230 (p. 221). 211 Margaret Topping, ‘The Proustian Harem’, The Modern Language Review, 97.2 (2002), 300–311 (p. 300). 242 Antonio Baldassarre

The depicted tile panels with nasta’līq calligraphy as commonly used in sixteenth-century Persia were found at the Altın Yol of the harem of Topkapı Palace at this time,212 while the frieze above these panels is likewise an ex- act reproduction of a painted inscription executed in thuluth script from the Baghdad Pavilion, a different part of the palace. Such a blend was not unusual in the tradition of European painting as I have discussed elsewhere and witness that techniques of pictorial transformation and modification were in use long before the invention of “Photoshop” to manipulate an im- age in order to satisfy specific agendas and narratives.213 The Ottoman-like figures are dressed or rather overdressed with garments which refer to the Balkan regions and thus further enhance the pastiche character of the paint- ing. Finally, the wall behind this group is adorned with Qajar Persian or In- dian armor.214 Admittedly, the pictorial part that attracts the most attention is the naked snake charmer. It is a rather disturbing part of the picture not because of his (or her?)215 nudity but rather first and foremost because of its de-contextualization. There is no compelling evidence, as Walter Denny has pointed out, that “naked snake charmers […] ever have appeared to have been a part of Ottoman popular culture.”216 Gérôme rather seems to transform the practice of dancing and singing young females and males which was very common in Ottoman culture up to the mid-nineteenth century although they never performed naked,217 and to allude to the very popular culture of belly dancing of his time. The emphasis of juxtapositions and the technique of de-contextualizing, both so tangible in Gérôme’s Snake Charmer, can – as I have suggested in another paper218 – be read as an attempt to break with “proper history” and

212 See Gerald Ackermann, The Life and Work of Jean-Léon Gérôme (New York: So- theby’s, 1986), pp. 108–110, passim. 213 Baldassarre, ‘Being Engaged, Not Informed: French “Orientalists” Revisited’, pp. 70–71. 214 The description follows insights presented in Denny, ‘Quotations in and out of Context’, p. 220. 215 Gérôme seems to leave the viewer consciously in abeyance about the figure’s sex. 216 Denny, ‘Quotations in and out of Context’, p. 220. 217 As far as the culture of dancing and singing at the Ottoman court is concerned see Dorit Klebe, ‘Effeminate Professionals Musicians in Sources of Ottoman-Turkish Court Poetry and Music of the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries’, Music in Art, 30.1–2 (2005), 97–116. The cultural practice of dancing young males signifi- cantly declined in 1826 and was eventually officially forbidden in 1857. See Metin And, Dances of Anatolian Turkey (Dance perspectives, 3), p. 31. 218 Baldassarre, ‘Being Engaged, Not Informed: French “Orientalists” Revisited’, pp. 72–74. The following considerations concerning this topic essentially follow the thoughts explored within this paper. The Politics of Images 243 to de-contextualize the codes, the rules and the traditions associated with this concept. In contrast to archival and ethnographic research, the tech- niques of de-contextualizing and re-coding link and rearrange contexts in ways opposing accepted beliefs and challenging the notion of history and reality as an accumulation of supposed facts instead of treating it as a con- struction or imagination. The de-contextualization created by juxtaposition and the removal of temporal and spatial dividing lines in Gérôme’s The Snake Charmer not only narrates visual fiction but also unmasks traditional Western European notions about the East as fictitious or the product of human imagination. In this way Gérôme solves at least partly the paradox that many scholars often encounter with him “as the most remarkable artist of this paradoxical juxtaposition of the realistic representational technique with the most imaginative, haunting, shocking yet ultimately fascinating thematic content.” 219 Emphatically spoken, Gérôme’s Snake Charmer un- covers the imaginary virtually by over-fictionalizing. This close-reading does not refute the captivating Said-based interpreta- tion of this painting provided by Linda Nochlin, assessing the painting as a product of Western a-historical and non-ethnographical imagination of the Orient as a theatrical place of eroticized diversion for the pleasure of the (mainly European male) viewer.220 Rather the present reading attempts to reveal views that were largely buried because of the painting’s prominent use for the cover of Said’s Orientalism. The period of the painting’s creation marked a crucial situation with respect to both the Orientalist painting movement and the socio-political context. The political system under the dictatorial leadership of Napoleon III collapsed and France suffered a crushing defeat in the Franco-Prussian War. This defeat and the subsequent proclamation of the German Empire in the Hall of Mirrors at the Palace of Versailles, one of the most symboli- cally charged places of memory of France’s glory, as well as the subsequent war reparations and the integration of Alsace-Lorraine into the German Empire, resulted in extraordinary feelings of ignominy and a deeply injured self-awareness in the consciousness of the “Grand Nation” – a term coined with respect to the Napoleonic period which was symbolically strongly present during the Second Empire as mentioned above. Gérôme’s painting with its over-fictionalizing content seems to be situated in the described po- litical context insofar as it uncovers not only the French imagination about

219 Sibel Bozdoğan, ‘Journey to the East: Ways of Looking at the Orient and the Ques- tion of Representation’, Journal of Architectural Education, 41.4 (1988), 38–45 (p. 43). 220 Linda Nochlin, ‘The Imaginary Orient’, in Linda Nochlin, The Politics of Vision: Essays on Nineteenth-Century Art and Society (New York, 1989), pp. 33–59. 244 Antonio Baldassarre the East to be a fiction but the French perception of its own glory and con- trol over the East as imaginary by strongly disrupting what Nochlin calls the Western male “controlling gaze” that “brings the Oriental world into being.”221 The absence of history and the presence of Western colonial at- titudes in Gérôme’s Snake Charmer appear in this context as self-referential, expressing the end of a glorious history in which control over the Orient entered a critical phase, symbolized by the collapse of spatial and temporal logic in the visual language of the Snake Charmer and manifested in history in the revolt of the Kabyle people in Algeria in 1870–1872. The Orientalist movement itself was strongly governed by the idea of having reached a sort of end, which is especially mirrored in a steady de- cline of visual motifs up to the almost exclusive focus on the female nude and motifs expressing eroticism, particularly by depictions of harem scenes. One popular reflection of this development was the almost hysterical en- thusiasm for belly dance in Islamic theaters erected during World Fairs and Western places of pleasure.222 “In these theatres, amid architecturally ‘au- thentic’ settings, belly dancers presented the element of Muslim life most intriguing to Europeans.”223 The nude figure in Gérôme’s painting reflects this enthusiasm for belly dancing in French society during the second half of the nineteenth century but in a rather disturbing way. The figure is not exclusively presented as an object of eroticized imagination but also as a study of a neoclassicist nude that was particularly championed by Jacques- Louis David and which is in line with Gérôme’s own passion for statuary and his experiments with polychrome and lifelike looking sculptures.224

221 Ibid., p. 37. 222 Sylviane Leprun, Le Théâtre des colonies (Paris: L’Harmattan, 1986), pp. 70–72, and Zeynep Çelik, Displaying the Orient: Architecture of Islam at Nineteenth-Century World Fairs (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1992), pp. 24–30. 223 Çelik, Displaying the Orient, p. 28. In this respect see also the contemporary ac- count published in Figaro illustré: “Men and women dressed in transparent silks and sumptuous embroideries reclined on rugs and cushions and, smoking the narghile and drinking rose- and liquor-flavored sherbets, awaited the delicious keif (pleasure) […] As though pinched by a needle, [the dancer] started moving with hideous contortions that all the Fathmas and Feridjees of the feasts of Neuilly have saturated us with. With the vibrations of her hips and her torso, she gives the il- lusion of a sea that calms down, one where the long slow waves die on the sand.” Figaro illustré, no. 124, July 1900, 142–143, quoted in Çelik, Displaying the Orient, p. 28–29. 224 A striking example in this respect is Gérôme’s Pygmalion and Galatea, ca. 1890, oil on canvas, 88.9 × 68.6 cm. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Gift of Louis C. Raegner (inv.-no.: 27.200). The Politics of Images 245

The study of anatomy, particularly of the male body, was part of academic painting education, particularly in preparation for the early nineteenth- century leading genre of history painting.225 However, Gérôme’s nude seems to consciously cloud the boundaries between aesthetic and sexual appreciation as was rudimentarily already the case with Delacroix’s Sar­ danapalus, which merged furious, rampant sensualism and ferocity. Both paintings appear to be part of a pictorial tradition of imagining the Ori- ent that was, in the second half of the nineteenth century, increasingly reduced to topics of sensualism and eroticism. The numerous Odalisque and “Turkish” bath scenes composed by Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres (1780–1867) and other Western artists made significant contributions to this tradition.226 Ingres’ Odalisque paintings (of 1839 and 1843 respec- tively) as preserved today at the Fogg Art Museum in Cambridge, Mas- sachusetts, and The Walters Art Museum in Baltimore227 present an Orient that is “essentially feminine, incarnated by unclothed and languishing female beauties” and saturated with a “profound voluptuousness.”228 The general pictorial narrative of these paintings can thus be interpreted as an attempt “to fix the Middle East as the epicenter of orientalism, conflated with forbidden sexual possibilities,”229 which simultaneously satisfied the expectations and consumption behavior of the paintings’ above all Western European male spectators. Ingres’ harem and Turkish bath scenes are – in general terms – transferred to and completely absorbed by a Western-

225 See in this respect, for instance, Léon-Matthieu Cochereau, L’intérieur de l’atelier de David, 1814, oil on canvas, 90.0 × 105.0 cm. Paris: Musée du Louvre. 226 See for instance Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, La baigneuse, dite Baigneuse Val­ pinçon, 1808, oil on canvas, 146.0 × 97.5 cm. Paris: Musée du Louvre (inv.-no.: R.F. 259); La Grande Odalisque, 1814, oil on canvas, 91.0 × 162.0 cm. Paris: Musée du Louvre (inv.-no.: R.F.1158); Odalisque with a Slave, 1839, oil on canvas, 72.1 × 100.3 cm. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Art Museum, Fogg Art Museum, Bequest of Grenville L. Winthrop (inv.-no.: 1943.251); Odalisque and Slave, 1842, oil on canvas, 76.0 × 105.0 cm. Baltimore: The Walters Art Museum (inv.-no.: 37.887); and Le Bain turc, 1862, oil on canvas, 108.0 × 110.0 cm. Paris: Musée du Louvre (inv.-no.: R.F. 1934). 227 The Odalisque painting preserved at The Walters Art Museum can be considered as a replica of the painting at the Fogg Art Museum in spite of some differences. It was executed by Ingres with the support of two of his students, i.e. Paul Flandrin (1811–1902) and his brother Hippolyte Flandrin (1809–1864). See Daniel Ternois and Ettore Camesasca, Tout l’œuvre peint de Ingres (Paris: Flammarion, 1984). 228 Christine Peltre, Orientalism in Art, transl. by John Goodman (New York: Abbev- ille, 1998), p. 184. 229 Richard Leppert, Art and the Committed Eye: The Cultural Functions of Imagery (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1996), p. 234. 246 Antonio Baldassarre

European narrative which was not only dominated by male fantasies but also by a history of art primarily shaped by the male. They are, as is Gérôme’s Snake Charmer, imbued with “voyeuristic urges, proscribed eroti- cism, and secret desires,” 230 in general with “stereotypical associations and impulses”231 for which the harem is employed visually; this locus exoticus and nefastus, served as the over-all “metaphorical embodiment”232 satisfy- ing the voyeuristic pleasure of the consumers and artist’s own gaze. This may explain the metaphor’s continuous fascination in twentieth-century Western arts. “Artistic representations of” the harem, “whether literary or pictorial, have always presupposed the gaze of the intruder who makes what is hidden visible […] and it is precisely this idea of trespass that further eroticizes the harem in Western imagination.”233 Closely related with this fascination was the discourse on and the fetishization of the female body and sexuality that took prominent shape in the nineteenth-century and eventually played a key role in the construction of two antagonist arche- types of the female: the seductive and sinful femme fatale destroying all men and Virgin Mary officially declared the only woman without ancestral sin by Pope Pius IX in the famous Apostolic constitution Ineffabilis Deus [Ineffable God] of 8 December 1854.234 Moreover, the increasing reduction of the Orient vision from Delac- roix’s blend of “flesh, gold, and blood”235 in his La Mort de Sardanapale to a mere voyeuristic sensual and erotic fiction eventually matched with the development of the independent artistic position of “décadence”, par- ticularly shaped by Charles Baudelaire (1821–1867) and Émile-Théodore- Léon Gautier (1832–1897). They distanced the concept from the highly negatively charged cultural critique of, for instance, Montesquieu, Rous- seau and Friedrich Nietzsche and introduced an understanding of “déca- dence” for which the anti-bourgeois stance against the ennui of the age, i.e. the “mal du siècle”, was characteristic as much as the affinity for over- excited and extravagant sensuality and the amalgamation of Eros and Thanatos.

230 Topping, ‘The Proustian Harem’, p. 302. 231 Ibid. 232 Ibid., p. 305. 233 Ibid., p. 309. 234 As far as the representation of this discourse in visual culture is concerned see An- tonio Baldassarre, “‘The daughter of too many fathers”: Salomonism and Oriental- ism in late nineteenth century visual culture”, keynote lecture presented at the 14th International RIdIM Conference Visual Intersections: Negotiating East and West, Istanbul 4–7 June 2013 (publication in process). 235 Peltre, Orientalism in Art, p. 89. The Politics of Images 247

Simultaneously

In general French Orientalists created their “realities” of the East which were commonly shared and supported by specific matrixes of Western cul- ture and politics, and they translated their concepts and ideas of “Eastern- ness” to the Western “reality”, including references to the West’s own visual history and socio-cultural matrix. By offering multiple narratives they at- tempted to provide broad opportunity for different consumption patterns ranging from pure amusement to serious involvement and thus left “behind more to think about than just what it [the brush of the painter] reveals to the eye.”236 They made visible what otherwise was not perceivable. To a certain extent visual items with Orientalist subject matter may take up the function of the special past tense used in Turkish to “distinguish hearsay from what we’ve seen with our own eyes”237 but which “help us to real- ize that our ways of making the Other are ways of making ourselves.”238 Implementing the East into the Western matrix resulted, on the one hand, in complex transformation and translation processes as activated by expe- riences and insights acquired by the exposure to the Eastern “Unknown” and, on the other, created a multifaceted web of narratives. These narratives represent “truth” insofar as items of visual culture do not falsify history and reality; they rather convey their meaning even if they present invented figures and events – to borrow a famous statement by Heinrich Heine.239

236 See note 4. 237 See note 2. 238 See note 3. 239 Heinrich Heine, Schriften zu Literatur und Politik, I, in: Sämtliche Werke, 4 vols, ed. by Jost Perfahl (Munich: Winkler Verlag, 1972), vol. 3, p. 330. See in this respect the remarkable study by Stephen Bann, Paul Delaroche: History Painted (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1997).

Notes on Contributors

Antonio Baldassarre, born 1964, is Professor and Director of Research and Development of the Department of Music at Lucerne University of Applied Sciences and Arts and a regular guest professor at Escuela Na- cional de Música of the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México. He is a member of and holds various positions with numerous national and international boards, such as President of the Association Répertoire In- ternational d’Iconographie Musicale (RIdIM); member of the Council of the International Musicological Society; President of the Willy Burkhard- Gesellschaft; and member of the editorial boards of “Music in Art,” “The- MA” and “Imago Musicae.” He holds a doctorate in musicology from the University of Zurich (Switzerland) and has held posts as visiting research scholar, lecturer and visiting professor at academic institutions in Austria, Mexico, Serbia, Switzerland and the U.S. He has extensively researched and published on topics of music history from the late eighteenth century to contemporary music, music iconography, performance studies, music his- toriography and the social and cultural history of music.

Dorothee Birke, currently Acting Professor of English Literature at Uni- versity of Freiburg, received her PhD in 2008 from the University of Gies- sen and then worked as a postdoctoral fellow at the Freiburg Institute for Advanced Studies (FRIAS). She recently finished her habilitation thesis on representations and evaluations of reading in the English novel. Her main fields of interest are the history of the novel, study of memory, nar- rative theory, eighteenth-century literature and contemporary fiction and film. Publications include the monograph Memory’s Fragile Power: Crises of Memory, Identity and Narrative in Contemporary British Novels (2008) and co-edited volumes on Counterfactual Thinking – Counterfactual Writing (2011), Realisms in Contemporary Culture: Theories, Politics and Medial Con­ figurations (2013) and Author and Narrator: Transdisciplinary Contributions to a Narratological Debate (forthcoming). She has published articles in vari- ous collections as well as in journals such as Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture, Narrative, and Journal of Popular Culture.

Hermann Blume, born 1950, studied German literature, philosophy, drama and communications studies at the LMU Munich and University of Vienna (PhD). Since 1979 he has been a collaborator on various research projects, since 1991 a collaborator at the Commission of Literary Studies (Austrian Academy of Sciences); editor in chief of the periodical Sprachkunst. Beiträge 250 Narrated Communities – Narrated Realities zur Literaturwissenschaft; co-editor of the historical critical Ernst-von- Feuchtersleben-Edition (KFA); and co-editor of the historical critical Adalbert-Stifter-Edition (Collected Letters, HKG). Since 2007 he has been collaborator at the Institute of Culture Studies and Theatre History (IKT) in Vienna. His main fields of research are scholarly literary editions, Aus- trian Vormärz, and correlations of history of medicine and literature. Re- cent publication include: Inszenierung und Gedächtnis: Soziokulturelle und ästhetische Praxis (ed. with E. Großegger, A. Sommer-Mathis‚ M. Rössner, Bielefeld 2014) and “Der tönende Memnon – Klänge zum Steinerweichen: Musikalischer Schmerz in vormärzlichen Texten” in Musik und Revolu­ tion: Die Produktion von Identität und Raum durch Musik in Zentraleuropa 1848/49, ed. by Barbara Boisits (Vienna 2013), pp. 597–615.

Michael Böhler, born 1940, Professor Emeritus at the University of Zurich, studied German language and literature, Greek philology, philosophy and sociology. Teaching and visiting positions include: Distinguished Professor, Swiss Chair at Stanford University 1992/93; Distinguished Visiting Max Kade Professor at the Washington University, St. Louis 1989; Full Profes- sor at Ohio State University 1978/79; Asst. and Assoc. Professor at the State University of New York, Binghamton 1968–1974; and visiting profes- sor at the Universities of Berne 1976–1978, 2007, Lausanne 1983, Genève 1988. He has been member of the Research Council of the Swiss National Science Foundation 1984–1992; and of the Standing Committee for the Humanities of the European Science Foundation, Strasbourg 1990–2000. He has published on: Gotthard Heidegger, Alexander Gottlieb Baumgar- ten, Herder, Lessing, Schiller, Goethe, Jean Paul, Wilhelm von Humboldt, Brentano, Stifter, Keller, Hofmannsthal, Robert Walser, Max Frisch, on the sociology of literature and reception theory, on the literary canon, on the theory of comedy and laughter, on the cultural topography of German speaking countries and on hyperfiction.

Brigitte Boothe, born 1948, was Professor for Clinical Psychology, Psy- chotherapy and Psychoanalysis until 2013 at the University of Zurich. Her fields of research include clinical narratology, dream communication and dream analysis and psychoanalytic concept research, especially the con- cept of wish. Recent publications include: Das Narrativ: Biografisches Er­ zählen im psychotherapeutischen Prozess (Stuttgart: Schattauer, 2011); with A. Riecher-Rössler (eds.): Frauen in Psychotherapie: Grundlagen – Störungs­ bilder – Behandlungskonzepte (Stuttgart: Schattauer, 2013); and Wenn doch nur – ach hätt ich bloss: Die Anatomie des Wunsches (Zurich: Rüffer & Rub, 2013). Notes on Contributors 251

Arianna Borrelli is a historian and philosopher of natural philosophy and modern science, currently working at the Technical University of Berlin with a DFG-funded project on concept formation in early particle phys- ics (1950–1965). She has researched in the areas of medieval mathemati- cal cosmology, early modern meteorology, and quantum theories from their early days up to the present. She has held research positions in theoretical high energy physics and in the history and philosophy of science at various international institutions (Rome University, CERN, MPI for History of Sci- ence in Berlin). In addition to numerous research papers she has published the monograph: Aspects of the astrolabe: ‚architectonica ratio‘ in tenth- and eleventh-century Europe (2008).

Bernd Bösel studied philosophy in Vienna, was a stipendiary researcher of the Austrian Academy of Sciences (APART-Program, 2011–2014) and is currently a fellow of the Academy of Media Arts Cologne. He is the author of Philosophie und Enthusiasmus: Studien zu einem umstrittenen Verhältnis (Vienna: Passagen, 2008), co-editor (with Marie-Luise Angerer and Mi- chaela Ott) of Timing of Affect: Epistemologies, Aesthetics, Politics (Zurich: Diaphanes, 2014) and co-founder of the journal Sublin/mes. Philosophieren von unten. In his ongoing project “The Art of Producing Emotions – Phi- losophy as Critical Psychotechnology” he looks into several models of af- fective organization and aims to establish a conception of philosophy that focuses on its capacities to shape affects.

Jochen Gläser, PhD 1990, Habil. 2004 (Wissenschaftliche Produktionsge­ meinschaften: Die soziale Ordnung der Forschung), has been senior research- er at the TU Berlin’s Center for Technology and Society since 2009. His major research interest is in the interaction of epistemic and institutional factors in the shaping of conduct and content of research at the micro-level of individuals and groups as well as the meso-level of scientific communi- ties. Other research interests include organizational sociology, bibliomet- rics, and qualitative methods. Recent publications include: Organisational Transformation and Scientific Change: The Impact of Institutional Restructur­ ing on Universities and Intellectual Innovation (2014, edited with Richard Whitley) and “Beyond Breakthrough Research: Epistemic properties of research and their consequences for research funding,” Research Policy 43 (2014), 1204–1216 (with Grit Laudel).

Aura Heydenreich, PhD, is University Lecturer at the Friedrich-Alexan- der-University Erlangen-Nurnberg, Department of German Literature and Comparative Studies, Chair of German Literary Studies. She studied Ger- 252 Narrated Communities – Narrated Realities man, English and American Cultural Studies in Cluj-Napoca and Erlangen and holds a Master of European Studies. In 2010 she initiated the “Phys- ics and Literature Research Group” between the German and the Physics Departments at the FAU. Since 2011 she has been the scientific coordinator of the FAU Emerging-Field-Project ELINAS (Erlangen Center for Litera- ture and Natural Science). She is a member of the German Physics Society (DPG) and of the Society of Literature, Science and the Arts (SLSA). Re- cent publications include: “Physik, Figur, Wissen: Das quantentheoretische Superpositionsprinzip als Narrativ der Intersexualität in Ulrike Draesners Mitgift”, in Ulrike Draesner (Text & Kritik), ed. by Anna Ertel, Susanna Brogi, Evi Zemanek (Göttingen 2014), pp. 58–66; (with Klaus Mecke:) Quarks and Letters. Naturwissenschaften in der Literatur und Kultur der Gegenwart (Berlin, de Gruyter, to be printed 2014); (with Klaus Mecke:) Physik – Poetik – Ästhetik: Labor-Dialoge mit: Thomas Lehr, Durs Grünbein, Raoul Schrott, Ulrike Draesner, Jens Harder, Ulrich Woelk, Juli Zeh, Michael Hampe, Reinhard Jirgl (Berlin, de Gruyter, to be printed 2014).

Christoph Leitgeb, born 1962, has been working at the Institute of Culture Studies and Theatre History (Austrian Academy of Science) since 2004. He worked in various research projects on Austrian literature of the 19th and 20th century and theory of literature in the past, as a literary critic for the newspaper Der Standard and as a lecturer in Sheffield, Osaka and Olo- mouc. After his habilitation thesis (Barthes’ Mythos im Rahmen konkreter Ironie (Munich and Paderborn: Wilhelm Fink, 2008), he co-edited several books on the specifics of literature and culture in central Europe. Some of his recent essays on a theory of the uncanny include: “Am Faden einer Sprache des Unheim­lichen: Josef Winklers ‘Die sterblichen Überreste einer Marionette’”, in Die Entsetzungen des Josef Winkler, ed. by Christine Iva- novic and Alexandra Millner (Vienna 2014), pp. 154–170; “Ilse Aichingers unheimliche Angst”, in Ilse Aichinger: Behutsam kämpfen, ed. by Christa Gürtler and Irene Fussl (Würzburg 2013), pp. 123–133.

Klaus Mecke, studied physics and philosophy in Darmstadt and Munich (PhD 1994) and has been Professor for Theoretical Physics at the Univer- sität ErlangenNürnberg since 2004. He was a research assistant in Austin, Boston, Wuppertal and Stuttgart, where he worked on statistical physics of fluids and biological systems. He developed geometric methods for mate- rial science, image analysis and astronomy (see ). An important part of his activities is the history of science and the study of the cultural context of physics research. He is spokesman of the Erlangen Center for Literature and Natural Science (ELINAS; see ). Publications include: “Physik im Spiegel der Literatur”, in Didaktik der Physik (1998), pp. 61–76; “Das physikalische Modell – eine quantitative Metapher?” in Metapher und Modell, ed. by Wolfgang Bergem (Trier 1996); “Zahl und Erzählung: Metaphern in Erkenntnisprozessen der Physik” in Quarks and Letters. Naturwissenschaften in der Literatur und Kul­ tur der Gegenwart, ed. with Aura Heydenreich (Berlin: de Gruyter, to be printed 2014); with Aura Heydenreich: Physik – Poetik – Ästhetik: Labor- Dialoge mit: Thomas Lehr, Durs Grünbein, Raoul Schrott, Ulrike Draesner, Jens Harder, Ulrich Woelk, Juli Zeh, Michael Hampe, Reinhard Jirgl (Berlin, deGruyter, to be printed 2014).

Elena Messner, PhD, born 1983, studied Comparative Literature and Cul- tural Studies in Vienna and Aix en Provence. Her dissertation topic was on the reception of Post-Yugoslavian prose in the German-language area. She was an editorial member of staff on the scientific Internet project “Kakanien Revisited.” She has also been an assistant lecturer in Vienna, Innsbruck, Klagenfurt and Berlin. She is co-founder of the online platform and translator from Slovenian and Croatian/Serbian. In 2010 she published with Antonia Rahofer the book Between there and here. Eight approaches to contemporary Bosnian prose” (Innsbruck: Studia). With Eva Schörkhuber she has published an anthology about literary Vien- nese soundwalks every year since 2012. In 2014 she she has published the monograph: Post-Yugoslavian Anti-War Prose (Vienna: Turia + Kant). She currently works at the Institute of German Studies at the University Aix/ Marseille in France.

Michael Rössner, studied translation, Romance languages and literature, and law at the University of Vienna. From 1978–1991 he was Assistant Pro- fessor at the University of Vienna and since 1991 he has been Professor for Romance Literatures at the University of Munich (LMU). He has taught and lectured at the Universities of Salzburg and Innsbruck and the Vienna University of Economics (Austria); the Universities of Queretaro (Mexico), Concepción (Chile), Buenos Aires (UBA) and Tucumán (Argentina); and the UFRGS in Porto Alegre (Brazil). He is Joint editor of the journal IBER- OROMANIA and of the book series TCCL (Theory and Criticism of Culture and Literature, Publisher: Olms) and JWR (Publisher: Böhlau). He is a full member of the Austrian Academy of Sciences, member of the Accademia degli Incamminati (Italian Art Academy), member of the Austrian PEN Centre, Chair of the European Pirandello Centre, Director of the Institute for Culture Studies and Theatre History (IKT) at the Austrian Academy of Sciences. He was the editor and translator of the edition of Luigi Piran- 254 Narrated Communities – Narrated Realities dello’s work in German and of a history of the Latin American literatures in German (Metzler, 1995, ³2007). He has published on literary and cultural theory and related subjects, such as Auf der Suche nach dem verlorenen Para­ dies (1988); Literarische Kaffeehäuser. Kaffeehausliteraten(1999); “¡Bailá! ¡Vení! ¡Volá!”: El fenómeno tanguero y la literatura (Frankfurt a. M. 2000), Renaissance der Authentizität? Über die neue Sehnsucht nach dem Ursprüngli­ chen (ed. with Heidemarie Uhl, 2012); and Translatio/n. Narration: Media and the Staging of Differences (ed. with Federico Italiano, 2012). Index of Names

A Beckett, Samuel 96 Beganović, Davor 134–135, 138 Acevedo, Gabriel 236 Belting, Hans 186, 215–216, 229 Ackermann, Gerald 242 Bénédite, Léonce 189 Adler, Jeremy D. 55, 67 Benjamin, Walter 190, 205 Aitchison, Jean 116 Benkler, Yochai 26–27 Alexandre Dumas (the elder) 223 Bennington, Geoff 68 Anders, Günther 95 Bentham, Jeremy 123 Anderson, Benedict 7, 19, 27, 173 Bergmann, Jörg R. 106, 112 Anderson, Greg W. 78, 82 Bernard, Camille 218, 232 Anderson, Marian 157–158, 168 Bertarelli, Achille 192 Aralica, Ivan 132 Bessières, Jean-Baptiste 195, 199 Arendt, Hannah 168 Biden, Joe 211 Aristotle 33–34, 174, 186, 230 Binétruy, Pierre 74, 76, 82 Arjomand, Saïd Amir 219 Birke, Dorothee 11, 249 Arkani-Hamed, Nima 78, 82 Blackstone, Byron 220 Assmann, Aleida 7, 10, 173 Blažeković, Zdravko 186 Assmann, Jan 10, 173 Blume, Hermann 249 Athanassoglou-Kallmyer, Nina 223, Blumer, Marie-Louise 199 238 Boehm, Gottfried 186–187, 203 Athron, Peter 75, 78, 82 Böhler, Arno 92, 99 Augé, Marc 186 Böhler, Michael 9, 55, 57, 67, 250 Auguste, Jules-Robert 218 Bohrer, Frederick N. 188, 232–234 Augustine of Hippo, Saint 89 Bone, Henry 235 B Boothe, Brigitte 10, 103, 111–112, 250 Bach, Johann Sebastian 153–156, Bösel, Bernd 9, 251 158, 163–164, 166–167 Borrelli, Arianna 9, 71, 76, 82, 251 Badiou, Alain 97, 99 Bourdieu, Pierre 203, 205, 212 Bailey, Matthew 175 Bourdon, Léonard 202 Bajou, Valérie 223 Boutard, Jean-Baptiste 202 Baldassarre, Antonio 13, 188, 190, Bowring, John 221 198, 209, 231, 234, 242, 246, Boylan, R. Dillon 31 249 Bozdoğan, Sibel 243 Bann, Stephen 247 Brändle, Ilka 208 Barthes, Roland 205 Brezovich, Mary 13 Baudelaire, Charles 234, 246 Broch, Hermann 98 Beauharnais, Hortense de 190 Brothers, Caroline 209 256 Narrated Communities – Narrated Realities

Brotóns Jordá, Mario 209 Cole, Juan Ricardo 190 Brown, Laurie M. 72, 82 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor 121 Brown, Roy Howard 199, 227, 229 Colin, Alexandre 222 Bruno, Giordano 92 Collingham, Hugh A. C. 237 Büchner 34 Collins, Harry M. 22, 27 Burke, Peter 201 Connerton, Paul 210 Busch, Günter 228 Constable, Olivia Remie 187 Byatt, A(ntonia) S(usan) 142, Constant, Benjamin 222 149–150 Ćopić, Branko 130 Byron, George Gordon Noel, 6. Corneille, Pierre 177, 204 Baron (Lord Byron) 220–221, Corning Clark, Alfred 240 224, 230–232 Ćosić, Dobrica 130–132 Couderc, Christophe 177 C Cousin, Victor 222 Camesasca, Ettore 245 Ctesias of Cnidos 230 Camões, Luis de 174 Currie, Gregory 240 Cantinelli, Richard 197 Capa, Robert 209 D Carboni, Stefano 187 Dalegre, Joëlle 225 Carter, David R. 186 Damas-Hinard, Jean-Joseph-Stanis- Castaño, Diego J. 78, 82 las-Albe 201 Castelnuovo, Enrico 197 Dance, Daryl Cumber 142, 146, Castoriadis, Cornelius 121 149–150 Celan, Paul 34 Dannenberg, Hilary P. 143, 150 Çelik, Zeynep 244 Dante Alighieri 232 Champmartin, Charles-Emile 218, Daston, Lorrain 74, 82 237–239 Daure, Jean-Pierre-Paulin-Hector Chandram, Mohini 205 195 Charles V, Emperor 219 Davičo, Oskar 130 Charles X, King 220, 235, 237–238 David, Jacques-Louis 196–198, Chateaubriand, François-René de 233, 235, 244 224 Dear, Peter 20, 27 Chéry, Philippe 203 Delacroix, Eugène 13, 199, 216– Christ, Birte 144, 150 218, 220, 222–224, 226–239, Cid, El (Rodrigo Díaz de Vivar) 12, 245–246 173–175 Delteil, Loys 227 Çirakman, Asli 219 Denny, Walter B. 241, 242 Cixous, Hélène 115, 117–120, 123 Deppermann, Arnulf 103, 105, 112 Clair, William St. 221 Derrida, Jacques 117–118, 123 Clinton, Hillary 212–213 Descartes, René 48 Cochereau, Léon-Matthieu 245 Desgenettes, René-Nicolas 194 Index of Names 257

Dewey, Joseph 155, 169 Flitner, Elisabeth 103, 112 Deyermond, Alan 183 Fludernik, Monika 104, 112 Dežulović, Boris 135, 137–138 Foer, Jonathan Safran 150 Dimopoulos, Savas 78, 82 Foucault, Michel 94 Diodorus Siculus 230 Frahm, Eckart 230 Diogenes of Sinope 95–96 Franco, Francisco 12, 182 Doody, Margaret Anne 91, 99 François, Charles 190 Douglas, Alexander, the tenth Duke Fraser, Elisabeth A. 220, 222, of Hamilton 196 227–228 Dowland, John 156, 159 Frazer, James George 193 Doxiadis, Apostolos 71, 82 Frederick II (the Great), King of Drašković, Vuk 131 Prussia 156, 160 Dreyss, Charles 201 Freud, Sigmund 10, 103, 113, Du Bois-Reymond, Emil Heinrich 115–124 55, 67 Friedlaender, Walter 194–195 Duggan, Joseph J. 183 Froude, James Anthony 31 Dumas, Alexandre (the elder) 228 Dupré, Louis 223 G Dvali, Gia 78, 82 Galassi, Peter 214 Galileo Galilei 34, 41 E Galison, Peter L. 70–71, 82 Gautier, Émile-Théodore-Léon 246 Eckermann, Johann Peter 56–57, Gautier, Théophile 232–233 67 Geiger, Daniel 57, 67 Efthymiou, Maria 221 Georgakopoulou, Alexandra 17, Eiland, Howard 190 22, 27 Einstein, Albert 11, 31, 153–155, Georgios II, King 220 157, 162, 167 Gérard, François 235 Elias, Norbert 204 Géricault, Jean Louis Théodore 199, Empedocles 33 237, 239 Escholier, Raymond 237 Gérôme, Jean-Léon 240–246 Estève, Edmond 232 Gersmann, Gudrun 222 Evans, Richard J. 203 Gianotti, Fabiola 75, 82 F Girard, René 153–155, 159 Girardet, Raoul 201 Fabian, Johannes 185 Girodet-Trioson, Anne-Louis Finkel, Jori 241 237–238 Flanagan, Owen 173 Gläser, Jochen 17–19, 24, 27, 251 Flandrin, Hippolyte 245 Glazer, Diane 186 Flandrin, Paul 245 Gödel, Kurt 11, 153–155, 157, Flat, Paul 234 162–163, 167 258 Narrated Communities – Narrated Realities

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von 9, Heston, Charlton 182 31, 51–67, 193, 232 Heydenreich, Aura 251 Golinski, Jan F. 70, 82 Hibbott, Yvonne 195 Gondek, Hans-Dieter 117 Hijazi, Muhammed 207 Goodman, John 245 Hijazi, Suhaib 207 Gordon, Thomas 220 Hinojosa, Eduardo de 183 Goupil, Adolphe 240 Hitler, Adolf 90 Grimmer, Bernhard 111–112 Hoban, Wieland 98–99 Gros, Antoine-Jean 191–196, Hoffmann, E(rnst) T(heodor) 199–203, 210, 216, 229, 235 A(madeus) 116–119 Günthner, Susanne 101, 113 Hofstadter, Douglas 154 Guérin, Pierre-Narcisse 233, 237 Holert, Tom 206 Guillén de Castro y Bellvís 177–178 Holmes, Frederic L. 20, 27 Guthmüller, Bodo 188 Hook, David 183 Gutiérrez, Eduardo 12, 179 Hösle, Vittorio 92, 99 Gutman, Judith M. 205 Howarth, Davis J. 220 Howe, Samuel Gridley 220 H Hughes, Sarah Anne 213 Hadot, Pierre 94 Hughes, Thomas Smart 226 Halbwachs, Maurice 10 Hughes-Wilson, J. N. 225, 227 Hamburger, Michael 67 Hugo, Victor 240 Hamman, Philippe 201 Hume, David 218 Hannoosh, Michele 234 Huntington, Samuel Phillips Hansen, Paul 207–209, 213 181–182 Harari, Haim 77, 82 Husserl, Edmund 60, 87 Hargens, Lowell L. 21, 24, 27 Huyghe, René 218 HarperCollins (publisher) 142 Harper, James G. 188–189, 191 I Harvey, Leonard P. 188 Ibn Warraq 189 Haskell, Francis 223 Ickstadt, Heinz 155, 169 Haslinger, Josef 125 Ilgen, Karl David 221 Hautecœur, Louis 199 Ingres, Jean-Auguste-Dominique Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich 88 13, 245 Heydenreich, Aura 11, 252 Iser, Wolfgang 7, 10, 115, 121–124 Heine, Heinrich 247 Italiano, Federico 174, 177, 183 Heinrichs, Hans-Jürgen 99 Held, Hans Walther 225 J Herder, Johann Gottfried 174, 193 Hermann, Ehrenfried 219 Jakiša, Miranda 133, 138 Hernández, José 178, 179 Jentsch, Ernst 115–118, 121 Hernon, Ian 222 Jergović, Miljenko 133, 137–138 Index of Names 259

Jesus of Nazareth 199, 210 L Joannides, Paul 222 Johnson, Lee 198–199, 227, Labinger, Jay 164 231–233 Laborde, Alexandre de 191 Johnson, Mark 34 Lacan, Jacques 10, 117, 121–122 Joséphine de Beauharnais, Empress Laden, Osama bin 210–211, 213 of France 197 Lakoff, George 34 Jourdan, Annie 201 Lalić, Mihailo 130 Lambertson, John P. 237, 239 K Lamey, Guillaume-Auguste 233– 234 Kaiser, David 70, 82 Landon, Charles Paul 196 Kant, Immanuel 53, 55, 68, 93, Langer, Axel 188 214 Lanser, Susan Sniader 147, 151 Kay, Lily E. 70, 82 Laplace, Pierre-Simon 55 Kazaz, Enver 133, 138 Latour, Bruno 23 Keller, Evelyn Fox 70–71, 82 Laudel, Grit 19 Kelvin, William Thomson 1. Baron Lebow, Richard Ned 144, 151 36 Leerssen, Joep 225 Khan, Huma 212 Leitgeb, Christoph 10, 252 King, Martin Luther 167–168 Lejeune, Philippe 101, 113 Kinross, Patrick 218 Leppert, Richard 245 Kittler, Friedrich 122 Leprun, Sylviane 244 Klausnitzer, Ralf 57, 68 Lessing, Doris 11, 141–151 Klebe, Dorit 242 Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim 63 Klein, Natalie 220 Levinski, Jorge 209 Kley, Antje 154 Levi-Strauss, Claude 80–81, 83 Knebel, Carl Ludwig von 63 Levitt, Barbara 25 Knightley, Philip 209 Lewis, Barry 155, 160 Knorr-Cetina, Karin 20, 26–27 Linde, Charlotte 17 Köppe, Tilmann 57, 68 Locke, Ralph 240 Kofman, Sarah 115–120 Locke Siegfried, Susan 201–203, Kohle, Hubertus 222 205 Konstantinović, Zoran 188, 225 Lockert, Lacy 204 Kosmač, Ciril 130 Löb, Ladislaus 33 Kozyrakis, Yulia 155, 164 Lomazzo, Giovanni Paolo 197 Krawetz, Neal 208 Longnon, Jean 201 Krebs, Claudia 142, 150 López Estrada, Francisco 183 Kristal, Efraín 89, 99 Loren, Sophia 182 Krusch, Bruno 191 Lorenz, Chris 203 Kühlmann, Wilhelm 188 Loti, Pierre 234 260 Narrated Communities – Narrated Realities

Louis XIV 197, 200–201, 204 Mecke, Klaus 154, 252 Louis XVI 194 Menéndez Pidal, Ramón 177, 181, Louis-Philippe I 233, 235 183 Lubarda, Vojislav 131 Merle, Philippe 103, 112 Lubkoll, Christine 154 Messner, Elena 11, 253 Lucretius (Titus Lucretius Carus) Michaelson, Stacy 212–213 63 Miller, David J. 75, 78, 82 Lugones, Leopoldo 178 Mitchell, William J. Thomas 187, Lukács, Georg 91 206, 210 Luther, Martin 219 Mlakić, Josip 134, 137–138 Luxutt, Athina 219 Montaiglon, Anatole de 197 Lynch, Michael 20 Montesquieu, Charles de Secondat, Lyotard, Jean-François 9, 51, 58–65, Baron de 218, 246 68, 88 Moore, Caroline 142–143, 151 Moore, Thomas 220 M Morrison, Blake 142, 151 Macho, Thomas H. 89, 94–95, 99 Müller-Pozzi, Heinz 104, 113 MacKenzie, John 189 Munhall, Edgar 192, 196 MacNamidhe, Margaret 228–229 Maeterlinck, Maurice 10 N Mahmud II, Sultan 218 Mann, Anthony 12, 173, 181–183 Nafissi, Mohammad 236 Mann, Thomas 115, 126 Nagel, Ivan 193, 213–214 Marchand, Jean 238 Napoleon Bonaparte 190–203, 210, Mármol, José 180 216, 222, 235 Marotte, Léon 227 Napoleon III 190–191, 243 Martin, Catherine 223 Nass, Clifford 25 Martine, Charles 227 Nawratil, Ute 104–105, 107, 113 Massarrat, Mohssen 236 Nazor, Vladimir 130 Masschelein, Anneleen 117, 119, Neckel, Sighard 107, 113 121 Neumann, Birgit 143, 151 Massonaud, Dominique 229 Neuschäfer, Hansjörg 176, 183 Massumi, Brian 68 Newton, Isaac 31, 41, 47, 55–56, Maxwell, James Clerk 31 61–62, 153 Mazur, Barry 71, 82 Nicolle, David 218 McCabe, Ina Baghidiantz 219 Nietzsche, Friedrich 33, 38–39, 48, McEwan, Ian 150 89, 91–92, 95, 99, 231, 246 McKitterick, Rosamond 191 Nochlin, Linda 243 McLaughlin, Kevin 190 Norris, Harry T. 188 McLuhan, Marshall 206 Norton, Lucy 217 McVeagh, Emily 141, 149 Noyons, Ed C.M. 24 Index of Names 261

Nünning, Ansgar 104, 108, 113 R Nünning, Vera 104, 113 Raan, Anthony F.J. van 24 O Rabbow, Paul 94 Raddatz, Martha 210 Obama, Barack 211–212 Raeder, Siegfried 219 O’Brien, David 191, 193, 195, 200, Raegner, Louis C. 244 201 Randall, Lisa 79, 83 Ohm, Simon 41 Reher, Meike 155 Olander, William 202 Reinhart, Oskar 227 Oliveira, Carlos 96, 99 Richemond, Stéphane 190 Olmsted, Jennifer W. 234, 237 Richthofen, Erich von 183 Orelli, Matthias von 231 Ricœur, Paul 11, 153, 155, 161, 163–165, 168 P Rigaud, Hyacinthe 197 Rodinson, Maxime 236 Pamuk, Orhan 185 Roese, Neal 144, 147, 151 Panofsky, Erwin 187, 193–194 Rössner, Michael 12, 174, 177, 179 Pascot, Alexandrine 233 183, 253 Paul, Gerhard 203, 209 Rosenthal, Donald A. 189 Peck, Amelia 188 Rouse, Joseph 24 Peltre, Christine 245–246 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques 89, 236, 246 Pfersmann, Otto 68 Royle, Nicholas 10, 115, 124–125 Phúc, Phan Thi Kim 209–210 Rubiés, Joan-Pau 219 Pias, Claus 215 Rycaut, Paul 231 Pickering, Andrew 70–71, 83 Pickering, Jean 142, 151 S Pinney, Christopher 205 Piot, René 234 Said, Edward 189–191, 241, 243 Pitati, Bonifazio de’ 198 Sanchez, Pierre 190 Pius IX, Pope 246 Sánchez, Tomás Antonio 177 Platen, Emil 156 Sarbin, Theodore 103, 113 Plato 52, 91–94, 214 Sardanapalus, Assyrian King 230 Plotnitsky, Arkady 71, 83 Sartre, Jean-Paul 121–122 Pogačnik, Jagna 135–136, 139 Sasse, Sylvia 133, 138 Poole, Robert 222 Saxl, Fritz 193–194 Powers, Richard 11, 153–154, 156, Schafer, Roy 103, 113 170 Schapp, Wilhelm 87–88, 90, 99 Priest, Brady 209 Scheffer, Ary 222 Pring, Debra 186, 206 Schelling, Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Proust, Marcel 10 120 262 Narrated Communities – Narrated Realities

Schiller, Friedrich 193 Suleiman the Magnificent, Sultan 219 Schrempp, Gregory Allen 79–80, Sundhaussen, Holm 130–131, 133, 83 139 Schubert, Franz 157 Susskind, Leonard 76–77, 83 Scott, Walter 232 Searle, John 123 T Segal, Robert A. 79, 83 Šehić, Faruk 134 Tayler, Alfred 141, 149 Seiberg, Nathan 75, 83 Taylor, Edward Burnett 193 Selenić, Slobodan 131 Ternois, Daniel 245 Sellars, Roy 116 ’t Hooft, Gerard 75, 77, 83 Shaftesbury, Lord (Anthony Ashley- Thornton, Lynne 190 Cooper, 7. Earl of Shaftesbury) 92 Thrift, Nigel 98, 100 Shakespeare, William 231–232 Tiger, Virginia 143, 146, 151 Shapin, Steven 20 Todorov, Tzvetan 12, 117 Shapiro, Michael J. 205 Tolkemitt, Brigitte 203 Shelly, Percy Bysshe 221–222 Tomason, Audrey F. 212–213 Shifman, Mikhail 72–74, 83 Topping, Margaret 241, 246 Sloterdijk, Peter 9, 87, 89–100 Trachtenberg, Alan 214 Smeenk, Chris 162 Tuđman, Franjo 132 Smolin, Lee 78, 83 Tuinen, Sjoerd van 96, 100 Socrates 226 Sontag, Susan 205, 210 U Soret, Friedrich 55 Soulier, Charles-Louis-Raymond Ut, Huynh Cong (‘Nick’) 209–210 238 Souza, Pete 211, 213 V Spector, Jack J. 231 Spence, Donald P. 103, 113 Vaughn, Justin 212–213 Spencer, Albert 240 Vax, Louis 117 Spiegel, Gabrielle M. 203 Veltman, Martin 77 Sprague, Stephen 205 Veltman, Martinus 83 Stanhope, Leicester Fitzgerald Verdi, Giuseppe 231 Charles, the 5th Earl of Harring- Verlinden, Jasper 154 ton 221 Vernet, Horace 235 Stanzel, Franz K. 225 Vico, Giovanni Battista 49 Starzinger, Vincent E. 222 Vidal, Fernando 74, 82 Stendhal (Marie-Henri Beyle) 228 Virgil (Publius Vergilius Maro) 174 Stiening, Gideon 57, 68 Visconti, Ennio Quirino 200 Strauber, Susan 227 Volpp, Leti 219 Streeck, Ulrich 111, 113 Voß, Christian 188 Index of Names 263

W Whitley, Richard 26 Wieland, Christoph Martin 193 Wachtel, Andrew Baruch 130–132, Winckelmann, Johann Joachim 139 185, 193 Wainwright, Martin 224 Wolf, Werner 160 Warburg, Aby 193 Wood, James 149, 151 Warnock, Mary 216 Woods, John E. 126 Weber, Max 236 Woolgar, Steve 23 Wellington, Hubert 217 Wütrich, Christian 162 Wells, James D. 74–76, 83 Welzer, Harald 7 Z Wendl, Tobias 205 Wenzlhuemer, Roland 144, 151 Zahareas, Anthony 183 White, Joanna 49, 103, 107, 112 Zerweck, Bernd 104, 113