Revista de la Asociación Española de Estudios Anglo-Norteamericanos
Vol. 30, núm. 2 Diciembre 2008
30.2 (December 2008) 30.2 (Diciembre 2008)
EDITORIAL COMMITTEE Consejo de Redacción
General Editor: Angela Downing Universidad Complutense de Madrid Assistant Editor: Ludmila Urbanová Managing Editor: Marta Carretero University of Brno Universidad Complutense de Madrid Book Reviews Editor: Clara Calvo Editor’s Assistant: Juan Rafael Zamorano Universidad de Murcia Universidad Complutense de Madrid Universität Bremen Style supervisor: Jorge Arús Hita Universidad Complutense de Madrid
ASSOCIATE EDITORS Editores Adjuntos
Andrew Blake Heinz Ickstadt University of Winchester Freie Universität Berlin Martin Bygate J. Hillis Miller Lancaster University University of California at Irvine Teresa Fanego Susheila M. Nasta Universidad de Santiago de Compostela Open University Fernando Galván Francisco J. Ruiz de Mendoza Universidad de Alcalá de Henares Universidad de La Rioja
EDITORIAL BOARD Consejo Científico
Joan C. Beal Rachel Bowlby Gordon Campbell University of Sheffield University College London University of Leicester Jesús Benito Sánchez Kris Van den Branden Isabel Carrera Universidad de Valladolid Katholieke Universiteit Leuven Universidad de Oviedo Marcella Bertuccelli Papi Mario Brdar Shirley Chew Università di Pisa Josip Juraj Strossmayer University University of Leeds Nilufer E. Bharucha Laurel J. Brinton Robert Clark University of Mumby University of British Columbia University of East Anglia Clare Birchall Manuel Broncano Thomas Claviez Middlesex University Universidad de León University of Stavanger Anita Biressi Christopher S. Butler Tom Cohen Roehampton University University of Wales University of Albany Maggie Ann Bowers Graham D. Caie Juan Camilo Conde-Silvestre University of Portsmouth University of Glasgow Universidad de Murcia
Francisco J. Cortés Rodríguez David Johnson Ruth Parkin-Gounelas Universidad de La Laguna The Open University Aristotle University of Thessaloniki Isabel de la Cruz Cabanillas Stephan Kohl Javier Pérez Guerra Universidad de Alcalá de Henares Julius-Maximilians-Universität Universidad de Vigo Pilar Cuder Würzburg James Procter Universidad de Huelva Zoltán Kövecses University of Stirling Daniela Daniele Eötvös Loránd University Victor J. Ramraj Università di Udine Manfred Krug University of Calgary Rocío G. Davis Otto-Friedrich-Universität Bamberg David Richards University of Navarra Merja Kytö University of Stirling Denise deCaires Narain Uppsala University Caroline Rooney University of Sussex Alberto Lázaro University of Kent Celestino Deleyto Universidad de Alcalá de Henares Francisco J. Ruiz de Mendoza Universidad de Zaragoza Ursula Lenker Universidad de La Rioja Balz Engler Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität Dianne F. Sadoff University of Basel München Rutgers University Charles Forceville María José López Couso Jürgen Schlaeger University of Amsterdam Universidad de Santiago de Humboldt-Universität Berlin Compostela Javier Franco Aixelá Elena Seoane Universidad de Alicante Dámaso López García Universidad de Santiago de Universidad Complutense de Madrid María del Pilar García Mayo Compostela Universidad del País Vasco María Losada Friend María Josep Solé Sabater Universidad de Huelva Cristina Garrigós Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona Universidad de León Ricardo Mairal Usón Alasdair Spark UNED Dirk Geeraerts University of Winchester University of Leuven Ana María Manzanas Calvo M. S. Suárez Lafuente Universidad de Salamanca Lincoln Geraghty Universidad de Oviedo University of Portsmouth Javier Martín Arista Juan Antonio Suárez Universidad de La Rioja Vincent Gillespie Universidad de Murcia University of Oxford John McLeod Henry Sussman University of Leeds Cristina Giorcelli University of Buffalo / Yale University Università di Roma Tre Lavinia Merlini Justine Tally Università di Pisa Manuel José Gómez Lara Universidad de La Laguna Universidad de Sevilla Rafael Monroy Paloma Tejada Caller Universidad de Murcia José Luis González Escribano Universidad Complutense de Madrid Universidad de Oviedo Carmen Muñoz Geoff Thompson Universitat de Barcelona Francisco Gonzálvez García University of Liverpool Universidad de Almería Jo Anne Neff Van Aertselaer I. M. Tieken-Boon van Ostade Universidad Complutense de Madrid Agnieszka Graff University of Leiden Warsaw University Heather Nunn Harish Trivedi Roehampton University Leighton Grist University of Delhi University of Winchester James Ogude Carmen Valero Garcés University of the Witwatersrand Adolphe Haberer Universidad de Alcalá de Henares Université Lumière-Lyon 2 Ana Ojea Ruth Wodak Universidad de Oviedo Pilar Hidalgo Lancaster University Universidad de Málaga Mohamed-Salah Omri Pilar Zozaya University of Exeter Juan Carlos Hidalgo University of Barcelona Universidad de Sevilla Klaus-Uwe Panther Universität Hamburg Ton Hoenselaars Utrecht University Pedro Javier Pardo Universidad de Salamanca Jacqueline Hurtley Universitat de Barcelona
Revista de la Asociación Española de Estudios Anglo-Norteamericanos
30.2 (December 2008) 30.2 (Diciembre 2008)
Table of Contents • Índice
Articles • Artículos
1492: Europe in America and America in Europe: Or, Traveling Metaphors in the Discoveries of America Boris Vejdovsky University of Lausanne ...... 11
The Lure of the Object in Henry James’s Fictions of Thwarted Desire: Reflections on the Libidinal and Social Poetics of Literary Forms Esther Sánchez-Pardo González Universidad Complutense de Madrid ...... 27
‘Trust them to Figure it Out’: Toni Morrison’s Books for Children María Lourdes López Ropero Universidad de Alicante ...... 43
The very idea! A Corpus-based Comparison of IDEA, CONCEPT and NOTION and their Formal Equivalents in Spanish Christopher S. Butler Swansea University ...... 59
Out of the Dark Room: Photography and Memory in Rachel Seiffert’s Holocaust Tales Cristina Pividori Universidad Autónoma de Barcelona ...... 79
Sex-Related Euphemism and Dysphemism: An Analysis in Terms of Conceptual Metaphor Theory Eliecer Crespo Fernández Universidad de Alicante ...... 95
A Wind of Change: The New British Colonial Policy in Post-Revolt India Belkacem Belmekki University of Oran, Algeria ...... 111
Goodbye to Isherwood: the Rise and Fall of a Literary Reputation Andrew Monnickendam Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona ...... 125
Reviews • Reseñas
Andrew Teverson 2007: Salman Rushdie reviewed by Christopher Rollason ...... 141
Ocke-Schwen Bohn and Murray J. Munro, eds. 2007: Language Experience in Second Language Speech Learning: In honor of James Emil Flege reviewed by Juli Cebrian ...... 147
Malcolm Coulthard and Alison Johnson 2007: An Introduction to Forensic Linguistics: Language in Evidence reviewed by M. Teresa Turell ...... 155
Aránzazu Usandizaga and Andrew Monnickendam, eds. 2007: Back to Peace. Reconciliation and Retribution in the Postwar Period reviewed by Eva M. Pérez Rodríguez ...... 161
Eva Darias Beautell and María Jesús Hernáez Lerena, eds. 2007: Canon Disorders: Gendered Perspectives on Literature and Film in Canada and the United States reviewed by Nieves Pascual ...... 167
Juan F. Elices 2006: The Satiric Worlds of William Boyd. A Case-Study reviewed by María Losada Friend ...... 173
Jorge Luis Bueno Alonso 2007: La épica de la Inglaterra anglosajona. Historia y textos desde el auge de Mercia al declive de la monarquía (750-1016) reviewed by Juan Camilo Conde-Silvestre ...... 179
David Walton 2008: Introducing Cultural Studies. Learning through Practice reviewed by Rubén Valdés Miyares ...... 187
Abstracts in Spanish ...... 193
Acknowledgements ...... 201
Instructions to Contributors ...... 203
ARTICLES
ARTÍCULOS
ATLANTIS. Journal of the Spanish Association of Anglo-American Studies. 30.2 (December 2008): 11–25 ISSN 0210-6124
1492: Europe in America and America in Europe: Or, Traveling Metaphors in the Discoveries of America
Boris Vejdovsky University of Lausanne [email protected]
Christopher Columbus may be the forerunner of our (post)modern condition: in his first accounts of the encounter with that land which is about to become America are contained all the tensions and contradictions of our contemporary world. Columbus is animated by faith, but he is greedy; he looks for a new world, but behaves like a tourist; he tries to decipher the unknown, but repeats the clichés of his own culture. Yet from all this a new world unexpectedly appears. This essay explores the cultural and rhetorical conditions that led to the emergence of ‘America’ by focusing on some moments when material reality and metaphor coalesced to produce unforeseeable and unforgettable effects.
Key words : Columbus; cultures in contact; invention of America; traveling metaphors
I retained the landscape, and I have since annually carried off what it yielded without a wheelbarrow. With respect to landscapes, “I am monarch of all I survey, My right there is none to dispute”. — Henry David Thoreau, Walden, Where I Lived, and What I Lived For
The moment we try to look at Europe in America — Europa en las Américas — or, as we should say, probably, Europa en las Indias, we are lost: we all know that these are not the Indies; we all know that these people on the beach are not Indians. But what good does that do to you? What is a man to do? What shall we call it, or call them? So we may turn to that place beyond the European Western horizon and try to see what there may have been to see more than five hundred years ago, when it was not, seen from the European shores, a nation, nor a continent, not a even a place, just space, nothing to look at but something to see — a landscape. A landscape may seem to be a place all have in common, a place where nobody would be an illegal alien, a place that would be a pre-linguistic place where no 12 Boris Vejdovsky hermeneutic activity would be required to be admitted there. The law of the landscape — unlike the jus soli or the jus sanguinis — would be an unwritten and unspoken law, for it would precede language and the law. The landscape would then be the motherly face of the world, the presence to which we could be present, a place that would require no knowledge and a place out of which no decree could ban us. The landscape would always be home to us; as Mary has it in Robert Frost’s ‘The Death of the Hired Man’, “Home is the place where, when you have to go there, / They have to take you in” (1969: 38). A close reading of the narratives of the early American moments, that is the early moments of the encounters between Europe-to-be and America-to-be, suggests that far from being a pre-semantic and pre-linguistic place, the American landscape encountered by the first European explorers has always already been a European text. Europe has always been in America, and in a mirroring performative effect Europe only became Europe when the name America could be read and pronounced in European languages. Thus, ‘America’ appears as the result of a paradigmatic act of reading — an act of reading with unique, unpredictable and non-repeatable consequences. The American landscape and the complex phenomenon we have come to call America results from what Hayden White calls the “narrativization of [a] real event” (1981: 793). ‘America’ but also ‘Europe’ have come down to us as the result of a metaphorical transformation “that is productive of meaning by its imposition of a certain formal coherence on a virtual chaos of ‘events’, which in themselves cannot be said to have any particular form at all” (White 1981: 795). Christopher Columbus, the first European-to-be in America-to-be, and the first American in Europe, presents us with “something that may be true or false”, and that something we have come to call ‘America’ “is nothing other than the meaning or ultimate nature of reality shared by the average members of [a] given culture” (White 1981: 797). It is of course necessary to use very carefully these commonplaces where the central tropes of our metaphysics transport us. It would be absurd, indeed, to consider Columbus as the ‘father’ of ‘America’ or the American nation. Columbus can only be a father in a highly paradoxical sense, only in the sense that his tropes engendered a place that kept escaping him, even as it is escaping us. This escaping sense of America begins with Columbus himself. We are not even certain that the remains of the body which were sent back to Spain in 1898 and buried in Seville Cathedral are really his. However, as Felipe Armesto points out, if these are not the bones of the Admiral, “the relics of his mind . . . are [in Seville] in the form of the surviving books from his library and the notes he scrawled in their margins” (1996: 184).1 In what follows, I wish to concentrate on a few of these relics that contain, in our
1 One of the best contemporary expositions of Columbus’s life and historical circumstances is certainly Felipe Fernández-Armesto’s Columbus. Armesto examines the “[t]he early controversy [which] was dominated by the legal wrangle between Columbus’s heirs and the monarchs of Spain over the non-fulfillment of the royal promises of 1492” (185). He then verifies the different competing theories regarding the ‘discovery’ of America, such as the theory of the “unknown pilot”, the Chinese route or the Norse route. He concludes that “Columbus was the first in a continuous tradition of transatlantic navigation which has continued to our time: he is therefore
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Western sense of the word, the first American metaphors. This is what the log of the Almirante de las mares oceanas reads on 11th October 1492:
A las dos horas después de media noche pareció la tierra, de la cual estarían dos leguas. Amaynaron todas las velas, . . . temporizando hasta el día viernes que llegaron a una isleta de los Lucayos, que se llamaba en lengua de los Indios Guanahaní. Luego vieron gente desnuda. . . . 2 (Colón 1985: 89-90)
We need to heed not only the “wonder of that first encounter [that] still survives” (Fiedler 1968: 38) and what is fascinating in this inscription of the place in Western tropology, i.e. reading of tropes, but also what is so trite and banal in it.3 Indeed, in the most banal and apparently commonsensical manner ‘the people’, la gente, immediately become ‘Indians’, and the archipelago of the Lucayos is readily reminiscent of the Floridian ‘Keys’ that derive their name from it. A few months later, as he was sailing back to Spain, Columbus wrote in his famous letter to Luis de Santángel:
Porque sé que habréis placer de la gran victoria que Nuestro Señor me ha dado en mi viaje, vos escribo esta, por la cual sabréis cómo en 33 días pasé a las Indias con la armada que los ilustrísimos Rey y Reina, nuestros señores, me dieron donde yo hallé muchas islas pobladas con gente sin número, y dellas todas he tomado posesión por sus Altezas con pregón y bandera real extendida, y no me fue contradicho.4 (Colón 1985: 221-22)
We can only be struck, as Stephen Greenblatt notes, how ignorant and helpless Columbus is before the spectacle of the world he encounters, and how in “the early our discoverer of America” (189; emphasis added). Indeed, whether we like it or not, Columbus started to shape America as the land that we the people of the global Judeo-Christian world inhabit. 2 ‘Two hours after midnight, land appeared; they were probably about two leagues of it. They took in the sails, . . . and biding their time until morning on Friday, when they reached a small island of the Lucayos called Guanahaní in the language of the Indians. Soon they saw naked people. . . .’ (Colón 1960: 47) 3 Thus, Washington Irving simply states: “As Columbus supposed . . . to have landed . . . in the extremity of India, he called the natives by the general appellation of Indians, which was generally adopted, before the true nature of the discovery was known, and since has been extended to all the aboriginals of the new world” (1981: 94). Irving’s casual remark ignores the performative nature of language, but it also shows that there is no going back on performative speech acts. Felipe Armesto points out that when the geographer Martin Waldseemüller, who had proposed to name the new continent America after Amerigo Vespucci, realized what an essential role Columbus had played, he “retracted and restored Columbus to the honor of the discovery”. However, as in the case of the ‘Indians’, “the name had begun to stick” (1996: 187). 4 ‘As I know that you will be pleased at the great victory with which Our Lord has crowned my voyage, I write this to you, from which you will learn how in thirty-three days, I passed to the Indies with the fleet that the most illustrious king and queen our sovereigns gave to me. And there I found very many islands filled with people innumerable and of them all I have taken possession for their highnesses, by proclamation made and with the royal standard unfurled, and no opposition was offered to me’. (Colón 1960: 191)
ATLANTIS. Journal of the Spanish Association of Anglo-American Studies. 30.2 (December 2008): 11–25 ISSN 0210-6124 14 Boris Vejdovsky discourse of the New World, the reassuring signs of administrative order—bureaucratic formulas already well established in a large number of earlier . . . encounters in Europe and Africa are deceptive; consciously and unconsciously they draw us away from a sense of all that is unsettling, unique, and terrible in the first European contacts with the peoples of the Americas” (1991 :54). For the first time, but also definitively, in the very moment he sees them, the land becomes las Indias and its inhabitants ‘Indians’. In that very second the land and the people are informed by European culture and both the land and the people start to follow a new line, the only line Western history and Western stories know: the written line.5 Columbus describes the landscapes he sees as an uncannily familiar topography and toponymy that erases its strangeness and cloaks it in Eurocentric tropes of the Renaissance aesthetics of the locus amoenus. As he describes the islands, it may seem that he “[l]iterally does not see anything new at all” (Debray 1991: 11):
A la primera qu yo hallé puse nombre San Salvador, a comemoración de Su alta Magestad, el cual maravillosamente todo esto ha dado; los Indios la llaman Guanahaní. A la segonda puse nombre la isla de Santa María de Concepción; a la tercera, Fernandina; a la cuarta, la Isabela; a la quinta, la Isla Juana, y así a cada una puse nombre nuevo.6 (Colón 1985: 222)
He tomado posesión; puse nombre ‘I took possession; I gave a name’, writes Columbus about the lands he encounters, implicitly claiming a great victory in tones reminiscent of the Christian chronicles of the gran victoria over the Moors in Spain. But does Columbus really believe he is in India and that he can take possession of the territories of the greatest world power of his time with a fistful of men? This mystery is part of the complex personality of the Admiral, but we need to resist the normalizing administrative discourse and realize that instead of the chronicle of a battle, we get “an account of a series of speech acts” (Greenblatt 1991: 54). Indeed, Columbus’s fleet has no priest on board, but there is an escrivano, a ‘scrivener’ or a ‘secretary’, who establishes the legal documents through which Columbus takes possession of the land through “writing that invades space and capitalizes time” (de Certeau 1975: 225; my translation). America passes under the European scriptural law — the landscapes themselves are subjected to the metaphors of Columbus’s writing:
5 Information is often understood as ‘news’ nowadays, that is, as the transmission of data by (mass) media. I use the verb inform in its now obsolete though by no means absent sense which is to “To put into (material) form or shape; to form, shape, frame, mould, fashion” (OED). In a world of global information and data circulation we may tend to forget the transitive and performative qualities of the verb inform, which spring to the eye when we look at its etymology: “informare to give form to, shape, fashion, form an idea of, describe, f. in- (in) + forma (form)” (OED). 6 ‘To the first island that I found I gave the name San Salvador, in rememberance of the Divine Majesty, Who has marvellously bestowed all this; the Indians call it “Guanahaní”. To the second I gave the name Isla de Santa María de Concepción; to the third, Fernandina; to the fourth, Isabella; to the fifth, Isla Juana, and so to each one I gave a new name’. (Colón 1960: 191)
ATLANTIS. Journal of the Spanish Association of Anglo-American Studies. 30.2 (December 2008): 11–25 ISSN 0210-6124 1492: Europe in America and America in Europe 15
Juana . . . y todas las otras [islas] son fertilísimas en demasiado grado, y esta en extremo; en ella hay muchos puertos en la costa de la mar sin comparación de otro que yo sepa en cristianos, y harto ríos buenos y grandes que es maravilla. Las tierras dellas son altas y en ellas muy muchas sierras y montañas altísimas, sin comparación de la isla de Tenerife de mil hechuras, y todas andables y llenas de árboles de mil maneras y altas, y parecen que lleguen al cielo; y tengo dicho que jamás pierden la hoja, según lo pude comprender, que los ví tan verdes y tan floridos, dellos con fruto, de dellos en otro término, según es su calidad; y cantaban el ruiseñor y otros pajaritos de mil maneras en el mes de noviembre por allí donde yo andaba.7 (Colón 1985: 223)
In these lines appears for the first time Columbus’s conviction that he has found the route to Paradise; the inaugural moment of Columbian writing offers a teleology to the newly-encountered land, which is both a projection into the future of a paradise regained and a return to an affective and mystical past. But this is not only about a mystic vision of the world, and Columbus’s metaphors are also coldly economic. The man he is writing to, Luis de Santángel, is escrivano de ración, that is, one of the ministers of treasury of the sovereigns, and one of his most important sponsors: in this inaugural moment of global capitalism, America is already a question of big business. When Columbus describes las Indias as paradisiacal, it is almost impossible to discern what belongs to empirical experience and what comes from his voracious bookishness, for, as Armesto points out, “At almost every discernible stage of his career . . . practical experience and book-learning seem to have reinforced one another, with neither monopolizing the process of his intellectual formation or mental development” (1996: 25). Although “There is no evidence that [he] ever read any of the chivalric literature of the sea, … he moved in a world steeped in it; his life was, in a sense, an embodiment of it” (1996: 4-5). Thus, veracity or simply verisimilitude is not the attempted effect of Columbus’s metaphors. When he assures his reader that the “mountains are incomparably higher that those of Tenerife”, his hyperbole really shows that he is looking for a point of comparison that his reader may know — indeed, with its 3,718 meters, the Teide, the culminating point of Spain, is indeed “incomparably” higher than any of the low Bahamas hills that Columbus may have seen. It is again the “banality of the hyperboles” (Debray 1991: 14; my translation) that must arrest us and we must wonder where it comes from and what effects it produces. When he addresses his letters to the sovereigns and bestows them with the fantasy title of King and Queen of the Islands of the Ocean, Columbus makes a reality of fiction and
7 ‘[Española] and all the other [islands] are very fertile to a limitless degree, and this island is extremely so. In it are many harbors and the coast of the sea, beyond comparison with others which I know in the Christendom, and many rivers, good and large, which is marvelous. Its lands are high, and there are in it many sierras and very lofty mountains, beyond comparison with the Island of Tenerife. All are most beautiful, and of a thousand shapes, and all are accessible and filled with trees of a thousand kinds and tall, and they seem to touch the sky. And I am told that they never lose their foliage, as I can understand, for I saw them as green and lovely as they are in Spain in May, and some of them were flowering, some bearing fruit, and some in another stage, according to their nature. And the nightingale was singing and other birds of a thousand kinds in the month of November there where I went’. (Colón 1960: 192)
ATLANTIS. Journal of the Spanish Association of Anglo-American Studies. 30.2 (December 2008): 11–25 ISSN 0210-6124 16 Boris Vejdovsky plays on a tradition that made of the “erection of an island-kingdom . . . a common dénouement of the chivalric romance” (Armesto 1996: 4). One can read Columbus’s “bookish taste” (Armesto 1996: 23) in his descriptions of las Indias that he represents as a cornucopia where all is honey and good grass and plants and fruit. Columbus sees but a landscape, and “Men interest [him] much less than trees and birds” [Debray 1991: 14; my translation]. He insists that “the nightingale . . . sing[s] and other birds of a thousand kinds in the month of November”. It is not nightingales, he hears, for though there are birds that resemble the nightingale (ruiseñor) in the islands of the Caribbean Sea, the poetic bird of Columbus’s letter is only indigenous in Europe and Asia. Not unlike Keats who would invoke the ‘immortal bird’ to write about the condition of a forlorn humanity, Columbus’s describes a nightingale that has crossed the Atlantic on the ‘wings of poesy’. The bird of love and of the good garden of medieval romance lends its song to las Indias and makes them resound in recognizable tones. Columbus may not know exactly where he is from a geographical point of view, but he knows that this is not Catayo;8 on the other hand, he has a metaphysical interpretation of his discovery, an interpretation that America will have to live with from then on. The French historian Michel Lequenne shows that in his copy of the Cardinal Pierre d’Ailly’s Imago Mundi Columbus wrote in the margin of the text: “‘Avicenna teaches us that beyond the equator lies a very temperate zone, because that’s where Paradise on earth is’. And further, the marginalia of the same book reads, like a pointed finger toward the horizon: ‘that’s where paradise is!’” (1991: 21; my translation). By the same token, in a famous letter to the sovereigns known as the carta rarísima and relating his third voyage, Columbus writes:
[C]reo que allí [debajo de la línea equinoçial] es el Paraíso Terrenal, adonde no puede llegar nadie salvo por voluntad divina. . . . Yo no tomo qu’el Paraíso Terrenal sea en forma de montaña áspera, . . . salvo qu’él sea en el colmo, allí donde dixe la figura del peçón de la pera, y que poco a poco andando hazia allí desde muy lexos se va subiendo a él. . . . Grandes indiçios son estos del Paraíso Terrenal, porqu’el sitio es conforme a la opinión d’estos sanctos e sacros theólogos.9 (Colón 1982: 218)
Further in that letter, as is often the case, “[D]isparate authorities are lumped together without sorting, like compacted waste”—Aristotle, Pliny, Averroes, the Cardinal Pierre d’Ailly, but also St Augustine and Ptolemy all comfort Columbus in his physical and metaphysical reading of the world, while “Some delicious irrelevancies are indulged in to add to the species of learning” (Armesto 1996: 121).
8 Armesto notes that “In none of his initial impressions of the New World — neither of the land nor of its people — did [Columbus] claim to detect any evidence that he was in Asia” (1996: 84). 9 ‘I believe that there [below the equator] lies Paradise on Earth, where nobody can go except Divine Providence. . . . I do not believe that Paradise on earth has the shape of an abrupt mountain, . . . but much rather that it is on top of what resembles a nipple on a pear, and to which one ascends, little by little, by an incline taken from very far away. . . . These are precious indications that this is Paradise on earth, for it is in conformity with the opinion of holy theologians’ (translation bv).
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At the same time, the proselytism and the mystico-religious vocabulary are sustained by economic metaphors, and Cristoforo — who has now changed his name to Cristóbal — is not only the bearer of Christ, but also the purveyor of metaphors of investment. The Virgilian landscapes of the new world are not just marvelous; they are also worth investing in:
La Española es maravilla: las sierras y las montañas y las vegas y las campiñas y las tierras tan hermosas y gruesas para plantar y sembrar, para criar ganado de todas suertes, para edificios de villas y lugares.10 (Colón 1985: 223)
Central to this description of Española is the Spanish word ganado meaning ‘cattle’. The word comes from ganar and resounds with the furor of battle as it means ‘to win’, ‘to vanquish’ or ‘to conquer’. But here the past participle of the verb has to do with economics and investment. Ganado is used here in the sense of increasing one’s capital by commerce, industry or work. Thus metonymically, in Spanish, the ganado (‘cattle’) is that which a man has earned for himself. The verb ganar (in the sense of ‘gaining’ or ‘earning’) is also central to the contract Columbus signed with the Kings, a contract, known as the Capitulaciones de Santa Fé, of 17 April 1492:
Otro sí, que Vuestras Altezas hacen al dicho D. Cristóbal Colón su visorrey [virrey] y gobernador general en las dichas islas y tierras firmes, que, como es dicho, él descubriere o ganare en las dichas mares. . . .11 (Gil; emphasis added)
By the same token, the term recurs in the contract, the so-called Mandamiento de los Reyes, signed by the Kings and Columbus on 30th April 1492, a few days before his departure for his first voyage:
Por cuanto vos Cristóbal Colón vades por nuestro mandado á descubrir é ganar . . . ciertas Islas, é Tierra-firme en la dicha mar Océana . . . después que hayades descubierto, é ganáredes. . . .12. (Mandamiento de los Reyes, 30 April 1492; quoted in Pagán 1995 :12; emphasis added)
The economic metaphors that confer coherence to Columbus’s mission are also the tropes that instantaneously transform Guanahaní into San Salvador. Even as Columbus is invested with the symbolic and semiotic powers of the Sovereigns who invest their money into the enterprise, his “promotional literature” (Armesto 1996: 79) is to induce the capitalists of the already old world to invest into the new economical paradise he has
10 ‘Española is a marvel: the hills and the mountains, the plains and the valleys, and this earth so rich and good for sowing and planting, and for raising cattle, and for building towns and cities’ (translation bv). 11 ‘Also, that your Highnesses make the aforesaid Don Christopher Columbus their Viceroy and General Governor of the aforesaid islands and mainland, which he may, as mentioned above, discover and gain. . . .’ (translation bv; emphasis added). 12 ‘You, Christopher Columbus, whose mandate it will be to discover and gain . . . certain islands and mainland in the Ocean Sea . . . after you have discovered and gained them. . . .’ (translation bv).
ATLANTIS. Journal of the Spanish Association of Anglo-American Studies. 30.2 (December 2008): 11–25 ISSN 0210-6124 18 Boris Vejdovsky discovered. It is striking that no indication whatsoever is given as to how Columbus is to ‘gain’ those newly discovered territories with barely a hundred men and a fleet of three ships that are not designed for warfare. Columbus is the bearer of credentials for the Great Khan — can he hope to win (ganar) against an army that the old world has dreaded at least since its description of it by Marco Polo? The ‘great victory’ (gran victoria) which he announces is not a military victory, and the sense of the verb ganar has to be sought in the economic field. It may be forever impossible to fathom the real sense of Columbus’s plans and intentions which have fed over the centuries many myths and legends contributing to obscure the sense of the ‘discovery of America’, but it is essential to note that this investment into Columbian metaphors by the “Renaissance Europe of merchants . . . produced America, which has, in turn, produced modern mercantile Europe” (Debray 1991: 63; my translation). By combining the quest for gold with the quest for Paradise, Columbus triggered our modern condition.13 It is tempting to see Columbus today either as a zealot carried away by his faith or a greedy adventurer obsessed with money, recognition and fame. Certainly, “Columbus [never was] a man to do anything for modesty’s sake”, and there is serious evidence that points to his obsession with “social respectability” and “lineage” (Armesto 1996: 3, 17, 117), and Columbus consciously casts himself in his writings as a “divinely elected protagonist”. He worshipped the Holy Trinity and dreamed of a Jerusalem crusade, but despite his piousness “his attitude to the Indians was religious without being humane” (Armesto 1996: 16, 138). But Columbus’s contradictory intentions and desires do not explain everything. Thus, Tzvetan Todorov points out in Columbus’s writings moments when the very purpose of exploration — the purpose of ganar either in the military of the economic sense — seem to be of secondary importance. Columbus reports in a letter that he has found “profitable things without number”, but that “[he] tarried not in any harbor,
13 The constitution of the ‘West’ and much of what has happened as its teleo-theological development is contained in these inaugural moments of contact. The discovery, or the invention of America, changed the Judeo-Christian world by adding the West to its geographical and mental maps, even as it started “the systematic investigation of the other man, the other culture” (Fiedler 1968: 41). 1492 can be seen as the symbolic beginning of “the westward displacement of the center of gravity of [‘Western society’]”; “the Mediterranean ‘frog-pond’ has been replaced by an Atlantic ‘lake’ across which we traffic in goods and ideas and around which we [Westerners] huddle for our defence” (Armesto 1996: 193). Even today, 1492 determines a globalized world that has been developing under the aegis of what Debray calls the “unfair trade” started by the discoveries (1991: 33). Indeed, Debray adds, “we have not fundamentally changed”; he further proposes that we have just modified the Renaissance model of the trinity of the “the soldier-the merchant-the missionary”. . . . “In 1492, the plundering West was to ‘attract all the peoples to real religion’ (Las Casas). In 1892, it was to attract them to Progress via the railroad. In 1992, it was to bestow on them the benefits of Democracy through free elections” (1991: 33; my translation). In 2009, our post-modern trinity is the arm merchant-the international financier-the humanitarian NGO; we are as obsessed by profit and as full of generous feelings as the men of the Renaissance. As Debray concludes, “Columbus is our paradigm; he is our grand-father” (1991: 35). On this subject, see also Walter Mignolo (1995) and José Rabasa (1993).
ATLANTIS. Journal of the Spanish Association of Anglo-American Studies. 30.2 (December 2008): 11–25 ISSN 0210-6124 1492: Europe in America and America in Europe 19 because [he] sought to see the most countries that [he] could, to give the story of them [hacer relación] to [their] highnesses” (quoted in Todorov 1999: 13). It appears that immediate interest is not the only thing that guides Columbus and that “for [him] ‘to discover’ is an intransitive action” (Todorov 1999: 13; emphasis added). Discovery justifies itself by itself, “just as”, Todorov further proposes, “for modern man a thing, an action, or a being is beautiful only if it finds its justification in itself” (1999: 13). One must be careful not to interpret this as some sort of idealism on Columbus’s part. On the other hand, Columbus’s encounter with the American new world and his wish to ‘give the story’ (hacer relación) suggests that there may be something intransitive in acts of reading and writing. For Westerners born under the regime of reading and writing, reading takes place, it happens, even when there is, apparently, nothing to read. When Columbus reaches the other side of the Ocean Sea, reading happens; it happens — just as we say it is raining — and as reading happens, it starts to conquer and subject new territories. And that territory is ‘fertile to a limitless degree’; Las Indias are a virginal and Edenic land even as they are a cultivated garden where Columbus’s Adamic land-surveying and sowing of semes can take place. The territory is also propitious for the edification of villas y lugares (‘towns and cities’), and Columbus’s ordering of the American garden evokes the opposition between sedentary culture and nomadic culture, an opposition that would particularly affect the relations between the newcomers and the indigenous populations. Columbus starts to define America in terms of the Biblical opposition between Cain the shepherd and Abel, the sedentary cultivator. As we read in Genesis, after he has slain his brother, Cain is “mark[ed]” by God who drives him out “from the face of the earth”; Cain becomes “a fugitive and a vagabond in the earth”. Only after he has “builded a city, and called the name of the city, after the name of his son Enoch” (Gen. 4.14, 4.17 [King James]), does Cain’s escape and stray life come to an end. This central opposition role in the Judeo-Christian world between sedentary and nomadic cultures is also essential for Columbus’s self-definition. In the Capitulaciones de Santa Fé, Columbus managed to obtain from the Sovereigns that his titles of Viceroy and Governor General be hereditary and therefore pass on to his sons. Columbus invests with his signs of power territories which should at least indirectly bear his name. For the first time, Columbus evokes an American urban landscape, the precursor of the future ‘New Jerusalem’ that would be supposed to put an end to the wandering of fallen mankind on earth. And Columbus himself — Italian born, Portuguese by marriage, Catalan by alliance and family, Spanish by allegiance — Columbus the European wanderer, seeks to put an end to his own vagrancy by founding his new city.14 The opposition between Cain and Abel, between a sedentary and nomadic culture, but also between a benevolent and a dangerous ‘other’ appears in Columbus’s early relation of the ‘Indians’:
La gente desta isla . . . andan todos desnudos, hombres y mugeres, así como sus madres los paren. . . . Ellos no tienen hierro ni acero ni armas ni son para ello; no porque no sea gente
14 On Columbus’s vagrant life and his desire to ‘establish’ himself, see Armesto (1996: 1-65, 157).
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bien dispuesta y de hermosa estatura, salvo que son muy temerosos a maravilla.15 (Colón 1985: 224)
The nakedness of the Indians is a sign of innocence that coincides with the virginity of the land that offers itself without resistance. Later, that same nakedness will become disquieting or threatening, but here Columbus sees all the people as children and mothers; as Columbus notes in his log: “Son gente … muy sin mal ni de guerra, desnudos todos, hombres y mujeres, como su madre los parió” (Colón 1985: 119). These naked people know no harm, and, unlike the descendents of Cain, whose grandson Tubal- Cain is “an instructor of every artificer in brass and iron” (Gen. 4.22), these child-like people are fearful and are ignorant of the metal that makes the strength of armies in Columbus’s world. Again, the materiality of geography, military force and economics cannot be detached from religious and metaphysical semantics. Of course, those who want to exploit las Indias can only be struck by the advantage of having as an opponent a people fearing to wage war. But that is not, at least ostensibly, the sense of Columbus’s remark. He emphasizes rather that in this childlike world everything seems united in its original simplicity, a simplicity in which what is and what seems to be is united in the same thing. The land is feminine and childlike — it is a land and a people in its infancy, that is, as the Latin root infans suggests, ‘incapable of speech’, ‘without language’. Columbus endows these infant people and lands with language — with the metaphoric language of a lettered European. This gift of language makes the land speak a language he, and we with him, can understand. Columbus speaks and dictates his text and none of the children dares to contradict him — “y no me fue contradicho” (Colón 1985: 222). ‘America’ (our America) comes into existence when Columbus makes it speak. Columbus resorts to similes to describe landscapes ‘similar to Castile’; he repeatedly hears nightingales that do not fly in that part of the world; his hyperboles transform the hills of the West Indies into the ‘highest mountains of the world’ and the rivulets running down those hills into ‘large rivers laden with gold’. One may rightly object that there is nothing special in all this: Columbus explores the unknown with the known, which is, after all, the very principle of metaphor. Metaphors say that which cannot otherwise be said and give a language to that which is incapable of speech or expression. However, we need to ponder further the banality of this tropological operation which is not innocent at all. As Wayne Franklin notes, “from the start language and event in America have been linked almost preternaturally to each other” (1979: xi). Columbus’s encounter with the lands lying west of Europe developed in a narrative that began to reshape Europe even as it started to shape “what finally [and always provisionally] emerged as an identifiable American culture” (1979: xi). It is a fact that on Friday 12 October 1492 a man, Cristoforo Colombo — for he was not Don Cristóbal yet — landed on the beach of a
15 ‘The people of this island and of all the other islands which I have found and of which I have information, all go naked, men and women, as their mothers bore them. . . . They have no iron or steel or weapons, nor are they fitted to use them. This is not because they are they are not well built of handsome nature, but because they are marvellously timorous’. (Colón 1960 : 194)
ATLANTIS. Journal of the Spanish Association of Anglo-American Studies. 30.2 (December 2008): 11–25 ISSN 0210-6124 1492: Europe in America and America in Europe 21 small island (probably in the Bahamas). But “what was fact became metaphor” (Franklin 1979: xii) and that metaphor traveled and started to do things and it started telling the narrative (hacer relación) of Europe and of America and America in Europe. The America we know could not have existed without Columbus. There may have been, there would have been, something else, but Columbus’s act of reading of the land, was like all acts of reading unique and unforeseeable. It was an act whose consequences, dramatic or felicitous, can only be read and reconstructed a posteriori through other acts of reading. Columbus encountered a new world, but he read it in terms of his own cultural past, in terms of a world that became old as he encountered the new one. The Indias that Columbus claims to bring back with him to Europe spring from the Europe he brought to America; it was Europe in America for the first time and forever. When he writes to his European sponsors, Columbus resorts to Biblical parables and tropes to authenticate what he has seen, but he cannot convey his sense of marvel and wonder lest this should be incomprehensible for the people to whom he writes. Indeed, Cristoforo Colombo changes his name to Spanish Cristóbal Colón, making thus resound in that language the meaning of his name, ‘bearer of Christ’. His mysticism appears in many aspects of his life; he has visions, hears a voice of “celestial origin” or compares himself to Moses or Noah (Armesto 1996: 91-92). In his Letter to Santángel, he counts the days of his first crossing of the Atlantic so that a banal thirty- five-day voyage may become a more significant thirty-three day voyage — thus alluding to the supposed age of Christ when he died on the cross.16 Once it has been touched by ‘America’, it becomes increasingly difficult not to read the metaphors of the Admiral’s name. It is Colombo in Italian, the (traveling) ‘pigeon’ but also the ‘dove’ (of peace), the symbol of the covenant between man and God; it is Colón, in Spanish, with a suggestion of colonia (‘colony’); it becomes Columbus in English, a language in which the highfalutin Latinate inflexion resonates with antiquated, official and religious echoes. We do not have to believe any of this and we may discard all this as mere coincidence and pure anecdote, but in the unstoppable metaphorical chains started by Columbus his name itself speaks in metaphors. When he writes to his sponsors, Columbus resorts to metaphors, lest his readers “seeing they may see, and not perceive; and hearing they may hear, and not understand” (Mark 4.12). “No me fue contradicho”
16 Columbus left La Gomera in the Canary Islands on 6 September 1492; the log on Thursday 11 October reads he sighted land “on the second hour after midnight”, that is, on Friday 12 October. The actual crossing from the Canary Islands lasted therefore 35 or 36 days — “The admiral departed that day [6 September] from the port of Gomera and took the direction to begin his voyage” (Colón 1960: 39). Counting from 6 September would be better arithmetic but inferior poetry, but factuality is probably less important than the metaphorical impact of Columbus’s words. As Las Casas himself notes, all this is only reliable si no está mentirosa la letra (Colón 1982: 28) — ‘if the words are exact’, or, more literally, ‘if the words do not lie’. In the Letter to Santángel — often called ‘letter announcing the discovery’, Columbus writes, “vos escribo esta [carta], por la cual sabréis cómo en 33 días pasé a las Indias” (Colón 1982: 221). This is not the only inconsistency and contradiction in a document often presented (in school books and anthologies, for instance) as the bona fide birth certificate of America. On the controversies surrounding that letter, see Margarita Zamora’s (1993) ‘Christopher Columbus’s “Letter to the Sovereigns”’. See also Felipe Armesto’s response to Zamora’s argument (1996: 197, fn 14).
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(Colón 1985: 221-22), Columbus writes, and yet his traveling metaphors inscribe ‘America-to-be’ in a resistance to European language and discourse. ‘America’ would never be available as what it is, but only as that which it is not, that is, as the produce of a European trope. It may be true (as Wallace Stevens noted) that only in the land of metaphor can one be a poet, but it is certainly true that only through metaphor can one apprehend, now and then, ‘America’. The first images of America received in Europe result from Columbus’s tropes, and his exploration of America-to-be shows that “the territory does not precede the map; and it does not survive the mapping”. In Columbus’s relation of travel “the map precedes the territory . . . [and] engenders the territory” (Baudrillard 1981: 10; my translation). This does not mean that without Columbus there would be nothing on the other side of the Atlantic, but it means that the physical and material nature of what is out there would have been surveyed, mapped and organized differently, forming an ‘empire of signs’ different from the one we know. As Greenblatt puts it:
For if microbes lie altogether beyond the grasp of Renaissance discourse, the other forces that we have cited as brute facts should under no circumstances be naturalized. The possession of weapons and the will to use them on defenseless people are cultural matters that are intimately bound up with discourse: with the stories that a culture tells itself. . . . And if gold is a natural phenomenon, the all-consuming craving for gold most assuredly is not. (Greenblatt 1991 : 63-64)
One of the most surprising aspects of the Admiral’s adventure is that, far from being limited to a set of past events, his evocation of ‘America’ opens the doors of our (post)modernity. Columbus’s empire of signs starts to build a global empire of which Charles the Fifth (Carlos Primero) would say that the sun never sets on it. Columbus’s imperial tropes and the imperial language of the Renaissance trigger globalization by defining Europe’s central identity, even as it announces the decline of that centrality. We know today that Columbus would never see the rivers laden with gold, that much of the cinnamon and aloe he brought back turned out to be worthless, that he misunderstood the ‘Indians’ and that his geography was confused. Today, in our new globalized age, we may be tempted to be ironic about the Admiral’s naïveté, or maybe feel bitter that such a tremendous upheaval in the course of human events should have been caused by a blundering geographer, a poor naturalist, a self-taught theologian and a rather stultifying writer. Todorov has pointed out that Columbus had a “naïve conception of language” and that he “perceive[d] the name of things as confounded with the thing itself” (1999: 64), but Armesto even as essentially points out that “Columbus was fertile even in error” (1996: 131) and indeed his semantic fertility stops nowhere. In his desire to authenticate his discovery, to distinguish America-to-be from Europe, Columbus piles up hyperboles, similes and parables that make ‘America’ both European and other. It may seem absurd to us today that Columbus should rename the places he encounters with the full awareness that they already have a name. One must recall that he is not a conquistador in the military sense of the word; he is not a Cortés nor a Pizarro. It never occurs to Marco Polo, who Columbus has read, to rename the places
ATLANTIS. Journal of the Spanish Association of Anglo-American Studies. 30.2 (December 2008): 11–25 ISSN 0210-6124 1492: Europe in America and America in Europe 23 he visits. The Adam-like gesture of Columbus — “a cada una le puse un nombre Nuevo” (Colón 1985:222) — is the gesture of paradise remembered. ‘America-to-be’ is the infancy of the world, a world before the fall, a world in which there is no divorce between the word and world. By renaming the place, Columbus seeks to inscribe the land in its original authenticity. Guanahaní means nothing to Columbus. It means nothing because it is as meaningless as the gurgling of an infant in an adults’ world. Columbus wants to teach the land to speak so it may tell its true and authentic story. This narrative project consisting in making the land speak emerges maieutically and preternaturally as soon as Columbus starts reading las Indias. On 11 October 1492 he sights the land; that same day, Columbus logs the (speech) acts by which he takes possession of the land, and the entry ends:
Yo plaziendo a nuestro Señor levaré de aquí al tiempo de mi partida seis [Indios] a vuestras Altezas para que deprendan fablar. Ninguna bestia de ninguna manera vide, salvo papagayos en esta isla. (Colón 1985: 56)
Received translations into English of the passage generally render (somewhat euphemistically) Columbus’s project to kidnap Indians as ‘so they may learn our language’. Though this sounds sensible, I agree with Todorov who suggests that the words need to be taken literally: para que deprenden fablar, that is, ‘so they may learn how to speak’ (see Todorov 1999: 30). For Columbus, America-to-be is a child or a woman deprived of language and his attitude is characteristic of his “failure of attention to the other’s language” (Todorov 1999: 31). The Admiral listens and listens, but does not hear the other; he looks and looks, but does not see. It is therefore significant that he closes the entry on the day of the discovery with a note on parrots, those birds notorious for their repetitive and inauthentic language. “I saw no animal of any sort on this island except parrots” (Colón 1960: 48); and Las Casas comments — maybe a bit bewilderedly? — that these are ‘the very words of the Admiral’ (“Todas son palabras del Almirante” [Colón 1982: 31]). The authentic language of America-to-be speak is the language of a European male writer. His writing surveys and maps the territory of the other while making it impossible for the voice of the other to be heard. It is therefore unsurprising that the land Columbus discovers is not only child-like but also feminine. It is a femininity that is not threatening yet, but promises on the contrary the comfort of a motherly presence and easy satisfaction. Hence Columbus’s geography which makes the earth ‘pear- shaped’ like a woman’s breast:
[Fallé] que [el mundo] no era redondo en la forma qu’escriven, salvo que de la forma de una pera que sea toda muy redonda, . . . o como quien tiene una pelota muy redonda y en un lugar d’ella fuesse como una teta de muger allí puesta, y qu’esta parte d’este peçón sea la más alta e más propicia al cielo. . . .17 (Colón 1982: 215)
17 ‘I Found that the earth was not round as we have been told, but in the shape of a very round pear. . . . Or it could be like a very round ball with a nipple on it, and this woman’s nipple would be its highest point and also closest to heaven. . . .’ (translation bv).
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Columbus initiates a tropology that has since then confounded femininity, America and otherness. Accordingly, “America, depicted as a naked or semi naked woman with bow and arrow and sometimes with a decapitated head in her arms,” became part of the “iconology accounting for the fourth part of the world” (Mignolo 1995: 274) and this otherness would be expressed in terms of possession and rape or in terms of bewitching and castration. For Columbus, the land and its inhabitants have not lost their innocence yet. America, for Columbus, is an intransitive object of reading as well as a white page on which he writes with his pen and his sword. Unlike, Ulysses — another beautiful stray traveler and liar — Columbus would never see America as his submissive and devout Penelope, and America would be possessed by much more violent suitors. In that, he may be the first American tragic hero facing an American destiny he does not completely comprehend, a hero who can never put an end to the wandering to which America condemns those who try to possess her.
Works cited
Armesto, Felipe Fernández 1996: Columbus. London: Duckworth. Baudrillard, Jean 1981: Simulacres et simulations. Paris: Galilée. Certeau (de), Michel 1975: L’écriture de l’histoire. Paris: Gallimard. Colón, Cristóbal 1982: Textos y documentos completos. Ed. Consuelo Varela. Madrid: Alianza. ––––– 1985: Diario de a bordo. Ed. Luis Arranz. Madrid: Historia 16. ––––– (Christopher Columbus) 1960: The Journal of Christopher Columbus. Trans. Cecil Jane. London: Hakluyt Society. Debray, Régis 1991: Christophe Colomb: le visiteur de l’aube. Paris: La Différence. Fiedler, Leslie 1968: The Return of the Vanishing American. New York: Stein and Day. Franklin, Wayne 1979: Discoverers, Explorers, Settlers: The Diligent Writers of Early America. Chicago: U. of Chicago P. Frost, Robert 1969: The Poetry of Robert Frost. Ed. Edward Connery Lathem. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston. Gil, Fernando: Documentos para el estudio de la Iglesia en América Latina
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White, Hayden 1981: ‘The Narrativization of Real Events’. Critical Inquiry 7.4: 793-98. Zamora, Margarita 1993: ‘Christopher Columbus’s “Letter to the Sovereigns”: Announcing the Discovery’. Stephen Greenblatt, ed. New World Encounters. Berkeley: U. of California P. 1-11.
Received 4 September 2008 Revised version accepted 9 November 2008
Boris Vejdovsky (Ph.D. Lausanne) is an Associate Professor (MER I) in the English Department at the University of Lausanne, where he teaches the literatures of the Americas and American culture. His research interests include visual media and literature, gender theory and contemporary women poets, among others. He is the co-editor of the volume Body Politics (Lausanne, 2002) and of The Seeming and Seen (Peter Lang, 2006), and is the author of numerous articles on American authors. Examples of his work in American cultural studies include ‘9/11: The Morning After and the Melancholy Streets of Manhattan’ (in Representing Realities [Günter Narr, 2003]), ’Strange Fruit: The Violent Beauty of the American Pastoral (New Formation, May 2004), or ‘Hidden Truths and Open Lies: The Performance of U.S. History and Mythography in Tony Kushner’s Angels in America ([forthcoming] American Secrets, Jose Liste, ed.). A book entitled Ideas of Order: Ethics and Space in American Literature is forthcoming with the Gunter Narr Press, while another current book project deals with symbolic cultural forms in Western literature and movies. Boris Vejdovsky is also General co-Editor of the series Transatlantic Aesthetics and Culture (Peter Lang).
Address : Department of English, Anthropole, 5075, University of Lausanne, CH-1015 Lausanne-Dorigny, Switzerland. Tel. 00 41 21 692-2991. Fax : 00 41 21 692-3045. http://www.unil.ch/angl
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The Lure of the Object in Henry James’s Fictions of Thwarted Desire: Reflections on the Libidinal and Social Poetics of Literary Forms
Esther Sánchez-Pardo González Universidad Complutense de Madrid [email protected]
This paper frames the figure of the object – a libidinally invested and desired object– in terms of its progression and development in Jamesian narrative, emphasizing how Henry James’s discourse on possession – the process of striving to secure the central object in narration– gains complexity and sophistication in his so called ‘major phase’ – from 1880 to 1905. Jamesian narratives continually foreground the implication of the novel itself in the plot of ‘thwarted desire’ these fictions criticize. The narratological tensions in James’s texts attest to the self–critical aspect (of the novel by the novel) of this internally directed critique. I have based my analysis of Jamesian late realism upon The Aspern Papers and ‘The Figure in the Carpet’, representative texts of James’s short fiction and novellas, in which objects – art or aesthetic objects such as literature, epistemological objects such as secrets or money – are foregrounded and which explore the circuitous routes of desire, systematically thwarted desire, and of libidinal and bourgeois possession.
KEY WORDS: Henry James, object, secret, major phase, late realism, modernism
[A]ny object mixes itself so profoundly with the stuff of thought that it loses its actual form and recomposes itself a little differently in an ideal shape which haunts the brain when we least expect it. Virginia Woolf
The novel is always an attempt to reconcile the consciousness of the writer and reader with the objective world at large; so it is that the judgments we make on the great novelists fall not on them, but on the moment of history which they reflect and on which their structures pass sentence. Fredric Jameson
28 Esther Sánchez-Pardo González
Contemporary theories of the novel are much indebted to Henry James’s important elaboration at the turn-of-the-century.1 Anglo-American novel theory begins with James: his ‘Art of Fiction’ (1884) and his prefaces to the New York Edition (1907-09) offer sensitive explorations of the novel’s technical capabilities and its compositional problems, together with a formal vocabulary that has endured new critical, structuralist, narratological and poststructuralist adaptations. Despite this broad adaptability, or perhaps because of it, James’s contributions to novel theory have often been described as ‘pure’ formalism, blind to the socio-historical contingencies that shape narrative. Dorothy Hale’s recent book on the subject advances a persuasive argument, however, that this is a false presupposition; the theoretical core of James’s formalism, Hale demonstrates, is in fact a social one.2 Bill Brown’s innovative work on James’s major novels offers a remarkable new way to think about materialism and to show how the novelist was, “eager to describe the physical object world yet eager to chart a kind of consciousness that transcends it” (2003: 14). This paper takes its point of departure from similar intuitions: the sense that a corresponding case might be made for James’s formal innovations in the novel –for his practice, as opposed to his theory. James’s increasing interest in the representation of interiority does not lead him to disregard (that is, to suppress or repress) the circulation or social uses of material ‘things’. On the contrary, James devotes a large body of his work, especially from the 1880s through 1900 and beyond, to exploring the entanglement of consciousness and desire with libidinal, social and materialist scripts of attainment or possession. The predominant theme in James’s novels and tales from the turn of the century is the struggle for possession. James’s narratives of thwarted desire, my focus of study here, revolve around the protagonist’s agonized quest to attain and/or possess – that is, to apprehend and appropriate– a rare and mysterious object. These narratives represent the elusive object as a libidinal, social or material object (at the level of plot) and also as an epistemological ‘secret’ which the narrator or protagonist attempts to glean in the absence of the material ‘thing’ itself. In narration, James reiterates this doubled plot structure: at this level, the plot for possession is interiorized, rehearsed through the struggle of the first-person narrator or focalizer to apprehend and represent the object – that is, to focus or narrate it for the tale.3 This is the mark of James’s romance- narratives and the essence of their double plot structure: the ‘thing’ which is to be had is
1 I gratefully acknowledge funding for this paper from the Del Amo Fellowships Program and Research Project PR34/07-15781. 2 In Social Formalism, Hale recounts the story of American formalist criticism from James through the New Critics, to Roland Barthes’ critique of Lubbock. Her revisionist analysis of novel theory challenges the presumed divide between formalism and cultural theory, arguing that contemporary social theories of identity are deeply influenced by the conceptual heart of James’s formalist criticism (1998: 4). 3 For the purposes of this paper, I define narrative discourse as the representation of story. I clarify moreover, that discourse is comprised of the following three operations (or levels): plot (the representation of action), narration (the representation of perspective, i.e. of the story-world focus and /or the narrator’s point of view) and style (or prose discourse, the verbal representation of narration).
ATLANTIS. Journal of the Spanish Association of Anglo-American Studies. 30.2 (December 2008): 27–41 ISSN 0210-6124 The Lure of the Object in Henry James’s Fictions of Thwarted Desire 29 also a secret to be known. At both levels, the material, epistemological and semiotic object of possession circulates just out of the protagonists’ and focalizer’s (hence, the tale’s) immediate grasp, continually eluding the frustrated seeker. With his stories of thwarted desire, James strives to accommodate the vision of the novel to a ‘respect’– if not a ‘passion’ – for both the individual and the social values of signifying ‘things’. In the gap between his characters’ various desires to attain objects and the achievement of their wills, James opens a space in which to represent the stakes of personal relationships and of possession in bourgeois society – aesthetically to mirror those desires, and morally to elicit a response from his readers. By seeking to grasp the dynamics of Jamesian narrative not exclusively from the perspective of the objects it purports to pursue but rather from the internal logic the text ratifies in grasping or withholding such ‘things’, we aim at elucidating both the libidinal and social poetics of Jamesian forms in a preliminary way. This paper argues that through the form of the double quest, James draws out the ‘hidden’ bases of desire that propel his plots: namely, sexuality,4 the performance of identity, bourgeois wealth and the establishment of social distinction. In the version of the quest he ‘interiorizes’ in his narrative centre (i.e. the focalizing or narrating protagonist), James also represents the impulse, so common to the story- world he pictures, to repress those dishonourable bases. Through the figure of the double quest, in other words, James locates a repudiation of the libidinal aim of the narrative in the story-world: an engagement in hedonistic and acquisitive individualism (the libidinal-social plot) alongside the reflector’s negation of that motive.5 The libidinal repudiation is, in this respect, a social narrative that James exposes and which produces concomitant psychic effects. From the perspective of literary history, James possesses a singular status. Jamesian narrative is at once supremely representative of the novel’s formal transition into
4 Speculations about the ambiguous nature of James’s sexuality have attracted much critical attention. Biocritical appropriations at the hands of Leon Edel (1985), Fred Kaplan (1992), Sheldon Novick (1996) and Colm Toibín (2004) have paved the way for a new series of essays centred on masculinities and their construction and queer theory. Magisterial in this regard has been the work of Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick who – after her important analyses of what she called homosexual panic in Epistemology of the Closet, productive of the “explicitly thematized sexual anaesthesia” (1990: 194) of the fin-de-siècle bachelor narrative and a concomitant regime of the closet – proposed an influential reading of ‘The Beast in the Jungle’ (1903) that would profoundly affect the course of Jamesian criticism. Today, critics such as Michael Moon (1998) Eric Savoy (2005) and Kevin Ohi (2004) attempt to reread James’s texts using the protocols of what they have called “queer formalism” (see Savoy 2007: 103). 5 James’s novels privilege one or more internal perspectives upon the action, even as they retain an extradiegetic narrator. James is not the first to combine these perspectives; Dickens does so also, notably in Bleak House. Neither is James the first realist to impose a represented consciousness as mediator to the plot and object-world: the device appears frequently in passages of free indirect discourse, for example, in Austen’s and Flaubert’s novels; it figures also in ‘romantic’ first-person narratives, such as in Hawthorne’s Blithedale Romance. We have nevertheless come to associate these formal innovations with the Jamesian legacy to Anglo- American realism, for no other novelist in English precedes James in deploying these techniques so systematically, or so self-consciously.
ATLANTIS. Journal of the Spanish Association of Anglo-American Studies. 30.2 (December 2008): 27–41 ISSN 0210-6124 30 Esther Sánchez-Pardo González modernism and also uniquely situated at the turning point of that change. The old- fashioned notion that James himself modernized the Anglo-American novel, almost single-handedly, by importing French innovations into its forms (such as Flaubertian impersonality) surely overstates the case; nonetheless, James’s 1875 foray into the Flaubertian circle, as well as his friendship with Turgenev and even his own ‘international’ status as adoptive Londoner and American émigré served to open the nineteenth century novel in English to a broad range of social and intellectual influences. His own novels betray the influences of American romance, French and English realism, Continental aestheticism and pictorial impressionism. As a result of his experiences in Europe from early on –he attended schools in New York, London, Paris, Geneva, Boulogne and Bonn and was exposed to the artistic and cultural treasures of Europe– he introduced in his fiction what he called the international subject –that is, the reaction of expatriate Americans to the impact of the older and more sophisticated Europe. Henry James, we might say, introduces a new manner of capaciousness into the English novel. This is as true of James’s novels discursively as it is, in a broader sense, aesthetically.6 Disenchanted with the overgrown novels of the nineteenth century, James discarded an antiquated realism overloaded with plot and weighed down by cataloguing and concretizing descriptions. Despite their own narrative circumlocutions and specific particularities, James’s novels initiate a late-century shift toward more economical ways of compressing complexity into form. The primary site of discursive complexity, with Jamesian narrative, is no longer the diachronic unfolding of plot but narration –and therefore style. Subordinating his materialist plots to an aesthetic focus in narration, James brings subjects and their perspectives to the foreground of his narratives while permitting action and its objects to recede from direct view.7 As I have argued above, James’s formal redemption of the possessive/acquisitive impulse (and its aesthetic or epistemological objects) link up with his formal innovations in the so-called ‘major phase’. The late style carries forward a project that James announces rhetorically with ‘The Art of Fiction’, the project of re-imagining the novel as a shared cultural possession. In ‘The Art of Fiction’ and his prefaces to the New York Edition, James represents the novel as an object held in common by the cultured elite, rather than a divisive instrument of social stratification. In these writings, as in the late style, James figures literary form as a means of uniting readers and novelists in a collaborative process of production and exchange. The highly mediated representational method of James’s late novels and the densely metaphorical qualities of his late style do not represent, in this regard, formal attempts at escaping the novel’s
6 Gerard Genette (1980) first associated focalization with a ‘focal character’ and the questions who sees? and who perceives? Following Mieke Bal (1985), however, many narratologists now believe that focalization covers a much wider scope than either vision or perception and that the narrator is a potential ‘focalizer’, too. First-generation narratologists like Genette and Seymour Chatman (1972) view this expanded scope with considerable skepticism. 7 In his preface to The Wings of the Dove, James names his mediators explicitly: “My registers or ‘reflectors’, as I so conveniently name them (burnished indeed as they generally are by the intelligence, the curiosity, the passion, the force of the moment, whatever it may be, directing them)” (2004: 17).
ATLANTIS. Journal of the Spanish Association of Anglo-American Studies. 30.2 (December 2008): 27–41 ISSN 0210-6124 The Lure of the Object in Henry James’s Fictions of Thwarted Desire 31 implication in social scripts of status, possession or consumption; they rather aim at differentiating such exchanges from the modes of commodity consumption or display. At the level of form, in other words, James does not repress the novel’s own implication in the process of production, consumption and exchange; on the contrary, together with his enigmatic elusive objects, he repudiates it, at once representing the libidinal and social stakes of the novel’s possession and at the same time re-envisioning these stakes, formally. James’s narratives, focusing on libidinally invested objects, are structured according to this contradictory logic. Discursively, his novels and tales translate an axiological ambivalence over the ‘social’ values of possession into a formal dissonance that marks the novel’s relation to its own objectified status. In these novels, the unpossessed object of the story is frequently an allusion to the literary text itself; it is explicitly so in ‘The Figure in the Carpet’, and The Aspern Papers. Confronting such objects – objects for material, epistemological, libidinal and ‘aesthetic’ possession – at the discursive levels of plot, narration and style, James’s novels relentlessly return to their own contradictory status in a culture given over to consumption. What are we to make of this ambivalent position vis-à-vis the cultural politics of possession or the form which encodes it? As Terry Eagleton implies in his criticism, what is at stake in our understanding of James’s narratives of possession is nothing less than the social politics of Jamesian realism.8 This question as to the relation between James’s formal innovations and his social critique bears also on our assessment of narrative modernism: for in subverting the idea of closure of a conventional nineteenth-century plot structure, splintering the perspective of narrative omniscience and subordinating plot to style, James charted a course for modern fiction. The modernist novel would exploit to the fullest possibility the formal techniques of impressionism, which James introduces in his late narratives of thwarted desire. James’s ‘impressionist’ mode of narration represents a half-way measure between traditional free-indirect discourse, which requires the interpenetration of an internal perspective and a narrator’s voice, and stream of consciousness technique, which dispenses with the narrator altogether. Free indirect discourse produces a heightened effect in the narrative and is generally limited to short passages in a novel; stream of consciousness, by contrast, is virtually inexhaustible. James’s stylization of the protagonist’s manner of perception in his impressionist novels anticipates the sprawl of the latter technique, yet James holds back from the precipice of this new development. By retaining an
8 In Criticism and Ideology (1978), and in his more recent Introduction to the English Novel (2005), Eagleton contends that James mediates story by subjective perception in order to suppress “certain real conflicts and divisions” (1978: 141) that are at stake in his plot. He identifies the typical plot of those narratives as “the struggle for material acquisition”. But he asserts something more: in Jamesian narrative, he claims, that material struggle is displaced by a parallel quest for putatively immaterial objects: consciousness, epistemological mastery, a detached but “encompass[ing] view” (1978: 141). This epistemological pursuit, Eagleton argues, hijacks the quest narrative, effectively repressing the plot and thereby conjuring away the social underpinnings of James’s text. Eagleton locates the central dynamic of Jamesian narrative in this ‘aesthetic turn’, so to speak, from a social and material world directly grasped to an interior harmony factitiously constructed by thought.
ATLANTIS. Journal of the Spanish Association of Anglo-American Studies. 30.2 (December 2008): 27–41 ISSN 0210-6124 32 Esther Sánchez-Pardo González extradiegetic narrator and references to ‘exhibitional conditions’ in plot, he limits the effect that stream of consciousness naturally produces in the represented consciousness, what James himself called “the terrible fluidity of self-revelation” (1947: 321). Enlarging the focus of James’s experimentation, modernist fiction develops the internal focus perspective through the stream of consciousness technique and relegates plot to at best a secondary discursive position, subordinate to both narration and style. As my conclusion will suggest, James’s formal revisions to realism are ultimately bound up with the cultural context of the late nineteenth-century novel in particular, with its social and material relation to an elite class of readers.
Desire and fetishization in The Aspern Papers
In The Aspern Papers9 we should recognize the familiar formula: as the tale emphatically reminds us, its ‘absolute’ basis – its cause and closure – rests upon an absent and long dead writer, Jeffrey Aspern. From the outset, however, this tale frankly locates Aspern at a temporal and therefore unbridgeable remove; his name comes from “ages before” (1984: 45) and the tense that accompanies its announcement, i.e. “had never been” (46), is the pluperfect: the tense of the completed past, the dead and buried. The poet cannot properly be ‘known’ or ‘possessed’, but the narrator nonetheless travels to Venice, seeking a mediated, or “transmitted contact” (48) with the dead poet. His quest is to possess Aspern’s papers, as symbolic literary ‘remains’ – or containers – of the poet’s buried and mysterious identity. At every step, however, the protagonist is blocked from seeing or possessing the papers, or even knowing what they represent. The tale illustrates another commonplace of James’s quest plots, which Todorov’s essay ‘The Secret of Narrative’ may help us to discern: the tendency of romantic ‘things’ to become conflated with ‘secrets’. By their affiliation with the poet, Aspern’s papers assume an overwhelming value for the protagonist; they become sacred, mysterious “relics” (1984: 51). Endowed with a curious semiotic status, the papers occupy a position somewhere between representation and sign: whether they compromise or merely represent Aspern’s ‘secret’, we cannot quite be sure. This central complex of uncertainty drives the quest, and is represented as being ultimately responsible for its thwarting: when the protagonist is closest to possession of the papers, he withdraws, “lost in wonder at the importance [he] had attached to Juliana’s crumpled scraps” (139). Before the narrator can recover his sense of the paper’s crucial value, Tina, Miss Bordereau’s niece, has consigned them to the flames. Without Aspern’s papers, the tale itself seems bereft of the ‘cause’ that is its name and figure for coherence. Its title asserts, however, (and with a wink to the reader) that it represents another link along the chain of substitutions: a narrative crux of secrets, mediating and supplanting the forfeited papers, which are known only through the tale that speaks of them.
9 In the preface to The Aspern Papers James pronounces the tale another example of the ‘romantic’: “I have had occasion in the course of these remarks (i.e. the prefaces) to define my sense of the romantic, and am glad to encounter again here an instance of that virtue as I understand it” (1947: 161).
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The Jamesian plot of thwarted desire dramatizes the protagonist’s conversion of this mediating object into a signifier, or compensatory substitution, for the relation it represents and later displaces. For in the protagonist’s conversion of the means to an end in itself (as the cherished papers become an object in their own right – the spoils of victory – and their significance as a representation of Aspern becomes secondary), the social relation to persons is subordinated to a domination over things. Thus the quest becomes derailed into a fixation on the material possession of the object, alienated from its referential function. What we observe, in novellas such as The Aspern Papers, is James’s critique of fetishization, a process which displaces human relations by their idealization in material ‘things’. In figuring the inability of Aspern’s papers to bear the meaning thrust upon them, James undermines the narrating protagonist’s assessment of the papers as an end in themselves. It is crucial to note that the tale does not take for granted the exalted status of Aspern or his papers –we will remember that Juliana recalls the poet in less glamorous terms than those in which the biographer imagines him, and that even the narrator’s colleague, John Cumnor, is but moderately persistent about the papers; in this tale, James represents the ‘meaning’ of the poet and his papers as a function of the protagonist’s projected personal and social uses of them. The imputation of libidinal value is one this protagonist would extend from his idol to himself: conflating his libidinally invested scholarly object with himself (as subject), the narrating protagonist equates ‘knowledge’ with identity –and exclusive rights of possession: “the world, as I say, had recognised Jeffrey Aspern, but Cumnor and I had recognised him most” (1984: 47). Here, as in James’s definition of the romantic, desire redoubles upon itself, mediating and displacing knowledge of any discrete object. Possession no longer entails penetration of the object but has become itself a sign of being, a mark of distinction for the possessor that also entails libidinal attachment. Despite James’s alleged preference for knowing versus having, what these tales in effect dramatize is the short-circuiting of both ends by the fetishistic ethic of possessive materialism, which renders them irreconcilable. James’s tales fail to mediate the problems of material possession through the epistemological quest, in other words, because in these texts ‘knowledge’ (or moral understanding, which presumes the recognition of difference) proves antithetical to the possession of objects imagined as libidinally invested inalienable properties. It is not clear that James will ever allow us to have both the concrete object and the value or idea it signifies. James’s late narratives represent possession split into two parts: through the counterpoint of possessive scripts in plot and narration, James alienates the physical domination of material ‘things’ from the appraisal of their relational value in consciousness. Here, the consciousness that imputes value (‘thought and desire’) is what brings the object near, yet it nonetheless holds the ‘real’ object at an inviolable remove. ‘Thought and desire’ meanwhile orbit around the protagonist’s social and professional aspirations, which have attracted or directed new meanings onto formerly referential ‘things’. In these tales, the ability of ‘things’ to stimulate personal desire is inextricably bound up with their dual role as instruments and representations of social power. In ‘The Figure in the Carpet’ and The Aspern Papers, for example, acquisition of the
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‘secret’ object represents to the protagonist not only a projected means of personal defence but also a means of professional advancement. Though taboo for unmarried, detached (and narcissistic) ‘professionals’10 – and often kept, as well, from celibate or widowed women – James represents possession as permissible within the context of familial or sexual relations.11 Tina inherits the papers from Juliana. The desired ‘thing’, as object and ‘secret’, circulates like property. The homodiegetic narrator of The Aspern Papers tacitly acknowledges the fact; in considering marriage, he quietly concedes that it is the only means to his desired ends. Yet the protagonist subsequently repudiates this knowledge. In the story, the narrator is similarly determined to procure the papers by his own efforts: “it was absurd that I should be able to invent nothing; absurd to renounce so easily and turn away helpless from the idea that the only way to become possessed was to unite myself to her for life. I mightn’t unite myself, yet I might still have what she had” (1984:141). The Aspern Papers struggles to contain ‘Aspern’ in ‘the papers’, but represents the letters at one moment as an elusive “treasure” reserved for contemplation, and at another as “crumpled scraps” for sale (1984: 65). It seems clear that what the questors’ desire, essentially, is to receive or inherit the symbolic ‘thing’, to possess it as a sign, symbol and legitimation of the social power they in fact covet. In conclusion, withholding direct access to the object (Aspern’s papers, Vereker’s secret) – both as a perceptual object to be focalized and as a linguistic object to be named or defined – the structure of perspective in these tales reproduces the plots’ problem of possession (the problem of having) as a representational problem, namely, the problem of seeing or presenting, of focalizing or narrating the central ‘thing’.
Textual/sexual secrets in ‘The Figure in the Carpet’
Nowhere better perhaps than in his well-known ‘Figure in the Carpet’ (1895) does James describe the impossible task of the literary critic, and what is quite brilliant in his story is that its very subject matter is the pursuit of a secret without which, James says, there can be no literary work. And in his story the secret remains untold; there is a figure in the carpet, but no one will tell us what it is. I have just alluded to the ‘impossible task’ of the critic and applauded James’s metaphor of a secret meaning condemned to remain secret.12 Does that mean that
10 James generally represents his male protagonists in the romances as professional men of letters: journalists, critics and scholars. In almost all cases, they are singularly devoid of personal attachments or close familial relationships. For James’s motherless female protagonists (such as Fleda or Isabel or Milly), by comparison, ‘adoptive’ family members often prove the means of their entrapment. 11 ‘The Figure in the Carpet’ unsettles the suggestion that the ‘figure’ is merely a cipher for sexual intimacy: Gwendolyn Erme gives birth to two of Drayton Deane’s children, and yet this husband appears never to have been initiated into the story’s secret, which Gwendolyn is said to possess. 12 Wolfgang Iser was one of the first critics who read ‘The Figure in the Carpet’ from the point of view of reception theory. He wanted to deconstruct the idea that there is something hidden in
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James’s fiction marks the end of literary criticism as we know it? Does that mean that the literature of the twentieth century, for some yet unknown historical reason, will no longer yield what we have up to now called its ‘truth’? In a way, it does, unless of course we exchange our ‘critical tools’ for others that we could call epistemological rather than critical. ‘The Figure in the Carpet’ is a tale about a secret which seems to be the condition of literary achievement. The question could run thus: what is it that makes a literary work worthwhile? Or what is it that denotes ‘good’ or ‘great’ literature? It is of course the question of literary criticism in James’s time. But it is true we are facing a very difficult problem, for it concerns beauty, and it concerns truth, and also the relationship between the two. Rapidly, however, in ‘The Figure in the Carpet’, literary achievement is left aside and the query then becomes more general and amounts to something like this: ‘What is literature made of?’ If we approach a summary of the tale, what we have is an enquiry into the genius, or success, of a famous writer whose name, very aptly, happens to be Vereker. Chosen by George Corvick, his senior as a literary critic, the narrator of the story is supposed to write a review of Vereker’s last novel. His task is to find out something like the secret of the man’s talent. The review is written, and published, and the people at the office declare it “all right”, while Corvick, who was obliged to be away in Paris at the time, is dissatisfied and writes that this was not “at all . . . what Vereker gave him the sense of” (2001: 285). In the next two scenes – or parts, for there are eleven of them – our hero comes to meet the great man at a reception in a country residence to which he has also been invited, and eventually they have a long conversation. Before this, however, at dinner, the review is indirectly discussed. At first the writer’s comment is vague, non- committal. Later on in the day, in the middle of the night in fact, writer and critic have a long interview. The author does not want to hurt the young man’s feelings and speaks kindly to him; but he nevertheless remains unable to explain why critics always “miss” his “little point” (2001: 289). Vereker calls his urge to write the “finest, fullest intention of the lot” (290) and also speaks of “this little trick” (290) of something we may find in “the order, the form, the texture of [his] books” (290). The approach is very modern, ahead of James’s time even, but it does point out what a critic ought to do in such a vague manner that it is no help, simply repeating that it is “the thing for the critic to look for” (290). We may take this for a probable intuition that in 1900 the world of criticism was not properly equipped for the task. That many, even in our day, should fare no better, is a point worthy of consideration.
the text, which is precisely a concealed referential meaning. Meaning for him, was rather the product of an interaction between reader and text. In Iser’s view, “Such a meaning [the text’s] must clearly be the product of an interaction; on the contrary, the activity stimulated in him will link him to the text and induce him to create the conditions necessary for the effectiveness of that text. As text and reader thus merge into a single situation, the division between subject and object no longer applies, and it therefore follows that meaning is no longer an object to be defined, but is an effect to be experienced” (1978: 9-10).
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But should not authors somewhat help the critics in their difficult task? This is what the young man asks: “Don’t you think you ought to – just a trifle – assist the critic?” (290). And Vereker’s answer is almost indignant: Assist the critic? But this is what he does when he writes. “I’ve shouted my intention in his great blank face!” (290). And here of course we shall note the word intention, a clue that even James’s writer does not know what his own secret, this impulse that makes him write, is. He then proceeds to speak of his ‘secret’. Again, we are given to understand that the intention that was mentioned earlier on cannot constitute an explanation sufficient in itself. Did James have some intuition about this? His Vereker, in any case, is far from unwise: “If my great affair’s a secret, that’s only because it’s a secret in spite of itself” (290). In fact, what the reader is very clearly told here is that writing is not a matter of intention. In James’s next step we are given to understand that the words a writer produces still remain somewhat mysterious to him. The thing is there, on the written page, but it cannot clearly be described. In the end it remains a secret and our young critic can only sum up the discussion with the author with a very general statement: “This extraordinary ‘general intention’ . . . is then generally a sort of buried treasure?” (292) The writer does vaguely approve, but still leaves us in the dark: “Yes, call it that, though it’s perhaps not for me to do so” (292). So, our young critic has failed to discover what the secret – the “general intention” – was, and he has failed so utterly that he comes to the conclusion that he has no knowledge and that perhaps nobody ever has. To Corvick, back from Paris and about to get married to Mrs Erme’s daughter, he confesses his failure. Together with Corvick, again, they wonder what the ‘thing’ is, and they decide that, certainly, it is “something to be understood” (293), but go no further. Has Corvick understood something our narrator has failed to see? Probably not, but at this point he seems more eager than ever to go ahead with his search. And the central metaphor in the tale, the one that gave it its title, is introduced, “For himself [Vereker], beyond doubt, the thing we were also blank about was vividly there. It was something, I guessed, in the primal plan, something like the complex figure in a Persian carpet” (295). The story goes on: Vereker leaves England, and Corvick, “contracted for a piece of work which imposed on him an absence of some length and a journey of some difficulty” (298). He goes to India and is thus separated from his beloved Gwendolen, and it is a separation that we may read as a sign of James’s probably unconscious insistence on the impossibility of love between man and woman. In India, as if by a miracle, Corvick is at last successful. Has the figure in the carpet finally come out, then? A telegram Gwendolen receives says so, but we shall not know what it is. And thus, to verify that what he has discovered is the right thing, Corvick rushes to Rapallo where Vereker is staying. Gwendolen and our narrator will simply have to wait a little longer. The fiancé does write from Rapallo, though, and all he has to say, in fact, amounts to the suggestion of what I will call, a transaction, or an exchange, for his letter consists, “of the remarkable statement that he would tell her after they were married exactly what she wanted to know” (302). The ‘secret’ might very likely have something to do with ‘life’ (sexuality), and this episode about marriage seems to confirm it. The letter says more, of course, but never what we want to know: the rule of the game, here, seems to be that the secret will always be alluded to, and somewhat
ATLANTIS. Journal of the Spanish Association of Anglo-American Studies. 30.2 (December 2008): 27–41 ISSN 0210-6124 The Lure of the Object in Henry James’s Fictions of Thwarted Desire 37 lengthily even, but never revealed. In the end, Corvick and the young lady marry, they go to Torquay for their honeymoon, and, there, the bridegroom dies in an accident! Deus ex machina or not, the book he planned to write on Vereker and that was supposed to reveal everything will not be written. Again, we are left in the lurch. He had completed the opening pages, however, but this does not help: “[T]hey were striking, they were promising, but they didn’t unveil the idol” (305). All that is left to our narrator is to question the lady, “Had she seen the idol unveiled? Had there been a private ceremony for a palpitating audience of one?” (305). The lady will now keep the secret to herself. To the narrator, anxious to know what it was that Corvick had found, her answer leaves no hope, “I heard everything . . . and I mean to keep it to myself!” (306). The next scene, the ninth, almost runs like a confession. Wounded by the lady’s refusal, our narrator still has hopes. But he is wrong, of course, and almost comes to realize it. The price to pay may be higher than he expects, and “intimacy” (306) may be the condition, of the secret. At which point he wonders whether he will have to marry the lady in order to discover the secret.13 The end of the episode might help us guess what is to follow. To the young man’s desperate question, “Now, at last, what is it?”, the young widow can only answer “Never!” (307). It is difficult not to interpret this never as an answer produced by unconscious desire. For after all, her refusal is prompted by James. His hero, our narrator, cannot, must not, find out what the secret (of sexuality?) is. This is no doubt the reason why a new character –who of course will marry the widow– is introduced at this point, Drayton Deane. He is also a literary critic, and he has the favour of the lady. Six months later, when Vereker’s last book is published, our narrator straight away takes it to Mrs Corvick. And already the title is interesting: The Right of Way, and that is a right of way from which our hero is obviously barred. The lady, our narrator thinks, “had got what she wanted” (309), and when three weeks after this, the news of Vereker’s death reaches him, he knows he will never find out what the secret was. For before the end of the year, he also learns of the death of Vereker’s wife whom he had hoped, as a last resort to approach. The only way left to our hero is to renounce, “I felt renouncement indeed my appointed lot. I was shut up in my obsession for ever – my gaolers had gone off with the key” (309). Our hero’s renouncement can easily be analysed, for it is indeed the very heart of the tale, the point of no return James wanted his story to reach. So, we are not surprised when Mrs Corvick becomes Drayton Deane’s wife, and perhaps not surprised either when we learn that the critic does not make public what new ‘knowledge’ he may have acquired by his marriage to the lady, what James flamboyantly calls “the splendour of the other party’s nuptial gift” (309). The solution might be to observe the husband and find out what he has learnt. But doubt in any case persists: does the husband know? We cannot be sure, and this is the question. For such matters, indeed, are not so simple, and the new husband may not possess the necessary talent, “He wasn’t interested, he didn’t care. Yes, it quite
13 The narrator muses and wonders, “There might be little in it, but there was enough to make me wonder if I should have to marry Mrs Corvick to get what I wanted. Was I prepared to offer her this price for the blessing of her knowledge?” (2001: 307).
ATLANTIS. Journal of the Spanish Association of Anglo-American Studies. 30.2 (December 2008): 27–41 ISSN 0210-6124 38 Esther Sánchez-Pardo González comforted me to believe him too stupid to have the joy of the thing I lacked. He was as stupid after as before, and that deepened for me the golden glory in which the mystery was wrapped” (311). When the lady dies we know we shall never find out, and this of course constitutes one of the aesthetic dimensions of the story. For the information has to be obtained from the husband.14 There is much in the rest of the scene that deserves analysis but I shall content myself with simply mentioning the obvious desire to remain in the dark, and then an obscure, but, I think, secondary wish to know what the joy of sex is, and also a wish to learn what femininity is. In the end, as announced, the secret remains untold, and James cleverly concludes his story with the mention of “unappeased desire” (313), unaware, for once, that there is no other way to approach desire as such.
Conclusion: The lure of the object, or beyond realism
In the case of ‘The Figure in the Carpet’ and The Aspern Papers, the ‘object’ in the narrative seems to point in a particular direction. Not of course that texts tell us in what way they should be read, certainly not. But because texts were written at a certain moment in history, we might advance the hypothesis that they carry in their very texture, or constitution, something that is significant of that moment. What we are alluding to is that forms, literary forms, have a socio-historical meaning.15 This socio- historical meaning is, among other things, an information on the epistemological assumptions of the age. Once again, literature does not directly deliver an ultimate truth, but it can be made to reveal some particular truth. The Jamesian plots of thwarted desire project the conflict between contradictory imperatives, which collide and converge in represented objects. Jamesian romances orbit around ‘things’ figured as material and ideal, as libidinal and social objects and as private secrets – but never finally one or the other.16 James’s texts internalize the
14 James explicitly writes, “The information? / Vereker’s secret, my dear man –the general intention of his books: the string the pearls were strung on, the buried treasure, the figure in the carpet” (311). But Drayton Deane apparently doesn’t know: “Have I been wrong in taking for granted that she admitted you, as one of the highest privileges of the relation in which you stood to her, to the knowledge of which she was after Corvick’s death the sole depositary? . . . I don’t know what you are talking about” (311). 15 As is well-known, this is the position Mikhail Bakhtin holds in his crucial works devoted to the genre of the novel. In The Dialogic Imagination, he states, “The forces that define [the novel] as a genre are at work before our very eyes: the birth and development of the novel as a genre takes place in the full light of the historical day” (1981: 5). And in more general terms, “[T]he boundaries between fiction and nonfiction, between literature and nonliterature and so forth are not laid up in heaven. Every specific situation is historical. And the growth of literature is not merely development and change within the fixed boundaries of any given definition, the boundaries themselves are constantly changing” (1981a: 33). 16 In his preface to The American (1877), James identifies the neatly polarized scheme of ‘bad people’ and ‘good’ as an ‘infallible sign’ of ‘the romantic’ mode. There is a degree of overlap between the aesthetic of the pre-novelistic prose romance and romanticism. The formal
ATLANTIS. Journal of the Spanish Association of Anglo-American Studies. 30.2 (December 2008): 27–41 ISSN 0210-6124 The Lure of the Object in Henry James’s Fictions of Thwarted Desire 39 contradictory logic of repudiation: they too serve contrary and independent laws, which project two irreconcilable views toward the narrative’s central object. In withholding such objects narratologically, suspending them from direct attainment, either in plot or narration, James sustains and even magnifies their oscillation in value. James’s plots of thwarted desire resist their own conclusions; they show the ending as a mere convention, motivated not by the internal mechanism of the narrative but imposed as an external force. Borrowing from the forms of the quest-narrative and the enigma story, James’s fictions nevertheless violate the teleologically oriented narrative trajectory that these conventions normalize: the endings of James’s fictions, rather than fulfilling their promises or desire, question the plots which precede them. In this respect, James’s mature work illuminates a tension which exists in the narrative fiction of his contemporaries, the tension between desires of the narratological ‘middle’ and the rule of its denouement. In the Jamesian story of thwarted desire, we find a narrative structure that challenges narratologists’ accounts of plot-structure in traditional realist narrative fiction. In these texts James’s narrators fail to attain mastery over the stock of things and appearances they seek, perceptually and epistemologically, to possess. Moreover, the characters’ failure to perceive, recognize or possess coveted objects stems from a conflict of impulses: in James’s narrators the material desire for goods collides with a moralistic judgment upon that wish. Objects of desire thus signify too much of the protagonists; the ‘romantic’ distance at which James maintains these characters from possession signals their inability to absorb and synthesize the contrary and independent ideas they project onto – and through – desired and resistant objects. We would expect James’s artistic problem to be the resolution of this contradiction. Yet in re-presenting the oscillation between opposed perspectives on the object and its attainment as a narratological problem, James stages his own artistic ‘rebellion’ of sorts. James’s romance–form represents and questions both the materialist realism he imputes to Balzac and the realists and its polar opposite, the fetishism of consciousness that critics have come to identify with James’s own aesthetic. James’s texts lie between these poles: his stories prove critical of the acquisitive drive that seizes upon ‘material’ things as representations of the social self. He remains critical as well of the fetishistic abstraction which would detach itself entirely from the sphere of social actions and concrete objects. In his texts of thwarted desire, James yokes together these contrary tendencies, advancing them both through the textual interplay of the narrative: analogous but antithetical figures for attaining desire – both lingering on impressions and exposing the blindspots of this narrative technique for rendering the object-world. Far from repressing the real – social and material – contexts in which the novel signifies, the dramatic and stylistic oscillations of James’s narratives of thwarted desire represent the novelist’s engagement with contradictions which structured the literary, social and economic position of the late-nineteenth century novel in a culture increasingly given over to consumption. resonances are particularly evident with regard to their respective treatment of material objects, inclination to subjective idealization and common use of displacement.
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Curiously, it is those objects which apparently retain a vital and legible relation to the social history of their production, (that is, to their material and social production as a value) that most appeal to Jamesian possessors and collectors. James’s acquisitive characters covet aesthetic treasures and relics such as Aspern’s papers. These characters elevate such stories, as James’s narrator does in The Aspern Papers, into history. By virtue of the historical qualities they ascribe to these objects, James’s possessors and collectors regard the prestigious ‘relics’ as transcendent of mere commodities; they imagine these things to be like ‘family’ properties, to bear the stamp of history and preserve it from alienation. As I have tried to prove, James also represents his short fiction – and his novels – as a new object for possession and endeavours to thoroughly reform realism. His narratives redefine the realist mode of production and reception in contradistinction to the acquisitive and fetishistic modes of consumption celebrated in commodity culture. If the combination of an aesthetically experimental form linked to a nostalgic, in some ways deeply conservative, position strikes us as the quintessence of bourgeois modernism, surely James’s narratives of thwarted desire herald the arrival of that movement in the novel.
Works Cited
Bakhtin, Mikhail 1981: ‘Epic and the Novel’. Michael Holquist, ed. Trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist. The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays. Austin: U of Texas P. 3-40. Bal, Mieke 1985: Narratology: Introduction to the Theory of Narrative. Toronto: U of Toronto P. Brown, Bill 2003: A Sense of Things. Chicago: U of Chicago P. Chatman, Seymour 1972: The Later Style of Henry James. New York: Barnes and Noble. Eagleton, Terry 1978: Criticism and Ideology. London: Verso. ––––– 2005: ‘Henry James’. The English Novel: An Introduction. Oxford: Blackwell. 214-31. Edel, Henry 1985: Henry James. A Life. New York: Harper & Row. Genette, Gerard 1980: Narrative Discourse: An Essay in Method. Trans. Jane E. Lewin. Ithaca: Cornell UP. Hale, Dorothy 1998: Social Formalism. Stanford: Stanford UP. Iser, Wolfgang, 1978. ‘Partial Art–Total Interpretation: Henry James’ The Figure in the Carpet. In Place of an Introduction’. The Act of Reading. A Theory of Aesthetic Response. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP. 3–10. James, Henry 1984 (1884): ‘The Art of Fiction’. Christof Wegelin, ed. Tales of Henry James. New York: Norton. ––––– 1984 (1888): ‘The Aspern Papers’. Anthony Curtis, ed. The Aspern Papers and The Turn of the Screw. New York: Penguin. 43-142. ––––– 1997 (1877): The American. New York: Everyman. ––––– 2001 (1895): ‘The Figure in the Carpet’. John Lyon, ed. Selected Tales. New York: Penguin, 2001. 284-313. ––––– 2004 (1902): Introduction. The Wings of the Dove. New York: Modern Library. 1-23. Kaplan, Fred 1992: Henry James: The Imagination of Genius. New York: Morrow. Moon, Michael 1998: A Small Boy and Others: Imitation and Initiation in American Culture from Henry James to Andy Warhol. Durham: Duke UP. Novick, Sheldon 1996: Henry James: The Young Master. New York: Random House. Ohi, Kevin 2004: ‘Narrating the Child’s Queerness in What Maisie Knew’. Bruhm Steven and
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Natasha Hurley, eds. Curiouser: On the Queerness of Children. Minneapolis: Minnesota UP. 81-106. Savoy, Eric 2005: ‘The Jamesian Turn: A Primer on Queer Formalism’. Kimberly C. Reed and Peter G. Beidler, eds. Approaches to Teaching Henry James’s Daisy Miller and The Turn of the Screw. New York: MLA. 132-42. ––––– 2007: ‘Entre chien et loup: Henry James, Queer Theory, and the Biographical Imperative’. Peter Rawlings, ed. Palgrave Advances in Henry James Studies. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. 100-25. Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky 1990: Epistemology of the Closet. Berkeley: U of California P. Toibín, Colm 2004: The Master. New York: Scribner.
Received 22 February 2008 Revised version accepted 19 June 2008
Esther Sánchez-Pardo González is Associate Professor in the Department of English Literature (Filología Inglesa II) at the Universidad Complutense de Madrid. Her research centres on modernism in a comparative framework and on issues of identity, community and the postnational at the turn of the 20th century. She recently published her work on Ch. Moraga’s La Ultima Generación (2007).
Address: Facultad de Filología, Edif. A, Departamento de Filología Inglesa II, Universidad Complutense de Madrid, 28040 Madrid, Spain. Tel. (34) 91 3945382 Fax (34) 91 3945762
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‘Trust them to Figure it Out’: Toni Morrison’s Books for Children
María Lourdes López Ropero Universidad de Alicante [email protected]
Toni Morrison has joined the ranks of those writers whose work includes texts for both adults and children. This paper examines this less known side to Morrison’s work in an attempt to define its characteristic features and its place within ethnic and African- American children’s literature. The texts will be read in the light of the ideas of such thinkers as John Dewey and Martha Nussbaum, among others, who advocate a liberal model of education that fosters autonomy and critical thinking. Depictions of children in Morrison’s adult fiction, for the author has shown a life-long interest in childhood, will also be engaged.
Key words: Toni Morrison, ethnic children’s literature, African-American children’s literature, picture books, fables, liberal education, critical thinking, crosswriting, African- American history, James Baldwin
Critics Sandra Beckett and David Galef have identified an increase in the number of authors who crosswrite or write for a dual-audience, producing both children’s and adults’ literature (Beckett 1999: xi; Galef 1995: 34). This crossover can occur, Galef points out, in different directions. Authors of adult fiction may decide to take up children’s literature in the middle of or late in their careers, Roald Dahl being a famous example. Conversely, authors of children’s fiction may turn to writing for an older audience, which is rarer. A third type is comprised of ‘polygraph[ic]’ writers such as A. A. Milne or Louisa May Alcott who managed to produce both kinds of texts from the beginning of their careers (Galef 1995: 29). It is true, however, that the number of authors who are able to succeed in both genres is more limited. Whether Toni Morrison will join the canon of children’s literature remains to be seen, but the truth is that after the publication of Paradise (1998) she has put out a substantial number of books addressed to younger audiences. These comprise two picture books, The Big Box (1999) and The Book of Mean People (2002), a series of retellings of Aesop in comic strip format under the title Who’s Got Game (2003) and a pictorial book titled Remember: The Journey to School Integration (2004). As much children’s literature is a collaborative effort, Morrison has worked alongside book illustrators Giselle Potter and Pascal 44 María Lourdes López Ropero
Lemaître, as well as her son Slade Morrison, a painter by profession, in the first three pieces. The extent of Slade Morrison’s collaboration in the texts is difficult to determine. Morrison has admittedly used the stories that he imagined as a child as a source of inspiration for the two picture books (Capriccioso 2003) and they have devised the revisions of Aesop together (‘Scribner Signs Six Book Deal With Toni Morrison and Son’). Morrison, who has admitted to having “a twinge of envy for novelists who write for all ages” (‘Scribner Signs Six Book Deal With Toni Morrison and Son’) is likely to be fulfilling a desire to target children directly as an audience, after showing a long- standing concern for them. In a 1981 interview by Charles Ruas, Morrison expressed her preoccupation with children as follows: “Certainly since Sula I have thought that the children are in real danger. Nobody likes them, all children, but particularly black children. . . . Everywhere, everywhere, children are the scorned people of the earth. There may be a lot of scorned people, but particularly children” (Ruas 1992: 103). Although the theme of childhood is not at the center of all her works, Morrison has often deployed the child archetype, to borrow Rocío Davis’s terms, to respond to her country’s “evolving socio-cultural climate” (2001: 12). The child-characters in her fiction are portrayed as the innocent victims of their families, communities and their nation. In The Bluest Eye, Pecola Breedlove is driven insane by the pervasive power of the white ideal of beauty and the lack of a loving family. While dismembering the normative narrative of the Dick and Jane primer throughout the novel, Morrison puts under scrutiny notions of childhood innocence and complacent American family life. She draws our attention to the way children’s behavior and personalities are shaped by their environment. Instilled prejudice leads some of her characters, such as Maureen Peal or Junior, to oppress other children. Junior, whose mother, Geraldine, “had explained to him the difference between colored people and niggers” (1994: 87), harasses Pecola in the “SEETHECAT” section of The Bluest Eye. Sula and Nel are bullied by a group of Irish immigrant boys in Sula. The narrator reveals that the bullying stems from the need of the newly arrived Irish immigrants to integrate in the white community by “echo[ing]” (1982: 53) its bias against blacks. In addition, Morrison is concerned with how children are affected by a society obsessed with success and driven by consumerism. This alienation cuts across class and racial boundaries. Adults, she insists in the above interview, are “interested in self-aggrandizement, being ‘right’ and pleasures” (Ruas 1992: 103), proving inattentive to the real needs of children. Scholarship on this part of Morrison’s oeuvre is still scarce, although her texts have drawn several reviews, to which I will refer in the course of my analysis. Nina Mikkelsen’s article on black esthetics, published in the MELUS 2002 issue on ethnic American children’s literature, discusses Morrison without mentioning the author’s own venture into the field. A miscellaneous article by Chia-yen Ku (2006) relates Morrison to key issues in the field of children’s literature such as censorship, power relations, didacticism or genres. Veronique Bragard’s piece (2007) focuses on one of the retellings of the Who’s Got Game series, ‘The Grasshoper or the Ant?’. Neal Lester devotes one of the chapters of his 2007 volume Once Upon a Time in a Different World: Issues and Ideas in African-American Children’s Literature to an analysis of the representation of adult control in the picture books The Big Box and The Book of Mean
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People. None of these critical pieces touches upon the non-fiction photo-essay Remember: The Journey to School Integration. All of them fail to determine Morrison’s overall intent as a children’s author, to contextualize her within the field of ethnic children’s literature, as well as to highlight the distinctive African-American elements that she incorporates into her texts. This paper addresses these issues through an exploration of Morrison’s seemingly disparate works for children, which range from picture book and comic to photo-essay. The comprehensive nature of my approach precludes an in-depth analysis of each of the texts under discussion. A brief introduction to the development of ethnic and African-American children’s literature becomes necessary at this juncture. As Pat Pinsent explains, in the 1960s and 1970s Anglo-American critics and authors became increasingly alert to the critical role played by children’s literature in the socialization of children and the transmission of values: “It could help make future citizens aware not only of past oppression, but also of how literature itself had been complicit in this oppression, both by using language, characters and situations which took it for granted and by rendering such groups invisible”. This led to the reexamination of children’s classics as well as to the production of new works aiming to redress the invisibility or misrepresentation of minority groups (2005: 177). Naturally, “ethnic self-definition” has been central to the development of ethnic literature for children (Davis 2002: 155). It will not escape readers that the agenda of ethnic children’s literature described by Pinsent and others resonates with that of ethnic literature for adults. In fact, critic Katharine Capshaw remarks that many ethnic American writers have also written for children, and underlines the importance of ethnic children’s texts within American ethnic literature (2002: 7). Capshaw shows how, in addition to highlighting orality and folklore, both literatures share a thematic concern with “issues of identity, assimilation, nationalism, cultural pluralism” (5). “Traumatic past events” such as the internment of Japanese- Americans or African-American slavery are not glossed over in order to “fill the gaps of historical memory” (6). Regarding its audience, ethnic children’s literature is often aimed both at “insider and outsider groups”. Whereas minority children will be encouraged to counter prejudiced representations of their culture, Capshaw argues, cross-cultural understanding will be instilled in mainstream children (4). Overall, contemporary ethnic children’s literature promotes a culture of mutual understanding, tolerance and rejection of racial stereotypes. Certainly, the work of African-American authors has been a vital contribution to the field. African-American writers soon learnt to exploit the “formative influence” this literature exerts on “social relations”, to borrow Capshaw’s words (2002: 3). Although this body of literature flourished in the 1960s and 1970s fueled by the Civil Rights and Black Power movements, its emergence dates back to the Harlem Renaissance’s program of racial uplift developed in the 1920s and 1930s (Capshaw 2004: xv). The Renaissance’s commitment to childhood and education as channels for racial progress were instrumental in the development of texts for black children. The touchstone publication for this era was the magazine The Brownies’ Book, launched by W.E.B. DuBois in 1920, which aimed to counter the prevailing racial stereotypes and historical misconceptions about blacks echoed in mainstream publications for children such as St. Nicholas (Johnson 1995: 140). Langston Hughes ─The Dream Keeper (1932)─ became
ATLANTIS. Journal of the Spanish Association of Anglo-American Studies. 30.2 (December 2008): 43–57 ISSN 0210-6124 46 María Lourdes López Ropero prominent as a children’s author in that period. The 1960s witnessed a “renewal” (quoted in Smith 1995: 34) of the Renaissance’s uplift ideology and it was in this decade that Walter Dean Myers, one of the most prolific contemporary African-American writers for children and young adults, gained popularity. Speaking of his goals he stated: “‘I want to tell Black children about their humanity and about their history and how to grease their legs so the ash won’t show and how to braid their hair so it’s easy to comb in frosty winter mornings’” (Smith 1995: 37). Such well-established authors for adults as James Baldwin also produced texts for children in this period. In Little Man, Little Man: A Story of Childhood (1976), dedicated to artist Beaufort Delaney and written in black dialect, Baldwin touches upon the joys and sorrows of ghetto life, which he knew first hand, by recording one day in the life of three Harlem children. He has his child protagonist, TJ, recount how some of the boys in his block “go up to the roof . . . and they shoot that dope in their veins and they come out and sit on the stoop and look like they gone to sleep” (24). Yet TJ is loved by his mother, whose skin is “the color of peaches and brown sugar” (56), and his self-affirming father, who “always say” “I want you to be proud of your people” (59). In his only piece for young readers, Baldwin aims to empower black children by emphasizing family and community bonds, orality, the importance of education, as well as the beauty of blackness. Contemporary African-American children’s literature is still concerned with, though its scope is not limited to, these issues, as shown is texts like bell hooks’s (Gloria Jean Watkins) Happy to be Nappy (1999), about the racial politics of hair, or Walter Dean Myers’s The Beast (2003), about a teenager’s transition from the streets of Harlem to a prestigious school. Morrison is included in surveys of African-American children’s literature such as Neal Lester’s and, furthermore, she is the recipient of the Coretta Scott King Award. This medal, which commemorates the life and work of Martin Luther King and honors his widow Coretta Scott King, is granted to African-American authors and illustrators of children’s books (Bernd 1995: 135). As I hope to show in my discussion of the texts, although Morrison’s work incorporates to varying degrees features and themes characteristic of ethnic and African-American children’s literature, she pursues more general goals. Indeed, the “elusive but identifiable style” characteristic of Black literature (Morrison 2008: 61) can be traced in several of her pieces. In the fable ‘Poppy and the Snake’, Morrison draws on story-telling and black folklore and uses the figure of the ancestor. Orality is emphasized through the rap rhythm pervading ‘The Grasshopper and the Ant’ as well as in the choral narrative of The Big Box. In terms of themes Remember: The Journey to School Integration illustrates a traumatic chapter in the history of education in America, in order to fill a gap in the historical memory of contemporary American children. It should be noted, however, as Chia-yen Ku argues, that Morrison does not confine herself to the exploration of “racism, black aesthetics and African American history” (2006: 638). All her children’s texts except for Remember, which foregrounds racism and African-American history, deal with experiences that are universal to children ─schooling, relationship with adults, bullying─ or retell stories that are well known to them. Regarding her readership, Morrison targets an integrated audience of children from different ethnicities, as her choice of themes and characters indicates. With the exception of ‘Poppy and the Snake’, which features black characters in a rural Southern setting, and ‘The Grasshopper and
ATLANTIS. Journal of the Spanish Association of Anglo-American Studies. 30.2 (December 2008): 43–57 ISSN 0210-6124 ‘Trust them to Figure it Out’ 47 the Ant’, whose anthropomorphic insect protagonists speak like black urban youngsters, Morrison’s texts either depict animals, as ‘The Lion and the Mouse’ and The Book of Mean People, or represent children from both insider and outsider groups. Thus, the three protagonists of The Big Box have different skin complexions and hair textures. Both black and white children and their parents and teachers are portrayed in the photographs that make up Remember. Rather than producing texts for and about African-American children alone, what concerns Morrison is inculcating her readers with values that are in keeping with a liberal ideal of education. The author has criticized a model of education solely based on the uncritical imposition and acceptance of a strict set of rules and goals. Something is lacking, Morrison claims, when children simply comply with norms and expectations: “they don’t have their own lives and their own experiences” (Capriccioso 2003). Her position as a professor of Humanities at Princeton enables her to witness the aftermath of such an approach. She complains that many university students aim at succeeding for success’ sake, which precludes a genuine learning experience: “You keep wondering and you want to scratch them a little bit to see what’s really underneath that enormous burden and commitment” (Capriccioso 2003). On no account is Morrison undermining parental authority or advocating anarchy through these statements. Her point instead is that a central goal of education should be to encourage children to think and decide for themselves: “trust the children to figure it out. . . . give them the opportunity to figure it out and applaud them not because they are beautiful or because they ate their food but when they figure something out on their own” (Capriccioso 2003). Morrison’s views on the education of children dovetail with those of a writer she greatly admires and whose influence she has acknowledged, James Baldwin. In his 1963 essay ‘A Talk to Teachers’, included in a revival collection edited by Morrison herself, Baldwin reminds teachers that their mission is “to create in a person the ability to look at the world for himself, to make his own decisions, to say to himself this is black or this is white, to decide for himself whether there is a God in heaven or not” (Baldwin 1998: 678). This idea is voiced by TJ’s father in Little Man, Little Man: “TJ’s father read Muhammad Speaks sometime, but then he say, ‘Don’t believe everything you read. You got to think about what you read’” (emphasis in the original) (Baldwin 1976: 70). Both Baldwin and Morrison argue for self-reliance and critical thinking as liberating life skills. Their own work and struggles rest on this vision. It is worth reading Morrison’s children’s texts, therefore, through the prism of a liberal philosophy of education, one that prepares children to live in modern democratic societies. In fact, her remarks reverberate with the ideas of such thinkers as John Dewey, Martha Nussbaum and others, who argue for a system that does not restrain children but guides them from dependency into adult autonomy. John Dewey, the touchstone for American educational reform in the first half of the twentieth century, approached education as an experimental, child-centered process. For Dewey, the founder of the Chicago Laboratory Schools still in operation today, education should not revolve around the acquisition of factual knowledge out of certain fixed materials, but should “begin with the child’s ideas, impulses and interests” (1990: 37). His revolutionary philosophy of education dismissed a system based on “listening”, which promotes “passivity”, the “dependency of one mind upon another” and
ATLANTIS. Journal of the Spanish Association of Anglo-American Studies. 30.2 (December 2008): 43–57 ISSN 0210-6124 48 María Lourdes López Ropero precludes the individualization of children. It is only when children are allowed to “act” that they become distinct individuals set off from the mass (33-4). Traditional education, Dewey complains, restrains the child’s communicative instinct by having him use language to repeat lessons rather than to express his own thoughts. As a result, children end up “having to say something” instead of “having something to say” (56). Echoes of Dewey’s self-reliant, articulate child are found in the work of contemporary thinkers. Acknowledging Dewey’s influence on liberal education and also drawing on the ideas of Socrates, the Stoics and Seneca, Nussbaum (2003: 180) alerts us to the fact that very often our words and actions are not our own but “the voice of tradition or convention, the voice of the parent, of friends, of fashion” (28). The education of future citizens, Nussbaum insists, should equip them to live what Socrates called “‘the examined life’” (9), one in which they are able to question received knowledge and authority. Similarly, Anthony Appiah remarks that the life we should live is not necessarily the one that fulfills others’ expectations of the good life, but that which best fits our “chosen sense of the meaning of [our] own life”, as long as our goals are morally acceptable (2003: 58). In order to become autonomous adults, children need to be encouraged to “speak up” early in their schooling (66) and discouraged from being totally “deferential” (Callan 2004: 153). The works that will be discussed in the coming pages are a perfect embodiment of these ideas. The Big Box, advertised for ages 8 and up, tells the story of Patty, Mickey and Liza Sue, three children who are put into a metaphorical brown box for misbehaving. The book begins with a quick scene that draws the readers into the story. Giselle Potter’s pastel-color illustration features the children in their imprisonment, isolated despite sharing a room cluttered with carpets, beds, a swing and a slide, sweets and fast food, different kinds of toys, a door that “has three big locks” and a window “with shutters to keep out the day”.1 The scene continues on the next page, where the parental figure is introduced as the weekly provider of all these consumer goods, as well as of presents meant to artificially preserve the natural world away from which the children are kept ─ “a picture of the sky”, “a butterfly under glass” or “an aquarium thing with plastic fish”. In contrast, the next illustration portrays the children with smiling dreamy faces playing together in a natural setting surrounded by seagulls, rabbits and a beaver. The corresponding text introduces the refrain that with slight variations runs through the story, in which a third person narrator complains that “Oh, the seagulls scream/And rabbits hop/And beavers chew trees when they need’em./ But Patty and Mickey and Liza Sue−/ Those kids can’t handle their freedom”. Soon we learn the reasons that have led to the children’s confinement. Patty, Mickey and Liza Sue are realistic characters that children can easily identify with. They have different skin complexions, as do all the characters featured in the book, and different social backgrounds, Patty representing the suburban girl, Mickey the urban child and Liza Sue country life. What they all share is a love for nature and freedom, and a disagreement with appropriate children’s behavior in adult terms.
1 The picture books and the comics are unpaged. Page numbers will therefore only be provided for Remember: the Journey to School Integration.
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At the center of the picture book are the protagonists’ individual stories of misbehavior and punishment, each child a further addition to the big box that they will all end up inhabiting. Patty, Mickey and Liza Sue engage in typical childish mischief that prompts adults to overreact as if there were no place for pranks in the lives of children. The big box into which they are put, overfed and stuffed with consumer goods, embodies adult control over children’s energy and critical thinking. Patty, who will not play with dolls and who will talk in the library, gets a Barbie doll and a Spice Girls tee-shirt. Mickey, who disturbs the peace of his neighborhood by playing handball where it is not allowed or screaming in the hall, gets an autographed basketball and a big cake all for himself. Liza Sue, who frees the horse from his bridle and feeds honey to the bees, gets a restaurant-cooked stuffed duck. Prior to being sent to the big box, each child is given a reproachful speech by parents or teachers in a rather anti-Deweyian school atmosphere, to which they invariably respond with the refrain “I know you are smart and I know that you think/ You are doing what is best for me./ But if freedom is handled just your way then it’s not freedom or free”. This refrain, through which the children comment on the action as it goes on, gives the story a choral note that Morrison has defined as characteristic of Black art (2008: 60). The children’s responses, however, receive no recognition from the adults in the book. They may sound “unchildlike” or “sophisticat[ed]” as the reviewers for Publishers Weekly (Roback 1999: 95) and School Library Journal (Fader 1999: 277) have respectively suggested. Yet they embody Morrison’s ideal of the child who figures things out for himself, or Nussbaum’s child countering the voice of the parent with his own reasoned account of things. Childlike or not, such a statement is meant to provoke questions and reflections in the young readers. Underlying some of these children’s harmless pranks −such as Patty’s reluctance to play with dolls or her spoiling the US flag when made to pledge to it, or Liza Sue’s refusal to take the eggs away from the chickens and her feeding of the bees with honey− are attacks on received ideas regarding gender roles, patriotism or the environment. The story ends on a happy note, as the children manage to escape from the big brown box aided by the rabbits and the beaver. They step out of the dreary box and into the natural world, which in the story is the epitome of freedom and well-being. This resolution does not follow the traditional circular “home-away-home” pattern typical of so much children’s literature (May 1995: 44), for the children do not return to the safety of the adult world but escape into an unpredictable natural setting. Whatever they do there is left open for the child to imagine, the final words in the text being “Who says they can’t handle their freedom?” Clearly, there is no reconciliation between the child’s and the adult’s point of view and the former takes center stage. In this regard, it should be noted that when Morrison was designing the story, she was warned that the child-adult division would render her book “unsalable”, since it is adults and not children that buy children’s books. She did not heed this warning, considering it “a strong dismissal of children’s intelligence” (‘Toni Morrison Talks about The Big Box’). The disagreement between Morrison and potential publishers for the story highlights a central issue in children’s literature. As Jack Zipes has pointed out, writing for children faces more “censorship” than writing intended for adults. The implied audiences of a children’s book include in order of importance “an editor/agent/publisher”, “a
ATLANTIS. Journal of the Spanish Association of Anglo-American Studies. 30.2 (December 2008): 43–57 ISSN 0210-6124 50 María Lourdes López Ropero teacher/librarian/parent” and finally children of a specific age group (2002: 44). Works like The Big Box challenge the marketing that according to Zipes dominates the institution of children’s literature and undermines “the value of critical and creative thinking” (40-1). Morrison turns children into the repository of these values, while making adults stand for the stifling world of consumerism and convention. Commenting on The Big Box and The Book of Mean People, Neal Lester has perceptively remarked that “Morrison’s subversiveness comes in creating children’s texts that are not tools for adult control over children’s behavior but rather tools adults can use to better understand children’s emotional positions and children’s perspectives on and interpretations of adult behavior” (2007: 137). The Book of Mean People places even more emphasis on the child’s perspective and interpretations of the adult world than its predecessor. The protagonist, an unnamed little rabbit in overalls accompanied by his dog friend, narrates the story in the first person, cataloguing the ‘mean’ people in his life for the reader. These people are mostly adults. They include his mother, who screams at him; his grandparents, who tell him to sit up or down; this brother, who tells him how to play chess; the teacher, who corrects his handwriting, or the babysitter who wakes him up in the morning. In keeping with a younger target audience, 4 to 8, the book features rabbits with anthropomorphic personalities as characters. The visual experience dominates and the text is kept to a minimum. The Book of Mean People has received better reviews than its predecessor. One reviewer claims that the portrayal of the child’s point of view has improved, and praises the way Lemaître’s cartoon-style illustrations make the adults look “silly as well as ugly and mean” (Rochman 2002: 413). Another, however, complains that readers are not allowed to see the slightest glimpse of kindness in the mean people depicted in the book (Constantinides 2002: 132). These interpretations miss the full grasp of the word mean in the story, which is more about meaning than about meanness. In fact, Morrison has stated that she didn’t intend the characters to be ‘villains’. Rather, they are mean insofar as they are the meaning-makers in a complex world through which the six or seven-year-old child is trying to elbow his way (Capriccioso 2003). The little child-rabbit takes adults to task in an effort to make sense of the arbitrariness of a world whose language and meanings are already given to him. The child’s reasoned but playful retaliations show him actively engaged in the meaning-making process. When his brother says “The knight can’t go there”, frowning down on him from the other side of the chess board, he replies “He knows the night goes every day” and the corresponding illustration shows him running along the beach under a starry sky wielding the chess knight. While the babysitter urges him to wake up in the morning saying, “Hurry up. You are wasting time!”, he muses “How can I waste time if I use it?”, the accompanying illustration featuring him jumping around the sky with his little dog in a dream. The child disturbs the logic of opposites when he claims that whereas mean people tend to shout, “some of the MEANEST people whisper” or that “frowning people scare [him] when they smile”. Interestingly, the rabbit’s witticism is reminiscent of Brer Rabbit, an African-American folktale character popularized by the Uncle Remus stories of Joel Chandler Harris. Harris collected and put down the tales that he heard slaves narrate on plantations, using the frame of an old man telling the stories to a little boy. The trickery of Brer Rabbit, who has come to be regarded as a “revolutionary black figure” (Cochran 2004: 21), allows him to survive in
ATLANTIS. Journal of the Spanish Association of Anglo-American Studies. 30.2 (December 2008): 43–57 ISSN 0210-6124 ‘Trust them to Figure it Out’ 51 the dangerous world of the forest, where he is constantly threatened by his antagonists Brer Fox, Brer Wolf or Brer Bear. The tales depict the adventures of these characters as they steal food from each other, lie, trick or try to kill each other. As the title of Tar Baby indicates, Morrison drew on one of Harris’s most famous stories in this novel, but it is unclear whether she had Brer Rabbit in mind as she designed The Book of Mean People, whose plotline and remaining characters are unrelated to and much simpler that the animal fables of Uncle Remus. Faced with so much confusion, the rabbit in The Book of Mean People decides to retreat into the forest. In what could be taken as a curious reversal of Beatrix Potter’s The Tale of Peter Rabbit and its sequel, The Tale of Benjamin Bunny, once again the story ends with the rebellious character fleeing the socialized world to the forest, leaving a trail of clothes and his watch behind. Intentionally or not, The Book of Mean People subverts the circular structure of Potter’s classic tales. Peter Rabbit, who lost his clothes and shoes after his naughty adventures in Mr. McGregor’s garden, returns with his cousin Benjamin in The Tale of Benjamin Bunny to retrieve them from Mr. McGregor’s scarecrow. In both tales, the rabbits return to the safety of home after their forbidden outings. The loss of clothes is an unwanted punishment for their defiance of adult control. In contrast, Morrison’s protagonist challenges adults as he enters the forest exclaiming “How about that!”. Clearly, Morrison connects children with the natural order, as opposed to the social status quo. In Sula, the two girl friends resort to daydreams about nature as a way to escape the oppressive atmosphere of their homes. Nel, for instance, watches the poplars from her porch and pictures herself “lying on a flowered bed, tangled in her own hair” (1982: 51) in an effort to flee from the overwhelming neatness of her mother’s house. The novel closes with Nel visiting Sula’s grave, where the breeze moving the tree tops carries Sula’s whisper to her (174) and the two childhood friends are bonded forever despite the conflicts that separated them as adults. With their open endings, thought-provoking statements, and critique of parenting, Morrison’s texts fall under the category of innovative books that resist market trends. The retellings comprising the Who’s Got Game? series are even more so. The title of the series recalls an MTV reality show where participants compete in New York City’s basketball courts (Bragard 2007). Having game therefore refers to being skillful enough to win a competition. Unlike closed texts, which “deny the plurality of meaning” and “cut the child off ” from the reading experience (Moss 1990: 50), open texts like these highlight the instability of meaning and call for reader collaboration. Their inquisitive titles ─‘The Grasshopper or the Ant?’, ‘The Lion or the Mouse?’, ‘Poppy or the Snake?’─ open up the classic tales to new interpretations. Addressed to both young readers and readers of all ages, these renditions of Aesop destabilize the “reassuring” nature of traditional fables with their “clear-cut distinctions” between winners and losers or right and wrong, as Ruth Maharg explains in her discussion of modern fables (1984: 72). Morrison not only weaves new twists into old tales, but leaves it to readers to decide who outsmarts whom, if anybody. This project is not new. Aesopian writing since early modern times has been “a flexible and constantly renewable system of metaphorical substitutions” (Patterson 1991: 52), so that different treatments have been given to the same fables. In fact Morrison is not trying to be innovative but simply puts
ATLANTIS. Journal of the Spanish Association of Anglo-American Studies. 30.2 (December 2008): 43–57 ISSN 0210-6124 52 María Lourdes López Ropero the versatility of the fable at the service of her penchant for instilling critical thinking skills into her young readers, who are not presented with repetitions of traditional tales but with clever revisions. The comic strip format chosen by illustrator Pascal Lemaître increases the contemporary character of the retellings. ‘The Lion or the Mouse?’ draws on the traditional association of the lion with despotic power, but takes great liberties with the plot. In this rendition, the focus is not on the lion’s generosity in freeing the mouse, which is later rewarded when the mouse frees him from the hunter’s net, here a thorn in his paw, but on the impact this action has on the mouse´s personality. The mouse wakes up the next morning feeling and acting like a lion, but receives no recognition from the jungle animals who laugh at his pretence. While at the end of the story the mouse concludes that the only way to feel powerful is hiding in the lion’s den and sitting on his throne where laughter cannot reach him, the lion gladly exchanges his royal abode and apparel for a quiet hill. In his retirement the lion and the reader are left to ponder on the question “Is he who wants to be a bully just scared to be himself?”. Whereas the balance is tilted towards the lion in the previous fable, what distinguishes ‘Poppy or the Snake?’, a variant on ‘The Farmer and the Snake’, is the even-handed treatment of the characters. The conventional focus on the need to be prepared for ungratefulness and betrayal shifts to the importance of being alert to the power of language, which requires concentration. Poppy, an old Southern man from the bayou, tells his grandson Nate, who cannot concentrate in school, the story of how once he was bitten by a snake whom he had run over with his truck and had taken home to be healed. Instead of condemning the snake, Poppy claims that what saved him was being alert to the snake’s words, which prompted him to buy an antidote: “He never said he wouldn’t bite me, just that he wouldn’t think of it. . . . Paying attention is what saved me”. The moral is that being able to speak up and think for oneself, which are recurrent ideas in The Big Box and The Book of Mean People, should be consistent with the capacity for attention, a life-saving skill in this fable. In addition to functioning as an Aesopian Uncle Remus, Poppy signals the presence of an ancestor in the story, a distinctive element of African-American literature that Morrison defines as “an elder . . . whose relationships to the characters are benevolent, instructive and protective” (2008: 62). Finally, the point of view in ‘The Grasshopper or the Ant?’ is given to the bohemian grasshopper, a musician called Foxy G. His friend Kid A plays the role of the ant who “did the chores and shopped the stores” and therefore refuses to give his friend shelter when the winter comes. The conventional industriousness of the ant is coupled in this tale with consumerism and complacency. The favoring of the artist rather than of the pragmatist is not new, for we find it in other retellings such as Leo Lionni’s Frederick. What makes this rendition distinct is the transposition of the story to a modern New York black urban setting peopled by different kinds of anthropomorphic insects. Critic Veronique Bragard has noted the African-American subtext of this fable, apparent in “the basketball courts and street corner hang-outs [that] suggest the outdoor context of the ‘ghetto’ of black expressive culture”, as well as in the rhythm of the text, which “resonates with rap music” (2007). The tale ends on an innovative metafictional note that turns the reader into a collaborator. The last word is given to a teenage ladybird that was featured early in the story engrossed in a cell phone conversation. She has now abandoned her gadget for a glass snowball containing the
ATLANTIS. Journal of the Spanish Association of Anglo-American Studies. 30.2 (December 2008): 43–57 ISSN 0210-6124 ‘Trust them to Figure it Out’ 53 final scene of the story. Seeing her puzzlement, the reader is prompted to decide whose project is worth pursuing, the safe but uninteresting life of the ant or the artistic though unpredictable career of the grasshopper, neither of which is presented as a clear winner. Morrison’s latest children’s book, Remember: The Journey to School Integration, is a memorial photo-essay intended to make contemporary American children aware of the struggle that led to the achievement of Civil Rights for African-Americans. A landmark in this fight was the desegregation of schools triggered by the Brown v. Board of Education court case in 1954. Remember gathers over fifty archival photographs to which Morrison has added imaginary captions voicing the thoughts and feelings of the children, mostly African-Americans but also white Americans. The author takes up once more the role of the historian archeologizing the past, as in Beloved, where she reconstructed the story of Margaret Garner, but addressing children this time. Her description of this process in the essay ‘The Site of Memory’ is applicable to Remember: “on the basis of some information and a little bit of guesswork you journey to a site to see what remains were left behind and to reconstruct the world that these remains imply” (Morrison 1987: 112). Morrison’s journey through the racial strife of the 1940s, 1950s and 1960s is divided into three sections. ‘The Narrow Path’ introduces readers to the impact of the separate-but-equal policies on the school education of black children, which led a group of parents to sue the Board of Education with the support of the NAACP (National Association for the Advancement of Colored People) in 1952. ‘The Open Gate’, the longest section, depicts American society’s reluctance to accept school desegregation in the aftermath of the Supreme Court Ruling. The final section, ‘The Wide Road’, touches upon segregation of other public facilities and features emblematic events such as Martin Luther King’s 1963 ‘I Have a Dream’ speech or the Montgomery Bus Boycott sparked by Rosa Parks in 1956. In a conversation with Cornel West, Morrison stated that what interested her about the school integration process in addition to the racial politics was the fact that it was children that were “on the frontline”, involved in something “bigger than they were” (Goodman 2004). Many of the photographs in the book portray children as helpless protagonists of a struggle that shaped history. One of the photographs shows a child being walked by his father to his first day in a previously white school. The accompanying text articulates the thoughts of the child as he faces the school’s entrance: “I can’t see anything but the dark inside the door. My father is strong and smart. He holds my hand in his big fist. When he leaves me here I’ll have to be strong too. I can do it. I know I can, even though all I can see in front of me now is the dark” (Morrison 2004: 48). The caption emphasizes the notion that the children were eventually left alone to bear all the weight of social rejection that followed the Brown decision. One of the possible scenarios was finding themselves alone in the classroom, after the white children had been taken out by their parents in protest (31), eating alone in the diner (40) or being banned from entering the school. The caption to another photograph portraying a group of rejected girls reads, “No, no, they said. You can’t come in here. Get away from the door. This school is for white children. Only them” (32). The sepia photographs are evocative not only of the period, but, more importantly of the children’s feelings, which range from fear, shyness and innocence to perplexity and determination.
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The aim of this pictorial and narrative journey through American history is not to stir “blood memory”, to borrow Nussbaum’s (2003: 173) words, but to move contemporary American children to empathy through exposure to a traumatic event of their historical past. Even though Remember focuses on the experiences of African- American children more than any of the previous works, it does so within the framework of American history. It is worth noting that, in addition to self-reliance, a liberal education should foster a capacity for empathy, which fulfills an important civic function insofar as compassionate citizens are more likely to be able to treat others fairly (Nussbaum 2003: 92; Callan 2004: 133). The photographs may be poignant, but Morrison avoids demonizing white children and their parents. While one photograph shows three male teenagers protesting desegregation at their high school, the caption suggests that they are not moved by hatred but by the need to remain popular among their peers (28). One of the pupils at a black rural school wishes he had a desk and well- lit classroom, but he does not take his criticism further and instead pictures himself outside, where “the sky is blue and the peaches are sweeter than cake” (14). Besides, scattered through the book are photographs featuring images of togetherness across racial lines. Morrison states her aim in the introductory pages by addressing her child readers thus: “None of that happened to you. Why offer memories you do not have? Remembering can be painful, even frightening. But it can also swell your heart and open your mind”(5). As children read Remember and look at the touching illustrations, they will imaginatively enter the lives and feelings of others. They will be exercising what Nussbaum calls the “narrative imagination”, or “the ability to think what it might be like to be in the shoes of a person different from oneself, to be an intelligent reader of a person’s story, and to understand the emotions and wishes and desires that someone so placed might have” (2003: 10-11). That way they will be better equipped to understand the multicultural society they live in and to face the new challenges it may place on them. Morrison acknowledges that this journey can be a difficult experience for her audience. Yet, as Nussbaum insists, the exposure to disturbing experiences has more “moral value” than the exposure to situations that make identification easy (2003: 98). In her coda, Morrison dedicates the book to the four girls who died in the racist bombing of a Birmingham church in 1963, exhorting her readers to remember why things are “much, much better now” (72). As they become aware of the cost of social progress, American children will hopefully be more respectful for and less complacent about what they have been handed down. This paper has brought to the foreground a little known facet of the work of an otherwise well-established author. Though Toni Morrison is a latecomer to children’s books, she has shown a long-standing interest in childhood, as we gather from her interviews and the child-characters in her adult fiction. Whereas the children in her novels are usually portrayed as victims of social injustice, the characters in her children’s books have independent minds that enable them to challenge the adult world. What all her books share is a concern with an education for autonomy that enables the child to become a thoughtful adult. She endorses a way of life characterized by non-consumerism, critical reflection, sensitivity to language and the arts, non- violence and empathy with others. The texts discussed challenge rather than affirm the parents’ and community’s values and way of life and therein lies their innovative
ATLANTIS. Journal of the Spanish Association of Anglo-American Studies. 30.2 (December 2008): 43–57 ISSN 0210-6124 ‘Trust them to Figure it Out’ 55 character. If children’s literature has been regarded as a conservative genre due to the need for works to reflect adult notions of childhood and appropriate behavior, Morrison’s texts fall under a more subversive category. In keeping with this, her texts are open, at times metafictional and intertextual, critically revisiting traditional children’s stories. As I hope to have shown, several of them display features characteristic of African-American writing, although in dealing with themes and experiences common to children regardless of race, they target an integrated audience. Morrison’s concerns include but are not limited to issues of racism and African- American history, which have been the traditional focus of African-American writers for children since the 1920s. The author’s venture into children’s literature should be seen in the light of her life-long concern with childhood, but also as evidence of a trend towards crosswriting. Speaking of established authors who cross over to children’s literature, David Galef has said that they “often have the audience to make these plans a reality, if not a success” (1995: 34). It is too early to decide if this will be the case with Morrison, but the truth is that her books elicit capacities which are much needed by children today.
Works Cited
Appiah, Anthony 2003: ‘Liberal Education: The United States Example’. Kevin McDonough and Walter Feinberg, eds. Citizenship and Education in Liberal-Democratic Societies: Teaching for Cosmopolitan Values and Collective Identities. Oxford: Oxford UP. 57-74. Baldwin, James 1998 (1963): ‘A Talk to Teachers’. Toni Morrison, ed. James Baldwin: Collected Essays. New York: Library of America. 678-86. ––––– 1976: Little Man, Little Man: A Story of Childhood. New York: The Dial. Beckett, Sarah, ed. 1999: Transcending Boundaries: Writing for a Dual Audience of Children and Adults. New York: Garland. Bernd, Lee 1995: ‘The Coretta Scott King Award’. Osayimwense Osa, ed. The All White World of Children’s Books and African-American Children’s Literature. New Jersey: Africa World. 135- 38. Bragard, Veronique 2007: ‘Opening-Up Aesop’s Fables: Heteroglossia in Slade & Toni Morrison and Pascal Lemaître’s ‘The Ant or the Grasshopper?’’. ImageText: Interdisciplinary Comic Studies 3.3
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––––– 2002: ‘Metanarrative in Ethnic Autobiography for Children: Laurence Yep’s The Lost Garden and Judith Ortiz Cofer’s Silent Dancing’. MELUS 27.2: 139-56. Dewey, John 1990 (1900): The School and Society. The Child and the Curriculum. Chicago: The U of Chicago P. Fader, Elen 1999: ‘The Big Box’. School Library Journal 45.9: 227. Galef, David 1995: ‘Crossing Over: Authors Who Write Both Children’s and Adults’ Fiction’. Children’s Literature Association Quarterly 20.1: 29-35. Goodman, Amy 2004: ‘Toni Morrison and Cornel West: A Historic Discussion on the State of the World, the 50th anniversary of the Brown Decision and Condoleeza Rice’.
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Smith Foster, Frances 1995: ‘Since the Sixties: Literature for Children by African-American Writers and Illustrators’. Osayimwense Osa, ed. The All White World of Children’s Books and African-American Children’s Literature. New Jersey: Africa World. 33-46. ‘Toni Morrison Talks about The Big Box ’.
Received 14 April 2008 Revised version accepted 8 September 2008
María Lourdes López Ropero holds an MA from the University of Kansas, and a PhD from the University of Santiago de Compostela. She is Lecturer in the English Department at the University of Alicante. Her research interests include Postcolonial Literature and Ethnic Children’s and Young Adult Literature. She has recently published “Colonial Flâneurs: the London Life-writing of Janet Frame and Doris Lessing”, Inside Out: Women Negotiating, Subverting, Appropriating Public and Private Space, Rodopi (2008) and “One People, One Nation?: Creolisation and Its Tensions in a Selection of Works of Trinidadian and Guyanese Fiction”, AfroAsian Crosscultural Encounters, New York UP (2006).
Address: Departamento de Filología Inglesa, Facultad de Filosofía y Letras, Universidad de Alicante, Campus San Vicente del Raspeig, Ap. 99, E-03080, Alicante. Tel. office (34) 965 903 400 ext. 2699. Fax (34) 965 90 3800
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The very idea! A Corpus-based Comparison of IDEA, CONCEPT and NOTION and their Formal Equivalents in Spanish
Christopher S. Butler Swansea University [email protected]
The present article uses corpus-based analysis in order to explore the similarities and differences shown by the nouns IDEA, CONCEPT and NOTION in English and, secondarily, between these nouns and their formal equivalents IDEA, CONCEPTO and NOCIÓN in Spanish. Three areas of investigation are highlighted: the frequencies of the three nouns across four registers of each language; the adjectival collocations into which the three words enter; and the occurrence of some idiomatic constructions built around the words under scrutiny. The results are of interest not only in their own right but also in the context of applications to, for instance, translation and the teaching and learning of English and Spanish.
Key words: corpus, contrastive linguistics, register, collocation, English, Spanish
1. Introduction: aims and methodology
The aim of this article is to exploit the power of corpus-based analysis in order to reveal differences, as well as similarities, between lexical items which appear to be closely 1 related. More concretely, I shall examine some properties of the nouns IDEA, CONCEPT and NOTION in English and between these nouns and their formal equivalents IDEA, CONCEPTO and NOCIÓN in Spanish, including their distribution across four registers of
1 This article is based on a presentation given at the 5th International Conference on Contrastive Linguistics, Leuven, July 2008. I am grateful to members of the audience at that conference, also to anonymous reviewers, for their comments. The work reported here was done under the auspices of two projects: ‘Estudio comparativo de la interfaz gramática-discurso en lengua inglesa con especial referencia a la coherencia y a la subjetividad’ (A comparative perspective on the grammar-discourse interface in English, with special reference to coherence and subjectivity), based in Santiago de Compostela and financed by the Spanish Ministry of Education and Science (HUM2007-62220); and ‘Corpus linguistics and online contrastive analysis (English-Spanish)’, carried out by Research Group 930175 of the Universidad Complutense de Madrid with a research grant from the Comunidad Autónoma de Madrid and the Universidad Complutense. 60 Christopher S. Butler each language: spoken, fiction, news and academic writing.2 The main focus will be on the English data, the Spanish data being examined rather more cursorily. If we look at dictionary definitions of these items, we often find that they are circular. Consider, for example, the following definitions, taken from two online dictionaries:
Compact Oxford Dictionary online3
idea • noun 1 a thought or suggestion about a possible course of action. 2 a mental impression. 3 a belief. 4 (the idea) the aim or purpose. — origin Greek, ‘form, pattern’.
concept • noun 1 an abstract idea. 2 an idea to help sell or publicize a commodity. — ORIGIN Latin conceptum ‘something conceived’.
notion • noun 1 a concept or belief. 2 an impulse or desire. 3 a vague awareness or understanding. 4 (notions) chiefly N. Amer. items used in sewing, such as buttons and pins. — ORIGIN Latin, ‘idea’.
Collins English Dictionary PRO online4
idea NOUN 1 any product of mental activity, thought 2 a scheme, intention, or plan 3 the thought of something ⋄ the idea excites me 4 a belief or opinion 5 a vague notion, inkling ⋄ they had no idea of the severity of my injuries 6 a person's conception of something ⋄ his idea of integrity is not the same as mine 7 aim or purpose ⋄ the idea is to economize on transport 8 (Philosophy) (in Plato) a universal model of which all things in the same class are only imperfect imitations
concept NOUN an abstract or general idea ⋄ one of the basic concepts of quantum theory
notion NOUN 1 an idea or opinion 2 a whim
2 In accordance with convention, small capitals are used to indicate lemmas rather than word forms. 3 http://www.askoxford.com/dictionaries, accessed 21.7.2008 4 http://www.collinslanguage.com/shop/english-pro.aspx, accessed 21.7.2008
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The word CONCEPT is defined in terms of IDEA, and NOTION in terms of CONCEPT (in the Compact Oxford Dictionary) or IDEA (in the Collins English Dictionary PRO), suggesting a certain degree of equivalence, although there are some pointers towards differences too (e.g. the emphasis on abstraction for CONCEPT, and the insubstantial element for NOTION implied by the use of ‘vague’ in the Compact Oxford Dictionary and ‘whim’ in the Collins English Dictionary PRO). Indeed, it is easy to find corpus examples in which the three words in each language appear to be used more or less interchangeably: (1) The idea of a pioneer was a very important one for early Christians. (BNC ABV 1450)5 (2) The notion of a network is fundamental to hypertext. (BNC CGA 23) (3) The concept of a university doctorate has always been clear. (BNC HPN 9) (4) La idea de un “socialismo liberal” es una contradicción en los términos. ‘The idea of a “liberal socialism” is a contradiction in terms.’ (Corpus del Español, Section 19-N, España ABC) (5) El concepto de defensa estratégica ha sufrido un profundo cambio durante el siglo XX. ‘The concept of strategic defence has suffered a profound change during the 20th century.’ (Corpus del Español, Section 19-A, Encarta: Sistemas de defensa) (6) La noción de Dios que me proponen las religiones me resulta ininteligible. ‘The notion of God that religions propose is unintelligible to me.’ (Corpus del Español, section 19-F, Manuel de historia) In each of these cases, the noun under scrutiny is in the syntactic context the idea/concept/notion of a NOUN, or la idea/el concepto/la noción de (un(a)) NOUN. However, as we shall see, corpus analysis demonstrates that there are interesting differences, as well as similarities, across the three lexemes in each language, and between languages. For English, the British National Corpus (World Edition) was accessed through Mark Davies’s BNC website (see fn. 5). In the present study, only four sections of the corpus were used, namely those containing material from spoken language, newspaper writing, fictional writing and academic writing. For Spanish, the Corpus of Español, again available online (see fn. 5), was used. This corpus contains material from the 12th to the 20th century, but only the 20th century component, again consisting of spoken language, news, fiction and academic writing, from both Spain and Latin America, was taken for analysis. The composition of the corpora is given in Table 1. Concordances and lists of collocates were produced using the software provided at each of the websites.
5 Examples marked BNC are taken from the British National Corpus (World Edition) (see http://www.natcorp.ox.ac.uk/), while those marked Corpus del Español are taken from the Spanish corpus compiled by Mark Davies, available at http://www.corpusdelespanol.org/.
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Corpus Words (millions) Total Spoken Fiction News Academic BNC 100 9.96 15.91 10.47 15.33 World Corpus 100 (approx. del one fifth 5.68 5.72 5.72 5.71 Español from 1900s) Table 1: The corpora used in the study
2. Frequencies
First let us look at the frequencies of the three nouns in each language, both as a whole and in the four separate registers. The data for English are given in Table 2.
Lemma Total Spoken Fiction News Academic IDEA 16987 3343 5071 2144 6429 [328.76] [335.64] [318.75] [204.78] [419.37] CONCEPT 4666 263 151 211 4041 [90.30] [26.40] [9.49] [20.15] [263.60] NOTION 2856 117 338 166 2235 [55.27] [11.75] [21.24] [15.85] [145.79] Figures in square brackets are frequencies per million words.
Table 2: Frequencies of the lemmas IDEA, CONCEPT and NOTION in the spoken, fiction, newspaper and academic sections of the British National Corpus (World Edition)
The lemma frequencies were calculated by summing those for the separate singular and plural forms. It can be seen that IDEA is much more frequent, in terms of occurrences per million words, than the other two nouns, and that CONCEPT is more frequent than NOTION. In all four registers, IDEA is the most frequent; the least common is NOTION for spoken, news and academic, but CONCEPT for fiction. The academic register has the highest frequency of each of the three nouns; IDEA is least frequent in news writing, CONCEPT in fiction and NOTION in spoken language. Analysis of the distribution of raw frequencies across the four registers and three nouns by means of the chi square test reveals that the differences are highly significant (χ2 = 4458, df = 6, p = 0.0000) and that, taking the three nouns in relation to each other, IDEA occurs less frequently in the academic register and more in the other three categories than would be predicted from 6 the null hypothesis of no association between noun and register, while CONCEPT and
6 The null hypothesis in a statistical test is that there is no difference between the values under test (here, the distribution of different categories across registers), in the populations from which the samples were drawn, the differences observed in the samples being due to sampling variation. Usually the investigator wants to reject the null hypothesis in favour of the alternative hypothesis that there is indeed a difference between the population values under study.
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NOTION occur far more frequently in academic language than the null hypothesis would predict and less frequently in the other three registers, particularly fiction. Comparable data for Spanish are shown in Table 3. Once more, in terms of normalised frequencies, IDEA is the most common overall, and CONCEPTO is more frequent than NOCIÓN. All four registers individually mirror this overall distribution of frequencies. IDEA is highest in spoken language, lowest in news, while CONCEPTO occurs most often in academic language and least in fiction, and NOCIÓN most frequently in fiction and academic language and least in news. Chi square analysis of the raw frequencies again gives a highly significant result (χ2 = 569, df = 6, p = 0.0000), and shows that when the three words are compared among themselves, IDEA is somewhat less common in academic writing and news than would be expected from the null hypothesis but more frequent in spoken language and fiction, while CONCEPTO is rather more frequent than expected in academic language and news but less common in spoken language and especially in fiction, and NOCIÓN is more frequent in fiction and less in spoken language and news.
Lemma Total Spoken Fiction News Academic IDEA 5800 1798 1406 1211 1385 [254.16] [316.55] [245.80] [211.71] [242.56] CONCEPTO 1910 424 111 503 872 [83.70] [74.65] [19.41] [87.94] [152.71] NOCIÓN 263 56 89 41 77 [11.52] [9.86] [15.56] [7.17] [13.49] Figures in square brackets are frequencies per million words.
Table 3: Frequencies of the lemmas IDEA, CONCEPTO and NOCIÓN in the spoken, fiction, newspaper and academic sections of the Corpus del Español
The most salient points of comparison between the two languages are as follows:
• In the four registers taken together, the frequency ordering is IDEA > CONCEPT > NOTION, or the equivalent, for both languages. • In terms of normalised frequencies, NOCIÓN is considerably less frequent than NOTION, and this is due to the relatively high occurrence of NOTION in English academic texts. • When the three nouns are compared among themselves, IDEA in both languages shows a lower relative frequency in academic writing than expected from the null hypothesis of equality of distribution of the three items, whereas CONCEPT and CONCEPTO show an association with academic language, as does NOTION in English. Both CONCEPT and CONCEPTO are particularly infrequent in fiction.
Overall, then, there are striking similarities between the two languages as far as frequency is concerned, with some more minor differences. From the associations between noun and register, we may hypothesise that in both languages IDEA, although it
ATLANTIS. Journal of the Spanish Association of Anglo-American Studies. 30.2 (December 2008): 59–77 ISSN 0210-6124 64 Christopher S. Butler occurs frequently in all four registers, is a more general word favouring non-technical registers, while CONCEPT(O) is associated with the more specific mental constructs which are important in the language of professional activities. English NOTION appears to associate more with professional registers than Spanish NOCIÓN.
3. Adjectival collocation
With these preliminary results in mind, let us turn to a second type of property of the three nouns in each language. We might expect that useful information about the usage of each item would be revealed by a study of the adjectives with which it associates. In order to test this, the ability of the software to generate frequency data on collocates selected by word class was exploited. For English, word forms tagged as adjectives in the BNC and occurring at the position (L1) one to the left of the head noun were tabulated in descending order of collocational frequency. Lists were obtained for both the singular and the plural form of each noun, and a list of collocates for each lemma drawn up by including any collocate which occurred in the top 20 in the frequency list for the singular form, the plural form, or both. The distribution across lemmas can be seen in Table 4. Let us begin with the collocates which are common to all three nouns.
IDEA, CONCEPT, IDEA, IDEA, CONCEPT, IDEA only CONCEPT only NOTION only NOTION CONCEPT NOTION NOTION whole good legal accepted Marxist clear traditional new bad central simple brilliant scientific general faintest key romantic vague fundamental very better broader popular basic great difficult objective other excellent limited simplistic different rough elusive wider original wrong British confused abstract nice particular complex religious fair important preconceived modern splendid relevant strange theoretical political historical conservative certain linguistic current radical psychological false dominant intuitive fresh older interesting western clever Table 4: Distribution of adjectival collocates at L1 for English data
One interesting observation is the occurrence of whole and very in the list. In order to illustrate the characteristics of the combinations of these adjectives with our three nouns, I give below an unbiased sample of five concordance lines for each combination, selected by generating a concordance for the combination and then taking every nth one, where n is the total divided by 5 and rounded down (for whole idea, the most frequent combination, 100 lines were generated and every 20th taken).
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1. them? Well Bill stood up and was a bit negative really to the whole idea of parish constables, farm watch and everything else, it was quite disappointing There 2. and Mary Rose began to think about drapes and colour schemes. The whole idea was too romantic and the awful prospect of the Ryan farmhouse or its equivalent vanished 3. to her lips. "But if you're a feminist, the whole idea of masculine verb endings including the feminine is a complete joke," she protested 4. 1983, pp. 55–7): The report goes on to repudiate the whole idea of a "no first use" pledge, which might enable "the Soviets 5. only in recent years was there a widespread and fundamental questioning of the whole idea of dictatorship, and a revaluation of peaceful, democratic forms of political change, 6. ways. Absolutely. Of course this is something for the future, the whole concept of hydrogen economy is well developed. When the economics become right, when the 7. be tough minded or sombre in mood to acknowledge the truth that the whole concept of A Retreat, in the older senses of the phrase, is now redundant 8. areas to coincide with National Foster Week, and a change in the whole concept of foster care. Family placement team members will be manning stalls at Alton market 9. not just upon the Christianity that precedes the reference, but on the whole concept of locality as somehow opposed to cosmopolitanism. We do well to remember that many 10. additional handicap. With a simple statement we have done away with the whole concept of deafness itself. Children are either capable of speaking or not; those who 11. these things. Do you think it's going to ultimately change the whole notion of publishing? Do you think that perhaps in due course publishing will move into 12. seating, designed primarily with public spaces in mind. If the whole notion of Designers' Saturday is altogether too much for you, or if your designer 13. and fewer dead-ends and irreversible choices than in the past, and the whole notion of "stages" has to be interpreted in the light of the individual's self-perception and the 14. inappropriate use of acute beds by younger patients to be raised. The whole notion of bed blocking seems to imply that older people enter hospital and then wilfully continue 15. and if necessary abandon a role altogether. Equally important, the whole notion of set role behaviour may come to seem problematic. In many situations, actors 16. anything, but --;" "Pregnant!" I screeched. The very idea ! The thought of the two of them fucking was bad enough; Lewis impregnating 17. director?" "Certainly not!" She was scandalised by the very idea , especially since the MD was a delightfully avuncular man, certainly old enough to 18. still convinced was operating in the club? Galvanised into action by the very idea , she rose abruptly to her feet, striving to keep her expression impassive as 19. was success in producing it. It is, rather, that the very idea of a body of knowledge about the world, of the sort we have now 20. This is precisely what the apparatus is designed to achieve. The very idea of the variable draws upon an analogy with the highly abstract structure of mathematics in 21. for entitlement to registration, since it is an indissociable principle of the very concept of establishment. 62. Part (c) of question (2), 22. process under review?" It may well be the case that the very concept of adjudication as applied to disputes between private individuals will have to be modified in
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23. dialectical possibilities of expansion and compression in a double logic. Thus the very concept of totalization, distinguished from totality, must always be refused its prospective closure, 24. of red objects are included in the set. The account presupposes the very concept , redness, the acquisition of which it is meant to explain. It is 25. a phenomenological analysis seems to result from the logical pressures built into the very concept of ontological existent. As a result of these pressures we are forced to modify 26. he would look entirely at home among the mountains --; but the very notion of spending time with him was enough to horrify her. She met his eyes 27. , it encounters an overwhelming obstacle. It overlooks the fact that the very notion that the market is capable of legitimating power is widely acknowledged as being open to 28. been to lead poets to trust their ear implicitly, thus discrediting the very notion of measure. The closeness of Pound's and Eliot's collaboration when they were 29. to revise an existing literary theory, but in order to make possible the very notion of such a thing. One may hear echoes of this kind of project in 30. from syntactic theory; but to make things even more difficult, the very notion of semantic equivalence is a disputed one. Some linguists argue that such equivalence does
There are some clear generalisations we can make here. 24 out of the 30 examples contain the framework the + whole/very + idea/concept/notion + of + nominal, the nominal (which is sometimes a gerund) usually having an indefinite or zero article (note that in the one example, 20, where the definite article occurs, it has a generic meaning). Other possibilities include a structure in which the noun is postmodified by a that clause rather than an of-phrase (27), a definite phrase with idea standing alone (The very idea!, as in 16), a non-postmodified NP with the definite article acting as subject or object (2), or a prepositional phrase with by (17, 18) . The function of the adjective is to emphasise, or focus upon, the mental construct, either by reference to its entirety (whole) or its inherent nature (very). But perhaps the most striking aspect of this set of examples is the presence, in the majority of cases, of something which clearly shows a negative attitude on the part of the speaker or writer. In some instances this takes the form of a lexical item or phrase which itself has a negative meaning: examples are negative, too romantic, awful prospect, a complete joke, repudiate, questioning, redundant, too much for you, wilfully, problematic, scandalised, refused, horrify, discrediting, disputed. In other examples where there are no strongly negative lexical items, the context still creates a negative impression: the whole concept of foster care requires a change; the whole concept of deafness has been done away with; the whole concept of locality is somehow opposed to cosmopolitanism (note the somehow); the very concept of adjudication may have to be modified; and so on. In yet other cases, consultation of the corpus itself reveals that the context beyond that given in the concordance line gives an indication of negative attitude: for instance, in the first example for whole notion, the later context shows that what is being moved into is a clearly undesirable situation in which nothing gets published. This kind of phenomenon has been discussed under the label of semantic prosody. Since this concept has been the subject of considerable debate in the corpus linguistics
ATLANTIS. Journal of the Spanish Association of Anglo-American Studies. 30.2 (December 2008): 59–77 ISSN 0210-6124 The very idea! 67 literature, it is worth exploring a little here. The term is usually attributed to a paper by Louw (1993), who defines it as “[a] consistent aura of meaning with which a form is imbued by its collocates” (Louw 1993: 157). Louw, however, refers to a personal communication dating from 1988, in which John Sinclair makes use of this label, using the term prosody in a similar way to Firth, who used the word in reference to phonological features which range across segmental boundaries. Partington (2004: 131) traces the origin of the study of semantic prosody even further back, to Sinclair’s (1987) demonstration that the items HAPPEN and SET IN are strongly associated with unpleasant events. Louw (1993: 172-73) warns us that “it should not be too readily assumed that semantic prosodies can be recovered with ease from corpora”, and that “[i]t may well turn out to be the case that semantic prosodies are less accessible through human intuition than most other phenomena to do with language”. As Hunston (2007: 250) points out in her excellent discussion of views of semantic prosody, there are quite major differences in the way in which the term is used by different authors. We have seen that early work by Sinclair identified a negative prosody associated with certain lexical items in English. The examples given by Louw also centre around ‘good’ and ‘bad’ prosodies. Partington, who defines semantic prosody as “the spreading of connotational meaning beyond single word boundaries” (1998: 68), clearly sees the connotational meanings involved as “favourable or unfavourable” (1998: 66), and this is also true of later discussion (Partington 2004). Stubbs (1995) demonstrates that the lexical item CAUSE has a strong negative prosody, and later (Stubbs 2001: 65) 7 that PROVIDE is associated with positive evaluation. On the other hand, Sinclair, in later work, recognises the possibility of semantic prosodies which are not simply ‘good’ or ‘bad’, but rather more specific in their interpretation. For instance, a sequence of words containing an indication of visibility plus a preposition (normally with or to, depending on the word class of the visibility word) plus the naked eye is found, in concordances, to be associated with a specific semantic prosody of difficulty, and the phrase true feelings with one of reluctance (Sinclair 2004: 30-36). Mention of Sinclair’s later work brings us to another important difference in approaches to semantic prosody. As noted by Hunston (2007: 250), Partington’s discussion is concerned largely with the prosodies associated with individual words: in Partington (2004), these are individual members of the semantic set of words including, and related to, HAPPEN. Partington does, however, state that “the evaluative meaning of phrases involving SET IN is […] communicated through the whole unit (consisting of item plus environment) rather than residing in just one of its parts” (2004: 132). Sinclair takes this idea further, associating semantic prosodies with an ‘extended unit of meaning’ which, in the case of naked eye is the whole complex of visibility + preposition + the naked eye, as we saw above. Whitsitt (2005) sees the concept of semantic prosody as inherently problematic. He first isolates three different types of definition of the term. He paraphrases Louw’s
7 Stubbs (2001: 66) comments that pragmatic prosody would be a better term than semantic prosody, and he himself actually uses the designation discourse prosody in order to emphasise not only that this phenomenon is pragmatic, relating to speaker attitude, but also that it has an important function in the creation of discourse coherence.
ATLANTIS. Journal of the Spanish Association of Anglo-American Studies. 30.2 (December 2008): 59–77 ISSN 0210-6124 68 Christopher S. Butler definition in the following way: “if several different words all sharing the same semantic trait are frequently used with another word, meaning will be passed, over time, from that group of words to the other word” (Whitsitt 2005: 284). He notes that Sinclair’s comment that “[a] semantic prosody […] is attitudinal, and on the pragmatic side of the semantics/pragmatics continuum” (Sinclair 2004: 34) casts doubt on the appropriateness of the term itself, and that Stubbs, in renaming the phenomenon as pragmatic prosody or discourse prosody, appears to agree. Finally, he discusses Partington’s use of the term, which equates it with connotation, and notes that Louw has rejected this usage, stating that “semantic prosodies are not merely connotational” (Louw 2000: 50), but that “[Louw] seems unable to offer any convincing argument demonstrating the difference between semantic prosody and connotation” (Whitsitt 2005: 286). The remainder of Whitsitt’s discussion is devoted to a detailed examination of Louw’s original treatment of semantic prosody, and finds it wanting. Among the aspects which Whitsitt finds most unsatisfactory is the claim that semantic prosodies carry over from one context to another, in such a way that a word or phrase may be interpreted positively or negatively even in contexts which do not themselves give any evidence of positive or negative evaluation. We shall, however, see some evidence for this idea later in our discussion. Hunston, on the basis of careful analysis of concordance data, points out that even when some item frequently co-occurs with collocates indicating positive or negative evaluation, this is not so in all cases, but is a statistical tendency. She concludes: “… it may be argued that ascribing semantic prosody to a word is over-simplistic. The attitudinal meaning of a word may be altered by its immediate phraseology. The concepts of positive and negative evaluation may themselves be [sic] over- simplification, and in any case rest crucially on a notion of point of view” (Hunston 2007: 256). Hunston herself leans towards Sinclair’s view that semantic prosodies characterise the consistent discourse function of an extended unit of meaning consisting of the central item and a set of co-occurrences, and that if the surrounding phraseology changes, so may the semantic prosody. Relating this view to our examples with whole/very plus idea/concept/notion, we may say that users of English commonly use this combination as part of an overall unit of meaning, whose precise limits may be difficult to define, which frequently contains expressions intended to have negative import, and whose function is to express the opinion that there is some problem associated with the mental construct under description. However, speakers and writers of English are also free to use such combinations simply to focus on the idea, concept or notion, without implying any associated negativity. Before we leave the issue of modification by whole/very, it is interesting to note its distribution across registers, as shown in Table 5.
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Sequence Total Spoken Fiction News Academic whole 108 34 37 14 23 idea [2.09] [3.41] [2.33] [1.34] [1.50] whole 44 14 6 6 18 concept [0.85] [1.41] [0.38] [0.57] [1.17] whole 12 2 0 3 7 notion [0.23] [0.20] [0.00] [0.29] [0.46] very 56 1 34 1 20 idea [1.08] [0.10] [2.14] [0.10] [1.30] very concept 23 0 1 0 22 [0.45] [0.00] [0.06] [0.00] [1.44] very notion 40 1 10 3 25 [0.77] [0.20] [0.63] [0.29] [1.63] Table 5: Frequencies of whole/very + noun in the 4 registers in BNC World
We see that on the basis of normalised frequencies, whole idea occurs in all four registers, being relatively more common in spoken language, while whole concept is found predominantly in spoken and academic language. Whole notion is rare: 7 of the 12 examples are in academic language. The combinations with very are almost confined to the academic and fiction registers: very idea is highest in fiction, very concept is found, with one exception, only in academic language, and very notion is also most frequent in this register. Let us now move on to examine the other frequent adjectival collocates which are common to the three nouns. These can be seen as falling into a number of semantic classes:8
• generality: general, basic • difference: different, other • recency: new, modern, original • domain: religious, theoretical • abstraction: abstract
The whole set of shared collocates can be seen as reflecting the similarities in meaning among the three nouns. Table 4 shows that there are a few collocates which are shared by two of the nouns. IDEA and NOTION share adjectives indicating clarity or the lack of it (clear, vague), also a positive evaluative collocate (brilliant); IDEA and CONCEPT share an adjective (Marxist) indicating domain; CONCEPT and NOTION have in common adjectives of domain
8 Adjective classifications proposed in the literature (e.g. Dixon 2005; Rachidi 1989; Lee 1994; Hundsnurcher and Splett 1982) were considered, but found not to facilitate the analysis in that they did not contain categories which were essential for an insightful interpretation of the results. I therefore decided to follow the principle commonly adopted in corpus linguistics, that categorisations should be allowed to emerge from the data themselves. Like most semantic categorisations, that of adjectives is not totally neat and tidy, and it is inevitable that some examples can be classified in more than one way.
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(scientific) and importance (fundamental), and also one (traditional) which we might treat under recency or the lack of it. It is also instructive to look at those adjectival collocates which are specific to individual nouns. What stands out most clearly in the list for IDEA is the predominance of evaluative terms, both positive (good, better, great, excellent, nice, splendid, interesting, fresh, clever, accepted) and negative (bad, wrong). There are also specific adjectives of generality (rough, fair), importance (dominant), domain (political), provenance (western) and degree (faintest), this last being part of idiomatic constructions which I shall deal with later. Finally, there are two adjectives specific to the list for IDEA which are more difficult to assign to clear semantic classes (radical, certain). As far as collocates found only in the list for CONCEPT are concerned, it is clear that domain adjectives are important (legal, historical, linguistic, psychological), together with those of importance (central, key, important, relevant) and generality or the lack of it (broader, particular, limited). Two collocates (difficult, elusive) indicate difficulty, and one (British) provenance. For NOTION, there are collocates of recency or the lack of it (current, older), generality (wider), difficulty or the lack of it (complex, simple) and objectivity (objective). However, the most striking feature is a clear preference for adjectives of negative evaluation (simplistic, confused, preconceived, strange, false and possibly conservative). If we examine the whole of the BNC, rather than just the four registers focused on in this article, we find additional negatively evaluative strong collocates of NOTION: absurd, mistaken, fancy. Furthermore, there are other adjectives in the list (e.g. romantic, popular, intuitive) which, although they are not in themselves inherently negative, are easily interpreted as negative in some, though not all, of the contexts in which they are used together with NOTION. All four examples with romantic (with a small initial ‘r’, rather than with a capital, referring to a period of literature or art) are of this type:
has. I think there's been surprisingly little er perhaps it's a slightly romantic notion , but I think it's it's got something to do with, brain is the first organ to truly "die". It's a romantic notion I know --; but to me, with his system idling yet the brain forgo your claim, do you think Rohan would allow it? What a romantic notion you must have of him." "We've fallen in love with proximity to an active audience. However, there is the problem of the romantic notion of pure art devoid of social responsibility. Some people engaging in the issue
For popular notion most of the concordance lines are too limited to show the effect clearly, so expanded contexts are provided below:
This chapter examines the currently popular notion of "transition to adulthood" in order to illustrate the complex and contentious nature of integration into adult life. The popular notion of a complete fusion of Christianity and Aristotle, obstructive to all criticism, can not stand. However, despite the publicity given to the more extravagant claims about the impact of new technology on the level of unemployment, and the popular notion that the silicon chip is a job destroyer, a survey, published in 1979, of some 400 documents on the effect of the new information technologies on employment showed "how little foundation there
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is to existing studies, half of which are by pessimists (often with a trade union background) The popular notion that words do not hurt you is by no means endorsed among women survivors of male violence Reform as the central aim of the penal system was a highly popular notion in the 1950s and 1960s: penological thought was dominated by "the rehabilitative ideal".
What we appear to have here is an instance of the phenomenon, discussed earlier, whereby an item, in this case NOTION, which frequently collocates with lexical items or longer stretches of language indicating a particular type of evaluation (here, negative), can sometimes induce an evaluative interpretation even of associated items which are not themselves inherently attitudinal. As we have seen, Hunston (2007: 266) warns us that this is only a tendency, since there are occasions on which this attitudinal meaning transfer does not occur. We may summarise the findings on adjectival collocation as follows:
• Certain types of adjective (emphatic/focusing, generality, difference, recency, domain, abstraction) are common to all three nouns, reflecting the close similarity among them. • IDEA collocates strongly with evaluative adjectives, positive and negative. • CONCEPT is associated with adjectives indicating domain, importance and difficulty. • NOTION associates strongly with negative evaluative adjectives, and may even exhibit a transfer phenomenon such that adjectives without an inherently negative component, such as romantic or popular, can at times be interpreted negatively in this context. These facts fit in well with the suggestion, in the dictionary definitions cited at the beginning of this paper, that notions are somewhat insubstantial, inconsequential mental constructs.
Broadly, the information derived from adjectival collocation supports and adds detail to that which we obtained from frequency considerations. Ideas are mental constructs which are part of our everyday lives, and are often evaluated either positively or negatively with respect to an intended application (e.g. a good/brilliant idea is one which the person describing it thinks is likely to be successful in relation to some particular plan or situation). Concepts, on the other hand, are mental constructs which are predominantly associated with fields of knowledge such as science, religion or philosophy, and are frequently commented on in terms of their importance or difficulty. Finally, notions are mental constructs which tend to be viewed negatively. Despite these differences, there are contexts in which the three nouns appear to be in free variation, though it is possible that close examination of an even larger database would reveal subtle differences even here. We now pass to a rather more cursory examination of the Spanish data on adjectival collocation. Here, lists were obtained for adjectives occurring at either the position one to the left of the noun (L1) or one to the right (R1), for the singular and plural forms of lemmas. This reflects the difference in word order between Spanish and English: in
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Spanish, although the default situation is for an adjective to follow a noun, there are circumstances in which the order may be reversed. An adjective was included in the list for a lemma if it appeared in the 20 most frequent collocates for the singular form, the plural form, or both. There is a problem here in that, since NOCIÓN is not common in the corpus, individual adjectival collocates are of too low a frequency for valid conclusions to be drawn. We shall therefore look only at IDEA and CONCEPTO. The distribution of collocates across the two lemmas is shown in Table 6. Collocates which are common to both nouns fall into the following categories, which overlap strongly with those for the three English nouns:
• generality: general (‘general’), básico (‘basic’) • importance: central (‘central’), fundamental (‘fundamental’) • difference: diferente, distinto (‘different’) • domain: filosófico (‘philosophical’), religioso (‘religious’), estético (‘aesthetic’) • recency: nuevo (‘new’) • evaluation: bueno (‘good’) • other: propio ( ‘own’ or ‘very’); cierto (with plural = ‘certain’)
IDEA, CONCEPTO IDEA only CONCEPTO only nuevo fijo antiguo general claro tradicional básico solo erróneo bueno original clásico central inicial actual fundamental malo alto diferente descabellado lechuguino propio grande esencial filosófico puta científico religioso mínimo principal cierto remoto espiritual distinto aproximado matemático estético genial hindú político genético liberal diverso previo elemental revolucionario cultural ilustrado complejo musical moderno socialista avanzado romántico menor
Table 6: Distribution of adjectives at L1 + R1 in Spanish (IDEA, CONCEPTO only)
If we now look at the adjectival collocates which are specific to IDEA, we see that there are a few which are evaluative, either positively: grande (‘big’), genial (‘brilliant’),
ATLANTIS. Journal of the Spanish Association of Anglo-American Studies. 30.2 (December 2008): 59–77 ISSN 0210-6124 The very idea! 73 avanzado (‘advanced’), and perhaps ilustrado (‘erudite’) or negatively: malo (‘bad’), descabellado (‘crazy’), but these are by no means as numerous as for English IDEA. There are also specific adjectives of generality: aproximado (‘approximate, rough’), recency: original (‘original’), inicial (‘initial’), previo (‘previous’), domain: político (‘political’), musical (‘musical’), socialista (‘socialist’), clarity: claro (‘clear’) and degree: menor (‘least’), mínimo (‘smallest’), remoto (‘remote’),9 puta (lit. ‘prostitute’), these last being part of idiomatic expressions (see later discussion). But there are also other collocates which do not fall into the main groupings: fijo (‘fixed’), solo (‘single’), liberal (‘liberal’), revolucionario (‘revolutionary’), romántico (‘romantic’). Collocates unique to the list for CONCEPTO include ones of domain: matemático (‘mathematical’), científico (‘scientific’), cultural (‘cultural’), genético (‘genetic’), espiritual (‘spiritual’), recency or the lack of it: antiguo (‘old’), tradicional (‘traditional’), actual (‘current’), moderno (‘modern’), and possibly clásico (‘classical’), importance: esencial, elemental (‘fundamental’), principal (‘main’), difference: diverso (‘different’), provenance: hindú (‘hindu’), complexity/difficulty: complejo (‘complex’). What marks CONCEPTO out as different from English CONCEPT, however, is the occurrence of evaluative adjectives, both positive and negative: erróneo (‘erroneous’), alto (‘elevated’), lechuguino (‘dandified’).10 Summarising the salient differences between the two languages with respect to adjectival collocation with the three nouns in each case, we may say that the Spanish nouns are more similar in their usage, overall, than the English ones. In particular, all three Spanish nouns associate with evaluative items, but this tendency is much weaker than for English IDEA and NOTION, and we have seen that English CONCEPT shows no predilection for such items. Interestingly, a similar general conclusion was reached in an earlier study of three adverbs, basically, essentially and fundamentally, and their formal equivalents in Spanish: once more, Spanish did not differentiate so clearly among the three items as did English (Butler in press). It is possible to speculate, on the basis of these two studies, that there might be a tendency towards a higher degree of precision or specificity in English lexis than in Spanish; however, this is an area which clearly requires considerably more research.
4. Idiomatic usages
Finally, we turn to some idiomatic usages in the two languages.11 We find English sequences consisting of forms of HAVE plus no and one of the three nouns under discussion (e.g. I have no idea). Combinations with idea, which express the meaning of not knowing something, are particularly frequent in fiction, followed by news, spoken
9 In the contexts in which it appeared with idea, remoto did not indicate lack of recency. 10 In view of the low frequency of collocations with NOCIÓN, these were extracted from the Leeds internet corpus of Spanish (http://corpus.leeds.ac.uk/internet.html). Preliminary investigation suggests that although there is some collocation of NOCIÓN with negatively evaluative adjectives, this tendency is much less pronounced than in the case of English NOTION. 11 Clearly, the idiomatic constructions discussed here are only a small subset of the ones into which the nouns under study enter. I have focused here on certain constructions which have restricted variability, and which are common to at least two of the nouns.
ATLANTIS. Journal of the Spanish Association of Anglo-American Studies. 30.2 (December 2008): 59–77 ISSN 0210-6124 74 Christopher S. Butler and academic language, as shown in Table 7. The other two nouns occur with smaller frequencies in this construction, and are used in a somewhat more literal way, to indicate that the subject does not possess a particular mental construct.
Collocation Total Spoken Fiction News Academic HAVE no 873 64 638 143 28 idea [16.90] [6.43] [107.95] [13.66] [1.83] HAVE no 10 3 2 3 2 concept [0.19] [0.30] [0.34] [0.29] [0.13] HAVE no 15 0 13 0 2 notion [0.10] [0.00] [2.20] [0.00] [0.13] Figures in square brackets are frequencies per million words.
Table 7: Frequencies of the lemma HAVE + no + noun in the 4 sections of BNC World
Sequence Total Spoken Fiction News Academic the faintest idea 68 13 49 3 3 [1.32] [1.31] [3.08] [0.29] [0.20] the faintest notion 2 0 2 0 0 [0.04] [0.00] [0.13] [0.00] [0.00] the slightest idea 16 1 14 0 1 [0.31] [0.10] [0.88] [0.00] [0.07] the slightest notion 1 0 1 0 0 [0.02] [0.00] [0.06] [0.00] [0.00] the foggiest idea 8 4 4 0 0 [0.15] [0.40] [0.25] [0.00] [0.00] the foggiest notion 1 1 0 0 0 [0.02] [0.10] [0.00] [0.00] [0.00] the remotest idea 7 2 5 0 0 [0.14] [0.20] [0.31] [0.00] [0.00] the least idea 12 0 11 0 1 [0.23] [0.00] [0.69] [0.00] [0.07] the vaguest idea 7 0 4 3 0 [0.14] [0.00] [0.25] [0.29] [0.00] the vaguest notion 3 0 3 0 0 [0.06] [0.00] [0.19] [0.00] [0.00] Figures in square brackets are per million words. No other combinations were found. Table 8: Sequences of the form the + superlative adjective + idea/notion occurring in the 4 sections of BNC World
Closely related are expressions of the form HAVE + n’t + the + superlative of adjective + noun, as in I haven’t the faintest idea. In terms of meaning, these are reinforced versions of the expressions we have just considered, such as I have no idea. As shown in Table 8, idea is the most frequent noun in this construction, and occurs with faintest, slightest, foggiest, remotest, vaguest and least as the superlative adjective, faintest being the most common. Notion occurs with faintest, slightest, foggiest, vaguest,
ATLANTIS. Journal of the Spanish Association of Anglo-American Studies. 30.2 (December 2008): 59–77 ISSN 0210-6124 The very idea! 75 but concept is not found at all in this construction. These constructions are most frequent in fiction and (less so) spoken language.12 They were very infrequent in news and non-existent in academic language. A detailed account of such sequences, situated within the framework of Systemic Functional Linguistics, can be found in Tucker (1996). Related expressions are found in the Spanish corpus (see Table 9). There are several expressions with idea: no + TENER (‘have’) + ni idea, la (más) mínima idea, ni puta idea, la más remota idea, etc. Of the most frequent, ni idea occurs most in spoken language, la menor idea in spoken language and fiction. There are also rare occurrences of la menor/mínima noción, but no occurrences of this construction were found with concepto.
Sequence Total Spoken Fiction News Academic ni idea 75 57 11 7 0 [3.29] [10.03] [1.92] [1.22] [0.00] la menor idea 50 22 23 5 0 [2.19] [3.87] [4.02] [0.87] [0.00] ni puta idea 8 7 1 0 0 [0.35] [1.23] [0.18] [0.00] [0.00] la más mínima idea 6 3 2 1 0 [0.26] [0.53] [0.35] [0.18] [0.00] la mínima idea 1 1 0 0 0 [0.04] [0.18] [0.00] [0.00] [0.00] la más remota idea 4 0 3 1 0 [0.18] [0.00] [0.52] [0.18] [0.00] ni remota idea 1 1 0 0 0 [0.04] [0.18] [0.00] [0.00] [0.00] idea remota 2 2 0 0 0 [0.09] [0.35] [0.00] [0.00] [0.00] la menor noción 2 1 0 1 0 [0.09] [0.18] [0.00] [0.18] [0.00] la mínima noción 1 0 1 0 0 [0.04] [0.00] [0.18] [0.00] [0.00] Figures in square brackets are per million words. No other combinations were found. Table 9: Idiomatic expressions with idea/noción in the Corpus del Español
12 The high frequency in fiction of a sequence whose idiomaticity might lead us to expect an association with spoken language recalls the comment of Biber et al (1999: 509) that emotive use of poor, as in poor little bastards, is frequent in fiction. It is as if writers of fiction unknowingly over-emphasise what they take to be typical conversational features in an effort to make their dialogues seem natural.
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5. Conclusion
In conclusion, we may say that close corpus-based analysis has shown that IDEA, CONCEPT and NOTION share a core of meaning which is reflected in their apparent interchangeability in some contexts, and in their frequent collocation with certain semantic groupings of adjectives. However, the study also reveals a number of differences in behaviour which suggest that ideas, as conceptualised in English, are mental constructs which belong essentially to the area of how we conduct our everyday lives and are frequently evaluated, positively or negatively, in terms of their suitability for some particular application. The term notion tends to be used preferentially for mental constructs which are negatively evaluated, while concepts are characterised by their abstraction and belong primarily to the realm of mental activities involved in professional and technical areas. The Spanish data reveal a picture which is similar in many ways, but there are indications that the three Spanish nouns are more similar than the English ones in their range of usage. At a more general level, this study has shown that detailed studies of corpus materials focusing on collocational behaviour offer powerful means of discriminating the fine detail of lexical usage, and can provide information which is of interest not only within descriptive and contrastive linguistics itself, but also in applied areas such as translation and advanced language learning.
Works cited
Biber, Douglas, Stig Johansson, Geoffrey Leech, Susan Conrad and Edward Finegan, eds. 1999: Longman Grammar of Spoken and Written English. London: Longman. Butler, Christopher S. In press: ‘“Basically Speaking”: a Corpus-Based Analysis of three English Adverbs and their Formal Equivalents in Spanish’. María L. A. Gómez-González, J. Lachlan Mackenzie and Elsa González-Álvarez, eds. Current Trends in Contrastive Linguistics: Functional and Cognitive Perspectives. Amsterdam and Philadelphia: Benjamins. Dixon, Robert M. W. 2005: A Semantic Approach to English Grammar. 2nd ed. Oxford: Oxford UP. Hundsnurcher, Franz and Jochen Splett 1982: Semantik der Adjektive im Deutschen: Analyse der semantischen Relationen. Opladen: Westdeutscher Verlag. Hunston, Susan 2007: ‘Semantic Prosody Revisited’. International Journal of Corpus Linguistics 12.2: 249-268. Lee, Sun-Muk 1994: Untersuchungen zur Valenz des Adjektivs in der deutschen Gegenwartssprache. Frankfurt am Main: Lang. Louw, Bill 1993: ‘Irony in the Text or Insincerity in the Writer? — the Diagnostic Potential of Semantic Prosodies’. Mona Baker, Gill Francis and Elena Tognini-Bonelli, eds. Text and Technology: In Honour of John Sinclair. Amsterdam: Benjamins. 157-76. Louw, Bill 2000: ‘Contextual Prosodic Theory: Bringing Semantic Prosodies to Life’. Chris Heffer and Helen Saunston, eds. Words in Context: A Tribute to John Sinclair on his Retirement. English Language Research Discourse Analysis Monograph 18. University of Birmingham. [CD-ROM] Partington, Alan 1998: Patterns and Meanings. Amsterdam: Benjamins. Partington, Alan 2004: ‘“Utterly Content in Each Other’s Company”: Semantic Prosody and Semantic Preference’. International Journal of Corpus Linguistics 9.1: 131-56. Rachidi, Renate 1989: Gegensatzrelationen im Bereich deutscher Adjektive. Tübingen: Niemeyer. Sinclair, John M. 1987: Looking Up. London: Collins.
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Sinclair, John M. 2004 (1996): ‘The Search for Units of Meaning’. Textus IX: 75-106. Reprinted in John Sinclair (2004) Trust the Text: Language, Corpus and Discourse. London: Routledge. 24- 48. Stubbs, Michael 1995: ‘Collocations and Semantic Profiles: on the Cause of the Trouble with Quantitative Studies’. Functions of Language 2.1: 23-55. Stubbs, Michael 2001: Words and Phrases: Corpus Studies of Lexical Semantics. New York: Blackwell. Tucker, Gordon H. 1996: ‘So Grammarians haven’t the Faintest Idea: Reconciling Lexis-Oriented and Grammar-Oriented Approaches to Language’. Ruqaiya Hasan, Carmel Cloran and David G. Butt, eds. Functional Descriptions: Theory in Practice. Amsterdam and Philadelphia: Benjamins. 145-78. Whitsitt, Sam 2005: ‘A Critique of the Concept of Semantic Prosody’. International Journal of Corpus Linguistics 10.3: 283-305.
Received 17 July 2008 Revised version accepted 9 September 2008
Christopher S. Butler is Honorary Professor at Swansea University, UK. His research interests are in the comparison of functional theories of language and their relationship with formal and with cognitive and/or construction-based theories, and in the use of quantitative corpus-based techniques in the study of English and Spanish. Recent publications include Structure and Function: A Guide to Three Major Structural- Functional Theories (Benjamins, 2003) and ‘Cognitive adequacy in structural-functional theories of language’. Language Sciences 30.1: 1-30, 2008.
Address: Applied Linguistics, School of Arts, Swansea University, Singleton Park, Swansea SA2 8PP. Tel. +44 (0)1792 602540, Fax +44(0)1792 602545. E-mail [email protected] (the latter used for all correspondence.)
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Out of the Dark Room: Photography and Memory in Rachel Seiffert’s Holocaust Tales
Cristina Pividori Universidad Autónoma de Barcelona [email protected]
Photography plays a crucial role in Seiffert’s debut novel, The Dark Room (2001). Not only does it contribute significantly to rediscovering Germany’s traumatic past, but it also shares certain common responses with the text: the narrative of the self, the album aesthetics, memory, the anti-heroic and the notion of open work. When applied to Seiffert’s novel, these categories allow not only for new insights into the representation of subjectivities but also for several possible textual readings. This study focuses on Seiffert’s concern for the visual, which lingers in a liminal zone between history and memory and reflects a post-Holocaust crisis of representation. The writer rejects the value of using history and documentary photography to handle German Holocaust memory and finds alternative representational approaches to dealing with it in her text. Particular attention is given to the fragmentation of time and space, the self as part of the narrative, the uncovering of unconscious impulses through the visual, the protagonists as anti-heroes, the novel as open work and, most importantly, the concept of post-memory, introduced in the representation of history, documentary photography and family portraits through the critical use of traumatic realism.
Key Words: photography, Holocaust, post-memory, liminality, narrative of the self, album aesthetics, anti-hero, open work, traumatic realism.
1. Introduction
It is often said that a photograph is worth a thousand words and this is certainly the case in today’s image dominated world. Nobody doubts that the visual, firstly associated with photography and later with the cinema, has become an influential mode of perception. However, for each individual that views a photograph, those thousand words will be irreversibly thought and expressed in a distinctive way. In other words, images may be regarded as universal language, but they still incite interpretation; they still need to be read. In its still short existence, the camera has made the traditional image-word distinction increasingly difficult to sustain. The productive interaction between the visual and the linguistic has not only blurred the image-word boundary but also produced more hybrid modes of representation. This post-modern conflation has 80 Cristina Pividori allowed us to read both prose photographs and visual fictions (Garret-Petts 2001) and made it possible not only for images to tell stories but also for language to reveal the hidden behind the visible through the creation of new narrative spaces, particularly when dealing with trauma and unresolved memories. Antonio Ansón highlights the impact of memory as one of the most relevant contributions of photography to the arts suggesting that “a partir de la fotografía se recuerda de otra manera,” as a photograph, “lejos de salvaguardar los recuerdos del olvido, es una puerta abierta de par en par para que nos perdamos en ellos” (2002: 40).1 Photography then, like memory, belongs to a private, uncertain space and becomes the means through which the unconscious can be visually recorded. It has, in fact, an elusive quality that seems to blend different worlds and realities, disclosing past mysteries. Moreover, it helps reveal the potential that the photographic image has for projecting an enigmatic atmosphere outside the photograph itself, an aura of mystery, some sort of vibration that seems to be essential for the realization of the photograph as the viewer transforms it into admiration and memory. Apart from regarding photography as a channel for rediscovering past memories, Ansón also deals with some of the common responses literature, films and photography share. While films are popular for having passed the aesthetics of montage on to the other arts – including ellipsis, sequencing, close-up and fragmentation – photography’s contributions are less acknowledged but nonetheless relevant. Among them, it is important to mention the narrative of the self, the album aesthetics, the anti-heroic as indisputable protagonist, the notion of open work and particularly memory, which, as mentioned above, has become a crucial reference linked to introspection (Ansón 2002: 29-42). Photographic memory, visual themes and images are used by post-Holocaust writer Rachel Seiffert in The Dark Room (2001) to explore a German past which “resides in a liminal zone between history and memory – that is, between the past as object of dispassionate study and the past as an affective part of personal and collective consciousness” (Goertz 1998: 33). Seiffert weaves a series of three novella-length stories, chronologically and thematically connected, to deal with collective German Holocaust guilt. As in a tragic photo album, each of the stories bears the main character’s name: ‘Helmut’, ‘Lore’ and ‘Micha’. The writer inserts bits of still images of concentration camps and mass shootings into family snapshots of German people – even Nazis – who are portrayed as ordinary human beings, rejoicing and suffering as everyday people do. The first story is about Helmut, a boy with a physical deformity who becomes a photographer’s assistant and records with fascination the evacuation of Berlin and its gradual ruin. The next story begins where Helmut’s ends and concerns Lore, a teenage girl whose parents are Party members captured at the end of the war, and who finds herself leading her four younger siblings on a dangerous flight across a divided Germany to reach her grandmother’s house in Hamburg. Finally, in the last story, set in the 1990s, a young teacher, Micha, becomes obsessed with the dark past of his beloved grandfather, imprisoned for nine years in the Soviet Union after the war.
1 The following translations are my own: “through photography, we remember differently, since a photograph, far from keeping memories alive, is an open door through which we lose ourselves in them” (Ansón 2002: 40).
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Born in Oxford to German and Australian parents, Rachel Seiffert was brought up bilingually. Yet her work can be considered as part of a range of German voices – among them Tanja Dückers, Birgit Bauer, Olaf Müller, Uwe Timm, Ulla Hahn, Monika Maron, Stefan Wackwitz and Tulla Pokriefke – who were affected and influenced by the Holocaust as second- and third-generation writers. These writers focus on the psychological, social and cultural impact of the Holocaust on German society, and their works can be regarded as the product of public debate on the legacy of German culpability and the problem of collective identity and memory. They all attempt to reconstruct the memory of both collective suffering and victimization and contribute to a public discourse in which memory may be transferred in a process of empathy and identification from one generation to the next (Cohen-Pfister 2005: 123). Photography contributes significantly to the process of “re-membering” history lost or silenced (a term coined by Michael White (1990) as part of his narrative therapy). The primacy of the visual in The Dark Room draws both on realism and illusion, history and memory to try to account for an inherited past that has become part of cultural trauma and collective identity. The writer reframes the visible world in her photo-text, a text that displays a concern for photography as one of the most relevant motifs, although photographs are not actually present but re-presented. The description of snapshots – both as family treasures or as criminal evidence – and the impressive array of details enrich the fabric of the text and offer several possible perspectives. The purpose of this essay thus is to give new insights into the descriptive categories exemplified by Antonio Ansón – the narrative of the self, the album aesthetics, the representation of memory, the anti-heroic and the notion of open work – by exploring the manipulation of the visual and the photo-textual in Seiffert’s novel.
2. Realism vs. Narrative of the Self
A comparison can be drawn between the photographic album and the personal diary to account for the discurso del yo (‘narrative of the self’ [Ansón 2002]) as a point of encounter between photography and literature when dealing with subjectivities. Both in the photograph album and the personal diary, the self becomes the centre of attention. While in the photograph album the protagonists are always part of the stories their photographs tell, either because they were in the photograph when it was taken or behind the camera as photographers; in the personal diary the self becomes a stimulating source of thought and the means through which the world can be understood. The subject confesses his or her private thoughts and feelings in first- person present-tense narration. Interior monologue, then, shapes that self, either consciously or unconsciously. This kind of narrative, essentially modernist and highly influenced by Freud’s psychoanalytical theory is the closest literature comes to represent consciousness (Lodge 2002: 63). Although Seiffert’s photo-text seems to lack the formal and artistic innovation the modernist novel has achieved – the writer uses short, sharp sentences and plentiful dialogue through which she seems to stay on the surface of the text – there are several instances, particularly in ‘Micha’, the last and longest novella, in which Seiffert succeeds
ATLANTIS. Journal of the Spanish Association of Anglo-American Studies. 30.2 (December 2008): 79–94 ISSN 0210-6124 82 Cristina Pividori in vividly representing the complexity of the mental event. By using ellipsis, switching narrative voice and mixing thoughts and the spoken word, the writer manages to break the linearity of language and places her conflicted Micha in the centre of consciousness in a passage that resembles the modernist interior monologue: Even now, with all his certainty about what Opa did, where he did it, the faces on the museum wall he might have done it to, Micha tries, but he can’t make it all add up to anything. Guilt, remorse, pride, defiance, shame. Nothing definite. Nothing for Micha to pin everything to. Facts, events, places stand separate, distinct, and Dilan screams. Micha straps her into the stroller, walks away from the house in search of a shop or a café, a place to buy water, some formula, somewhere to warm it all up. Dilan won’t stop crying, and he is afraid. Over two hours home on the train. (Seiffert 2001: 268) The profusion of rhetorical figures – repetition and alliteration – gives readers the impression that they are sharing the character’s consciousness: Micha’s brain working with a myriad thoughts at the same time, his soul being tested, trying to come to terms with his national and family past, feeling guilty and ashamed. In Ansón’s narrative of the self: “El sujeto enuncia, evoca, relata, rememora, proyecta en el futuro, supone, imagina desde el ahora de ese sujeto” (2002: 36).2 Although Seiffert speaks through Helmut, Lore and Micha using the third person, the mood of the novel is charged with dramatic emotion as free indirect speech is introduced either in the form of rhetorical questions or association of ideas in the character’s mind. For instance when Micha’s thoughts turn to returning home – “Over two hours home on the train” (Seiffert 2001: 268) – or when Lore is confronted with the truth about their saviour – “What do you want from me?” (151). Free indirect speech always appears in italics in the text and allows for the fusion of the first and the third person perspectives in a single style and, of course, for the intimacy and immediacy of the first person phenomenon of consciousness, that is the narrative of the self. The character’s concern is expressed “as a silent, private thought in [his] own words, to which we are given access without the overt mediation of the narrator” (Lodge 2002: 37). While Seiffert clearly privileges depth over surface when going into the representation of her characters’ thoughts and feelings, as in the previous quote for instance, she remains on the surface when representing both photographs and the external world. In the first of the three novellas, Helmut, the protagonist, is made to observe and document not only the decline and then repopulation of Berlin’s railway station – “his encyclopaedic knowledge of the timetable impresses many of the other little boys” (2001: 8) – but also the evacuation and devastation of his native city – “The lonely clock tower of the Kaiser Wilhelm Church, and the rubble of the Tiergarten nearby. The grand hotels on Unter den Linden reduced to skeleton structures. Their chandeliers glittering in the debris, tapestries hanging loose and torn” (43). The character’s shots of deportations and destruction emerge from the same dark room as the family portraits, the same careful attention to detail noticeable in all of them:
2 “The subject enunciates, evokes, relates, recalls, projects into the future, supposes, imagines from his/her present”.
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The family photos show a healthy boy, already quite tall, standing between his parents, both seated slightly in front of him. He has a sailor suit on, the regular uniform for boys on Sundays and holidays. His right arm rests on his mother’s shoulder, and he is standing so that his left side favors the camera slightly. The combined effect is to minimize his lopsided chest, to mask the crooked hang of his arm. For three or four years, the family adopts a similar pose, variations coming in the clothes, Helmut’s height, and the gradual graying of his father’s beard. (Seiffert 2001: 9) These accounts seem to be completely devoid of judgement or moral understanding. The method of approaching reality is by describing it, as if the narrator were behind a camera. The representation is apparently objective; Seiffert uses bare description, refraining from commentary. Still, each detail is loaded with significance, perhaps because of the compelling quality of the visual images. Such vivid and disturbing images explicitly engage readers-spectators, who are asked to supply insights into the missing, nonetheless implied, emotional and moral significance of the scene. The text captures elements that mediate between the reader and the photograph with a kind of intensity and resonance that readers cannot ignore. When, in the first novella, Helmut is made to photograph the deportation of the Gypsies, “[he] is afraid, exhilarated. His hands sweat and shake” (Seiffert 2001: 28). Still, he is not allowed to succeed: “He reloads, curses his fingers, feeble and damp, fumbles and struggles with the focus” (28). Through Helmut’s fear and anxiety, the writer implicitly shows her own helplessness, a tension between words and images as the photographic medium appears not to be able to record external reality as it is perceived by the eye. In her study of Holocaust collective memory under the influence of journalistic photographs taken in concentration camps after World War II, Zelizer (1998) questions the ability of atrocity photography to bear witness to the truth of the Jewish Holocaust. Drawing on Benjamin’s ‘Theses on the Philosophy of History’ (1940), Zelizer appears to distrust visual representation of Holocaust trauma and to allow for the possibility of different acts of viewing over time: “The past can be seized only as an image which flashes up at the instant when it can be recognized and is never seen again” (Benjamin 1940 qtd in Zelizer 1998: 15). Constant exposure to traumatic photography as a type of collective remembering may in fact have the opposite effect: it may get viewers used to Holocaust atrocities to the point of neglecting contemporary acts of barbarism. In Zelizer’s opinion, then, atrocity photographs would not help remembering to remember but rather remembering to forget. Although Seiffert builds her narrative around the visual, she also seems to criticize photographic perception, implying that “neither photography nor perception can give us what is before the camera or the eye” (Cadava 1997: 91). Both as photographer and witness to the disturbing scene taking place in front of him, Helmut is left only with fragments of the seen, unable to reconstruct the whole. Seiffert’s objective representation of the common, phenomenal world appears to fail when faced with the horror of the Holocaust; the rhetoric of abstention becomes an impossible feat when covering such traumatic events. By making Helmut take the photographs, the writer calms the anxiety produced by the scene, but immediately after the photographs, she makes his character a victim of the seen. Seiffert’s own despair and impotence seem to be filtered through the text when describing Helmut’s utter disappointment: “At first he can only cry. Angry tears: the
ATLANTIS. Journal of the Spanish Association of Anglo-American Studies. 30.2 (December 2008): 79–94 ISSN 0210-6124 84 Cristina Pividori panic of the day turned to rage. Turned against the photos, against himself, his failure to capture the scene” (2001: 29). When historical references are introduced in the photo-text a similar thing happens. Public events are never directly addressed. They are added as impersonal, external elements, although the Nazi Party, the Holocaust, and the implicit question of how to remember them, are centrally important in The Dark Room. The passive voice is used to describe the National Socialist Party’s conquests in the first story: “To the east, new land is found; old land is found again” (Seiffert 2001: 12). This journalistic commitment to detachment may possibly hide Sieffert’s post-modern reluctance to rely on History or her intention to undermine the subject of the action. The writer seems to imply that the more thorough is the description of historical events, the less likely will the description account for bereavement and loss. In the second story, on the other hand, it is through the visual, through the indirect description of the rough posters of emaciated bodies put on public display that Seiffert approaches the hellish world of concentration camps: The pictures are of skeletons. Lore can see that now, pulling her hands back, tugging her sleeves down over her glue-damp palms. Hundreds of skeletons: hips and arms and skulls in tangles. Some lying in an open railroad car, others in a shallow depression in the ground. Lore holds her breath, looks away, sees the next picture: hair and skin and breasts. She takes a step back, trapped by the wall of the crowd. People. Lying naked in rows. Skin thin as paper over bone. Dead people in piles with no clothes on. (Seiffert 2001: 77) It would seem that when confronting genocide and war crimes, “traditional forms of history will not provide an understanding of the past” (Sturken 1999: 10). Nevertheless, despite the absence of authorial voice, history permeates through the represented photographs with diffuse agency as a result of meeting the other’s pain and horror. Through the incorporation of the photographs of Holocaust victims into the text, Seiffert appears to perform a mode of conceiving history that is not linear but rather discontinuous. In order to account for what they call crises of witnessing, Felman and Laub (1992) articulate a performative text to deal with the testimonies of the Holocaust and the effect that collective trauma has on the individual mind. Words and images appear as overlapping categories allowing for the construction of new meanings each time they are reinterpreted by readers. Similarly, Cadava (1997:7), in an effort to understand Walter Benjamin’s use of photographic language to represent history, refers to the writer’s “dialectical images” (Benjamin 1999:462), or, as Cadava calls them, “snapshots in prose” as Benjamin’s attempt to write about both modern history and the relation between fascism and aesthetic ideology. Seiffert seems to emulate Benjamin’s use of textual snapshots not only to write about German Nazi history, but also to uncover “the invisible traces of trauma” (Nunn 2004: 288). The purpose behind Lore’s photographic confrontation with Nazi mass executions seems to be the description of “the literal return of the traumatic event against the will of the one it inhabits” (Caruth 1995: 5). By being confronted with trauma Lore is also faced with both the history of her people and her own family history.
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The protagonist of the third story, Micha, is also brought face to face with history and unresolved past images as he is made to travel to pay a visit to the “visual sites of memory – memorials, photographs, installations” (Morris 2001: 368) where the character confronts his grandfather’s Nazi past: All along the final wall are photos taken during the war. Micha sees them out of the corner of his eye while he is still by the uniforms. He prepares himself to look closer; tells himself what they will show. Public executions, smiling Germans, mass graves, mass shootings. He is right. Heads hanging loose, bodies hanging long from trees. Young men aiming rifles at kneeling children. Soldiers standing, smoking in the sunshine and behind them, the dead lying pale and naked in rows. Micha looks at them all, looks hard into the faces of the soldiers, checks for Opa’s cheekbones, his high forehead, his deep-set eyes. (Seiffert 2001: 195) These ‘visual sites of memory’ appear as the only way to approach past history for second-hand witnesses, yet they are distrusted. As in the above description, Seiffert’s treatment of Third Reich images goes beyond the objective reporting of the external world. The writer creates a folk-tale atmosphere, though much cruder, much rougher. Through fiction, Seiffert is able to surpass reality and bear more truth than most studied attempts at historical revisionism. In the same line of thought, Morris refers to Humberto Eco’s “travel to hyperreality” as the only possible way to cope with traumatic past through the visual: “The hyperreal blurs the distinction between presence and absence, between photographic image and death, between sound and silence, crafting sites of authenticity that are no longer historic, but instead visual” (2001: 369). Seiffert demolishes reality with the introduction of photographs in her text and then redefines them in the process of writing (Cohen 1984: 22). Just as Walter Benjamin grieves over the vanishing of the ‘aura’ surrounding the original piece, that is to say the displacement of reality into the printed image, Seiffert goes one step further by displacing photographs from their traditional medium to cause several subsidiary effects in her text. The writer brings Barthes’ “photographic paradox” (1988: 19) into her photo-narrative to challenge the acclaimed distinction between studium – the cultural interpretation or the denotation of the photographic image – and the punctum – the connotation of the photograph. It would seem, therefore, that The Dark Room reveals the “spectral evidence” (Baer 2002) embedded in every image, the ethereal or ghostly afterlife of the photograph’s theme. In other words, the writer appears to be willing to show how photography and traumatic memory may intersect in her text. With a similar approach towards the connection between photography and the experience of trauma, Nunn confers crucial importance to the combination of image and text: Text and image combined invite us to think about firstly photography’s capacity to make us aware of a dimension of reality that is at once there but also is not easily visible or even socially registered. Secondly, on a more structural level, they invite us to develop an analogy between the processes of photography and the experience of trauma. (Nunn 2004: 287) Seiffert achieves, then, what Sontag calls the “talismatic use of photographs” as “attempts to contact or lay claim to another reality” (Sontag 2002: 16) uncovered by the
ATLANTIS. Journal of the Spanish Association of Anglo-American Studies. 30.2 (December 2008): 79–94 ISSN 0210-6124 86 Cristina Pividori photographic image. The Dark Room in fact departs from reality to become only a resemblance to the seen. The writer introduces some very interesting and subtle visual shadings to deal with trauma in her text, substituting photographic certainty for the partiality of her own view. Seiffert’s choice of describing her photographs, rather than presenting them as direct evidence of the horror, seems to be a careful strategy adopted to manipulate verbal description and stress the theme of memory in the novel, denying, at the same time, the value of photographs to convey truth. The problem with representing collective trauma for second- or third-generation writers is that when horror becomes part of the everyday, when horror is generalized, language loses its power to respond to it. As Rostan clearly states it, “collective traumas, then, change how we think about the `real´ – they show extreme, unbelievable, and unrealistic events emerging from the matrix of the everyday” (2006: 173). In the description of the Holocaust photographs, of Helmut’s failing to capture the seizing of the gypsies and of Micha being faced with these “visual sites of memory” there seems to be an immediacy and urgency coming from the text that makes the whole discussion of representation problematic. In order to understand how both realism and the narrative of the self function in Seiffert’s photo-text, The Dark Room should be read in terms of the interplay of different levels of representation. The writer moves through them, deliberately remaining in a liminal zone between surface and depth, history and memory, the self and the other, and allowing for a continuous interweaving thread of the real, the photographic and the textual with a particular metalinguistic awareness. The novel articulates a crisis of representation, the difficulty in finding the right words to express the guilt and the sorrow intruding upon the lives of the Germans since the end of WWII and the complexity of unresolved post-Holocaust memory. Seiffert’s narrative – together with other works that deal with German post-war experience with a similar approach – has been shaped by German Holocaust guilt in such a way that it appears to outline a kind of realist subgenre, that which successfully combines stark realism with the representation of trauma. In Traumatic Realism: The Demands of Holocaust Representation (2000), Rothberg re-evaluates and examines the role of realism in the representation of trauma, suggesting alternative modes of artistic representation of what he believes to be a seemingly ordinary reality characterized by the presence of numerous instances of collective anguish and shame. Rothberg’s notion of traumatic realism may be applicable to Seiffert’s The Dark Room in its attempts to re-define history, collective identity and literary representation under the sign of trauma.
3. Album Aesthetics: The Representation of Memory
When mentioning the common responses literature and photography share in their representation of subjectivities, Ansón refers to the album aesthetics and argues that, apart from the self, whose presence is implicit in the photo-album, there is also the notion of novella mosaico, memory, the anti-hero, and open-work, which, within the context of the photo-album, take on an entirely different meaning. The disposition of the photos, unlike the pages in a book or the progression of the written language, is not
ATLANTIS. Journal of the Spanish Association of Anglo-American Studies. 30.2 (December 2008): 79–94 ISSN 0210-6124 Out of the Dark Room 87 linear: while “language progresses in linear order through time, photographs are apprehended in a more immediate manner” (Eisinger 1995 qtd in Humm 2002: 213). They open a space for spectators to get lost and an opportunity to see past, present and future all at once. Like the photographs on the pages of an album, Seiffert’s characters are constructed and arranged in an array of shapes and sizes, appearing and disappearing without sequential description. As Culver puts it, images are like “fragment[s]violently cut out from a larger whole and never complete in [themselves]” (1989: 191); once incorporated into another representational meaning, they are contextually redefined, telling an entirely different story. Not only does The Dark Room rely on a notion of discontinuous history, but it also resists formal linearity. Though based on a chronological structure, the text develops in the tradition of the album aesthetics, that is, as a gallery of portraits drawn with a strong resemblance in style and composition. This montage effect distorts time and space perceptions and from these distortions, metaphors and symbolism are created (Gianetti 1972: 54). While every story is self-contained, the three of them are linked together by the presence of photography: Photographs are captured, treasured, exhibited, hidden and stolen. They not only serve the purpose of reminding viewers of both their past experiences and public history but also take the story back to a past that is inevitably connected to the present, precisely through visual representation. Ansón explains that the aesthetics of novela mosaico is similar to that of the photo album in that it consists of “párrafos cortos, de diferentes tamaños, que se siguen uno tras otro, completándose, parciales sesgados” which “comparten con el álbum su incapacidad para trazar un horizonte” (2002: 39).3 Both in the photo-album and in the novela mosaico, time linearity is abolished “para enroscarse en bucles sucesivos que van hacia delante para volver hacia atrás, explicar algo que todavía está por suceder o entender, de repente, algo que ya sucedió pero no estábamos en disposición de conocer porque carecíamos de los datos necesarios para su comprensión” (2002: 39).4 In The Dark Room, the plot tends to go backwards in time as the presence of photographs not only triggers affective responses and specific cultural memories but also adds another layer to the reading of the text, contributing to this notion of literary montage. In the third story, the description of the photograph of the character’s grandfather provides an illustrative example. Although it tells a story of shame, it becomes crucially important for the reconstruction of his family past: The second photo was taken just before Michael started school. Just before Opa died. This one is in color, taken at a family dinner, with Opa in shirtsleeves and Michael in pyjamas, orange and blue. -- It was time for bed. I was sent down to say good night, and Opa let me stay. In this photo, Michael sits on his Opa’s lap, legs dangling, smiling into the lens. Behind them, his uncle Bernd is laughing, facing the camera, wineglass raised. Opa has his hands
3 “short paragraphs, of different sizes, following one after the other, completing themselves, partial, biased, [which] share with the album their inability to draw a horizon”. 4 “to roll up in successive curls that go back and forth, explain what is about to happen or suddenly understand something that had already happened though we were not able to know because we lacked the necessary information to understand it”.
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folded across Michael’s tummy and is smiling, too, but not at the lens. He is looking only at the boy on his lap; his food and wine abandoned on the table, the photographer forgotten again. Why not earlier? Another question which circles Michael’s brain. It should have been important all along. (Seiffert 2001: 168) The album aesthetics is stressed not only by the presence of narrative fragments and interior monologue in the form of free indirect speech but also by this journey in time that reveals the character’s obsession with the recent acquired knowledge that his dear grandfather had been a member of the Nazi Party’s fighting force, the Waffen SS. Seiffert’s photo-text then posits a double experience, forcing characters and readers to relive the scenes in the photographs. Micha seems to be trapped in the photographs he has seen as both his imagination and his memory retain these images over time. The act of viewing involves not only a desire for the truth, no matter what form it takes, but also a longing for a sense of the past, or better said, for a sense of the viewer’s past. New interpretations of the photographic image can turn both memories and images inside out. The following quote from the third story reproduces the atemporal quality of the photo album together with the power of the visual “to mobilize conscience [and] bring news of some unsuspected zone of misery” (Sontag 2002: 17). The scene takes place at the university library, and the character goes backwards and forwards in time, juxtaposing past and present in tireless lucubration, as he watches, not photographs this time, but an old video collection about the Nazi leader Heinrich Himmler, who, in the character’s unconscious, is inevitably linked to his own Opa: The video hums on in front of him, quieter as he slips away. When he wakes up, the tape is playing in the machine. Heinrich Himmler inspects his ranks of saluting SS. Chin receding into skinny neck, coat belted high over his chest. The headphones have slipped out of their socket, silent pads cover Micha’s ears. He hears his breath loud and long; still in the pattern of sleep. Memory rattling out Himmler facts. A school-teacher. Had copies of Mein Kampf bound in human skin. Said the SS were righteous killers; right to kill Jews. Great nations must march over thousands of corpses. Something like that. (Seiffert 2001: 174-75) The narrative seems to be fragmented into half-remembered, brittle moments, as all the possible images that were prevented from coming to light by war trauma seem to struggle to the surface. Everything is happening in the mind: past and present, repressed drives and desires. Readers jump from image to image as the character does, reproducing, to a certain extent, not only the experience of looking at a photo album but also that of the moviegoer. An interesting interplay between visual images, memory and dreams and their relation towards trauma is introduced as the half-asleep character’s unconscious optics is triggered. In her essay ‘The Cinema’ (1926), Woolf uses the image of “the eye and the brain” that Seiffert clearly explores in the previous quote: “The eye is in difficulties. The eye wants help. The eye says to the brain, ‘something is happening which I do not understand. You are needed’” (Woolf 1926: 1). This is precisely the visual process that takes place when Micha is made to watch Himmler’s images. His mind tries to bring back what is unconscious to make it conscious again. By using free indirect speech, Seiffert describes his character’s obscure
ATLANTIS. Journal of the Spanish Association of Anglo-American Studies. 30.2 (December 2008): 79–94 ISSN 0210-6124 Out of the Dark Room 89 memories, hidden and covered by other memories – and puts him in a drowsy state in which reality and sleepy visions combine as disturbing images are recalled. As for the representation of memory, its crucial importance is emphasized over and over both in the photo-album and in Seiffert’s photo-text. Through the representation of Micha’s dream state, Seiffert stresses the power of the visual to trigger traumatic memory, implying, as Cathy Caruth brilliantly states, that “to be traumatised is to be possessed precisely by an image or an event” (1995: 4). Micha’s memories do not seem to depend on the character’s will-power. What is more, images become more meaningful and disturbing with time, as they unexpectedly return and Micha is made to remember. By bearing witness to a traumatic past which has not faded with the generation that personally witnessed the horrors, Seiffert manipulates actual Holocaust photographic evidence, to produce a non-conventional effect. Due to the traumatic relationship of post-holocaust generations with memory, the pre-eminence of the visual in The Dark Room has to do with the writer’s longing for the truth but also with dreaming and illusion –like in Plato’s cave myth. Being a second-hand witness, the writer can only rely on history, “visual sites of memory” and her imagination, so she moves in a liminal, in- between state, where traumatic fantasies seem to coexist with the power of historical reality. The memory of the Holocaust for post-holocaust generations is, as Marianne Hirsch has called it, a “post-memory” (1992). The concept applies not only to the memories of the children of survivors, but also to the process of cultural memory itself since it describes “a hybrid form of memory that distinguishes itself from personal memory by generational distance and from history by a deep personal connection” (Hirsch qtd in Goertz 1998: 33). Hirsch’s notion of post-memory seems to flow as endless sorrow in German time and space “echoing in the ruins of the city that is in a constant state of (re)construction” (Morris 2001: 369). After the Holocaust, both history and the visual lose their representational power. Post-memory implies a rethinking of the experience of representation and the mediation of the past in the present. Seiffert allows for a post- memory’s rethinking of traumatic memory as she manipulates the documentary photograph as a haunting symbol of the past. By interpreting the photographs in the text, the writer gives them a past and a future, as past memory and present feeling are fused in the representation. The effect of Holocaust photographs is thus far more successfully attained in Seiffert’s post-memory representation than as published photographs, because the writer’s memory traces represent ongoing states or processes rather than still, frozen images. However, Seiffert’s treatment of memory through the visual is not always limited to the documentary photograph; there are also the family portraits, which are regarded as “affective memory icons” (Fuchs 2006: 184) in the stories that take place before the war. Family photographs – generally catalogued in photo-albums – protect the family past and keep personal memories alive. Although Hirsch states that “the tension between documentary and aesthetics, between the photograph as memory and as evidence, is particularly complex in family photographs” (qtd in Sturken 1999: 21), Seiffert is not afraid of using them in her dealing with German history and the Holocaust. Not only do the family snapshots represent subjectivities, but they also play an important role in
ATLANTIS. Journal of the Spanish Association of Anglo-American Studies. 30.2 (December 2008): 79–94 ISSN 0210-6124 90 Cristina Pividori the reconsideration of personal and cultural memory. In the second story for instance, Lore is made to evoke memories connecting past to present through the family photo- album, particularly through the photographs of the absent Nazi father, who becomes precisely “an affective memory icon” coming back to the present as a ghostly image belonging to a happier life: Lore looks at them [the pictures] while her mother sleeps. Mutti, Vati, and Oma in Hamburg. By the railing along the Jungfernstieg, with the lake behind them. Before I was born. Their faces are familiar but unfamiliar, too. All three smiling, holding on to their hats, the wind pulling their coats stiffly to the right. (Seiffert 2001: 62) As Barthes puts it in Camera Lucida (1980), the photograph becomes an emblem of mortality, as it freezes in time a moment now vanished, irreversibly shattered. Lore’s family photographs both give the character “an imaginary possession of a past that is unreal” and become “a pseudo-presence and a token of absence” (Sontag 2002: 9-16). By jealously keeping those photographs, Lore is able to recover the paternal figure and protect her family identity as an important source of self-validation. While “she [Lore] pulls out the pictures too precious to lose, slipping them gently out of their white corner fastenings, lining them up on the quilt next to her” (Seiffert 2001: 57), Seiffert progressively discloses the family photo-album to her readers-viewers both as a valuable possession to be treasured and as a nostalgic reminder of idyllic days. Although family past and memories are sacredly kept in the photo-album, when Lore is made to embark with her siblings on the journey to Hamburg, Seiffert distances her character from the past by making it almost impossible for Lore to recognize her father in the photographs. The character is given no choice but to look at the future and the immediate needs that require her attention – the hunger, the cold – in order to survive the journey. There is no time for coming to terms with the past. The war has changed everything. The old photographs start acting as a disturbing element. Although cherished in the past, these “affective memory icons” are now perceived as a disruption in Lore’s current life as they “are [now] invested with the affective imprints of a traumatic historical experience” (Fuchs 2006: 184): The war is lost, The Americans have camps, not prisons. For people like Mutti who haven’t committed crimes. She thinks of her father, wonders what he is doing now the fighting is over. Peter dozes against her chest, and Lore looks through the photos again, wants to see a picture of Vati before she sleeps. But the pictures she finds are more confusing that comforting. All taken long ago, long before the war. They don’t look like her father; more like an older brother, an anonymous young man in civilian clothes. Lore is tired, hungry again, her eyelids heavy. (Seiffert 2001: 67) The interplay between image and text in this passage “construct[s] a region of the unknown … both prior to and adjacent to memory” (Mitchell 1994 qtd in Humm 2002: 213) which moves beyond the surface aesthetics into both repressed subjectivities and self-referential discourse. It seems the photographs reflect a part of a mistake that the character should mend. Reality seems to be the character’s only connection to life; photographs are no guarantee of truth. So Lore, at risk of having become ‘the wrong kind of German’, is made to bury them:
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Shortly after dawn on the third day, when Lore is sure Tomas is sleeping, she pulls the photos of Vati from her bag and slips out into the trees behind the barn. She digs a hole with her fingers and buries them as deeply as she can, pressing the heavy soil down firmly with her heels, and covering the spot carefully with twigs and leaves. After that, she runs around under the trees to confuse her tracks, and before she goes back to the barn, she takes care to wash her hands clean again in the stream. (Seiffert 2001: 102-103) Family photographs become as incriminating as the Holocaust posters displayed in the village squares. Thus, the destruction of the family photo album implies “the loss of the only iconic record that would have the power to authenticate and construct her family’s existence and togetherness before its extinction” (Fuchs 2006: 185). Lore’s getting rid of her family portraits represents a strong need to deny both her sense of the past and her family identity; memory denial can be understood as a failure or impossibility to come to terms with traumatic memories.
4. The Anti-hero
The protagonists of the photo-albums are described as ordinary people with ordinary lives, “haciendo cosas absurdas y familiares e irrelevantes” (Ansón 2002: 41).5 Thanks to photography and the family photo-album, ordinary lives become extraordinary. As Günter Grass explains it in The Tin Drum (1959), the anti-hero, a central character in modern and post-modern literature, originates with the advent of photography and the development of portraits and photo-albums as they become the ideal setting for anonymous adventure. Anti-heroes can be clumsy, selfish, alienated, mean, hateful, submissive, pathetic, insensitive, or just ordinary. “El antihéroe es el hombre que pasea anónimo por la calle, al que nunca le ha ocurrido nada extraordinario, y descubre un día que su vida merece ser contada. Y la cuenta” (Ansón 2002: 41).6 As mentioned in previous sections, The Dark Room reproduces the logic of the photo-album, enclosing snapshots of the main characters’ everyday lives. Seiffert speaks from the point of view of the Germans: they are portrayed as ordinary people and, as such, exposed to readers, who, like viewers of a photo-album, look into the characters’ private lives as they are uncovered by the photographs. No Jews are introduced in the novel – except in the Holocaust posters displayed in the village squares. Yet the absent figures are tacitly there as shadows of the survivors, as reminders of the past. The idea of the photograph organized around the absent is inherent to The Dark Room; Jewish identity is defined as uncomfortable silence, but experienced as a presence that dominates public and private life. In fact, the figure of the absent is associated not only with post-Holocaust guilt but also with the difficult need of reconciliation with the past. Interestingly, Seiffert’s characters are ordinary people who live ordinary lives but are also capable of doing terrible things. Evil actions are presented as disturbingly human, and monstrous acts are perpetrated by fathers, friends and brothers:
5 “doing absurd, familiar and irrelevant things”. 6 “The anti-hero is the man who wanders the streets anonymously, the one to whom nothing extraordinary has ever happened, and who one day discovers that his life is worth retelling. And so he does”.
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Helmut appears likeable in his status as an outsider, but it is his disability that prevents him from participation. Lore’s parents are high-ranking Nazis, yet are loved by their children. Askan is a doting grandfather, but responsible for countless deaths. The elderly man who befriends Micha is a collaborator and killer. And Thomas, Lore’s benefactor, helps the children but steals Jewish papers from a corpse. These actions are monstrous, yet their perpetrators are not monsters. (Spencer 2002: 2) Readers are faced with gray areas that, curiously enough, become part of human experience as the problem of evil is exposed in the particularly difficult form of everyday life. The contradictory images of people loving, suffering and killing reveal appalling and entrenching human misery. Seiffert chooses to show her characters’ humanity, but also their corruption. In The Dark Room moral good is inseparable from the possibility of evil, and Seiffert tries to humanize evil even if she is aware that her characters will never get rid of it. However, accepting that ordinary people may commit evil deeds or succumb to social pressure to commit acts that would otherwise be unthinkable brings no relief; on the contrary; wrongdoings become even more dramatic and shocking. Seiffert finds no excuse for immoral behaviour; for such people “there is no punishment … not enough sadness and no punishment” (2001: 254).
5. Open Work
A photograph is always open to interpretation. What happens in the photograph does not have an end, because there is no possible end. Photographs do not tell stories, they are the story. Sontag claims that “photographs, which cannot themselves explain anything, are inexhaustible invitations to deduction, speculation, and fantasy” (2002: 23). The idea of open work is essential in today’s world of images. However, just like photographs, there are literary works that suggest rather than tell stories. They require the intervention of the reader as an active participant, because the text, like the image, is perceived as a constructive process. The fact that The Dark Room is seen as interplay of different levels of representation – the real, the photographic and the textual – suggests an openness that allows for different readings and demands individual recreation. Moreover, though the three stories can be regarded as transitional steps towards reconciliation and a more detached appreciation of the German past, they still “[remain] open-ended and unresolved in terms of how this memory will manifest in the next generation” (Goertz 1998: 37). The end brings gladness but loss too as it opens to a future that seems uncertain. Despite the imminent fall of the Reich, and surrounded by weak and elderly comrades, Helmut is finally made to pose and smile for the photograph, “standing high on his rubble mountain, over which Soviet tanks will roll with ease” (Seiffert 2001: 47). Lore, in the second story, “looks forward to when there will be no more ruins, only new houses, and she won’t remember anymore how it was before” (156). And finally Micha, whose thorough investigation seems an inventory of Seiffert’s own, wonders how he can reconcile the happy memory of his grandfather with the recent discovery. Still, the final scene, when Micha is made to take his granddaughter to his Oma’s home, reflects Germany’s new openness to the past:
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Micha looks into his daughter’s face, watches her accept another family member without a flicker. Her family map spreads out; unproblematic, curious, unhesitant. Painful for Micha to see. He lifts Dilan on his shoulders. -- Is she there? (Seiffert 2001: 278) The Dark Room, like all other literature dealing with German healing “ultimately affirms the importance of memory as the means through which re-workings, engagements and confrontations with the past can take place” (Sturken 1999: 24). The three characters are made to step out of the darkroom – a necessary space for reflection and mourning – and face the light.
6. Conclusion
From what has been argued here, it would seem, then, that analyzing the opening of a photographic dimension in Rachel Seiffert’s The Dark Room has significant repercussions on the articulation of traumatic realism, as a realist subgenre, and post- memory as the means through which German traumatic past can be reconstructed and reinterpreted in the present time. Seiffert’s photo-text builds on alternative representational approaches to deal with collective Holocaust trauma. In so doing, The Dark Room might contribute to questioning both history and documentary photography’s capacity to record reality in post- post-holocaust literature. Moreover, Seiffert’s novel stresses the growing power of a narrative that lingers in a liminal zone between history and memory in order to read photographic and historical evidence of trauma. By analyzing and underlining Seiffert’s textual snapshots, then, readers are encouraged not only to listen to the new voices in the text but also to become participants and provide symbolic meaning to the photographs they cannot see or trust.
Works Cited
Ansón, Antonio 2002: ‘Retrato (fotográfico) de lo íntimo’. Los mil relatos de la imagen y uno más. Fotografía & literatura. Huesca: Diputación de Huesca. 29-42. Baer, Ulrich 2002: Spectral Evidence: The Photography of Trauma. Cambridge: MIT Press. Barthes, Roland 1980: Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography. New York: Hill and Wang. ––––– 1988 (1977): Image-Music-Text. New York: Noonday Press. 15-31. Benjamin, Walter 1940 ‘Theses on the Philosophy of History’. Hannah Arendt, ed. Illuminations. New York: Schocken. ––––– 1999: The Arcades Project. Rolf Tiedmann, ed. Cambridge: The Balknap Press of Harvard UP. Caruth, Cathy 1995: Trauma: Explorations in Memory. Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins UP. Cadava, Eduardo 1997: Words of Light: Theses on the Photography of History. Princeton: Princeton UP. Cohen, Keith 1984: ‘Cortázar and the Apparatus of Writing’. Contemporary Literature 25.1: 15-27. Cohen-Pfister, Laurel 2005: ‘The Suffering of the Perpetrators: Unleashing Collective Memory in German Literature of the Twenty-First Century’. Forum for Modern Language Studies 41.2:123-35.
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Culver, Stuart. 1989: ‘How Photographs Mean: Literature and the Camera in American Studies’. American Literary History 1.1: 190-205. Felman, Shoshana and Dori Laub 1992: Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis and History. New York: Routledge. Fuchs, Anne 2006: ‘From `Vergangenheitsbewältigung´ to Generational Memory Contests in Günter Grass, Monika Maron and Uwe Timm’. German Life and Letters 59.2: 169-86. Garret-Petts, William F. and Donald Lawrence 2000: Photographic Encounters: the Edges and Edginess of Reading Prose Pictures and Visual Fiction. Alberta: Alberta UP. Gianetti, Louis D. 1972: ‘Cinematic Metaphors’. Journal of Aesthetic Education 6.4: 49-61. Goertz, Karein 1998: ‘Transgenerational Representations of the Holocaust: from Memory to “Post-Memory”’. World Literature Today 72.1: 33-40. Grass, Günter 1959: The Tin Drum. New York: Random House. Hirsch, Marianne 1997: Family Frames, Photography, Narrative, and Postmemory. London: Harvard UP. ––––– 1992: ‘Family Pictures: Maus, Mourning and Post-Memory’. Discourse 15.2: 3-29. Humm, Maggie 2002: Modernist Women and Visual Cultures. Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP. Lodge, David 2002: Consciousness and the Novel: Connected Essays. London: Secker & Warburg. Morris, Leslie 2001: ‘The Sound of Memory’. The German Quarterly 74.4: 368-378. Nunn, Heather 2004: ‘Emotional Death: the Charity Advert and Photographs of Childhood Trauma’. Journal for Cultural Research 8.3: 271-92. Rostan, Kimberly 2006: ‘Reading Traumatically and Representing the Real in Collective Suffering’. College Literature 33.2: 172-83. Rothberg, Michael 2000: Traumatic Realism: The Demands of Holocaust Representation. Minneapolis: Minnesota UP. Seiffert, Rachel 2001: The Dark Room. New York: Pantheon. Sontag, Susan 2002 (1977): On Photography. London: Penguin. Spencer, Sally Ann 2002: ‘Picture Book: The Dark Room’. Spike Magazine
Received 24 September 2007 Revised version accepted July 1 2008
Mª Cristina Pividori is currently teaching literature and writing her doctoral thesis at UAB (Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona) on a grant awarded by the Generalitat de Catalunya. Her field of research is WWI literature.
Address: Departament de Filologia Anglesa i de Germanística, Edifici B, Facultat de Filosofia i Lletres, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, 08193 Bellaterra (Cerdanyola del Vallès), Barcelona. Tel.: (34) 93 5811567. Fax: (34) 93 5812001. Email: [email protected]
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ATLANTIS. Journal of the Spanish Association of Anglo-American Studies. 30.2 (December 2008): 95–110 ISSN 0210-6124
Sex-Related Euphemism and Dysphemism: An Analysis in Terms of Conceptual Metaphor Theory
Eliecer Crespo Fernández Universidad de Alicante [email protected]
It is my purpose in this paper to draw attention to the euphemistic and dysphemistic figurative language used to designate the taboo of sex in the frame of the well-known Conceptual Metaphor Theory initiated by Lakoff and Johnson. From this standpoint, I claim that conceptualization plays a crucial role in both the use and interpretation of sexual metaphorical euphemisms and dysphemisms. In this regard, I consider the implications and effects of the process of lexicalization in conceptual categorization, particularly concerning the directionality of metaphorical projections. I also analyse the function of conceptual metaphors in euphemistic and dysphemistic use, seeking to study the way in which a particular experiential domain is more likely to give rise to verbal mitigation or offence, and I finally trace how a given conceptualization accounts for the interpretation of sex-related euphemistic and dysphemistic metaphors. The analysis undertaken shows that metaphorical terms and phrases referring to sexual taboos can be insightfully described in terms of Lakoff and Johnson’s cognitive view of metaphor.
Keywords: Cognitive Semantics, conceptual metaphor, euphemism, dysphemism, referent manipulation, sexual taboo.
1. Introduction
As usually happens with most things dangerous or censored, taboos are somehow tempting and fascinating for us.1 Judging from the endless series of mild and abusive references to forbidden concepts, it seems obvious that taboo is not indifferent to
1 I would like to thank Angela Downing and the three anonymous reviewers for their insightful comments and suggestions on an earlier draft of this paper. I am also grateful to Clive A. Bellis, University of Alicante, for proofreading the paper. Of course, I assume full responsibility for all forms of error still remaining. 96 Eliecer Crespo Fernández human beings.2 As Burridge puts it, “what is taboo is revolting, untouchable, filthy, unmentionable, dangerous, disturbing, thrilling − but above all powerful” (2004: 199). This power of taboo keeps language users from avoiding the forbidden concept and compels them to preserve or violate it. To this end, they resort respectively either to euphemism (i.e. the semantic or formal process by which the taboo is stripped of its most explicit or obscene overtones) or to dysphemism (i.e. the process whereby the most pejorative traits of the taboo are highlighted with an offensive aim to the addressee or to the concept itself). This ambivalence towards taboo seems to be especially noteworthy in the case of sex, an area of interdiction particularly fruitful in lexical generation. Indeed, sex is pervasive in everyday life, which, as could not be otherwise, is reflected in the tremendously high degree of synonymy in the English vocabulary for genitalia and copulation.3 Given that metaphorization stands out as the most prolific linguistic device of lexical creativity, it is hardly surprising that speakers turn to figurative language as a means of coping with the realm of sex. Clearly, metaphor plays a crucial role in the manipulation of the taboo referent insofar as it is at the user’s disposal to model the distasteful concept and present it without its pejorative overtones or, by contrast, with an intensification of its most unacceptable conceptual traits.4 In this regard, as metaphor stands out as a major device in structuring sexual euphemism and dysphemism conceptually, the main concern of this paper is to demonstrate that sex- related euphemisms and dysphemisms are based on underlying metaphor systems within the framework of Conceptual Metaphor Theory (henceforth CMT) initiated by Lakoff and Johnson (1980). This seems to prove a worthy enterprise, because whilst there is a substantial body of research on the metaphorical conceptualization of the taboo of sex (Lakoff 1987; Pfaff, Gibbs and Johnson 1997; Murphy 2001, among others), to the best of my knowledge relatively little attention has been paid to conceptual metaphor as a purely euphemistic or dysphemistic device. With this in view, and granted that euphemisms and dysphemisms are highly dependent on context, my study is not based on isolated words, but on coherent and contextualized discourses extracted, unless otherwise stated, from literary texts and from The British National Corpus (hereafter BNC). This paper is structured as follows. After providing the theoretical framework of CMT in which my study is embedded, I first deal with the effects of the process of lexicalization in sexual conceptualization, particularly concerning the bidirectionality of metaphorical projections. Next, I proceed to analyse the function of conceptual
2 I understand by taboo the prohibition of certain kinds of behaviour or objects believed to be harmful either for moral, religious or social reasons, whereas the linguistic taboo is the word or phrase to be avoided in public discourse because of the restrictions imposed by taboos. 3 According to Allan and Burridge (1991: 96), there exist approximately 1,200 terms for vagina, 1,000 for penis and 800 for copulation. 4 I understand by referent manipulation the process whereby the language user presents the taboo referent in a particular way, either softening its less acceptable aspects or, by contrast, intensifying them. It seems obvious that the concept is not modified whatsoever, though it is manipulated by the speaker, and the result of this manipulation is what the receiver notices. For a detailed description of this process, see Crespo Fernández (2007).
ATLANTIS. Journal of the Spanish Association of Anglo-American Studies. 30.2 (December 2008): 95–110 ISSN 0210-6124 Sex-Related Euphemism and Dysphemism 97 metaphors in euphemistic and dysphemistic reference, seeking to study the way in which a particular experiential domain is more likely to give rise to verbal mitigation or offence. I then move on to the interpretation of euphemistic and dysphemistic conceptual metaphors referring to sexual topics. A summary of the results obtained will bring this study to an end.
2. Theoretical assumptions. The cognitive approach
The theoretical assumptions on which the present paper is based are derived from the well-known CMT initially developed by Lakoff and Johnson (1980). In its broadest sense, the cognitive approach claims that metaphor is a device with the capacity to structure our conceptual system, providing, at the same time, a particular understanding of the world and a way to make sense of our experience. From this standpoint, metaphor is defined as “a cross-domain mapping in the conceptual system” (Lakoff 1994: 203); that is, a mapping or set of conceptual correspondences from a source domain (the realm of the physical or more concrete reality) to a target domain (the taboo of sex, in this case). A good case in point is the conceptual metaphor A MALE HOMOSEXUAL IS A FLOWER, in which the mapping projects attributes of the source domain (delicateness, softness, etc.) onto the taboo target domain of homosexuality. It is precisely in this correspondence between the source and the target domains that conceptualization fulfils its euphemistic or dysphemistic function, as will be explained later on. Therefore, within the cognitive tradition, there is no question that metaphor enables language users to delimit and reify abstract concepts in particular terms and, rather than as a matter of language, it should be considered as a mode of thought and reason, as Lakoff (1994: 208) points out. As certain values are given priority in the metaphorical structuring of a given concept (Lakoff and Johnson 1980: 10), the filter of metaphorical conceptualization through which reality is presented provides us with a partial understanding of the concept, masking or revealing particular aspects of the topic being dealt with, a process which makes conceptual metaphors readily accessible for euphemistic or dysphemistic reference respectively. When giving priority to some value systems over others, socio- cultural considerations play a crucial role; indeed, Langacker (1997: 241) claims that cognitive and cultural considerations are so closely connected that metaphor stands out as the main device in cultural construction. In fact, our conception of the target domain as expressed in a source-domain pairing is grounded in our knowledge and experience of how the reality expressed by the source domain is culturally understood. The role of the receiver in CMT cannot be obviously left aside. The conceptual representation of abstract concepts is an active process in which both the speaker and the receiver are involved. In this regard, Indurkhya emphasizes the active role of the human mind in the process of finding similarities and associations between two entities: “The world we see in our mind’s eye is a world that is not ‘given’ but is constructed by our cognitive apparatus.... the conceptual organization of the world is brought about by an interaction between the cognitive agent and the environment, a process in which each participant is actively involved” (1992: 111). In this sense, the
ATLANTIS. Journal of the Spanish Association of Anglo-American Studies. 30.2 (December 2008): 95–110 ISSN 0210-6124 98 Eliecer Crespo Fernández meaning conveyed by a given conceptualization does not precede the metaphor; rather, it is produced by the interpretative process in which the creative response from a competent reader is, as Black (1979) suggests, what allows us to see one object in terms of another. Hence, the process of finding similarities between entities and the assignment of the mitigating or pejorative traits to a term or expression is subject to the active and cooperative role on the part of the hearer to unravel the possible meanings of the utterance, a process which largely depends on the restrictions, beliefs and social behaviour of the participants in the verbal exchange (see Chamizo Domínguez and Sánchez Benedito 1994: 85).
3. The effect of lexicalization in sexual conceptual metaphors
The euphemistic or dysphemistic conceptual categorization of sexual taboos is greatly influenced by the degree of lexicalization of the linguistic substitute, that is, the extent to which the tabooed conceptual traits have become associated with the euphemistic or dysphemistic metaphorical alternative. In this respect, Chamizo Domínguez and Sánchez Benedito (2000: 68-70) distinguish three types of euphemisms and dysphemisms according to their degree of lexicalization: lexicalized (those in which the figurative meaning is regarded as the normal or literal meaning); semi-lexicalized (the substitute is associated with the taboo because of its inclusion in a conceptual domain traditionally tied to the forbidden concept); and creative (the euphemistic or dysphemistic item is the result of a novel association with the taboo, only accessible in its phraseological context).5 The degree of lexicalization of metaphorical units plays a crucial role in conceptual categorization, as explained in what follows. Semi-lexicalized and creative metaphors suit the purpose of framing the taboo topic in a particular conceptual sphere, which considerably determines the perception of the taboo topic being dealt with and suits the purpose of euphemism and dysphemism particularly well. In either case, the transfer of semantic components from the source to the target domain typical of cognitive association determines how the concept is dealt with and reflects the speaker’s intention to be respectful or offensive. Consider the 6 following examples included in the semi-lexicalized metaphor SEX IS EATING:
5 As metaphors are so closely connected with euphemisms and dysphemisms, Chamizo Domínguez (1998: 47-70) had already applied these categories to metaphorical language, distinguishing three types of metaphors: lexicalized, semi-lexicalized and new or creative metaphors. In the same vein, I proposed a typology of metaphorical euphemism in a previous study, establishing four types of euphemisms according to their degree of association with the taboo and mitigating capacity, namely explicit, conventional, novel and artful euphemisms (Crespo Fernández 2006: 32-34). 6 Eating and food are common sources for naming sexual organs and sex-related actions. Allan and Burridge (2006: 190) argue that the close association between the alimentary and the sexual can be explained on the basis that “food is often the prelude to sex .... Eating and love- making go together”. This link between eating and sex has an obvious influence at the linguistic level; indeed, the food/eating metaphor for sex is pervasive in our ordinary language and throughout the history of English slang (for examples on the symbolic value of the food and eating vocabulary, see Hines 2000; Allan and Burridge 2006: 194-97; Kövecses 2006: 155-56).
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(1) Selfishness on the part of the man demands that the wife submit to his sexual desires.... He is somewhat like a hungry man, who sits down at the table to eat his meal.7 (Stoll 1996) (2) Slim in her dungarees, with her long, curly, chestnut hair and wide-eyed enthusiasm, some would tell you Marcia was a little cookie. (BNC APC 1007) The new semantic categorization of the taboo provided by semi-lexicalized metaphorical alternatives leads to particular ways of understanding the topics referred to. Indeed, to verbalize sexual referents via the conceptual metaphor SEX IS EATING implies to understand the sexual taboo in terms of a different domain: food, or, more precisely, as Kövecses (2006: 156) points out, appetizing food.8 This particular association provides the language user with different lexical alternatives from this source domain such as eat his meal in (1) and cookie in (2) in the designation of the taboo referents ‘copulate’ and ‘promiscuous female’ respectively. These metaphorical items are both interpreted in terms of the same conceptual association, though the motivation and the resulting lexical realization of the conceptual association is radically different: the euphemistic alternative eat his meal provides a socially acceptable way of dealing with the taboo of copulation, whereas the dysphemistic term cookie implies that women are simply sex objects to be enjoyed or eaten. In fact, words like cookie or cheesecake, says Hines, are included in a conceptualization equating women-as-sex- objects with desserts that “reduces women to the status of objects, with the attendant implications of powerlessness, inanimacy and procurability” (2000: 146). Such implications of this metaphor provide the basis for the dysphemistic reference to women. The semi-lexicalized metaphors discussed in the preceding paragraph provide a particular understanding of the sexual taboo within the conceptual system of our culture. There are, however, metaphorical networks which offer a non-conventional approach to the target domain, leading to creative metaphorical items which resort to the novelty in the reference to the taboo, only accessible in its phraseological context, to provide a fresh insight (either mitigating or offensive) into the taboo. A case in point is the conceptualization AN ORGASM IS A BAPTISM, extracted from D. H. Lawrence’s The Rainbow: (3) Their coming together now, after two years of married life ... was the baptism to another life, it was complete confirmation. (Lawrence 1986: 95) The consideration of an orgasm in terms of a baptism does not respond to pre-existing metaphorical associations in the reader’s cognitive system, but derives from Lawrence’s personal view of sexuality and the particular associations that the novelist creates between both concepts, masking the physical aspects of an orgasm and highlighting its spiritual side. This metaphorical equation arises from the beliefs concerning a baptism
7 Hereafter, the metaphorical items that I want to highlight in the examples will appear in italics. 8 The conceptualization of women as appetizing food combines with other food-related metaphors for sex such as WOMEN ARE DESSERTS (Hines 2000), SEX IS EATING, THE OBJECT OF SEX IS FOOD and SEXUAL DESIRE IS HUNGER (Kövecses 2006).
ATLANTIS. Journal of the Spanish Association of Anglo-American Studies. 30.2 (December 2008): 95–110 ISSN 0210-6124 100 Eliecer Crespo Fernández as the entry into a new life to conceptualize an orgasm, which leads to the hyperbolic artful euphemism baptism to another life.9 So far we have seen that both semi-lexicalized and creative metaphors can suit the purpose of euphemism and dysphemism by conceptualizing a given reality in particular terms within a cognitive network. However, this is not the case with lexicalized metaphors, those in which the second order or figurative meaning becomes the norm in the speech community and are thus felt to have lost their metaphorical status. Indeed, a coarse word like cock, whose original meaning was ‘adult male chicken’ and its use with a sexual sense (‘penis’) first appeared in the early seventeenth century (OED2), has picked up sexual connotations as a consequence of its frequent use in the reference to the sexual male organ over the years.10 This word has reached the last stage in the process of lexicalization of metaphorical units commented above, after which the word or expression is deprived of its capacity to refer figuratively or euphemistically to the taboo due to its intimate association − not to say identification − with the sexual concept that it names. Take the example that follows: (4) I’m going to see a wee lassie tonight; maybe she’s not as pretty as Helen, but after I have a word with her, then maybe, just maybe, she’ll let you put that cock of yours into action. (BNC BN3 756) The lexicalized metaphorical term cock does not offer an alternative way of comprehending reality. In fact, granted that nobody would think of a connection of cock with a male domestic fowl in the example above, this word is unable to frame the taboo topic in a particular conceptual sphere and consequently does not provide a particular way of understanding the sexual concept. The term does provide a way to refer to the tabooed body part in a colloquial register like that of (4), but not to reason about it, as happens in conceptual categorization. Given that the sexual sense of the word has overlapped its axiologically neuter meaning, the once euphemistic term is inevitably linked to the sexual taboo. The considerations stated in the preceding paragraphs lead me to reflect on one of the basic aspects of the standard CMT approach, the principle of unidirectionality, according to which the associative process goes from the more abstract concept to the more concrete reality. That this is so can be gathered from Barcelona (2003: 214): “... according to the standard cognitive theory of metaphor and metonymy (CTMM), mapping in metaphor is always unidirectional: only the source is projected onto the target domain, and the target domain is not at the same time mapped onto the source domain. Therefore, simultaneous bidirectional metaphorical projections do not exist in this theory”(emphasis in the original). Nonetheless, I tend to believe that not always are metaphorical projections unidirectional: when focusing on the use in communication
9 I understand by artful euphemism the modality of verbal mitigation in which the euphemistic disguise relies on ambiguous and connotative language. For further information about this euphemistic category, see Crespo Fernández (2007: 147-50). 10 OED2 reports that the cock metaphor for ‘penis’ does not come directly from the domestic fowl, but from a barrel tap in the shape of a cock’s nest. In this sense, as Murphy (2001: 20-21) argues, the penis is characterized as a mechanical device engineered to pour liquids and can thus be included in the sex-as-machine conceptual equation.
ATLANTIS. Journal of the Spanish Association of Anglo-American Studies. 30.2 (December 2008): 95–110 ISSN 0210-6124 Sex-Related Euphemism and Dysphemism 101 of certain lexicalized linguistic realizations of a given conceptual metaphor, the mapping of knowledge from the source domain onto the target domain can be somehow considered as bidirectional. In fact, the initial projection from the source onto the taboo target domain may be reversed as a consequence of the continuous use of the metaphorical units that arise from a sex-related conceptualization. As a result, the more abstract or ‘innocent’ domain may become contaminated because of its connection with the reality expressed by the source domain and may be ultimately felt as part of the taboo target domain. Consider the term come below: (5) When I think I’m going to come, I pull out, pull the rubber off and ejaculate over the girl’s chest. (BNC CGB 2014)
(6) CRESSIDA... My lord, come you into my chamber: you smile and mock at me as if I meant naughtily. T ROILUS. Ha, ha! C RESSIDA. Come, you are deceived, I think of no such thing. (Shakespeare, Troilus and Cressida, IV. ii. 36-39)
Through the conceptual metaphor AN ORGASM IS THE END OF A JOURNEY, in (5) the sexual climax is seen in terms of the end-point of a journey, as the unidirectional property of cognitive association maintains. Here, by virtue of the SOURCE-PATH-GOAL Schema into which our everyday experience may be organized (Lakoff 1987: 275), a sexual encounter is understood as a process with a starting, an end point and a time span. This, in turn, implies that an orgasm is conceptualized as the final stage of the sexual encounter, the end-point of the journey. Hence, the source domain of journeys is used not only to verbalize the target domain of sex, but also to reason about it in terms of a different domain of experience. However, in (6) this set of conceptual correspondences is reversed in the process of interpretation by mapping knowledge about journeys onto knowledge about a reality from the realm of sex. From this perspective, it is therefore likely that the end of a journey, as expressed by the source domain in the initial correspondence of the source-target pairing, acquires sexual overtones, given that its interpretation in the Shakespearean example is the result of the lexicalization of the term with a sexual sense.11 The tension between the literal and the euphemistic meaning that come had in Shakespeare’s times, lends itself to humorous effects. From this it can be deduced that using metaphors with a lexicalized sexual meaning in discourse does not only involve a projection from the source domain onto the target domain, since the target domain may also be projected onto the source domain. As in come, the tabooed conceptual traits have progressively become an integral part in the reference of the word, the sexual taboo will be activated, either consciously or not, in the interpretation of such a term. This seems to confirm Levin’s position on the subject: “As far as metaphor in general is concerned, it is just as possible for one term of the comparison to modify the other as it is for the reverse procedure to take place” (1979:
11 This metaphorical interpretation provides the basis for considering come in (6) an asymmetric metaphor, as the hearer interprets the word metaphorically though there is no metaphorical intention on the part of the speaker (Goatly 1997: 128).
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128). This process of bidirectionality in lexicalized conceptual metaphors is graphically shown in figure 1:
Conceptual metaphor SOURCE TARGET DOMAIN DOMAIN AN ORGASM IS THE ‘journey’ ‘orgasm’ END OF A JOURNEY UNIDIRECTIONAL PROJECTION
Process of lexicalization
Conceptual metaphor TARGET SOURCE DOMAIN DOMAIN
THE END OF A JOURNEY ‘orgasm’ ‘journey’ IS AN ORGASM
BIDIRECTIONAL PROJECTION
Figure 1: The bidirectional projection of lexicalized metaphors As shown in figure 1, there seem to be two cognitive networks at play in the conceptualizations in which come is included, namely AN ORGASM IS THE END OF A JOURNEY and THE END OF A JOURNEY IS AN ORGASM, in both the choice and understanding of the sexual issue. By virtue of the process of lexicalization undergone by come, the initial projection from the source domain of journeys onto the taboo target domain of sex − i.e. the principle of unidirectionaly already commented on − may be extended to a metaphorical projection from the target to the source domains, giving way to a redescription of the latter in terms of the sexual connotations evoked by the former.12 An example such as (6) provides evidence for the assumption that metaphorical terms lexicalized with a sexual meaning create the basis in CMT for seeing aspects of reality that they themselves help to constitute, activating new semantic connotations of metaphorical units. This constitutes a basic tenet in the Interactive Theory developed by Black (1962 and 1979), which sees metaphor as an intellectual operation with a cognitive import in which the creative response from the receiver allows for a redefinition of the frame, in Black’s terminology (or source domain in CMT), as a result of the system of associated commonplaces (i.e. standard beliefs and opinions shared by the members of a community) spontaneously evoked by the focus (or target domain): “The metaphorical utterance works by ‘projecting upon’ the primary subject a set of
12 However, as an anonymous referee correctly observes, bidirectionality in metaphors is not exclusive of metaphors based on sex. For instance, the terms cat and catty applied to women’s behavior or chicken to refer to fearful people may acquire connotations that, in some contexts, carry over to the non-metaphorical referents (cats have malice, chicken are fearful).
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‘associated implications’, comprised in the implicative complex, that are predicable of the secondary subject” (Black 1979: 28). These associated implications which allow us to create new senses are derived from the association of the source domain with the sexual taboo. Thus, some lexicalized metaphors create similarities that previously were not known to exist. In sum, the process of lexicalization contributes to modifying our conception of the reality expressed by the source domain and allows us to see new aspects of an entity in terms of the target domain. By saying this, I do not challenge the principle of unidirectionality in the mapping of metaphor within the model of CMT; rather, I believe that the source is not projected onto the target domain on all occasions, as the principle of unidirectionality maintains, since in lexicalized metaphors the target domain may be mapped onto the source domain. From this viewpoint, bidirectional metaphorical projections could be admitted in CMT.
4. Conceptualization in euphemistic and dysphemistic use
As discussed earlier, it seems evident that sexual taboos can be analysed and shaped in terms of conceptual metaphors. Metaphorical language structures the use of the taboo areas and establishes how cognitive domains and mappings determine the mitigating or offensive value of the metaphorical alternative. Granted that a sex-related target concept can be expressed via different source domains (see Kövecses 2003: 79), the particular connotations of the source domain used to refer to the target concept largely influence the euphemistic force of the metaphorical substitute or, by contrast, its pejorative load. A significant example is the taboo ‘copulate’, subject to different conceptualizations via the metaphorical equations SEX IS WAR, TO COPULATE IS HORSE- RIDING and SEX IS WORK in the examples that follow:
(7) HOSTESS: ... he stabbed me in mine own house, and that most beastly. In good faith, a cares not what mischief he does, if his weapon be out, he will foin like any devil. (Shakespeare, 2 Henry IV, II. i. 14-16) (8) It is just likely that she will allow one male after another to mount her until her whole circle of admirers has been accommodated. (BNC BMG 1032) (9) I remember the first time we went to bed and did the business. (BNC CGC 1671) The type of source domain in the mappings above determines the euphemistic or dysphemistic nature of the lexical substitute for the taboo of copulation. In (7), stab is included in the metaphor SEX IS WAR, a cognitive association which transfers different attributes from the source domain of war to the target domain of sex. More specifically, it presents different sets of ontological correspondences as a result of using the knowledge we have about war to talk about the taboo of sex; for instance, the lover is the enemy, to seduce the sexual partner is to overcome an enemy, the penis is a weapon, etc. The conceptual basis for war metaphors responds to an overall view of sex in terms of hostility, violence and dominance (see Beneke 1982); accordingly, many of the metaphorical substitutes that fall under this cognitive equation tend to acquire dysphemistic overtones. Similarly, the sex-as-horse-riding metaphor in (8) implies that
ATLANTIS. Journal of the Spanish Association of Anglo-American Studies. 30.2 (December 2008): 95–110 ISSN 0210-6124 104 Eliecer Crespo Fernández the woman is referred to as the horse, while her sexual partner is the rider who ‘mounts’ her. This equine imagery constitutes a good source domain for the expression of disrespect toward women, who are depicted as less than human, and confers on the man a position of control and dominance over the female sexual partner. Nonetheless, to resort to a more neutral conceptual metaphor which refers to a non- violent source domain like work by means of the mild phrase did the business in (9) no doubt facilitates the mitigation of the taboo and the possibility of using it safely in public discourse. In this conceptualization, the connotations of such items as work on ‘copulate with’ or the job ‘sexual intercourse’ are far from the violent overtones of the metaphorical alternatives included in the sex-as-war conceptual network, which clearly favours their use to target the sexual issue euphemistically. Despite its mitigating force, Murphy considers that the metaphor SEX IS WORK implicitly degrades the sexual act itself on the basis that “men view their relationships with women through the lens of control, discipline, regulation and commodity. Men’s reduction of their sexuality to work, business, and an economic exchange embraces their relations to women as part of the male economy” (2001: 41). Indeed, the connection between sex and work reduces sex to an exchange devoid of intimacy and affection and contributes to portraying women as inferior. Another case that is worth mentioning is the taboo ‘prostitute’, that can be conceptualized differently through the euphemistic conceptual metaphor A PROSTITUTE IS A WORKER or via the intrinsically dysphemistic network A PROSTITUTE IS AN ANIMAL. Indeed, the kind of source domain determines the euphemistic or dysphemistic nature of the resulting conceptual metaphor, as pointed out before. In the first case, the conceptual basis lies in the fact that prostitution is perceived in strictly commercial terms, as a job like any other, in line with the metaphor which understands sex in terms of work and labour; for this reason, metaphorization gives rise to socially acceptable alternatives such as business woman, working girl or sex worker, as recorded by Holder (2003). In the case of A PROSTITUTE IS AN ANIMAL, however, the conceptual association cannot be said to offer any sort of amelioration to the taboo referent; instead, this conceptualization generates undeviating terms of abuse from the animal vocabulary that dehumanize prostitutes in some way and undermine their social and personal status (see Fernández de la Torre and Sánchez Benedito 1999).13 By way of illustration, take the following example: (10) Watching, Jess was reminded of a pack of alley cats he’d seen at the rear of Samson’s smithy one night. (BNC C85 3241) In (10) the animal metaphor is based on the similarity between a stray cat that frequents alleys in search of food and a prostitute seeking customers. In addition, this metaphor alludes to the mating habits of female cats and therefore suggests that prostitutes act out of carnal lust. In this sense, by analogy to a freewheeling feline, there is a mapping of
13 Several studies have analysed the multiplicity of animal-based metaphors depicting women as objects of sexual abuse and denigration in different languages. Among them, those by Baider and Gesuato (2003) in French and Italian; Fernández Fontecha and Jiménez Catalán (2003) in English and Spanish; and Chamizo Domínguez and Zawislawska (2006) in Spanish and Polish.
ATLANTIS. Journal of the Spanish Association of Anglo-American Studies. 30.2 (December 2008): 95–110 ISSN 0210-6124 Sex-Related Euphemism and Dysphemism 105 negatively evaluated animal attributes onto the human referent. It must be noted that an animal metaphor such as this involves semantic derogation at the levels of both the speaker and the receiver. In fact, by referring to a prostitute as a stray cat, the speaker, either consciously or not, evokes the standard set of beliefs associated with the animal to understand human character in terms of animal behaviour (Black 1962: 50); in the same vein, the receiver is aware that attributes of a negative nature are commonly associated with animals, which constitutes the basis for the dysphemistic interpretation of the metaphorical utterance. However, a conceptual metaphor is not usually limited to either evasive or abusive references to sexual taboos. Indeed, the same mapping may have both euphemistic and dysphemistic realizations. In such a case, the intention of the speaker to be respectful or offensive will be largely responsible for the positive or negative attributes to be transferred from a given source domain to the target domain of sex. This happens in the conceptual equation SEX IS EATING, which gives rise both to metaphorical phrases with euphemistic overtones such as eat one’s meal and to dysphemistic references like cookie, as illustrated in (1) and (2), above, respectively. The purpose of the language user is radically different in each case: whereas in (1) the speaker attempts to be respectful towards the interlocutor and/or to the concept itself by alluding to sexual intercourse in a socially acceptable way, the image conveyed by cookie is that of women as things for sexual use, as inferior and accessible sexual objects, undermining their status as human beings, in line with the conceptual metaphor A PROSTITUTE IS AN ANIMAL seen above.
5. Interpretation of sex-related conceptual metaphors
Not only does conceptualization play a significant role in the speaker’s euphemistic or dysphemistic choice, but, as could not be otherwise, it also has an obvious effect on the understanding of the metaphorical substitute, a process in which the receiver’s role must by no means be underestimated. Indeed, the associative links between the metaphorical item and the taboo require an active participation on the part of the receiver, who is expected to identify an alternative and novel meaning in the designation of the forbidden concept and, in so doing, go beyond the literal meaning and arrive at the speaker’s intention to be respectful or offensive. Otherwise, a literal understanding of metaphors would impede effective communication because, after all, euphemism and dysphemism must necessarily be ambiguous in order to carry out their communicative function. It is precisely thanks to the intrinsic uncertainty of metaphor with regard to the application of the word to a denotatum that metaphorical euphemism and dysphemism are able to suggest that there is a distasteful concept underneath the signifier (Chamizo Domínguez and Sánchez Benedito 2000: 40-41). The metaphorical phrase eat one’s meal in (1) commented on earlier is ambiguous, meaning something different in relation to food from what it means in relation to sex (‘copulate’). This implies that the literal meaning does not actually correspond with the meaning intended by the speaker in that context, and enables the interlocutor to opt for a plausible interpretation beyond the denotation of the signifier. According to this view, I tend to believe that not only is
ATLANTIS. Journal of the Spanish Association of Anglo-American Studies. 30.2 (December 2008): 95–110 ISSN 0210-6124 106 Eliecer Crespo Fernández ambiguity the raw material of euphemism, as Teso Martín (1998: 199) claims, but that the ambiguity intrinsically attached to metaphor also moves to dysphemism and compels the receiver to process at the metaphorical level and understand cookie in (2) with the figurative sense of ‘promiscuous female’. In sum, in euphemism as well as in dysphemism, it is the intentional and deliberate ambiguity of metaphors that leads the receiver to explore beyond the literal meaning and arrive at the connotations hidden under the metaphorical disguise. In this process of detection of metaphorical meaning, the nature and particular connotations of a given conceptualization determine the perception of the metaphorical substitute in terms of a euphemism or a dysphemism and, in this way, contribute to the process of disambiguation of sexual metaphorical items.14 A good example is the conceptualization SEX IS WAR mentioned before, a metaphor that constitutes the source of a remarkable diversity of sex-related vocabulary, as shown by Sánchez Benedito (2004: 186-92). As a consequence of this conceptualization of sex in terms of violence − a tradition which dates back to Elizabethan literature (see Partridge 1968: 23) − our understanding of the metaphorical substitutes included in this mapping is inevitably shaped by preexisting metaphorical associations deriving from the sex-as- violence metaphor which form part of the hearer’s cognitive system (see Lakoff 1994: 210). Because of this immediate identification of sex with violence, the taboo target domain is easier to comprehend − although its nature is radically different from that of the source domain − and, therefore, it automatically activates the dysphemistic reference of the source domain in a given communicative context. Indeed, a dysphemistic interpretation of a metaphorical term or phrase within this conceptual domain seems reasonable and plausible. Consider the following example: (11) When finally he grabbed the ropes which secured her, and shot his load deep inside her pulsing jewel, she screamed a combination of thankful relief and dark ecstasy. (BNC FPX 2551) Given the pejorative connotations arising from considering sex as a violent act, an interpretative process is triggered in the receiver which compels him or her to identify an offensive reference toward the sexual concept conveyed by the metaphor shot with the meaning of ‘ejaculated’. Thus, the most likely and reasonable interpretation of shot is dysphemistic mostly because of the particular conceptualization in which this metaphorical alternative is included; a cognitive association which assumes the existence of a more specific conceptualization whereby the penis is seen as a tool to attack, injure or kill an adversary. By contrast, to resort to the cognitive equation which relates sex to a game unavoidably contributes to a diametrically opposed interpretative process, in which the hearer is likely to be aware of the euphemistic nature of the metaphorical expression. That this is so can be seen in the example below:
14 In this respect, it is worthy of mention that Chamizo Domínguez and Sánchez Benedito (1994) propose a pragmatic strategy in the interpretative process for the disambiguation of euphemistic and dysphemistic references. In the same vein, Goatly (1997: 293-328) claims that the disambiguation of metaphorical meanings depends on the Gricean principle of Relevance in relation to the Contents associated with the Field (i.e. social interaction, conversation).
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(12) Experts have exploded the old wives’ myth that, if he decided to play away, there must have been something wrong with the relationship in the first place. (BNC G2V 1087) The metaphor play away will activate its euphemistic sense (‘commit adultery’) in a more effective way if the reader associates it with the conceptual metaphor SEX IS A GAME, the source of other euphemisms like play doctors and nurses and score for ‘copulate’, play around for ‘copulate casually’ or play the field for ‘be sexually promiscuous’, among many others (see Holder 2003). The imagery of game and sports favours an unbiased reinterpretation of a sexual encounter as an innocent pastime. This clearly determines the perception of the receiver, who is compelled to understand the sexual taboo in terms of this particular conceptualization, leaving aside other unacceptable semantic traits of the referent. When focusing on euphemistic and dysphemistic interpretation, context cannot be excluded from cognitive issues. After all, as Allan and Burridge (1996: 28) argue, mitigation or offence ultimately depend on the context in which the word is used, and thus the euphemistic or dysphemistic quality of a word can never be considered as an intrinsic quality of the word regardless of context. In this sense, a contextually consistent conceptualization significantly contributes to the understanding of euphemisms and dysphemisms. From this standpoint, Pfaff, Gibbs and Johnson provide evidence that the mitigating or offensive value of metaphors is easier to comprehend if there is a conceptual match between these and the context: “Our contention is that a speaker should consider one X-phemism [euphemism or dysphemism] more appropriate than another in a certain context because he is conceptualizing that context metaphorically.... contexts can provide people with metaphorical concepts that influence the appropriateness or ease of interpretation of the X-phemism by cueing them to its metaphorical meaning” (1997: 61-62). In effect, it seems that the mitigating and offensive nature of figurative words and phrases belonging to a particular cognitive domain is easier to comprehend when the context is equally categorized in terms of the same domain. Thus, the interpretation of euphemistic and dysphemistic conceptual metaphors is partly motivated by the presence of lexical units related to this conceptual metaphor. In order to illustrate the role of context in euphemistic interpretation, it is worth resorting to Braine’s narrative: (13) I hadn’t fallen in love with her. And I wasn’t sex-obsessed.... It was simply that I was an unmarried man with normal appetites. If you’re hungry and someone’s preparing you a good meal, you’ll naturally angle for an invitation. The meal was on the table, so to speak, and it was a long time since I had eaten. (Braine 1984: 32-33)
The concepual basis of this extract is the cognitive metaphor SEX IS EATING. The euphemistic use of eaten with the meaning of ‘had sexual intercourse’ is easier to reach if the reader considers preceding terms like appetites, hungry and meal, which all share a common sexual reference, namely ‘sexual desire’, ‘sexually aroused’ and ‘sexual intercourse’, respectively. In fact, these metaphorical terms belong to a conceptual equation that relates sex to eating; an association which, in this way, favours their interpretation in a figurative euphemistic sense within a conceptually consistent context.
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The above considerations lead me to claim that conceptual associations are crucial in determining the euphemistic or dysphemistic value of the metaphorical substitute. In this sense, conceptualization can be considered as a relevant aid in the disambiguation of a given metaphorical term or phrase insofar as it is largely responsible for the euphemistic or dysphemistic effect of the lexical alternative and, therefore, contributes to establishing the dividing line between mitigation and offence. In this respect, as noted above, the characteristic ambiguity of metaphor can be made explicit by focusing on the nature of the source domain in terms of which the metaphorical substitute is conceptualized. As a result, cognitive conceptualization can effectively contribute to clarifying the intended meaning of metaphorical language.
6. Concluding remarks
Although it has not been my purpose in this article to deal with sexual conceptualization and verbalization exhaustively, I have attempted to outline the main implications underlying both the use and interpretation of sexual metaphorization within the frame of the well-known CMT initiated by Lakoff and Johnson (1980). In this sense, the present paper has provided evidence that euphemisms and dysphemisms used to refer to sexual taboos are well accounted for in terms of CMT. More specifically, a cognitively motivated approach to sexual mitigation and offence has revealed different features of sex-related conceptualizations that can be summarised in the following points: first, the degree of lexicalization of metaphorical substitutes greatly influences conceptual categorization and accounts for a bidirectional metaphorical projection between the target and source domains; second, the particular nature and connotations of the source domain largely determine verbal mitigation or offence in the metaphorical alternative employed; third, the type of conceptualization plays a crucial role in the interpretation of the metaphorical substitute in terms of a euphemism or a dysphemism; and fourth, the use of cognitive metaphors in conceptually consistent contexts significantly contributes in the process of disambiguation of metaphorical language. Thus, I hope to have demonstrated that metaphors have the power not only to create a new reality, as Lakoff and Johnson claimed, but also to shape already existing euphemistic and dysphemistic references in their use and interpretation. In sum, granted that language is metaphorical to the core and conceptual metaphorization constitutes a potent source for euphemistic and dysphemistic sexual reference, it seems quite evident that Cognitive Linguistics cannot be left aside from the study of sex-related metaphorical language. In fact, what emerges from the present research is that CMT is of paramount importance in euphemistic and dysphemistic use and interpretation, given that cognitive representation affects evasive and abusive referent manipulation in a remarkable way. For this reason, the phenomenon dealt with in this paper seems to deserve more attention than it has traditionally received, since, despite the considerable amount of research that has focused on figurative language, relatively little is known about metaphorization as a purely euphemistic or dysphemistic device. Therefore, I hope that the cognitively-motivated approach to
ATLANTIS. Journal of the Spanish Association of Anglo-American Studies. 30.2 (December 2008): 95–110 ISSN 0210-6124 Sex-Related Euphemism and Dysphemism 109 sexual mitigation and offence outlined here will contribute to shedding light on the crucial role of cognitive conceptualization in sex-related euphemism and dysphemism.
Works Cited
Allan, Keith and Kate Burridge 1991: Euphemism and Dysphemism. Language Used as Shield and Weapon. Oxford and New York: Oxford UP. ––––– 2006: Forbidden Words. Taboo and the Censoring of Language. Cambridge: Cambridge UP. Baider, Fabienne H. and Sara Gesuato 2003: ‘Masculinist Metaphors, Feminist Research’
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––––– 2006: ‘Metaphor and Ideology in Slang: The Case of WOMAN and MAN’. Revue d’Études Françaises 11: 151-66. Lakoff, George 1987: Women, Fire and Dangerous Things. Chicago: Chicago UP. ––––– 1994 (1979): ‘The Contemporary Theory of Metaphor’. Andrew Ortony, ed. Metaphor and Thought. Cambridge: Cambridge UP. 202-51. ––––– and Mark Johnson 1980: Metaphors We Live By. Chicago: Chicago UP. Langacker, Ronald W. 1997: ‘The Contextual Basis of Cognitive Semantics’. Jan Nuyts and Eric Pederson, eds. Language and Conceptualization. Cambridge: Cambridge UP. 229-52. Lawrence, D. H. 1986 (1915): The Rainbow. London: Penguin. Levin, Samuel 1979: ‘Standard Approaches to Metaphor and a Proposal for Literary Metaphor’. Andrew Ortony, ed. Metaphor and Thought. Cambridge: Cambridge UP. 124-47. Murphy, Peter F. 2001: Studs, Tools and the Family Jewels. Metaphors Men Live By. Madison and Wisconsin: The U. of Wisconsin P. OED2: Oxford English Dictionary 1992 (1989) 2nd ed. on CD-ROM. Version 1.0. Oxford: Oxford UP. Partridge, Eric 1968: Shakespeare’s Bawdy. London and New York: Routledge. Pfaff, Kerry L., Raymond Gibbs and Michael D. Johnson 1997: ‘Metaphor in Using and Understanding Euphemism and Dysphemism’. Applied Psycholinguistics 18: 59-83. Sánchez Benedito, Francisco 2004: Supplement to a Semi-Bilingual Dictionary of Euphemisms and Dysphemisms in English Erotica. Granada: Comares. Shakespeare, William 1951: The Complete Works. Ed. Peter Alexander. London and Glasgow: Collins. Stoll, John H. 1996: ‘Toward a Balanced View of Sex’
Received 27 January 2008 Revised version accepted 5 July 2008
Eliecer Crespo Fernández, PhD, is Lecturer at the University of Alicante. His research interests focus on the semantic and pragmatic dimensions of euphemism and dysphemism, particularly in the taboo areas of sex and death. He has authored the book El eufemismo y el disfemismo. Procesos de manipulación del tabú en el lenguaje literario inglés (Universidad de Alicante, 2007) and articles in Estudios Ingleses de la Universidad Complutense (2006), SKY Journal of Linguistics (2006) and Bulletin of Hispanic Studies (forthcoming).
Address: Departamento de Filología Inglesa, Universidad de Alicante.Apartado de Correos 99, E-03080, Alicante, Spain. Tel. (34) 96 590 34 00 (3187) / Fax.: (34) 96 5903800
ATLANTIS. Journal of the Spanish Association of Anglo-American Studies. 30.2 (December 2008): 95–110 ISSN 0210-6124
ATLANTIS. Journal of the Spanish Association of Anglo-American Studies. 30.2 (December 2008): 111–124 ISSN 0210-6124
A Wind of Change: The New British Colonial Policy in Post-Revolt India
Belkacem Belmekki University of Oran, Algeria [email protected]
Up to the nineteenth century, nothing had ever seriously threatened British rule in the Indian subcontinent the way the happenings of 1857 did. In fact, the East India Company officials there were caught unawares and unprepared for such an unexpected ordeal. As a result, shortly after the end of the hostilities, the British Government decided to rethink its policies in the region in order to avoid another similar catastrophe. This could be seen in the profound changes that London effected in the subcontinent, mainly upon the request of Queen Victoria, who explicitly urged the Government of India, in her historic Proclamation of 1858, to adopt a different approach in governing her colonial subjects. Hence, the task in this article is to analyze the impact that the Great Revolt of 1857 had on the British Raj.
Keywords: Great Revolt, British India, Queen Victoria’s Proclamation, Sepoys, East India Company, Evangelicals, Lord Dalhousie, British Empire
Most scholars dealing with British India believe that the events of 1857 came as a bolt from the blue that shook the very foundations of the British Empire in the Indian Sub- continent, and left a deep wound in the psyche of the British officials, both in London and Calcutta. News of terrifying atrocities being perpetrated by the Indian insurgents was reported by British newspapers (James 1997: 279). For instance, the Manchester Guardian wrote in February 1858: “Belief in horrible stories of torture, mutilation and dishonour worse than death, inflicted on our own countrymen and countrywomen in India, has been universal” (Judd 1996: 74). As a result, the pre-Revolt image of India, as being a “fairy-tale land where sultans sat on ivory thrones, ‘fanned by peacocks’ wings in palaces”, was turned into a slaughterhouse where every white man could be murdered (James 1997: 279). Moreover, Indians, who had hitherto been looked upon as “a simple race, little inclined to war and unconcerned as to who ruled them”, became murderous fiends and bloodthirsty in the minds of the British (1997: 280). 112 Belkacem Belmekki
Yet, despite such an unwelcoming atmosphere, the British Government was not willing to forsake India, for the simple reason that Britain could not afford to lose such an important colony (Judd 1996: 77). In fact, India constituted a significant source of wealth to Britain and, consequently, British economy depended heavily on it. Lending support to this statement, Lawrence James quoted a contemporary saying that “without India, Great Britain would subside into a third-rate state” (1997: 278). Besides, unlike other British dependencies, India was the only one that needed no subsidies from London, owing to land taxes (1997: 280). Apart from that, probably the most important outcome of the Great Revolt was the realization by the British Government that their pre-1857 rule in India was not free from defects. The latter had been serious and had to be rectified. For this reason, the post-1857 period was going to witness a metamorphosis in the way India was to be governed. In fact, the events of 1857 came as a shock to the British complacency and self-confidence there. They realized how vulnerable their position was in the Sub- continent. Thus, security took precedence over the major reforms that were going to be introduced. This could be seen in the reorganization of the army shortly after the end of the hostilities. Indeed, the issue of reforming the Indian army was first brought up in July 1858, during the height of the Great Revolt, when a royal commission of inquiry was set up in London to investigate the root reasons behind the sepoys’ – i.e. native regiments in the service of the East India Company – discontent as well as those defects related to the army organization which contributed significantly, in a way or another, to the outbreak of the uprising. This royal commission, known as the Peel Commission, was required to put forward some recommendations regarding the post-Revolt organization of the Indian army (David 2002: 399).1 As a result of this investigation, the Peel Commission submitted a number of recommendations and regulations by March 1859.2 Coming at the top of these recommendations was the number of European troops to be stationed in the Indian Sub-continent. In fact, it was recommended that the number of European troops necessary for the security of the British Empire in India should be about 80,000 (Chopra 1973: 522). Furthermore, it was reckoned as an obligatory measure to decrease the proportion of native troops, which should be set at two to one in the Bengal army, from which the uprising of 1857 was sparked off, and three to one in the armies of the other Presidencies, namely Madras and Bombay (1973: 522). In this respect, Percival Spear pointed out that in the aftermath of the Great Revolt the army of Bengal consisted of 65,000 Europeans as opposed to 14,000 natives (Spear 1990: 146).
1 This royal commission was named so because it was presided over by Major-General Jonathan Peel, then secretary of State for War in London (David 2002: 399). 2 According to Chopra (1973: 522), some British historians keep insisting on the fact that one of the factors that contributed to the outbreak of the uprising of 1857 among the native army was the faulty disposition of the Indian troops, as well as the significant disparity in numbers between European and Indian troops.
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In addition to the number of soldiers, the Commission stated that the artillery and ‘scientific branches’ should strictly be reserved for the British units. It also advised that sepoy troops, or native regiments, should be recruited from distant parts of the country, mainly from those areas which either were neutral or sided with the British during the events of 1857, and preferably speaking different languages (Read and Fisher 1998: 58- 59).3 Furthermore, to avoid unity among the sepoys, the Commission recommended that the native regiments should be composed of different nationalities and castes (David 2002: 400). Another important area of military reform was that the power of the commanding officers to punish should be increased. Actually, most of those who gave evidence to the Peel Commission were of the opinion that Bengal officers, in particular, needed more authority over their men (2002: 402). In fact, the weakening of commanding power of British officers during pre-Revolt India was attributed to Lord Bentinck who abolished corporal punishment of the native regiments. As a justification to this move, he stated that “flogging deterred ‘young men of respectable connections’ from joining up and produced ‘a baneful influence upon the pride, the manly feeling and the character of the whole service’” (2002: 42). From another standpoint, many British officers regarded this abolition as a serious mistake that could have serious consequences on the discipline of the native troops. One British senior officer in the Bengal army, Lieutenant-Colonel Drought, remarked on the eve of the Revolt: I saw very great laxity in the ranks . . . The authority of the commanding officer had become less than mine was as a subaltern4, as regards punishment drill to . . . officers, owing to army standing orders being set aside by circulars, and by station orders issued by officers perfectly ignorant of the proper method of keeping sepoys in subjugation, and thereby interfering with the commanding officer’s authority, and rendering him a mere cipher in the eyes of his men . . . (2002: 42) According to Saul David, the reduction of the power of the commanding officers was interpreted by the native soldiers as a sign of weakness, and consequently, this did much to inflate their sense of power and self-importance (2002: 42). To back up his statement, Saul David reported on Sitaram Pandy, a native soldier in the Bengal army, as saying that the principal cause of the rebellion was “the feeling of power that the sepoys had, and the little control the sahibs (Europeans) were allowed to exert over them” (2002: 42). As far as the sepoys’ professional grievances were concerned, the Peel commission put forward only a couple of recommendations: one dealing with their uniform and the other dealing with promotion. Regarding the former, it was recommended that a modification should be made in the uniform of the Indian troops, thus “assimilating it more to the dress of the country” and making it more suitable to the climate (2002: 403).
3 According to Denis Judd, post-Revolt Indian army relied heavily on Sikhs (natives of the Punjab), Ghurkhas (natives of the neighbouring Nepal noted for their military prowess), and the frontier tribes of the northwest (Judd 1996: 75). 4 A ‘subaltern’ is a lower rank than a captain in the British army.
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About the second recommendation, the Commission advised that the promotion of the native officers should be regulated on the principle of efficiency, rather than of seniority (2002: 400). As a matter of fact, before the events of 1857, rarely did the British allow an Indian soldier to rise in the military hierarchy, however clever and strong he might be.5 To add insult to injury, he was always kept in the background and, according to Bisheshwar Prasad, subjected to the authority of the youngest and most inexperienced European soldiers in the regiment (Prasad 1981: 545). Besides military reform, the British took other measures to ensure their security in post-Revolt India. This could be reflected in the passing of the Indian Police Act of 1861. The latter introduced a uniform police service throughout the whole Sub- continent and decreed that each Indian district should have a British superintendent of police, to be assisted by a deputy superintendent and inspectors, who could be recruited from the natives (Read and Fisher 1998: 61). Another significant step taken by the British that would ensure their domestic security in India was the passing of an Act in 1859 that would disarm the local population on a permanent basis.6 This Act gave the local Magistrates carte blanche to enter homes in search of arms, and if the presence of hidden weapons was suspected in any village, the latter’s possessions were to be confiscated until all arms were handed over to the authorities (Metcalf 1965: 306). Here, it is to be noted that following the passing of this Act, those who were found in possession of arms without a licence were fined Rs.500, and in addition, were either sentenced to seven years’ imprisonment or corporal punishment (1965: 306). This move on the part of the Government of India to disarm the local population mirrored the atmosphere of distrust that prevailed between the British and Indian subjects in India in the aftermath of the Revolt. In reality, as has been previously observed, the Great Revolt came as a shock to the British complacency and self- confidence in the Indian Sub-continent. They had never thought that one day, these so- called ‘docile’ and ‘submissive’ natives would rise against them. According to Denis Judd, after the events of 1857, the British started looking at the natives with caution and suspicion, if not fear, and this contributed to a growing gulf between both races (1996: 73-74). Corroborating this fact, A. Read and D. Fisher state that in the wake of the Revolt, the British citizens in India began building new suburbs for themselves on the outskirts of towns and cities, “‘civil lines’ consisting of spacious bungalows set back from broad, tree-lined roads which could be defended more easily in the event of trouble. At their centre was the club, strictly for Europeans only, a secure haven where the only native faces belonged to servants” (1998: 57).
5 In this respect, Saul David states that due to the principle of seniority in promotion used by the British in the native regiments, it was almost impossible for a sepoy to reach the rank of subedar-major (the post of a senior Indian officer in the army) before he was sixty (2002: 31). 6 Actually, the passing of this Act was but an enactment of the one already passed at the height of the Great Revolt (Act XXVIII) in 1857. Yet, unlike the latter, the 1859 Act meant to disarm Indians on a permanent basis (Metcalf 1965: 305).
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It is interesting to note that a profound distrust was reserved for the Muslim community. Actually, as the events of 1857 ended, the British chose to throw the cover of responsibility on the Muslim aristocracy alone, notwithstanding the fact that the latter were not the only ‘culprits’. This is because the British assumed that the Indian Muslims were the bona fide fomenters and the main beneficiaries of the uprising. Commenting on this fact, Thomas R. Metcalf wrote: “As the former rulers of Hindustan, the Muslims had, in British eyes, necessarily to place themselves at the head of a movement for the overthrow of the British Government” (1965: 301). The happenings of 1857 made the British realize how defective their security system in the Indian Sub-continent was. For this reason, they decided to revolutionize the organization of their army, as well as other security institutions, in such a way as to be more efficient in facing up to any possible domestic emergency in India. This could be seen in the number of British troops in India during the 1860s, which, according to Lord Strang, was said to have cost more than the armed forces of any European monarchy (1961: 171). On the other hand, on the heels of the Great Revolt, the British Empire in India entered a new chapter in its history and many changes took place, mainly on the political scene. To begin with, the last vestiges of the Mugal Empire were done away with. In fact, shortly after Delhi was retaken, the British captured the ageing Mughal Emperor, Bahadur Shah II, with his three sons and tried them for complicity in murder. Found guilty, the sons were executed, and the ageing Mughal was sent into exile with his wives to Burma, where he died in 1862 (Meyer and Brysac 2001: 147). Thus, with the departure of the last Mughal Emperor, Delhi, the last foothold that remained of the Mughal Empire came under British hegemony (2001: 146-47). Furthermore, shortly after the British were declared victorious, the British Parliament passed the Government of India Act on August 2nd, 1858,7 whereby British power over India was transferred from the East India Company to the Crown. In reality, it was the East India Company which took the brunt of the Great Revolt (James 1997: 292). After all, the latter broke out as a result of the Company’s reforms, mismanagement of local affairs and excessive abuses by its officials. In this regard, Lawrence James observes: Reforms had been thrust upon the Indians, irrespective of whether they needed or wanted them. The authority of the princes had been devalued and their lands and privileges had been snatched from them by Dalhousie’s policies of lapse and annexation.8 Having trampled on the rights of property, the reformers tampered with religion and had offended the sensibilities of Hindus with laws which overturned their customs of inheritance. (1997: 291)
7 It is worth mentioning that although the Great Revolt was officially ended in July 1858, it actually lasted until January 1859 due to the presence of pockets of resistance mainly in rural areas (James 1997: 295). 8 Dalhousie’s ‘policy of lapse’ was a formula devised by Lord Dalhousie (1812-1860), Governor-General of India between 1847 and 1856, to deal with questions of succession to the remaining semi-autonomous Indian princely states. According to L. James, between 1847 and 1856, more than five states fell to British rule under this stratagem (Ballhatchet 1973: 438).
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To put it in a nutshell, the reputation of the East India Company was indelibly tarnished beyond repair and as a result, it forfeited its right to rule the Indian Sub- continent for good (1997: 291). Nevertheless, it is noteworthy that the happenings of 1857 were not the only reason for bringing an end to the English East India Company. In fact, according to some scholars, there had been a growing popular outrage in Britain itself against the Company’s misrule as well as the malpractices of its agents in India prior to the uprising. This made the British Government try to find a way to take such a ‘big empire’ from the hands of a ‘trading company’. Thus, the Revolt of 1857 came as a godsend to the authorities in London to take the right action against the East India Company (Spear 1990: 148). In this respect, Percival Spear points out that the English Company “was held to have failed to gauge Indian opinion, to be inert and backward- looking. The occasion of the Revolt was thus a convenient one to end an administrative anomaly which had become an anachronism” (Spear 1990: 148). After ending the East India Company’s rule, the British Government came up with a new system to rule India. Thus, a post of Secretary of State for India was created, which was in charge of overseeing Indian affairs from London, hence replacing the Company’s Board of Directors there. In turn, the Governor-General of India in Calcutta, who kept the same prerogatives, acquired the title of Viceroy of India, hence, a personal representative of the Monarch. In fact, the latter was so important a position that, by the end of nineteenth century, it was held by the most prominent political leaders in Britain (Wolpert 1973: 410). This reflects how important India was to London. In this respect, Colin Cross contends that “one of the most glittering prizes a political career in Britain could offer was to become Viceroy, the ruler of one sixth of the human race” (1970: 44). To back up his statement, Cross adds that the salary of a Viceroy of India was between £20 000 and £25 000 a year, the highest salary of any British public official during the nineteenth century (1970:44). Apart from that, in the wake of the Great Revolt, several measures were taken by the British Government to avoid the recurrence of any similar event. This was characterized by Queen Victoria’s Proclamation, issued on 1 November 1858, which was addressed to the princes and peoples of the Indian Sub-continent. In her proclamation, drafted by the then Prime Minister, Lord Stanley Derby, Queen Victoria promised that her Government would no longer treat Indians as it used to (Feiling 1972: 929). Thus, the pre-1857 abuses were to be superseded by reform measures that would be beneficial to the British as well as the Indians, at least in the period immediately following the uprising. To begin with, the Queen vowed that the British Government would no longer interfere in the local affairs of the Indian population, and that the latter’s traditions and customs, however ‘abhorrent’ and ‘primitive’ they might be, should be respected. As she plainly put in her Proclamation:
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We declare it Our royal will and pleasure that . . . none be molested or disquieted, by reason of their religious faith or observances, but that all shall alike enjoy the equal and impartial protection of the law; and We do strictly charge and enjoin all those who may be in authority under Us that they abstain from all interference with the religious belief or worship of any of Our subjects on pain of Our highest displeasure . . . 9 Thus, as a sign of its willingness to refrain from interfering in the natives’ social and religious affairs, the post-Revolt Indian Government, under the leadership of the Governor-General, or rather the Viceroy, Lord Canning, took prohibitory measures against Christian missionaries in order to curb their activities in the Sub-continent (Judd 1996: 76). In fact, after the end of hostilities, the fingers of blame were mostly pointed at the Evangelicals,10 whose ‘aggressive’ proselytising was said to be responsible for the uprising (Metcalf 1965: 96). Amongst the most significant of these measures was the curtailing of Government subsidies to the missionaries. Actually, this government financial support to the missionaries was most of the time interpreted by the natives, mainly the Orthodox, as a way to indirectly help missionaries in their campaign to Christianize them (1965: 94). This punitive move on the part of the Government led to a remarkable decline in the number of missionaries working in India. According to Thomas R. Metcalf, whereas the number of missionaries in pre-1857 India was 262, it fell to 234 during the decade 1861- 1871 (1965: 97). The Evangelicals, on the other hand, saw things differently. For them, the Great Revolt came as a chastisement from God for not having done enough to free Indians from their “benightedness” (1965: 99). As a Scottish missionary in India, Alexander Duff, put it: “God has, in a strange way, given us India in trust for accomplishment of His grand evangelizing designs concerning it. In the discharge of this solemn trust, we, as a people and a nation, have been shamefully negligent. Hence it is . . . that the Lord has admonished us in the way of sore judgments” (1965: 99). Duff then added that having weathered this ordeal safe and sound, thanks to the Lord’s forgiveness, it is now incumbent upon the British officials to make a great deal of effort to realize the objective for which they had come to the Indian Sub-continent: the “subversion of Satan’s empire” (1965: 99). Therefore, in an attempt to concretize their opinion, the Evangelicals came up with a set of measures and applied pressure on the British Government in India to fulfill them. The most significant of these measures was that the Bible should be introduced as a class book in schools. Another proposal was that the Government should employ all legitimate means for the spread of Christian teachings among the so-called ‘benighted population of India’ (Metcalf 1965: 100).
9 ‘Her Majesty’s Proclamation (1858)’ India Office Records, Africa, Pacific and Asia collections, British Library, London: L/P&S/6/463 file 36, folios 215-16. 10 The Evangelicals were members of a Christian religious group who went preaching the Gospel all over the globe (Metcalf 1965: 8).
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Furthermore, the missionaries went a step further by asking the Government to disregard all distinctions of caste among the Hindus, as well as to put an end to all caste connections with the rites and customs of the Hindu religion (1965: 100), to which the Government’s response was a swift ‘no way’. Thomas R. Metcalf corroborates this statement by pointing out that the British officials in India as well as back in London, who were very concerned with restoring the confidence of the local population in the British Government, were well aware of the fact that this proselytizing enthusiasm was very dangerous and constituted a real threat to the very foundations of the British Empire in India.11 In other words, from Alexander Duff’s point of view, it is clear that the experience of the Great Revolt served as a lesson, as well as an incentive, for the Christian missionaries to make a greater effort than before to spread Christian teachings among Indians. Meanwhile, in another sphere, the new policy of live-and-let-live, as decreed in Queen Victoria’s Proclamation, could also be noticed in the post-Revolt legislation of the Government of India. Actually, the British officials, who were still haunted by the events of 1857, were very reluctant to take any measures that could directly challenge the social and religious affairs of the local population. In this regard, Denis Judd writes: “Fearful to set in motion an Indian reaction similar to the one that had precipitated the great uprising of 1857, the Government avoided drastic political and social change” (Judd 1996: 76). Probably the best example illustrating this was the passing of an Act in 1863 (Act n° XX) that called for the handing over of the entire superintendence of the Hindu temples and their endowments to local communities headed by natives themselves (Metcalf 1965: 111). Another example depicting the British determination to distance themselves from all matters related to local social traditions and religious beliefs was the passing of an Act, in 1866, which allowed Indian converts to Christianity to remarry. In fact, contrary to Lord Dalhousie’s Hindu Widow’s Remarriage Act of 1856, which in a flagrant breach of Hindu customs had legalized the remarriage of Hindu windows, the recent Act involved no attack upon the latter, since it concerned only Christian converts (Metcalf 1965: 111). On the other hand, the British Government was convinced that Lord Dalhousie’s policies of annexation were an important drive behind the participation of dispossessed princes in the Great Revolt. Moreover, even most of those who had not been victims to Lord Dalhousie’s policies were tempted by the rebels’ cause, as they felt that they, too, could be the next prey (Metcalf 1965: 220). As a result, Queen Victoria’s Proclamation put an end to Lord Dalhousie’s doctrine of lapse. In her Proclamation, the Queen stated that the British “desire no extension of Our present territorial possessions” and they
11 About the introduction of the Bible as a class book in schools, as put forward by the missionaries, Sir Henry E. Frere (1815-1884), a British official in post-1857 India, stated that it would convince the natives that the British were in India to convert its people, and this could provoke a full-scale rebellion (Metcalf 1965: 105).
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“would respect the rights, dignity and honor of the native princes as Our own”.12 Consequently, no more lands and possessions would be confiscated by the British in the future on the basis of this doctrine. In addition to that, the Proclamation stated that princes should be left free to adopt any heirs they desired, and to manage their states as they wished, so long as they remained loyal to the British Crown (Duff 1957: 122). In other words, following the experience of 1857, the British decided to treat the native rulers as friends and allies, rather than as foes, hoping to gain their support. Describing this switch in British policy towards the native princely states, A. R. Desai writes: Till 1857, the aim of the British was to liquidate the native states and convert entire India into a British territory directly governed by the East India Company. In light of the experience of the revolt of 1857, this aim was relinquished in favour of a decision to perpetuate those states, which were still unannexed. The new policy of Britain aimed at transforming the rulers of these states into ‘allies’, so many loyal supporters of the British rule in India. (1959: 288) According to S. A. Wolpert, more than 560 “enclaves of autocratic princely rule” survived in the aftermath of the Revolt (1973: 413). In this respect, some scholars provide conflicting data as to the actual number of princely states that existed in post- Revolt India. For instance, whereas A. Read and D. Fisher state that there were about 601 Indian states, some as large as France, others only covering a few square miles (1998: 59), Lawrence James points out that there were about 675 covering an area of 822,000 square miles (1997: 326). The Indian Great Revolt also made the British realize how influential the taluqdars, or the landed gentry, were among their communities. Thus, an effort was made to conciliate them. This took the form of giving them back their lands, which had been confiscated before 1857, to hold in perpetuity. Moreover, the landed gentry were made into local magistrates (Read and Fisher 1998: 53). Thus, these dispossessed taluqdars, hitherto bearing a grudge against British rule in India, became part and parcel of it overnight. The objective behind this shrewd move on the part of the British Government was to have the support of the Indian masses through this influential class of Indians (Spear 1990: 149). Another important element in Queen Victoria’s Proclamation was that Indians should have the right to take part in the management of their country (Feiling 1972: 929). As the Queen stated: “… in so far as may be, Our Subjects, of whatever race or creed, be freely and partially admitted to office in Our service, the duties of which they may be qualified by their education, ability and integrity duly to discharge”.13
12 ‘Her Majesty’s Proclamation (1858)’ India Office Records, Africa, Pacific and Asia collections, British Library, London: L/P&S/6/463, file 36, folios 215-16. 13 ‘Her Majesty’s Proclamation (1858)’ India Office Records, Africa, Pacific and Asia collections, British Library, London: L/P&S/6/463, file 36, folios 215-16.
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Thus, as can be seen from this quotation, the Queen took an unprecedented move by stating unequivocally that the natives, hitherto marginalized in the management of their local affairs, were thenceforth to be allowed to work, as well as hold responsibility, in the Indian Civil Service, provided that they met the required criteria. While on the subject, it is important to refer to the fact that Indians had been recruited in the British administration in India ever since the days of the first Governor- General, Warren Hastings. This was due to the fact that the English East India Company could not afford to ‘import’ a significant number of British citizens to run the day-to-day administrative affairs of a country almost as big as Western Europe. As a result, they had no alternative but to resort to the co-operation of the natives. Confirming this statement, Thomas R. Metcalf states that it was as impossible to run the Indian administrative machinery without the natives as to wage a war in India without sepoy troops (1965: 268). Nevertheless, it was out of the question that a native, who was usually assigned to a subordinate position, should hold a higher post of management and responsibility. In fact, the latter was often made off limits to the Indian recruit (1965: 268). But, the events of 1857 served as a lesson for the British officials in the Sub- continent. They actually realized how dangerous it was to marginalize that category of educated Indians who could be relied on in the Civil Service. In this respect, T. R. Metcalf comments: “The Government was well aware of the frustration and resentment which this exclusion produced in the heart of the educated Indian, and the experience of the Mutiny had taught the British, if nothing else, the discontented and unhappy men were a fertile breeding ground for sedition” (1965: 274). Yet, notwithstanding the fact that the Great Revolt paved the way, for the first time in the history of British India, for the Indian population, regardless of their faith or social class, to take part in the administrative management of their country alongside the British, only few managed to do so. This was due to linguistic and financial factors, which served as serious hurdles. In other words, competitive examinations were done in English, which required good mastery of this language on the part of the Indians (Lloyd 1989: 178). Furthermore, very few Indians could afford to make a trip to London in order to sit for these examinations. Colin Cross corroborates this fact with the following statement: In theory it was possible for an Indian to join the Indian Civil Service and a handful actually had done so; there was no racial bar. But the competitive entry examination was held in London and an Indian candidate had to gather £100 to pay his fare and living costs. Moreover, he was unlikely to do well in the examination unless he had spent years in Britain at public school and university which alone could provide suitable preparation; this would cost £2,000, a sum beyond the reach of 99 per cent of Indian families. (Cross 1970: 44) It is to be noted that even most of those who could afford such a trip to Great Britain faced another type of obstacle: the Hindu religion. In fact, crossing the sea, or the ‘black water’, was considered as a sinful act in the Hindu faith, and thus, it was impossible for the devout Hindus to do so (Lloyd 1989: 178).
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Further positive changes effected by the British reflecting their willingness to allow Indians to take part in the management of their country could be noticed in the passing of the Indian Councils Act of 1861 – already mentioned above. In fact, the latter divided the old advisory council of the Governor-General into two separate bodies: the Executive and the Legislative Councils. The first body was an inner cabinet consisting of five British officials, and each of the latter was responsible for a department, namely home affairs, revenue, finance, military and law, with the viceroy in charge of the foreign affairs department in person, besides being the Commander-in-Chief of the army (Read and Fisher 1998: 61). These officials were also important members of the second body, namely the Legislative Council, which consisted of up to twelve handpicked nominees, among whom there were, for the first time, two Indian subjects (Judd 1996: 75). Nevertheless, in the eyes of many critics, and to the Indians’ dismay, this reform was worthless since the function of the new legislative body was purely consultative (Read and Fisher 1998: 61). In fact, according to Bipan Chandra et al., besides being overwhelmingly outnumbered by Europeans, the Indian members were not allowed to discuss certain important issues, such as budget and financial matters, without prior carte blanche from the British Government (1989: 113). Moreover, the British were implicitly determined, out of caution, to keep the upper hand in all matters. Indeed, it was a sine qua non for the maintenance of their Empire in India to retain power in their hands, as T. R. Metcalf puts it: “No matter how far Indian employment might be extended, the ultimate controlling power had always to remain in British hands” (1965: 287-88). Yet, despite these setbacks, the decision of the British Government to allow members of the local population to participate in the management of their country was the first step of its kind that was going to set a precedent for further concessions by the British later on. Commenting on the significance of this legislative reform, Percival Spear writes: “Such a body may be regarded as the proverbial mouse emerging from the travail of the mutiny mountain. But it had a significance, for it marked the beginning of Indian participation in government at the top. After years of dwarfdom, the house was to grow into [sic] elephant” (1990: 177). The British were well aware of the fact that the economic grievances of the native population were a significant driving force behind the outbreak of the happenings of 1857. After all, most of the rebels had been, in a way or another, affected by the new exploitative measures imposed by the East India Company. Consequently, post-Revolt India witnessed a major step towards development, ranging from economic infrastructure to social care (Lloyd 1989: 177). As stated in the Proclamation: “. . . it is Our earnest desire to stimulate the . . . industry of India, to promote works of public utility and improvement . . . for the benefit of all Our subjects resident therein”.14 The best example of such progress could be noticed in the railway industry. In fact, the
14 ‘Her Majesty’s Proclamation (1858)’ India Office Records, Africa, Pacific and Asia collections, British Library, London: L/P&S/6/463, file 36, folios 215-16.
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Indian railway network, which did not exceed 200 miles on the eve of the Great Revolt, had reached 5000 miles by the 1860’s (Lloyd 1989: 177). This had, to a certain extent, a positive impact on the growth of the local economy and, eventually, on the local population. Probably the best indicator of this positive outcome was the rapid growth of the Indian population, as confirmed by T. O. Lloyd who pointed out that “there was general surprise when the first Indian census, held in 1872, showed that the population had reached at least 206 million” (1989: 177). Another move on the part of the Government of India featuring its attempt to alleviate the economic hardships of the local population was the reviewing of the Permanent Land Settlement Act of 1897, which had aroused much disaffection among the peasantry.15 Now, contrary to the fixed cash payment that cultivators had to offer to the Company, regardless of how much the land yielded, in post-1857 India this payment was to be made proportionate to the amount of the produce, without causing any damage to the cultivators (Metcalf 1965: 242). However, the new land settlement scheme did not go beyond the 1870s. This was due to the shortage of revenue that was engendered by the application of such a scheme, which proved to be very costly for the British treasury in India (1965: 248). To put it differently, the land revenue constituted a major source of income to the Government of India, and the latest reform meant a sharp decrease in revenue that could cripple the British establishment in the Sub-continent if it were to last longer. Therefore, once stability was restored to the region and the events of 1857 became a mere memory, this scheme was discarded as the British could no longer afford to maintain it. Commenting on this statement, Thomas R. Metcalf writes: “Peace and security had now been secured, and the fears of the Mutiny era were little more than a memory. Fiscal considerations took on a new importance. What had appeared a political necessity in 1862 was, a decade later, an expensive luxury the Government could not afford” (1965: 248). Nonetheless, despite the fact that the post-Revolt reform measures were, most of the time, short-lived, and were seen by some contemporaries as half-measures which ‘fizzled out’ as soon as the events of 1857 were forgotten, the Indians became convinced that in a time of crisis, the British colonizers could make a great deal of concessions. Moreover, though the Revolt of 1857 fell short of expelling the foreign rulers from the country, it was regarded by many Indian contemporaries as a patriotic act and a progressive step. In fact, the Great Revolt would, in the future, serve as a source of inspiration that the young Indian nationalists of the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century would resort to in their struggle for freedom. As Bipan Chandra et al. claim: “If the importance of a historical event is not limited to its immediate achievements, the Revolt of 1857 was not a pure historical tragedy. Even in failure it served a grand purpose: a source of inspiration for the national liberation movement which later achieved what the Revolt could not” (1989: 40).
15 It was Lord Cornwallis, Governor General of India from 1786 to 1793, who introduced the Permanent Land Settlement Act. By this Act, the British destroyed the old system of collective ownership of land in the Indian Sub-continent and replaced it with the system of individual proprietorship (Chandra, Amales and De Barun 1983: 17).
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In a word, following the Great Revolt, the British realized how vulnerable they were in India. The Queen’s Proclamation of 1858 was but a set of preventive measures taken by the British Government to avert another similar event. This Proclamation was a historic one, because, for the first time, it made the British Crown take Indian affairs seriously. Moreover, the Indian Great Revolt made the British officials wake up to the gravity of the situation in India, and reminded them of their vulnerability there. Indeed, Queen Victoria’s Proclamation, in which she implicitly deplored British misbehavior in the Sub-continent and called for better treatment of Indians, reflects how tremendous British apprehension was. This was an unprecedented move from the British Crown. In fact, never before had the latter officially intervened to ‘defend the rights’ of the indigenous populations in the colonies. As Robert A. Huttenback puts it: “It was the first imperial paper in which the British government admitted the right of an indigenous colonial population to have a part in the shaping of its own destiny” (Huttenback 1966: 68).
Works cited
Ballhatchet, K. A. 1973: ‘James Ramsay Dalhousie’. The New Encyclopaedia Britannica. Volume: 5. Britain. 438-39. Chandra, Bipan, Mukherjee Mridula, Mukherjee Aditya, Panikkar K. N. and Mahajan Sucheta 1989: India’s Struggle for Independence. New Delhi: Penguin Books. Chandra, Bipan, Tripathi Amales and De Barun 1983: Freedom Struggle. New Delhi: National Book Trust. Chopra, Pran Nath, ed. 1973: The Gazetteer of India: History and Culture. Vol. II, New Delhi: Ministry of Education and Social Welfare. Cross, Colin 1970: The Fall of the British Empire. London: Paladin. David, Saul 2002: The Indian Mutiny: 1857. London: Viking. Desai, R. Akshayakumar 1959: Social Background of Indian Nationalism. Bombay: Popular Book Depot. Dutt, Palme 1957: L’Inde: aujourd’hui et demain. Paris: Editions Sociales. Feiling, Keith 1972: A History of England: From the Coming of the English to 1918. London: Book Club Associates. ‘Her Majesty’s Proclamation (1858)’ India Office Records, Africa, Pacific and Asia collections, British Library, London: L/P&S/6/463 file 36, folios 215-16. (Official Document) Huttenback, A. Robert 1966: The British Imperial Experience. London: Harper & Row Publishers. James, Lawrence 1997: Raj: The Making and Unmaking of British India. London: Little, Brown and Company. Judd, Denis: 1996: Empire: The British Imperial Experience, from 1765 to the Present. London: Harper Collins Publishers. Lloyd, T. O. 1989: The British Empire: 1858-1983. New York: Oxford UP. Metcalf, R. Thomas 1965: The Aftermath of Revolt: India 1857-1870. New Jersey: Princeton UP. Meyer, E. Karl and Brysac B. Shareen 2001: Tournament of Shadows: The Great Game and the Race for Empire in Asia. London: Abacus. Prasad, Bisheshwar 1981: Bondage and Freedom: A History of Modern India (1707-1947): Volume I: Bondage, 1707-1858. New Delhi: Rajesh Publications.
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Read, Anthony and Fisher David 1998: The Proudest Day: India’s Long Road to Independence. London: Pimlico. Spear, Percival 1990: A History of India: Volume II. Middlesex: Penguin Books. Strang, Lord 1961: Britain in World Affairs: A Survey of the Fluctuations in British Power and Influence: Henry VIII to Elizabeth II. London: Faber & Faber and Andre Deutsch. Wolpert, A. Stanley 1973: ‘British Imperial Power: 1858-1920’. The New Encyclopaedia Britannica. Britain. 408-18
Received 14 April 2008 Revised version accepted 30 August 2008
Belkacem Belmekki holds a PhD in British Civilization from the University of Oran, Algeria, where he is a lecturer in English and in British and Commonwealth Studies. His most recent publications on the subject of British involvement in South Asia include: ‘Rationale for the Indian Muslims' Philosophy of Loyalism to British Colonial Rule in the Nineteenth Century, in Atenea: A Bilingual Journal of the Humanities and Social Sciences, N° XXVII-1. Puerto Rico: University of Puerto Rico-Mayagüez, 2007: 41-52 [Special Issue: (Trans) Nationalism and (Post)Colonialism], and ‘The Emergence of Muslim Nationalism in British India: A By-product of Hindu Fanaticism?’, in Les Cahiers du CICLaS, N° 13, Paris: Université de Paris-Dauphine, 2008. 67-75 [Special Issue: Nationalism(s), Postnationalism(s)]. His current research focuses on the different theoretical explanations of the phenomenon of Muslim communalism/separatism in British India.
Address: Faculty of Letters, Languages and Arts, Department of Anglo-Saxon Languages, University of Oran, Oran, 31000, Algeria Tel : + 213-771-53-41-52, FAX : +213-41-58-19-41.
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Goodbye to Isherwood: the Rise and Fall of a Literary Reputation
Andrew Monnickendam Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona [email protected]
This article analyses the critical reception of Christopher Isherwood. In the first half, using the oft-quoted words I am a camera as a starting point, it illustrates how at the outset this phrase was redolent with political commitment. This idea is reinforced by using two contemporary texts: Isherwood’s own view of Germany; John Lehmann’s contemporary assessment, itself based on Virginia Woolf’s remarks on the comparative merits of fiction and poetry. The second half traces how the situation has radically altered. The three deciding factors in this critical sea change are first, biographical: his decision to leave England; second, the emergence of Isherwood as a key figure in the gay movement, and third, Isherwood’s elusiveness. Some of these factors are well-known, others are not, but brought together in this way, they will hopefully prepare the ground for a critical reassessment of his early work.
Keywords: Christopher Isherwood, John Lehmann, 1930s, literary reception, Berlin, modernism, gay studies
I am a camera with its shutter open, quite passive, recording, not thinking. Recording the man shaving at the window opposite, and the woman in the kimono washing her hair. Some day, all this will have to be developed, carefully printed, fixed. (Isherwood 1969: 7)
It would be no exaggeration at all to say that the first simple sentence of this quotation, the second paragraph of Goodbye to Berlin, has determined the reception of Isherwood’s entire literary output from its moment of publication in 1939. Take, for example, Thomas’s ‘Goodbye to Berlin: Refocusing Isherwood’s Camera’, which begins with the classic statement that the camera “has become almost the obligatory starting point for discussions of Christopher Isherwood’s fiction” (1972: 44). The simplicity of I am a camera has led to multifarious interpretations both in terms of the book’s form and content. The simplest and least questionable gloss would be that it demonstrates how 126 Andrew Monnickendam important still photography and cinema were in Isherwood’s life. Novels centred on cinema, such as Prater Violet (1946), chapters dedicated to cinema in other works, such as in Lions and Shadows (1938), Isherwood’s unsuccessful flirtation with Hollywood as narrated by Lehmann (1987) or Parker (2004) would all indicate that Isherwood was a cinema director manqué. However, the controversy surrounding this statement stems less from a quantitative perspective – how much did the cinema interest him? – than from a qualitative perspective – what did he use this trope for? How politically active or passive is Isherwood as a writer? He was writing at a time when the power of the cinema was central to political life; we only have to think of Leni Rifenstahl’s work or Walter Benjamin’s seminal account of its power to indoctrinate in ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Production’ (1936). By accident or on purpose, Isherwood lighted on a memorable image that suggests that the writer remains in control to point the lens where he wills, in this case, run-down, seedy, politically violent Berlin, very much in the tradition of the politically-committed writer of reportage of the 1930s. As a representative appreciation of this fact, in his influential study The Auden Generation, Hynes argues that “Isherwood was the best documentary writer of the thirties” (1976: 342). This he attributes to the absence of great events and people, and Isherwood’s focus on the lost, The Lost being the intended title of his Berlin stories. Hynes argues that Isherwood strives for coherence by juxtaposing the many elements that make up the lost: the fate of the rich as opposed to the fate of the poor; Jews, as opposed to Gentiles; the Communists against the Fascists, and so on. In other words, Isherwood imposes symmetry (1976: 355). Even in this brief extract we have an illustrative example: a man and woman performing their daily hygiene; the images are held together by the internal rhymes: recording...shaving…washing” and “window...woman...washing” (Isherwood 1969: 7). The idea that the narrator is passive is therefore difficult to uphold. What Hynes is stating is amply supported by Isherwood’s virtually unknown article ‘German Literature in England’, a companion piece, in terms of time, to Goodbye to Berlin. It was published in the left-wing American journal The New Republic in April 1939. On a biographical level, this is very soon after Isherwood and Auden had left Britain, a question to which I will return. The article’s title refers to literature only but its contents reach out far beyond. Isherwood starts off by insisting that he and his contemporaries reacted to the “blind chauvinism” of their parents’ generation, which had considered the Germans “ravening beasts”. The younger generation naturally rebelled and Germany became “the most cultural and artistic nation in Europe” (1939: 254). Isherwood suggests that in the 1920s “younger English writers and the British public at large were becoming increasingly pro-German” (1939: 254). I would stress that he uses a generalisation, “the British public at large”, which would not survive closer inspection. It is true, however, that there was a real perception that the Versailles Treaty was unjust and that Germany had been treated atrociously by the allies. He goes on to say that the post-war period lacked an artistic representation of the horrors of modernity and modern warfare and it was precisely the German filmmakers who dared to do this. This portrayal of horror, whether in drama, films or art responded to the interests of contemporary youth in London; Isherwood is reluctant to extend its influence farther. This is, I believe, due to his hesitancy in formulating a motif which runs through much of the article, namely, that Anglo-American art of the time looked
ATLANTIS. Journal of the Spanish Association of Anglo-American Studies. 30.2 (December 2008): 125–137 ISSN 0210-6124 Goodbye to Isherwood: the Rise and Fall of a Literary Reputation 127 tame in comparison. The rest does focus on literature, but I would insist that in each of the cases I go on to analyse, it is useful to bear this suggestion in mind. For example, he puts forward the premise, perhaps even less controversial now than in 1939, that the best war literature is German, and in particular Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front (1929), a book banned and publicly burnt by the Nazis. Isherwood develops his major thesis that British art of the time is basically a German invention. This can only be done by maintaining a steadfast belief in high art, or more specifically in the case at hand, high modernism. For example, he says that “If you asked the average educated young man what German authors he most admired, he would probably say Hölderin, Kafka, Rilke, Thomas Mann. Some might mention Heinrich Mann, the Zweigs, and if politically minded Toller and Brecht” (1939: 254). All this must be easily available in translation, because he then goes on to talk about books which are only available in their original tongue. Clearly, if taken at face value, the average educated person of 1939 was extremely well educated! It is hard not to identify this average educated young man with Isherwood and his circle, who then make their appearance. First is Stephen Spender, who is German for two reasons. One is that he promotes Hölderin’s ideas and second that Spender’s poetry reflects his literary education, which took place, Isherwood claims, in Germany. Rilke and Kafka become the major authors of our time for the simple reason that they best personify the Zeitgeist. Rilke, because “as loyalties twist into paradoxes, and strange and unwelcome allies invade the political camps, Rilke and what he represents must seem, to many people, the only valid assertion, the last things still fit to fight for” (1939: 255). Similarly, Kafka is “the mirror of our age and all its terrors”. For Isherwood, Germany was the source of great literature, which Nazism strangled. Isherwood uses the phrase German Republican literature as the best term to describe this period of experimentation and great art, often referred to as the art of Weimar. Isherwood concludes by suggesting that Kafka’s world might soon be our own; that the forces of horror he depicts are precisely those which threaten the surviving democracies. Consequently, the exiles or those out of favour with the Nazis “are our allies” (1939: 255). Isherwood maintains a clear distinction between those who benefit from and those whose suffer at the hands of the regime. That seems a laudable objective, at the risk of repetition, as late as 1939, but at the same time it demonstrates a keen awareness that Nazism both promoted and denigrated art in a most emphatic way, as analysed by Spotts (2002). This leads on to three important conclusions. First, art is inextricably linked to politics. Isherwood insists that highly motivated artists-cum-translators like Spender or the Muirs share a desire to communicate the value of German literature to an English-speaking readership; they truly act as cultural bridges capable of conveying the realities of a Kafkian world. Second, this highlights the importance of the incident in the section ‘A Berlin Diary’ in which a pacifist bookshop is burned to the ground whilst a looker-on comments, “No More War.... What an Idea!” (202). Isherwood is aware, as it would have been impossible not to, that such burning of books would turn the concept of a politically uncommitted writer into a contradiction in terms. Third, a voyage to Berlin is a voyage to Europe’s most dynamic culture. Throughout this article, I will often refer to terms such as the thirties or writers of the thirties. Such terms, as occurs with the lost generation, are inevitably used as labels, but
ATLANTIS. Journal of the Spanish Association of Anglo-American Studies. 30.2 (December 2008): 125–137 ISSN 0210-6124 128 Andrew Monnickendam that does not necessarily mean that they are nothing else, nor, as often happens, that they are invented years later for matters of convenience. On the contrary, I would stress that this feeling of belonging to such a group is one shared by its component parts as World War II approaches. Isherwood’s friend, John Lehmann, director of the Hogarth Press, was also involved with Penguin. He was the founder of the Penguin New Writing Series and responsible for the Pelican special issue New Writing in Europe (1940), a surely remarkable project for such a fateful year. For Lehmann, the economic crisis brought about by the Wall Street Crash “cracked the world of the ’twenties beyond repair” (1940: 19). This comment is pretty obvious, but it is fundamental to the reception of Isherwood and his contemporaries. That a crisis has economic causes is a straightforward idea, but in this case it has led many critics to believe that any author of the 1930s who writes like this, who uses a materialist approach, was a paid-up Marxist. For example, if the writers of the 1930s had, to borrow the title of Johnstone (1982), a will to believe, the critical commonplace has been to offer the binary of communist or fascist. Cunningham takes a different tack by rightly insisting that the Communist Party in Britain was “tiny” (1988: 30) in 1930, consisting of just over 3,000 members. On the next page, Lehmann argues that while the West underwent crisis, living conditions in the Soviet Union improved, thereby disaster and achievement are further highlighted in symbiotic form. Lehmann dates the feeling of brotherhood as far back as 1932 with the publication of New Signatures, a collection of poetry written by W.H. Auden, Julian Bell and so on. Lehmann’s foreword begins: My aim in this book is to review what has been one of the most interesting developments in our literature for many years: the growth, during the early nineteen-thirties, of a group of poets and prose-writers who were conscious of great social, political and moral changes going on around them, and who became increasingly convinced that it was their business to communicate their vision of this process, not merely to the so-called highbrow intellectual public to which their predecessors had addressed themselves, but to the widest possible circles of ordinary people engaged in the daily struggle for existence. But these writers cannot be considered in their island isolation; they were European writers almost as much as they were British writers, deeply influenced by events and thoughts beyond our own shores. (1940: 13) I have quoted the passage at some length because it is an extremely concise description of what influenced Isherwood and his contemporaries. Of the many points made, I would emphasise the belief in the nexus between English literature and its continental European counterparts, so often forgotten in the studies of the period. Indeed, I would argue that critical accounts of the thirties, even those so different in style, politics and objectives as Johnstone (1982) or Cunningham (1988) suffer from not having available such a clear statement that the highly politicised concept of the writers of the thirties was born with the thirties themselves. At the same time, Lehmann’s account portrays Isherwood with amazing perspicacity. That said, the basis for Lehmann’s analysis of Isherwood is Virgina Woolf. He states throughout the early pages that for the generation of the thirties Virginia Woolf is the great literary innovator, primarily for her critical dismissal of realism and promotion of experimentalism. Therefore there is no incompatibility between the search for form and the promulgation of reality and ideas, as what artists convey is “their vision of this
ATLANTIS. Journal of the Spanish Association of Anglo-American Studies. 30.2 (December 2008): 125–137 ISSN 0210-6124 Goodbye to Isherwood: the Rise and Fall of a Literary Reputation 129 process” (1940: 13). The third chapter of his study, entitled ‘Refitting the Novel’, a very nautical metaphor, uses as its theoretical basis her 1931 essay ‘Letter to a Young Poet’, published in the volume The Death of the Moth and Other Essays. Having talked about English and German authors, it is possible that Woolf is reworking Rilke’s earlier publication of the same name; however it is equally probable that the title is such a common one that what we have is nothing more than a coincidence. Initially, it might seem odd that, if the genre which is being refitted is the novel, Lehmann should begin his chapter with Woolf on poetry. However, Lehmann holds with Woolf’s view that poets have been shirking contact with life. They have become increasingly introverted, frequently ignoring questions whose principal concern is not the poet’s mind. Her point is that dealing with reality is something which canonical English poetry has done marvellously; she cites Shakespeare, Crabbe and Byron as examples. Previously, she says, English poetry was full of characters rather than the poets’ muse. Perhaps the Romantic concept of the artist’s uniqueness is her real target. She implies that contemporary poets are unable to write about reality in its most basic, mimetic sense because they are so obsessed with questions of form. Woolf imagines the frustration this might cause. And while you write, while the first stanzas of the dance are being fastened down, I will withdraw a little and look out of the window. A woman passes, then a man; a car glides to a stop and then – but there is no need to say what I see out of the window ... for I am suddenly recalled from my observations by a cry of rage or despair. Your page is crumpled in a ball; your pen sticks upright by the nib in the carpet. If there were a cat to swing or a wife to murder now would be the time ... the rhythm which was opening and shutting with a force that sent shocks of excitement from your head to your heels has encountered some hard and hostile object upon which it has smashed itself to pieces. Something has worked in which cannot be made into poetry. (1961: 182) This violent account of poetical frustration – swinging a cat, murder, smashing things to pieces – obeys Woolf’s own views that the prose of her generation does indeed come into contact with life. Crucial to my analysis of Isherwood is her use of the metaphor or synecdoche of the window: look out, rather than in, is the message here. It is precisely Isherwood who opens Goodbye to Berlin with the words “From my window, the deep solemn massive street” (1969: 7). It is impossible to know whether Isherwood was conscious of Woolf’s essay when he wrote these words, but if so, it would simply reinforce his intention to describe the lost. Unlike Woolf’s introverted poet, he has avoided “the ornate and the obscure, with a vocabulary as close to the colloquial as possible”. Lehmann humorously states that “Isherwood has digested his Hemingway well” (1940: 48). However, what makes Lehmann’s Woolfian version of Isherwood different from all other accounts is his claim that Isherwood is a moralist. By this, he means that Isherwood consciously tackles the question “of social injustice” on two levels which have Berlin at their intersection. First, he is aware of the lost, and second, because he “was one of the first prose writers of his generation to receive the full impact of Europe as the Fascist tidal wave began to roll over it” (1940: 50). Isherwood’s central theme is thus “social illness” (1940: 51). In short, Isherwood is a politically committed writer who fulfils to a tee the conditions for being considered a new writer in Europe.
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Lehmann also gives a perceptive defence of Isherwood’s constant use of odd characters. First, they form part of Isherwood’s wide panorama: “He almost invariably prefers to take eccentric and fantastic characters as his central pivots, the extreme products of the anarchy and pathological condition of modern society” (1940: 51). The fact that Isherwood looks out of the window, committed as he is to recording the comedie humaine of modernity as Balzac had done in the previous century, is the pivot of the argument. It should be pointed out that Lehmann’s insistence on Isherwood’s role as a realist sidetracks other concerns, such as modernism, voyeurism or the role of the flâneur. The aim of the second half of this essay can be summarised in a simple question: if Isherwood and Lehmann are so acutely aware of the cracked world, why has the reception of Isherwood gone in a radically different direction? This can be briefly illustrated by Thomas (1972) when he discusses Friedman (1955), who wrote that Isherwood’s camera statement meant filming, “without apparent selection, ‘a slice of life’”. Friedman concludes his critical remarks with the statement that “To argue that the function of literature is to transmit unaltered a slice of life is to misconceive the fundamental nature of language itself; the very act of writing is a process of abstraction, selection, omission, and arrangement” (1955: 1179). Friedman believes that if we want a slice of life, we simply need to go to a street corner; we do not need books for that. For Friedman, Isherwood’s stance (the camera) represents the ultimate denial of an author’s role, responsibility or function as stated by Lehmann himself. Isherwood, from Friedman’s stance, has become as socially useless as Woolf’s introverted, solipsistic young poet. He has metamorphosed into the opposite of what he appeared to be eighteen years previously. What has brought this about? The first of the three reasons is the joint decision by Isherwood and Auden to leave Britain for the United States in 1939.1 For many contemporaries, Auden and Isherwood had not simply left Britain, they had abandoned Europe at the worst possible moment, just as it was about to plunge into war. To make matters worse, both writers fully understood the effects of war, not only because they knew about the bloody street-fighting in Berlin but because they had published as co-authors, in that very same year, Journey to a War (the war being that waged in China). On the whole, it seems a puzzling, disjointed effort; puzzling, because it betrays an almost non-committal or indifferent attitude towards suffering and death; disjointed, because its mixture of prose and poetry seems gratuitous, little different from a cut-and-paste exercise. Commitment and fellowship for the suffering of others have vanished. Lehmann himself is surely being sarcastic, particularly in the light of Auden’s experience in Spain, when he describes in indirect speech, their anticipation. “A war of their own! ... Not the front stall of the Spanish War, so crowded already with celebrities, from Malraux to Hemingway to their own English friends” (1987: 40). Note the particularly disturbing image of the front stall; for them it is a spectator sport watched from a suitably comfortable vantage point. The usually sympathetic Lehmann insists on this idea of a celebrity trip to war. He adds that “[t]here was a great deal of
1 In January 1939, Isherwood emigrated; Goodbye to Berlin and Journey to a War were published in March; the article in The New Republic appeared in April.
ATLANTIS. Journal of the Spanish Association of Anglo-American Studies. 30.2 (December 2008): 125–137 ISSN 0210-6124 Goodbye to Isherwood: the Rise and Fall of a Literary Reputation 131 publicity about their departure with cameras at Victoria, which Christopher thoroughly enjoyed” (1987: 41). Furthermore, the memoir includes one well-known photograph of the pair in front of the train, cigarettes in their hands, big smiles on their lips as if they were about to go on holiday, which seemed to be uncomfortably close to the truth. The explanation Isherwood gives in his diaries for emigration is difficult to take at face value: ”Why were we going to America? I suppose, for myself, the chief reason was that I couldn’t stop travelling” (1997: 4). Isherwood has exchanged his concern for the lost for a romantic wanderlust. It might not be completely clear from this brief citation what their motives for choosing America as their destination were, but both writers were fully conscious that they were leaving Europe on the brink of war. In addition, Auden and Isherwood were hardly two ordinary citizens: they were considered part of the artistic vanguard lacking what was expected of them: a real commitment to the cause of freedom when the crunch came. Whereas three years previously, artists had taken up the case for Spain both by publishing manifestos and by volunteering, Auden and Isherwood, it seems, had briskly abandoned their left-wing idealism. Lehmann stresses the attraction of America as a more liberal country, notes Isherwood’s involvement in an erotic triangle at that time, but in the end even he cannot condone the decision. To say that someone gets into “a panic frenzy” in the events leading up to Munich is hardly flattering; but worse is to come. Lehmann continues As we read the latest editions of the evening papers, I said to Christopher bitterly: ‘Well, that’s the end of Europe as we wanted it’, and voiced the fear that unless further betrayals were imminent Munich could mean the postponement of war and not its avoidance. And in an unguarded moment Christopher replied; ‘That doesn’t matter any more to me: I shall be in America’. (1987: 48) Lehmann tries to soften the effect of this cynical comment by adding that at that moment Isherwood had no intention of taking up American citizenship, something which he did do in 1946. This reads as a damage-limitation exercise. Even for such a close friend and champion as Lehmann, Isherwood’s behaviour reveals the suspicion that the latter’s commitment to the shared ideals of the 1930s had swiftly evaporated. However, more telling than the bitterness in Lehmann’s voice is the fact that these words were not written in 1940, when surely there would have been more grounds for a gut-reaction, but in 1987, nearly forty years later; a suitable time had surely elapsed for reflection if not forgiveness. Isherwood’s literary standing as the camera which recorded the hardship of the world was wiped out at one fell swoop. Yet Isherwood’s reputation as a committed writer returns in the post-Stonewall 1970s, but from a different perspective: that of his homosexuality. His novel A Single Man, first published in 1964, has become one of the most important novels in the gay canon, as has the re-written autobiography of his youth, Christopher and His Kind (1976). The novel has become a milestone, yet, as its plot is so hackneyed, an impossible love quest, initially it might not be apparent why this is so. It is narrated as taking place in twenty-four hours. Its time framework can be seen as a tribute to Virginia Woolf (Mrs. Dalloway) or James Joyce (Ulysses), though I would argue that this obvious literariness is more likely to be a conscious attempt to establish canonical status.
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Edmund White and David Hockney both show immense respect for Isherwood as a whole and for this novel in particular, which indicates some success. Although it is widely seen as an innovative gay novel, there is nothing remarkable in its description of sex: in terms of explicitness, by present-day standards, it is rather tame. Critical attention pinpoints its importance, as is evident from the most recent substantial collection of critical essays, The Isherwood Century (2001). One of the contributors, David Bergman, in an essay entitled ‘Isherwood and the Violet Quill’, gives the most convincing account of its significance: “In contrast to such tormented and self- destructive gay writers as Truman Capote or Tennessee Williams, Isherwood provided a calm, sane, and productive counterexample whose work was imaginatively rich, stylistically challenging, and politically and spiritually engaged” (2001: 203). However, politically now refers primarily, and in some cases exclusively, to sexual politics. Consequently, an interesting reappraisal of Isherwood’s pre-war work is brought about. As an illustration of this, Marsha Bryant reads Journey to a War as subversive, in complete contrast to Lehmann. For her, it was written in opposition to “the tough masculinity of George Orwell’s The Road to Wigan Pier and Ernest Hemingway’s dispatches from the Spanish Civil War” (2001: 172). Although it “provides a triple coverage: Auden and Isherwood cover (report) the war, cover (conceal) their sexual confrontation, and cover (re-perform) prior acts by straight men” (2001: 178), it is coded, as both reporters fail, in a highly camp way, to perform the straight masculine role of war reporters. If that is the case, then the situation has been reversed: whereas Auden – and Lehmann for that matter – can be criticised for being homosexuals but never really tackling it in their writing, now Isherwood is revered for being politically committed to the gay cause all his life! The knock-on effect is that his status as raconteur of the Berlin underworld and as a social critic withers away to almost nothing. Whereas the down-and-out were previously the subject of his Berlin novels (the down-and-out of all classes, of all ideologies), Berlin now becomes the scene in which sexual drama is enacted; foreground and background have changed places, or at least the distinction has melted away. Although this reversal of fortune is a salutary lesson in the fickleness of literary history, we have to see how it interacts with the question of political commitment which I have stressed as being such a fundamental component of the aesthetics of the thirties. Clearly, if Isherwood is a lifelong concealer, as Bryant suggests, then his fame after 1964 is simple to understand: he is one of the first writers to come out of the closet. His earlier writing, with England and Germany as locations, is primarily a preparation for that key moment. However, up to now, my approach has been entirely different, namely, to stress how politically committed he was in the 1930s. Much recent interpretation of Isherwood at some point turns to a highly evocative phrase from Lions and Shadows, “homosexual romanticism” (2000: 78). In a similar fashion, near the end of Goodbye to Berlin, Landauer comments “By Jove, Christopher - what a romantic life you lead” (1969: 176). If that is the motif of his pre-war work, what does it imply? I will concentrate on two recent major studies, one specifically on Isherwood (and Auden) and the other about the thirties’ generation as a whole. The first is Norman Page’s Auden and Isherwood: the Berlin Years (1998). It makes certain points of great interest to this essay. It argues well that Berlin
ATLANTIS. Journal of the Spanish Association of Anglo-American Studies. 30.2 (December 2008): 125–137 ISSN 0210-6124 Goodbye to Isherwood: the Rise and Fall of a Literary Reputation 133 replaces Paris as the cultural and sexual Mecca for the aspiring author. As we have seen, Isherwood’s own defence of Germany and its culture fit the mould of this idealisation. Page also insists that Berlin was an especially attractive destination not simply for sex but for pleasure in general (1988: 3), but by going on to describe Auden’s preference for violent sex (1988: 14), Page is not totally consistent. In addition, he is adamant that Berlin represents “the nexus of class, sexual colonialism” (1988: 36). This desire – Berlin meant Boys! – for Germanic youth of the working class is neatly put, but it increases the evidence for there being, in the end, little or no distinction between pleasure and sex. In his analysis of Goodbye to Berlin, Page is also critical of Isherwood’s use of the camera as a trope, believing that it is logically untenable, as someone has to point it somewhere. He argues that Isherwood “plays down the drama of contemporary happenings” (1988: 184). This does not represent the extreme views of Friedman, but expresses a similar concern. Page is particularly astute in his analysis of Isherwood’s female characters. First, he states that it is inexplicable that the narrator feels no pangs when Sally disappears from the text. Second, his insistence on Isherwood’s misogyny, in the notorious sanatorium scene for example, is extremely convincing. Page’s contribution shows, in my opinion, that for him Isherwood is politically – but not sexually – non- committal. Alternatively, and more challenging in the light of Page’s prestige as an important critic of English literature, would be the suggestion that his study shows that the two political currents never successfully merge; this unsuccessful combination contributes significantly, for Page, to his inferiority to Auden as a literary figure. If that is so, what about the thirties as a whole? For a tentative answer, we must turn to Valentine Cunningham’s comprehensive British Writers of the Thirties (1988). This is a huge study, so packed with information and documentary evidence that it would be risky to engage in a study of the period without prior consultation. I stress this because my intention here is to point out one of its peculiarities, not to criticise it as a whole. Cunningham’s hostility is even more marked than Page’s, yet whereas as the latter is perceptive and deeply sceptical, the former is often unreasonably aggressive. Of the new Isherwood, he argues that “he turned into an almost excessively clamant Gay Liberationist in the seventies partly from guilty hostility towards his own earlier concealments and unoutspokenness”(1988: 153). This sounds convincing, perhaps at first reading, but as an interpretation, it has two drawbacks. First, even though all the Berlin books and Lions and Shadows are to a certain extent coded or occasionally muted in their description of boys, clubs and Berlin in general, one would have to be extremely ingenuous to argue that that adds up to concealment. Second, it is incompatible with Bergman’s insistence on the quiet, sane nature of latter-day Isherwood. Cunningham does not stop here. For him the whole Lehmann circle exists primarily to promote the writing of his homosexual friends (1988: 149). The whole generation is corrupt: “They’re a troupe of middle-class voyeurs ... able to achieve heroic stature for themselves only by pretence, by proxy, in metaphor and other literary figures” (1988: 170). This is surely a huge generalisation, which like most generalisations contains certain grains of truth, but nothing more. As to the camera, Cunningham is adamant: Isherwood, we are assured, “turned himself ... into ‘a camera’” (1988: 329). This forthrightness leaves no space for discussion. Cunningham traces two possible sources. One is “the Camera Eye sections in Dos Passos’s USA. Both authors doubtless knew of
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Dziga Vertov, Leninist film-maker” (1988: 329). No evidence is given to support either claim. However, if Isherwood did follow either Dos Passos or Vertov, he would certainly not be a mere voyeur, oblivious to the hardships of the thirties; following Cunningham, he would be at least a socialist if not a Leninist. From this brief explanation of how more recent studies approach Isherwood, hopefully it will have become clear that in both cases the revelation, the discovery, or more basically, simply an awareness of Isherwood’s homosexuality has made little contribution to the study of his pre-war output. The greater the importance of Isherwood’s homosexuality becomes in accounts of his Berlin books, the less he is seen as a socially committed writer. There is no reason why this should be so, why public and sexual politics should become irreconcilable, but this is the pattern criticism has followed, as the work of Page and Cunningham illustrates. The quandary, in the case of the former, and hostility, in the case of the latter, is sufficient proof. In no way am I trying to belittle two important studies; my only objective is to show how this surprising phenomenon has arisen in academic circles. The final strategy for finding an explanation is an appeal to Isherwood himself. Initially, this would not seem a difficult task; after all, if the I is so central to Isherwood, then ample evidence must abound. The fact that I can be the first person singular, the first letter of Isherwood or the homophone for eye when applied to “I am a camera” (Isherwood 1969: 7) provides multiple possibilities. However, Isherwood was and remained throughout his life a loquacious but most elusive figure. As my previous account (2005) points out, Lions and Shadows (1938) is supposedly an autobiographical fiction describing his life before he left for Berlin; it contains things that he actually did, working as secretary to the violinist Cheuret for example. Nevertheless, the prefatory note tells us it is neither strictly autobiographical nor really true. This would seem to conflict with the book’s subtitle, An Autobiography in the Twenties. The use of masks, delaying tactics and simultaneously true and false identities is one of Isherwood’s literary games. That makes life difficult at times but not impossible. However, pinning him down is no easy matter, as we shall see. In 1976, Twentieth Century Literature published an issue dedicated exclusively to Isherwood. In an interview, the editor, Carolyn Heilbrun, asked him about his sexuality; he replied, “I said in some interview that I felt that I would certainly have become heterosexual, if everybody else was homosexual – there’s a streak of that in my make-up”(1976: 257). This is witty but extremely unhelpful. For, just at the moment when gay writing begins to make its presence felt, one of its major figures debunks himself in a reply which playfully ignores the basic truth of human reproduction. This roguish reply, it must be noted, contains one of the most excruciating puns one could come across: “there’s a streak of that in my make-up”, a highly camp play of words whose irony farther distances literary figure from documentary proof. Indeed, there is only a small step from make-up to mask, so we are farther distanced from revelation. He adds that his new book will be more factual than Goodbye to Berlin, but this reference to Christopher and his Kind (1977) cannot withstand even the most cursory of examinations. If that was not enough, towards the end, he informs us that “I’ve really come to the conclusion, in the wisdom of my seventy-one years, that there are even more beautiful and terrible obstacles to enlightenment than sex. And one of them is writing” (1976:
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263). This grandiloquent epigram by the grand old man of letters is difficult to decipher. It is clearly very ironic and meant to be amusing, but the moment writing reaches over the edge of creativity towards criticism, it openly defies any article writer to decipher his – Isherwood’s – texts. Clearly, then, if both his writing and life seem to be based on concealment and the occasional deliberate deception, the search has to be for interviews where irony has temporarily been put aside and a more straightforward approach is taken. The onus is now placed on the critic to make moot judgements about what is and what is not ironic. The interview which I believe most useful is that conducted by David J. Geherin, which first appeared in volume 2:3 of Journal of Narrrative Technique (1972) and was reprinted in Berg and Freeman’s Conversations with Christopher Isherwood (2001). That said, there are some very ironic comments. When asked why Forster did not publish Maurice (1971), he impishly replies that “First of all, it would have upset his mother”. He adds that as a novel, it is “absurdly militant”. He refutes the idea that he has written about homosexuality, “I’ve introduced some homosexual characters, but that’s not the same thing” (2001: 85). The point might be that he does not restrict himself to gay lifestyles, but it is hardly a convincing argument. So even in a relatively frank interview, Isherwood maintains his love of leading the reader down the garden path. The major interest in this interview stems from some explicit commentary on the relationship between autobiography and fiction: I was always concerned primarily with live models. But I was trying to show the inwardness of the models that I was using for my characters. That is to say, I was trying to show what it was about them that really interested me, why they seemed to me more than themselves, why they seemed to me to be almost archetypes, and therefore why I was writing about them, what was magic about them, what was numinous about them. In order to show that, I didn’t hesitate to alter actual facts and create scenes which never actually happened, invent circumstances of all kinds. The analogy I usually use here is that of a horse that you’re showing off at a show. You want to put it through its paces. In the same way you want to put a character through its paces, provide scenes which will make it behave in the way which is almost characteristic of itself. Therefore you very quickly get away from what really happened into what might have happened – that is say, you get into fiction. (2001: 75) The first reaction to reading this citation could justifiably be that, in his usual exasperating fashion, Isherwood has avoided the question completely. He has told the interviewer nothing about the presence of himself in his fiction. Similarly, the use of numinous (holy, indicating the presence of a divinity) might correspond to Isherwood’s belief in Vedanta but says virtually nothing about his literary technique. However, his evasive tactics, whether deliberately or not, actually reveal an approach which is similar to that of the camera, even though the metaphor is completely different. Putting a horse through its paces supposedly draws the spectators’ interest towards the animal and away from its trainer. It is arguable that the metaphor of the camera strives to achieve that goal precisely: our attention is directed less to the new arrival than to the squalid Berlin and Berliners: in other words, reportage. Later on, Isherwood is very direct in his replies to two key questions. In an answer to one on the relationship between autobiography and fiction he states that “The whole endeavor of the Christopher
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Isherwood persona in the novels is to be in the background as much as he can because what he is trying to do is tell a story. He’s not telling his story at all, or only incidentally, and only just to explain why he was there with those people and what he was up to” (2004: 76). This unequivocally confirms my previous point: autobiographical presence means committed presence. Isherwood’s reportage therefore predicts the importance of witnessing, which Rawlinson (2000: 11) sees as being so important to twentieth-century literature and fundamental to World War II narratives. When asked whether he believes critics have overemphasised the importance of the camera statement, he replies: “Yes, very much so. What I was simply trying to do was describe my mood at that particular moment. Obviously, the description does not fit Christopher in many of the other sections” (Geherin 2001: 77). This is the point made by Wilson when he says “the novelist is untrue to his original conception: of being a camera” (1976: 316). In moving towards my conclusions, I must first make a very important point. There are some extremely perceptive accounts of Isherwood’s literary style. For example, Wilde argues that irony, basically that of Schlegel, is central to modernity in general and Isherwood in particular. For Wilde, it is an existentialist response to “a growing loss of faith both in the reality of the external world and in the authenticity of the self” (1970- 1971: 480). But I do not believe this to be necessarily the case in his fiction and certainly not in his other prose and interviews. Isherwood is simply playing hide-and-seek, with a great deal more hiding than finding. What surprises me is less the sharpness of Isherwood’s darts than the virtual silence in critical writing on his extensive use of obfuscating irony which, in the end, locates itself somewhere on a scale between self- effacement and self-erasure. Therefore my major conclusion is a simple one: when Isherwood becomes a renowned figure in the 1970s, the possibility of reassessment presents itself. This certainly happens with his later gay writings and in reinterpretations of his earlier works through a post-Stonewall perspective. However, this has had three consequences. First, the idea that the Berlin stories inform the reader as reportage has eroded away, as has Isherwood’s persona as a politically committed writer of the 1930s. Second, for reasons impossible to explain, this same pattern has imposed itself in critical circles, and there seems to be no way to bring together Isherwood’s public and sexual politics. Thirdly, I would therefore argue that the result of this impasse is that Isherwood criticism has become stuck in a critical rut. Sadly, then, Peter Parker’s biography, published in 2004, which is a wonderful achievement, rather than stimulate other studies, is something of a swansong.
Works Cited
Bergman, David 2001: ‘Isherwood and the Violet Quill’. James J. Berg and Chris Freeman, eds. The Isherwood Century. Madison: U of Wisconsin P. 203-15. Bryant, Marsha 2001: ‘Documentary Dilemmas: Shifting Fronts’. James J. Berg and Chris Freeman, eds. The Isherwood Century. Madison: U of Wisconsin P. 172-86. Cunningham, Valentine 1988: British Writers of the Thirties. Oxford: Oxford UP. Friedman, Norman 1955 ‘Point of View in Fiction: The Development of a Critical Concept’. PMLA 70.5: 1160-84. Geherin, David J 2001 (1972): ‘An Interview with Christopher Isherwood’. James J. Berg and
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Chris Freeman, eds. Conversations with Christopher Isherwood. Jackson: UP of Mississippi. 74-89. Heilbrun, Carolyn G. 1976: ‘Christopher Isherwood: An Interview’. Twentieth Century Literature, 22.3: 253-63 Hynes, Samuel 1976: The Auden Generation: Literature and Politics in England in the 1930s, London: Bodley Head. Isherwood, Christopher 1939: ‘German Literature in England’. The New Republic, 5 April: 254-55. ––––– 1969 (1939): Goodbye to Berlin. Harmondsworth: Penguin. ––––– 1997 (1996): Diaries Volume One: 1939-1960. Ed. Katherine Bucknell. London: Vintage. ––––– 2000 (1938): Lions and Shadows. London: Minerva. Johnstone, Richard 1982: The Will to Believe: Novelists of the Nineteen-Thirties. Oxford: Oxford UP. Lehmann, John 1987: Christopher Isherwood: A Personal Memoir. New York: Henry Holt. ––––– 1940: New Writing in Europe. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Monnickendam, Andrew 2005: Rev. of Christopher Isherwood: A Life, by Peter Parker. Atlantis 27:1: 145-50. Page, Norman 1988: Auden and Isherwood: the Berlin Years. New York: St. Martin’s P. Parker, Peter 2004: Isherwood: A Life. London: Picador. Rawlinson, Mark 2000: British Writing of the Second World War. Oxford: Oxford UP Spotts, Frederic 2002. Hitler and the Power of Aesthetics. London: Hutchinson. Thomas, David P 1972: ‘Goodbye to Berlin: Refocusing Isherwood’s Camera’. Contemporary Literature 13.1: 44-42. Wilde, Alan 1970-71: ‘Irony and Style: The Example of Christopher Isherwood’. Modern Fiction Studies 16: 475-89. Wilson, Colin 1976: ‘An Integrity Born of Hope: Notes on Christopher Isherwood’. Twentieth Century Literature 22.3: 312-31. Woolf, Virginia 1961 (1941): ‘A Letter to a Young Poet’. The Death of the Moth and Other Essays. Harmondsworth: Penguin. 178-93.
Received 9 September 2007 Revised version accepted 12 May 2008
Andrew Monnickendam is Professor of English at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona. He holds a BA in Literature from the University of Essex and a PhD from the UAB. His current research interests are two. The first is centred on the life and works of Christian Isobel Johnstone (1781-1857), novelist, journalist and possibly the first woman to edit a mainstream journal in Britain. He edited her pan-European novel Clan- Albin (1815) for the Association of Scottish Literary Studies (2003) and has several articles on her work published in Scottish Studies Review. His second area of interest is the literature of war and its aftermath. The latest publication in this field is a volume of essays, co- edited with his colleague Aránzazu Usandizage, Back to Peace: Retribution and Reconciliation in the Postwar Period, published by Notre Dame UP in 2007.
Address: Departament de Filologia Anglesa, Edifici B, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, 08193 - Bellaterra, tel. (34) 93-5812308, fax (34) 93-5812001.
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Andrew Teverson 2007: Salman Rushdie. Contemporary World Writers. Manchester: Manchester UP. xvii + 259 pp. ISBN 978-0-7190-7051-8
Christopher Rollason Metz (France) [email protected]
If ever a writer’s work lacked primal innocence, it is Salman Rushdie’s. It is impossible to write about the Indian-born, US-resident, British national, secular-Muslim, postcolonial and globalised novelist/polemicist/celebrity without being controversial. Equally, there is more than one Rushdie, and that in numerous senses. Generically, there is a postmodern Rushdie claimed as a British writer, and a postcolonial Rushdie seen as part of Indian Writing in English (IWE); ideologically and chronologically, there is an earlier Rushdie viewed as a standard-bearer of progressive movements and a later Rushdie seen by some, at least, as a convert to establishment values; qualitatively and again chronologically, there is, for many, an earlier Rushdie, author of epoch-making fictions, and a later Rushdie whose works are of lesser value. Above all, there is a ‘literary’ Rushdie, emblematic of magic realism and postcoloniality and the author of Midnight's Children (1981), and a ‘non-literary’ Rushdie, his name a battleground between the advocates of free speech and those in both East and West who demand theocratic censorship, the author of The Satanic Verses (1988). Thanks to Khomeini’s fatwa and the surrounding controversy, Salman Rushdie has surely become the writer most written about in literary history by those who have not read and will never read a word of his writings. Any detailed study of his work has to operate some kind of balance between these ‘literary’ and ‘non-literary’ aspects, and the volume under review opts essentially for the former while incorporating comment on the latter. This is no doubt a necessary choice for a study which aims to cover Rushdie’s entire oeuvre, most of which is of no interest to those who see him only through the Verses prism; nonetheless, readers of a book like Andrew Teverson’s still need to remember that the name Salman Rushdie has global reverberations for those who do not read books. The book is divided into two main parts, ‘Contexts and Intertexts’ (five chapters) and ‘Novels and Criticism’ (six chapters), plus an Afterword. It proposes a reading of the oeuvre up to Shalimar the Clown (2005), thus following in the footsteps of, for example, the French-language study by Marc Porée and Alexis Massery (1996), which offered a comparably detailed overview up to The Moor’s Last Sigh (1995). Teverson assumes that understanding Rushdie means swallowing him whole, and, across a literary production perceived by many as wildly uneven in quality, accounting for and integrating everything. There is a chronology at the beginning; the end matter consists of endnotes, a (fairly brief) bibliography, and an index. The first half of the book locates Rushdie’s writing within a series of different frameworks – ‘Political and Intellectual Contexts’, ‘[Indian] Writing in English’, ‘Intertextuality, Influence and the Postmodern’, and, finally, ‘Biographical Contexts’ (a dimension which in this case not even the most fervent textualist can ignore). From the
ATLANTIS. Journal of the Spanish Association of Anglo-American Studies. 30.2 (December 2008): 141-146 ISSN 0210-6124 142 Christopher Rollason beginning, the reader notes Teverson’s use of devil’s-advocate tactics, taking up elements of the anti-Rushdie case and then wholly or partly refuting them: thus, in the introduction he already cites a critic like Aparna Mahanta (2001) who castigates Rushdie for, allegedly, writing only for Westerners and for “a tiny stratum of India’s and Pakistan’s elite, ... deracinated, speaking English, thinking English” (7) – a stricture so generalised that it could be levelled at any IWE writer. Teverson responds by calling Mahanta’s argument “overstated” and “sensationalist”, while admitting that she does identify a problem in that Rushdie, while at least some of the time claiming to speak for the underprivileged masses, is, as a hybridised metropolitan intellectual, by definition not a member of those masses (8). His method here typifies the study as a whole and reveals in Teverson a critic who, while never reducing Rushdie to his non-literary avatar, is acutely aware of the complex political connotations of his work – seeing his subject as a writer whose fiction “intersects with many of the most pressing debates in contemporary cultural and political affairs” (10). The chapter ‘Political and Intellectual Contexts’ develops the proposition that “for Rushdie, politics is central to his art, but art is also central to his politics” (13). Teverson examines the charge levelled by Aijaz Ahmad (1992) that Rushdie is compromised with the poststructuralist obsession with discourse to a degree that estranges him from real political engagement. Arguing that, rather, “Rushdie ... is a writer who is prepared to bite off big chunks of the world and chew them over” (13), Teverson defends the significance of his work for progressive politics, roping in two heavyweights of postcolonial criticism, Edward Said and Homi Bhabha. The Said invoked is less the Foucault-influenced and at times arguably determinist author of Orientalism (1995, first published in 1978) than the later, ‘contrapuntal’ Said of Culture and Imperialism (1993), for whom, according to Teverson, Rushdie is one of those postcolonial writers who “write back ‘to the metropolitan cultures’ in order to disrupt the 'European narratives of the Orient'" (22; the term "write back" is from Rushdie's own celebrated article 'The Empire Writes Back With a Vengeance', published in the London Times on 3 July 1982). Rushdie's authorial stance is further validated from Bhabha's conception, as advanced in his 1994 volume The Location of Culture, of “newness as a form of cultural impurity” (23), entailing the privileging of hybridisation as a key determinant of the postcolonial (and Rushdiean) world-view. Next considered is the issue of English as the chosen linguistic medium of a large part of Indian and other postcolonial writing, and of Rushdie in particular. Against the authenticists who claim innate ontological superiority for those writing in Indian languages as against IWE practitioners, Teverson stresses that since Independence English “has been made into one of India's many languages” (34), and that a writer like Rushdie does not reproduce the metropolitan version of English unscathed, but, rather – at least in his more ‘Indian’ texts – succeeds in localising it (it could have been added that one reason for those Indian writers who feel most at ease in English to publish in that language is that English is the only language that allows a novelist to reach a pan- Indian audience without having to go through translation). Mention is made of Rushdie’s well-known and controversial statement in his introduction to the 1997 volume The Vintage Book of Modern Indian Writing 1947-1997 (co-edited by himself and his then partner Elizabeth West) expressing a preference in qualitative terms for IWE
ATLANTIS. Journal of the Spanish Association of Anglo-American Studies. 30.2 (December 2008): 141–146 ISSN 0210-6124 Reviews 143 over writing in Indian languages as far as post-Independence prose writing is concerned (though, like most commentators, Teverson fails to add that two paragraphs down Rushdie qualifies that statement by stating he believes the reverse is true for poetry). It is concluded that Rushdie's use of English (anyway the only language he knows well enough to be a writer in) is, hybridised as it is, postcolonially legitimate, constituting him as one of those who engage in the “reclamation of English for counter-hegemonic purposes” (37), and allowing him to “undermine rather than confirm the over- simplistic binary opposition that pits vernacular languages against English” (40). Teverson next considers Rushdie's relationship to the discourses of poststructuralism and postmodernism. He distances himself from the more extreme manifestations of Roland Barthes’ ‘death of the author’ position – an ideological stance that in any case has surely been called in question by history in, precisely, Khomeini’s call for the literal death of the author Rushdie. Teverson posits that Rushdie’s work embodies a “dynamic image of the author as agent” (56), as one who acts upon the given in order to contest it. He further contends that Rushdie, though influenced by postmodernist technique, is ultimately not a postmodernist, arguing that if his texts at times display something resembling a postmodern “free play of signifiers”, those ludic patterns have nonetheless, and crucially, been “historically validated” (emphasis in the original) (61). On this reading there is no question of recruiting Rushdie as a second Thomas Pynchon, still less as a disciple of Lyotard or Foucault. Indeed, Teverson further dissociates himself from the poststructuralists in the next chapter, by offering a chronological overview of Rushdie’s life and writings, the latter being located in their biographical context. This chapter foreruns the more detailed novel-by-novel analysis of the book’s second part, but is also useful in that it examines some of the minor works that are not novels – the 1987 Nicaraguan travelogue The Jaguar Smile, the 1994 story collection East, West (the book, though, contains no detailed consideration of the two essay collections of 1991 and 2002, respectively, Imaginary Homelands and Step Across This Line); it also includes the first tranche of a two-part discussion of The Satanic Verses and the surrounding ‘affair’. The book’s second half centres on a detailed examination, again chronologically ordered, of Rushdie’s nine novels up to Shalimar the Clown. Teverson offers a number of positions of indubitable interest to Rushdie criticism. Midnight's Children is analysed less from the familiar magic-realist prism than as a latter-day instance of another genre, namely the historical novel as conceived by Walter Scott (Teverson proposes potentially fecund comparisons with Waverley and Ivanhoe) and theorised by Georg Lukács. For the other major novels (his take on The Satanic Verses will be considered later), Teverson usefully stresses the crucial divergence of Shame (1983) from Midnight’s Children in that Rushdie’s novel of Pakistan painfully highlights the closure and narrowness of that country’s society as opposed to the burgeoning multiplicity of the India celebrated in its predecessor; affirms The Moor's Last Sigh's construction of Bombay as metonym of Indian pluralism as against Hindu-particularist sectarianism; reads The Ground Beneath Her Feet (1999) – a shade controversially in view of the very non-Indian music of that novel's Indian rock’n’rollers – as a pregnant exploration of hybrid globalisation; and welcomes Shalimar, Rushdie’s then latest offering, as a path- breaking fusion of “the interest in US-led globalisation apparent in the novels of his
ATLANTIS. Journal of the Spanish Association of Anglo-American Studies. 30.2 (December 2008): 141–146 ISSN 0210-6124 144 Christopher Rollason middle period ... with the sustained focus on a South Asian national experience apparent in the novels of his early period” (217). In addition, Teverson integrates Haroun and the Sea of Stories (1990) into the debate as being not just a children’s book but a paean to pluralism, and valiantly justifies the two novels most often viewed as minor, Grimus (1975) and Fury (2001) as manifestations of the Rushdiean world-view (the first as a satire on poststructuralism, the second as a further, post-Ground exploration of the global). In his summing-up chapter, ‘Critical Overview and Conclusion’, Teverson comes down in favour of Rushdie as being, throughout his career, a novelist who adopts an oppositional, satirical and subversive stance towards established power, be it secular or religious, Western or Eastern. He sees Rushdie’s political critique, as, if essentially negative, nonetheless necessary: “he does not conform to an ideology … he does not see it as his job, as a novelist, to provide answers; … rather, he sees himself … as the grit in the state machine that unsettles the machinery” (205), ending with a flourish by quoting The Ground Beneath Her Feet: “When you know what you’re against you have taken the first step in discovering what you’re for” (216). We may, though, ask exactly what it is that Rushdie is for and against, and since Teverson’s book appeared there have been several new developments. In June 2007, Salman Rushdie became Sir Salman Rushdie, and the knighting of the ‘empire writes back’ man himself both stirred up antagonism in postcolonial critical milieux and reignited the Verses controversy via hostile demonstrations, notably in Pakistan; while 2008 saw both the third-in-a-row consecration of Midnight's Children by the Booker Prize judges (this time for the award's fortieth anniversary) and the nomination for the Booker longlist – though, it transpired, not shortlist – of Rushdie's latest work (and his first-ever historical novel set in remoter times), The Enchantress of Florence (2008). The new novel appeared to mixed reviews, once again raising the issue of the relative literary merits of the earlier and later Rushdie. The knighthood controversy came as a reminder that the Verses issue is still being fought over, and here Teverson’s book, while useful, perhaps does not quite make the unequivocal contribution to the anti-censorship, libertarian cause that might have been expected (here, splitting discussion of the book/affair between two different chapters does not help). Teverson notes that Rushdie studied early Islamic history as a special subject as part of his Cambridge history degree (77-78), and quotes the full text of Khomeini’s fatwa (91) (though not making it clear that the Ayatollah could not possibly have read a book that then existed only in English). A careful analysis of Rushdie’s novel as satire is followed by an account of the ‘affair’ in which, arguably a shade disturbingly for Rushdie’s more secular-minded readers, Teverson allows himself the question: “Should such acts of blasphemy ... be subject to censorship?” (155). If one reads on, that question in fact turns out to be rhetorical, as he goes on to cite a very interesting reading by Sara Suleri, in her 1992 book The Rhetoric of English India, that would constitute The Satanic Verses as no less than a plea for a secular Islam, a seeming betrayal that “seeks to desecrate a cultural tradition in order that that cultural tradition might be revisited and renewed” (158). However, the very mention, in a book like Teverson’s, of the possibility of a ban (and how could such a ban be enforced in the Western world, unless, say, the UK morphed into a province of Orwell’s Oceania or the
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US repealed the First Amendment?) seems unnecessarily to subvert the study’s own rationalist raison d'être as an account of all Rushdie’s fiction. Teverson mentions the important volume, first published in French in 1993, For Rushdie: A Collection of Essays by 100 Arabic and Muslim Writers (Abdallah et al.; actually it consists of 99 essays plus a musical score by a Moroccan composer, by a total of 226 signatories, one item being a text signed by 127 Iranian intellectuals), but not that this volume contains a crucial vindication of The Satanic Verses by Edward Said, ‘Against the Orthodoxies’, which culminates in the affirmation that “Rushdie is the intifada of the imagination” (1994: 261). What is missing from Teverson’s account is the robust and informed libertarianism that characterises the defences of Rushdie offered at the time in Said’s statement or in Malise Ruthven’s book A Satanic Affair (1990), or more recently by Christopher Hitchens in his critique of theocracy God Is Not Great (2007). The question of the post-fatwa Rushdie (has he made a pact with the establishment? has the quality of his fiction declined in parallel?) was foregrounded in a text by Priyamvada Gopal of Cambridge University, ‘Sir Salman's Long Journey’, published in response to the knighthood in The Guardian on 18 June 2007 and widely syndicated. Gopal lamented the circumstance that “a once-beleaguered writer has accepted a quaint honour from the British establishment”, charging Rushdie simultaneously with political betrayal (“what he once undertook in the name of shared human values and goals, he now identifies largely with the West”) and artistic decline (the “lamentable transformation of a visionary and complex writer into a weak-voiced celebrity … too busy being a pastiche of his former self to actually write well”) (2007). Against such severe charges it needs to be established whether Rushdie’s recent non-fictional writings really manifest such an ideological shift, and, should that be so, whether his alleged uncritical stance on the West is actually reflected in, say, the in many ways very anti- American Shalimar the Clown. It could be argued that Teverson’s method in this book is not the best equipped to deal fully with contentions of this kind, by reason of its chronological reading of the fiction and all-inclusive approach to the œuvre. However, those constraints themselves reflect the impossibility of embracing in a brief compass all aspects of so literarily and politically complex a phenomenon as the work of Salman Rushdie. One day the attempt will be made to account in full for both the literary and the non-literary Rushdie. That will, however, be an enormous task, and meanwhile Andrew Teverson’s book should be welcomed by all those concerned with postcolonial writing and with the relationship between literature and politics, as a valuable source of reference and a significant, if partial, contribution to debates that are of crucial significance for our times.
Works Cited
Abdallah, Anouar et al. 1993: Pour Rushdie: Cent intellectuels arabes et musulmans pour la liberté d'expression. Paris: La Découverte/Carrefour des Littératures/Colibri. English version, 1994: For Rushdie: A Collection of Essays by 100 Arabic and Muslim Writers. New York: George Braziller. Ahmad, Aijaz 1992: In Theory. Classes, Nations, Literatures. London: Verso. Bhabha, Homi 1994: The Location of Culture. London: Routledge.
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Gopal, Priyamvada 2007: ‘Sir Salman’s Long Journey’. Guardian 18 June.
Received 11 August 2008 Accepted 1 October 2008
Christopher Rollason (BA and MA Cambridge, PhD York) is an independent British scholar living in France. He has lectured at the University of Coimbra and collaborated as a guest lecturer with several Indian universities, including Jahawarlal Nehru University (Delhi). He has been Language Editor for the Atlantic Literary Review (Delhi), and is currently an editorial board member of the Indian journals Reflections and Pegasus. He has co-edited the anthology Modern Criticism (2002) and has many articles published on Indian Writing in English, Hispanic literatures, cultural and translation theory in journals including JSL Delhi, Hispanic Horizon (Delhi), San Marcos Semanal and Boletín de la Academia Peruana de la Lengua (Lima). Currently he is co-editing a volume of critical studies on the work of Vikram Chandra.
Address : 16 rue de Belchamps, F-57000 Metz, France. Telephone 00352-4300-23090. Fax 00352-4300- 23905.
ATLANTIS. Journal of the Spanish Association of Anglo-American Studies. 30.2 (December 2008): 141–146 ISSN 0210-6124 Ocke-Schwen Bohn and Murray J. Munro, eds. 2007: Language Experience in Second Language Speech Learning: In honor of James Emil Flege. Amsterdam / Philadelphia: John Benjamins. xvii + 407pp. ISBN 9-78-90-272-1973-2 (hb)
Juli Cebrian Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona [email protected]
This book provides a state of the art overview of the main issues in second language (L2) speech research. The volume is a collection of compelling articles contributed by leading scholars in the field of L2 speech and dedicated to James Emil Flege, on the occasion of his retirement in July 2006. Flege has undoubtedly been one of the most influential researchers in L2 speech learning since the 1980s. His best known theoretical contribution is the development of the Speech Learning Model (SLM, Flege 1995, 2002 among others). Central to this model are the claims that the mechanisms involved in speech learning remain intact throughout the lifespan and that difficulty in L2 speech learning results from first language (L1) interference, which is greater the more developed the L1 system is. Flege’s theoretical contributions, as well as his highly rigorous methodology and experimental techniques, have inspired a wealth of research among opponents and collaborators alike. This is evident in the quality of the contributions to this festschrift, many of which are the work of scholars trained in Flege’s laboratory. The volume consists of twenty chapters divided into five sections: The Nature of L2 Speech Learning (Part I), The Concept of Foreign Accent (Part II), Consonants and Vowels (Part III), Beyond Consonants and Vowels (Part IV), and Emerging Issues (Part V). Beyond these themes, the articles also address topics such as the role of age and experience (Chapters 5, 6, 16), and the effects of training (Chapters 4, 8, 14). L2 perception is examined in Chapters 2, 4, 7, 8, 13 and 14, as well as in Chapters 3, 5, 11 and 12, which focus on theoretical and methodological aspects of crosslinguistic similarity. Finally, L2 production is addressed in Chapters 9, 10, 14 and 16, and in studies on overall degree of perceived foreign accent and intelligibility (Chapters 6, 7, 19). The five chapters in Part I lay out the main topics in current L2 speech research and serve as an introduction to the book. In Chapter 1, Munro and Bohn, the editors of the volume, give an overview of the origins and development of research on L2 speech, explaining the emergence of current theories and outlining the main issues in present- day research. The chapter describes influential models such as Flege’s (1995) SLM and Best’s (1995) Perceptual Assimilation Model (PAM) and introduces core issues such as cross-language speech perception, the notion of a critical age for speech learning, the effect of training on L2 speech learning, L2 production and practical implications of L2 speech research. The authors explain the organization of the book and relate these topics to the relevant chapters. The chapters that follow introduce these core issues in more detail.
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Best and Tyler (Chapter 2) contrast Best’s PAM framework with the SLM, pointing out the similarities and the divergences between the two models and shedding light on distinctions that have not always been well understood by researchers in the field. Although both models are concerned with cross-language perception, the focus of PAM is the perception of non-native sounds while the SLM addresses the effect of L2 experience on L2 production and perception. The chapter then presents a new version of the PAM specifically applied to L2 speech learning: the PAM-L2. This is a welcome extension of the original model and a necessary guide to researchers in the field who have long tried to apply Best’s model to L2 learning. The chapter ends with a number of suggestions for further research, raising challenging questions that may be tested on both the SLM and PAM-L2. The notion of crosslinguistic phonetic similarity is crucial to most L2 speech theories. PAM’s predictions about the ability to discriminate non-native contrasts are based on the degree of similarity between the target sounds and the closest native sounds. According to Flege’s SLM, learners must discern some of the phonetic differences between L2 sounds and the closest L1 sounds for target-like categories to be formed. This notion is equally important to Lado’s (1957) Contrastive Analysis Hypothesis, Kuhl’s Native Language Magnet model (Kuhl and Iverson 1995) and Major’s Similarity Differential Rate Hypothesis (Major and Kim 1999). As Strange points out in Chapter 3, the problem with this key concept is that there is still no consistent and reliable method of measuring cross-language similarity. In line with earlier discussions (Bohn 2002), this chapter reviews the most widespread methodologies, including inventory comparisons, articulatory comparisons, acoustic measurements and perceptual tests. Reporting data from her own work on German, French and American English vowels, Strange points to the need to incorporate contextual variability in crosslinguistic acoustic and perceptual comparisons and argues for the use of direct methods of perceptual assessment of cross-language similarity while questioning the usefulness of category goodness ratings. Perceiving differences between L1 and L2 sounds is crucial to new category formation according to the SLM. In Chapter 4, Guion and Pederson explore this further by examining the mechanisms by which learners may come to discern the relevant differences. In one study they find that English and Japanese speakers differ from native speakers and advanced learners of Mandarin in their use of specific cues when discriminating between tones. Their second study, involving novel Hindi stop contrasts, shows that directing the learners’ attention towards phonetic form may improve discrimination to a greater extent than does drawing attention to meaning contrasts. The authors also discuss additional situations in which the explicit direction of attention may be useful. Frieda and Nozawa (Chapter 5) present the results of a perception study involving Korean and Japanese learners of English of varying degrees of proficiency. The study first tests the perceived similarity between L2 and L1 vowels to make predictions for an experiment involving L2 vowel discrimination and the effect of experience. The perceptual assimilation task in their first experiment is a timely illustration of the methodology advocated by Strange in Chapter 3, and also complements earlier studies (Flege, Bohn and Jang 1997; Ingram and Park 1997). The
ATLANTIS. Journal of the Spanish Association of Anglo-American Studies. 30.2 (December 2008): 147-153 ISSN 0210-6124 Reviews 149 study supports the SLM in that it shows a positive effect of experience on L2 vowel discrimination even with late learners. Part 2 of the volume consists of three chapters investigating the concept of foreign accent. Birdsong (Chapter 6) explores the end state of acquisition by evaluating Flege’s claim that given enough experience with the target language, native-like pronunciation may be achieved even in the case of very similar sounds. The study examines proficient Anglophone learners of French and explores the relationship between acoustic measurements and native speaker judgements of L2 production. The results indicate that some learners can achieve native-likeness. However, the relationship between measurements of vowel duration and voice onset time (VOT), and global pronunciation ratings are not apparent, possibly due to the limited nature of the acoustic analysis. An issue that has received little attention to date is the effect of the target language variety on L2 speech learning. Fox and McGory (Chapter 7) address this issue by reporting the results of a production and perception study involving Japanese learners of English in two different areas of the US and exploring their sensitivity to standard vs. substandard varieties. The finding that all learners regardless of their local variety are better at perceiving and producing the standard variety runs counter to the SLM’s emphasis on the role of the L2 input. This is explained by the possibility that the actual input may not have always been the local variety and underscores the need to incorporate sociolinguistic variables in the study of L2 input effects. Jongman and Wade (Chapter 8) present a thorough study on the effect of training in and familiarity with variability on the perception and processing of accented speech. The absence of headings and subsections to introduce the different aspects of the methodology contrasts with the format and the amount of detail present in previous chapters. Nevertheless, the chapter presents very interesting findings such as the fact that non-native speakers may be less affected by the variability present in L2 speech than native speakers, presumably due to their shared knowledge of the L1 and the L2 and their greater exposure to variability. In addition, Jongman and Wade also report that, at least for difficult vowel distinctions, training with low-variability stimuli has a more positive effect on perceptual learning than training with high-variability stimuli. This finding has important implications for the use of training in language teaching and encourages further research on additional languages and sounds. Part 3 is dedicated to studies on vowel and consonant acquisition. In Chapter 9, McAllister tests the feature hypothesis which states that target contrasts based on phonetic features that are not exploited in the L1 to cue the contrast will be difficult for learners to acquire. This is examined in a study on the acquisition of vowel duration cues to final obstruent voicing in English by speakers of Swedish, a language with vowel duration contrasts but no final voicing distinction. The specific contrast examined is the English /s/-/z/ pair in final position. Although the elicitation procedure chosen might have directed the speakers’ attention to the sound contrast, the learners were overall unsuccessful in using L1 duration to reproduce the English pattern, showing little support for the feature hypothesis. The analysis and presentation of results are not always apparent and the amount of data collected is limited, but the study is valuable
ATLANTIS. Journal of the Spanish Association of Anglo-American Studies. 30.2 (December 2008): 147-153 ISSN 0210-6124 150 Juli Cebrian because it underlines the need to examine the role of shared but not equivalent L1 and L2 phonological traits. Wang and Behne further investigate a crucial notion in L2 speech research, the interlanguage hypothesis, by examining the production of English and Mandarin Chinese stops by Chinese speakers, English speakers, and Chinese learners of English (Chapter 10). Stop VOT values have often been examined in studies of interlanguage production. For instance, Flege (1987), strangely omitted in this article, found that speakers of both French and English produced VOT values in their L2 which were intermediate between the L1 and the target language’s values. Wang and Behne’s study is innovative in that, in addition to VOT, the duration of the stop closure and the following vowel are also analyzed providing measures of overall syllable duration and syllable-internal timing. Their results showing intermediate values lend support to the notion of interlanguage. In Chapter 11 Schmidt explores the issue of crosslanguage similarity further and provides another example of the methodology proposed by Strange in Chapter 3 and illustrated in Chapter 5 with respect to vowels. Schmidt presents the results of a study in which English native speakers label and rate Korean syllable-initial consonants in terms of English consonants. The study complements earlier results from Schmidt (1996) involving Korean native speakers’ identification of English consonants in terms of Korean sounds. Crosslinguistic identification patterns are found to be affected by the use of acoustic cues in the L1 and the phonetic context of the stimuli. This study is thus innovative in being one of the few existing reciprocal studies on crosslanguage similarity and opens the path for further research in this area. Crosslanguage perception is also explored in Chapter 12 in another reciprocal study involving the identification and discrimination of Thai and Korean stops by Thai speakers and Korean speakers. Using a crosslinguistic identification and goodness rating task, Wayland examines which of two stimulus presentation conditions, either in isolation or as the middle stimulus in a triad, better predicts discrimination in a crosslinguistic AXB task. The results indicate that identification involving a triad better predicts discrimination, although the difference is only small in the case of the Thai stops. Like Schmidt’s, this study also points to the need to explore the methodology of crosslinguistic perception and suggests the usefulness of reciprocal investigations. In a logical progression, Part IV explores the acquisition of structure beyond the segment. Gottfried (Chapter 13) investigates the potential effect of musical ability on L2 competence by examining the perception and production of Mandarin tones by English monolingual speakers who differ in their knowledge of music. They find that highly proficient music students and experienced musicians identify, discriminate and imitate four mandarin Chinese tones more accurately than non-musicians. Their finding indicates a positive effect of musical ability in early stages of language learning and raises the question of whether this beneficial effect is the result of musical training or of the participants’ inherent musical ability. Sereno and Wang (Chapter 14) report the results of several studies exploring differences between native and non-native speakers in the processing of tone contrasts and the effect of perceptual training on perception and production. Using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) they find differences between native and non-
ATLANTIS. Journal of the Spanish Association of Anglo-American Studies. 30.2 (December 2008): 147-153 ISSN 0210-6124 Reviews 151 native speakers in hemispheric (brain) activity. They also find that training with minimal pairs has a positive effect on the ability to perceive and produce non-native tone differences as well as resulting in a more native-like pattern of hemispheric participation. The evidence of change in brain activity with adult learners lends support to the SLM’s assumption that the language faculty remains active throughout the lifetime. Burnham and Mattock (Chapter 15) review the main findings concerning the nature and development of tone perception and its differences with segmental perception. For example, in line with the previous chapter, the review shows that speakers of tone languages process tone in the same hemisphere as the rest of the linguistic information (the left hemisphere), whereas this is not true for non-native tone perception. The last chapter in this section (Chapter 16) focuses on the use of different cues in the production of stress in English by native and non-native (native Japanese) speakers. While English makes use of amplitude, F0 and duration, Japanese relies mostly on F0. Discussing a study involving Japanese adults and children living in the US, Aoyama and Guion report measurable differences between native and L2 speech as well as between adult and child speech. Younger speakers and L2 speakers tend to have a slower speech rate, and L2 speakers have a smaller duration difference between content and structural words than native speakers. Japanese speakers’s overreliance on pitch in their English production illustrates an effect of L1 prosody on L2 speech. The book concludes with a section describing recent developments in L2 speech research and their implications (Part V: Emerging Issues). Flege’s and other L2 models are designed to account for L2 acquisition in a naturalistic setting as opposed to a classroom environment. Piske’s discussion of the implications of L2 speech research for foreign language learning in a classroom setting (Chapter 17) is of great interest to both researchers and pedagogues. Piske reviews the main findings concerning learner-related factors affecting L2 speech learning in light of their relevance to the language- instruction setting. These include an early starting age of learning, sufficient amount of target language input, the native-like nature of the input, the amount of L2 use and the effect of training. Interestingly, these are also the factors that characterize successful acquisition in immersion programs (Wesche 2002), pointing to the fact that research on naturalistic L2 acquisition can help understand factors at play in foreign language acquisition and vice-versa. Chapter 18 discusses an area still underrepresented in L2 speech research: lexical reorganization and word recognition in bilingual speakers. Walley discusses the relationship between Flege’s SLM and her Lexical Restructuring Model. She reports findings from several studies showing that just as phonetic categories may become more defined with increased experience of the L1 system, lexical representations also become less holistic and more segmentally-based over time. She discusses interesting differences between L2 learners of different levels of proficiency and monolinguals in word recognition in foreign-accented and native speech and underlines the need for research on child L2 speech and individual learner differences. Brent, Bradlow and Smith (Chapter 19) evaluate the relationship between the position of errors in the word and the degree of intelligibility of L2 speech. The Mandarin learners of English in their study made more errors involving vowels and
ATLANTIS. Journal of the Spanish Association of Anglo-American Studies. 30.2 (December 2008): 147-153 ISSN 0210-6124 152 Juli Cebrian word/syllable-final consonants than word/syllable-initial consonants, in agreement with previous studies. A novel finding is that word-initial errors, in addition to vowel errors, impede intelligibility the most, lending support to models of lexical access that emphasize the importance of word-initial information for lexical access and word recognition. This study thus contributes to our understanding of the relationship between segmental accuracy and foreign accent intelligibility, hence relating to issues in Part II. Chapter 20 concludes this last part of the volume with a discussion that contests the traditional view of the phoneme and casts doubt on the appropriateness of the segment as a unit of phonological analysis. Port argues that the emergence of notions such as the phoneme are the result of life-long familiarity with alphabets more than an accurate description of the psychological facts of speech. Although the inclusion of empirically- based examples would have been welcome, the topic is of relevance to this volume given that one reason for investigating L2 speech is to contribute to our general understanding of phonetic and phonological knowledge. In conclusion, this volume presents twenty high-quality empirical studies inspired by the cutting-edge work of James E. Flege. The contributions present the field’s core issues and main findings, illustrating a variety of methodological approaches, and highlighting a number of key topics for further investigation. The result is a book that is a valuable resource for L2 speech researchers, phoneticians, language acquisition researchers, foreign language teachers and pedagogues, psycholinguists and applied linguists. Over a decade ago, the publication of a very influential collection of articles edited by Winifred Strange (Strange 1995), which included Flege’s description of the Speech Learning Model as well as other influential theories, had a stimulating impact on the development of the field of L2 speech learning. I have no doubt that the papers in this book will be equally inspiring and contribute to the advancement of the field in the next few years.
References
Best, Catherine T. 1995: ‘A Direct Realist View of Cross-Language Speech Perception’. Winifred Strange, ed. Speech Perception and Linguistic Experience: Issues in Cross-Language Research. Timonium: York P. 171-206. Bohn, Ocke-Schwen 2002: ‘On Phonetic Similarity’. Petra Burmeister, Thorsten Piske and Andreas Rohde, eds. An Integrated View of Language Development: Papers in Honor of Henning Wode. Trier: Wissenschaftlicher Verlag. 191-216. Flege, James Emil 1987: ‘The Production of “New” and “Similar” Phones in a Foreign Language: Evidence for the Effect of Equivalence Classification’. Journal of Phonetics 15: 47-65. ––––– 1995: ‘Second Language Speech Learning: Theory, Findings and Problems’. Winifred Strange, ed. Speech Perception and Linguistic Experience: Issues in Cross-Language Research. Timonium: York P. 233-77. ––––– 2002: ‘Interactions Between the Native and Second-language Phonetic Systems’. Petra Burmeister, Thorsten Piske and Andreas Rohde, eds. An Integrated View of Language Development: Papers in Honor of Henning Wode. Trier: Wissenschaftlicher Verlag. 217-44. –––––, Ocke-Schwen Bohn and Sunyoung Jang 1997: ‘Effects of Experience on Non-Native Speakers’ Production and Perception of English Vowels’. Journal of Phonetics 25: 437-70.
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Ingram, John C. L. and See-Gyoon Park 1997: ‘Cross-Language Vowel Perception and Production by Japanese and Korean Learners of English’ Journal of Phonetics 25: 343-70. Kuhl, Patricia and Paul Iverson 1995: ‘Linguistic Experience and the “Perceptual Magnet Effect”’. Winifred Strange, ed. Speech Perception and Linguistic Experience: Issues in Cross-Language Research. Timonium: York P. 121-54. Lado, Robert 1957: Linguistics Across Cultures. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P. Major, Roy and Eunyi Kim 1999: ‘The Similarity Differential Rate Hypothesis’. Language Learning 49.S1: 151-83. Schmidt, Anne Marie 1996: ‘Cross-Language Identification of Consonants. Part I: Korean Perception of English’. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America 99: 3201-11. Strange, Winifred, ed. 1995: Speech Perception and Linguistic Experience: Theoretical and Methodological Issues in Cross-Language Speech Research. Timonium: York P. Wesche, Marjorie 2002: ‘Early French Immersion: How has the Original Canadian Model Stood the Test of Time?’ Petra Burmeister, Thorsten Piske and Andreas Rohde, eds. An Integrated View of Language Development: Papers in Honor of Henning Wode. Trier: Wissenschaftlicher Verlag. 357-79.
Received 6 June 2008 Accepted 29 August 2008
Juli Cebrian (PhD) is Profesor Agregat at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona. His research interests cover second language speech, acquisition of phonology, phonetics, English as a second/foreign language and the teaching of pronunciation. Two representative publications of his are Cebrian, J. 2006: ‘Experience and the use of duration in the categorization of L2 vowels’. Journal of Phonetics 34: 372-387 and Cebrian, J. 2008: ‘The effect of perceptual factors in the acquisition of an L2 vowel contrast’. Contrast in Phonology: Perception and Acquisition. P. Avery, E. B. Dresher and K. Rice (eds.). Mouton de Gruyter. 303-321.
Address: Departament de Filologia Anglesa i Germanística, Facultat de Filosofia i Lletres, Edifici B, Campus Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, Bellaterra, 08193.Tel. (34) 93 581 1567. Fax (34) 93 581 2001
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Malcolm Coulthard and Alison Johnson 2007: An Introduction to Forensic Linguistics: Language in Evidence. London and New York: Routledge. 237 pp. ISBN 978-0-415-32023
M. Teresa Turell Universitat Pompeu Fabra [email protected]
In many countries around the world Forensic Linguistics is now a well defined, well established discipline which seeks to uncover and establish the existing interplay between linguistic and legal issues. The discipline of ‘Forensic Linguistics/Language and the Law’ has consolidated in the last twenty years from the point of view of both research and teaching programmes, and through this consolidation the discipline has emerged as multidisciplinary in nature. Many forensic linguists like to trace the birth of Forensic Linguistics back to the publication in 1968 of The Evans Statements: A Case for Forensic Linguistics, by Jan Svartvik, who showed that the disputed parts of Evans’ confessions were linguistically very different from the non-disputed parts. Also, as Coulthard and Johnson mention (5), “almost 20 years earlier, the term forensic English was used by F.A. Philbrick in the title of his book on legal English, Language and the Law: the Semantics of Forensic English (1949), but the phrase was never taken up”. During the sixties, the seventies and the eighties, mainly in the US and Canada, lawyers, judicial police and other professionals devoted to the investigation of crime had been requesting linguists to use their expertise in relation to issues which have to do with the interface between language and the law. However, their performance was isolated and their methodology not established within parameters of validity and reliability. In Europe pioneer studies on Forensic Linguistics can be traced back to 1985, primarily in Birmingham, when experts were called into court to contribute their expertise in handwriting analysis and authorship attribution of both spoken and written texts. Thus, forensic studies in the UK were in their infancy and in other countries such as Spain they were non-existent, except for certain isolated practices by university scholars such as Enrique Alcaraz, who contributed to Forensic Linguistics in the area of legal translation and interpreting. Prior to the founding of the International Association of Forensic Linguists (IAFL), forensic linguists, mainly from Europe, met at conferences in diverse European universities between 1988 and 1992. The First British Seminar on Forensic Linguistics, which took place at the University of Birmingham in 1992, assembled delegates from Australia, Brazil, Eire, Holland, Greece, Ukraine and Germany as well as the UK. Among them there was consensus that an international association was needed and thus it could be said that from that seminar the IAFL was born (http://www.iafl.org). However, it was not until the nineties that Forensic Linguistics emerged more forcefully. The experts’ performance became much more professionalized; there was an outstanding increase in the publication of articles and chapters on a number of forensic
ATLANTIS. Journal of the Spanish Association of Anglo-American Studies. 30.2 (December 2008): 155-160 ISSN 0210-6124 156 M. Teresa Turell linguistic themes, whose content was much more methodologically grounded than before; the International Association of Forensic Phonetics (now named the International Association of Forensic Phonetics and Acoustics) was founded in 1991 and the International Association of Forensic Linguists was backed and founded by Malcolm Coulthard in 1992. Finally, also under Coulthard’s leadership, a journal of Forensic Linguistics/Language and the Law was created in 1994. The journal underwent several changes of title and publishers and is now published by Equinox as The International Journal of Speech, Language and the Law. With the turn of the century Forensic Linguistics came of age: Firstly, our journal has reached its 15th year of publication and many articles on Forensic Linguistics/Language and the Law have been published in specialist journals; Second, Eight biennial IAFL conferences and many other regional conferences have been held. Third, a number of Forensic Linguistics laboratories, centres, sites for language and the law (http://www.forensiclinguistics.net/cfl_fl.html; http://www.languageandlaw.org; http://www.iula.upf.edu/forensiclab), government funded police laboratories and agencies have emerged around the world in order to ensure reliable methods in linguistic identification and analysis. Moreover, several universities around the world now offer graduate courses in Forensic Linguistics, while specialist Master’s courses are at present being offered in this discipline at the universities of Cardiff, Aston and Pompeu Fabra. Finally, it is possible to speak of a state of the art in the literature on Forensic Linguistics, with the publication of volumes on particular subjects, edited volumes and introductions to various aspects of the discipline. Most authors, however, have opted to develop either their specific linguistic or legal aspects, while a few reflect the above-mentioned multifaceted growth and diverse nature of the discipline. The three basic Forensic Linguistics areas which have seen publication in the last twenty years or so are the language of the law, the language of the judicial process and language as evidence. In the area of the language of the law, the most outstanding volumes (some collective) on the list, by no means exhaustive, are: Alcaraz and Hughes (2002), Kniffka (2007), Levi (1994), Mellinkoff (1982), Schane (2006) and Tiersma (1999). Several monographs and collective books have also been published in the area of the language of the judicial process, including: Berk-Seligson (1990), Conley and O'Barr (1998), Cotterill (2003), Edwards (1995), Heffer (2005), Laster and Taylor (1994), Kurzon (1997), O'Barr (1982), Rock (2007), Shuy (1993, 1998, 2005), Solan (1993) and Stygall (1995); finally, in the area of language as evidence several volumes are worth mentioning: Eades (1995), Ehrlich (2001), Foster (2000), Haenlein (1999), Hollien (2001), McMenamin (1994), Nolan (1983), Rose (2002) and Shuy (2002), among others. One of the most recent comprehensive books on Forensic Linguistics which reflects its international conceptual growth and diverse nature is without doubt Coulthard and Johnson’s An Introduction to Forensic Linguistics: Language in Evidence (Routledge, 2007). This book cuts across both the legal and the linguistic aspects involved in the discipline and goes beyond the existing boundaries resulting from the diversity of judicial systems, although it focuses primarily on Common Law cases. Most importantly, it is a comprehensive account of the multidisciplinary nature of the
ATLANTIS. Journal of the Spanish Association of Anglo-American Studies. 30.2 (December 2008): 155-160 ISSN 0210-6124 Reviews 157 discipline and as such is addressed not only to devoted forensic linguists and linguists in general, but also to forensic practitioners and students of Forensic Linguistics. The book is organised into two parts, with five chapters each. Part I (‘The Language of the Legal Process’) deals with the language of the legal and judicial process and is clearly the more legally and judicially oriented of the two. Part II (‘Language as Evidence’) refers to language used as evidence and is the more linguistically oriented part of the book. As the authors explain in their introduction, Part I “offers a thorough grounding in forensic approaches to language analysis” (9). Chapter 1 (‘Approaching a Forensic Text’) begins with a pedagogical description of the nature of forensic texts and of the diverse theories, methods and tools which are relevant to forensic textual analysis. It also includes a useful practical study of three different types of texts, which are analysed from the point of view of schemas, quantitative observations of the speaker’s control and topic movement, Grice’s cooperative principle and Maxims, and Austin’s and Searle’s Speech Act Theory. Chapters 2 and 3 deal with related topics; chapter 2, entitled ‘The Language of the Law’, includes a thorough study of legal texts, taking different units of analysis (statutes, contracts and other legal sub-genres such as police cautions, and interrogation and cross-examination) and considering them from the point of view of legal style and register. Probably the most interesting outcome of this chapter is the conclusion that legal styles are also context-bound, that is, “related to use, functions and activity” (41). Chapter 3 (‘Legal Genres’) explores the mechanisms of genre production and, by looking in detail at data on police interviews and on courtroom interviewing, concludes that “Genres are domain specific” (55). Chapter 4 (‘Collecting Evidence: Calls to the Emergency Services and First Encounters with Witnesses and Suspects’) is at once theory-building and concerned with methodology. It is a theory-building chapter in that it retrieves concepts in-built into Speech Act Theory, conversational analysis, Speech and Writing distinctions and narrative analysis and applies them to forensic linguistic analysis. It is a methodological chapter, since it presents different approaches to evidence collection by exploring first encounters in emergency calls, policespeak, lawyerspeak and interviews with vulnerable victims such as children and rape victims. The last chapter in Part I, Chapter 5, ‘Order in Court’, includes an insight into the courtroom by looking at the trial context as an overall genre which is structured around two discourse types, the narrative or story-telling type in the Labovian tradition, and the questioning type, documented in the analysis of examination-in-chief of witnesses and also in the analysis of cross-examination transcripts. Other courtroom interactions referred to include the interrogations of child and other vulnerable witnesses, following the analysis of complex questioning proposals. Part II (‘Language as Evidence’) begins with Chapter 6 (‘The Work of the Forensic Linguist’), in which Coulthard and Johnson examine examples from authentic cases and discuss the problems encountered and the techniques applied in the analysis of linguistic evidence of very different nature: phonological, morphological, syntactic, lexical, discoursal, textual and pragmatic. They also consider the recording of interaction in written form, the narrative analysis of disputed statements and
ATLANTIS. Journal of the Spanish Association of Anglo-American Studies. 30.2 (December 2008): 155-160 ISSN 0210-6124 158 M. Teresa Turell courtroom contexts in which either the defendant is a non-native speaker, with subsequent problems in language comprehension and production, or the question is that of determining the nationality of people claiming refugee status. Chapter 7 (‘The Work of the Forensic Phonetician and the Document Examiner’) is an overview of the applied work of the forensic phonetician, which considers both auditory and acoustic approaches to tape-recorded data, briefly refers to speaker profiling, looks at speaker identification practice in detail and also comments on the ins and outs of voice line-ups and naïve speaker identification. This chapter ends with a reference to the work of the document analyst and makes an insightful distinction between graphologists (grafólogos, in Spanish), not equivalent to phonologists as the term seems to imply, and handwriting analysts (calígrafos, in Spanish), which is useful in the Spanish context to understand which of these areas falls within the scope of Forensic Linguistics and which is less scientifically grounded. Chapter 8 (‘Idiolect and Uniqueness of Encoding’) is on authorship attribution. This chapter gives clues as to how to discern who the author of a particular text is. It begins with a historical account of the interest in authorship attribution, making references to early Greek philosophy and authorship attribution of religious texts, of certain of Shakespeare’s plays and of eighteenth-century political texts. It also includes an overview of new and not so new approaches to authorship attribution, including a critical analysis of the Cusum technique. This chapter devotes one section to specific analyses in terms of the mistakes and errors, consistency and resemblances found, and ends with a presentation of a case report (the Derek Bentley case), which is considered from the point of view of the presence of single or multiple narrators, due to a possible alteration of the text, and a corpus assisted analysis of register. Chapter 9 (‘On Textual Borrowing’) is an analysis of plagiarism which includes an overview of its history, followed by a reference to plagiarism in education, where unacknowledged use of published texts is not infrequent. The chapter goes on to analyse the issue of whether or not writers repeat themselves and ends with a suggestive discussion of the evidential value of single identical strings, above all in terms of their length. The last chapter in the second part of the book is entitled ‘The Linguist as Expert Witness’, and includes an interesting discussion on the role of the expert witness when giving evidence in court, which involves primarily the expression of opinion, both semantically and statistically expressed. This chapter also includes an analysis of the situation of admission of evidence by the court in different countries, in particular Australia, Britain, and the United States, discussing how this evidence can be used by both prosecution and defence in civil and criminal cases. Returning to the formal contents, the book begins with a ground-breaking introduction and, although there are no general concluding remarks (something which could be open to criticism), each chapter ends with useful summarising conclusions, which in most cases orient the reader towards the following chapter. Furthermore, each chapter includes a section of further reading and a number of research tasks, while the book as a whole contains a complete reference list and a subject and author index. The additional value of this book is that it is framed around the application of recent theoretical, methodological and practical insights within the field of Forensic
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Linguistics/Language and the Law about how forensic linguists and expert witnesses work and perform their activity. Therefore, it is possible to claim that Coulthard and Johnson’s An Introduction to Forensic Linguistics: Language in Evidence is not merely a comprehensive introduction but is also a handbook, or better, a textbook covering the main topics and areas in Forensic Linguistics/Language of the Law, which will surely become an excellent reference volume for both linguists and law scholars interested in the interface between language and the law, as well as for students of Forensic Linguistics courses.
Works cited
Alcaraz Varó, Enrique and Hughes, Brian 2002: Legal Translation Explained. Manchester: St. Jerome. Berk-Seligson, Susan 1990: The Bilingual Courtroom: Court Interpreters in the Judicial Process. Chicago: U of Chicago P. Conley, John, M. and William M. O’Barr 1998: Just Words: Law, Language and Power. Chicago: U of Chicago P. Cotterill, Janet 2003: Language and Power in Court: A Linguistic Analysis of the O.J. Simpson Trial. Basingstoke: Palgrave. Eades, Diana 1995: Language in Evidence: Linguistic and Legal Perspectives in Multicultural Australia. Sydney, Australia: U of New South Wales P. Edwards, Alicia B. 1995: The Practice of Court Interpreting. Amsterdam/ Philadelphia: Benjamins. Ehrlich, Susan 2001: Representing Rape: Language and Sexual Consent. London: Routledge. Foster, Don 2000: Author Unknown: On the Trail of Anonymous. New York: Henry Holt. Haenlein, Heike 1999: Studies in Authorship Recognition - A Corpus-Based Approach. Frankfurt: Peter Lang. Heffer, Chris 2005: The Language of Jury Trial: A Corpus-aided Analysis of Legal-Lay Discourse. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Hollien, Harry 2001: Forensic Voice Identification. San Diego: Academic Press. Kniffka, Hannes 2007: Working in Language and Law. A German Perspective. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Kurzon, Dennis 1997: Discourse of Silence. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Laster, Kathy and Taylor, Veronica L. 1994: Interpreters and the Legal System. Sydney: Federation P. Levi, Judith N. 1994: Language and Law: A Bibliographic Guide to Social Science Research in the U.S.A. Chicago, Illinois: American Bar Association. McMenamin, Gerald R. 1994: Forensic Stylistics: A Workbook. California: California State University. Mellinkoff, David 1982: Legal Writing: Sense and Nonsense. New York: Scribners. Nolan, Francis 1983: The Phonetic Bases of Speaker Recognition. Cambridge: Cambridge UP. O'Barr, William M. 1982: Linguistic Evidence: Language, Power, and Strategy in the Courtroom. New York: Academic Press. Philbrick, F. A. (1949) Language and the Law: The semantics of forensic English, New York: Macmillan. Rock, Frances 2007: Communicating Rights: The Language of Arrest and Detention. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Rose, Philip 2002: Forensic Speaker Identification. London: Taylor and Francis. Schane, Sanford 2006: Language and the Law. New York: Continuum.
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Shuy, Roger W. 1993: Language Crimes: The Use and Abuse of Language Evidence in the Court Room. (1st Edition 1993, Reprinted 1996.) Oxford UK and Cambridge USA: Blackwell. Shuy, Roger W. 1998: The Language of Confession, Interrogation, and Deception. Thousand Oaks, CA. and London: Sage. Shuy, Roger W. 2002: Linguistic Battles in Trademark Disputes. London: Palgrave. Shuy, Roger W. 2005: Creating Language Crimes: How Law Enforcement Uses (and Abuses) Language. New York: Oxford UP. Solan, Lawrence M. 1993: The Language of Judges. Chicago: U of Chicago P. Stygall, Gail 1995: Trial Language: Differential Discourse Processing and Discursive Formation. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: Benjamins. Svartvik, Jan (1968) The Evans Statements: A case for forensic linguistics, Gothenburg: U of Gothenburg P. Tiersma, Peter M. 1999: Legal Language. Chicago: U of Chicago P.
Received 22 July 2008 Accepted 10 October 2008
M. Teresa Turell (PhD Barcelona, M.A. Leeds and M.A. Pompeu Fabra) is Professor of English Linguistics at Universitat Pompeu Fabra (Barcelona, Spain). She has conducted extensive research on Catalan, Spanish and English sociolinguistic variation, qualitative and quantitative studies of language contact and, more recently, analysis of forensic authorship attribution and plagiarism. Results of this research have appeared in Language Variation and Change, Language in Society, Treballs de Sociolingüística Catalana and The International Journal of Speech, Language and the Law. Her most recent publications include: Lingüística Forense, Lengua y Derecho. Conceptos, Métodos y Aplicaciones (Barcelona: Publicacions de l’IULA, 2005) and El Plurilingüismo en España (Barcelona: Publicacions de l’IULA, 2007). She has edited, with John Gibbons, Dimensions of Forensic Linguistics (Benjamins, 2008).
Address: ForensicLab, Institut Universitari de Lingüística Aplicada, Campus de la Comunicació, Universitat Pompeu Fabra, c/ Roc Boronat, 138 08018 Barcelona. Tel: 93 542 2322. Fax: 93 5422321.
ATLANTIS. Journal of the Spanish Association of Anglo-American Studies. 30.2 (December 2008): 155-160 ISSN 0210-6124 Aránzazu Usandizaga and Andrew Monnickendam, eds. 2007: Back to Peace. Reconciliation and Retribution in the Postwar Period. Notre Dame, Indiana: U of Notre Dame P. i-viii+ 312 pp. ISBN 978-0-268-04452-7.
Eva M. Pérez Rodríguez Universitat de les Illes Balears [email protected]
The interest in English speaking countries, in particular Great Britain and the United States, in issues related to the two world wars is made manifest in the profusion of novels, as well as historical and cultural studies, that are published week after week and granted the best-selling aisles in bookshops across both countries. Not only is the post- WW2 period taken as a watershed supposed to open a new historical and literary era, but also the two World Wars are being studied increasingly as the thematic source for fiction inspired on them. Novels based on the 1914-1945 period that have met with both critical and public accolades in the last couple of decades include Martin Amis’s Time’s Arrow (1991), Pat Barker’s Regeneration trilogy (1991–1995), Robert Harris’s Enigma (1995), Anthony Beevor’s Stalingrad (1998), Sebastian Faulks’s Birdsong (1994) and Charlotte Gray (2000), Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day (1989) and When We Were Orphans (2000), Ian McEwan’s Atonement (2001), or William Boyd’s Restless (2006). The selection, while obviously limited, does indicate the varied literary techniques, genres and themes that authors explore, from magical realism to historicism, spy-novel to biography. For the literary researcher, however, it is the different narrative techniques that attract the highest interest, since we encounter violent disruptions not only of characterisation and time-line but also of the narrative voice and even the very frame that separates fiction from reality. Such narrative innovations and the sheer proliferation of novels whose background is mainly WW2 has led, in turn, to a profusion of literary studies specialising in the topic. To name but a few, DeCoste studies the “literary response” (2005: 3) to WW2 in the period between the closure of the conflict and the turn of the century, as do Taylor (1993), whose analysis is literary and social, and Salwak, who focuses on “the angry decade” (2005: 21) and after; and Munton (1989) concentrates on fiction produced in the direct aftermath of the conflict, in which the main focus of interest are stories by and about combatants or other direct participants (nurses, civil servants, etc.), an approach consonant with its earlier date of publication. To mention a few titles whose scope is closer to that of Back to Peace, Norris (2000) presents an overview of 20th century wars in literature that covers British and American authors of mainly novels, but also covering films and press censorship in the last decade. Acton (2007) has compared the private expressions of grief during war in letters, diaries and poetry among others, with the public discourse of armed conflict. Recently, White (2008) has studied pacifism in literature, mainly poetry, from the fourteenth century onwards. These three latter volumes insist that the concept of war is in need of revision, and that art must find an alternative to the legitimised discourse of warfare.
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The object of this review, Aránzazu Usandizaga’s and Andrew Monnickendam’s Back to Peace. Reconciliation and Retribution in the Postwar Period, inscribes itself in this current trend. It attempts an “understanding of war” (3) not as an absolute, but as the manifestation of contradictory human tendencies: to self-destruction and philanthropy; and it analyses the various literary responses to the processes that individuals, communities and nations undertake in order to return to the ‘prelapsarian’ status quo, if indeed such a shift may be accomplished. The result of that analysis is given in three Parts, Return of the Combatant, Reconciliation, and Wars within Peace, in which the different contributors offer an overview of the literary approaches that authors – geographically, temporally and aesthetically divergent – have adopted in their traumatic rendition of peace after war. The main feature that recommends Back to Peace is its innovative interdisciplinary approach to a category, that of peace, that has been insufficiently considered so far in academic circles, and which deserves the kind of revision that is associated not only with Lyotard’s rejection of master narratives to favour individual petits récits, but also with Hayden White’s concept of metahistory, and even Habermas’s public sphere (Barry 2002: 86; Habermas 1994; Newton 2006: 480). The volume edited by Aránzazu Usandizaga and Andrew Monnickendam addresses these issues directly. In first place, the role of the individual, as he or (less often) she returns to civilian mode, whether in mourning and shock, as in Brian Dillon’s analysis of Great War poets; in shame, as in Beatrice Trefalt’s study of autobiographical accounts of defeated Japanese fighters; or in impotence, as in Aránzazu Usandizaga’s research on collaborators who witnessed the general international indifference towards the Spanish Civil War as WW2 approached. Secondly, the volume considers the extent to which the disintegration of the Humanities’ formerly closed categories and the encroachment of cultural studies in academia continue to provide scholars with documents (diaries, letters, pamphlets, etc.) which challenge the assumed concept of history. For, if history is discourse, it includes elements of the fictional, as White affirms, and fiction includes elements of the historical; or, as the volume editors put it, “literature and history must work together” (4). This is the approach we find in Claire Tylee’s study of the play The Lucky Ones, and Renny Christopher’s essay on Vietnamese exile writers. In both chapters, the issue of identity is seen as the result of challenging one’s personal, family’s, community’s and country’s perceptions of nationality, in particular since all the characters try to adapt in their new environment. Tylee’s piece, in particular, is rich in British historical and social contextualisation, which can only enhance a literary study. Likewise, Kathy J. Phillips’s chapter on works by H. D. (Hilda Doolittle) and Gertrude Stein is a perceptive analysis that debunks the traditional pigeonholing of Modernist authors as escapist non-combatants. She shows, by contrast, that their aesthetic radicalism expressed a criticism of inter-war power systems in a much more acute way that demands new lines of interpretation. The only shortcoming of Back to Peace is its not totally coherent selection of articles, or to put it more precisely, the impression one gets that there is no unifying thematic principle for all articles, although there is one for most, as I explain next. The title and subtitle point to no specific after-war era, but Reconciliation and Retribution in the Postwar Period, through the use of the definite article, offers specification. This
ATLANTIS. Journal of the Spanish Association of Anglo-American Studies. 30.2 (December 2008): 161-166 ISSN 0210-6124 Reviews 163 impression is reinforced through the volume’s cover photograph, of soldiers waving their hats from a train’s windows. To judge from their appearance, they could be troops taking part in any conflict in the 20th century, which is the period that most of the articles cover (for accuracy’s sake, a stop at www.clipart.com confirms they are American Signal Corps during the First World War). Indeed, twelve out of fourteen chapters in the book deal with contemporary conflicts, from the Great War to the Viet Nam War. Of those twelve, three chapters deal with World War 1 exclusively, and two more in association with some other conflict; and five deal with WW2 in isolation plus three in combination with other conflicts. These statistics of sorts reinforce the ideas that 1) there is a strong presence of WW2, the greatest catastrophe that has affected mankind in its history; this is what the reader, I defend, would expect from the title and cover photograph; and 2) that, as a result, the remaining two articles seem oddly out of place in the selection offered in Back to Peace. I feel that the volume would have gained consistency, both thematic and chronological, in limiting the selection of contributions to 20th century conflicts. This idea is reinforced by current historical research which considers the two World Wars as falling within one thirty-year global-war period (Purdue 1999: 11-12). In addition, the Spanish Civil War and the Vietnam War can be considered a prequel and a consequence, respectively, of WW2. Indeed, when the reader reaches chapters 6, ‘Searching for Peace: John Dryden’s Troylus and Cressida or Truth Found Too Late’, and 7, ‘Romances of Reconstruction: The Postwar Marriage Plot in Rebecca Harding Davis and John William De Forest’, the impression is one of lack of continuity, notwithstanding the civil war element common to both adjoining chapters. This is not to detract from their value. Janet Dawson’s study of Dryden’s tragedy is perhaps one of the most perceptive ones in the volume, with its historicist analysis of the parallelisms not only between Hobbes’s philosophy in Leviathan and the theme of the Trojan war but also England’s convulsed political climate after the Restoration, which London theatre audiences would have been able to read in the play. Equally perceptive is Jennifer Terry’s historically contextualised study of Toni Morrison’s fiction in terms of American-ness as defined by race and class, a definition which nevertheless made an exception of coloured ex-combatants. One more query has to do with the titles of sections II and III. Part I, Return of the Combatant, is self-explanatory, with accounts of the problems of readjustment that former soldiers of the Great War, WW2 and the Vietnam War encountered upon their return to their homes. These home lives were either shattered by tragic reminiscences (Brian Dillon’s study of World War 1 poets) or implied an uncomfortable re- domestication of both wives and ex-combatants (Mary Anne Schofield’s study of soldiers’ return to everyday civilian life); in other cases, their homes and families were ashamed of their return (Beatrice Trefalt on the defeated Japanese troops), rent by unresolved race divides (Jennifer Terry on Morrison’s fiction), or ill-adjusted in their indolence (William Blazek on Tender Is the Night). Part I is the most consistent in its selection of themes, and also the most varied in its genre representativeness. The titles of Parts II and III, however, depart from conciseness and specificity. Part II uses an abstract term, Reconciliation, whose meaning changes: first, appeasement between the contending factions, in Don Dingledine’s study of Southerners marrying Northerners after the American civil war; then, the very opposite of conciliation, in
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Laurie Kaplan’s study of the English clubs which denied access to WW2 Indian brothers-in-arms who had served in their “King uniforms” (161). Most problematic of all is the naming of Part III, Wars within Peace, since such vagueness in the title’s metaphorical meaning allows for the inclusion of any conflict, not necessarily armed ones. And this is what the reader finds, incidentally. For example, there is no war (or war within peace, even metaphorically speaking), no reconciliation and no retribution in Donna Coates’s study of Canadian female authors of fiction and drama. The chapter is undoubtedly very vividly written, thoroughly researched and enlightening, but it can claim very tenuous kinship to the rest of the volume; and it is somewhat exaggerated in its claim that those War Brides – whose lives the chapter describes – who arrived in physically or socially desolate Canadian landscapes suffered as much through displacement as the soldiers did at the front (264). The choice of section titles is not an issue in itself, but it does reflect what may potentially constitute a fault in the volume’s cohesion. In Part III, the editors have stretched too far a conjunction like “gender issues” (15) plus the back-to-peace motif. The choice of one critical frame is of course not censurable, but one wonders why gender studies have been given such prevalence in Part III, when Parts I and II cannot be characterised by any school of literary criticism in particular. Quite the opposite, it is never made very clear whether the critical approach is literary, cultural, historicist or a mixture of all. A consistent historicist approach would, in my view, have yielded excellent results, although this may be disputed as a matter of personal choice. Certain chapters do adopt a cultural or historicist approach, as has already been mentioned, and the broad, post-modern sense of the term literature ensures that many different genres are given scope, from diaries to plays, novels to memoirs, or poetry to conduct books. This evidently enriches the volume. The inclusion of Camila Loew’s ‘Ta(l)king War into Peace’ is a fitting closure to the section and the whole volume. It analyses La Douleur as Marguerite Duras’s means of going back to peace, as a witness to and teller of her lover’s experience at a French concentration camp. The war-within-peace here is humanity’s fallen condition resulting from the Nazi order, a disappointment for the author whose best expression is the very impossibility of lexical representation. It is a suitable, albeit disheartening, ending for a volume which concentrates not only on reconciliation but also on retribution, for, as Loew suggests, such a return to peace implies inevitably returning to war (289). One final and, I concede, very personal doubt arises with regard to the selection of chapters, or rather, the exclusion of potential ones. Several salient 20th century conflicts seem to be inexplicably missing in the volume. For example, a study on the Balkans War, the wars in Afghanistan (both USA vs. Russia and USA vs. the Taliban regime), the Arab-Israeli conflict or the Cold War. And this only to mention those conflicts which have provoked the bitterest response from media and society alike, the most widespread degree of civilian suffering, or, as in the case of the Cold War, the widest- ranging tension across the globe. After all, the media attention that characterised those conflicts and, in most cases, their cruelty and pointlessness would make them consonant with many of the points made in the volume. Most interesting, in particular, would have been to see a study of reconciliation and retribution in Germany, as proved
ATLANTIS. Journal of the Spanish Association of Anglo-American Studies. 30.2 (December 2008): 161-166 ISSN 0210-6124 Reviews 165 by the success of films such as Downfall (Der Untergang), Goodbye Lenin or The Lives of Others (Das Leben der Anderen), which address the issue of how the German nation is coming to terms with its own recent past. I would not like, however, this criticism to appear more severe than it is. For I would like to argue, too, that the somewhat arbitrary inclusion of literary periods, historical periods and genres does serve the purpose of making the volume wide- ranging, entertaining and highly educative. Another attractive feature of this volume is precisely its postmodern stress on the debatable nature of the definitions of the terms peace and war. Unarguably, the contributors’ degree of knowledge and specialisation is commendable. The editors have clearly chosen experts in their respective fields, and the reader receives an impression of well-argued ideas, deeply-researched topics and well- structured articles. The editors themselves are well versed in the topic of war literature and discourse, as evidenced in their joint edition of Dressing Up for War (2001). Their Introduction is actually one of the most interesting pieces of the volume, since it gives a concise overview of its contents which stresses their thematic and critical links. Perhaps the highest praise that can be given to a literary study is that the reader has found its perusal educational while entertaining, academically satisfying and thought- provoking. Such was precisely my reaction to this volume. Although missing certain inclusions and personally favouring certain literary periods over others, which is all but inevitable, I enjoyed the diversity of outlooks and genres, of tone and style, that this selection of studies offers, and will be returning to it for inspiration for my own field of research. Most relevantly of all, the editors and contributors must be congratulated for their daring approach to a theme and label, peace, that should be debated and reviewed from the points of view of history, sociology, philosophy, politics and even anthropology. It is to the credit of Usandizaga and Monnickendam that they have conducted such a pioneering study in the field of literature.
Works Cited
Acton, Carol 2007: Grief in Wartime: Private Pain, Public Discourse. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Barry, Peter 2002 (1995): Beginning Theory. An Introduction to Literary and Cultural Theory. Manchester: Manchester UP. DeCoste, Damon Marcel 2005: ‘The Literary Response to the Second World War’. Shaffer, Brian ed. 2005: A Companion to the British and Irish Novel, 1945-2000. Malden: Blackwell: 3-20. Habermas, Jürgen 1994 (1989): ‘The Emergence of the Public Sphere’. The Polity Reader in Cultural Theory. Cambridge: Polity: 81-90. Lassner, Phyllis 1990: ‘The Quiet Revolution: World War II and the English Domestic Novel’. Mosaic 23.3: 87-100. Munton, Alan 1989: English Fiction of the Second World War. London: Faber. Newton, Ken M. 2006: ‘Performing Literary Interpretation’. Patricia Waugh, ed. Literary Theory and Criticism. Oxford: Oxford UP: 475-85. Norris, Margot 2000: Writing War in the Twentieth Century. London: UP of Virginia. Purdue, A. William 1999: European History in Perspective. The Second World War. Basingstoke: Palgrave.
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Salwak, Dale 2005: ‘The “Angry” Decade and After’. Brian Shaffer, ed. A Companion to the British and Irish Novel, 1945-2000. Malden: Blackwell: 21-31. Taylor, David John 1993: After the War: The Novel and English Society since 1945. London: Chatto & Windus. White, Robert S. 2008: Pacifism and English Literature: Minstrels of Peace. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
Received 20 May 2008 Accepted 10 September 2008
Eva M. Pérez Rodríguez (PhD Universidad de Oviedo, MPhil University of Bradford) is Lecturer in English Philology at the Universitat de les Illes Balears. Her current research interests include contemporary fiction in English of the Second World War and narrative techniques in contemporary British authors. Her recent publications include ‘Binary voices: Humanism and science in David Lodge’s Thinks…’ (2007), in BELL (Belgian Journal of English Language and Literature) and ‘Ian McEwan's Atonement: Revisiting History and Rereading Fiction’ (forthcoming), Cambridge Scholars’ Press.
Address: Universitat de les Illes Balears, Facultat de Filosofía i Lletres, Depto. de Filología Española y Moderna. Cra. de Valdemosa, km 7’5. Campus UIB, Edificio Ramón Llull. Palma de Mallorca. 07122. Islas Baleares (Spain). Tel.: (34) 971 259537 (office), Fax: (34) 971 173473.
ATLANTIS. Journal of the Spanish Association of Anglo-American Studies. 30.2 (December 2008): 161-166 ISSN 0210-6124 Eva Darias Beautell and María Jesús Hernáez Lerena, eds. 2007: Canon Disorders: Gendered Perspectives on Literature and Film in Canada and the United States. Logroño: La Universidad de la Rioja/Tenerife: Universidad de La Laguna. 186 pp. ISBN: 978-84-96487-7-2
Nieves Pascual Universidad de Jaén [email protected]
The book under consideration addresses the issue of the canon, both literary and filmic, and the ways gender studies have contributed to disordering its structuring principles during the last 25 years in both Canada and the United States. There, as the title graphically reads, in the words of the editors “feminist scholarship has insistently brought to the foreground the complex relationship between canon and power, uncovering the patriarchal ideology of our literary and cultural traditions and pushing the current questioning of the Cartesian subject in directions never explored before” (11). In this sense, it is a welcome addition to a critical literature that at the end of the eighties and in the early nineties started to dismantle traditional theories of value in order to give voice to those whom historical record had kept silent (Altieri 1990; Ruoff and Ward 1990; McMullen 1990; Lauter 1991; Lecker 1991; Winders 1991; Stimpson 1992; Guillory 1993; Alberti 1995). Despite its broad scope (bringing under scrutiny the disorder of Western canonical structures of thought and writing during the last decades is no small feat), the book is successfully circumscribed by way of five themes to which the canon has been blind: dirt, domesticity, performance, maternity and ganzfeld (or silence), through which the authors work to rethink the official catalogue of the good. In their introduction Eva Darias Beautell and María Jesús Hernáez Lerena historicize the changes in the notion of literature brought about by Alice Walker’s counterwriting, the oppositional stance of Chicana activists, the radical discourses of Arun Mukherjee and Marlene Nourbese Philip, together with the critique of Sara Mills in her 2005 work on gender and spatiality. Alliances between the gender valence and other constituencies of identity (race, class, age, space), and, by implication, relations between different realms of experience and connections across disciplines, are reviewed in a succinct and limpid way. Usefully this account guides readers to the issues the seven contributions of the book deal with, but, most of all, it is the economy of its style and the clarity of its exposition that make it an excellent tool for students and researchers willing to examine the arrangements that produce canonical knowledge. One of the great assets of the book is the first chapter, ‘Hanging Out the Laundry: Heroines in the Midst of Dirt and Cleanliness’ by Canadian writer Aritha van Herk, author of 5 novels to date, 2 works of ficto-criticism and an “illegitimate history”, her words, entitled Mavericks: An Incorrigible History of Alberta (2005). Aritha van Herk works through a diversity of texts ranging from the films Quills (2000) and The Magdalene Sisters (2003), directed by Philip Kaufman and Peter Mullan respectively, the novels Alias Grace (1996) by Margaret Atwood and Joan Makes History (1988) by
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Kate Grenville, the short-story collection China Dog (1997) by Judy Fong Bates, and the fictional memoir of Maxine Hong Kingston: The Woman Warrior (1975). In them the critic examines the metaphor of laundry and, essentially, discovers in it a useful tool to “scrutinize the extent to which the privileges of class, leisure, and cleanliness have served the canonical project” (42), which is read as a generic one because laundry has since the beginning of time been aligned with domesticity and femaleness. Still, the author is not concerned with middle-class wives and mothers who, thanks to feminism and its theories of literary representation, have been smugly accommodated into the canon. Rather, her concern is with the othered, that is the indigent and the invisible (maids, servants, criminals, outcasts, and immigrants) who get their hands dirty and remain outside the canon, even though they are usually in charge of the story by virtue of seeing what “no one else sees” (29). In short, van Herk appraises the canonical through the unrefreshed or uncanonical linen in order to “argue for a renovated literary canon, one aware that it cannot escape being plunged into boiling water” (43), and in the process transforms a corporeal metaphor into a transcendental one, or rather, makes of transcendence a matter of bodies. Cleverly, the author points to the paradox of assigning the task of purification to those classed as impure, and hints at the connection between impurity and canonization, into which, unfortunately, she does not delve. In the second chapter Eva Darias Beautell brilliantly examines Gail Anderson- Dargatz’s first work, The Cure for Death by Lightning (1996), a novel that contributes to a rich tradition of Canadian women’s writings engaged with rural and small-town life (Alice Munro), regional identities (Sandra Birdsell and Margaret Lawrence), the Canadian gothic (Margaret Atwood), and the metaphoric dimensions of the wilderness (Marian Engel, Arita van Herk). Although firmly grounded in this Canadian tradition of foundational myths, Darias Beautell explains that Anderson-Dargatz pushes it in a new direction. The text runs smoothly and reads well as the author proceeds by articulating this process of redirection “at three different levels that eventually overlap: the writing of the pioneer narrative, the analysis of the metaphoric meaning of the Canadian wilderness vis-à-vis the Western Canadian homesteading, and the recuperation of the Aboriginal cultures in the country’s myths of origin” (46). So, even though Anderson-Dargatz replicates the plot and structure of pioneer women’s writing, she draws our attention to inter-gender relations and intercultural considerations by juxtaposing the wild and the domestic, revising the wilderness as a trope different from that articulated by Northrop Frye and Margaret Atwood, and bringing in the Aboriginal. Yet, as the author of this essay insists, despite advocating contact with nature, the novel, unlike Sharon Butala’s The Perfection of the Morning (1994), veers away from an uncritical celebration of living in the backwoods and erodes any essentialist expectations that readers might accommodate by straining the binaries of culture/nature colonizing/colonized, and consequently, masculine/feminine. Chapters 3 and 4 address performance. María Jesús Hernáez Lerena focuses on Marguerite de Roberval, the first French settler in Canada, as performed by Douglas Glover in Elle (2003). It is useful to remember here Judith Butler’s definition of performance as the possibility to disrupt the law by parody (1993: 225, 234), because it is by way of parody that Glover develops the theme of the foundation of the Canadian
ATLANTIS. Journal of the Spanish Association of Anglo-American Studies. 30.2 (December 2008): 167-172 ISSN 0210-6124 Reviews 169 nation, also touched upon in the previous chapter. Although Glover takes Marguerite as the metaphor of the Canadian colonial condition, he de-constructs the character through his readings of current critiques of gender and postcolonialism. The result is a libidinous and vengeful woman, incisively critical, knowledgeable of the grammar of feminism, who rather than submitting to the rigidity of the social rules by which she is supposed to abide, becomes herself the originator of events. Hernáez Lerena makes two inferences from here: First, by including theoretical concerns in the flow of the narrative, not only does Glover turn the story into an essay, transform his character into a literary critic, and question the validity of official (hi)stories, but also, within the same movement, he claims that criticism has narrative status. Second, by exposing the reader to two different mechanisms of comprehension (theory and story) Glover makes Marguerite “more real because we recognize […] (her) experience in the way contemporary criticism has codified it and made it familiar” (87). Lerena’s thesis that theorization of experience makes it familiar is an exciting contribution that challenges the rationalist conception of theory as the objective view of a subject undisturbed by the burden of emotions. To her it is precisely theory that helps readers engage with the text in emotional terms. All in all, however, the word impersonation in the title receives scant attention. It is not clear in which ways Glover pretends to be Marguerite de Roberval, nor is it explained how Glover’s Marguerite imitates the woman who was abandoned by her uncle on the north shore of St. Lawrence in 1542. Just as theoretically well informed is the next chapter by Vicente R. Rosselló Hernández on masculinity as performed in documentary films. After presenting a necessarily brief account of gender, performativity, masculinities and documentary studies, he reflects on the intersections between them through a close reading of three documentary films by white directors: Rob Reiner’s This Is Spinal Tab (1984), Peter Lynch’s Oscar-nominated Project Grizzly (1996), and Henry A. Rubin & Dana A. Shapiro’s cult-classic Murderball (2005). The first two interrogate the category of white heterosexual masculinity by parodying its prosthetic character. The third, by contrast, which depicts a U.S. professional quadriplegic rugby team, reclaims an aggressive manhood by disavowing disability: “The wheelchair, often taken as a shameful mark of impotence, is deftly transformed into a weapon, and draws grandiose comparisons with filmic exemplars of militant virility (Mad Max, Gladiator)” (112). The author moves on to debate the tensions inherent in competitive sports and ponders on the rhetoric that aligns manhood and national formations. The chapter is an exploration of the non- canonical within the canonical since the three movies are now recognized as classics. Otherwise, it is remarkable inasmuch as it redresses the scant attention gender matters have so far received in the medium of the documentary. The next section focuses on maternity. Dulce María Rodríguez González probes the Freudian Oedipal narrative in ‘The Double Image’ and ‘Listen’ by Anne Sexton and Alicia Ostriker respectively, so as to claim that the traditional father-son dyad is dismantled in the poems written by women during the last decades of the 20th century, and replaced by the mother-daughter relationship. The author reviews the theories of individuation developed by Sigmund Freud, Luce Irigaray, Nancy Chodorow, Jacques Lacan, Margaret Mahler and Jane Flax to conclude by saying, with Nancy Friday, that: “in a sense we [children] continue to be physically connected to her, just as the mother
ATLANTIS. Journal of the Spanish Association of Anglo-American Studies. 30.2 (December 2008): 167-172 ISSN 0210-6124 170 Nieves Pascual psychologically still experiences us almost a part of her body, her own narcissistic extension. The symbiosis is mutual, complete, and satisfying” (1979: 58). And yet, separation from the mother becomes imperative in order to achieve subjectivity (Rich 1986: 236). When separation is hindered, the daughter is flooded by a feeling of guilt that gives way to self-destructive behaviors. Within this paradigm the author offers her own reading of these two poems. In the first, Sexton deals with the loss of her daughter Joyce, who is left under the care of her paternal grandmother due to her mother’s precarious mental state. Because Sexton overidentifies with her own mother, who died of cancer, she feels incapable of setting her own course, turning to her daughter to affirm her identity. The second poem, ‘Listen’, depicts a mother who, hogtied by her daughter’s independence, engages in a quest for a consoling substitute. Gloria Evangelina Alzandúa’s autobiographical encounters with her mother is the issue of chapter 6 by María Henríquez Betancor. Like many other texts by Sandra Cisneros, Norma E. Cantú, Cherríe Moraga, and Sheila and Sandra Ortiz-Taylor, who experiment with the form of life writing by including poetry, stories, plays, photographs, recipes, pieces of fantasy, myth, and fiction, Borderlands/La Frontera (1987) is difficult to classify. As Sonia Saldívar-Hull states, it “continually refuses stasis. Shifting from Mexico-tejana history, to personal testimonial, the text moves restlessly onward to a history of a larger political family” (1999:3). True as this is, the author focuses on Alzandúa’s biological family and sustains that it was the insistence of her mother, Amalia, on her behaving as tradition dictated that pushed her into rebellion “towards the search of her own freedom as an independent chicana who had her own political ideas as a Marxist and openly declared a forbidden sexual orientation as a lesbian” (145). Like the daughter in ‘Listen’, Alzandúa attains independence, but only at the cost of pain and fear, the details of which she is quick to describe, contravening Estelle Jelinek’s dictum that autobiographies as a rule avoid intimate and shameful conflicts (1980: 12-15). Henríquez Betancor, however, does not stop at the moment of separation but investigates how the mother-daughter relationship is reconstructed when the latter finds a common space for both and reconnects to Amalia. The essay concludes with an illuminating reflection on Alzandúa becoming her own mother, that is, giving herself birth, when adopting the Aztec goddess Coatlicue’s image, a “symbolic presence that creates, reinforces, and constructs her complex multicultural and multiethnic self” (156). It is not coincidental that the editors have decided to complete this collection with the innovative essay of Madlen Kurajica on the poetics of silence in Robert Kroetsch’s The Hornbooks of Rita K (2001). In the novel, Raymond tries to bring back to life the memories of poet Rita Kleinhart, his lover, who has mysteriously disappeared after entering the space that artist James Turrell has constructed with light. The narrative does not explain her self-erasure but the critic examines the motivations behind her act, which, in his words, “comes to stand not only as a powerful blow against traditional modes of conceiving subjectivity but as a serious challenge to any kind of representation stemming from the binary operations of the machine we call language” (163). Next he examines the ways Rita’s escape disrupts language and perception through Deleuze and Guattari’s work on subjectivity as an intensity of fluid, “unpredictable movements, random velocities, [and] surprising effects” (163), always
ATLANTIS. Journal of the Spanish Association of Anglo-American Studies. 30.2 (December 2008): 167-172 ISSN 0210-6124 Reviews 171 becoming, rhizomatic, in a plane of immanence (ganzfeld) that refuses organization and borders. Also operating with the laws of chaos theory Kurajica explains that Rita’s silence contaminates the language of others inside and outside the text (“ganzfeld effect”) and demands that we become “poets of becoming” (157). It comes as no surprise, then, that Kroetsch steps into his own narrative to spend time with his female protagonist. All that notwithstanding, the basic contradiction resides in the fact that, after all, we have a story, and even though it is of a different kind it is still made of language. Those who approach this book looking for a history of the uncanonical (if a history there is) or an organized deconstruction of its structuring principles will certainly be disappointed. Its strength resides in the variety of theoretical perspectives and in the decision to dissect the canon through the examination of those topics its makers have relegated to the fringes. The use of canonical works (by Gloria Alzandúa, Anne Sexton, Sylvia Plath, Margaret Atwood, Kate Grenville or Robert Kroetsch) to dismantle the canon indicates that disorder is a constituent part of the canon and brings us into awareness of our own complicity in the process of canon-making. Still, when the authors claim for the need “to open up (the canon) to include the work of the previously excluded” (13), one wonders why no more excluded authors have been brought in. The overall conception of the book would have profited from a deeper reflection on the transformation the canon has undergone in the last 20 years (what was non-canonical in the late eighties has by now been consecrated as good), and on the castrating effects canonization exerts over the revolutionary potentialities of a previously excluded work. On the other hand, the gendered perspectives on film the title promises are not completely fulfilled. Why just one chapter on filmic disorders? And does not the process of canonization operate differently in different registers and different media? But this does not lessen the merits of the book. I hope that the editors are already thinking of another volume of filmic disorders to broaden the picture.
Works Cited
Alberti, John, ed. 1995: The Canon in the Classroom: The Pedagogical Implications of Canon Revision in American Literature. New York: Garland. Altieri, Charles 1990: Canons and Consequences: Reflections on the Ethical Force of Imaginative Ideals. Evanston: Northwestern UP. Butler, Judith 1993: Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex”. New York: Routledge. Friday, Nancy 1979: My Mother; My Self. London: Fontana. Guillory, John 1993: Cultural Capital: The Problem of Literary Canon Formation. Chicago: U of Chicago P. Jelinek, Estelle C., ed. 1980. Women’s Autobiography: Essays in Criticism. Bloomington: Indiana UP. Lauter, Paul 1991: Canons and Contexts. New York: Oxford UP. Lecker, Robert, ed. 1991: Canadian Canons: Essays in Literary Value. Toronto: U of Toronto P. McMullen, Lorraine 1990: Re(dis)covering our Foremothers: Nineteenth-Century Canadian Woman Writers. Ottawa: U of Ottawa P. Rich, Adrienne 1986: Of Woman Born. Motherhood as Experience and Institution. New York: Norton.
ATLANTIS. Journal of the Spanish Association of Anglo-American Studies. 30.2 (December 2008): 167-172 ISSN 0210-6124 172 Nieves Pascual
Ruoff, A. LaVonne Brown and Jerry Washington Ward, eds. 1990: Redefining American Literary History. New York: MLA. Saldívar-Hull, Sonia 1999: Introduction. Gloria Alzandúa. Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza. San Francisco: Aunt Lute. 1-16. Stimpson, Catherine R. 1992: ‘Feminist Criticism’. Stephen Greenblatt and Giles Gunn, eds. Redrawing the Boundaries: The Transformation of English and American Literary Studies. New York: MLA. 251-70. Winders, James A. 1991: Gender, Theory and the Canon. Madison: U of Wisconsin P.
Received 16 May 2008 Accepted 10 June 2008
Nieves Pascual Soler is Associate Professor in the Department of English Philology at the University of Jaén. Her research interests centre on women's literature and cultural studies. Her most recent publication is as co-editor of the volume: Feeling in Others: Essays on Empathy and Suffering in Modern American Culture. Berlin: Lit Verlag, 2008.
Address: Departamento de Filología Inglesa, Facultad de Humanidades, Universidad de Jaén, Paraje las lagunillas, s/n, 23071 Jaén. Tel. (34) 953-211830. Fax: (34) 953-211824.
ATLANTIS. Journal of the Spanish Association of Anglo-American Studies. 30.2 (December 2008): 167-172 ISSN 0210-6124 Juan F. Elices 2006: The Satiric Worlds of William Boyd. A Case-Study. Bern: Peter Lang. 259 pp. ISBN: 3-03910-691-0
María Losada Friend Universidad de Huelva [email protected]
When Elices’ book came out in 2006, William Boyd was already a well-known author actively publishing, as his latest works have shown (Fascination 2004, Bamboo 2005, Restless 2006). However, by then, few studies within the Spanish academic realm had analyzed or questioned Boyd’s contribution, those by Lázaro (1997, 2000) and Rivas (1999) being the most notable ones. Thus, this book, which provides much more than ‘A Case Study’, is welcome as it fills an existing vacuum, and stands as a serious, original examination of Boyd and his work. Elices approaches Boyd’s writing with the intention of dismantling its peculiar satiric discourse. A serious analysis revealing a deep knowledge of critical and literary satiric works allows him to wisely interpret the use of satire in contemporary narratives. His previous scholarly studies in the field (especially Historical and Theoretical Approaches to English Satire 2004) credential him as a natural reader of satire and enable him to approach five narrative works written by Boyd before 2006. Even if it is not mentioned as part of the methodological apparatus, Elices implicitly offers a complex exercise of comparative literature as one of his most efficient techniques of analysis. Constantly referring to satirical tradition from its theoretical, literary and artistic perspectives, he shows how, even in contemporary times and with new elements, the powerful satiric machinery works. The reader of the book sympathises with the author as he/she feels that various unsurmountable roads have been taken in the ever-complex theoretical battlefield of satire, and many primary texts have been read in order to ascertain the satiric nature of Boyd’s work. Thus, the book reveals an extensive comprehension of traditional studies on satire, ranging through etymological, formalist, archetypical, rhetorical, and anthropological approaches. It combines celebrated names of the sixties: Highet (1962), Feinberg (1967) or Sutherland (1967), and the well-known voices from the seventies and eighties who have encouraged the revision of satire, such as Edward and Lillian Bloom (1979), Seidel (1979) or Fletcher (1987). Having taken into account the dense and overwhelming study by Dustin Griffin (1994) as well as Combe and Connery’s contribution (1995) also shows Elices’ awareness of the change of perspective that since the nineties has transformed the simple and conventional definition of satire into a theoretical interpretation of a complex, versatile and elusive spirit. As Ralph Rosen proves (2007: 17) and Herman Real intelligently stated, satiric critics are aware of the difficult explanation of the concept ‘satire’, that ultimately depends on a personal choice: “the definition of satire is no longer to be regarded as a factual question, but as a decision question” (1995: 9).
ATLANTIS. Journal of the Spanish Association of Anglo-American Studies. 30.2 (December 2008): 173-178 ISSN 0210-6124 174 María Losada Friend
Elices’ familiarity with satirical works, especially those from the English eighteenth and twentieth centuries allows him to unravel the sophisticated vision of William Boyd on human nature. The interest of the book lies in the complex point of confluence between satire and the discourse of contemporary fiction. In Boyd’s case, one cannot consider his use of satire in simple terms precisely because of his profile and the themes that intermingle in his works. His African origin and Scottish upbringing comprise an explosive mixture that makes his work almost unclassifiable. Elices, however, marshals his arguments to justify Boyd’s satirical individualistic touch, determined by realist parameters within the postcolonial discourse. This is not the first time that this complex mixture has taken place in satiric literature. Thackeray quickly comes to mind. Born in Calcutta and educated in England, he fused in his works proximity and detachment from the society he critiqued, leaving such successful portraits as the government official Joseph Sedley in Vanity Fair, who moves to London after working for the Empire in India. Like Boyd, Thackeray considered himself a comic writer in the serious sense of the term. Both include in their works the dynamics of a colonial or postcolonial setting (India or Africa) and the perspective of the expatriate, of the English abroad or at home with enormous doses of irony and a sense of humour that verges on cynicism and sarcasm. Connections such as this can arise from the reading of Elices’ book. Aware of the power of satire throughout literary history, and knowing how many authors have used it as a critical weapon, he weaves a complex web to analyze Boyd’s narrative, convincing the reader that Boyd cannot be understood fully if Roman and Augustan satiric heritage, or works by Waugh, Orwell and Lewis among many are ignored. He offers a clever exercise of exposition and elaboration, given the many accurate and useful comparisons that allow the reader to imagine other possible associations. Elices’ work revises satiric discourse in contemporary narrative, revealing Boyd’s personal interpretation of the plural and complex society in which we live. In general, his analysis points not only to Boyd’s determination to use the satiric mode, so common among his predecessors, but also to his individualistic proposal, studied through recurrent features that Elices has discovered. It is an ambitious work as Elices finds what he calls “significant parallelism” (15), “literary connections” (80) or “echoes” (82) of traditional satiric strategies in Boyd’s narratives and describes them in an exhaustive and up-to-date study. The key to this technique is set out at the very beginning of the book, where the initial quotes from Kernan and Swift postulate the adequate combination of theoretical proposals and detailed practical examples proved throughout the five chapters of the 259 pages in the book, introduction and bibliography included. After a detailed introduction, the initial chapter (‘William Boyd’s Narrative Production’) sets off with a biographical sketch of Boyd, an author whose complex combination of humour and realism has detached him from the rest of the so-called postmodernist contemporary authors. That factor, Elices argues, makes it difficult to find critical approaches to his work (35). This is a useful chapter since Boyd’s general narrative features are summarized and since some of the works that are not the focus of this study are mentioned: his scripts, short story collections and the novel Any Human Heart (2005). The reader learns about Boyd’s literary background and although his
ATLANTIS. Journal of the Spanish Association of Anglo-American Studies. 30.2 (December 2008): 173-178 ISSN 0210-6124 Reviews 175 personal tribute to Rousseau (The New Confessions 1987) is mentioned, it would have been interesting to have more information on Boyd’s personal debt to other authors, especially the satirists, with whom Elices cleverly makes connection later on. Normally, reviewers of Boyd’s books recognise his influence from other writers and Elices takes it for granted. Since we get to know Boyd’s admiration of Fitzgerald, Auden or Heaney, it would have been interesting to be given some insight into his direct preferences for certain satirists, or other personal and literary convergences, so as to complete his profile with other useful rapports de fait. Each of the ensuing chapters focuses on one single work within Boyd’s narrative, analyzed mainly around one aspect of the satiric discourse. In the second chapter, which deals with A Good Man in Africa, political satire and the recognizable anti- colonial attacks are carefully pointed out. Knowing the recurring presence of political subjects in satirical works, Elices engages with the topic through three aspects: the figure of the anti-hero, the satiric scene and the effects of colonialism. He confronts the anti- hero in the novel, Morgan Leafy, with a wide range of heroes, from classic figures to the postmodernist anti-hero. A necessary step into relevant modernist anti-heroes such as Bloom or Prufrock should have been included for a fuller understanding of Boyd’s contribution. Reflections on the use of the grotesque complement the observation of scatology as a conscious weapon to mark moral and physical degradation of the character. Elices makes a clever comparison between Leafy and Gulliver, and successfully proves the power of satiric scenes in Boyd’s book referring to analogous satiric representations such as those by Bernard Picart or William Hogarth. Important parallelisms are also established so as to understand the disorder, chaos and corruption of the fictional Nkongsamba imagined by Boyd in a knowledgeable reference to the satiric attacks on Rome by Juvenal, or London by Johnson. One of Elices’ most successful points is the clarification of Boyd’s degree of criticism in the way he diverges from the classics: even if at times his incisive rebukes acquire Juvenalian tones, he never offers solutions or advice for reform. His truly comic but disturbing narrative succeeds in making the reader reach his/her own conclusions. With the explanation of another novel in chapter three (‘Anti-war Satire in An Ice- Cream War’), Boyd’s contribution is analyzed in detail. A description of the complex satiric scene is provided in a two-folded exercise. Stackpole Manor is studied as an emblematic centre of affectation, and the war scenario in East Africa is incisively portrayed, the British presence being deflated in a degrading portrait of deplorable administrative and institutional activities. In the contextualization of satirical approaches against war, Elices simply nods to Hasek and his work The Good Soldier (1921), leaving out other important works, such as Shaw’s incisive Arms and the Man. To study the war scenario and its futility, Elices rightly chooses the theoretical reflections by Rosenheim (1963), a good support throughout the book, proving how satire needs to be grounded in a real historical background in order to be successful. His historical revision on satiric compositions on war includes the unavoidable examples of the mock-heroic tradition and, although he surprisingly forgets Fielding, his account of Cervantes, Hudibras, The Battle of Books or the comparison between Hasek and Brooke is enlightening. Boyd’s technique, therefore, is well understood in this light. Clear examples of the animalization of humans and degradation in the portrait of the British
ATLANTIS. Journal of the Spanish Association of Anglo-American Studies. 30.2 (December 2008): 173-178 ISSN 0210-6124 176 María Losada Friend army are provided and scatological images are described, proving Boyd’s connections to the literary tradition arising from Aristophanes. Old strategies used in a new context help to understand the deflation of the British presence in Africa, clearly revealed in the character of Felix Cobb, the representation of an immobilized and decadent England. The complexity of Boyd’s incisive satire is also extensively analyzed in chapter four (‘Stars and Bars: Great Britain and the United States’), a double rebuke comparing the old Continent with the excesses of modern civilisation in the new America. The chapter deals with Boyd’s complex exercise in irony to point to the conflicts of racial identities. Elices relies on a concise theoretical framework based on Bhabha’s (1995) explanation of cultural hybridisation, and describes the clever game that Boyd sets up in manipulating language to demystify the use of English (American and British). Linguistic errors and misunderstandings mark the lack of communication between speakers of English and enhance Boyd’s critical attention to ignorance and lack of education. The complex analysis of witty dialogues clarifies Boyd’s sarcastic attack and leaves an open field of study and research for any reader interested on the strategies used by Spanish translators, for example, Bernardo Moreno (Boyd 2006), when confronting those entangled exercises on language. Moreover, the complex degree of satire on immigration issues is clearly understood through the analysis of the protagonist Henderson Dores, a British citizen on American soil, who ironically falls into a process of alienation similar to any other African or Asian visitor. The fifth chapter (‘The Relation between Satire and Cinema in “The Destiny of Nathalie X”’), deals with the first short story in the collection of the same title. Elices considers it the paradigm of the satiric short story as Boyd magnificently sets his examination on Hollywood and the film industry as the focus of satire. The question of immigration, so exhaustively analyzed in his other works is enhanced in the satiric portrait of Hollywood’s superficiality. It is cleverly explained as the contemporary recreation of an imaginary Vanity Fair, and justifies Boyd’s place in the tradition of Bunyan and Wolfe. This sets a smooth transition into the sixth chapter (‘Conflicts of Identity: Armadillo’s Satiric Approaches’), where London is studied as an exceptional satiric scene, the site of identity conflicts. For the contextualization of the use of London as a source of satire, Elices proposes an ambitious revision that leaves aside relevant authors, especially those satirists from the nineteenth century whose vision of London is essential in the history of satire (Austen and her depiction of the subtle superiority of the high classes, or Thackeray’s description of rich parvenus). The implications of the double identity of the main character, Milomre Blocj transformed into Lorimer Black, is carefully explained and provides a good example of the figure of the stranger as an object of satire. An exile, immigrant and expatriate, he becomes the excuse for all Boyd’s sarcastic observations on the situation of contemporary multiracial societies, and brings to the reader’s mind Dalnehoff’s (1973) and Kristeva’s (1991) studies on the outsider, revealing the multiple possibilities of this satirical type in a twenty-first century interpretation. Throughout the book, Elices seems to have in mind Genette’s (1997) Paratexts as he considers relevant paratextual elements that are so frequently ignored in satiric analysis. His close attention to the satirical possibilities of initial quotes and endings proves how those elements contribute with relevant connotations to the total effect of Boyd’s satire,
ATLANTIS. Journal of the Spanish Association of Anglo-American Studies. 30.2 (December 2008): 173-178 ISSN 0210-6124 Reviews 177 as shown, for example, when discussing the ending of A Good Man in Africa, or likewise its beginning, he compares it with Clarin’s opening of La Regenta. A similar approach might have been expected in the treatment of Boyd’s powerful prologues, as in the famous revealing letter that opens An Ice-Cream War, or the shocking initial paragraph in Armadillo. All in all, this is a book that can be enlightening for readers who are fond of scrutinizing satiric strategies. In the early chapters Elices is inclined to offer a too detailed description of the plot of the novels. For those readers not well versed in Boyd’s works, it can be quite useful, for those who have read the novels, it becomes an extra complement that slows the complete exercise of research and reflection proposed later. The clever organization of the contents analyses each work around one contemporary crucial theme (political colonialism, war, racial identity, immigration, multilingual city lives) proving Boyd’s skilful manipulation of effective traditional satiric strategies. Cultural and literary connections between centuries explain satisfactorily the transformations that the versatile satiric spirit has undergone in order to be incorporated successfully into contemporary works. The combination of classic postulates with revisionist proposals of updated criticism enriches the theoretical support of the literary reading. Web resources could have been included, such as the well-known useful bibliographical link by Brian Connery from the University of Oakland (Theorizing Satire. A Bibliography), which updates theories of satire, narrative satire, drama satire, satiric strategies, satire in historical and national literatures, extra literary satire, etc. The book relies mostly on eighteenth century satire and thus, useful references to satire in the 19th century have not been included, such as Lockwood’s study on the so-called post-Augustan satire, Palmieri’s (2003) research on post- Juvenalian satire or Marcus Wood’s (1994) study on satiric visual images. One of the book’s best values lies in its power of suggestion. Some reflections are enlightening, evoking our curiosity and stimulating the motives for research. Reading Elices’s book one is aware of the many approaches that can be taken to trace the rough tracks of the satiric spirit. The reader feels able to apply, as does George Test (1991), five basic categories to rightly understand Boyd’s intentional satire, as his truly comic production proves to be a disturbing, intelligent coordination of aggression, game, humour, judgement and censorship. His surprising use of realistic details and his harsh wit as seen in Elices’ study show themselves to be a clever exercise to uncover the truths of our contemporary times and of our human nature.
References
Bhabha, Homi K. 1995: ‘Cultural Diversity and Cultural Differences’. Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths and Helen Tiffin, eds. The Post-colonial Studies Reader. London and New York: Routledge: 206-09. Bloom, Edward A. and Lillian 1979: Satire’s Persuasive Voice. Ithaca and London: Cornell UP. Boyd, William 2006: Barras y Estrellas. Trans. Bernardo Moreno. Madrid: Alfaguara. Combe, Kirk and Brian A. Connery, eds. 1995: Theorizing Satire: Essays in Literary Criticism. New York: St. Martin’s P.
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Connery, Brian A. 1995: ‘Theorizing Satire. A Bibliography’ http://www.otus.oakland.edu/english/showcase/satbib.htm (Accessed 18 March, 2008). Dalnehoff, Donna 1973 : ‘A Familiar Stranger: The Outsider of 18th century Satire’. Neophilologus 57: 121-34. Elices, Juan 2004: Historical and Theoretical Approaches to English Satire. Munich: Lincom Europa. Fletcher, M. D. 1987: Contemporary Political Satire: Narrative Strategies in the Post-modern Context. Lanham: UP of America. Genette, Gérard 1997: Paratexts. Thresholds of Interpretation. Cambridge: Cambridge UP. Griffin, Dustin 1994: Satire. A Critical Reintroduction. Kentucky: The U of Kentucky P. Highet, Gilbert 1962: The Anatomy of Satire. Princeton: Princeton UP. Kristeva, Julia 1991: Strangers to Ourselves. New York: Columbia. Lázaro, Alberto 1997: ‘El nuevo destino de William Boyd’. Revista Canaria de Estudios Ingleses 35: 47-59. ––––– 2000: ‘El espíritu satírico en la novela británica contemporánea: Menipo redivivo’. Fernando Galván, ed. Márgenes y centro en la literatura británica actual. Alcalá de Henares: Servicio de Publicaciones de la Universidad de Alcalá. 93-120. Palmeri, Frank 2003: Satire, History, Novel. Narrative Forms, 1665-1815. Newark: U of Delaware P. Real, Herman, ed. 1995: Teaching Satire. Heidelberg: Carl Winter. Rivas, Cristina 1999: ‘Alteridad y aliedad: reflexiones sobre identidad y marginalidad en A Good Man in Africa de William Boyd’. Revista Canaria de Estudios Ingleses 39: 323-35. Rosen, Ralph 2007: Macking Mockery. The Poetics of Ancient Satire. Classical Culture and Society. Oxford: Oxford UP. Rosenheim, Edward 1963: ‘The Satiric Spectrum’. Ronald Paulson, ed. Satire: Modern Essays in Criticism. New Jersey: Prentice Hall. 305-30. Seidel, Michael 1979: Satiric Inheritance. Rabelais to Sterne. New Jersey: Princeton UP. Sutherland, James 1967: English Satire. Cambridge: Cambridge UP. Test, George 1991: Satire: Spirit and Art. Tampa: U of South Florida P. Wood, Marcus 1994: Radical Satire and Print Culture 1790-1822. Oxford: Clarendon P.
Received 6 June 2008 Accepted 17 September 2008
María Losada Friend (M.A. North Carolina at Chapel Hill, PhD Seville) is Associate Professor in English Philology at the University of Huelva (Spain). Her main areas of interest evolve around issues in Comparative Literature and Narrative and Narratology. Her latest publications include Estudios sobre literatura y suicidio. Alfar, 2006 (Co-authors: Pablo Zambrano, Eloy Navarro y Regla Fernández) and ‘Otras lecturas románticas sobre Chatterton’ Cuadernos de Ilustración y Romanticismo, 2006.
Address: Departamento de Filología Inglesa. Campus de El Carmen. Avda. Tres de Marzo. Universidad de Huelva (Spain). 21071 Huelva. Tel.: +34 959 219126, Fax: +34 959219143.
ATLANTIS. Journal of the Spanish Association of Anglo-American Studies. 30.2 (December 2008): 173-178 ISSN 0210-6124 Jorge Luis Bueno Alonso 2007: La épica de la Inglaterra anglosajona. Historia y textos desde el auge de Mercia al declive de la monarquía (750-1016). Foreword by Santiago Corugedo.Vigo: Universidade de Vigo, Servizo de Publicacións. vi + 157 pp. ISBN: 978-84-8158-348-9 pb
Juan Camilo Conde-Silvestre Universidad de Murcia [email protected]
The rise of English studies in Spain over the last thirty years has yielded a score of publications by Spanish scholars on the various fields of the discipline. The domain of English medieval studies at large and, in particular, that of Old English or Anglo-Saxon are no exception. A survey of bibliographical repertoires evinces that both have been extraordinarily attractive to experts in English philology trained in Spain. For instance, the monograph Old and Middle English Studies in Spain. A Bibliography (Bravo, Galván and González 1994) includes over 800 entries, covering publications from the late 1970s. A recent, more specific, overview on ‘Old English Studies in Spain: Past, Present and Future?’, especially commissioned for the Old English Newsletter (Conde-Silvestre and Salvador 2006), consists of over 250 selected bibliographical items on Old English language and literature published by nearly one hundred different Spanish scholars.1 This triumphant note should, however, be tempered concerning the Spanish- authored articles and textbooks on the history of the English Middle Ages and, in particular, of the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms before the Norman conquest. With the exception of some translations into Spanish of general histories of England and the European Middle Ages, the majority of the publications by Spanish authors on the so- called Germanic ‘dark ages’ refer to the Franks, the Vikings or, in more general terms, to the ‘barbarian invasions’. Early exceptions were Vicente Clavel’s Historia de Inglaterra desde los orígenes hasta el fin de la Edad Media (1948), Micaela Misiego Llagostera’s Los orígenes de la civilización anglo-sajona: Desde el siglo VI hasta la batalla de Hastings (1970) and, more recently, Historia del pensamiento anglosajón. Edad Media, by Bonnín Aguiló (1996), which, despite its title, covers the whole span of the English Middle Ages. An additional constraint comes from the relatively scant attention given to the translation of the original texts informing the history of Anglo-Saxon England. Indeed, with the exception of Beowulf, with four translations published since 1962 (Vera Pérez 1962; Bravo García 1981; Lerate 1986; Cañete Ávarez Torrijos 1991)2 and
1 Numbers illustrating this wealth of interest would have undoubtedly increased if the papers delivered at the twenty conferences held since 1988 by the Spanish Society for Mediaeval English Language and Literature (SELIM) had been counted. 2 Beowulf has also been translated into Catalan (Campos 1998) and a Galician version is now being prepared by Bueno Alonso and Fernández Soneira (2005). The latest Spanish version of the poem (Roa Vial 2007) was published in 2007 following the tracks of the Hollywood movie Beowulf. The translator, however, does not explain his technique in adapting the Old English original, or even acknowledges whether he has followed it at all.
ATLANTIS. Journal of the Spanish Association of Anglo-American Studies. 30.2 (December 2008): 179-185 ISSN 0210-6124 180 Juan Camilo Conde-Silvestre some excerpts of Anglo-Saxon heroic verse translated by Bravo (1998), attention has hardly been paid to the translation of other texts, such as The Dream of the Rood (Fernández Nistal 1992), the so-called elegies (Rivero Taravillo 1988; Conde-Silvestre 1994) and some riddles from the Exeter Book (Santano and Britwistle 1992). Regarding prose, a general selection was translated by de la Cruz in his La prosa de los anglo-sajones (1983), and some hagiographic texts from Ælfric in Héroes y santos en la literatura anglo- sajona by Bravo and Gonzalo Abascal (1994). Worthy of special attention is the general introduction to Old English literature with a selection of texts in translation Literatura anglo-sajona y antología bilingüe del inglés antiguo by Antonio Bravo (1982). Indeed, Bueno Alonso’s book, with his twofold aim, makes a lot of sense in this context. Firstly, the author engages with a narrative account of the main events in the history of Anglo-Saxon England and, secondly, he supplements this presentation with the translation into Spanish of the main primary sources – the cultural products – that have informed the previous task. Thus, he manages to present before the reader the close connections between history and literature in the early English Middle Ages (4). In accordance with this pattern, the book has two main parts respectively devoted to ‘The Epic of History’ (‘La épica de la historia’, 8-108) and ‘The Epic of Texts’ (‘La épica de los textos’, 109-145). In his epic narration of the history of the Anglo-Saxons, Bueno skips the so-called ‘settlement period’ (mid-5th to early 7th century) and starts with a section (11-17) on the rise of Mercia during the reigns of Penda (632-655) and Æthelbald (716-757). This decision seems to be grounded in the privilege of textual sources in his account, disregarding the field of archaeology. The account of the origins of Mercia is followed by ten pages (18-27) on the flourishing reign of Offa (757-796), the leading monarch who extended the realm northwards and southwards, kept the kingdom peaceful after digging a ditch along the Welsh border and stimulated trade on an international scale, establishing connections with the Franks and Charlemagne on a equal, friendly footing. The main sources that Bueno Alonso uses in his account are manuscripts A and E of The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle (the Parker and Laud chronicles), as well as the classical handbooks by Stenton (1943), Blair (1956), Campbell et al. (1991) and Whitelock (1952). In my opinion, the exclusive use of these (by now) traditional materials is problematic, in so far as the propagandistic aim of the Chronicle is not sufficiently emphasized, to the extent that some of them have tended to insist on the construction of Anglo-Saxon identity in parallel with political unity and ‘nationhood’. This slight drawback persists in section 1.3. (27-36) which tackles the reigns of kings of Wessex, like Egbert (802-839), Æthelberht (860-865) and Æthelred (865-871), as well as dealing with the arrival of the Danes. At this stage, traditional historiography, relying on the Parker Chronicle, had aimed at drawing a ‘Viking other’ against which English identity was constructed, so that the battles and strifes between both communities were often interpreted as trials necessary for the formation of a unified kingdom (see, among others, Frantzen 1990; Nelson 2003). Indeed, Bueno Alonso, following this traditional trails, is not oblivious to the approach; accordingly, Egbert’s kingdom is said to have established “las bases de la resistencia inglesa a las invasiones danesas” (31) (‘the foundations for the English resistance against the viking invasion’), or, in general, to be “[crucial] en el avance de los pueblos ingleses hacia la unidad política” (29) (‘basic for the advance of the English
ATLANTIS. Journal of the Spanish Association of Anglo-American Studies. 30.2 (December 2008): 179-185 ISSN 0210-6124 Reviews 181 people towards political unity’); similarly, Alfred the Great appears in the horizon as the only leader with the necessary expertise to lead the defence of the Anglo-Saxons against the encroaching enemy: “un hombre experto […] a cargo del mando supremo de las tropas anglosajonas […] que consiguió que defendiesen la tierra y se enfrentasen a los daneses” (36). Interestingly, this tone is sensibly moderated when the settlement of the Scandinavians in the Danelaw is dealt with in sections 1.4. (36-55) and 1.5. (55-86). On the one hand, the author relies on a variety of primary sources, like manuscripts C and D of The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle (Abingdon and Worcester), as well as on some recent studies, like Smyth (1995; see also Horspool 2007), which have questioned many of the accepted assumptions about the nationalistic motives behind king Alfred’s achievements, as propagandistically expressed by Victorian historiography. Additionally, these sections also benefit from the necessary reference to aspects of cultural and socio-economic history, which go beyond the chronological description of political events. Thus, the program to encourage cultural revival by promoting translation is given extensive treatment – incidentally introducing some of the texts appended at the end of the volume – and similar heed is paid to the economic benefits derived from the peaceful coexistence of Danes and Anglo-Saxons and their trading contacts in the territory of the ‘five boroughs’ (Lincoln, Leicester, Derby, Nottingham and Stamford) as attested in other, less official, sources.3 This perspective allows Bueno Alonso to moderate the view that had guided previous sections and accept that “las relaciones entre ambos bandos no eran tan hostiles como nos hacen pensar las continuas referencias militares de los documentos históricos que poseemos” (59) (‘the relationship between both parties was not as hostile as the military references in historical written documents seem to imply’). The wealth of information gathered on this period also allows the author to deal more extensively with aspects of the reigns of king Edward of Wessex (899-924) and queen Æthelflæd of Mercia (911-918), as well as with the settlement of York by Norwegians in the early 10th century. The same extensive, unbiased treatment is given to the reign of Athelstan (927-939) and the events leading to the celebrated battle of Brunanburh (937), and Edmund (939-946) who gradually conquered York and the five boroughs, as celebrated in the battle poem from the Chronicle ‘The Conquest of the Five Boroughs’ (942). The last section of ‘The Epic of History’ deals with the decline of the Anglo-Saxon monarchy (86-106), although, in my opinion, this stereotyped label does not do justice to an outstanding figure from the late 10th century: Edgar of Wessex (959-975), extensively celebrated in poems from The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, ‘The Coronation of Edgar’ (973) and ‘The death of Edgar’ (975). During his peaceful reign the monastic reforms undertaken by Cluniac monks in France reached England, through the leadership of Dunstan (909-988), Æthelwold of Winchester (909-984) and Oswald of Worcester (died 992). This is a best-documented period, when a majority of the OE manuscripts that have been preserved were copied, and it has also attracted the attention of some scholars from Spain, like Sara Pons Sanz (2004) or Mercedes
3 In Spain, Pérez Raja has recently dealt with this issue in “The Anglo-Scandinavian connection: reading between lines and layers” (2007).
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Salvador (2006), among others. In fact, as Bueno Alonso sensibly remarks, Anglo- Saxon England declined later, during the reign of Æthelred unræd (‘ill-advised’) (978- 1016), when a succession of violent Viking raids and the state necessity of buying them off unchained economic and political instability which was to last until the Norman conquest. All in all, despite the flaw of a non-independent treatment of the pre-Alfredian period, this introductory review of the history of Anglo-Saxon England fulfils the author’s desideratum by showing that “la sociedad anglosajona dista mucho de ser simple y tanto su organización político-social, como los avatares históricos por los que transcurrieron los designios de su sociedad son complejos y necesitan del análisis de diferentes perspectivas” (107) (‘Anglo-Saxon society is far from being simple; in fact it is fairly complex regarding both the historical events surrounding it and its own socio- political organization; as a result it deserves a profound analysis from different perspectives’). The second part, ‘The Epic of Texts’ (‘La épica de los textos’, 109-45) includes five Old English texts in Spanish translation which punctuate the preceding historical account. A selection of passages from The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle for the period 675-994 opens this chapter (section 2.1, 111-26), most of them translated into Spanish for the first time. The author includes here many of the texts that have informed his account of the history of the Anglo-Saxons, rendered in the simple, repetitive and asyndetic narrative style of the original. This chapter covers certain other Old English prose texts, some translated into Spanish for the first time. Firstly, there is the complete letter by king Alfred introducing the translation of Gregory the Great’s Cura Pastoralis (section 2.2, 126-30), also known as ‘On the State of Learning in England’ (Whitelock 1983): a key text on medieval culture and language planning. Secondly, the book includes the Sermo Lupi ad Anglos by Archbishop Wulfstan of York (died 1023) (section 2.5, 138-45), highly appraised as a piece of rhetorically well-constructed prose, touching on the devastating moral effects of the Viking attacks in the late-tenth-century and interpreting them as a sign of divine punishment at the turn of the millennium. Bueno Alonso carefully manages to transmit the rhythmic prose of the original, as the following sample illustrates: [P]or sus muchos pecados y fechorías éste se ha convertido en un país de pecadores. Por los pecados mortales y los crímenes, por la avaricia y la codicia, por el robo y el pillaje, por la venta de seres humanos, por los vicios infieles, por el fraude y el engaño, por el quebranto de la ley, por la sedición, por el ataque a los parientes, por las matanzas masivas, por el adulterio, por las injurias a los que profesan las órdenes sagradas, por el incesto y la fornicación. (143) One may say that this translator is at his best with complex texts. And this idea seems to be confirmed after reading the four poetic texts from The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle included in the appendices: ‘The Battle of Brunanburh’ (937) (in section 2.3, 130-34), ‘The Conquest of the Five Boroughs’ (942), ‘The Coronation of Edgar’ (973) and ‘The Death of Edgar’ (975), all of them in section 2.4 (134-37). Bueno Alonso acknowledges here previous translations into Spanish by Bravo (1998) and Lerate (1986). However, in contrast to the common practice of translating Anglo-Saxon poetry into Spanish prose,
ATLANTIS. Journal of the Spanish Association of Anglo-American Studies. 30.2 (December 2008): 179-185 ISSN 0210-6124 Reviews 183 he renders them all as proper poetry. One basic challenge, in this respect, is the four- stressed, rhythmic, alliterative patterning of the OE original, compressed into highly synthetic syntactic structures, in contrast with the expanding, analytic syntax of contemporary Spanish, which favours a syllabic organization of the speech chain, for which alliteration is uncommon. This is not the place to discuss Bueno’s technique as a translator –the author himself describes it in a presentation of his own translation of Beowulf into Galician (Bueno Alonso y Fernández Soneira 2005). Suffice it to say that – in the opinion of this reviewer– he manages to convey the rhythmic and alliterative effects of the original by a general recourse to three or four full meaning words per line and the use of enjambment to avoid the deferring effect of Spanish syntax, as in lines 81-86 of Brunanburh, where the beasts of battle are depicted: Cadáveres y carroña para el cuervo negro dejaron detrás, para que disfrute el del compacto pico y negra cubierta, también para el águila de pardo plumaje y blanca rabadilla, belicosa ave, y para el lobo en los bosques, bestia gris de la guerra. (134) The author’s capacity as a translator of Old English poetry is also reflected in his gift for recreating other basic literary conventions such as variatio, i.e. the accumulated references to the same entities by different means of expression and with distinctive emphasis, or the special type of metaphor known as kenning, both reflected in the following description of the sun, from The Battle of Brunanburh (lines 19-22): [C]uerpo celeste, candela del creador eterno, que suavemente, sobre la superficie del suelo, se deslizó hasta desplomarse desvanecida, preciosa criatura, al proceder a su puesta. (132) To round up this review I find no better way than to appropriate, with apologies, the following words from the prologue signed by Professor Santiago Corugedo. In his well- informed opinion, this book “[n]o solamente proporciona […] una aproximación a los reinos y literatura de los anglosajones […] sino un epítome adecuado, y en su mayoría inédito, de unas colecciones de textos que nos ayudan […] a ser un poco partícipes de los comportamientos y hechos heroicos de un pasado relativamente remoto en el tiempo, pero relativamente contemporáneo en el sentir” (iv). [“not only does it provide […] an account of Anglo-Saxon history and literature […] but also a necessary epitome of texts, most of them translated into Spanish for the first time, which may allow us [...] to appreciate the heroic events and behaviours from a past, in time fairly distant, but emotionally fairly contemporary.”]
ATLANTIS. Journal of the Spanish Association of Anglo-American Studies. 30.2 (December 2008): 179-185 ISSN 0210-6124 184 Juan Camilo Conde-Silvestre
References
Blair, Peter Hunter 1956: Anglo-Saxon England. 2nd ed. 2003. Cambridge: Cambridge UP. Bonnín Aguiló, Francisco 1996: Historia del pensamiento anglosajón. Edad media. Alcalá de Henares: Servicio de Publicaciones de la Universidad de Alcalá de Henares. Bravo García, Antonio 1981: Beowulf: Estudio y traducción. Oviedo: Servicio de Publicaciones de la Universidad de Oviedo. Bravo García, Antonio 1982: Literatura anglosajona y antología bilingüe del antiguo inglés. Oviedo: Servicio de Publicaciones de la Universidad de Oviedo. Bravo García, Antonio 1998: Los lays heroicos y los cantos épicos cortos en el inglés antiguo. Oviedo: Servicio de Publicaciones de la Universidad de Oviedo. Bravo García, Antonio and Pedro Gonzalo Abascal 1994: Héroes y santos en la literatura anglosajona. Oviedo: Servicio de Publicaciones de la Universidad de Oviedo. Bravo García, Antonio, Fernando Galván Reula and Santiago González 1994: Old and Middle English Studies in Spain. A Bibliography. Oviedo: Servicio de Publicaciones de la Universidad de Oviedo. Bueno Alonso, Jorge Luis and Ana Fernández Soneira 2005: ‘De Frisia a Fisterra ou como facer unha tradución aliterativa á lingua galega do poema épico anglosajón Beowulf’. Viceversa: Revista Galega de Tradución 11: 77-94. Campbell, James, Eric John and Patrick Wormald 1991: The Anglo-Saxons. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Campos Vilanova, Xavier 1998: Beowulf: Traducció en prosa d’un poema epic de l’anglés antic. Castellón: Societat Castellonenca de Cultura. Cañete Álvarez-Torrijos, Ángel 1991: Beowulf. Málaga: Servicio de Publicaciones de la Universidad de Málaga. Clavel, Vicente 1948: Historia de Inglaterra desde los orígenes hasta el fin de la Edad Media. Barcelona: Cervantes. Conde-Silvestre, Juan Camilo 1994: Crítica literaria y poesía elegíaca anglo-sajona: Las Ruinas, El Exiliado Errante y El Navegante. Murcia: Universidad de Murcia, Secretariado de Publicaciones. Conde-Silvestre, Juan Camilo and Mercedes Salvador 2006: ‘Old English Studies in Spain: Past, Present and ... Future?’. Old English Newsletter 40.1: 38-58. De la Cruz Fernández, Juan M. 1983: La prosa de los anglosajones. Málaga: Universidad de Málaga, Servicio de Publicaciones. Fernández Nistal, Purificación 1992: ‘La traducción de The Dream of the Rood’. Purificación Fernández Nistal, ed. Estudios de Traducción. Primer curso superior de traducción: inglés- español. Valladolid: Universidad de Valladolid. 79-92. Frantzen, Allen J. 1990: Desire for origins. New Language, Old English and Teaching the Tradition. New Brunswick: Rutgers UP. Horspool, David 2007: Why Alfred Burned the Cakes. A King and His Eleven-hundred-year Afterlife. London: Profile Books. Lerate, Luis 1986: Beowulf y otros poemas anglosajones. 2nd ed. 2000. Madrid: Alianza. Misiego Llagostera, Micaela 1970: Los orígenes de la civilización anglo-sajona. Barcelona: Ariel. Nelson, Janet 2003: ‘England and the Continent in the Ninth Century II: The Vikings and Others’. Transactions of the Royal Historical Society 13: 1-28. Pérez Raja, Mª Dolores 2007: ‘The Anglo-Scandinavian Connection: Reading between Lines and Layers’. Revista Canaria de Estudios Ingleses 55: 47-67.
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Pons Sanz, Sara 2004: ‘For Gode and for Worolde: Wulfstan’s Differentiation of the Divine and Worldly Realms through Word-Formation Processes’. English Studies 85.4: 281-96. Rivero Taravillo, Antonio 1988: ‘The Seafarer’. Anglo-American Studies 8.1: 80-85. Roa Vial, Armando, trans. 2007: Beowulf. Barcelona: Belacqua. Salvador, Mercedes 2006: ‘Architectural Metaphors and Christological Imagery in the Advent Lyrics: Benedictine Propaganda in the Exeter Book?’ Catherine E. Karkov and Nicholas Howe, eds. Conversion and Colonization in Anglo-Saxon England. Tempe: Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies. 169-211. Santano Moreno, Bernardo and Adrian Birwistle 1992: Enigmas anglosajones del Codex Exoniensis: Selección bilingüe. Cáceres: Servicio de Publicaciones de la Universidad de Extremadura. Smyth, A.P. 1995: King Alfred the Great. Oxford: Oxford UP. Stenton, Sir Frank 1943: Anglo-Saxon England. 3rd ed. 1971. Oxford: Oxford UP. Vera Pérez, Orestes, trans. 1962: Beowulf. Foreword by Emilio Lorenzo. Madrid: Aguilar. Whitelock, Dorothy 1952: The Beginings of English Society. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Whitelock, Dorothy, ed. 1983: Sweet’s Anglo-Saxon Reader in Prose and Verse. 15th ed. Oxford: Oxford UP.
Received 13 July 2008 Accepted 24 September 2008
Juan Camilo Conde-Silvestre is Professor of English at the University of Murcia (Spain), where he teaches History of the English Language. His main research interests are related to the fields of Old English language and literature and English historical linguistics. He has recently published the book Sociolingüística histórica (Madrid: Gredos 2007) as well as articles and papers in, among other journals, Neuphilologische Mitteilungen, Language in Society, Neophilologhus, Studia Anglica Posnaniensa and International Journal of English Studies (IJES).
Address: Dpto de Filología Inglesa, Facultad de Letras, Universidad de Murcia, C/ Santo Cristo s/n, 30071 Murcia. Tfno: +34 968-363178. Fax: +34 968-363185 e-mail: [email protected]
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David Walton 2008: Introducing Cultural Studies. Learning through Practice. London: Sage. 323pp. ISBN 978-1-4129-1895-4 (pbk)
Rubén Valdés Miyares Universidad de Oviedo [email protected]
David Walton’s handbook is arguably the most notable cultural studies book to have come out of Spain since Felicity Hand and Chantal Cornut-Gentille’s groundbreaking Culture and Power (1995). Walton’s own contribution to that collection, ‘From Donald Duck to the McDonaldization of Society: “Doing” Cultural Studies – a Heuristic, Involving a little Haberdashery’ (in addition to his ‘Cultural Studies: An Annotated Bibliography of Useful Sources’ in the same volume), already displayed some of the basic ingredients (also present in Walton’s other publications: 1998, 2002) for the new handbook: a creative approach to criticism, inspired by the heuristic as a device to think with ideas rather than just about ideas; a sense of fun, irony, and even “parody with a pedagogical point” (61); a love of puns as a means to redefine concepts (what Walton calls “puncepts” [300]), and a self-conscious care to keep the reader or/and student motivated. Produced by Sage, recently the publishers of a few important cultural studies text-books (e.g. Hall 1997; Tudor 1999; Couldry 2000; McRobbie 2005), the book makes amends for the comparative neglect of cultural studies in Iberian English studies (about which Cornut-Gentille and Hand have often complained), while it also bras witness to the productivity of cultural studies panels in AEDEAN conferences and the Culture and Power Seminar, with its own conferences and publications, which Walton himself has often presided over. As the Introduction states, the book is written for those who “wish to do cultural studies for themselves (rather than just read about how others have done it)”, imagining that many of its readers’ first language may not be English, and using Britain as the main focal point (2). It is actually an example of classic British cultural studies, starting from Matthew Arnold and evolving all the way to Stuart Hall, with the assimilation of certain continental thinkers such as Adorno, Gramsci and Althusser, and then considering how the British feminist perspective, here embodied by Virginia Woolf, developed its own critique with relation to gender, and how such critique compares to the cultural studies of the subaltern practised by Hall and others, including (tangentially) post-colonialism. It does not attempt to be in any way exhaustive, as it shows a constant awareness of “what’s been left out” (4, 283, 301), but, working towards “interpretive independence” (278), it aims to provide students with sufficient notional skills to start doing their own cultural criticism. A learner-centred book like this must be immediately appealing, and Walton has contrived seductiveness through a varied layout including help files, notes on practice, oversimplification warnings, heuristic diagrams, illustrative comic drawings (by José María Campoy Ruiz), and imaginary critical dialogues. The page format offers generous margins for readers who (like myself) like to jot down their own responses. The
ATLANTIS. Journal of the Spanish Association of Anglo-American Studies. 30.2 (December 2008): 187-191 ISSN 0210-6124 188 Rubén Valdés Miyares dramatisation of critical debates is at first sight its boldest feature. Some cultural studies books have integrated dialogue, usually in the form of actual interviews, in their discussion of various issues (Jordan and Weedon 1995; Morley and Chen 1996). The dialogic form, even when it is fictional as in Walton’s use of it, allows space for debate, dissent and uncertainty. In the first chapter, for example, we meet the ghost of Matthew Arnold in conversation with Notlaw (one of the anagrams of the author’s name); in Chapter 5, E.P., a young man who is preparing for a cultural studies exam meets a friend with a prodigious memory whose name happens to be Thompson in London’s Highgate Cemetery, where the latter lectures E.P. on E.P. Thompson’s The Making of the English Working Class, as they stroll near where Karl Marx is buried, and they eventually share a sandwich; in Chapter 11, adapting ideas from Louis Althusser, it is Hyde who introduces Jekyll to the notions of the invisible problematic, the symptomatic reading, and the meanings hidden under publicity icons such as the Marlboro Man and Nike sports wear. At one point Jekyll and Hyde are joined in the pub where they are talking by John Storey, Pierre Macherey, Judith Williamson and Catherine Belsey, who remind them that they also have something to say about the subject: thus the student is recommended further reading. However, every chapter, in addition to ‘References’, has a ‘Further Reading’ section which is a useful annotated bibliography. In the last chapter no less than Plato butts in to claim credit for the use of dialogue as a way of communicating difficult ideas. As a character called Tandow (whom, to be honest, I have failed to identify) explains, “the dialogue, as Plato discovered, offers a very effective way of creating a dialectical approach to writing”. Walton acknowledges another important model of “dialectical style” in Virginia Woolf’s Three Guineas in Chapter 12, ‘Crying Woolf! Thinking with feminism’, where he creates a feminist heuristic (242). The question of gender comes up gradually in previous chapters, particularly in Chapter 8 through Angela McRobbie’s contribution to the Birmingham Centre’s work on subcultures and the conspicuous marginality of women’s roles in early cultural studies and in the film Quadrophenia (159-64). The difficulty, as I see it, is when it comes to delimiting the feminist approach as a whole. The subject is broached cautiously, in a dialogue between George, Eliot (an allusion to the Victorian novelist’s male pen-name) and the Author on the question of ‘femenism’, that is, on whether men writers can give voice to ideas developed within feminism (240). It then proceeds, very plausibly in my opinion, to debate why “Woolf merits a place in the pantheon of early British cultural critics” (241). Most interestingly, as in the case of the other early authors, some of Woolf’s insights are applied to contemporary topics and theories which she could not have known herself (at least in their current form), such as semiotics. However, when other feminist writers like Simon, De Beauvoir, Elaine, Showalter, among others, along with morality play characters like The Voice of Poverty and The Voice of Chastity, begin to show up, the subject becomes somewhat muddled, and the student might feel overwhelmed. Many of the feminist characters (Julia, Kristeva, Hélèn, Cixous, etc.) do not introduce their own ideas, but discuss those in Three Guineas, which might give the impression that feminist thought can be monolithically derived from Woolf’s original thought. For instance, one might have expected De Beauvoir to have introduced the notion of the Other sex. The
ATLANTIS. Journal of the Spanish Association of Anglo-American Studies. 30.2 (December 2008): 187-191 ISSN 0210-6124 Reviews 189 names of feminists are simply dropped in for the student to find out more if they are interested, but as there is no annotated bibliography for them, it is hard to know where to start. The difficulty, in fact, is not in Walton’s book, whose scope could not possibly accommodate the range and complexity of feminist criticism, or even its contribution to British cultural studies. That would take another volume. The starting point for that other book on ‘fewomenism’ might consider why Stuart Hall felt displaced from the Birmingham Centre after the arrival of feminism (Hall 1996: 500), and Carolyn Steedman’s (1986) critique of how classic British cultural studies failed to account for the experience of women’s personalized landscapes. Walton nevertheless introduces the problematic as he refers to how ‘Women Take Issue’ (162-64) in the 1978 book of that title produced by the Women’s Study Group at the Birmingham Centre. Moreover, it is beyond doubt that Woolf touched on many (though not all) of the topics that gender studies would confront decades after her death: it is hard not to be reminded of A Room of One’s Own (1929) looking at Campoy Ruiz’s illustration of the ‘Tenny Booper’ option “which only required a record player, a space on the wall for photos of pop idols and a few friends” (163), even if what Woolf wanted was much more than that. One of the pleasant features of the book is its self-consciousness about the impossibility of embracing the wide field of cultural studies in a single introductory volume. The first illustration the reader comes across shows Walton himself looking slightly embarrassed as a young woman addresses him at a bookshop with the book in her hand and asks “What can I realistically expect from a careful reading of this book?” (3). The chapters on particular authors, if not totally replacing the reading of them, do work like individual critical introductions such as those often published in brief separate volumes, so that, taken together, the chapters make up a small reference library, even though the “oversimplification warnings” keep reminding the reader that we are “only scratching the surface” (192). The chapters on Thompson and Hoggart, for example, go into remarkable detail (e.g. about Hoggart’s attention to language and Thompson’s ‘making’ of history). Chapters also do more than introduce the main ideas of other books: heuristics invite students to look at ideas from inside by using them. In one of the most memorable passages, Theodor Adorno’s critical method is adapted to a critique of “hip-hop as a product of the culture industry” (63-64), and then the author writes a rap where he puts himself “in the position of a rapper who tries to take up a critical but appreciative attitude towards the method we have been exploring” (65). Thus a theory which was devised in the 1940s is tested in its current application. The book makes a very commendable effort to empathize with its younger readers. The actual difficulties of students are reflected humorously in Chapter 6, where Vidal finds himself in “the old story, exams are just round the corner and, erm, well, I’m not that well prepared and I missed most of the stuff on Raymond Williams” (112), so he calls his more studious sister Ladvi for help, who will provide him with a few tricks (including “another creative-critical technique” (112) to understand some of Williams’ basic ideas. Some of us who are no longer (just) students but who have arrived quite recently in cultural studies (certainly after Williams’ death) may be grateful for this user-friendly introduction to his large contribution to many aspects of cultural studies.
ATLANTIS. Journal of the Spanish Association of Anglo-American Studies. 30.2 (December 2008): 187-191 ISSN 0210-6124 190 Rubén Valdés Miyares
The main examples of analysis are film studies of Quadrophenia (Chapter 8) and East is East (Chapter 13), which can truly be said to be representative of the topics on which British cultural studies focus at two decisive moments in their development, i.e. the 1970s, with their earnest work on subcultures, and the 1990s and after, with their (often more self-reflective, even ironic) focus on gender and ethnicity. Both chapters complement the more theoretical ones, and include annotated filmographies for further practice. This focus on film distinguishes the book from the only other cultural studies handbook which it can really be compared with, i.e. Giles and Middleton’s (1999). The latter offers a wider range of examples of cultural analysis, and its approach is as thoroughly practical and learner-centred as Walton’s, but probably less inventive, and its chapters are arranged according to topics, so that the gradual development of cultural studies through key books and writers is less evident. Not even Plato could deny Walton’s creativity and his consciousness of method (14). The book is neatly structured, blending synchronic and diachronic approaches (289), despite not including Structuralism in its survey (301). In its chronological approach Introducing Cultural Studies coincides with Storey’s useful Introductory Guide to Cultural Theory and Popular Culture (1993), a suitable feature for those of us teaching cultural studies under History and Civilization rubrics. While every chapter is synchronically aware of the relevance of, say, Adorno’s analysis of jazz to hip-hop, T.S. Eliot’s preoccupation with cultural fragmentation to the postmodern condition (41), or adapting Williams’ keywords to new contexts (116-17), it is also diachronically sensitive to successive historical moments. Through Arnold and the Leavisites we catch glimpses of the emergence of democracy and mass culture; with the Frankfurt School, Hoggart and Williams, of reactions to it by the mid-twentieth century; with the Birmingham Centre on subcultures and Quadrophenia we are prompted to “think historically” of post-war Britain again (152-55), and the historical contexts of East is East return us to contemporary multicultural and multiethnic Britain (261-69). Thus the longer twentieth century is encompassed. Every chapter is headed by clearly stated ‘Main Learning Goals’, showing a constant awareness of teaching in terms of developing students’ critical competencies, which is a welcome feature in view of the new kinds of university curriculum. Yet it also enjoins John Frow’s definition of cultural studies, if not as an “antidiscipline”, as existing “in a state of productive uncertainty about its status as a discipline” (292, quoting from Frow 1995: 7). In other words, he would probably agree with Couldry that cultural studies is a subject with “at least a recognizable set of methodological debates” (2000: 8). Its boundaries are explored in various ways within the book, for example in the section called “A dialogue with the social sciences” (184-85). The complexity of cultural studies is made delightfully simple in the ‘Conclusions and “Begin-Endings”’ when it is compared to Gollum’s multiple identities in The Lord of the Rings (290) and then to Shrek’s attempt to explain to Donkey that ogres are multilayered like onions (294-95). This chapter includes an up-to-date list of journals and web pages, pointing to the sheer width of the field (306-07), and a brief annotated bibliography of studies with a social sciences approach to method (305), including the compilation recently edited by White and Schowoch (2006).
ATLANTIS. Journal of the Spanish Association of Anglo-American Studies. 30.2 (December 2008): 187-191 ISSN 0210-6124 Reviews 191
Like the best cultural studies works, Walton’s exhilarating book may leave the student wondering what cultural studies actually is, perhaps undecided about a final definition, but nonetheless confident enough to start practising it. It also leaves the reader wanting more like this, hoping for a sequel that would include the Structuralist and Postmodernist approaches which had to be omitted here (301). That Walton is already conversant with these approaches can be inferred even from this book, so it may just be a matter of time.
Works cited
Couldry, Nick 2000: Inside Culture. Re-imagining the Method of Cultural Studies. London: Sage. Frow, John 1995: Cultural Studies and Cultural Value. Oxford: Clarendon. Giles, Judy and Tim Middleton 1999: Studying Culture. A Practical Introduction. Oxford: Blackwell. Hall, Stuart 1996: ‘The Formation of a Diasporic Intellectual. An Interview with Stuart Hall by Kuan-Hsing Chen’. Morley and Chen, eds. Stuart Hall: Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies. London: Routledge. 484-503. Hall, Stuart, ed. 1997: Representation. Cultural Representations and Signifying Practices. London: Sage. Hand, Felicity and Chantal Cornut-Gentille, eds. 1995: Culture and Power. La Pobla de Segur: Poblagràphic S.L. Jordan, Glenn and Chris Weedon 1995: Cultural Politics. Class, Gender, Race and the Postmodern World. Oxford: Blackwell. McRobbie, Angela 2005: The Uses of Cultural Studies. London: Sage. Morley, David and Kuan-Hsing Chen, eds. 1996: Stuart Hall: Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies. London: Routledge. Steedman, Carolyn 1986: Landscape for a Good Woman. London: Virago. Storey, John 1993: An Introductory Guide to Cultural Theory and Popular Culture. Hemel Hempstead: Harvester Wheatsheaf. Tudor, Andrew 1999: Decoding Culture: Theory and Method in Cultural Studies. London: Sage. Walton, David 1995: ‘From Donald Duck to the McDonaldization of Society: “Doing” Cultural Studies – a Heuristic, Involving a little Haberdashery’. Felicity Hand and Chantal Cornut- Gentille, eds. Culture and Power. La Pobla de Segur: Poblagràphic S.L. 19-37. Walton, David 1998: ‘Theme-Antics and the The-Eerie Class: CrWit(t)icism in Wrap’. Miscelánea: A Journal of English and American Studies 19: 189-204. Walton, David and Scheu, Dagmar, eds. 2002: Ac(unofficial)knowledging Cultural Studies in Spain. Bern: Peter Lang. White, Mimi and James Schwoch, eds. 2006: Questions of Method in Cultural Studies. Oxford: Blackwell.
Received 17 April 2008 Accepted 7 July 2008
Rubén Valdés Miyares is a senior lecturer at the University of Oviedo, where he obtained his PhD in 1992. His research interests are Cultural Studies and Medieval Studies. He has co-edited, with Carla Rodríguez González, Historia y representación en la cultura global (Oviedo: Ediciones KRK, 2008), and the forthcoming Culture and Power: The Plots of History in Performance (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars P.).
Departamento de Filología Anglogermánica y Francesa, Campus "El Milán", c/ Teniente Alfonso Martínez, s/n.3011 Oviedo.Tel: +34 985104589, Fax: +34 985104555
ATLANTIS. Journal of the Spanish Association of Anglo-American Studies. 30.2 (December 2008): 187-191 ISSN 0210-6124
ABSTRACTS
RESÚMENES
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1492: Europe in America and America in Europe: Or, Traveling Metaphors in the Discoveries of America
Boris Vejdovsky University of Lausanne [email protected]
Es posible que Cristóbal Colón sea el precursor de nuestra condición (post)moderna: en sus primeros relatos del encuentro con esa tierra que iba a llamarse América se encuentran todas las contradicciones de nuestro mundo contemporáneo. Colón tiene mucha Fe, pero ansía oro; busca un mundo nuevo, pero se porta como un turista; trata de descifrar lo desconocido, pero se ahoga en los clichés de su propia cultura. Este ensayo examina las condiciones culturales y retóricas en que surgió ‘América’, concentrándose en unos momentos de circunstancias imprevisibles e inolvidables causadas por la alianza de la realidad material y la poética de las metáforas.
Palabras clave Colón; culturas en contacto; la invención de América; metáforas viajeras
The Lure of the Object in Henry James’s Fictions of Thwarted Desire: Reflections on the Libidinal and Social Poetics of Literary Forms
Esther Sánchez-Pardo González Universidad Complutense de Madrid [email protected]
Este trabajo sitúa la figura del ‘objeto’ –un objeto deseado e investido libidinalmente– en función de su progresión y desarrollo en la narrativa de James, poniendo especial énfasis en cómo el discurso de James en torno a la posesión –el proceso que aspira a asegurar el objeto central en la narración– adquiere complejidad y sofisticación en la llamada major phase del autor. Las narraciones de James ponen siempre de relieve su propia implicación en el argumento de ‘deseo frustrado’ que ellas mismas critican. Las tensiones narratológicas en los textos de James ponen de manifiesto el aspecto auto– crítico (de la narración y por la propia narración) de esta operación dirigida al interior del texto. He basado mi análisis del realismo tardío de James en The Aspern Papers y ‘The Figure in the Carpet’, textos representativos del relato y la novella jamesiana, en los cuales, los objetos – de arte o estéticos, como por ejemplo la literatura, epistemológicos como los secretos o el dinero – pasan a un primer plano y exploran las intrincadas rutas del deseo, de manera sistemática un deseo frustrado, y de la posesión en sus aspectos libidinal y burgués.
Palabras clave: Henry James, objeto, secreto, major phase, realismo tardío, modernismo 196
‘Trust them to Figure it Out’: Toni Morrison’s Books for Children
María Lourdes López Ropero Universidad de Alicante [email protected]
Toni Morrison figura ahora entre el grupo de escritores cuyo trabajo incluye textos para adultos y para niños. Este artículo examina una faceta poco conocida del trabajo de la autora con el fin de definir sus rasgos distintivos y el papel de Morrison como escritora para niños. Sus textos serán leídos a la luz de pensadores como Martha Nussbaum y otros, que abogan por un modelo educativo que fomente la autonomía y el pensamiento crítico. Además, se hará referencia a la representación de personajes infantiles en las novelas de Morrison, que ha demostrado su interés por la infancia a lo largo de toda su carrera.
Palabras clave: Toni Morrison, literatura infantil y juvenil, libros ilustrados, fábulas, educación liberal, pensamiento crítico, cross-writing, James Baldwin.
The very idea! A Corpus-based Comparison of IDEA, CONCEPT and NOTION and their Formal Equivalents in Spanish
Chris Butler University of Swansea [email protected]
Este artículo hace uso de un análisis basado en córpora para explorar las similitudes y las diferencias entre los sustantivos IDEA, CONCEPT y NOTION en inglés y sus equivalentes formales IDEA, CONCEPTO y NOCIÓN en español. En este estudio se ponen de relieve tres áreas de investigación: (i) las frecuencias de los tres sustantivos en cuatro registros de cada lengua; (ii) las colocaciones adjetivales de las tres palabras en cuestión; y (iii) la aparición de construcciones idiomáticas construidas con las palabras sometidas a análisis en este trabajo. Los resultados que se desprenden de nuestro análisis no sólo son interesantes en sí mismos, sino que además tienen aplicaciones a ámbitos tales como, por ejemplo, la traducción así como la enseñanza y el aprendizaje del inglés y del español.
Palabras claves: corpus, lingüística contrastiva, registro, colocación, inglés, español
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Out of the Dark Room: Photography and Memory in Rachel Seiffert’s Holocaust Tales
Cristina Pividori Universidad Autónoma de Barcelona [email protected]
La fotografía desempeña un papel decisivo en The Dark Room (2001), la novela debut de Rachel Seiffert. No sólo contribuye de manera significativa a redescubrir un pasado traumático para los alemanes, sino que también comparte con el texto algunas respuestas comunes: el discurso del yo, la estética del álbum, la memoria, lo anti- heroico y la noción de obra abierta. Aplicadas a la novela, estas categorías permiten descubrir no sólo nuevas particularidades sobre la representación de lo subjetivo, sino también varias posibles lecturas del texto. Este artículo se centra en el interés de Seiffert por la visual, que permanece en una zona liminal entre la historia y la memoria y refleja una crisis de representación posterior al Holocausto. La escritora rechaza el valor de la historia y la fotografía documental y encuentra perspectivas alternativas para representar el tema de la memoria del Holocausto en el texto. Se presta especial atención a la fragmentación del tiempo y del espacio, al yo como parte de la narrativa, al descubrimiento de impulsos inconscientes en lo visual, a los protagonistas como anti- héroes, a la novela como obra abierta y, fundamentalmente, al concepto de “post- memory”, introducido en la representación de la historia, la fotografía documental y el retrato de familia a través del uso crítico del “realismo traumático.”
Palabras Clave: fotografía, Holocausto, “post-memory,” liminalidad, discurso del yo, estética del álbum, anti-héroe, "realismo traumático".
Sex-Related Euphemism and Dysphemism: An Analysis in Terms of Conceptual Metaphor Theory
Eliecer Crespo Fernández Universidad de Alicante [email protected]
El objetivo del presente artículo es analizar el lenguaje figurado eufemístico y disfemístico utilizado en la designación del tabú sexual dentro del conocido marco de la Teoría de la Metáfora Conceptual iniciado por Lakoff y Johnson. Desde esta óptica, defiendo que la conceptualización juega un papel crucial tanto en el uso como en la interpretación de eufemismos y disfemismos. Así, analizo las implicaciones y efectos del proceso de lexicalización en la categorización conceptual, sobre todo en lo concerniente a la direccionalidad de las proyecciones metafóricas. Asimismo estudio la función de las metáforas conceptuales en el uso eufemístico y disfemístico, intentando descubrir la 198 manera en que un determinado dominio conceptual es más propicio para la mitigación u ofensa verbal. Finalmente, examino de qué modo una u otra conceptualización determina la interpretación de las metáforas sexuales. El análisis llevado a cabo demuestra que los términos y expresiones referidas al tabú sexual pueden abordarse bajo la perspectiva cognitiva de la metáfora de Lakoff y Johnson.
Palabras clave: Semántica Cognitiva, metáfora conceptual, eufemismo, disfemismo, manipulación del referente, tabú sexual.
A Wind of Change: The New British Colonial Policy in Post-Revolt India
Belkacem Belmekki University of Oran, Algeria [email protected]
Nada hasta el siglo XIX había amenazado tan seriamente el dominio británico sobre el subcontinente indio como lo hicieron los acontecimientos de 1857. De hecho, a los oficiales de la Compañía del Este de la India, la odisea que se les vino encima les cogió desprevenidos. En consecuencia, poco después del fin de las hostilidades, el Gobierno Británico decidió reconsiderar su política en la región para evitar otra catástrofe del mismo orden. Esto se vio reflejado en los profundos cambios que Londres llevo a cabo en el subcontinente, principalmente a instancias de la Reina Victoria, quien explícitamente instó al Gobierno de la India, a través de su histórica Proclamación de 1858, a adoptar un enfoque diferente en el gobierno de sus súbditos coloniales. Este artículo se propone analizar el impacto que sobre el Rajá Británico tuvo la Gran Rebelión de 1857.
Palabras clave: Gran Rebelión, India británica, Proclamación de la Reina Victoria, cipayos, Compañía del Este de la India, evangélicos, Lord Dalhousie, Imperio Británico
Goodbye to Isherwood: the Rise and Fall of a Literary Reputation
Andrew Monnickendam Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona [email protected]
El artículo analiza la recepción crítica de la obra de Christopher Isherwood. La primera parte demuestra que la célebre afirmación “I am a camera” – que aparece en la primera página de su novela Goodbye to Berlin (1939) - tenía un destacable sentido político en el 199 momento de su publicación. Se confirma esta idea con la evidencia de dos documentos contemporáneos de gran relevancia: la opinión personal de Isherwood sobre Alemania y la evaluación de su obra por parte de John Lehmann, basada en las teorías de Virginia Wolf sobre los méritos respectivos de la poesía y la prosa. La segunda parte revela un cambio radical: Isherwood ya no se considera un autor político. Se proponen tres factores clave como explicación del fenómeno: la decisión tomada por Isherwood de abandonar Inglaterra; su papel crucial en el movimiento gay; los intentos obsesivos de esconder su personalidad. Cada uno de estos factores cruciales ha sido objeto de análisis por separado en estudios anteriores pero su integración en la lectura que proponemos ilumina la obra de Isherwood de un nuevo modo.
Palabras clave: Christopher Isherwood, John Lehmann, los años treinta, el modernismo, los estudios gay
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Acknowledgements
The Editors wish to thank Boris Vejdovsky, of the University of Lausanne, for his guest contribution to this issue. We also thank all those members of the Editorial Board of Atlantis who have given their time and expertise to this journal. Likewise, we thank Mª Luz Celaya Villanueva and Kathleen Firth (University of Barcelona), Pamela Faber (University of Granada), Pilar Garcés-Conejos Blitvich (University of North Carolina at Charlotte) and Paul Meara (Swansea University), for their willingness to collaborate with us in assessing certain articles.
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Instructions to authors
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Danby, John F. 1961: Shakespeare’s Doctrine of Nature: A Study of King Lear. London: Faber. Carnero González, José 1982: ‘Calipso y Penélope en Ulysses’. James Joyce: A New Language: Actas/Proceedings del Simposio Internacional en el Centenario de James Joyce. Ed. Francisco García Tortosa, et al. Sevilla: Depto. de Literatura Inglesa de la Univ. de Sevilla: 167-74. Kastovsky, Dieter 1986: ‘The Problem of Productivity in Word-formation’. Linguistics 24: 585- 600.
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