Transatlantica Revue d’études américaines. American Studies Journal

2 | 2015 The Poetics and Politics of Antiquity in the Long Nineteenth-Century / Exploiting Exploitation Cinema

Electronic version URL: http://journals.openedition.org/transatlantica/7648 DOI: 10.4000/transatlantica.7648 ISSN: 1765-2766

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

The Poetics and Politics of Antiquity in the Long Nineteenth-Century

Introduction: The Poetics and Politics of Antiquity in the Long Nineteenth- Century Ronan Ludot-Vlasak

Mercy Otis Warren, the American Revolution and the Classical Imagination Eran Shalev

From Savage to Sublime (And Partway Back): Indians and Antiquity in Early Nineteenth- Century American Literature Mark Niemeyer

“Solutions in Hieroglyphic”: Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Picturesque Language,” and the Ancient Near East Mathieu Duplay

Radical Innocence: Margaret Fuller’s Utopian Rome Leslie Elizabeth Eckel

“Orpheus’ Sermon”: Making a Case for an Antiquer Dickinson Eric Athenot

Proserpine upon the Coin: Melville’s Quest for Greek Beauty in “Syra” Bruno Monfort

Henry James’s Spectral Archaeology Stefano Evangelista

Exploiting Exploitation Cinema

Exploiting Exploitation Cinema: an Introduction David Roche

Exploitation Cinema and the Lesbian Imagination Anne Crémieux

Exploitation Feminism: Trashiness, Lo-Fidelity and Utopia in She-Devils on Wheels and Blood Orgy of the Leather Girls Kristina Pia Hofer

Sex, Gore and Provocation: the Influence of Exploitation in John Waters’s Early Films Elise Pereira Nunes

“Unnatural, unnatural, unnatural, unnatural unnatural” . . . but real? The Toolbox Murders (Dennis Donnelly, 1978) and the Exploitation of True Story Adaptations Wickham Clayton

Quentin Tarantino : du cinéma d’exploitation au cinéma Philippe Ortoli

Hostel (Eli Roth, 2005 et 2007), le torture-porn et le cinéma d’exploitation : l’être humain à l’ère de sa reproductibilité technique Pierre Jailloux

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The Haunted World of El Superbeasto (Rob Zombie, 2009): An Animated Exploitation of Exploitation Cinema Pierre Floquet

Hors-thème

“The Past Undetonated”: Nostalgia and Storytelling in Philip Roth’s American Pastoral Tanguy Bérenger

L’autobiographie ou l’art de la vie dans A Small Boy and Others de Henry James Thomas Constantinesco and Agnès Derail

Actualités de la recherche

The Historical “Dispute of the New World.” European Historians of the United States and European History, Culture and Public Life, International Workshop Fondazione Luigi Einaudi – Turin, September 10-11, 2015 Francesca Cadeddu

Think Tank IdA : « Le processus de normalisation des relations États-Unis/Cuba : défis et perspectives » Institut des Amériques, Maison de l'Amérique Latine, mardi 6 octobre 2015 Shirley Yoselin Rodríguez Paz

Colloque annuel de l’Institut des Amériques (IdA) : « Ressources et Innovations dans les Amériques » Université Toulouse Jean-Jaurès, 14-16 octobre 2015 Lucile Bentley and Chloé Monasterolo

Compte-rendu de la journée d’étude « Le travail contraint dans les Amériques avant l’abolition de l’esclavage » Université de Poitiers – 16 octobre 2015 Kalilou Barry

Atelier-conférence : Smaro Kamboureli « From CanLit to Canlits : The Re-formation of a Discipline » Université Sorbonne Nouvelle – Paris 3, 17 novembre 2015 Samuel Harvet

Journée d’Étude : « Le récit d’esclave, publications récentes et perspectives » Université Paris 13 – 27 novembre 2015 Josette Spartacus

Arts et littérature

Symposium “Photo Archives V: The Paradigm of Objectivity” The Getty Center & The Huntington, Los Angeles / San Marino, February 25-26, 2016 Carolin Görgen

One-day symposium “Small Town America” Université Toulouse - Jean Jaurès, 6 novembre 2015 Claire Cazajous-Augé and Jérémy Potier

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Colloque international « L’œuvre de Brian Evenson » Université Rennes 2, 21-22 mai 2015 Maud Bougerol

4ème conférence annuelle du réseau européen des études sur la Beat Generation (EBSN) Université Libre de Bruxelles, 28-31 octobre 2015 Peggy Pacini and Anna Aublet

Journée d’études « Photographie et histoire américaine » Université Paris Diderot, 25 septembre 2015 Eliane de Larminat

Recensions

Xiaojing Zhou, Cities of Others. Reimagining Urban Spaces in Asian American Literature Nicoleta Alexoae-Zagni

Ana Manzanas and Jesus Benito, Cities, Borders, and Spaces in Intercultural American Literature and Film Nathalie Cochoy

Clémentine Tholas-Disset and Karen A. Ritzenhoff (eds), Humor, Entertainment and Popular Culture During World War I Trevor Harris

Amélie Ducroux, La relation et l’absolu : Lecture de la poésie de T. S. Eliot Edward Lee-Six

Cristelle Terroni, New York Seventies. Avant-garde et espaces alternatifs Marc S. Smith

Samantha C. Harvey, Transatlantic Transcendentalism: Coleridge, Emerson, and Nature Thomas Constantinesco

Greg Elmer, Ganaele Langlois, Fenwick McKelvey, The Permanent Campaign, New Media, New Politics Patrick Litsangou

Alan B. Cohen, David C. Colby, Keith A. Wailoo, and Julian A. Zelizer, eds., Medicare and Medicaid at 50: America’s Entitlement Programs in the Age of Affordable Care Éveline Thévenard

Rona Cran, Collage in Twentieth-Century Art, Literature, and Culture. Joseph Cornell, William Burroughs, Frank O’Hara, and Bob Dylan Juliette Nicolini

Daniel Katz, American Modernism’s Expatriate Scene. The Labour of Translation Roxana Oltean

Trans'Arts

Warhol (Un)limited : peut-on encore exposer Andy Warhol ? Guillaume Mouleux

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« Sauter sans sortir du cadre : le portrait gymnastique chez Philippe Halsman » François Brunet

"Paul Strand: Photography and Film for the 20th Century" Victoria and Albert Museum (Londres), 19 mars-3 juillet 2016 Didier Aubert

Reconnaissances

Rencontre avec Richard Powers et Bruno Latour Nathalie Cochoy and Jean-Yves Pellegrin

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The Poetics and Politics of Antiquity in the Long Nineteenth-Century

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Introduction: The Poetics and Politics of Antiquity in the Long Nineteenth- Century

Ronan Ludot-Vlasak

1 As Caroline Winterer argues in her insightful study of Greco-Roman culture in American intellectual life, “next to Christianity, the central intellectual project in America before the late nineteenth-century was classicism” (Winterer, 2002, 1). This permeation of ancient models in a new nation seeking to break from the yoke of European culture presents some paradoxes which have been pointed out by historian Meyer Reinhold: Despite the distance from the great centers of humanistic learning, the absence of visible relics of the Greek and Roman presence to memorialize the continuity with classical antiquity and excite feelings of pride in the cultural heritage, and sporadic opposition on religious and utilitarian grounds, classical learning was swiftly naturalized on American soil, and in consequence a fair number of colonial and Revolutionary Americans were nurtured and molded by the humanistic tradition (Reinhold, 1984, 23). Be it the name of certain institutions (the Senate) or their location (the Capitol), the influence of antiquity in early American art and architecture, the founding of cities named after ancient figures (Cincinnati), or the place of classics in college curricula, Greco-Roman antiquity was meant to provide the new nation with a set of political, aesthetic and philosophical models on the foundation of which its inhabitants might fulfil their destiny. Such ubiquity of (neo)classical culture led educated men and women in the late eighteenth century to speak of antiquity as a familiar world, to which they claimed to be the rightful heirs. Joseph Warren thus wore “a Ciceronian toga” in order to commemorate the Boston massacre in 1775 (Winterer, 2002, 26) and John Adams likened classical antiquity to a boudoir of octagonal shape with a “full- length mirror on every side” in which the citizens of the New World might see their reflection (quoted in Shalev, 2009, 2).

2 This fantasized connection to ancient cultures impacted Americans’ understanding of historical time. In Rome Reborn on Western Shores, Eran Shalev has demonstrated that

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American history lent itself to typological readings and was often referred to as a reenactment of Greek and Roman annals. Antiquity was turned into both the birthplace of Western civilization and a horizon setting an example to be followed and improved by the emerging nation. Claiming continuity between the American experience and the classical world was also a way of downplaying the cultural ties which united the United States and Britain although these uses of antiquity were often mediated through eighteenth-century British appropriations of such models, the enduring presence of Addison’s Cato in American revolutionaries’ political imagination being a case in point (Shalev, 2009, 99-104).

3 Despite this “cult of antiquity” (Reinhold, 1984, 23), ancient cultures proved to be an ambivalent model at the turn of the nineteenth century. Athens’ cultural legacy and Sparta’s military ethos were praised, but references to the internecine conflicts which plagued ancient Greece were used by the Federalists as a warning against minimal government and Jefferson’s political platform (Winterer, 2002, 20).1 Although republican Rome came to symbolize an ideal of civic and political virtue the citizens of the New World were to imitate and emulate, the Roman Empire was associated with debauchery and decadence; it provided them with “cautionary tales about civic virtue” (Winterer, 19) and held up a mirror of what the emerging nation might degenerate into, should it fail to fulfill the ideal it meant to embody.

4 Cultural historians have emphasized Americans’ familiarity with the classics and shown how this cultural heritage informed their Weltanschauung as well as their conception of the United States’ cultural and political identity. In Meyer Reinhold’s words, “the authors of the classical canon offered the founders companionship, solace, and the models and antimodels which gave them a sense of identity and purpose” (Reinhold, 1984, 232). This issue of Transatlantica aims at accounting for the presence of antiquity in nineteenth-century America from a slightly different angle by questioning this alleged direct filiation with the Ancients. Central to all the articles is the subversive potential of literary imagination and its ability to question the apparent unity and familiarity of the classical models that shaped the American ethos. In this respect, it might be argued that revisiting classical antiquity enabled American writers to view the world in which they lived as “contemporaries” who “firmly h[e]ld [their] gaze on [their] own time so as to perceive not its light, but rather its darkness” (Agamben, 2009, 44). As the different contributors also show, the presence of classical antiquity in late eighteenth-century and nineteenth-century American literature may not be addressed exclusively in the light of the influence of the former on the latter; by unsettling dominant ideological constructs which sustained the reception of Greco-Roman cultures in the long nineteenth century, Mercy Otis Warren, Washington Irving, James Fenimore Cooper, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Margaret Fuller, Herman Melville, Emily Dickinson or Henry James unveiled the paradoxically heterogeneous and monumental nature of antiquity, thus offering new ways of apprehending it—an aspect which has so far attracted little critical attention in American literary studies.

5 Through the example of Mercy Otis Warren’s remarkable appropriation of classical models, Eran Shalev sheds light on the ways in which American revolutionaries made classical Rome relevant to their political and national identity. Instead of staging Roman history by adapting it to late-eighteenth-century standards, Warren’s plays “import[ed] Roman heroes into contemporary settings,” conveying the illusion that America’s revolutionary experience may easily bridge the historical and geographical

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gap between New England and the Roman Republic. Thirty years later, her Whig interpretation of early American history turned the Revolution into “a chapter in classical history.” By “Romanizing” the United States, she transformed the classical heritage into a promise to be fulfilled on American shores. Yet her references to Roman annals also allowed her to expose the potential disruption of the classical ideals claimed by her contemporaries.

6 This ambivalent use of classical images and motifs is evidenced in early nineteenth- century depictions of Native Americans. Likening them to Greco-Roman artefacts or historical figures may not be reduced to a legitimizing strategy that “elevates” the figure of the Indian. In Mark Niemeyer’s words, it “contains various fundamental ambiguities at its very heart.” The parallels drawn between Indian tribes and Greco- Roman cultures by William Tudor, Washington Irving, or James Fenimore Cooper may be read in relation to the trope of the “vanishing Indian” and obliquely hint at the potential violence and savagery of the classical world. Such associations undermine totalizing narratives that depicted ancient Greece and Rome as the cradle of Western civilization and question the United States’ claim for this heritage.

7 Ralph Waldo Emerson’s hermeneutics testifies to this ability for literature to rethink and reshape antiquity. The American philosopher challenged the historicity of the Bible while simultaneously drawing on the new perspectives offered by higher criticism, which no longer regarded the Bible as a book requiring no contextualization. Such new developments in biblical scholarship enabled Emerson to explore issues concerning the reading and legibility of texts and turned the exploration of the Ancient Near East into a textual and hermeneutic adventure—and the history of exegesis into “a narrative of emancipation.” Although he considered that the Bible contained a universal truth, Emerson warned his reader that it may not be found in “the idoms of [Jesus’] language” or in the tropes in which it is cloaked. This is particularly visible in the philosopher’s ambivalent attitude towards hieroglyphs and the historicity of the Holy Scriptures. This approach to antiquity ultimately suggests that biblical scholarship does not unveil the historical truth of ancient texts, but makes it possible for the scholar to explore the relevance of such writings to the present day. In such a line of interpretation, meaning may be accounted for in relation to the reader’s experience, its “true location […] ly[ing] not in the texts themselves, but in our ongoing dynamic exchanges with and about them.”

8 Classical antiquity also manifests itself as a space of potentiality in the works Margaret Fuller published after her journey to Italy in 1847. Her discovery of the Eternal City filled her with enthusiasm and led her to write about Rome in utopian terms, which marked a significant change in her vision of both antiquity and utopias: up to that time, not only did she consider classical education to be a “dystopian intellectual environment” of female subjection to male power, but she was also skeptical of the utopian experiments launched by American transcendentalists in the early 1840s. Leslie Eckel analyzes this evolution as a shift from “a space of local experience” to a “world of radical innocence.” Fuller’s transatlantic voyage from the New World to Old Europe ultimately challenges the pattern according to which American shores were the promised land onto which utopian dreams may be projected and turns Rome into a utopian space where neo-Platonic ideals and Europe’s revolutionary present are merged.

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9 As they revisit the world of the Ancients, both Fuller and Dickinson called into question the gendered performances at work in the cultural appropriations of antiquity. Instead of resorting to the classics as a familiar and reassuring set of models, Dickinson explored their subversive and liberating potential. Eric Athenot investigates the politics of such intertextual and intercultural practices. Far from being “an escapist strategy,” allusions to ancient history and literature enabled Dickinson both to undermine patriarchal readings and appropriations of classical culture and to challenge slavery as well as teleological visions of history or Calvinistic tenets. Antiquity in her poems thus turns the “antique” world into an “antic” one.

10 Whereas the use of antiquity by Emerson, Fuller and Dickinson works as an empowering and liberating force, it may also prove to be an uncanny—if not threatening—space which disrupts identities and unveils destructive forms of violence. Stefano Evangelista’s analysis of “The Last of the Valerii” not only explores the ways in which James “draws on archeology to investigate the relationship between the buried secrets of the soil and the hidden desire of the individual mind,” but it also sheds light on the writer’s ambivalent use of the archaeological fantastic, “La Vénus d’Ille” “function[ing] as a buried object from the literary past” both erased and brought to light in the short story.

11 Literary filiations and historical time are also questioned in Melville’s late poetry. It is often assumed that Melville’s verse on Greece is little more than a poetical transcript of the journal entries focusing on his Mediterranean journey in 1846-1847. Yet Bruno Monfort argues that such an approach overlooks the change of perspective one notices between the journal and “Syra.” Although the poem resists Hellomaniac celebrations of Greek antiquity, it may not lend itself to a purely ironic reading concealing a thinly- veiled colonialist bias. On the contrary, the poetic voice frees itself from such depictions and “rescue[s the scene] from the picturesque.” The allusion in the poem to a coin representing Proserpine blurs the line between the aesthetic and economic spheres, and the “spectacle of trade [paradoxically] leads to an ambiguous utopian time ‘when trade was not.’”

12 These seven essays contribute to our understanding of the modes through which the resurfacing of Greco-Roman culture in literary works questions this “sense of kinship with the ancients” (Richards, 1994, 8) as well as the aesthetic filiations between the new nation and its classical models. Instead of attesting to the use of stable and reliable cultural motifs, the circulation of classical antiquity in nineteenth-century American literature manifests itself as a complex intertextual and intercultural network challenging the Americans’ claim for the classical heritage and contributes to shaping American literature as “a crisscrossing set of pathways, open-ended and ever multiplying, weaving in and out of other geographies, other languages and cultures” (Dimock, 2006, 3). As some of the articles demonstrate, the use of antiquity by Americans may not be reduced to a dual relationship, but requires many transatlantic detours: William Tudor’s allusions to Apollo pass through Guido Reni’s Aurora, Melville’s mention of Proserpine is indebted to Winckelmann’s History of Ancient Art, and Emerson’s hermeneutics draws on nineteenth-century Near East archeology and philology.

13 Once it has been defamiliarized, the marmoreal antiquity celebrated by the champions of neoclassicism thus gives way to an unstable realm of experience and lets us glimpse

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at Greco-Roman cultures as a “multifaceted imaginary world” and “a dark continent to be explored, layer by layer2” (Dupont, 2013, 287).

BIBLIOGRAPHY

AGAMBEN, Giorgio, “What is an apparatus?” and Other Essays, translated from Italian by David Kishik and Stefan Pedatella, Stanford, Stanford University Press, 2009.

DIMOCK, Wai Chee, Through Other Continents: American Literature across Deep Time, Princeton, Princeton University Press, 2006.

DUPONT, Florence, L’Antiquité, territoire des écarts. Entretiens avec Pauline Colonna d’Istria et Sylvie Taussig, Paris, Albin Michel, 2013.

HAMILTON, Alexander, James MADISON, and John JAY, The Federalist Papers, New York, Random House, 1982 [1787].

REINHOLD, Meyer, Classica Americana: The Greek and Roman Heritage in the United States, Detroit, Wayne State University, 1984.

RICHARD, Carl J., The Founders and the Classics: Greece, Rome, and the American Enlightenment, Cambridge, Harvard University Press, 1994.

SHALEV, Eran, Rome Reborn on Western Shores. Historical Imagination and the Creation of the American Republic, Charlottesville, London, University of Virginia Press, 2009.

WINTERER, Caroline, The Culture of Classicism: Ancient Greece and Rome in American Intellectual Life, 1780-1910, Baltimore, The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002.

NOTES

1. This is for instance the case in Federalist Paper 9, in which Hamilton alludes to “the petty Republics of Greece” in order to convince his fellow citizens of “the utility of a confederacy” and of a “firm union” (Hamilton, Madison, Jay, 1982, 44, 46). 2. My translation.

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AUTHOR

RONAN LUDOT-VLASAK Professeur Université Lille 3-Charles de Gaulle EA4074 CECILLE

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Mercy Otis Warren, the American Revolution and the Classical Imagination

Eran Shalev

1 A rebellion to free the polity from tyranny was imminent. Cassius and Brutus, the revered heroes of the Roman republic, stood in a narrow street, discussing the precarious state of liberty. Brutus, the stern republican, censured the “insulting soldiers,” who “tread down our choicest rights.” Cassius, Brutus’s co-conspirator to free the commonwealth of the menace of Caesar, responded, “Oh! Brutus, our noble ancestors, who lived for freedom, and for freedom died,” would have been proud to see the young generation’s “generous bosoms flow with manly sentiment.”1 These young republicans would not put their virtuous predecessors to shame; they would react decisively against despotism. Other Romans, Junius and Portius, joined their compatriots Brutus and Cassius, helping them to plan how to stop tyranny. A revolution loomed. It was not ancient freedoms, however, that the classicized protagonists protected. Remarkably, the revolution they participated in, in Mercy Otis Warren’s drama The Adulateur (1772), did not belong to Roman annals. Rather, Warren’s drama “imported” the band of Romans to American shores to lead the resistance to the British crown’s policies in the colonies. The Roman republicans, in short, were about to lead an American Revolution.

2 Warren’s revolutionary plays The Adulateur and The Defeat (published in 1773, one year after The Adulateur) were, like the culture that cultivated them, thoroughly classical. Students of American history have examined closely Greece and Rome’s immense influence on the ideology and political thought of the Revolutionary Era and beyond. Literary scholars have also diligently studied Mercy Otis Warren’s life and prolific writings. By focusing however on the use of the classics in Warren’s popular, if now mostly forgotten, propagandistic dramas, this essay aims to illuminate the remarkable ways in which revolutionaries could understand and establish the relationship between late eighteenth-century American republicanism and classical antiquity. The classics were, as this essay demonstrates, a major element in Mercy Otis Warren’s literary

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rhetoric, and more broadly were imperative to the shaping of revolutionary modes of thought.

Revolutionary American Classicism

3 Decades of fruitful scholarly studies have given us a good understanding of the depth and breadth of the use of the classics in the United States’ formative years.2 Nevertheless, we still lack an understanding of the modes of thought and action through which revolutionaries made the world of ancient Greece and Rome meaningful to their political endeavors. Scholars have already shown the impressive degree to which American patriots absorbed the ideological aspects of classical republicanism.3 Taking the cue of those studies, this essay will attempt to understand how one American woman patriot, namely Mercy Otis Warren (1728-1814), made use of ancient history to classicize her compatriots’ political imagination.

4 The classics were becoming meaningful after 1750 to ever-growing numbers of North Americans, and Greece and especially Rome became particularly important throughout the era of the American Revolution (Rahe, 571). The complex cultural and economic processes that late colonial American societies experienced, from a consumer revolution to the expansion of erudition and a culture of print, enabled the reception and permeation of the classics to a degree that was unthinkable only decades earlier. While the prevalence of the classics in revolutionary culture reflected the contemporary European neo-classical resurgence, the context of that cultural surge in America was different from its European counterpart.4 The severe ideological strains they experienced after 1765 encouraged American leaders and patriots to use the classical world to promote revolutionary ends, and the classics became a medium for legitimizing and constructing reality in terms of a venerated republican past.

5 The American Revolution, which witnessed the unyoking of the British colonies in North America and subsequently the construction of republican governments and federal institutions, enticed American patriots to free the reins of their classical imagination. Patriots constructed their revolutionary present through the histories of Greece and Rome in remarkable ways, in a variety of contexts, and to diverse ends. Revolutionaries referred to the venerated ancients in their private moments and in their public performances. They appealed to the classics for consolation, justification, and validation, as they experienced an intense intellectual and emotional relationship with the narratives and heroes of antiquity. Invoking the inspiring examples of ancient republics was a vital tool in the hands of American orators and writers, who provided the exempla of the virtuous ancients and emphasized their relevance to the American situation. The classics encouraged and roused the Americans collectively before crossing the Rubicon of Independence, and consoled them in private at times when war tried their souls. Charles Lee, the revolutionary general, an Englishman who rallied to the American cause, asserted that Plutarch converted him into an “enthusiastick [sic] for liberty … and for liberty in a republican garb” (quoted in Sellers, 1994, 77).5 Adorning reality “in a republican garb” was common practice in revolutionary America.

6 Revolutionaries found the classics so appealing because they perceived the ancient republics as the origin and embodiment of some of the most powerful ideals they cherished, namely the ideological bundle modern scholarship understood under the

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common framework of “the republican synthesis.”6 Indeed, many revolutionaries envisioned a society and government based on virtue and disinterested citizenship, the main sources of classical republicanism. Unsurprisingly, a powerful ideal of many of the Revolution’s leaders and their followers was not a democracy (a government still associated with the rule of the mob), but rather an organic hierarchy led by patricians who would embody the classical virtues.7 It is thus republican Rome more than any other classical polity that dominated revolutionaries’ political imaginations, Mercy Otis Warren’s included.

7 Even if the reach of the classical world has never attained the universality of the Bible, and the elite and educated would always feel more comfortable within its borders than their social lowers, as the eighteenth century reached its final decades more Americans found themselves participating, both as cultural producers and as consumers, in a wide-ranging, continuous conversation of and through the classics. Thomas Jefferson, for instance, thought that the entirety of the white male yeomanry, which he considered the backbone of American society, consisted of potential classical discoursers. In a letter to St. John de Crèvecoeur Jefferson stated that, “ours are the only farmers who can read Homer” (quoted in Kaminski, 2006, 10). From the other side of the political divide, arch-Tory Jonathan Boucher also had an expansionary view of the prevalence of classical antiquity in America. Boucher, as opposed to Jefferson, deplored the inflammatory influence of antiquity on “an abundance of men” who read “only classics” (quoted in Reinhold, 1984, 25).

8 The foundations of what would become in historian Caroline Winterer’s words a “culture of classicism” during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries were as old as settlement in North America. American elites had always been preoccupied with the classics, their formal education based on a strict and uniform curriculum that stressed Latin, Greek and Hebrew (in this order of importance), derived from the admission requirements of contemporary colleges, of which there were nine in 1776 and 25 by 1800. Students graduating from grammar school would be expected to read Cicero and Virgil in Latin and the New Testament in Greek if they wished to be admitted to college. The years spent in college deepened the familiarity of generations of Americans with antiquity and its languages (Cremin, 1970). The holdings of public and private libraries reflected these cultural interests, and catalogues consistently show between 10 and 12 percent of classical materials, both of originals and of translations (Reinhold, 1984, 29). Yet even Americans who were not privileged enough to enjoy the benefit of years of rigid classical studies could still develop formidable knowledge and a sense of familiarity with the world of antiquity. Men such as George Washington and Patrick Henry, and women such as Mercy Otis Warren, never learned Latin or Greek. Nonetheless, they and many of their likes were able to make the classics relevant to their private and public lives to a remarkable degree.

9 The permeation of the classics during the second half of the eighteenth century went beyond the few thousands of college graduates and traditional elites. The increasing popularity, accessibility and penetration of the classics occurred in a context of rising prosperity, commercialism, and aspirations toward gentility among a broad swathe of Americans.8 New cultural aspirations supported by the proliferation of print and the expansion of the public sphere exposed numerous middling Americans across the colonies to mores and spheres of knowledge that were traditionally out of their cultural reach. Among those areas was the world of antiquity.

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10 The steep rise in the importation of books and multiplication of bookstores, as well as the bustling colonial scene of printers producing a growing number of local newspapers and imprints by the 1770s, provided eager Americans with a new abundance of printed matter, as prints of all kinds became cheaper and more widely available (Hall and Reilly, “Introduction,” in Amory and Hall, 2000, 378).9 With the increasing output of newspapers their importance increased, as by the mid-eighteenth century those prints came to occupy “an essential niche in the social ecology” (Clark, 1994, 8). By and large the newspapers, in which Mercy Warren’s early plays appeared and gained their credit, portrayed the worldview of the middling and upper classes: cultivated, ethnocentric, Protestant, and English. Most subscribers naturally came from these categories, and were concentrated in the cities (Kielbowicz, 1983). However, because of their low cost and frequent appearance newspapers were readily available in homes and in public spaces to many thousands who were not white, genteel (or male). Scholars have thus concluded that newspapers “almost certainly reached well beyond the audience most publishers had in mind” (Clark, 1994, 251). It does thus not seem a long jump “to assume that the information and the knowledge that colonists acquired through the press [...] did indeed influence them.” (Sloan and Williams, 1994, 209) The newspapers, as anyone who even superficially examined a random sample of contemporary prints can tell, abounded with classical quotations, tags, pseudonyms, histories, parallels, and parables. The staggering expansion of print culture was not confined merely to books and newspapers, however. More printed material in the form of pamphlets and broadsides, two main venues for manifesting classical wisdom, came into the view of growing numbers of readers.10

11 Late eighteenth-century Americans developed a “vernacular classical” canon of modern histories of antiquity and translations from the Latin and Greek. Such a growing corpus of translations vastly extended the potential number of participators in the classical discourse to Americans who could read English but were not proficient in Latin or Greek (Winterer, 2007, 26). The backdrop to this sea of literary and literacy- related change was the substantial increase in private and public schooling after about 1750, as schools of all kinds were being opened across the American provinces (Monaghan, 2005, 238). Even elite white women, such as Mercy Otis Warren, who in the mid-eighteenth century still found it hard to benefit from institutional classical education, “began in growing numbers to immerse themselves in the wondrous literary and material vestiges of classical antiquity” during the revolutionary decades. The wives, siblings and daughters of patriots became more noticeable discoursers of the classics as the Revolution progressed, as they became more proficient classicists with their numbers steadily growing (Winterer, 2007, 12, 68). Intelligent and well-bred women such as Mercy Otis Warren were positioned to join the chorus of patriots who mobilized the classics for their political goals.

Mercy Otis Warren, Founding Mother

12 One of a handful of women who can claim the label “Founding Mother,” Mercy Otis Warren, sister to James Otis and wife of James Warren, both notable Patriots, was at the center of the radical anti-British movement in Massachusetts (Roberts, 2005, 37). Warren has begun to attract substantial amount of attention from scholars, who recognize the fascinating perspective that her life as revolutionary and writer may

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provide on her tumultuous times. The “republican synthesis,” and the renewed interest in language and textual representation have made Warren’s work a rewarding subject for historical inquiry.11 Less known than other female contemporaries such as Abigail Adams, her literary accomplishments and political contributions to the Revolution position her in the forefront of scholarly interest, particularly driven by the development of feminist and gender studies academia. Hence, students of women’s history and writing have returned to Warren and her work in the past decades in the hopes of constructing the life of an extraordinary American acting in a revolutionary world.

13 Warren was surely unlike most of her female contemporaries: educated by a tutor along with her brother James, she had consumed the classics of literature, of mythology, and history and subsequently begun to compose poetry. Rosemary Zagarri, among other scholars, reminds us, however, how Warren, a woman who insisted to repeatedly step outside of her feminine “sphere,” cultivated a long-life dependence on men, without overtly challenging feminine subordination (Zagarri, 2015, xv). Other feminist scholars seem to concur that even though Warren was the only woman among a cadre of New England revolutionary patriots, she was probably not a “progressive feminist thinker,” and that her “womanly thinking,” as Nina Baym observes, did not lead her to pacifism, as one might expect (Baym, 1991, 535). Similar studies have further underscored the particular ways in which Warren could employ her gender identity to attain forms of political influence unavailable to men (Davies, 2005, 306-307).12

14 Warren enjoyed a decades-long career as a writer, historian and political thinker in a period in which drama was positioned for the first time to influence and participate in the forefront of political battles in America. Her literary career has thus attracted continued interest from literary historians, who have noted Warren’s fine intellect and wide-ranging correspondence, commended her work as poet and historian, and speculated about her authorial status.13 Her revolutionary “sketches” have attracted particular interest. One authority concluded that Warren’s plays from the 1770s lacked in plot, love interest, and women characters, naming them “conversation pieces.” However, as Sandra Sarkela reminds us, since Warren’s dramatic literature is commonly considered more propaganda than art, “the power and significance of these dramatic sketches has been misunderstood and often underestimated” (Sarkela, 2009). While the debate over the merits of those pieces may continue, little has been written on Warren’s choice to merge Boston and ancient Rome, and her American compatriots with classical republicans.

Warren’s Revolutionary Plays

15 Mercy Otis Warren published The Adulateur and The Defeat during the so-called “quiet period” that followed the Boston Massacre of 1770 and preceded the Tea Party in December 1773. During those years the wind seemed to have blown out of the Revolution’s sails, and Warren wrote those dramatic pieces to revive a dwindling patriotic zeal at a time in which highly propagandistic political dramas emerged as a chief literary tool in the revolutionary war of belles-lettres (Schofield, 1990, 30). Placed alongside actual news and transcriptions of political speeches and assembly resolutions, the dramatized republican manifestoes were particularly potent in achieving their political, rhetorical and literary goals. In spite of their rudimentary

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character, The Adulateur and The Defeat successfully established a frame for understanding the actions of government officials and movement leaders that successfully provided “a context within which the fictional actions and attitudes could be read as ‘real’” (Sarkela, 546).

16 Those revolutionary pieces were in many ways conventional and much the product of their time, and participated in an established eighteenth-century genre, the neo- Roman play. The most famous and popular of neo-Roman plays in the Anglophone world was Joseph Addison’s Cato (1718), which described Cato the Younger’s last hours besieged in Utica by Julius Caesar, and his dilemma before choosing to commit suicide once the Roman republic was doomed. Addison’s Cato was immensely popular in the colonies, and held enormous sway once the revolution commenced. Cato functioned as the quintessential neo-Roman drama, influencing a generation of American playwrights, including Warren, in setting the tone and themes proper for a Whig drama. It was known to shape revolutionaries’ attitude toward public life and provided memorable quotes, from Nathan Hale’s “I only regret that I have but one life to give for my country,” to Patrick Henry’s “give me liberty or give me death.” Another proof of Cato’s popularity came when the Continental Army’s soldiers staged the play, which was George Washington’s favorite, during the brutal winter in Valley Forge (Litto, 1966).

17 As noted above, scholars have pointed out The Adulateur’s and The Defeat’s shortcomings as literary pieces, their lack of development and plot, and concluded that they amounted to “propaganda.” Definitely not complete dramas in a conventional sense, Warren’s sketches were made up of a few speeches or brief dialogues between fictional but often recognizable real-life figures. While there is an agreement about the rhetorical function and literary value of the dramas, little has been devoted to explore their literary lineage as neo-Roman dramas, perhaps because they were in no way orthodox neo-Roman plays. Warren’s plays from the first half of the 1770s did not fashion events from ancient history to cater contemporary tastes and sensibilities, as neo-Roman plays traditionally did. Rather, Warren made a daring move, importing Roman heroes into contemporary settings in order to act in revolutionary Boston. In doing so those dramas did not follow standard literary convention, updating Roman history for eighteenth-century audiences. Her plays rather classicized contemporary, American history. Giving the lead roles of the revolution in America to a cluster of Roman republicans, Warren actually achieved the opposite effect from the standard neo-Roman play: rather than adorning Rome with a Boston-like appearance, Warren chose to Romanize Boston.

18 The Adulateur was Mercy Warren’s first published work in what would be a remarkable career of a woman of letters. Thematically simple, this early dramatic effort seemed to have, as Zoe Detsi-Diamanti has argued, “substantially reproduced the naïve optimism of the American Revolution and infuse the political break with England with moral fervor and idealistic depth” (Detsi-Diamanti, 1998, 9). The plot consisted of a thinly disguised attack on Massachusetts’s governor, the high-Tory Thomas Hutchinson. Issued anonymously, like all of Warren’s revolutionary work, The Adulateur and its successor The Defeat were written in blank verse and published in installments in newspapers, first in Boston and then in various other colonies. Warren set both plays in “Servia,” a subdued province which had been encroached upon by “the adulateur,” its governor Rapatio. Warren’s intentions were anything but to conceal the real-life

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referents of Servia and Rapatio, which readers easily recognized respectively as Massachusetts and Thomas Hutchinson, the colony’s governor since 1771. Rapatio first appeared in The Adulateur reflecting on the Stamp Act while sitting on the remains of his ransacked house and resolving to destroy Servia and its inhabitants in reprisal. The setting was one that no American could misinterpret, referring to Thomas Hutchinson’s ordeal, which involved the destruction of his mansion by a Bostonian mob during the Stamp Act crisis in 1765. Most readers could without difficulty identify deputy- governor Andrew Oliver under the cover of another character, Limpet.

19 With the identity of Warren as the author unavailable to the general readership, most readers would not have been able to easily identify the real-life figures represented by Brutus, Rusticus, Hortensius and the other Romans that Warren resurrected to play the part of the heroic patriots in the familiar Loyalist-controlled Boston. If today we can confidently recognize James Otis Jr. in Brutus, and James Warren in Rusticus, among others, it is only because of our hindsight regarding the author’s identity. Contemporary readers, however, not aware that those eminent Bostonians were the playwright’s brother and husband, could have reasonably recognized any other eminent Patriots in the Roman figures. Alternatively, they could read the plays without making a correlation between the Roman characters and specific Americans at all. Hence, while the Tories, especially the governor and his literary alter-ego, could be easily correlated to the real-life figures they represented, the Roman Patriot leadership remained unattached to specific contemporaries. Throughout the popular plays it were thus Romans that were commanding the American revolutionary movement.

20 Both plays thus demonstrated a significant imbalance in the characters’ nomenclature: while the villains in both dramas were not given Roman names (certainly not a consequence of the lack of Roman scoundrels), and could be easily identified (as was the state of “Servia” as Massachusetts), the identities of the Patriot-Roman heroes remained mostly obscure. Hence, while both dramas’ villains held specific American referents, the protagonists’ identities remained Roman through and through, a fact that increased the effect of actual Romans participating in the American rebellion. Warren’s plays encouraged Americans to imagine fellow patriots as Romans, exhorting them to expel tyranny and restore liberty.

21 Warren’s goal in The Adulateur was to warn citizens of the evil, insidious intentions of the new, native-born governor. The apparent motive of The Defeat, a shorter and even more fragmentary piece than its coarse predecessor, was similar, as the two plays were evidently written while Warren held a similar political as well as literary frame of mind and could arguably be seen as comprising one larger intellectual whole. The Defeat made use of many of the characters introduced earlier in The Adulateur, including Rapatio- Hutchinson. Warren also employed a similar, if not identical, array of the Roman- Bostonians initially introduced in The Adulateur. Warren meant the dramas to mobilize public opinion against Hutchinson and his circle of cronies, and in favor of the Patriot leadership. Both pieces were thus tightly connected, sharing themes and personae dramatis. Both also highlighted the Roman character and virtue of Bostonian patriots and satirized and exposed the alleged threatening (if comically incompetent) corruption of British officials in Massachusetts.

22 In both The Adulateur and The Defeat the American-Romans lamented the death of liberty in Servia, a Latinized name that alluded not only to the servile state of Massachusetts but also to the tyrannical, Roman nature of its enslavement. The dramas

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pitted righteous, freedom loving Roman-Americans against evil, despotic and thoroughly corrupt Tories in a world in which good and evil, Whig and Tory, were unmistakably opposed. Warren rendered Crown representatives, though not yet the Crown itself (that would have to wait until 1776 and Common Sense), as adulating and corrupting Servia’s citizens through “honor, places, pensions,” while the patriot heroes proved immune to such vices. For example, in order to subdue the colony he governed, Rapatio ordered his henchmen to murder innocent civilians, an episode intended to remind readers of the Boston Massacre. Rapatio-Hutchinson’s ultimate goal was, to “throw the state in dire confusion, nay, … [to] hurl it down and bury all ... in one common ruin.” As opposed to the evil, hysterical Tories, the Roman-Bostonians protagonists called in light of such murderous schemes for “cool, sedate, and yet determin’d spirited” action to unravel Rapatio’s plots (The Adulateur, 8, 18).

23 Interestingly, both plays—tragedies by Warren’s own definition—ended optimistically, with the Patriots winning over their Loyalist enemies, but Servia significantly did not gain independence in either play, reflecting the still-limited goals of American resistance during the early 1770s. While at the end of The Adulateur Rapatio captures the high position he sought, in The Defeat he falls from power and is removed from his gubernatorial position.

The Adulateur’s and The Defeat’s Classicism Considered

24 The Adulateur and The Defeat were never staged, due to Boston’s laws against staging plays. In fact, in a city that did not even host a theatre before 1794 Warren most likely had never seen a play performed on stage. Why then would Warren choose dramas to convey and promote her ideas? Not due to a lack of available literary outlets: she could easily have used pamphlets or shorter newspaper essays, the conventional forms to convey revolutionary ideas and sentiments that she would wield throughout her prolific literary career (novels, which would first be published in America only in the late 1780s, were not yet an option). During the early 1770s, however, political dramas emerged as a major literary tool in the war for colonial hearts and minds. Unlike more formal dissertations such as pamphlets or broadsides, dramas, “tragedies” as Warren put it, allowed the author to effectively and powerfully link the American struggle, opposition Whig ideology, and classical republicanism. As the historian Lester Cohen noted, republicanism was “consistent and insistent” in Warren’s writing to the extent that it was the determining factor in the organization and shaping of her political thought (Cohen, 1983, 485-86). By rendering her revolutionary propaganda as classicized dramas, thus becoming the only author to pen such Roman-American plays, Warren was able to unsettle her audience by exposing Hutchinson’s intrigues and the Patriots’ republican virtue in a familiar, yet estranged Bostonian setting that was roamed by Romans.

25 The unusual fictional means of translocating Romans into contemporary Boston had implications beyond the propagandistic and literary. The Roman names with which Mercy Warren chose to adorn Boston’s Patriot leaders were striking enough, but in her attempt to harness Roman history to her cause Warren set out to enrich and deepen her plays’ classicization. Hence, both The Adulateur and The Defeat repeatedly alluded to specific historical events from Rome’s history and culture. For example, Warren named

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Boston’s council members “Senators” at a time when those magistrates had only a Roman connotation (during the 1780s American elected officers would be named “senators” and “congressmen” for the first time, in an act of adulation of their Roman namesakes). The author did not mean, then, that the classical ancients in her dramas would merely ornament an American setting, but rather that they would participate in constructing revolutionary Boston as a city that was Roman as much as it was American.

26 Warren also imposed the Roman narratives for which Brutus, Cassius and the rest of the classical figures in her dramas earned their fame on the American present. The plays repeatedly alluded, for example, to the original act of regicide, which Marcus Junius Brutus and Gaius Cassius Longinus committed upon Julius Caesar. They referred to Servia’s governor Rapatio as a Roman tyrant, either as a Caesar or Nero. Hence, in order to secure Servia’s liberty the virtuous Roman-Americans swore, in a stark reference to Caesar’s extra-legal execution by Roman senators, to “dare, what men can dare, and with our daggers force a way to freedom.” The revolutionaries were then resolved “to die, or set the country free,” as “the shining steel half drawn, its point glittering” (The Group, Act I sc.1). The American Brutus and Cassius were planning, in short, to reenact their historical namesakes’ venerated republican deeds in 44 B.C. (The Adulateur, 20, 19)

27 Warren’s plays did not attempt to represent Americans as the equals of, or comparable to, Roman heroes, as many of Warren’s contemporaries habitually did. Rather, the dramas’ novelty was in transforming Roman republicans into Americans. We will never know whether, had the plays been enacted on stage, the actors would have worn Roman attire to complement their Roman nomenclature. Regardless, the literary, metaphorical togas in which Mercy Warren donned her dramas’ heroes were striking enough.

28 Such merging of classical characters and modern settings achieved more, then, than merely providing Warren with the rhetorical high ground in the unfolding imperial struggle. This Roman presence in America expressed a remarkable attitude toward, and understanding of, history. Hence it would be wrong to interpret the function of the classical world in the plays as mere “intellectual window dressing,” in Bernard Bailyn’s famous (and wrongheaded) words (Bailyn, 1967). As Warren’s dramas virtually transported antiquity into the American present, she was not asking her audience to recognize similarities between Americans and Romans. She was not interested, as other contemporaries were, in exposing correlations between present and past events and individuals. Rather, Warren asked her contemporaries to perceive their leaders as Romans and revolutionary America as Rome. Such understanding of history, in which two societies, separated by millennia, were united, had remarkable implications. Warren’s widely read plays shrank the temporal expanse, eliding for all practical purposes eighteen centuries of history between her own and the Roman revolution. With her Bostonians as Romans fighting on behalf of republican virtue against sinister, despotic and Caesarian forces, the playwright undermined the conventional understanding of time as what separated what was, is, and will be. The battle Americans were encouraged to fight was a cosmic, millennia-old struggle between the forces of tyranny and freedom that began centuries before on the Italian peninsula.

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Warren’s History

29 Mercy Otis Warren’s heavy reliance on the classics to make sense of American history continued throughout her illustrious career that spanned, as her grand-history’s title attests, The Rise, Progress and Termination of the American Revolution (1805). That influential history, which she wrote decades after the her revolutionary tracts and of which President Jefferson ordered copies for all Federal department heads, provides another striking example of the ways in which she constructed, now in retrospect, the relationship of the classical world and the Revolution (Friedman and Shaffer, 1975, 195). Warren’s history was distinct from contemporary American histories on several counts. She was the only woman among a group of gentlemen-historians who produced the early revolutionary histories; she was also the only staunch Jeffersonian- Republican among them, and hers was the only history that was published more than a decade after its completion.14

30 However, Mercy Warren’s history stands out also in its intense construction of the relationship between America and the classics. We have examined Warren’s unique historical outlook through her revolutionary neo-Roman plays, which fused revolutionary contemporaneousness and classical history by placing Roman characters in revolutionary Boston’s Patriot leadership, thus constructing the American Revolution as a stage upon which Roman history was reenacted. Her later history of the Revolution still demonstrated many of the characteristic and peculiar attitudes toward history, particularly toward classical history, her writing manifested years before. Those similarities relate to Lester Cohen’s observation that throughout her decades- long literary career Warren employed a singular republican voice, bespeaking a single persona (Cohen, 1983, 486). Nevertheless, perhaps we should not be surprised that the distinct historical sensibilities that Warren first presented in her plays during the Revolution were somewhat altered in her grand-history, written more than fifteen years after her neo-Roman dramas, and published some thirty years later.

31 In The Rise, Progress and Termination of the American Revolution Warren made the classical ancients once more central to explaining America and its Revolution. Now narrating events that already belonged to the past, rather than writing in their midst and attempting to influence their outcome, Warren understood and projected the recent history of the Revolution as a chapter in classical history. Once more, the Revolution that emerged from Warren’s History seemed in many ways closer to Roman annals than to late eighteenth-century America. In her attempt to construct the past—rather than to mold the present as she had sought to do in her writings from the 1770s—Warren intertwined Roman history in her narration of the American Revolution. Once more, she made an attempt to merge the two historical epochs.

32 Warren’s History consisted of a civic-humanistic narrative that interpreted history to be made up of a set of moralistic and exemplary plots. Like other similar eighteenth- century interpretations, Warren’s metahistorical assumptions lined up with what modern scholars consider Whig interpretations of history, a British eighteenth-century historiographical mode that understood the course of human events as progress toward greater freedom.15 This pejorative label (Whig historians are accused of submitting to the fallacies of teleology and to presentism) definitely suits Warren’s account of liberty’s advance toward its fulfillment in the United States. Warren saw in clear Whig fashion “freedom, long hunted round the globe by a succession of tyrants,”

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to appear “at this [revolutionary] period, as if about to erect her standard in America” (History, I: 126). Indeed, it was Warren’s Whig assumptions, the imminent relation she discerned between the on-going march of liberty from antiquity to the present, that tied so closely the classical and American societies and their similar respective roles in human annals.

33 Warren understood history as a “tragic theatre,” and hence classical antiquity and the American Revolution as acts contributing to a vast drama that unfolded over millennia (History, I: 339). As in other contemporary Whig narratives, Warren detected two antagonistic, ever-battling forces that dominated history: on the one hand there were the lust for power, ambition and avarice, “the leading springs which generally actuate the restless mind,” that lead to luxury and corruption; on the other, and diametrically opposed to the former, stood civic virtue, frugality, and disinterestedness. This dichotomous, civic-humanistic view inevitably led Warren to interpret history as a succession of battles between evil, tyrannical forces and benign, virtuous ideals. She located the historical origins of her account of that momentous battle in the Roman revolution, when the republic was cataclysmically transformed into an empire. Even Caesar’s death could not save the republic, since “specious Augustus established himself in empire by the appearance of justice,” and “the savage Nero shamelessly weltered in the blood of the citizens” (History, I: 3). The Roman republic’s dissolution had cosmic consequences, far beyond the Italian border. “From the dictatorship of Sylla to the overthrow of Caesar, and from the ruin of the Roman tyrant to the death of the artful Cromwell, deception as well as violence have operated to the subversion of the freedom of the people” (History, III: 690). Indeed, ever since Rome’s fall luxury and corruption have caused “all the rapine and confusion, the depredation and ruin, that have spread distress over the face of the earth from … Caesar to an arbitrary prince of the house of Brunswick” (History, I: 2). The march of corruption that Warren artfully articulated, from the Roman Caesars to the British monarchy, was stated boldly, and demonstrated how Britain and Rome shared “the love of domination and an uncontrolled lust for arbitrary” power. These poisonous traits “have been equally conspicuous in the decline of Roman virtue, and in the dark pages of British story. It was these principles that overturned that ancient republic. It was these principles that frequently involved England in civil feuds” (History, I: 5).

34 Where did America fit in this tragic tale of overpowering vices that topple even the greatest of empires? Warren believed that the same despotic powers that Britain inherited from Rome repulsed at least part of the inhabitants of the British Isles and “drove the first settlers of America from elegant habitations and affluent regions of the western world” (History, I: 5). The first settlers’ flight from the continent was thus an ocean crossing by radical Protestants in the search of religious liberty, an attempt to retain in America their civic purity, which stood opposed to the perceived corruption and oppression of the Anglican Church, and to avert political decadence. Unfortunately, Warren believed, “the corrupt principles which had been fashionable in the voluptuous and bigoted courts of the Stuarts soon followed the emigrants” (History, I: 9). Not only did these excesses find a footing in America but also “unhappily for Great Britain and America the encroachments of the crown had gathered strength by time” (History, I: 15). It was this lineage of corruption, from Rome to Britain and America, that eventually “involved the thirteen colonies in the confusion and blood” of the Revolution (History, I: 4).

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35 The Revolution was, according to Warren, America’s attempt to retain its virtue in light of the frightful advance of corruption throughout human annals. In fact Warren depicted the Revolution as an era during which Americans manifested virtue on a scale rarely witnessed in history. The patriots displayed devotion, self-denial, prudence, and industry to an astounding degree. “Happily for America,” its “inhabitants in general possessed not only the virtues of native courage and a spirit of enterprise, but minds generally devoted to the best affections…[bearing] the costly sacrifices of health, fortune and life” (History, I: 98). So commendable were American revolutionaries that there was “no age which bears a testimony so honorable to human nature; as shews mankind at so sublime a pitch of virtue” (History, I: 97). If Britain attempted to corrupt America, America fought back with its admirable stock of virtuous citizens. It was nothing less than astonishing to Warren that through the boycotts that left Americans devoid of many necessities, and the dissolution of government that reduced them almost to a state of nature, their virtue prevailed, and that they “did not feel the effects of anarchy in the extreme” (quoted in Cohen, 1980, 209). While she could not situate actual Romans in a history of the creation of the United States, Warren concluded that American patriots “rivaled the admired heroes of antiquity” (History, I: 93).

36 Warren’s rendition of a Manichaean struggle between luxury and virtue, corruption and disinterestedness, was anything but an original theme. Indeed, it was a mainstay of Whig histories. What was distinct in Warren’s philosophy of history was the way in which she understood Rome and America to be related. Warren, we have seen, had depicted Britain as a debauched Rome and America as a reincarnation of republican Rome for decades before the publication of her History. Her extraordinary conviction that during the trying years of the Revolution America raised her “Caesars and her Catilines, as well as her Brutuses and her Catos” comes to mind (History, I: 212). Lucius Sergius Catilina (108 BC – 62 BC) was arguably the most infamous of Roman conspirators who attempted to subvert the republic, a conspiracy memorably foiled by Cicero’s Catiline Orations in which the orator exposed the villain’s crimes. Unfortunately for the ancient republic, although Catilina failed in his subverting attempts, his legacy paved the way for Julius Caesar who finally dealt the republic its deathblow. Hence, being labeled a “Catiline” was the most denigrating of all epithets, as Caesar, successful in his mischief, was at least remembered as a dynamic and most successful chieftain. Warren, searching for American Catilinas, found her saboteur once again in Thomas Hutchinson, Massachusetts’s last civil governor.

37 We have seen how Warren had already devoted her energies to defame Hutchinson back in the 1770s in The Adulateur and The Defeat, when the American Tory was still in power. The decades that had passed since Hutchinson had sailed to England in 1774, never to return, did not weaken Warren’s venom toward the loyalist governor. In her history she saved no grim words to describe the man she deemed “an adulator.” Placing Hutchinson at the level of the worst villains the world has known, Warren concluded that “few ages have produced a more fit instrument for the purposes of a corrupt court” (History, I: 45). Warren went on to describe Hutchinson’s sinister character: “He was dark, intriguing, insinuating, haughty and ambitious, while the extreme of avarice marked each feature of his character” (ibid.). Like Catilina of old, Hutchinson was driven by the love of luxury and the lust for power. Like Catilina, he attempted to elevate himself to a more powerful position by subverting his country’s constitution. It is no wonder then that Warren accused Hutchinson of urging “the creation of a

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patrician rank,” referring to the Roman elite caste, “from which all officers of government should in future be selected” (History, I: 65). In choosing to describe Hutchinson’s scheme as a patriciate, and not as an aristocrat, Warren demonstrated the extent to which she understood not merely Hutchinson but America’s revolutionary past in general in Roman terms. Hutchinson fulfilled Warren’s prediction that America would find her Catilinas.16

38 While the American populace at large demonstrated laudable collective virtue, their leaders matched those of antiquity. Warren could thus perpetuate the comparison so popular in the revolutionary days, of Benedict Arnold’s march on Canada in the dead of winter of 1775 as equating to “the celebrated march of the renowned Hannibal” (History, I: 143). As in her revolutionary plays, Warren did not shy from complimenting her close circle of Bostonian patriots. Her brother James Otis, for example, demonstrated, among a long string of virtues, “patriotism marked with the disinterestedness of a Spartan” (History, I: 49). While James Otis demonstrated Lacademonian impartiality, the arch-revolutionary Samuel Adams possessed “stern manners, a smooth address, and a Roman-like firmness, united with that sagacity and penetration that would have made a figure in a [ancient] conclave.” As close as could possibly be to an American Cato, Adams “exhibited on all occasions, an example of patriotism […] and virtue honorary to the human character” (History, I: 116). Warren and Adams, who were most likely the Brutus and Cassius of her revolutionary plays, were described once more as American-classical protagonists.

39 A staunch Jeffersonian Republican, Warren was not as adulating as most American authors were toward George Washington, the Federalist father of his country. Nevertheless, she repeated the conventional appraisal the general received for exhibiting “the caution of Fabius,” and “the energy of Caesar” (perhaps intentionally alluding to the problematic symbol of the ruthless Julius Caesar in relation to Washington, although alluding to Caesar’s merits as a battlefield commander and avoiding his crippling shortcomings with relation to the American future Federalist president) (History, I: 128). Even when she described men who were not wholly capable in her opinion to rise to ancient heights, Warren still employed figurative ancient comparisons. Hence, General Lee “emulated the heroes of antiquity in the field, while in private life he sunk into the vulgarity of the clown” (History, I: 160).

40 Warren did not restrict herself to individuals, as she bestowed ancient glory on American institutions as well. Hence, the Continental Congress was, according to Warren, “composed of men jealous of their rights, proud of their patriotism and independence, and tenacious of their honor and probity” (History, I: 264). The states’ representatives demonstrated “the most pointed indignation, against such daring attempts to corrupt their integrity.” We have already seen how Warren repeatedly tied American patriotism and fear of corruption together with the framework of the classical world. In the same vein she described the revolutionary congressmen as holding “genuine amor patriae,” leaving no doubt as to the classical nature of that revolutionaries’ patriotism. Finally, by dubbing the Congress “the Amphyctions of the Western world,” (her emphasis) referring to the ancient Greek league of city-states, Warren sealed her representation of the Congress—the name in itself being a reminder of its classical origins—as an institution to be perceived as a gathering in the revered tradition of ancient leagues (History, I: 82-3).

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41 As in her revolutionary plays, her History represented the Revolution as a drama, and history in general as a “tragic theatre” (History, I: 339). In the historical drama players were assigned recognized roles of past figures, according to which they followed their allotted parts. Warren’s exasperation was evident when Americans did not act according to their ascribed historical role. The retired officers of the Continental Army, who formed the Society of the Cincinnati as the war ended in 1783, provided a case in point. Assuming the name of Cincinnatus, the retired dictator who capitulated and returned peacefully to his oxen and plough, the Cincinnati frustrated Warren as they did not retire “satisfied with their own efforts to save their own country” as their ancient namesake has done. Rather, Warren believed, the American Cincinnati “ostentatiously assumed hereditary distinctions, and the insignia of nobility.” The Cincinnati, she concluded, should have “imitated the humble and disinterested virtues” of their ancient Roman namesake (History, II: 618).

Conclusion: Warren, Classicism, and Revolutionary Historical Consciousness

42 For more than a quarter of a century Mercy Otis Warren interpreted the Founding Era as tied to and fulfilling classical, especially Roman narratives. Her classicized dramas from the 1770s already depicted the American Revolution as hosting Roman republicans, understanding time as a medium through which history could “happen” back and forth. Warren merged the present and the past not only in her public writings, she also did so in the private sphere, underscoring the significance of her remarkable historical consciousness.

43 Warren signed, for example, personal letters as Marcia, assuming the persona of a virtuous Roman matron, while corresponding with her “Roman” friend Portia, better known to most of us as Abigail Adams (Hicks, 2005). As Portia, Cato the Younger’s daughter and Brutus’s wife, Adams, in turn, referred to her husband John in their correspondence as Brutus. It appears that Warren and other revolutionaries were committed in their private lives to Roman role-playing that allowed them to perceive themselves as active participants in the momentous historical events that they believed equaled those of antiquity. In fact, Warren seems to have routinely set what she saw and did within two different contexts: that of eighteenth-century America and that of the classics. As the historian Lester Cohen noted, one discovers in Warren’s writings only one voice, one persona. Her self-fashioning as a Roman matron reveals, then, no interior self that is separable from its public performance. Warren’s personality as Marcia was perfectly consistent with the public presentation of America as Rome reborn.

44 One needs to grasp this peculiar sort of historical consciousness, so deeply at odds with our contemporary sensibilities, in order to fully appreciate how American revolutionaries constructed their worldviews. Warren may have been unique in the way in which she merged in her dramas the late eighteenth-century American present with the historical world of classical antiquity. She was anything but unique, however, in relying on the classics for making sense of the present. Contemporaries habitually transcended the volatile present by understanding the here-and-now through the well- recognized terrain of the history of the classical civilization. We have no indication that contemporaries perceived Warren’s representation of Roman republicans leading the

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American Revolution as odd. To the contrary, citizens of the early United States found it obliging to perceive their revolution as a reenactment of classical narratives. John Adams for example read the history of the Founding Era through the prism of classical history: “change the [Roman] Names,” Adams argued, “and every Anecdote will be applicable to Us” (letter to Benjamin Rush, 4 December 1805).17 In this light, Warren’s depiction of Brutus, Cassius and other Romans as leading the American revolutionary movement was merely the logical extension of a rich contemporary classical imagination.

45 The frame of mind that allowed Warren and others to present their acquaintances as Brutuses and Cassiuses, and their recent history as a reenactment of Roman annals, enables us to fully understand the modes of thought and action that led revolutionary Americans to make the break with Britain, to justify that rupture, and to construct their new, independent republic. Such rich classicization of revolutionary America offers, then, new perspectives for explaining the motives that drove the Revolution, as well as the meanings that patriots and the citizens of the young United States ascribed to their revolutionary deeds.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

ADAMS, Willi Paul, The First American Constitutions: Republican Ideology and the Making of the State Constitutions in the Revolutionary Era, translated by Rita and Robert Kimber, Lanham, Md., Rowman and Littlefield, 2001.

AMORY, Hugh, and David D. HALL, eds., A History of the Book in America: The Colonial Book in the Atlantic World, New York, Cambridge University Press, 2000.

BAILYN, Bernard, The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution, Cambridge, Belknap, 1967.

BAYM, Nina, “Mercy Otis Warren's Gendered Melodrama of Revolution,” South Atlantic Quarterly, 90:3 (1991), p. 531-54.

BREEN, Timothy H., The Marketplace of Revolution: How Consumer Politics Shaped American Independence, New York, Oxford University Press, 2004.

BUTTERFIELD, Herbert, The Whig Interpretation of History, New York, Norton, 1965.

CLARK, Charles E., The Public Prints: The Newspaper in Anglo American Culture, 1665–1740, New York, Oxford University Press, 1994.

COHEN, Lester, “Mercy Otis Warren: The Politics of Language and the Aesthetics of Self,” American Quarterly, vol. 35, n° 5 (1983), 481-98.

EADIE, John William, Classical Traditions in Early America, Michigan, Ann Arbor, 1976.

COHEN, Lester, “Explaining the Revolution: Ideology and Ethics in Mercy Otis Warren’s Historical Theory,” The William and Mary Quarterly, vol. 37, n° 2 (1980), 200-18.

CREMIN, Lawrence A., American Education: The Colonial Experience, 1607–1783, New York, Harper and Row, 1970.

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DAVIES, Kate, Catharine Macaulay and Mercy Otis Warren: The Revolutionary Atlantic and the Politics of Gender, New York, Oxford University Press, 2005.

DETSI-DIAMANTI, Zoe, “The Metaphors of Freedom: Republican Rhetoric and Gender Ideology in Mercy Otis Warren’s Romantic Tragedies, The Sack of Rome and The Ladies of Castile,” American Drama, vol. 8, n° 1 (1998), 1-25.

---, “Languages of Assent: Republican Rhetoric and Metaphors of National Redemption in American Revolutionary Drama,” American Drama, vol. 13, n° 1 (2004), 1-30.

FRIEDMAN, Lawrence J., and Arthur H. SHAFFER, “Mercy Otis Warren and the Politics of Historical Nationalism,” The New England Quarterly, vol. 48, n° 2 (1975), 194-215.

GREENE, Jack P., Pursuits of Happiness: The Social Development of Early Modern British Colonies and the Formation of American Culture, Chapel Hill, University of North Carolina Press, 1988.

HICKS, Philip S., “Portia and Marcia: Female Political Identity and the Historical Imagination, 1770–1800,” William and Mary Quarterly, vol. 52 (2005), 265-94.

HONOUR, Hugh, Neo-classicism, Middlesex, Penguin, 1968.

KAMINSKI, John P., The Quotable Jefferson, Princeton, Princeton University Press, 2006.

KIELBOWICZ, Richard B., “The Press, Post Office, and the Flow of News in the Early Republic,” Journal of the Early Republic vol. 3, n° 3 (1983), 255-280.

LITTO, Fredric M., “Addison’s Cato in the Colonies,” William and Mary Quarterly, vol. 23, n° 3 (1966), 431-49.

MONAGHAN, Jennifer, Learning to Read and Write in Colonial America, Amherst, University of Massachusetts Press, 2005.

PASLEY, Jeffery L., The Tyranny of the Printers: Newspaper Politics in the Early American Republic, Charlottesville, University of Virginia Press, 2001.

POCOCK, J. G. A. The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition, 2nd ed. (1975), Princeton, Princeton University Press 2003.

RAHE, Paul A., Republics Ancient and Modern, Tulsa, University of North Carolina Press, 1992.

REINHOLD, Meyer, Classica Americana: The Greek and Roman Heritage in the United States, Detroit, Wayne State University Press, 1984.

RICHARD, Carl J., The Founders and the Classics, Cambridge, Harvard University Press, 1994.

RICHARDS, Jeffrey H., Mercy Otis Warren, Woodbridge, CT, Twayne Publishers, 1995.

ROBERTS, Cokie, Founding Mothers, New York, Harper Perennial, 2005.

SARKELA, Sandra, “Freedom's Call: The Persuasive Power of Mercy Otis Warren's Dramatic Sketches, 1772-1775,” Early American Literature, vol. 44, n° 3 (2009), 541-68.

SCHOFIELD, Mary Anne, “The Happy Revolution: Colonial Women and the Eighteenth-Century Theatre,” in June Schlueter, ed., Modern American Drama: The Female Canon, Rutherford, Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1990, 29-37.

SELLERS, M. N. S., American Republicanism: Roman Ideology in the United States Constitution, New York, New York University Press, 1994.

SHAFFER, Jason, “Making ‘An Excellent Die’: Death, Mourning, and Patriotism in the Propaganda Plays of the American Revolution,” Early American Literature, vol. 41, n° 1 (2006), 1-27.

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SHAFFER, Arthur H., The Politics of History: Writing the History of the American Revolution, New Brunswick, London, Transaction Publishers, 1975.

SHALEV, Eran, Rome Reborn On Western Shores: Classical Imagination and the Creation of the American Republic, Charlottesville, University of Virginia Press, 2009.

SHALHOPE, Robert, “Toward A Republican Synthesis: The Emergence of an Understanding of Republicanism in American Historiography,” William and Mary Quarterly, vol. 29 (1972), 49-80.

--- ,“Republicanism and Early American Historiography,” William and Mary Quarterly, vol. 39 (1982), 334-56.

SLOAN, William D. and Julie Hedgepeth WILLIAMS, The Early American Press, 1690-1783, Westport, CT, Praeger, 1994.

STUART, Nancy Rubin, The Muse of the Revolution: The Secret Pen of Mercy Otis Warren and the Founding of a Nation, Boston, Beacon, 2008.

TOEWS, John E., “Intellectual History after the Linguistic Turn: The Autonomy of Meaning and the Irreducibility of Meaning,” American Historical Review, vol. 92, n° 4 (1987), 879-907.

WARNER, Michael. “Franklin and the Republic of Letters,” Representations, vol. 16, n° 3 (1986), 110-30.

---, The Letters of the Republic: Publication and the Public Sphere in America in the Eighteenth-Century America, Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University Press, 1986.

WARREN, Mercy Otis, The Adulateur, As is now Acted in Upper Servia, Boston, 1773.

---, The Group: A Farce as Lately Acted, and to be Re-Enacted…In Two Acts, Philadelphia, 1775.

---, Poems, Dramatic and Miscellaneous, Boston, 1790.

---, History of the Rise, Progress and Termination of the American Revolution 2 vols., Lester H. Cohen, ed., Indianapolis, Liberty Fund, 1989.

WILSON, Joan Hoff and Sharon L. BOLLINGER, “Mercy Otis Warren: Playwright, Poet, and Historian of the American Revolution (1728-1814),” in J. R. Brink, ed., Female Scholars: A Tradition of Leaned Women Before 1800, Montreal, Eden, 1980.

WINTERER, Caroline, The Culture of Classicism: Ancient Greece and Rome in American Intellectual Life, 1780-1910, Baltimore, Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001.

---, The Mirror of Antiquity: American Women and the Classical Tradition, 1750-1900, Ithaca, Cornell University Press, 2007.

ZAGARRI, Rosemary, A Woman’s Dilemma: Mercy Otis Warren and the American Revolution, Hoboken, Wiley Blackwell, 2015.

NOTES

1. Warren, The Adulateur, 5-6. The drama was first published in installments in newspapers across the colonies throughout 1772, and, in 1773, published in pamphlet form, from which the quotes hereby are taken. 2. For important works on the classics in America see: Winterer, The Mirror of Antiquity; and also The Culture of Classicism; Richard, The Founders and the Classics. For earlier works that significantly expanded our knowledge of the classics in America see Reinhold, Classica Americana; Eadie, ed.,

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Classical Traditions in Early America. For other important works see: Rahe, Republics Ancient and Modern; and Sellers, American Republicanism. 3. The magisterial analysis of classical republicanism remains Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment. 4. For the extent of the influence of the cult of classicism see Shalev, 2009, chap. 1. For the European context see Honour, Neo-classicism. 5. Seller notes there that Lee’s was “a wholly conventional claim.” 6. For the standard account of the republican synthesis see: Shalhope, “Toward a Republican Synthesis” and “Republicanism and Early American Historiography.” 7. For the changing notions of “democracy” and “republic” in eighteenth-century America see Adams, The First American Constitutions, 96-114. 8. For major works on those processes see Green, Pursuits of Happiness; Breen, The Marketplace of Revolution. 9. See Monaghan, Learning to Read and Write in Colonial America. For the late-eighteenth century American printing scene see Pasley, The Tyranny of the Printers. 10. Michael Warner calls the new culture of print “ideology of print,” in which print and republicanism were integrated (Warner, 1986, 112). For reading and circulation in the new “republican public sphere” see Warner, The Letters of the Republic. See also Amory and Hall, A History of the Book. 11. For a valuable synthesis see Toews, “Intellectual History after the Linguistic Turn.” 12. Davies, Catharine Macaulay and Mercy Otis Warren, 306-7. Scholars such as Zoe Detsi-Diamanti have also emphasized how Warren’s gender interacted with and influenced her republicanism; Detsi-Diamanti, “The Metaphors of Freedom.” Lester Cohen, on the other hand, pointed out that Warren’s notion of the equality of the sexes and her republicanism made her predict a time when men and women would be judged by the standard of “virtue alone” (Cohen, 1980, 493). Others pointed out that Warren was convinced that women and men were equal in intelligence and that all people should have an education, and yet seems to have never envisioned a society in which women could actively engage in public life. In order to function in male-dominated intellectual circles, Warren seemed to have thrived on praise from a close circle of male contemporaries and resorted to a variety of “feminine wiles” (Wilson and Bollinger, 1980, 178, 162). For a popular biography of Warren, see Stuart, The Muse of the Revolution. 13. For the role of theatre and drama in the American Revolution, see Shaffer, “Making ‘An Excellent Die’” and Desti-Diamanti “The Metaphors of Freedom.” The most authoritative literary biography of Warren is Richards’ Mercy Otis Warren, which includes an extensive, if by now somewhat dated, bibliography of the scholarship on Warren. 14. Warren finished writing her history by 1791 but published it only in 1805, most likely laying it aside because of “the virulence of party spirit” of the Federalist Era. The other woman historian writing at that time was Hannah Adams. Adams however wrote mostly religious, not political, histories (quoted in Shaffer, 1975, 149-150). Reading the parts of Warren’s history pertaining to the pre-1789 years does not reveal, according to Friedman and Shaffer, her Republican stance (Freidman and Shafer, 1975, 206). 15. See Herbert Butterfield’s classic, The Whig Interpretation of History. 16. Years later Warren expressed once more a similar view of historical reoccurrence when she predicted that “America has many a worthy name / Who shall, hereafter, grace the rolls of fame. Her good Cornelias / and her Arias fair / Who, death, in its most hideous forms, can dare” (in Warren, Poems, Dramatic and Miscellaneous, 209-10). 17. “From John Adams to Benjamin Rush, 4 December 1805,” Founders Online, National Archives (http://founders.archives.gov/documents/Adams/99-02-02-5110 [last update: 2016-03-28]).

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ABSTRACTS

Students of American history are aware of Greece and Rome’s immense influence on the ideology and political thought of the Founding Era, while scholars of women studies acknowledge Mercy Otis Warren’s importance as a “Founding Mother” of the American republic. This essay focuses on Warren’s remarkable use of the classics in her popular, if now forgotten revolutionary dramas, and in her magisterial history of the Revolution written years later. In her works Warren put to use a set of powerful and unique rhetorical modes for incorporating and merging America and the classical world. The frame of mind that allowed her to present acquaintances as Brutuses and Cassiuses, and American history as a reenactment of Roman annals, enables us to better understand the modes of thought and action that propelled the American Revolution. Focusing on Warren’s rich classicization of revolutionary America offers, then, new perspectives for explaining the meanings that patriots and the citizens of the young United States ascribed to their revolutionary deeds and their young republic. The historical consciousness that underlies Warren’s literary work suggests that at moments the American Revolution was presented and seen, and should thus be understood, as a Roman revolution.

Tandis que les chercheurs en histoire américaine ont bien conscience de l’influence considérable que la Grèce et la Rome antiques ont exercée sur les modèles idéologiques et la pensée politique de la jeune république américaine, les spécialistes d’histoire des femmes ont souligné le rôle de « mère fondatrice » joué par Merci Otis Warren. Cet article explore les usages singuliers des classiques par Warren dans son théâtre révolutionnaire – aujourd’hui oublié, mais fort populaire en son temps – et dans l’histoire magistrale de la Révolution qu’elle rédige une trentaine d’années plus tard. Dans ses écrits, Warren a recours à des procédés rhétoriques originaux et efficaces qui lui offrent la possibilité de confondre l’Amérique et le monde classique. Le paradigme culturel qui lui permet d’ériger ses proches en autant de Brutus ou de Cassius et de faire de l’histoire américaine une répétition des annales romaines rend possible une meilleure compréhension des modes de pensée et d’action qui servirent de moteur à la révolution américaine. L’étude de cette classicisation de l’Amérique révolutionnaire ouvre ainsi de nouvelles perspectives en mettant en lumière le sens que les patriotes et les citoyens de la jeune nation donnaient à leurs actes et à la république. La conscience historique qui sous-tend l’œuvre littéraire de Warren suggère ainsi qu’à certains moments, la révolution américaine fut présentée et perçue comme une révolution romaine – et doit donc aussi être comprise comme telle.

INDEX

Mots-clés: Révolution américaine, néoclassicisme, Merci Otis Warren (1728-1814), théâtre révolutionnaire, écrits de la jeune Amérique, conscience historique Keywords: American Revolution, neo-classicism, Mercy Otis Warren (1728-1814), revolutionary drama, early American history writing, historical consciousness

AUTHOR

ERAN SHALEV Haifa University

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From Savage to Sublime (And Partway Back): Indians and Antiquity in Early Nineteenth- Century American Literature

Mark Niemeyer

“I may challenge the whole orations of Demosthenes and Cicero, and of any more eminent orator, if Europe has furnished more eminent, to produce a single passage, superior to the speech of Logan, a Mingo chief, to Lord Dunmore, when governor of this state.” —Thomas Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia (1785)

Introduction

1 It is generally recognized that positive—and romanticized—images of Native Americans began to make their appearance in literary works of the United States around the middle of the second decade of the nineteenth century. As Benjamin T. Spencer points out, “In almost any version of a national culture before 1815 he [the Indian] assumed an unheroic and antinational guise” (Spencer, 1957, 51). Yet things changed relatively quickly after that time, and, in the period between the War of 1812—which provided a strong nationalistic catalyst for this phenomenon—and the Civil War, as Robert F. Berkhofer, Jr. notes, “the Indian figured prominently in the higher forms of American art and literature” (Berkhofer, 1979, 86).1 And this prominence was often, though certainly not always, in the form of positively portrayed representatives of Native Americans. The new image was primarily the result of two trends: cultural nationalism and Romanticism. As Berkhofer also explains: “If cultural nationalism prompted American authors and artists to turn to the Indian and the forest for subject matter, the

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importation of romanticism from Europe made possible the elevation of this subject matter to literary and artistic respectability” (Berkhofer, 1979, 86).2 It is already somewhat ironic, of course, that an artistic movement imported from Europe should be adopted by American authors motivated by cultural nationalism. Doubly ironic is the fact that one of the ways in which the eminently American subject of Indians, seized on by writers trying to create a distinctive and independent literature, was romanticized and simultaneously legitimized for use as a worthy subject through, in part, parallels made between them and heroes, gods, statuary and, especially importantly, great orators of (European) Antiquity.3 More generally, almost any link that could be established between Indians, on the one hand, and the Ancient World, on the other, seemed to help justify the appearance of Native Americans in the nascent “home literature.” And this strategy was, in fact, often adopted by American writers of the first half of the nineteenth century, including the two most successful authors of that period, Washington Irving and James Fenimore Cooper, whose works I will return to later.

2 To begin with, it should be pointed out that two additional paradoxes are often embedded in the comparisons between Indians and Antiquity. First, if these links were generally motivated by an attempt to “elevate” Indians and bring them alive in literature, they also frequently had the simultaneous consequence of identifying Native Americans with a distant and disappeared, or “vanished,” civilization, just at the moment when the Indians’ own existence was being increasingly threatened by encroaching whites. Second, if the comparisons between Indians and Antiquity generally served to give an aura of dignity and sophistication to Native Americans (and thus, again, legitimizing them as worthy symbols of the recently independent United States), in some cases the associations seem to serve to bring the Ancient World down to the level of “savagery,” suggesting that both civilizations, romantically perceived as “primitive,” were somehow “below,” or at least fundamentally different from, contemporary American society, a view running counter to the prevailing veneration of Ancient Greece and, especially, Rome as providing some of the best examples of the highest levels attainable by republican government and human civilization, more generally.

I. The Origins of the Association between Indians and Antiquity

3 The association between Indians and the Greeks and Romans (and occasionally other peoples) of Antiquity did not, however, spring up overnight, as it were, with the upwelling of nationalistic sentiment associated, to a large extent, with the War of 1812 and the beginnings of the American Romantic movement in literature, which started at about the same time. Indeed, almost immediately after the period of first contact, Europeans began comparing American aborigines to the peoples of Antiquity. As Berkhoffer explains, comparison between Europeans and Native Americans was the very basis for the descriptions and understanding of the Indian in the first place. Casual comparison of the Indians with ancient peoples occurred in most accounts of Indian beliefs and behavior as a device to make the unfamiliar known to readers and listeners in terms of the familiar found in the Bible, the classics, or other travel literature already known to the audience. The systematic analysis of parallel cultural traits

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and language was basic to the method of determining Indian origins at the time. […] Likewise, the systematic explication of correspondences between Indian customs and myths and those of the Greeks and Romans by French and English writers began shortly after settlement of North America by those nations. (Berkhofer, 1979, 45-6)

4 By the early eighteenth century, the idea that such comparisons were legitimate had more or less been taken for granted, as it was in the influential work of the Jesuit Joseph Lafitau, Mœurs des sauvages amériquains [sic], comparées aux mœurs des premiers temps (Customs of the American Savages Compared with the Customs of Antiquity), first published in 1724. As Lafitau explains in his introduction, I was not satisfied with knowing the character of the Savages and learning about their customs and practices. I looked for the vestiges of remotest Antiquity in these practices and customs. I carefully read the earliest Authors who have treated in their works the Customs, Laws and Usages of the Peoples about whom they had knowledge. I compared these Customs with each other, and I confess that if the Authors of Antiquity provided illumination that supported certain happy conjectures concerning the Savages, the Customs of the Savages also provided illumination that helped me more easily understand and explain several things described by the Authors of Antiquity. (Lafitau, 1724, 3-4, my translation)4

5 Further along in the introduction, Lafitau asserts, “In the description of the Customs of the [Native] Americans, the parallel with the Ancients is sustained throughout because there is not one single aspect of their customs that doesn’t have a corresponding example in Antiquity” (Lafitau, 1724, 18, my translation).5 Many thinkers of the eighteenth century (and earlier) were especially fascinated by the parallels to be made between American Indians and the peoples of Antiquity because they had the impression that, through the Indians, Europeans were able to see themselves as they had been in the past. They felt that they had discovered, in fact, a sort of time machine that allowed them direct access to the secrets of (western) humanity’s earlier existence. As Adam Ferguson, a professor at the University of Edinburgh and prominent figure of the Scottish Enlightenment, asserted in his Essay on the History of Civil Society, first published in 1767: It is in their [the American Indians’] present condition, that we are to behold, as in a mirrour, the features of our own progenitors; and from thence we are to draw our conclusions with respect to the influence of situations, in which, we have reason to believe, our fathers were placed. […] If, in advanced years, we would form a just notion of our progress from the cradle, we must have recourse to the nursery, and from the example of those who are still in the period of life we mean to describe, take our representation of past manners, that cannot, in any other way, be recalled. (Ferguson, 1767, 122)

6 The many parallels made between Indians and the peoples of Antiquity formed an integral part, in fact, in the development of the myth of the Noble Savage, though, as already noted, the myth took root much earlier in Europe than in America (see footnote 2).

II. Early Comparisons in American Writings between Indians and the Ancient World

7 One of the earliest and most famous examples in the newly formed United States of the more ideological uses of the myth of the Noble Savage, which includes a favorable

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comparison between Indians and figures of Antiquity, can be seen in Thomas Jefferson’s Notes on the State of Virginia (1785)6 as part of his effort to defend Native Americans against European charges that they (along with pretty much everything else in the New World) existed in a degenerate state.7 Jefferson praised their bravery and made a bold, not to say jingoistic, comparison between the orations of Demosthenes and Cicero— who, in eighteenth and nineteenth century America, were “legendary orators and widely considered, respectively, Athens’s and Rome’s greatest speakers” (Shalev, 2009, 125)—and a speech made by an Indian chief to Lord Dunmore, the last colonial governor of Virginia: Of their [the Indians’] bravery and address in war we have multiplied proofs, because we have been the subjects on which they were exercised. Of their eminence in oratory we have fewer examples, because it is displayed chiefly in their own councils. Some, however, we have of very superior lustre. I may challenge the whole orations of Demosthenes and Cicero, and of any more eminent orator, if Europe has furnished more eminent, to produce a single passage, superior to the speech of Logan, a Mingo chief, to Lord Dunmore, when governor of this state. (Jefferson, 1984 [1785], 187-8)

8 Logan’s speech itself, at least as it is reported by Jefferson, is a heartfelt defense of the chief’s character and act of vengeance, as well as a bold statement of defiance, delivered after his family had been massacred by a group of whites, led, according to Logan, by the British Colonel Cresap, seeking retribution for a previous robbery and murder that neither Logan, who had been on friendly terms with the colonists, nor his family had anything to do with. In fact, a small war had ensued and the several tribes that had allied themselves against the whites were finally defeated and sued for peace, but Logan refused to take part in such supplication.8 As far as Jefferson’s comparison of the Mingo’s words with those of two of the greatest orators of Antiquity, as Marjorie N. Murphy notes, it perhaps wasn’t as exaggerated as all that: Cicero would have approved: his canons of rhetoric are all observed in Logan’s short speech. The Indian concisely told of treachery in the face of friendship, moving the idea along with his power of memory so the listener cannot forget. His semantic connectives provide contrasts as he speaks of love, then treachery. The use of repetition in parallelism, the shift in voice, and the blunt frankness are Indian qualities. (Murphy, 1970, 361)

9 From a more thematic point of view, Logan’s speech can also be seen as recalling Cicero’s Catiline orations, which offered an eloquent denunciation of Lucius Sergius Catilina’s conspiracy to overthrow the Roman Republic, a parallel that would no doubt have suggested itself to late eighteenth-century and early nineteenth-century Americans steeped in classical history.9 Just as Cicero had exposed Catiline’s crimes, the Indian chief’s eloquence revealed the barbarity and injustice of Cresap. And the fact that Cresap was a British officer allowed Jefferson to suggest a further comparison by casting him into the role of representative of an oppressive non-democratic power and Logan into that of defender of (American) liberty, thus providing an example of the sometimes relatively subtle role of cultural nationalism in the transformation of the image of the Indian. Finally, and I will come back to this point later, since Logan is portrayed as the last surviving member of his family, the text also offers a relatively early example of the trope of the “vanishing Indian.” As Arnold Krupat states, Logan’s speech is also a “farewell,” which functions, in part, “as a justification for dispossessing the ‘savages’ of the lands they soon will not need” (Krupat, 2012, 66).

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10 While far from being the only speech of an Indian held up for public admiration at the time, Logan’s oration was, according to Robert A. Ferguson, “the most famous Native- American utterance” (Ferguson, 1994, 510), and it clearly helped to spread a positive image of Indians as comparable to heroic and well-spoken figures of Antiquity throughout the United States and beyond. Indeed, besides the notoriety given to this particular oration by its appearance in a work by such a prominent citizen as Jefferson, who would be elected president of the United States in 1800, by the early nineteenth century Logan’s speech had been reprinted numerous times, notably in two of the most popular school textbooks of the early nineteenth century, Noah Webster’s An American Selection of Lessons in Reading and Speaking and Caleb Bingham’s The American Preceptor.10 While these reprintings did not include Jefferson’s comparison of the speech to the orations of Demosthenes and Cicero (though Notes on the State of Virginia is clearly their source11), they did implicitly recognize the supposed quality of Indian eloquence by its very inclusion in these collections meant to provide models of effective rhetoric while at the same time instilling virtue in the minds of their young readers. Furthermore, there is, in fact, an implied comparison between Logan’s speech and classical oratory (besides the overt one given by Jefferson) in both Webster’s and Bingham’s works since the two books also include a selection of great speeches from Antiquity. In An American Selection of Lessons in Reading and Speaking, for example, the Mingo chief’s words are immediately followed by the “Speech of a Scythian Ambassador to Alexander” (Webster, 1802, 68), and other examples of classical oratory such as an excerpt from “Cicero’s Oration Against Verres” (158-61) and the “Speech of Publius Scipio to the Roman Army, before the Battle of the Ticin” (164-6) are also included. The American Preceptor, too, includes several examples of eloquence from the Ancient World, including some of the same ones found in Webster’s work such as the “Speech of a Scythian Ambassador to Alexander” (Bingham, 1811, 109-10). In another of Bingham’s school texts, The Columbian Orator,12 designed as a sequel to The American Preceptor, there is a piece entitled “Speech of an Indian Chief, of the Stockbridge Tribe, to the Massachusetts Congress, in the Year 1775” (Bingham, 1800, 54-55),13 and, once again, this example of eloquence appears amidst a host of others, including several by classical figures, such as the “Speech of Paulus Emilius to the Roman People, as He Was about Taking the Command of Their Army” (36-38), an “Extract from Cato’s Speech before the Roman Senate, after the Conspiracy of Catiline” (48-49) and “Socrates’ Defence before His Accusers and Judges” (122-5). As these examples suggest, by the early nineteenth century, readers were being made accustomed to the idea that Native Americans were comparable, at least in the field of oratory, to the great figures of Antiquity, whose popularity, for their part, was related to the widespread phenomenon of Americans—in the years before, during and after the Revolution—seeing their country as characterized by classical virtues and representing, more specifically, the birth of a new Rome.14

III. William Tudor and the Encouragement of the Literary Use of Indians

11 Positive portrayals of Indians, in fact, often went beyond the parallels made with classical orators and other major figures of the Ancient World found in works like Notes on the State of Virginia and early school textbooks, and it wouldn’t be long before literary

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writers in the United States began making frequent use of various—very often idealized —images of Native Americans that also linked them with Antiquity. They were directly encouraged to do so, in fact, by cultural nationalists like William Tudor15 who, in 1815, published an address in The North American Review in which he rejected the notion that “one reason why we have not produced more good poems, was owing to the want of subjects” (Tudor, 1815, 14). Instead, he offered a long list of topics he considered appropriate for treatment by the nation’s authors. These suggestions include early colonial history, the beauties of the American landscape, distinctive native fauna, such as the beaver, deer and eagle, and the “human actors on this theatre” with “their history replete with interest and romantick adventure” (18). If Tudor begins by briefly mentioning the English and French and their vast empires and centuries of conflict on the North American continent, he quickly moves on to “the Aborigines, who became the allies of these nations and the most efficient part of their force” (19), and Native Americans become, in fact, one of his central themes. But at this still relatively early period, Tudor was aware that Indians did, in fact, need to be defended as a fit topic for American literature. “Before speaking more particularly of them,” he notes, “it will be necessary to deprecate the prejudices naturally entertained on the subject” (19). His strategy, to a large extent, is to claim that while many of the surviving Indians were but a mere shadow their former selves, those of earlier times were of a truly noble nature, comparable to the most admirable characters of the Ancient World: “They possessed so many traits in common with some of the nations of antiquity, that they perhaps exhibit the counterpart of what the Greeks were in the heroick ages, and particularly the Spartans during the vigour of their institutions” (19). Tudor’s contrasting of Indians of the present day and former times makes use of a relatively common strategy that doubly qualifies the Native Americans as a suitable subject for a (Romantic) national literature, but which did not bode well for contemporary Indians as real human beings. Not only are the Indians of earlier periods of North American history presented as being like the great figures of Antiquity, but, conveniently enough, they, too, have disappeared (or are disappearing): sudden civilization at least, has been shewn to be impossible; they diminish and waste before its progress, like snow before the vernal influence. The sublime allegorical painting of Guido, in which Apollo encircled by the hours, is chasing night and her shadows over the surface of the globe, might almost represent the extinction of our savage precursors before the dawn of science and cultivation. (19-20)

12 This clear evocation of the trope of the “vanishing Indian,” combined with another reference to Antiquity, here the image of Apollo, provides a complex link between Native Americans and the Ancient World. Here, in fact, Tudor makes Apollo representative of advancing white civilization, while the Indians figure as the disincarnated “night and her shadows” chased away by the Greek god of light (among other things). This reference thus casts the Indians into a mythically distant past since it suggests that they were already in the process, at least, of vanishing in the days of Apollo. Furthermore, the fact that Tudor’s reference to Antiquity passes through Guido Reni’s early seventeenth-century painting (Aurora) adds another layer of distancing and aestheticizing, which intensifies the unreal and “vanished” dimension of the Indian. Indeed, this passage provides an encapsulated vision of just why the Indians could so easily, in the end, be transformed into perfect subjects for the fledgling American literature: they are distinctively American (and thus appropriate for the uses of cultural nationalism in the creation of a uniquely native literature); they are linked

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with Antiquity, here mythology, as well as, in this case, with a recognized masterpiece of European art (and thus legitimate for high literary purposes); and they are largely part of the past, or at least presented as being part of the past (and thus cloaked in the mists of time, making them a fitting theme for Romantic literature, which often favors subjects from history or mythology that can only be recalled through an appeal to the imagination).16

13 Tudor comes back to the comparison between Native Americans and various aspects of Antiquity again and again in his address. He asserts, for example, that “The solemn councils of the Sachems, the war-dance which preceded their expeditions, like the Pyrrhick Dance of antiquity, was full of terrifick expression” (21). And, perhaps most significantly, Tudor suggests that the exploits of the Indians are fully equal to those recounted in—nothing less than—the Iliad and the Aeneid: Many of their achievements were performed by a few or sometimes only one or two individuals. These were savage in their character, and not admitted now in the practice of war among civilized nations; and yet such actions may be rendered highly interesting in poetry. What was the nocturnal excursion of Diomed and Ulysses in the 10th book of the Iliad, in which they slew Rhesus, king of the Thracians, with many of his officers in their sleep, and brought away his beautiful horses? what was the enterprise of Nisus and Euryalus in the 9th book of the Æneid, in which they murdered so many in their sleep, and in which Euryalus, by taking from one of them his splendid helmet and belt was afterwards discovered by the moon gleaming on its polished surface, and the death of both occasioned by this spoil? These episodes are two of the finest in those immortal Epicks, yet it is only to the genius of Homer and Virgil, that they are indebted for more than may be found in several Indian adventures. (21-2)

14 Tudor’s “elevation” of the Indians to the level of heroes of classical literature could also, of course, be seen, in this particular case at least, as a “lowering” of those same figures of Antiquity to the level of “savages.” Since if thinkers like Adam Ferguson saw American Indians as a reflection in a mirror of their own ancestors of the Ancient World, the image they are ostensibly gazing at is still, nonetheless, that of the aborigines of North America. And though it is clear that Tudor’s overt agenda in his address is to confer dignity on the native inhabitants of his country, there remains an implicit question, which comes very close to the surface in the preceding quotation, as to what extent the achievements of the heroes of the Ancient World could be seen, as Tudor puts it, as “savage in their character, and not admitted now in the practice of war among civilized nations.”

15 Like Jefferson, Tudor also highlights Indian eloquence as an important attribute “raising” them again, so to speak, to the level of the ancients. He cites, for example, the remarks of Cadwallader Colden, the first colonial representative to the Iroquois Confederacy, concerning an Indian orator named Decanesora: “His person was tall and well made, and his features to my thinking, resembled much the busto’s of Cicero” (25). 17 Tudor follows this quotation with the remark: “The speeches given by Homer to the characters in the Iliad and Odyssey, form some of the finest passages in those poems. The speeches of these Indians only want similar embellishment, to excite admiration” (26). Unlike the confident assertion of Jefferson concerning the quality of Logan’s oration, Tudor does state here that a literary touch would be necessary to “elevate” Indian speeches to the level of Homer, since they are in “want” of “embellishment.” But Homer, of course, “embellished” the speeches in his works, and thus the somewhat equivocal mirroring of heroes of Antiquity and Native Americans previously noted

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appears here once again. It is the new country’s rising authors, and not Native Americans, after all, whom Tudor’s address is meant to recruit, inspire and guide, and who will have the essential role of the new national Homers. A similar example of this sort of ambiguity appears just after the passage quoted above, where Tudor gives a long sample of an oration by the Indian Garangula to the governor of Canada. He compares it to “the celebrated message of the Scythians to Alexander in Quintius Curtius,” a speech, it will be recalled, which appeared in both Webster’s An American Selection of Lessons in Reading and Speaking and Bingham’s The American Preceptor along with Logan’s celebrated words. Garangula’s oration, Tudor concludes, “affords materials, which, if they were drest in the style of the great Roman Historians, would vie with any that they have transmitted to us; indeed, its figurative language, pungent sarcasm, and lofty tone can hardly be surpassed” (28). Once again, the Indians provide a worthy subject, but it is American authors who will transform this useable past into a distinctive national literature.

16 Finally, it should be noted that if Tudor, like many literary nationalists of his day, was primarily thinking of America’s coming national literature in terms of epic poetry or grand presentations of national history, that did not stop authors of literary prose works from making use of the relatively widespread suggestion, present either explicitly, in writings like Tudor’s, or implicitly, in works like Jefferson’s, Webster’s or Bingham’s, that a comparison between Native Americans and heroic figures of Antiquity could be a useful and, indeed, fertile element in the literature of the United States. Among many others, the two most successful American authors of the early decades of the nineteenth century, Washington Irving and James Fenimore Cooper, did just that.

IV. Washington Irving: Early Linking of Indians and Antiquity in American Literature

17 Washington Irving was one of the first American literary writers to offer positive, and often romanticized, portrayals—sometimes indeed strong defenses—of Native Americans. Indeed, while there is some debate about how the author’s attitude towards Indians did or did not evolve over the course of his career, Jason Almus Russell’s assessment that “Irving acted as the literary defender, interpreter, and recording historian of the American Indian, as far as he had a knowledge of his history, or came into personal contact with the aborigine” (Russell, 1931, 194), though somewhat dated, still seems relatively fair, as least as concerns his earlier writings. Indeed, as far back as 1809, in A History of New York, Irving included an entire chapter criticizing the harsh treatment of the Indians by whites, through an ironic and sharply sarcastic defense of the whites’ depredations. As Per Seyersted writes, “the author exposes, with an uncommon harshness, the particularly unpalatable truth about the white settlers’ genocide of the original Americans and the concomitant seizure of their lands” (Seyersted, 1974, 17). Irving, Seyersted also points out, “often assumes the mask of a thoroughly bigoted white person, a speaker who sees so few positive qualities in the natives that he feels he has the right to exterminate them” (Seyersted, 1974, 20). At one point, Irving notes the Indians’ apparent indifference to European notions of wealth, money and ambition. He then ironically comments:

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Now all these peculiarities, though in the unenlightened states of Greece, they would have entitled their possessors to immortal honour, as having reduced to practice those rigid and abstemious maxims, the mere talking about which, acquired certain old Greeks the reputation of sages and philosophers;—yet were they clearly proved in the present instance, to betoken a most abject and brutified nature, totally beneath the human character. (Irving, 1981 [1809], 414)

18 The tone, of course, is not too surprising, given that the work is a burlesque history of the Dutch colonial period in New York, but the passage does provide at least one early example in Irving’s writings, and in American literature more generally, of Indians being defended, in part, through a comparison with the ancients, in this case, Greek philosophers, most likely the Cynics, who, in an effort to promote virtue, advocated the renouncement of worldly goods. However, as in some of the passages by Tudor examined above, Irving’s comments cut in more than one direction. He “elevates” the Indians by comparing them favorably to Greek thinkers, even suggesting the Indians are superior since they actually practice what some of the ancients, according to Irving, only talked about. This comparison, however, seems to have the simultaneous effect of “lowering” the sages of Antiquity, whom Irving describes as living in “the unenlightened states of Greece” and appearing as hypocrites, who don’t practice what they preach. But the passage’s ambiguous message could also be read as presenting the values of both the Ancient World and Native Americans as relatively superior, in any case, to those of the Europeans of the early colonial period and, no doubt, of the Americans of Irving’s own time.

19 It was in Irving’s sketch, “Traits of Indian Character,” first published in the Analectic Magazine in February 1814 and later incorporated into The Sketch Book (1820), that he produced one of American literature’s first clear and strong presentations of Indians in a positive and idealized light, linked, in part, with Antiquity. The sketch’s epigraph, and this should by now come as no surprise, is a short excerpt from Logan’s speech as reported by Jefferson, though Irving does not identify his source. Indeed, by 1820,18 he had no need to do so since the oration was familiar to just about every American. And apart from the epigraph, Irving praises Indian eloquence several times in this piece, noting, for example, that in councils organized to decide what sort of response should be made to injuries inflicted on a member of the tribe, “Eloquence and superstition combine to inflame the minds of the warriors. The orator awakens their martial ardour, and they are wrought up to a kind of religious desperation, by the visions of the prophet and the dreamer” (Irving, 1981 [1814, 1820], 1005). Here it should be noted, however, that in highlighting the combination of eloquence and superstition, Irving seems to establish a distinction between the logic-based Ciceronian rhetoric of Antiquity, so often seen as a model in late eighteenth-century and early nineteenth- century America, and Indian oration, a distinction which Jefferson, for his part, did not make. Irving then follows his general comment with a “specimen of Indian eloquence” (1006), delivered by a sachem whose mother’s tomb had been violated by whites. The author then makes a more direct link with Antiquity, just afterwards, when he notes that “The Indians had also the superstitious belief, frequent among barbarous nations, and prevalent also among the ancients, that the manes of their friends who had fallen in battle were soothed by the blood of the captives” (1007). The use of the word “manes” (whose primary definition is “the deified spirits of the ancient Roman dead honored with graveside sacrifices” [Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary, 2008, 755]) links the Indians with Antiquity, as does the word “ancients,” though the evocation of

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“superstitious belief” adds an ambiguity to Irving’s remarks, suggesting, once again, something “uncivilized” about both the Indians and the Ancients. One explanation, however, for this ambiguity in the parallels made between Indians and Antiquity, by both Irving and Tudor, can be found in their link with a Romantic outlook, which tended to cast a positive light on “primitive” peoples, whose “uncivilized” characteristics were part of what made them attractive as subjects for literature. Continuing the comparison with Antiquity, later in the sketch, Irving notes that “No hero of ancient or modern days can surpass the Indian in his lofty contempt of death, and the fortitude with which he sustains its cruelest infliction”(1009). The most significant example in “Traits of Indian Character,” however, comes near the end, when Irving recounts the tragic story of the Pequot War of the 1630s, which resulted in the almost total annihilation of the tribe. As some of the last remaining Indians are surrounded by their Puritan adversaries and find themselves in a hopeless situation, they nonetheless refuse to surrender, choosing, instead, to die. Irving, quoting a seventeenth-century Puritan source (William Hubbard’s Narrative of the Troubles with the Indians in New-England), writes, “‘the rest were left to the conquerors, of which many were killed in the swamp, like sullen dogs who would rather, in their self willedness and madness, sit still and be shot through, or cut to pieces,’ than implore for mercy” (1010). Having recounted the gruesome details of this massacre, Irving comments, Can any one read this plain unvarnished tale, without admiring the stern resolution, the unbending pride, the loftiness of spirit, that seemed to nerve the hearts of these self-taught heroes, and to raise them above the instinctive feelings of human nature? When the Gauls laid waste the city of Rome, they found the senators clothed in their robes and seated with stern tranquility in their curule chairs; in this manner they suffered death without resistance or even supplication. Such conduct was, in them, applauded as noble and magnanimous; in the hapless Indian it was reviled as obstinate and sullen. How truly are we the dupes of show and circumstance! How different is virtue, clothed in purple and enthroned in state, from virtue naked and destitute, and perishing obscurely in a wilderness. (1011)

20 Here, the association between Indians and Antiquity is clearly positive, revealing what seems to be genuine admiration for members of both societies. This defense of Native Americans, however, contains the same ambiguity present in Tudor’s presentation of them in relation to the trope of the “vanishing Indian,” which Irving repeatedly evokes and which is linked throughout the sketch, at least implicitly, with Antiquity, which itself, of course, had already vanished. Indeed, in the last paragraph of the sketch, Irving laments the fact that the eastern tribes are already gone and that the others will inevitably follow. They are only likely to be saved for posterity, he remarks, as with Antiquity, in literature: “Or if, perchance, some dubious memorial of them should survive, it may be in the romantic dreams of the poet, to people in imagination his glades and groves, like the fauns and satyrs and sylvan deities of antiquity” (1012). The “vanishing Indian” trope can be seen as being intensified here, notably in its seemingly self-evident and tautological inevitability, by the reference not to historical figures of the Ancient World, but to mythological creatures and gods, who, of course, never existed in the first place.19

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V. Washington Irving: Declining Comparisons between Indians and Antiquity in the Western Narratives of the 1830s

21 After the appearance of “Traits of Indian Character” and “Philip of Pokanoket” (see footnote 19), Irving did not return to Indians as a main theme for two decades. When he came back to the United States in 1832, after a seventeen-year absence, however, his apparent desire to reconnect with the land of his birth led him to publish three books on the American West, in all of which Indians figure prominently: A Tour on the Prairies (1835), Astoria (1836) and The Adventures of Captain Bonneville (1837). These three works could perhaps best be described as literary travel narratives, since if Irving’s imaginative skills are clearly on display, all three are based, at least, on fact. The author’s presentation of Indians is not unambiguously positive in these works, as it primarily was in his earlier writings, and it is because of this shift that Jason Almus Russell’s assessment, quoted above, needs at least some qualification. It would probably be more accurate, in fact, to suggest, as does Robert L. Hough, that in the three western narratives Irving was on some occasions leaning towards a romanticized, and on others towards a less flattering, portrait of Native Americans. As Hough notes: “If the trapper lived a ‘wild Robin Hood kind of life’ certainly the Indian was equally romanticized—at least sometimes” (Hough, 1968-1969, 31). But, he adds, “Irving’s romantic Indian should not be exaggerated. As in his ambivalence over the natural and civilized states he presented two positions” (Hough, 1968-1969, 32).20

22 The first of the three works, A Tour on the Prairies, was based on a trip Irving made out West just a few months after his arrival back in the United States, and it is the only one directly inspired by the author’s own experience. None of the three books has a large number of references to Antiquity, but A Tour on the Prairies has the most. That Irving still had a strong tendency to romanticize at least some of the Indians he saw is clear early on in the text. Though in the very first chapter he describes certain tribes such as the Pawnees and Comanches as “warring and vindictive” (Irving, 2004 [1835], 13), in the second chapter a Creek Indian on horseback forms “a picturesque object, in unison with the wild scenery around him” (19). The Osages, however, seem to have most favorably impressed Irving, and they are the only Indians in the work explicitly linked to Antiquity. In one passage, he seems to transform them into Roman centurions: Their heads were bare, their hair was cropped close excepting a bristling ridge on the top like the crest of a helmet, with a long scalp lock hanging behind. They had fine Roman countenances, and broad deep chests, and, as they generally wore their blankets wrapped round their loins, so as to leave the bust and arms bare, they looked like so many noble bronze figures. (20)

23 And just two chapters later, Irving describes a young Osage “with the fine Roman countenance common to his tribe” (27). According to the author, “as he rode with his blanket wrapped round his loins his naked bust would have furnished a model for a statuary” (27). Irving later remarks that the same Indian, along with his horse, “would have formed studies for a painter or a statuary” (32). In the same chapter, a group of Osages are described as looking like “figures of monumental bronze” (35). And much later, one of a group of Osages is seen as having “a free and noble mien” (117), and Irving admires “the finely shaped heads and busts of these savages” (117), as if he were considering them as models for statues, or even imagining them as having already been

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transformed into statues. All of Irving’s aestheticizing comparisons between Indians and works of art, especially statues, paralleling and often closely linked with comparisons to Antiquity, it should be noted, are further examples of an indirect reinforcement of the trope of the “vanishing Indian,” since “noble bronze figures,” to recall just one of Irving’s phrases, are no more alive—less so, in fact, one could argue— than heroes or gods of ancient times.

24 It could also be pointed out that one of the ironies of Irving’s use of both explicit and implicit comparisons with Antiquity in this work is that he also claims, in the same text, to have realized just how false most literary presentations of Indians are. In chapter VII, he asserts: “the Indians that I have had an opportunity of seeing in real life are quite different from those described in poetry” (35). And a few lines later he states: “As far as I can judge, the Indian of poetical fiction is like the shepherd of pastoral romance, a mere personification of imaginary attributes” (36). Romanticism, of course, is relative. And, without going outside of Irving’s own writings, one could maintain, as I have already suggested, that he is somewhat less Romantic in his depictions of Indians in A Tour on the Prairies—notably in the way he differentiates among the various tribes— than in the earlier sketches, though Romanticism there is, as is clear in his use of evocations of Antiquity.

25 Astoria and The Adventures of Captain Bonneville are somewhat different cases than A Tour on the Prairies since these two works were based largely on the journals, notes and letters of others and thus were not directly inspired by Irving’s own experiences. Astoria recounts the history of John Jacob Astor’s ultimately unsuccessful attempt, in the years just before the War of 1812, to develop the fur trade in Oregon and the Northwest, in competition with the British, while The Adventures of Captain Bonneville is a rewriting of the papers of Benjamin Bonneville, which Irving purchased from the western explorer. The circumstances of the genesis of these two works, I would argue, result in narrative voices that are somewhat less free, tied, to a certain extent, to the points of view of Irving’s various sources, which the author, in fact, frequently quotes. In any case, the tendency to romanticize Native Americans, while still present, is diminished in these works, and there are, in fact, few evocations of Antiquity. One example, though not concerning American Indians, confirms at least Irving’s tendency to see “primitive” peoples like figures of Antiquity. This is how he describes the native Hawaiian islanders met by the men on one of Astor’s ships on its long voyage from New York to the Pacific Northwest to bring supplies to another party that had taken the overland route (in the days, of course, before the Panama Canal): The Islanders are a comely race, of a copper complexion. […] The men wore the Maro, a band one foot in width and several feet in length, swathed round the loins and formed of tappa, or cloth of bark; the Kihei or mantle, about six feet square, tied in a knot over one shoulder, passed under the opposite arm, so as to leave it bare, and falling in graceful folds before and behind, to the knee, so as to bear some resemblance to a Roman toga. (Irving, 2004 [1836], 229-30)

26 The narrative, however, also contains many accounts of the cruelty and lawlessness of members of various tribes, notably the Sioux, Blackfeet and Crow. Others, in contrast, including the Wallah Wallah21 and Snake are described as friendly. The only direct reference linking Indians and Antiquity is when Irving describes an Arickara chief calling across a wide river to invite a party of whites to a council: The river was half a mile in width, yet every word uttered by the chieftain was heard. This may be partly attributed to the distinct manner in which every syllable

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of the compound words in the Indian languages is articulated and accented; but in truth a savage warrior might often rival Achilles himself for force of lungs. (344)

27 A multi-layered reinforcing of the trope of the “vanishing Indian” is once again present in this comparison. Achilles, of course, is not only a hero of Greek mythology (and thus not a historic figure who ever existed). He is also a character who is probably best known for having a vulnerable spot, his heel, which led directly to his death when he was shot by Paris, who hit him in that very place (with an arrow, no less). Besides this comparison, there are a few references to speeches made by various Native Americans, though Indian eloquence is not emphasized, with the only partial exception being the characterization of a Chinook chief’s “spirited war speech to his son in law” (587).

28 The only explicit, though slight, reference to Antiquity, in the last of the three narratives, The Adventures of Captain Bonneville, is in a brief description of Crow horsemen: “Nothing can be more spirited than a band of Crow cavaliers. They are a fine race of men, averaging six feet in height, lithe and active, with hawks’ eyes and Roman noses” (Irving, 2004 [1837], 894). While there is no necessary link with Antiquity in this description since “Roman” can simply indicate a particular shape of nose, the polysemy of the adjective, along with the rest of the image, clearly suggests heroic Roman figures. And Irving’s focus on physical beauty shows him, once again, seeing Indians aesthetically, as fit subjects for statuary. It should also be noted that this comparison is made despite the fact that the Crow, here as in Astoria, are depicted as warlike and predatory. Indeed, this work also includes both positive and negative characterizations of Indians (the Blackfeet and Crow, for example, are described as hostile, while the Nez Percé are said to be friendly). And there is occasional highlighting of Indian powers of oratory in The Adventures of Captain Bonneville, such as a reference to one Indian’s “nervous eloquence” (719) and later to his “impassioned eloquence” (747), but these are not frequent. Irving even undermines, to a certain extent, the myth of Indian eloquence and use of lofty speech: though Indians generally are very lofty, rhetorical, and figurative in their language at all great talks, and high ceremonials, yet, if trappers and traders are to believed, they are the most unsavory vagabonds in their ordinary colloquies; they make no hesitation to call a spade a spade; and when they once undertake to call hard names, the famous pot and kettle, of vituperating memory, are not to be compared with them for scurrility of epithet. (894)

29 Indeed, by the time Irving wrote The Adventures of Captain Bonneville, it seems clear that he no longer saw the majority of Indians as measuring up to the heroes of Antiquity. Thus, as a preliminary conclusion, one would have to say that there is indeed a certain evolution in Irving’s presentations of Indians from his History of New York and early sketches to his later narratives. If the author continues, throughout his works, to offer positive portrayals of Indians, they become less systematically romanticized and are accompanied by negative characterizations of other Indians. This change is reflected, in part, in the author’s diminishing use of comparisons between Native Americans and Antiquity, including a reduced insistence on their supposed lofty oratory.

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VI. James Fenimore Cooper: Indians and Antiquity in the Leatherstocking Tales of the 1820s

30 Another major American author of the early decades of the nineteenth century who frequently described Native Americans in his works is, of course, James Fenimore Cooper. The author returned again and again to the subject, and he relatively frequently evokes Antiquity in his descriptions of Indians, notably in his famous series of romances collectively known as the Leatherstocking Tales, which includes The Pioneers, or the Sources of the Susquehanna; A Descriptive Tale (1823), The Last of the Mohicans: A Narrative of 1757 (1826), The Prairie; A Tale (1827), The Pathfinder: or, The Inland Sea (1840) and The Deerslayer: or, The First War-Path (1841).22 In a similar fashion to the works of Irving considered above, there is a fairly large gap within this grouping. And, to a certain extent, once again, there is a reduction in the romanticizing of Indians over time, also reflected in a diminishing use of comparisons between Native Americans and Antiquity, though this development is not fully linear. While a detailed analysis of these five relatively long romances is beyond the scope of this study, I will try to characterize Cooper’s use of references to the Ancient World in order to clarify how the author employed them in offering, in most cases, positive images of Indians. Before beginning, however, it would be well to recall that Cooper’s Indians, somewhat like Irving’s in his works of the 1830s, tend to fall into one of two categories: good ones and bad ones. In general, the Delawares (or Mohegans or Mohicans), exemplified by the central Indian hero, Chingachgook,23 and his son, Uncas, are romanticized and portrayed in an extremely positive light, while, as John T. Frederick somewhat humorously points out, “the Iroquois, or Mingoes, as he called them following Heckewelder, are—as every boy used to know—the bad Indians in Cooper” (Frederick, 1968-1969, 1015).

31 Chingachgook appears for the first time in chapter VII of The Pioneers, though he is not a major character in that work. Cooper nonetheless notes, as the Indian is first introduced, that “His forehead, when it could be seen, appeared lofty, broad, and noble. His nose was high, and of the kind called Roman” (Cooper, 1985a [1823], 84). Several speeches by Chingachgook are also described in the romance, including a moving oration made as he dies in chapter XXXVI. Cooper makes an effort, both in this work and throughout the series, to put what are clearly intended as noble-sounding words into the mouths of his Indian characters, however successful or unsuccessful these attempts might be. Indeed, at least since 1895, when Mark Twain skewered him in his essay, “Fenimore Cooper’s Literary Offenses,” the author’s reputation for dialogue and speech has not exactly been of the highest order. But if Twain declared that one of the “rules governing literary art” violated by Cooper was that “when the personages of a tale deal in conversation, the talk shall sound like human talk, and be talk such as human beings would be likely to talk in the given circumstances” (Twain, 1895, 2), Cooper’s portrayal of speech, and specifically his portrayal of the words of Indians, does have its defenders. John T. Frederick, after making a thorough study of the author’s sources, asserts, for example: Cooper did not, then, indulge his imagination freely and irresponsibly in putting figurative language into the mouths of his Indian characters. Still less did he float passively in the current of European literary tradition or imitate the language of English Romantic writers. Instead he followed diligently and consistently—faithful always to the spirit and usually to the letter—the most trustworthy firsthand

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accounts of actual Indian speech which the literature of the time afforded. (Frederick, 1968-1969, 1014)

32 He concludes: “The recurring charge that Cooper idealized and falsified his red men in this respect—that their eloquence was the product of his own imagination, or the effect of trans-Atlantic literary influence—is contrary to the facts” (Frederick, 1968-1969, 1017). Frederick, however, only claims to prove that Cooper was true to his sources on Indian speech, not necessarily to Indian speech as it actually existed either in the first decades of the nineteenth century or in the earlier periods portrayed in the Leatherstocking Tales. And the debate continues, as Lawrence Rosenwald, for his part, in more or less agreement with Twain, indicts Cooper for impoverishing Indian language in his representations of it. For Rosenwald, “Cooper makes Native American languages fascinating; but he also makes them something less than European languages and their speakers less than adult members of a complex culture” (Rosenwald, 1998, 22).

33 In any case, when Cooper wrote the second book in the series, The Last of the Mohicans, no doubt the most famous of the five, he placed Indians, notably Chingachgook and his son, Uncas, at the heart of the action. In this book, Indians, and the entire work as a whole, in fact, are associated with Antiquity in various ways. And the author was also thinking seriously about Indian language—again regardless of how accurate his notions of it were—as the introduction to the work makes clear.24 Chingachgook’s language is described as “earnest” (Cooper, 1985a [1826], 500); and, early on in the work, the Indian briefly recounts the first meeting between his tribe and white men, “with a solemnity that served to heighten its appearance of truth” (502). Even a “bad” Indian, like Magua, a Huron, is described as “speaking with the dignity of an Indian chief,” using “those significant gestures with which an Indian always illustrates his eloquence” (591). In the mouth of a hostile Indian, however, this famed eloquence becomes dangerous. At one point, Magua is seen “gliding among his countrymen” like a snake “and speaking with his fatal and artful eloquence” (671). These various examples already suggest that, unlike Irving, Cooper’s portrayal of Indians was ambiguous from the very start. Later still in The Last of the Mohicans, Hawk-eye, who was raised amongst the Delawares, “assumed the manner of an Indian, and adopted all of the arts of native eloquence” (700). This last example shows how some authors, like Cooper, no doubt influenced consciously or subconsciously by cultural nationalism, not only appropriated the Indian as a worthy subject for the new country’s literature, but also attributed certain supposedly admirable qualities of Native Americans to selected members of the white population, thus helping to create, strengthen and celebrate distinctive national traits that contrasted with those of Europeans.

34 Recurring amidst all of this Indian eloquence are several references to Antiquity, lending legitimacy and sublimity to this very American story. Indeed, when Chingachgook’s son, Uncas, first appears, he is seen by Alice, who is being escorted to Fort William Henry, where her father is commander, as “some precious relic of the Grecian chisel” (529), thus offering another comparison to statuary—once again an image that is dignified, but not suggestive of life. Also, like in Irving’s “Traits of Indian Character,” Cooper makes reference to the great respect that Indians have for the “manes” of their friends and relatives, using that term which recalls Antiquity four times in the book (576, 760, 788, 871). And even the Huron Magua, portrayed as an incarnation of evil, seems, for a while, to be able to escape every attempt on his life, “with that sort of fabled protection, that was made to overlook the fortunes of favoured

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heroes in the legends of ancient poetry” (859). Linking the story to ancient statuary, literature and history, however, as should be clear by now, also has the ironic effect of both “elevating” the Indians and, at the same time, emphasizing the imaginary, and indeed “vanishing”/“vanished” aspect of these same subjects. Finally, another method Cooper employs to suggest a tie with Antiquity in The Last of the Mohicans, thus giving his entire work the prestigious aura of the great stories of the Ancient World, is through some of the epigraphs he places at the head of each chapter. These quotations include excerpts from Thomas Gray’s Agrippina, A Tragedy (chapter IX), Alexander Pope’s translation of The Iliad (chapters XXIV, XXIX & XXXII) and William Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar (chapter XXVII). From the point of view of cultural nationalism, these examples also include a significant ironic dimension, since in order to legitimize an American story, they make an implicit appeal not only to the classical world and its literature, but, since only British authors, in fact, are directly cited, also to the prestige of the literature of the very country the United States had only recently broken away from and whose culture it was the most urgently trying to distance itself from.

35 Cooper’s third romance in the Leatherstocking series, The Prairie, is actually the last from the point of view of the chronological progression of the central character and is set in the early nineteenth century. Chingachgook is already dead before the romance begins, but there are a host of Indians who nonetheless make their appearance in the work. Paralleling Cooper’s division in the earlier novels between the Delaware Indians, on the one hand, and the Iroquois (and Huron), on the other, in this work the Pawnee are generally portrayed in a positive light, while the Sioux are described as “demons,” “miscreants” and “reptiles” (Cooper, 1985a [1827], 918-9). The Pawnee leader Hard- Heart is described as furnishing “some idea of the personal appearance of a whole race,” and Cooper asserts that, “Would the truant eyes of Alston or Greenough turn, but for a time, from their gaze at the models of antiquity to contemplate this wronged and humbled people, little would be left for such inferior artists as ourselves to delineate” (1089).25 Of Hard-Heart himself, Cooper writes: “The outlines of his lineaments were strikingly noble, and nearly approaching to Roman, though the secondary features of his face were slightly marked with the well-known traces of his Asiatic origin” (1089). Here, in fact, Cooper seems to want to have his Indian both ways: “elevated” through an association with Antiquity and “savage” through a reminder of his “Asiatic origin.” As previously remarked, this dual nature can be seen as embracing a Romantic view that values the “uncivilized” appeal of “primitive” peoples. In The Prairie, too, there are frequent examples of Indian oratory, and though most of them are placed in the mouths of the hostile Sioux, oratory’s sacred place in Indian culture is nonetheless recognized. One example of a speech given by Hard-Heart, however, offers a subtle, and indeed complex, link with the Ancient World. The young chief’s address is not only delivered “in the usual, metaphorical language of an Indian,” but it is noted that he began “by alluding to the antiquity and renown of his own nation” (1296). It thus has the eloquence of a classical oration; its very subject matter touches on the concept of “antiquity,” with the polysemous nature of the word continuing the link between Indians and the Ancient World; and the mention of the word “nation,” with its own ambiguity, creates a parallel between the Indian and American peoples—both of whom were concerned with the futures of their nations—completing the circle, so to speak, and thus “raising” not only the Indians, but the United States as well, to the level of Ancient Greece and Rome, a fundamental aspiration, in fact, of the cultural nationalists.

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VII. James Fenimore Cooper: Declining Comparisons between Indians and Antiquity in the Leatherstocking Tales of the 1840s

36 There is a thirteen-year gap between the publication of The Prairie and the next work in the Leatherstocking series, The Pathfinder, which takes the reader to a period of time between the events described in The Last of the Mohicans and The Prairie. There are very few references to Antiquity in this work. Arrowhead, however, a Tuscarora who serves as a guide for Charles Cap and Mabel Dunham, is described as “one of those noble- looking warriors that were often met with among the aborigines of this continent a century since” (Cooper, 1985b [1840], 13), though he turns out to be a traitor. And when Davy Muir, a quartermaster who himself betrays the British, tries to convince Mabel to surrender to Arrowhead, he makes the claim that the Indian reminds him of “a Roman, or a Spartan, by his virtues and moderation,” but that he could also prove dangerous since he may feel the need “to appease the manes of fallen foes” (378). These references, of course, create a certain tension in their association with a hostile Indian and a traitorous British soldier, but they do continue the link between Indians and Antiquity.26 In fact, they may be seen as highlighting once again just how ambiguous the strategy of associating Indians with the Ancient World can be. As already noted, if such links can “elevate” the Indian, they can also highlight his “savageness” as a member of a “primitive” people.

37 The last work in the series is The Deerslayer, which is also the first one chronologically in the lives of Leather-stocking and Chingachgook. It describes events that take place just before those presented in The Last of the Mohicans, as the tensions leading up to King George’s War (the third of the French and Indian wars, known in Europe as the War of Austrian Succession) are beginning. The hostile Indians in this story are the Hurons, who have not only sided with the French, but have also kidnapped Chingachgook’s betrothed. Indeed, as the Delaware works out his plan to recover his wife-to-be, there is a reference to Antiquity in his description as “an Apollo of the wilderness” (Cooper, 1985b [1841], 716). While on the surface this association is no doubt another effort to “elevate” the Indian, it may also be viewed as a further example of the ambiguity of many of the characterizations of Native Americans as figures of Antiquity since, as Marcel Detienne has shown, Apollo displayed traits of excessive and vengeful violence in addition, for example, to being recognized as a god of music and poetry and an embodiment of order, knowledge and harmony.27 Furthermore, the deliberate melding of the American and the Indian through the use of comparisons with Antiquity can also be seen in this romance when Deerslayer makes a desperate effort to escape from the Hurons “that would have rendered a Roman illustrious throughout time” (770). Here, as seen in previous examples, a reference to Antiquity serves to link Indians and white Americans, creating a web of associations whose primary goal is to culturally “elevate” them both. Later in the romance, one of the Hurons is said to be “the model of a naked and beautiful statue of agility and strength” (820), and even the fading light of day, over the lake, casts “a glow that bore some faint resemblance to the warm tints of an Italian or Grecian sunset” (862-3)—but it is Chingachgook, once again, who is cast into the role of a hero of Antiquity when, as Leather-stocking leaves to keep his pledge of honor to surrender himself to the Hurons, the Delaware draws “the light blanket he

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wore over his head, as a Roman would conceal his grief in his robes” (940). Finally, when Chingachgook makes his dramatic attempt to save Leather-stocking, he is clothed in “his war dress, which scarcely left him more drapery than an antique statue” (17). The final work also includes several references to Native American oratory. And if none of these examples are explicitly linked to Antiquity, it should be clear by now that the connection between the two is implicit throughout Cooper’s works—and American writings of the early nineteenth century more generally. As was the case with Irving, Cooper had more of a propensity to romanticize Indians, notably through comparisons with various aspects of the Ancient World, in his earlier works than in his later ones. But he nonetheless made use of that association, in varying degrees, throughout the entire Leatherstocking series.

Conclusion

38 The tendency to compare Indians with heroes, gods, statues and, perhaps especially, orators of Antiquity was relatively widespread in American culture and literature—and certainly in the works of Washington Irving and James Fenimore Cooper—in the early decades of the nineteenth century. The phenomenon was more pronounced in the period from the War of 1812 (or just before) to around the end of the 1820s and then seems to have tapered off. It is likely that one reason for this change, notably in Irving’s A Tour on the Prairies (1835), Astoria (1836) and The Adventures of Captain Bonneville (1837) and Cooper’s The Pathfinder (1840) and The Deerslayer (1841), is the policy of Indian Removal, formalized by the Indian Removal Act of 1830, and the related tensions involved in implementing that act, which, among other things, made it painfully clear that all of the Native Americans—including those east of the Mississippi River—had not, in fact, “vanished.” Indeed, as John McWilliams suggests, the ambiguity of Cooper’s portrayal of Indians in The Last of the Mohicans, for example, can be seen as both supporting and criticizing the growing movement for removal, which was already being widely discussed by the time the book was first published in 1826 (McWilliams, 1998, 419-20). Cooper’s romance, in fact, seems to embed that fierce debate within its story. And the same thing could be said, to a certain extent, about the other works I have discussed from the period before the end of the 1820s. Once the Indian Removal Act was passed, it may have been more difficult to maintain that same ambiguity, at least in the same way.

39 The comparisons between Native Americans and Antiquity, however, had begun long before they had started to be integrated into the works of more purely literary writers. The association between Indians and Greek and Roman orators, as far as that aspect is concerned, was, from the beginning, so insistent and so sustained that Indian speeches as presented in works of early nineteenth-century American literature became almost a code, or shorthand, for the type of nobility associated with Antiquity. A large part of the motivation for the comparisons between Indians and the Ancient World more generally was undoubtedly to give legitimacy to the use of the subject of Native Americans in the literature of the United States. And yet this strategy, as I have tried to demonstrate, contains various fundamental ambiguities at its very heart. Prestigious European history and high culture were used to legitimize a distinctively American subject for the nascent “home literature,” one aim of which, at least for cultural nationalists, was to highlight its independence from European literature. Indians,

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portrayed as linked to the Ancient World, became useful literary material in part because, like Antiquity itself, they were seen as belonging to a “vanished,” and thus perhaps more useable, past, which, unfortunately for them, risked masking the real- world tensions related to their on-going destruction. The Romantic interest in “primitive” peoples can also be seen as sometimes tending to highlight a certain distance between both the Ancient World and the Indians, on the one hand, and the “civilized” world of contemporary America, on the other. Thus, the frequent comparisons between Indians and Antiquity in early nineteenth-century American literature, though largely inspired by a desire to “elevate” the status of Native Americans as subjects for that literature had at times, in part, the opposite effect, creating a paradoxical image that “lowered” as well as “elevated” their prestige. In the end, both tendencies reinforced the trope of the “vanishing Indian” and, no doubt, helped justify American actions that resulted in bringing that constructed image, and implicit prophecy, closer to fulfillment.

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BINGHAM, Caleb, The American Preceptor, Boston, Caleb Bingham, 1811.

---, The Columbian Orator, Boston, Caleb Bingham, 1800.

COOPER, James Fenimore, The Leatherstocking Tales, vol. I (The Pioneers, or the Sources of the Susquehanna; A Descriptive Tale—The Last of the Mohicans: A Narrative of 1757—The Prairie; A Tale), Blake Nevius, ed., New York, Library of America, 1985.

---. The Leatherstocking Tales, vol. II (The Pathfinder: or, The Inland Sea—The Deerslayer: or, The First War-Path), Blake Nevius, ed., New York, Library of America, 1985.

DEANE, Seamus, “General Introduction,” The Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing, Seamus Deane, ed., vol. 1, Derry, Field Day Publications, 1991, 3 vols., xix-xxvi.

DETIENNE, Marcel, Apollon, le couteau à la main: une approche expérimentale du polythéisme grec, Paris, Gallimard, 2009.

ELLINGSON, Ter, The Myth of the Nobel Savage, Berkeley, University of California Press, 2001.

FERGUSON, Adam, An Essay on the History of Civil Society, London and Edinburgh, A. Miller & T. Caddel and A. Kincaid & J. Bell, 1767.

FERGUSON, Robert A., “The American Enlightenment, 1750-1820,” The Cambridge History of American Literature, vol. I: 1590-1820, Sacvan Bercovitch, ed., Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1994, 345-537.

FREDERICK, John T., “Cooper’s Eloquent Indians,” PMLA, vol. 71.5, 1956, 1004-1017.

HOUGH, Robert L., “Washington Irving, Indians, and the West,” South Dakota Review, vol. 6, 1968-1969, 27-39.

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IRVING, Washington, History, Tales and Sketches (Letters of Jonathan Oldstyle, Gent. —Salmagundi—A History of New York—The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent.), James W. Tuttleton, ed., New York, Library of America, 1981.

---, Three Western Narratives (A Tour on the Prairies—Astoria—The Adventures of Captain Bonneville), James P. Ronda, ed., New York, Library of America, 2004.

JEFFERSON, Thomas, Writings (Autobiography—A Summary View of the Rights of British America—Notes on the State of Virginia—Public Papers—Addresses, Messages, and Replies—Miscellany—Letters), Merrill D. Peterson, ed., New York, Library of America, 1984.

KRUPAT, Arnold, “That the People Might Live”: Loss and Renewal in Native American Elegy, Ithaca, Cornell University Press, 2012.

LAFITAU, [Joseph], Mœurs des sauvages amériquains, comparées aux mœurs des premiers temps, Paris, Saugrain l’aîné and Charles Estienne Hochereau, 1724.

LITTLEFIELD, Daniel F., “Washington Irving and the American Indian,” American Indian Quarterly, vol. 5, 1979, 136-154.

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---, McGuffey’s New Fifth Eclectic Reader, Cincinnati, Wilson, Hinkle & Co., 1866.

---, McGuffey’s Newly Revised Rhetorical Guide; or Fifth Reader of the Eclectic Series, Cincinnati, Winthrop B. Smith & Co., 1853.

---, McGuffey’s Rhetorical Guide; or Fifth Reader of the Eclectic Series, Cincinnati, Winthrop B. Smith & Co., 1844.

McWILLIAMS, John, “The Historical Contexts of The Last of the Mohicans,” in The Last of the Mohicans, by James Fenimore Cooper, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1998, 399-425.

MELVILLE, Herman, Moby-Dick, Harrison Hayford, Hershel Parker and G. Thomas Tanselle, eds., Evanston and Chicago, Northwestern University Press and The Newberry Library, 1988 [1851].

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MURPHY, Marjorie N., “Silence, the Word, and Indian Rhetoric,” College Composition and Communication, vol. 21, 1970, 356-363.

NIEMEYER, Mark, “As Monumental Bronze Unchanged his Look”: Washington Irving’s ‘Philip of Pokanoket,’” Monument et Modernité dans l’art et la littérature britanniques et américains, Marc Porée, Christine Savinel, éds., Paris, Presses de la Sorbonne nouvelle, 2015, 25-38.

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SEYERSTED, Per, “The Indian in Knickerbocker’s New Amsterdam,” The Indian Historian, vol. 7, 1974, 14-28.

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NOTES

1. James Ruppert, for his part, concurs with these characterizations, noting: “Between the War of 1812 and the Civil War, the Indian held a central place in American literature and art, a position he has yet to regain” (Ruppert, 1996, 386). 2. One could, of course, add the myth of the Noble Savage to these two trends, though that phenomenon can be seen, to a certain extent, as being encompassed by the Romantic Movement, which often highlighted the supposed dignified simplicity, closeness to nature and character uncorrupted by civilization of “primitive” peoples. The myth, however, can be traced back to well before the Romantic Movement, in fact, to the earliest years of European colonization of the American continents. Ter Ellingson, for example, whose in-depth study highlights the problematic nature of the very concept of the myth of the Noble Savage, suggests that it may have originated in Marc Lescabot’s ethnological studies of the Indians of eastern Canada first published in 1609 (Ellingson, 2001, 12-13). Still, as Berkhofer points out, “In the English colonies the literary and ideological use of the Noble Savage came on the scene only during the Revolutionary era” (Berkhofer, 1979, 76). 3. This ironic phenomenon is actually quite common in postcolonial cultures attempting to define themselves as distinct and different from that of their former “mother countries.” As Seamus Deane points out, simplifying somewhat, “Nationalism, cultural or political, is no more than an inverted image of the colonialism it seeks to replace” (Deane, 1991, xxv). 4. The original French (which I have not modernized or corrected) reads: “Je ne me suis pas contenté de connoître le caractere des Sauvages, & de m’informer de leurs coûtumes & de leurs pratiques, j’ai cherché dans ces pratiques & dans ces coûtumes des vestiges de l’Antiquité la plus reculée; j’ai lû avec soin ceux des Auteurs les plus anciens qui ont traitté des Mœurs, des Loix, & des Usages des Peuples dont ils avoient quelque connoissance; j’ai fait la comparaison de ces Mœurs les unes avec les autres, & j’avouë que si les Auteurs anciens m’ont donné des lumieres pour appuyer quelques conjectures heureuses touchant les Sauvages, les Coûtumes des Sauvages m’ont donné des lumieres pour entendre plus facilement, & pour expliquer plusieurs choses qui sont dans les Auteurs anciens” (Lafitau, 1724, 3-4). 5. “Dans la description des Mœurs des Ameriquains, le parallelle avec les Anciens est toûjours soûtenu, parce qu’il n’y a pas un seul trait des mœurs de ceux-là qui n’ait son exemple dans l’Antiquité” (Lafitau, 1724, 18). 6. Printed privately in France in 1785, the first public edition of Notes on the State of Virginia appeared in England in 1787.

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7. As Jefferson indicates in Notes on the State of Virginia, the main European proponent of the relatively popular theory of degeneration—whose ideas Jefferson sought to counter with specific examples from his home state—was Georges-Louis Leclerc, comte de Buffon (1707-1788). What was probably even more aggravating for Americans like Jefferson is that some Europeans tended to extend the theory of degeneration to include not only indigenous fauna (including Indians), but also Americans of European descent and their entire culture, including scientific and literary works. 8. The text of Logan’s speech, as reported by Jefferson, is as follows: “I appeal to any white man to say, if ever he entered Logan’s cabin hungry, and he gave him not meat; if ever he came cold and naked, and he clothed him not. During the course of the last long and bloody war, Logan remained idle in his cabin, an advocate for peace. Such was my love for the whites, that my countrymen pointed as they passed, and said, ‘Logan is the friend of white men.’ I had even thought to have lived with you, but for the injuries of one man. Col. Cresap, the last spring, in cold blood, and unprovoked, murdered all the relations of Logan, not sparing even my women and children. There runs not a drop of my blood in the veins of any living creature. This called on me for revenge. I have sought it: I have killed many: I have fully glutted my vengeance. For my country, I rejoice at the beams of peace. But do not harbour a thought that mine is the joy of fear. Logan never felt fear. He will not turn on his heel to save his life. Who is there to mourn for Logan?—Not one” (Jefferson, 1984 [1785], 188-89). The history of Logan’s speech is complex and not totally clear. Furthermore, as Arnold Krupat points out, it wasn’t actually a speech, but rather a written message sent to Lord Dunmore by Logan, who had refused to meet with the governor in person (Krupat, 2012, 62-63). The additional fact that the text was a translation, possibly from Cayuga, only further complicates the matter. In the context of this study, however, these aspects need not be overly insisted upon since what is important is Jefferson’s desire to present Logan’s words as an example of dignified Native American oratory, comparable to that of the greatest of the ancients. Indeed, Logan’s speech offers an early example of the kind of transformation and “elevating” of the image of Indians that literary authors would engage in the early decades of the nineteenth century. 9. As Eran Shalev notes, “many indicators suggest that the world of classical antiquity was becoming meaningful after 1750 to growing numbers of North Americans. Contemporaries certainly felt so. Thomas Jefferson, for instance, thought that the entirety of the white male yeomanry, which he considered the backbone of American society, consisted of potential classical discoursers. […] The foundations of what would become, in the words of the historian Caroline Winterer, a ‘culture of classicism’ during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries were as old as settlement in North America” (Shalev, 2009, 10). 10. Both of these works went through multiple editions and numerous printings. Chief Logan’s speech, along with Jefferson’s account of its historical context, had been incorporated into Webster’s work by 1802 and into Bingham’s by 1811. My focus in this article is on the early decades of the nineteenth century, but it should be noted that Logan’s speech was later included in the even more successful series of McGuffey’s readers that dominated the school market in the second half of the century. It appears, for example in the 1857 and 1866 editions of McGuffey’s New Fifth Eclectic Reader (McGuffey, 1857 & 1866, 324-325 in both editions), though not in earlier editions such as that of 1844, entitled McGuffey’s Rhetorical Guide; or Fifth Reader, of the Eclectic Series, or that of 1853, entitled McGuffey’s Newly Revised Rhetorical Guide; or Fifth Reader of the Eclectic Series. 11. Both works credit Jefferson as their source in their tables of contents. The later reprintings of Logan’s speech in McGuffey’s New Fifth Eclectic Reader (see previous footnote) do include Jefferson’s comparison of the Indian’s speech to the orations of Demosthenes and Cicero (McGuffy, 1857 & 1866, 324 in both editions).

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12. The Columbia Orator is probably best known today because it is mentioned in Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave (1845) as a source for Douglass both of general instruction in reading and elocution and, more specifically, of arguments against slavery. The Columbia Orator was first published in 1797 and, like An American Selection of Lessons in Reading and Speaking and The American Preceptor, went through many editions and printings. 13. This Indian oration had been incorporated into the work no later than the edition of 1800. 14. As Eran Shalev points out, “American Whigs found the classics so appealing because they perceived the ancient republics as the origin and embodiment of some of the most powerful ideals they cherished—namely, the ideological bundle modern scholarship understands under the common framework of “the republican synthesis” (Shalev, 2009, 5). Furthermore, he explains, it was Rome that “enticed […] revolutionaries’ political imagination and historical inquisitiveness more than any other historical society” (Shalev, 2009, 5). This fascination with the Ancient World continued throughout the first half of the nineteenth century and, to a certain extent, well beyond it. The inclusion of Cato’s speech in Bingham’s work is especially telling since the story of the Roman tribune’s opposition to Julius Caesar’s rise to power was very well known in America during the colonial and early national periods, notably through Joseph Addison’s play Cato, which “was widely produced and quoted by Americans in a revolutionary context” and “had become a symbol of colonial resistance to British tyranny” (Litto, 1966, 440). The figure of Cato was still widely enough familiar by mid-century for Herman Melville to include a reference to him in the opening paragraph of Moby-Dick, published in 1851, in which Ishmael declares: “With a philosophical flourish Cato throws himself upon his sword; I quietly take to the ship” (Melville 1988 [1851], 3). 15. William Tudor (1779-1830) graduated from Harvard in 1796. His interest in literature led him to help found the North American Review in 1815. He was its first editor and contributed many of the articles to its first volumes. 16. This projection of the Indians into the past, as early as 1815, was, at least in part, fanciful, though it did have the advantage, as has already been suggested, of avoiding bothersome political questions and, no doubt, helping to ease American consciences as the spoliation and massacre of the continent’s first inhabitants continued. 17. Colden’s History of the Five Indian Nations was first published in two parts, in 1727 and 1747. 18. The epigraph was added to the piece in 1820 when it was incorporated into the first book- form publication of The Sketch Book. 19. “Philip of Pokanoket,” a companion piece to “Traits of Indian Character,” was also first published in the Analectic Magazine in 1814 before being included in The Sketch Book, and it, too, presents Indians, and most notably its central figure, Philip of Pokanoket, or King Philip, as the Puritans called him, as heroic figures. Once again, romanticized Noble Savages, referred to early in the sketch as “native untaught heroes” (Irving, 1981 [1814, 1820], 1014), comparable to heroes of Antiquity, come to life on the pages of this sketch, and there is praise for Indian oratory. Irving does not, however, use any specific references to the Ancient World in this sketch. See Niemeyer, “As Monumental Bronze Unchanged his Look”: Washington Irving’s ‘Philip of Pokanoket.’” 20. For Per Seyersted, the break between the early sketches and the later narratives is fairly strong. He writes: “Though he in his three books of the 1830s—written when he had gained personal experience of the Indians—still gives a rather favorable picture of them and still exposes the white men as the instigator of frontier trouble, he is much softer in his criticism of his fellow whites. […] Whatever the reason, these later treatments of the original Americans mark a sad anticlimax for a writer who started out as one of America’s strongest critics of his countrymen’s merciless robbing and killing of the Indians” (Seyersted, 1974, 27). However, doubts such as those expressed by Seyersted are attacked, to a certain extent, by Daniel F. Littlefield, who asserts: “throughout his works, Irving is consistent in his attitude toward the Indian. Because he realized that the Indian’s existence depended on a fragile relationship with the land the Indian occupied,

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Irving predicted the Indian’s destruction in the wake of American progress, and he regretted that destruction. His later works graphically portray fulfillment of his early prediction. He was anxious to ‘fix on record’ the Indian and his habits so that Americans of his generation and of the future would not be too quick to generalize about the Indian’s character or his condition. While in some modern readers’ views Irving may have fallen short in his literary treatment of the Indians, his attitude toward them, when taken wholly and placed in the context of some of his other non-Indian works, seems intelligent and enlightened for his time” (Littlefield, 1979, 152). There is, no doubt, truth in both of these assessments, which do not, in fact, really contradict each other, and an examination of Irving’s explicit and implicit references to Antiquity in his three western narratives can help clarify the situation somewhat. 21. The English spellings of the names of many Indian tribes have changed over the years. Here, I have followed Irving’s usage. 22. The Leatherstocking Tales take their name from the central character whose life ties together all five romances, Nathaniel (or Natty) Bumppo, also known as the Leather-stocking. This simple, honest and good-hearted white man, a sharpshooter and expert woodsman, who was raised by the Delaware Indians, is also referred to as Hawk-eye, Pathfinder and Deerslayer. It should be noted that the unfolding of the history of Natty Bumppo’s life does not proceed sequentially in the order of the publication of the five works. The chronological development of his career is portrayed in the romances in following order: The Deerslayer: or, The First War-Path (1841), The Last of the Mohicans: A Narrative of 1757 (1826), The Pathfinder: or, The Inland Sea (1840), The Pioneers, or the Sources of the Susquehanna; A Descriptive Tale (1823) and The Prairie; A Tale (1827). 23. In his apparent desire for exoticism, Cooper did not provide the reader with an easily pronounceable name for his Indian hero. A clue, however, to the pronunciation of Chingachgook’s name, which, according to Cooper, can be translated as “Great Snake” (Cooper, 1985a [1823], 84) or, more colloquially, as “Big Sarpent” (Cooper, 1985a [1823], 154) is given in The Deerslayer. In chapter XIII, upon seeing the Indian, Hist, Chingachgook’s bride-to-be, who at that point barely knows him, carefully pronounces his name, which is repeated by Hetty, a young white girl: “‘Chin—gach—gook—’ pronouncing the name slowly, and dwelling on each syllable —‘Great Sarpent, Yengeese tongue.’ “‘Chin—gach—gook—’ repeated Hetty, in the same deliberate manner. ‘Yes, so Hist called it, and you must be the chief’” (Cooper, 1985b [1841], 712). Mark Twain famously joked that Chingachgook’s name is “pronounced Chicago, I think” (Twain, 1895, 4). 24. Cooper’s asserts, for example: “The imagery of the Indian, both in his poetry and in his oratory, is Oriental,—chastened, and perhaps improved, by the limited range of his practical knowledge. He draws his metaphors from the clouds, the seasons, the birds, the beasts, and the vegetable world. In this, perhaps, he does no more than any other energetic and imaginative race would do, being compelled to set bounds to fancy by experience; but the North American Indian clothes his ideas in a dress which is different from that of the African, and is oriental in itself. His language has the richness and sententious fulness of the Chinese. He will express a phrase in a word, and he will qualify the meaning of an entire sentence by a syllable; he will even convey different significations by the simplest inflexions of the voice” (Cooper, 1985a [1826], 473). 25. Cooper refers here to two prominent American artists of the time, the painter Washington Alston (1779-1843) and the sculptor Horatio Greenough (1805-1852). Though the writer admired both men (his modesty in the passage is probably not entirely false), here his reference to Antiquity cuts in two directions, lending prestige to the Indians while, at the same time, implicitly suggesting that these two artists might be well advised to focus a bit more on portraying distinctively American subjects—like Indians. 26. It is also worth mentioning that friendship between Leather-stocking and Chingachgook is insisted on more explicitly in The Pathfinder than in any of the other works. At one point, Leather- stocking refers to the Delaware as his “best and most tried friend” (Cooper, 1985b, 77) and soon

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after declares: “He knows I love him, and that I speak well of him behind his back” (79). Indeed, the closeness between the two can be seen as a theme that reinforces Cooper’s other efforts to legitimize the Indian as a figure in American literature. The friendship, or even love, between Leather-stocking and Chingachgook “elevates” the Indian, so to speak, to the social level of the white American. At the same time, by insisting on the closeness of the relationship, it reinforces, in part, the idea that the Indian really is, also, an American, an integral part (at least symbolically) of the new nation, and that the American really is like the Indian, with distinctively native traits that distinguish him from non-Americans, notably the British. 27. As Detienne recalls, Apollo, often seen in a purely positive light—as the god who encouraged Socrates to follow a “philosophical” life, the god of Pythagoras and the sage speaking in the name of the Pythian—was also a strong, violent figure who could be cruel, as when he shot Niobe’s sons full of arrows or flayed Marsyas alive after a musical contest (Detienne, 2009, 10-11).

ABSTRACTS

This article examines the comparisons made between Indians and Antiquity in early nineteenth- century American literature (notably in the works of Washington Irving and James Fenimore Cooper); to do so, it begins by reaching back to references in European and American writings of the eighteenth century. One of the main motivations behind the associations between Native Americans and the Ancient World made in the early decades of the nineteenth century was to “elevate” Indians in order to transform them into worthy symbols of the recently established United States. Such associations also rendered them suitable subjects for treatment by authors inspired to a large extent by the Romantic Movement and involved in the project of creating a national literature for the new country. Bringing together these two quite different worlds, however, resulted in various ambiguities: it simultaneously reinforced the suggestion that Indians were already part of the past (providing a certain complicity with the continuing destruction of Indian culture) and questioned the then dominant image of Ancient Greece and Rome as examples of some of the highest levels attainable of government and human civilization.

Cet article examine les comparaisons faites entre les Indiens et l’Antiquité dans la littérature américaine des premières décennies du XIXe siècle (notamment dans les œuvres de Washington Irving et de James Fenimore Cooper), entreprise qui suppose au préalable une exploration de ce type d’allusions dans des textes européens et américains du XVIIIe siècle. Ces associations entre les Amérindiens et le monde antique visaient entre autres à « élever » les Indiens pour en faire des symboles dignes de la jeune nation américaine, mais aussi des sujets appropriés pour des auteurs fortement influencés par le Romantisme qui cherchaient à faire émerger une littérature nationale. Le rapprochement entre ces mondes n’est cependant pas dépourvu d’ambiguïtés: il suggère que les Indiens appartenaient déjà au passé (entérinant ainsi le processus de destruction de la culture indienne alors en cours) et interroge l’idée alors dominante selon laquelle la Grèce et la Rome antiques incarnaient des formes parmi les plus accomplies de gouvernement et de civilisation.

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INDEX

Keywords: American Indians, Antiquity, nineteenth-century American literature, Romanticism, oratory, Thomas Jefferson, nineteenth-century textbooks, William Tudor, Washington Irving, James Fenimore Cooper Mots-clés: Amérindiens, Antiquité, littérature américaine du XIXe siècle, romanticisme, art oratoire, Thomas Jefferson, manuels scolaires du XIXe siècle, William Tudor, Washington Irving, James Fenimore Cooper

AUTHOR

MARK NIEMEYER Université de Bourgogne

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“Solutions in Hieroglyphic”: Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Picturesque Language,” and the Ancient Near East

Mathieu Duplay

1 A graduate of Harvard Divinity School and a former Unitarian minister, Ralph Waldo Emerson was predisposed to view the ancient Near East primarily as a textual corpus, which he identified, for better or for worse, with the Biblical canon. By now, the argument is familiar to every reader of his essays. “Palestine is ever the more valuable as a chapter in universal history,” he writes in “Swedenborg; or, the Mystic,” conflating the Holy Land with the “Hebrew muse” (RWE, 1850, 683): to him, the Bible is not just a key historical document, but a paradigm of all “history” in its dual sense of bygone events and of their formal, written record. On the one hand, he implies, the past exists only in so far as it is kept alive by subsequent acts of interpretation, like a book whose truth lies in “transition” but which becomes “false if fixed,” Scripture being a case in point (682). On the other hand, the possibility of such acts is guaranteed by the existence of reliable modes of decipherment, guided by the “intuition of the moral sentiment” which, in Emerson’s view, proves capable of solving the most intractable problems of scriptural interpretation (RWE, 1838, 76; Grusin, 1991, 76). Whatever once happened in the Hebrews’ ancient homeland, the actual events matter less than the pages devoted to them in a volume whose “value” is entirely contingent on the uses to which it is put by later generations when they approach it with the benefit of hindsight, especially when it comes to the “stereotyped language” into which the “evanescing images of thought” all too easily degenerate (682): What have I to do […] with jasper and sardonyx, beryl and chalcedony; what with arks and passovers, ephahs and ephods; […] chariots of fire, dragons crowned and horned, behemoth and unicorn? Good for orientals, these are nothing to me. (683-84)

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2 The discerning reader should reject the Bible’s “foreign rhetoric” to focus on “the moral sentiment” it conveys (683)—a recommendation ultimately based on the time- honored distinction between “mode” and “essence,” between the “literal” and “universal” senses of allegorical writing (675), which plays a central role in Christian theology.

3 However familiar it may have become in the meantime, Emerson’s argument was original enough to have occasioned a lively controversy when he presented it in 1838 in the so-called “Divinity School Address”; in particular, his insistence that the mechanical application of correct hermeneutic procedures does not in and of itself produce correct readings of Scripture was calculated to alienate both Trinitarian and Unitarian scholars, who had few other points of agreement (Grusin, 1991, 76). And yet, even at his most inflammatory, Emerson seemingly held fast to traditional assumptions whose reliability appeared increasingly dubious, as a series of developments in ancient Near Eastern philology forced a reconsideration of what it means to “read” ancient Biblical texts. Starting in the late eighteenth century, the progressive decipherment of scripts and languages once used in and near Palestine meant that the Biblical canon no longer represented, or would soon cease to represent, the sole source of direct textual information on the ancient Near East.1 Thus, the Bible could not stand on its own for an entire “chapter in universal history”; even more significantly perhaps, Old Testament Hebrew, and the alphabet used to notate it, no longer represented the sole entry point into an otherwise silent world of mysterious, unreadable inscriptions. This scientific revolution drew attention to the semiotic properties of scripts which are neither strictly nor exclusively alphabetical, such as Egyptian hieroglyphs. At the same time, it raised unforeseen questions about the Hebrew and Latin alphabets, whose defining features could no longer be confused with the universal properties of all writing, but were seen to result from contingent choices. Traditionally, Biblical exegesis had concerned itself with the problem of correct interpretation, with finding ways in which the right meanings can be recovered from texts whose letter often appears ambiguous and confusing; the “Divinity School Address” is Emerson’s most striking contribution to this debate. Advances in Near Eastern philology raised a different set of questions: What does it mean for a text to be read at all, let alone to be read well? What are the steps that must be taken in order to ensure its basic legibility before correct interpretation becomes an issue? While the two lines of inquiry can be pursued simultaneously, as indeed they are in Emerson’s essays, they turn out, in his case, to lead in rather different directions, causing perceptible strain whenever the study of ancient scripts undermines cherished assumptions about the nature of language and writing. The purpose of this essay will be to explore some of these tensions as they complicate Emerson’s account of the semiotic nature of language, affect his already troubled relationship with contemporary scholarship, and shape his response to his own writing, in a manner which strikes the twenty-first century reader as strikingly modern.

“Reading” the Bible: Decipherment vs. Interpretation

4 Emerson’s interest in the new school of Biblical exegesis known as “higher criticism” is well documented and has been explored by a number of scholars (Packer, 1986; Grusin, 1991). Encouraged by recent philological discoveries, the rise of higher criticism made

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it possible to confront Biblical passages, treated as texts written by human agents in specific situations, with other Near Eastern sources. Emerson reflects upon this development when he refers to the Bible as a “chapter” in an ongoing series, implicitly recognizing that it can no longer be considered as a self-contained, autonomous work requiring no contextualization. However, this aspect of the question is not what most directly preoccupies him, not least because the decipherment of ancient languages was a slow and painstaking process that did not yield useful results until the second half of the nineteenth century, by which time he had already published most of his major works.2 To Emerson, the real problem lies in the unexpected light cast by modern philological science on what makes a text legible, regardless of what it turns out to mean. When he comments on proper and improper responses to the Bible in his essay on Swedenborg, Emerson takes it for granted that the letter of the text is not itself elusive, whatever may be said of its spiritual significance: however unfamiliar to most readers, the terms “sardonyx” and “ephod” have supposedly “literal” meanings which the present-day writer can safely discard because they are clearly tied to a particular context in ways that do not compromise their broader allegorical value. No such assumptions can be made about Egyptian hieroglyphs, both because many Egyptian words were (and remain to this day) obscure, and because the very notion of “literalness” appears problematic in connection with a writing system composed of symbols that cannot be adequately described as “letters.” The Hebrew, Greek, and Latin alphabets consist of abstract shapes whose primary function is to notate phonemes; as such, they radically differ from hieroglyphic script, which combines phonetic with logographic components and comprises elements that can be understood as representations of various objects. Therein lies the difficulty to which Emerson refers in the opening page of Nature when he writes that “[e]very man’s condition is a solution in hieroglyphic to those inquiries he would put”: “he acts it as life, before he apprehends it as truth” (RWE, 1836, 7). Although no longer illegible, hieroglyphs afford, at best, a delayed access to truth, not because their meaning is in itself obscure (what humans “act as life,” humans can also “apprehend” intellectually), but because the logic that governs its expression is disconcertingly alien, requiring a far greater effort than the alphabets to which we have become accustomed since Biblical times.

5 Throughout his career, Emerson held firm to the belief that the test of a “true theory” is “that it will explain all phenomena” (RWE, 1836, 7): the ultimate purpose of all intellectual endeavor is to reach for the invisible beyond the visible and to grasp the general principles underlying “accidental picture[s] of the truth,” as he writes in his essay on Swedenborg (RWE, 1850, 682). In particular, this applies to speech and writing, which “clothe” thought in “images”: A man conversing in earnest, if he watch his intellectual processes, will find that a material image, more or less luminous, arises in his mind, cotemporaneous with every thought, which furnishes the vestment of the thought. Hence, good writing and brilliant discourse are perpetual allegories. (RWE, 1836, 23)

6 Passages such as this one support John T. Irwin’s contention that Emerson subscribed to the “metaphysical” school of interpretation according to which all language is essentially emblematic (Irwin, 1980, 5-6). However, it should be noted that the argument offered here rests on a number of assumptions about the relationships between written and spoken language, between verbal and pictorial expression, between inner logos and “discourse” or “writing,” which are encouraged by a primary allegiance to an alphabetical system; for instance, the assertion that wisdom consists in

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the ability to “fasten words again to visible things” (23) presupposes that this connection has been severed, as is indeed the case when the symbols used in writing have no obvious representational value. Thus, it is doubly ironic that the “metaphysical school” had its roots in Renaissance speculation about Egyptian hieroglyphs, described by Athanasius Kircher as visible emblems of intelligible essences (Irwin, 1980, 5-6); for a passing acquaintance with Champollion’s account of hieroglyphic writing is enough to suggest that it was not in any way clearer or easier to read than its alphabetical counterpart. “As we go back in history, language becomes more picturesque, until its infancy, when it is all poetry; or all spiritual facts are represented by natural symbols,” Emerson writes in Nature (22)—a claim both confirmed and undermined by his generation’s experience of Egyptian script, whose decipherment required hitherto unparalleled feats of philological acumen even though its “picturesque” quality is everywhere apparent.

7 All this sits uneasily with Emerson’s understanding of the Biblical canon, as it makes it impossible to cast aside “the dead scurf of Hebrew antiquity” (RWE, 1875, 306), its antiquated language, and obsolete imagery, in favor of its forward-looking spiritual message. A “solution in hieroglyphic,” the record of human experience—the Bible, for instance—is perfectly capable of providing answers to the questions that preoccupy us today; but reaching for these answers implies devoting more, rather than less, attention to the modes of inscription on which the ancient writers relied, and recognizing that the letter of the text resists all attempts at discarding it as a mere “accident” of expression, a quaint “vestment” in which enduring truths are provisionally cloaked. This realization has important consequences, as Emerson’s careful wording suggests. Traditional readings of the Bible contrast Egypt and the Hebrews, the land of slavery and the chosen people in search of freedom; likewise, Emerson extols the “intuition of the moral sentiment,” emphasizing that interpretation cannot be restrained by “the dead letter of historical authority” (Grusin, 1991, 76): “that is knowledge, which is for our liberation” (RWE, 1850, 685). However, by stating that “hieroglyphics” offer a solution to “every man’s condition,” he also implies that the priestly script of Egypt continues to shed light on the whole of human history, including that of the liberated Hebrews and their modern counterparts. Thus, hieroglyphs cannot, strictly speaking, be described as an ancient, near-forgotten script that long ago “retir[ed] from its prominence, before western modes of thought and expression” (RWE, 1850, 683); instead, they exemplify an aspect of all writing, either as remnants of the “picturesque language” spoken by humankind in its “infancy” and revived later by the wisest authors or, less reassuringly, as examples of what happens to words once they are “sculptured,” “fixed,” and “perverted” (682). To put it bluntly, without a “dead letter” there is simply nothing for us to read, and the Bible, like all written documents, carries within itself the Egypt that its writers congratulated themselves on having left behind.

8 Richard Grusin states that even in his most antinomian moments, Emerson never conceived of the solution to his spiritual problems as the outright rejection of all institutional authority (Grusin, 1991, 3); he appealed to “moral truth,” an authority so fundamentally institutional that it appeared to be innate (6). Likewise, one could argue that even when he questions the literalist impulse that all too often results in “the incongruous importation of a foreign rhetoric” (RWE, 1850, 683), Emerson never considers doing away with the letter of ancient texts; instead, he proposes to

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reexamine the ways in which letters actually work, bearing in mind that all writing systems are arbitrary and provisional, and that their very arbitrariness is essential to the survival of writing as an institution since it is impossible to write at all without committing oneself to some kind of system, be it hieroglyphic or alphabetical: all one ever encounters are individual “modes” of a sacred “essence” which never exists in isolation (683). This complex endeavor accounts for his ambivalent attitude towards hieroglyphs, which he simultaneously approaches in two very different and seemingly contradictory ways. On the one hand, they remind him that all forms of expression are likely to be superseded in the long run, helping us distinguish between “universal wisdom” and the merely parochial (683). On the other hand, hieroglyphs stand for the error into which we are always in danger of falling whenever we lose sight of this fact, preferring the “symbol” to the many meanings it is capable of generating (683). Thus perceived, hieroglyphs are not exclusively associated with ancient Egypt; they embody “literature” at its worst, which manifests itself whenever “visible things” are seen as an end in themselves instead of being apprehended as allegories of a higher, invisible truth: “Literature is a poor trick when it busies itself to make words pass for things” (RWE, 1840, 334).

9 Ultimately, this complicates Emerson’s view of the Biblical canon as a historical document, since it raises important questions about the human perception of time and consequently forces a reexamination of what “history” means. To a certain extent, the experience of hieroglyphic writing is undeniably temporal, since it involves a deferral of meaning, a latency period to be traversed before the promised truth becomes accessible. However, it would be incorrect to conclude that hieroglyphs are historical artifacts; rather, Emerson’s argument suggests that history is what happens when successive generations of readers struggle with the obscurities of hieroglyphic writing and seek release from the tyranny of reified symbolism. Properly understood, the history of Biblical scholarship, in the full Emersonian sense of an activity that befits “Man Thinking” (RWE, 1837, 63), is a narrative of emancipation from “this eastern monarchy of a Christianity, which indolence and fear have built” (RWE, 1838, 81); like the Pyramids, the “petrified” expressions of insincere “admiration and love” that now surround the person of Jesus stand for a kind of slavery: “the friend of man is made [by them] the injurer of man” (81). The institutional Church, “historical Christianity” (80), carries much of the blame, as the “Divinity School Address” makes abundantly clear. However, the fact is that the Bible lends itself all too readily to such a misreading due to the extraordinary “idioms” and the potentially obfuscating “rhetoric of its language,” that is to say the very features that make it so persuasive (80). Thus, the true goal of philology should be the same as that of all political revolutions, to resist these undue impositions and help “new lands” and “new men” create their “own works and laws and worship” (RWE, 1836, 7).

10 Paradoxically, Emerson’s argument thus appears to de-historicize the Bible and to downplay its indebtedness to a particular place and time, even as he takes advantage of recent scholarly advances to address the enduring presence of a past that continues to exert a deadening influence on current thinking: as the example of Egyptian hieroglyphs suggests, all attempts at breathing new life into old writings inevitably leave the reader groping among “dry bones” that refuse to be resurrected, despite Ezechiel’s assurances to the contrary (7). Thus, Emerson appears to struggle with an insoluble conundrum, as he hesitates between a vision of history as allegory—of historical events, and their written accounts, as representations of the unending

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human quest for intellectual and spiritual emancipation—and a vision of allegory as history, of the successive stages in human development as an ongoing confrontation with the treachery inherent in all forms of symbolism (including writing), without which thought would come to a standstill.

History and the Semiotics of Writing

11 Emerson’s ambivalence about history, and specifically about the historicity of Scripture, largely accounts for his troubled relationship with much contemporary thought—with New England theologians of every stripe, as is well known, but also, and no less significantly, with current advances in Biblical scholarship, even when one would have thought them compatible with his interest in language and his rejection of “parish disputes” (RWE, 1850, 684). One explanation might be that Emerson’s interest in the Biblical past takes second place to his preoccupation with the semiotics of writing, and especially with the nature of his own activity as a writer, in the light of which he tends to assess all his other epistemological concerns.

12 Emerson shared modern philology’s refusal to worship the letter of the Bible in the name of the respect due to Scripture; but this tactical alliance did not extend far beyond a common rejection of literalism, and there is no indication that he was in any way interested in studying Hebrew history for its own sake or in exploring the world of the ancient texts, unlike the nineteenth-century scholars who examined the relationship between the historical or archaeological record of actual events and the accounts given in the Bible. At the time when Emerson was at work on his major essays, the weakening of Ottoman rule at last made it possible for Americans to travel to Palestine in search of traces of the Biblical past. Edward Robinson (1794-1863) journeyed twice to the Holy Land, in 1838 and 1852; his five-volume account of his discoveries, Biblical Researches in Palestine (1841-52), became a bestseller whose popularity was eclipsed only by the runaway success of Uncle Tom’s Cabin (Goldman, 2004, 152). Robinson’s endeavor signaled a paradigm shift in Biblical research, as he was motivated both by an interest in German-style historical criticism and by the desire to demonstrate the veracity of Biblical narratives (152-3); his aim was to develop a new form of Christian apologetics reconciling faith and archaeological knowledge, and he was accompanied, on his first journey, by the missionary Eli Smith (154). Emerson took no part in this intellectual revolution. There is no indication that he ever took any interest in Robinson’s innovative field work; to him, Palestine remained a purely textual entity, a literary creation testifying to the greatness of the “Hebrew muse,” the province of the “Christian symbol” (RWE, 1850, 683)—a term which, in this instance, itself recalls a well-known text, the Symbolum Nicaenum, the Nicene Creed in which the early Church sought to present the fundamental tenets of the Christian faith.

13 Up to a point, Emerson’s attitude can be described as theologically and philologically conservative. A trained minister, he was responsive to the moral message of Scripture, which he approached in a spirit that prefigures Cavellian perfectionism, convinced that regular contact with the Bible helped the reader make ever further advances on the road to spiritual and ethical excellence. As he describes her, the “Hebrew muse” sings in a distinctly didactic strain; he gives her credit for “[teaching] the lore of right and wrong to men” (RWE, 1850, 683), and the “Divinity School Address” shows him looking for “the new Teacher” who will complete the task of educating humankind, begun by

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Jesus and, before him, by the Old Testament prophets (RWE, 1838, 92). Thus, to all intents and purposes, Emerson remains scrupulously faithful to the Augustinian tradition of Biblical hermeneutics, as he lays stress on the relationship between the text and a reader who, from the beginning, demonstrates a willingness to approach it in the light of Christ’s teachings (Yarchin, 2004, xviii-xix). Everything begins with the experience of conversion, while the ultimate goal lies in meditation and good works; Scripture provides the necessary mediation, as the reader is encouraged to reach beyond its literal meaning in search of insights relevant to the present moment—hence the emphasis on allegory, on the quest for a higher, living truth above and beyond the text’s historical relevance.

14 True, Emerson’s conservatism in this regard is by no means confident or unproblematic: he increasingly appears to view Palestine, whatever the name means to him, as a question and not just as a repository of answers, of “innumerable christianities, humanities, [and] divinities” yet to be discovered in its bosom (RWE, 1850, 683). While at Harvard, he was made aware of new developments in German philology by Edward Everett (1794-1865), a Göttingen graduate who taught that religion is the expression of philosophical thought in mythological guise (Richardson, 1995, 13); in addition, the young Emerson read key works by Robert Lowth (Lectures on the Sacred Poetry of the Hebrews, 1787) and Thomas Blackwell (Life and Writings of Homer, 1735), both of them early advocates of “higher criticism” who held that the poetic and prophetic functions are essentially identical, as evidenced by both the Greek and the Hebrew literary traditions (Richardson, 1995, 12). His reminder, in the “Divinity School Address,” that the Christian Bible is actually a bilingual book consisting of “[t]he Hebrew and Greek Scriptures” (RWE, 1838, 91), his pointed reference to “the poetic teaching of Greece and Egypt,” which he compares to the Christian “Mythus” (80), and his tribute to the Hebrew “muse” (RWE, 1850, 683)—a deity more commonly associated with Mount Parnassus than with Pisgah or Sinai—thus suggest that the Biblical writings should properly be placed in the broader context of an anthropology of ancient Mediterranean cultures.

15 This, however, is not a project to which Emerson actually devotes his energies, convinced though he may be of its epistemological validity: his attention never strays far from the Biblical text itself, and any insights gleaned from other disciplines are immediately reinterpreted in hermeneutic terms. While higher criticism seeks to demonstrate that Scripture fulfills a spiritual impulse common to many civilizations, bolstering Emerson’s argument that the Bible should be approached with an eye to the universal rather than to the purely local, he does not see this as an invitation to engage in what we would now term comparative mythology, but directs his attention to the ways in which this tension manifests itself on a semiotic level as a conflict between abstract ideas and cosmic meanings on the one hand, and, on the other, trivial, context- bound symbolism reflecting life as lived in a specific cultural setting. The piety of the Hebrew prophets purges their grossness. The circumcision is an example of the power of poetry to raise the low and offensive. Small and mean things serve as well as great symbols. The meaner the type by which a law is expressed, the more pungent it is, and the more lasting in the memories of men. (RWE, 1844a, 454-5)

16 What is at stake here is not so much the record of past human experience as the Word itself, the language of divine instruction which points to “the eternal revelation in the heart” (RWE, 1838, 80) by treating “low and offensive” symbols as vehicles of superior

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truths. To the extent that history enters the picture at all, it does so on a strictly speculative level when Emerson accounts for the inadequacies of institutional religion by sketching out a narrative of usurpation and decline: “The idioms of [Jesus’] language, and the figures of his rhetoric, have usurped the place of his truth; and churches are not built on his principles, but on his tropes” (80). The point of this statement is not to convince the reader that the early Church, or indeed the Apostles themselves, understood Jesus’ teachings more clearly than nineteenth-century Christians were capable of doing; in fact, one strand of Emerson’s argument suggests the opposite, when he proclaims his faith in the spread and development of Christianity in America (RWE, 1838, 91-2; Grusin, 1991, 74). Instead, his intention is to describe in narrative form the ambiguous and ever-present relationship between the “law” and its “type,” understood as the “small and mean thing” whose “grossness” both conveys and obfuscates the inspiring message of great poetry. Emerson’s “ages” are not to be understood as historical eras in the usual sense; they are epochs of the mind, moments in a quasi-dialectical progression, metaphors of conflicting forces that remain present at all times, vying for supremacy: There is no doctrine of the Reason which will bear to be taught by the Understanding. The understanding caught this high chant from the poet’s lips, and said, in the next age, “This was Jehovah come down out of heaven. I will kill you, if you say he was a man.” (RWE, 1838, 80)

17 Here, Emerson’s brand of history is the same as Rousseau’s; in fact, there is a clear similarity between the argument offered in this passage and Rousseau’s Essay on the Origin of Languages, which states that speech and song, meaning and expression, were initially welded since every word uttered by early humans came straight from the heart (Rousseau, 1781, 103). As in Rousseau, the point is not so much the factual accuracy of this narrative as its ability to illuminate and allegorize the present state of affairs.

18 In the end, Emerson’s meditations on the ancient Near East invariably contribute to a reconsideration of reading and writing—acquiring, in the process, a distinctly self- reflective cast as they come to illuminate his own authorial practice by comparison with his forebears. When he discusses the Bible, he does not do so in order to confirm its factual accuracy; for him, there is no point in seeking out tangible proofs of the Bible’s veracity, which is of a wholly different order—the spirit speaks for itself, and is its own evidence. It is far more useful to note that the fate of the Biblical writings is not unprecedented, and that a similar treatment has been inflicted on other poetic and religious canons. “Christianity became a Mythus, as the poetic teaching of Greece and of Egypt, before” (RWE, 1838, 80). Incompetent readers are certainly to blame, but the very fact that the same mistake has been made several times in different situations suggests that the ancient texts themselves can, to some extent, be held responsible, if only because they are not content with expressing divine “principles,” but invariably shroud them in “tropes” that tend to divert attention from their actual import. One such trope is narrativity: “principles” are not allowed to stand on their own, but give rise to stories which seek to explain various aspects of the human condition, thus encouraging readers to describe in terms of linearity and succession a divine impulse that actually operates in an essentially discontinuous manner and “evermore goes forth anew,” disregarding its earlier manifestations (80).

19 Obviously, this is just what Emerson himself does on numerous occasions, not only when he laments Christianity’s dogmatic bent, but, more broadly speaking, whenever he attempts to consider the general drift of human affairs. Theological disagreements

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notwithstanding, Emerson remains enough of a Christian to share an apocalyptic and soteriological view of history; he awaits a “Teacher” who will fulfill Jesus’ prophecies by demonstrating the essential oneness of ethics, aesthetics, and knowledge. To that extent, he demonstrates his attachment to what François Hartog would term a “futuristic” regime of historicity, one according to which the present and the past only become intelligible in the light of a later revelation (Hartog, 2003, 16); and this futurism governs his own practice as a narrator, for instance in the famous concluding sentence of “Experience,” with its pointed use of the future tense: “the true romance which the world exists to realize, will be the transformation of genius into practical power” (RWE, 1844b, 492). The example of Scripture suggests that this Emersonian “Mythus” is just as capable of giving rise to a fossilized creed as anything to be found in the Bible; therefore, it necessitates, as an antidote, a much darker counter-narrative whose subject is the unceasing accumulation of ossified tropes and lifeless symbols as humankind makes its way forward. [The] Hebrew muse […] had the same excess of influence for [Swedenborg], it has had for the nations. […] The genius of Swedenborg […] wasted itself in the endeavor to reanimate and conserve what had already arrived at its natural term, and, in the great secular Providence, was retiring from its prominence, before western modes of thought and expression. (RWE, 1850, 683)

20 Every time the human race takes one step in the direction of greater enlightenment, its discarded beliefs and the antiquated language in which it once chose to voice them are added to the giant dust-heap that is history itself, understood as the repository of ideas that once were alive, but have lost all relevance now that they no longer meet a genuine spiritual need. “Miracles, prophecy, poetry; the ideal life, the holy life, exist as ancient history merely” once faith has deserted them (RWE, 1838, 79). Swedenborg mistook the quaint remains of dead beliefs for the early manifestations of a new spiritual awakening; hence his insistence on retrospection, on the artificial preservation of “a poetry and philosophy […] of tradition” rather than “insight” (RWE, 1836, 7). Emerson refuses to make the same error, but this forces him to dwell on the dark side of human experience, if only for the sake of contrast and in order to make his point sufficiently clear. While he complains that “[o]ur age is retrospective,” he cannot wholly exempt himself from this general condemnation, and the first object he dwells upon is “the sepulchres of the fathers,” much as he would prefer to roam the fields in search of “wool and flax” (7).

Hieroglyphs and the Question of Meaningful Expression

21 This is the point at which the question of hieroglyphic writing becomes crucial. Hieroglyphs are an ideal metaphor for the complications inherent in allegorical modes of expression and interpretation, for the ever growing tension between an eager anticipation of the advent of truth and a retrospective inquiry into the lost meaning of discarded and, by now, largely unintelligible tropes. “Every man’s condition is a solution in hieroglyphic to those inquiries he would put. He acts it as life, before he apprehends it as truth” (RWE, 1836, 7). Hieroglyphs stand for the time “before,” for a script once familiar to the literate, but falsely believed to be illegible after many centuries of disuse—and these remnants of a bygone age are to be approached in the light of what comes after them, of a “truth” they have always heralded in ways to

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which everyone long remained oblivious. Thus, “hieroglyphics” crystallize the ambiguous temporality of interpretation: no matter how forward-looking, it is perpetually shadowed by the past, which somehow manages to remain enigmatic and forbidding even when it turns out to have found the “solution” to questions yet to be formulated.

22 However, this isolated but highly visible reference to hieroglyphs also expresses a deeper anxiety about the possibility of meaningful expression, in ways to which the scenario outlined above does not do full justice. To interpret Emerson’s statement in the manner that has just been attempted is to assume that the main difficulty is tropological—that hieroglyphs are tropes, that their eventful history can be turned into a convenient allegory, and that what they most convincingly stand for is allegory itself, language’s propensity to cloak meaning in figures, the “mean types” out of which “great symbols” are fashioned, as Emerson argues in “The Poet” (RWE, 1844a, 454). This plausible assumption makes sense given the general drift of Emerson’s argument, but it fails to take into account the peculiar nature of the difficulties with which hieroglyphic writing, unlike the Biblical canon, confronts the modern reader. Far-ranging questions may legitimately be raised about the best ways of interpreting the Old and New Testaments, but what is not in doubt is that deciphering them requires little more than a willingness to learn ancient languages and alphabets superficially different from, but ultimately comparable to, the one in use in the English-speaking world. The case of ancient Egyptian is qualitatively different, for the nature of the script itself is a problem, raising unexpected questions about the function of interpretation. An alphabetical system relying on abstract shapes, each in theory associated with a sound present in the spoken language, is not in danger of “mak[ing] words pass for things,” as bad literature is wont to do (RWE, 1840, 334), since the individual letters are unlikely to be perceived as pictures of actual objects, let alone to be confused with them; whatever associations may be culturally established between a given alphabet and the world of “things,” these usually remain speculative, as shown by Talmudic and Kabbalistic theories about the mystical functions of Hebrew letters. This is a far cry from the difficulties raised by Egyptian hieroglyphs, which mostly consist of signs that can readily be seen as pictograms even though, as Champollion demonstrated, their actual meaning often bears no discernible relation to what they appear to represent. In other words, hieroglyphs question the tropological nature of all writing, besides encouraging the reader to wonder about the rhetorical status of tropes in expressive discourse, a different issue altogether.

23 When the key to the ancient Egyptian script was lost, the symbolic meanings of the texts it notated became a moot point, since they could no longer be read; on the other hand, the pictorial quality of the writing itself came into prominence, causing numerous authors to theorize that hieroglyphs referred directly to things without the mediation of words (Parkinson, 1995, 15-6). Well established since the Renaissance, this mode of thinking had not yet been entirely supplanted by modern scholarship when Emerson wrote his most important essays; although Champollion’s discoveries soon gained wide currency, they continued to attract controversy for several decades, and as late as 1854, the German-American Egyptologist Gustavus Seyffarth lectured in New York City on the merits of his alternative theory, showing that Champollion’s ideas still had some way to go in convincing the scholarly community of their validity (Parkinson, 1995, 41).

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24 In retrospect, these Neoplatonic speculations can be construed as logocentric fantasies of pure, unadulterated ideality; Emerson undoubtedly shared them to a certain extent, believing, as John T. Irwin puts it, that the physical fact serves the spiritual fact (Irwin, 1980, 11). However, they can also give rise to the fear that hieroglyphs bypass ideality altogether and deny the authority of logos, preferring to establish connections between material things, between graven images and natural or man-made objects. The latter interpretation is entirely consonant with Emerson’s pessimistic take on antiquated modes of expression and thought: if it is correct, hieroglyphs can be described as tropes concealing tropes—as reified pictures enclosing, as in a hermetically sealed casket, the dead rhetoric of an ancient priestly class whose irrelevant beliefs have faded from human memory along with the language in which they were once articulated. Indeed, it is doubtful whether hieroglyphs, thus understood, still constitute tropes, since they “pass for things” to the point where it becomes unclear whether they have anything to do with words. In this light, hieroglyphs mark the limit between the realm of the “universal soul,” as manifested in speech, and the lifeless husk which is all that remains of nature once it has been stripped of its spiritual associations. “All the facts in natural history taken by themselves, have no value, but are barren, like a single sex” (RWE, 1836, 21).

25 It would be tempting to state that hieroglyphs are an isolated case if Emerson did not stress that they shed light on “every man’s condition,” and if he did not argue, in a later section of Nature, that all language is susceptible to death and decay, like the ancient Egyptian tongue, and for the same reasons. When simplicity of character and the sovereignty of ideas is broken up […], the power over nature as an interpreter of the will, is in a degree lost; new imagery ceases to be created, and old words are perverted to stand for things which are not; a paper currency is employed, when there is no bullion in the vaults. (22)

26 Bearing in mind that the word “character” can be understood in an ethical sense as a synonym for “personality,” but also as an allusion to the symbols used in writing, this statement aptly describes the decline of hieroglyphic script, which rejects the “sovereignty of ideas” and compromises language in its entirety, much as inflation, the lack of sufficient bullion, threatens to make money worthless. The only way of healing this “rotten diction” is to “fasten words again to visible things” (23), i.e. to restore a connection that hieroglyphs were supposed to guarantee, but which they eventually tended to undermine. Whenever a true poet proves equal to the task, he—Emerson’s preferred pronoun—shows himself to be “a man in alliance with truth and God,” like Moses whose “good writing and brilliant discourse” rescued the Hebrew people from slavery in Egypt (23). Ironically, the great prophet’s successors—and, by implication, Moses himself—thus fulfill their mission by creating another Egypt within the very language they deploy as they leave behind the land of the Pharaohs and turn their backs on a “long-civilized” but decadent nation, dissatisfied with its utter inability to “clothe one thought in its natural garment” (22).

“Speaking with the Dead”: History and the Pragmatics of Writing

27 All this confirms that the reality (past or present) of the Near East, the lessons of biblical archaeology, and the latest advances in Egyptological research have no bearing

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on Emerson’s argument, except in so far as they shed light on the complex relationships between thought, language, and writing, which are his real center of interest. To him, the East is not so much an actual place as it is a near-paradigmatic example of the factors affecting any poetic or prophetic enterprise, including his own. His ancient Near East is first and foremost a mental construct, a theoretical model meant to challenge dogmatic theology. As such, it is indebted to modern scientific approaches, which likewise question entrenched attitudes and beliefs; however, archaeology and textual criticism cease to interest him as soon as they lead in directions different from those he wishes to take, and in particular whenever they describe history in positive terms, as valuable in its own right and not just as the dark obverse of the human spirit’s aspiration to a higher visionary state. To that extent, Emerson’s project partakes of Orientalism, defined by Edward Said as “a created body of theory and practice,” “a system of knowledge about the Orient, an accepted grid for filtering through the Orient into Western consciousness” that can be construed as “a sign of European-Atlantic power” (Said, 1978, 6); for while Emerson did not devote much attention to recent developments in regions such as Egypt and Palestine (then at a turning point in its eventful history, as British influence in the Levant was on the ascendant due to the weakening of Ottoman rule), his insistence that Eastern culture has long “retired from its prominence, before western modes of thought and expression” (RWE, 1850, 683) provides a handy justification for the colonial enterprises then under way. True, it is important to realize that Emerson’s disparaging comments on the inevitable decline of Oriental civilization are mainly intended as a critique of European (and, by extension, American) literature and philosophy. His real target is not the East or its religious and poetic legacy, but the Western thinkers who, like Swedenborg, insist on borrowing an extinct phraseology from writings whose interest is by and large of an antiquarian nature; Emerson’s aim is not to instill in Westerners a sense of their unfailing superiority, but rather to goad them into taking better care of their own spiritual needs. Nonetheless, it cannot be denied that the Orient/Occident dichotomy, understood as “an ontological and epistemological distinction” (Said, 1978, 2), persistently informs his discussions of the Christian West’s biblical heritage, in a manner that certainly cannot be considered as innocuous.

28 That being said, the most troubling ambiguity inherent in Emerson’s argument concerns his largely negative portrayal of Judaism, whose reliance on “arks,” “passovers” (shorn of their capital P) (RWE, 1850, 683), and supposedly “obscene” symbols such as ritual circumcision (RWE, 1844a, 454), repeatedly comes in for sharp, if largely indirect, criticism.

29 To some extent, this can be explained by Emerson’s lack of exposure to, and consequent ignorance of, the living realities of Judaism. As Shalom Goldman points out, Jewish presence in the United States was virtually non-existent until the 1830s, and the first major wave of Jewish immigration from Eastern Europe did not begin until the early 1880s (Goldman, 2004, 112), by which time Emerson’s career was over (he died in 1882). Thus, his knowledge of Judaism was essentially, if not indeed exclusively, bookish, and he remained largely indebted to the long line of Christian Hebraists whose American origins coincide with the founding of Harvard College (9). Goldman describes the ambivalent attitude that these scholars adopted towards Hebraic sources. On the one hand, they relied on Jewish writers for information on the world and language of the Old Testament; on the other hand, they argued that the Christian faith was intrinsically

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superior to Judaism, and therefore tended to treat their Jewish contemporaries with indifference (12), when they did not actively attempt to convert them—in 1820, the American Society for Meliorating the Condition of the Jews was founded for that purpose by one J. C. S. Frey (1771-1850), himself a Jewish convert to Christianity (95). Up to a point, Emerson conforms to this well-established pattern, for instance when he argues that the Bible conveys a universal wisdom not to be confused with the obsolete ways in which it is expressed: this implies that the truth contained in the Hebrew Scriptures can be claimed neither by the Hebrews themselves nor by their Jewish heirs as their exclusive property, and may even be taken to suggest that the “eastern men” mentioned in the “Divinity School Address” are unable to do full justice to their own Scriptures (RWE, 1838, 91). In this regard, Emerson’s position is far from original, save in his insistence that the Christian churches are not immune from a similar condemnation, that the faith they stand for is still too “Eastern,” too respectful of the letter of the Biblical text, and too indifferent to its spirit.

30 However, the importance of these contextual factors should not be overstated, and the key to Emerson’s quarrel with Judaism is linked to a philosophical disagreement that cannot be entirely explained away as a sign that he shared the prejudices of his time. Alfred Kazin makes remarks to this effect in a diary entry dated 1969: RWE believes that nature is something for men to think with. It is comprehensibility (and in his case expressiveness) incarnate. It is the beginning of “natural” thinking—thinking according to nature, by the light of nature, according to the (great) book of nature. Everything is open—everything is possible. There is nothing inherently different from men (witness Plato’s eternal realm), only the first cause (which too lurks in nature—at the end of the labyrinth so to speak.)

What has always bothered me in all this is the applicability and practicality of everything. There is sublimity of course, but no mystery. Whereas nothing is so obvious about the Jewish condition (to say nothing about the Jew’s God) as its mystery. (in LaRocca, 2013, 616)

31 Emerson’s account of the Hebrew Bible lays stress on its fundamental intelligibility. Although he is aware of the difficulties involved in bringing to life such an ancient text, and while he implies that they are, in part, to be blamed on the self-defeating tendencies inherent in all forms of expression, a full understanding and lucid presentation of universal truths remains the ultimate goal; as to the Biblical text’s many obscurities, he views them either as imperfections in need of a corrective or as inevitable, but temporary, obstacles on the way to enlightenment. Ultimately, this argument is predicated on the belief that Scripture’s purportedly divine origin is essentially irrelevant to the scholar since God is another name for the spirit at work in the depths of the human soul, and is therefore present in all poetry worthy of the name. This accounts for Emerson’s view that “hieroglyphics,” taken as a synecdoche for writing in all its forms, are akin to a problem in need of an ingenious “solution” (RWE, 1836, 7): what God says or does, humans can comprehend, as they are essentially one and the same. Nothing could be further removed from the Jewish belief that the Biblical text uniquely records the ancient prophets’ dealings with a transcendent power whose essence lies beyond human comprehension, and that the letter of the sacred text, no less than its meaning, partakes of a mystery deserving of infinite respect.

32 Ultimately, Emerson’s philosophical disagreement with Jewish readings of the Bible reflects divergent conceptions of the relationship between writing and divine Law. “I would write on the lintels of the door-post, Whim. I hope it is somewhat better than

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whim at last, but we cannot spend the day in explanation,” Emerson writes in “Self- Reliance” (RWE, 1841b, 262), alluding to the Jewish tradition of placing a mezuzah (a small capsule containing a fragment of Deuteronomy) near the front door of one’s home in order to invoke divine protection. In Judaism, the mezuzah is a reminder that believers must scrupulously conform to divine commandments in exchange for supernatural aid; the ritual itself is a sign of obedience, as the Bible makes it mandatory (Dt 6:4-9). Emerson substitutes the word “whim” for the Scriptural quotation: the imperative to which he must be faithful at all costs originates neither in prophetic writings handed down from generation to generation, nor in obedience to the dictates of a transcendent Deity, but in the inner force that makes him “greatly listen to himself, withdrawing himself from all the accents of other men’s devotion” (RWE, 1841a, 399). According to Deuteronomy, God’s decrees guarantee genuine freedom since they stand for the one true Law, as opposed to the false authority wielded by the Egyptian slaveholders (Dt 6:20-5); the mezuzah is an acknowledgement of this fact (Dt 6:9). In “Self-Reliance,” the word inscribed on the door-post paradoxically urges whoever reads it to disobey written orders—a prohibition from which it is exempt since it does not actually command anything and mandates no specific course of action. Indeed, it would make no difference whatsoever if its meaning were eventually forgotten, or if readers found Emerson’s cursory “explanation” unclear and decided to act as they pleased; for in doing so, they would unwittingly carry out the writer’s recommendation and prove faithful to the spirit of the inscription, even if its letter eluded them. Thus, Emerson’s subversive mezuzah stands as the ultimate answer to the errors into which Christian and Jewish exegetes of the Bible customarily fall: a foolproof piece of legislation, it cannot possibly be misunderstood, not even by the illiterate, and serves as a reliable guide to conduct in all circumstances, even when the people passing by have no inkling of its meaning.

33 Obviously, it helps that the inscription consists of just one ingeniously chosen word; this bold combination of a pithily expressed idea and a rhetorical strategy designed to make interpretation irrelevant probably cannot be sustained any longer (although it could be argued that Emerson never stops trying—hence the oracular obliqueness of his prose, which often manages to be both explicit and strangely elusive at the same time as if to discourage the reader from trying to pinpoint a specific meaning even when plausible interpretations teasingly suggest themselves). This does not diminish the importance of Emerson’s claim, understood as a statement of intention (“I would write”). According to him, neither theology nor philology demonstrates the proper use of the Bible: both value attention to the letter of the text and assess the validity of particular readings according to their degree of conformity to established hermeneutic practice, whereas Emerson contends that “[w]hoso would be a man must be a nonconformist” (RWE, 1841b, 261). The mark of true Emersonian “scholars” is that they never bow to the demands of “scholarship” in the usual sense of the word, and that any conflict between interpretive accuracy and “the integrity of [their] own mind[s]” (261) is fearlessly resolved in favor of the latter. In other words, coming to terms with the legacy of slavery in Egypt means realizing that the ancient writings in which it is commemorated should not intimidate us as the Pharaohs enslaved the Hebrew laborers: subjugation to a text, even one that recalls a nation’s epic struggle against oppression, is no better than subjugation to a tyrant. What saves this argument from spilling over into needless provocation is that Emerson does not shrink from its consequences as regards his own work, and tries to distance himself from what is still

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too “Eastern,” too literalist, too cryptically dogmatic, in his own largely allegorical discourse. If, in his view, ethical trump epistemological concerns when it comes to writing, then it behooves him to act in a responsible manner, showing respect where it is due—in his relationship to his reader—the better to question the false pieties that all too often limit our understanding of ancient texts.

34 Interestingly, while this unconventional attitude appears calculated to exacerbate the tensions inherent in what were then the dominant modes of Biblical interpretation, Emerson’s insistence on the pragmatics of reading and writing appears less problematic in the light of more recent conceptions of history and archaeology. Twentieth and twenty-first century research has challenged the assumption that exploring an extinct culture is akin to cracking a code, and that deciphering the script, syntax, and vocabulary used by ancient writers is enough to understand what they had to say. As Robert Parkinson points out, texts are cultural and material artifacts, inseparable from their social context and the means of their production and circulation (Parkinson, 1995, 12). Thus, an excessive preoccupation with the literal meanings of ancient writings is likely to prove counterproductive: it obscures the considerable difference between archaeologists and cryptanalysts who, when trying to decipher a message, usually know its origin, destination, and general purpose, unlike historians struggling to comprehend the full significance of inscriptions whose original context and pragmatic function may be difficult to ascertain, even when the script and language are unproblematic (Parkinson, 1995, 191-5). In this light, Emerson’s disregard for the niceties of textual scholarship and preference for readings that emphasize the life of language in actual communication may appear more attuned to contemporary preoccupations. Instead of indulging in the fantasy that the scholar can open a window on the past by means of careful philological research, he stresses that whatever interest ancient writings retain for us today lies in their contribution to present-day conversations between people who, in good faith, fearlessly desire enlightenment, as evidenced by “the institution of preaching,—the speech of man to men,” by which we are urged to “speak the very truth, as […] life and conscience teach it, and cheer the waiting, fainting hearts of men with new hope and new revelation” (RWE, 1838, 91). Not unlike twenty-first century scholars, Emerson thus stresses that the true location of meaning lies not in the texts themselves, but in our ongoing, dynamic exchanges with and about them: deciphering an ancient document will not bring it to life unless we are aware of its unique relevance in its present-day context, of the interaction between the position we adopt in regard to it and what we know of the situation in which it was originally composed. This may be the closest we can come to “speaking with the dead” (Parkinson, 1995, 195) in such a way that their voices can be heard again, and their contributions properly appraised, without drowning out our own. “I look for the hour when that supreme Beauty, which ravished the souls of those eastern men, and chiefly of those Hebrews, and through their lips spoke oracles to all time, shall speak in the West also.” (RWE, 1838, 91)

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---, “The American Scholar. An Oration before the Phi Beta Kappa Society, at Cambridge, August 31, 1837,” Emerson. Essays and Poems, Joel Porte, Harold Bloom, and Paul Kane, eds., The Library of America, 1996, 51-72.

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---, Sermon CLXII [1832], Emerson’s Prose and Poetry, Joel Porte and Saundra Morris, eds., New York, W. W. Norton & Company, 17-26.

---, “Swedenborg; or, the Mystic” [1850], Emerson. Essays and Poems, Joel Porte, Harold Bloom, and Paul Kane, eds., The Library of America, 1996, 661-89.

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GRUSIN, Richard A., Transcendentalist Hermeneutics. Institutional Authority and the Higher Criticism of the Bible, Durham, NC, Duke University Press, 1991.

HARTOG, François, Régimes d’historicité. Présentisme et expériences du temps [2003], Paris, Éditions du Seuil, 2012.

IRWIN, John T., American Hieroglyphics. The Symbol of the Egyptian Hieroglyphics in the American Renaissance, New Haven, Yale University Press, 1980.

LAROCCA, David, Estimating Emerson. An Anthology of Criticism from Carlyle to Cavell, New York, Bloomsbury, 2013.

PACKER, Barbara, “Origin and Authority: Emerson and the Higher Criticism,” Reconstructing American Literary History, Sacvan Bercovitch, ed., Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press, 1986, 67-92.

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PARKINSON, Richard, Cracking Codes. The Rosetta Stone and Decipherment, Berkeley, University of California Press, 1999.

RICHARDSON, Robert D., Emerson. The Mind on Fire, Berkeley, University of California Press, 1995.

ROUSSEAU, Jean-Jacques, Essai sur l’origine des langues [1781], Catherine Kintzler, ed., Paris, Flammarion, 1993.

SAID, Edward, Orientalism [1978], London, Penguin Classics, 2003.

YARCHIN, William, History of Biblical Interpretation. A Reader, Peabody, MA, Hendrickson Publishers, 2004.

NOTES

1. In 1758, the Phoenician alphabet was deciphered by Jean-Jacques Barthélémy (1716-95) ; then came the turn of Egyptian hieroglyphs, thanks to the combined efforts of Thomas Young (1773-1829) and Jean-François Champollion (1790-1832). Soon afterwards, cuneiform was deciphered by Henry Rawlinson (1810-95) and Sir Edward Hincks (1792-1866), whose task was more or less complete by the late 1840s. 2. Champollion’s discovery of the key to ancient hieroglyphs is usually thought to have taken place in 1822, when for the first time he was able to read a royal cartouche whose meaning was not already known to him from a Greek translation (Parkinson, 1995, 35). However, it still took him several years to sketch out his pioneering grammar of ancient Egyptian, which was posthumously published in 1836, the same year as Emerson’s Nature ; and it was not until 1858 that the full text of the Rosetta Stone became available in an American translation (Parkinson, 1995, 41).

ABSTRACTS

Ancien pasteur unitarien, Ralph Waldo Emerson assimile l’Antiquité proche-orientale à un corpus de textes (le canon biblique) ; pour lui, elle relève d’une enquête herméneutique, indissociable d’une réflexion poussée sur la nature et les enjeux de l’écriture et de la lecture. Héritée de la théologie chrétienne, cette approche s’appuie sur des présupposés devenus problématiques à l’heure où les progrès de la philologie jettent un éclairage novateur sur l’histoire de l’écriture, notamment grâce aux découvertes de Champollion qui permettent de déchiffrer les inscriptions hiéroglyphiques. Traditionnellement, l’exégèse biblique s’était jusque-là donné pour tâche d’élaborer des interprétations correctes, de retrouver la signification exacte de textes dont la lettre paraît souvent ambiguë et confuse ; le discours connu sous le nom de « Divinity School Address » constitue la principale contribution d’Emerson à ce débat. Au début du dix-neuvième siècle, les progrès de la philologie proche-orientale posent des problèmes d’un autre ordre : que signifie « lire » un texte, et a fortiori le lire « correctement » ? Quelles précautions faut-il prendre afin de garantir sa lisibilité minimale avant même que ne se pose la question de la « juste » interprétation ? Le présent essai tente d’examiner quelques-unes des tensions qui résultent de cette situation nouvelle. Il s’agit de montrer en quoi elles infléchissent la réflexion d’Emerson sur la nature sémiotique du langage, compliquent ses rapports avec la pensée contemporaine et

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déterminent l’attitude qu’il adopte vis-à-vis de sa propre écriture, d’une manière qui, du point de vue du vingt-et-unième siècle, conserve une grande actualité.

INDEX

Mots-clés: Ralph Waldo Emerson, Antiquité proche-orientale, écriture, hiéroglyphes, herméneutique, pragmatique Keywords: Ralph Waldo Emerson, ancient Near East, writing, hieroglyphs, hermeneutics, pragmatics

AUTHOR

MATHIEU DUPLAY Université Paris Diderot — Paris 7 Professeur

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Radical Innocence: Margaret Fuller’s Utopian Rome

Leslie Elizabeth Eckel

1 As her Transcendentalist contemporaries in Boston and Concord built utopian “castles in the air” (Alcott, 543), some resulting in tangible social experiments at Brook Farm, Fruitlands, and Walden Pond, Margaret Fuller gave the impression of detachment from such endeavors. Not for her were the waves of philosophical enthusiasm that characterized the early 1840s in New England, whose landscape was peopled by Shakers, Fourierists, proto-environmentalists, and other lovable bands of eccentrics. Profoundly skeptical, even superior in her view of social reform, Fuller told her friend William Henry Channing, “… I do not believe in Society” (Fuller to Channing, 29 March 1841, in Letters 2: 205). By the time Fuller arrived in Italy in 1847, after a two-year stint in New York as a journalist, literary editor, and feminist intellectual, she had begun to think and to write in precisely those utopian terms she once disdained.

2 This essay seeks to discern what changed in Fuller, and what her transatlantic journey did to ignite that transformation. How could she travel from a space of local experience, in which she freely laughed when the dreams of her colleagues went up in smoke, to a world of radical innocence, where she invested her energies in the ephemeral Roman Republic, a utopian experiment that she felt held the key to the future of humanity as a whole? In transit, Fuller passes through the Atlantic, which in itself is a utopian space that is literally “no-place,” without terrestrial topography of its own but held in solution by the continents that give it form. The Atlantic generates a series of utopian projections from Thomas More’s fictional island onward, and at the same time destroys those ideals, unleashing the violence that in Paul Gilroy’s theory produces the “fractal patterns” of the black Atlantic (15). As Fuller moves from experience to innocence, her language bears witness to her growing radicalism, and her thought ripens into the tantalizing yet often “invisible harvest” (Alcott, 547) in which we share as practitioners of transatlantic studies. I argue that for Fuller, this journey toward radical innocence involves not only a turn away from the skepticism with which she initially viewed Transcendentalist utopias, but also a deliberate

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reinvention of the authoritarian Rome of her childhood as a space of invigorating Romantic possibility.

Utopianism in Doubt

3 Transcendentalist utopias themselves were products of transatlantic collaborations, echoing in part such Romantic projections as Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Robert Southey’s never-realized plans for “Pantisocratic” community, a “Sublime of Hope” that beckoned them “O’er the ocean swell” to the banks of the Susquehanna River in Pennsylvania (Coleridge, 14).1 Bronson Alcott’s Fruitlands, an agrarian, vegan commune formed in Harvard, Massachusetts in 1843 and dissolved several months later, was co- founded by Englishman Charles Lane, whom Alcott had met in a small village near Richmond, Surrey, while visiting Alcott House, the experimental school named in his honor. Brook Farm, a larger and more ambitious community that was the brainchild of Transcendental Club member George Ripley, refashioned itself as the Brook Farm Phalanx in 1845, in keeping with the socialist principles of French reformer Charles Fourier. Even Henry David Thoreau’s Walden, although defiantly local on the one hand, seemed to Thoreau like a project of global, even cosmic scope, for as he settles in for his two years by the pond, he writes, “I discovered that my house actually had its site in such a withdrawn, but forever new and unprofaned, part of the universe” (Thoreau, 88). However grounded these utopias may have seemed on U.S. soil, they were still networked into the wider Atlantic world, in person, in theory, and in imagination. In fact, I would argue, their very identity as utopias depends on their pursuit of what Bronson’s daughter Louisa May Alcott would identify as the broader cause of “human freedom” (Alcott, 539).

4 Fuller cast a skeptical eye on such grand plans. As her colleagues plotted their course for Brook Farm, she took more pleasure in observing their characteristic behavior in company than in contemplating their philosophical principles. Ripley, a co-editor of the Transcendentalist journal The Dial, appears to her “too sanguine, and does not take time to let things ripen in his mind, yet his aim is worthy, and with his courage and clear mind his experiment will not, I think, to him at least be a failure” (Fuller to Channing, 25 and 28 October 1840, in Letters 2: 174). In Fuller’s opinion, his naïveté speaks to a certain greenness, or “unripeness” of thought, yet she admires him for his “courage and clear mind.” Emerson did the same, even as he refused to participate in Ripley’s community, damning him with faint praise as he comments, “of all philanthropic projects of which I have heard yours is the most pleasing to me” (Emerson qtd. in Fuller, Letters 2: 195).

5 It is important to note that at this point, what mattered more to Fuller than Ripley’s specific intentions for Brook Farm was his willingness to fail in his attempt to create utopia. She tells her friend William Henry Channing that Ripley “will not say, however, that he considers his plan as a mere experiment, and is willing to fail, or can well bear to fail. I tell him that he is not ready till he can say that” (Fuller to Channing, 13 December 1840, in Letters 2: 194). Before Ripley even settles into the contours of his utopia, Fuller’s pessimism predicts his failure, or at least enlivens the possibility of it. As she does so, Fuller allows us to glimpse one of the essential paradoxes of utopian thinking : in the place that in More’s invented term means “no-place,” and in the “no- place” that is also the happiest place imaginable, or “eutopia” with the Latin prefix

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“eu,” utopian success is bound up with failure. Fátima Vieira observes that utopias are “simultaneously constituted by a movement of affirmation and denial,” dissolved even as they are built, like John Winthrop’s American “city upon a hill,” where he predicts for his audience of transatlantic pilgrims, “we shall surely perish out of the good land whither we pass over this vast sea to possess it” (Vieira, 4; Winthrop, 158).

6 Despite these warnings, Fuller does not take Transcendental utopianism seriously. She tells Channing of a river excursion with her friend Caroline Sturgis, fancifully recasting that adventure as the foundation of a utopian community. She asks, “But, truly, why has such a thing never been? One of these valleys so immediately suggests an image of the fair company that might fill it, and live so easily, so naturally, so wisely. Can we not people the banks of some such affectionate little stream? I distrust ambitious plans, such as Phalansterian organizations!” (Fuller to Channing, 31 October 1840, in Letters 2: 179-80). Utopia is a matter of play for Fuller, an “affectionate,” romantic amusement unlikely to come to fruition. Her “easy” speculations make Coleridge and Southey’s “Sublime of Hope” seem in deadly earnest. Although Fuller shared her initial “distrust” with him, Channing himself was a committed Associationist who would launch his own utopian journal called The Present in 1843. David M. Robinson has commented on the degree to which their correspondence and their friendship gradually helped politicize Fuller’s thinking, which took a definitive turn toward social activism in her Dial essay “The Great Lawsuit: Man versus Men, Woman versus Women” (1843) and her manifesto Woman in the Nineteenth Century (1845) (95-96).2 In the meantime, however, in keeping with her lighthearted approach, Fuller treated Brook Farm as a country retreat in the years that followed its establishment in 1841: occasionally seeking “stillness and solitude” there for her own writing, and leading for the benefit of community members the kind of educational conversations that she was directing for Boston women as a professional venture (Fuller to Emerson, 10 August 1842, in Letters 3 :83; Fuller to Emerson, 16 October 1842, in Letters 3 :97).3

7 Fuller’s playfulness with utopian possibilities suggests her unexpected kinship with Transcendentalist daughter Louisa May Alcott, who published a lightly fictionalized account of her childhood experience at the Fruitlands commune in the generous- spirited satire “Transcendental Wild Oats” in 1873. In this story, the characters “Abel Lamb” (Bronson Alcott) and “Timon Lion” (Charles Lane) “desired to plant a Paradise, where Beauty, Virtue, Justice, and Love might live happily together, without the possibility of a serpent entering in” (Alcott, 539). The serpent that undermines these philosophical abstractions turns out to be “Lion,” or Lane himself, who is as tyrannical as he is ineffective. Yet Bronson Alcott himself believed in the power of such utopian principles, lifted above the sentence in his daughter’s text by capitalization, symbols of ideals difficult to define and therefore to realize in practice. These were precisely the kind of ideals of which Fuller was skeptical and that led her to anticipate the failure of such experiments. In a letter to Emerson, Fuller expressed her suspicion that Alcott’s “truth [would] be left unembodied as far as depends on him” (Fuller to Emerson, 8 March 1842, in Letters 3 :50).4 When Fruitlands collapsed just months after its founding, she wrote to Lane, challenging him to account for her “disappoint[ment]” (Fuller to Lane, 17 July 1844, in Letters 3 :212). On another occasion, she admitted to Emerson that “the letter from Fruitlands [published in The Dial] made me laugh till I cried,” proving that she, like Louisa May Alcott decades later, saw Fruitlands primarily as comic relief,

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not as the proving ground for her best hopes (Fuller to Emerson, 4 August 1843, in Letters 3 :137).

8 Fuller’s utopian perspective began to change under what Judith Mattson Bean and Joel Myerson note was the “reformist” mentorship of Horace Greeley, the editor of the New- York Tribune who employed her first as staff critic in New York and then as foreign correspondent in Europe (Fuller, 2000, xviii). Fuller reviewed socialist novels by French writers Eugene Sue and George Sand, asserting that their ideas of “Association, in its grander forms, will have fair play in America” (Fuller, 2000, 62). Her utopian thinking becomes more and more euchronic, that is, she anticipates that utopia “will have fair play” and will be achieved in the future tense rather than tested in the present moment, as Alcott, Ripley, and Thoreau believed. Vieira suggests that euchronia is the most common mode of utopianism in the nineteenth century, shared by transnational community builders Robert Owen, founder of New Lanark in Scotland and New Harmony in Indiana, and Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, whose Communist Manifesto (1848) proved a foundational “utopian” document (Vieira, 12-14).5 While these thinkers seek rebirth, they do not imagine that it is happening here and now, as William Wordsworth did at the apex of the eighteenth century in the wake of the French Revolution, when he found “human nature seeming born again” (Wordsworth, 226).

9 Fuller endorses Sue’s vision that “the heart of mankind may be made to beat with one great hope, one love,” beginning to imagine the kind of intentional, principled community that inspired Alcott in his search for an earthly “Paradise” (Fuller, 2000, 62).6 She works to persuade her readers that “something of universal importance” is about to happen, and the near total vagueness of that event is another sign of its utopian potential. “Else what avail magnetic telegraphs, steamers and rail cars traversing every road of land and ocean,” Fuller speculates. “Surely there would not be all this pomp of preparation as to the means of communication, unless there were like to be something worthy to be communicated” (Fuller, 2000, 329). Here, she perceives the transatlantic means, but not the ends of utopia, as she has not yet formulated those philosophical goals that motivated her peers : the “Beauty, Virtue, Justice, and Love” of Alcott or the utopian infinitives of Thoreau, who created his retreat “to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life” (Thoreau, 90).

Utopian Rome

10 Fuller’s European venture began in August 1846, more than halfway through Thoreau’s solo experiment at Walden, and she speaks eagerly of her first “nine days of wonder in England” (Fuller, 1991, 39). Fuller is one of the first American writers to reverse the transatlantic dynamic generated by European thinkers such as More and Winthrop, who saw the western New World as the utopian space in which their desires would be fulfilled. Although Fuller finds much that intrigues her in both Britain and France, it is Italy, and more specifically Rome, where she lays the groundwork for her own utopian experiment. Upon arrival in Italy, she explains to her Tribune readers, “… I could not realize that I had actually touched those shores to which I had looked forward all my life, where it seemed that the heart would expand, and the whole nature be turned to delight” (Fuller, 1991, 129). Fuller embraces this state of emotional expectation, pursuing a youthful “delight” that leads her both forward and backward into radical innocence. She begins to speak in those naïve terms that she deemed “useless” in

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Transcendental utopianism, noting the utopian behavior of the Italian people and their leaders, particularly Pope Pius IX, who seems to her “a man of noble and good aspect, who, it is easy to see, has set his heart upon doing something for the benefit of Man” (Fuller to Caroline Sturgis, October 1840, in Letters 2: 163; Fuller, 1991, 36). Although as Elizabeth Fenton has shown, Fuller’s initial optimism about Pius IX’s potential “to stand for the people” soon devolves into the “anti-Catholic” “suspicion and disdain” that haunted U.S. political discourse at the time, Fuller admires such moral ambition.7 First, she praises this spiritual leader, and then hails the triumphant return to Rome of political exile Giuseppe Mazzini, who admits that his own “hopes for Italy” are “Utopian” ones (Fuller, 1991, 264). Her perception of the “childlike joy and trust” of Italians themselves, initially the sort of nineteenth-century stereotype that makes us cringe, ripens into an ideal of prophetic innocence that prompts Fuller to ask of Europe more broadly, “Where is the genuine Democracy to which the rights of all men are holy? where the child-like wisdom learning all through life more and more the will of God?” (Fuller, 1991, 155, 163-4). This Romantic regression is at once surprising given Fuller’s initial level of skepticism and indicative of her growing political sophistication during her years abroad, in which she develops the “child-like wisdom” that enables her to see the ironies of the transatlantic pursuit of “Democracy.”

11 Fuller’s embrace of a utopian Italy also marks a significant turn in her personal relation to the Mediterranean world of antiquity. As a child, Fuller experienced Rome as a profoundly anti-utopian, even dystopian intellectual environment. She explains in her “Autobiographical Romance” (1840) that her father Timothy drilled her in Latin and English simultaneously, and that she began immersing herself in classical texts from the age of six onward (Fuller, 1992, 27-28). Born in 1778, Timothy modeled himself after his “political hero” Thomas Jefferson, who also gave his daughters an intensive classical education (Matteson, 19). His “generation,” which as Matteson notes was “plagued by the anxious fear that it could never live up to the courage and deeds of its Revolutionary fathers” (3), inherited the habits of what Meyer Reinhold identifies as a “cult of antiquity” from those predecessors (24). Jefferson, John Adams, and those who helped them author the founding documents of the republic turned to classical figures as mentors in rational thinking; their writing held “practical value in promoting moral and political wisdom” (Reinhold, 25). In his study of ancient Rome’s impact on the formation of a distinctly American historical consciousness, Eran Shalev argues that these participants in “a modern revolution” actually envisioned themselves as “ancient republicans,” creating conditions of imaginative simultaneity between revolutionary America and classical Rome (2). As I will observe later on, Fuller also sought a confluence between Rome and the United States, but by 1848, her transatlantic republics occupied the same historical moment.

12 To cultivate republican virtues, reading Virgil was essential for college-bound young men in the eighteenth century, but they were seldom taught to appreciate the literary merits of the Aeneid, as it was used instead “for drilling grammar, for construing and parsing Latin, and for scanning verses” (Reinhold, 222). Like her male peers, Fuller encountered Virgil’s Aeneid unprepared for its complexities, but she was less bored than disturbed. These literary encounters gave her nightmarish visions of “horses trampling over her” and “as she had just read in her Virgil, of being among trees that dripped with blood, where she walked and walked and could not get out, while the blood became a pool and plashed over her feet, and rose higher and higher, till soon

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she dreamed it would reach her lips” (Fuller, 1992, 27). Virgil’s Rome is for Fuller bloody, violent, and apocalyptic: opposed to both Jefferson and Adams’ rational domain and the region of “delight” that she discovers in Italy later in life. Classical learning figuratively suffocates her and overwhelms her body, putting her health at risk and curtailing her innocence to the point where she declares, “I had no natural childhood!” (Fuller, 1992, 27)

13 In Fuller’s purgative “romance,” which draws on her journals, the classical drama of her childhood home becomes the site not only of “gendered… struggle” between an overbearing father figure and a sensitive daughter, as both Robinson and Phyllis Cole have observed, but also, I would add, the crucible of Fuller’s Romantic imagination (Robinson, 83; Cole, 25). Her father recreates ancient Rome as a world of intellectual stringency, martial “precision,” and declarative authority. His classical obsessions clash with what Fuller identifies as her own preference for “imagination and feeling.” As she reads the stories of the “great Romans,” Fuller reflects, “[e]verything turns your attention to what a man can become, not by yielding himself freely to impressions, not by letting nature play freely through him, but by a single thought, an earnest purpose, an indomitable will, by hardihood, self-command, and force of expression” (Fuller, 1992, 28, 30). Even as she absorbs the “indomitable” Roman model of self- determination, therefore, Fuller is developing a countercultural vocabulary of “yielding… to impressions” and “letting nature play freely” that she can use to write her own “Autobiographical Romance.” Fuller’s Dionysian opposition to an Apollonian force of will surely draws as well on Emerson’s experience of the sublime in Nature (1836), whose most memorable episode of self-discovery celebrates how “[t]he currents of the Universal Being circulate through me; I am part or particle of God” (Emerson, 1 : 10). In this experience of “yielding,” rather than asserting the self, Fuller stands with Emerson against the stern Roman values that dominated her upbringing.

14 Still, Fuller expresses ambivalence about her ancient Roman models, which both constrain and support her imaginative efforts. More powerfully drawn to Greek mythology and its “shifting shows of nature,” which she took as the subject of her first “Conversations” series for Boston women in 1839, she nonetheless counts her father’s Rome as an essential part of her intellectual identity. She explains, “I steadily loved this ideal in my childhood, and this is the cause, probably, why I have always felt that man must know how to stand firm on the ground, before he can fly” (Fuller, 1992, 30). Her preference for concrete, “ground[ed]” action may help account for her belated adoption of utopian thinking—that vision of “the flying Perfect” (Emerson, 2: 179) that Emerson captured in writing, but never in fact—and for her skeptical attitude toward such decidedly imperfect social experiments as Brook Farm and Fruitlands. “Hope” and “desire,” the two engines of utopian thinking identified by Ernst Bloch and Ruth Levitas, would be too ethereal for an intellectual such as Fuller, who was accustomed to the “firm” foundations of classical learning (Levitas, 7).

15 Yet, Fuller’s discovery of Rome in 1847 was a decidedly Romantic event, merging the geography of her past (“those shores to which I had looked forward all my life”) with the emotional immediacy of a revolutionary present (“where it seemed that the heart would expand, and the whole nature be turned to delight”) (Fuller, 1991, 129). Fuller’s Romantic Rome developed in dialogue not only with the academic Rome of her childhood but also with the cities she inhabited in her mature adulthood, especially New York and Paris. In New York, Fuller expanded her work beyond the pages of the

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Dial and the circles of her Conversations series to embrace direct experiences with the city’s poor, the mentally ill, and the incarcerated. These encounters fed the social conscience of her writing, both in the cultural commentary she contributed to the New- York Tribune and in her treatise on Woman in the Nineteenth Century. Robert Hudspeth finds in Fuller’s writing about Rome and other cities a particular kind of “urban innocence,” or a capacity to see these places with fresh eyes as proving grounds for social reform (Hudspeth, 199). On her way to Rome, Fuller experienced her own “French Revolution,” and her excitement was just as high as Wordsworth’s, for as Larry J. Reynolds notes, “to her it marked the dawn of a new era, a socialist-republican era” (Reynolds, 65). In Paris, Fuller solidified her connections with such “revolutionary” thinkers as George Sand, Adam Mickiewicz, and Victor Considerant (Reynolds, 60-61).8 Considerant, like Coleridge, projected his utopian energies westward to a Fourierist community in Texas in 1855 (Robinson, 98). Together with Mazzini, these leaders persuaded Fuller that utopia was no fiction, but rather an ongoing pursuit in which she could take part. As More himself did in his Utopia, Fuller adapted her knowledge of classical Rome to suit her present purposes. In its opening verses, More’s Utopia “claim[s] / To match, or beat” Plato’s Republic “at its own game,” and likewise, the potential energy of Fuller’s Roman Republic surpasses the visions of ancient Rome that shaped her childhood (More, 5).

Fuller’s Radical Innocence

16 In keeping with her spirit of innocence, Fuller fixates on the “radical” nature of European revolution, first in France, where she writes of “the need of some radical measures of reform,” and then throughout her time in Italy, where she joins the fight for “peaceful though radical revolution” (Fuller, 1991, 119, 320). Etymologically, radicalism speaks of transformation from the ground up, of first things at the roots of knowledge and growth. Transatlantically, radicalism’s roots also remind us of Paul Gilroy’s central homonym “routes”: a pairing that underscores both the territorial quality of utopia, its need for a place of origin, and the migratory element of its pursuit, which means it has no place at all (Gilroy, 3, 19). Fuller brings this metaphorical network into play as she describes her ideal traveler as “The thinking American—a man who, recognizing the immense advantage of being born to a new world and on a virgin soil, yet does not wish one seed from the Past to be lost. He is anxious to gather and carry back with him all that will bear a new climate and new culture” (Fuller, 1991, 163). This utopian thinker is a farmer of sorts, “anxious[ly]” radical, focused on rerouting seeds through the Atlantic world and giving them new roots. This transplanter of growing ideas is also Fuller herself.

17 The Transcendental utopias Fuller knew from her time in Concord were deliberately agricultural in their orientation; greater engagement with manual labor was intended to balance the intellectual pursuits in which the Transcendentalists excelled. Brook Farm residents were assigned specific tasks, but Fruitlands adherents were encouraged to follow their inclinations, which led to little actual productivity. Only Thoreau in his bean field at Walden Pond managed to cultivate a successful utopian crop, but even his harvest was more figurative than literal, for he planted “only for the sake of tropes and expression, to serve a parable-maker one day” (Thoreau, 162).9 In Italy, Fuller’s vision of the fields of reform echoes Thoreau’s, as it is entirely metaphorical. Like Bronson

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Alcott’s, her utopia promises uncertain results; in “Transcendental Wild Oats,” Alcott’s daughter Louisa May would call this an “invisible harvest.” The seeds that Fuller plants sound familiar: ideals such as “truth” and “Genius,” and philosophical principles such as “Virtue and Love” (Fuller, 1991, 164, 303). In what she believes is a “riper period in the world’s history,” Fuller trusts that these efforts to seed transatlantic change will bear fruit, reflecting, “I felt the calm of thought, the sublime hopes of the Future, Nature, Man – so great, though so little, so dear, though incomplete” (Fuller, 1991, 263, 216).

18 However abstract and “incomplete” her utopian projections might be, Fuller experiences Rome as a literal utopian community. Rome is her “City of the Soul,” a neo- Platonic republic formed in February 1849 and dissolved through foreign intervention just a few months later, perhaps the shortest-lived of all Transcendental utopias (Fuller, 1991, 238). Rome has long stood at the center of human history, but this particular moment, Fuller feels, surpasses all the rest. She observes, “This week has been one nobler, sweeter feeling of a better hope and faith than Rome in her greatest days ever knew” (Fuller, 1991, 209). During these five months, the principles that she and others have sown actually spring into practice. In Rome, she explains, “I hear earnest words of pure faith and love. I see deeds of brotherhood” (Fuller, 1991, 230-1). Here, Bronson Alcott’s promises of “Beauty, Virtue, Justice, and Love” are transmuted into a transatlantic victory, and Fuller lives in a “Paradise… already reestablished on earth.” Yet this is no utopia in thought only, as Fuller becomes personally invested in its success: she enters into a utopian marriage with Roman revolutionary fighter Giovanni Ossoli, and serves the republican army as the superintendent of its Fatebenefratelli hospital. We can recognize Fuller’s Rome as a utopia precisely because of its double-edged contours: at once imaginary and concrete, literary and historical, no-place and place.

19 The Roman Republic never looks more utopian, in fact, than when it is about to fall, surrounded by barricades, reminiscent of More’s original Atlantic island and many other utopias that sustain themselves in geographical isolation. Fuller’s theory of utopian failure is put to the test; she once cautioned Ripley that he should not establish his community until he was ready to fail, and now, Fuller values her own utopia even more as it collapses. In the final struggle between the dystopian energies of tyranny and the utopian hopes of democracy, Fuller’s principles of “Virtue and Love” typographically rise above the lower energies of “egotism and brute force,” and she finds that “yet Truth is not dead, Honor yet glows in many breasts, and Falsehood cannot destroy immortal verities by its corrupt use of their names” (Fuller, 1991, 303, 315). As she witnesses Rome’s latest fall, Fuller enters the zone of “planetary” time theorized by Wai Chee Dimock (Dimock, 6). Fuller looks ahead into a euchronic future while turning her gaze westward to the newly promising territory of America. As she does so, she celebrates a synchronicity of “Joy to those born in this day: In America is open to them the easy chance of a noble, peaceful growth, in Europe of a combat grand in its motives, and its extent beyond what the world ever before so much as dreamed.” Once wary of the “wide” scope of the Brook Farm enterprise, Fuller now broadens her utopian reach to the fullest “extent” possible. From transatlantic roots, she gives us a vision of global transformation (Fuller to William Henry Channing, 25 and 28 October 1840, in Letters 2: 174).

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Conclusion

20 I began this essay by invoking the foundational Romantic polarities of William Blake’s innocence and experience. How odd it seemed that Fuller would turn this familiar transit from hoping to knowing on its head, seeking radical innocence after so much Transcendental experience. I would like to suggest that within the framework of the Atlantic world, such reversals of terms should not be as surprising as they seem. Innocence and experience are perhaps flip sides of the same coin, but they are also parts of a perpetual cycle, elements that circulate within a system in which we can be led from experience to innocence and around again with the help of the ocean’s currents. Vieira contends that utopia is ultimately “a strategy of creativity” (23). In conceptualizing utopianism as a distinctly Atlantic practice, I would argue that transatlanticism, or Atlantic thinking, is also a profoundly creative and hopeful process.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

ALCOTT, Louisa May, “Transcendental Wild Oats,” The Portable Louisa May Alcott, Elizabeth Lennox Keyser, ed., New York, Penguin, 2000, 538-52.

BLOCH, Ernst, The Principle of Hope, Neville Plaice, Stephen Plaice, and Paul Knight, trans., Cambridge, MA, MIT Press, 1986.

COLE, Phyllis, “Fuller’s Lawsuit and Feminist History,” Margaret Fuller and Her Circles, Brigitte Bailey, Katheryn P. Viens, and Conrad Edick Wright, eds., Durham, NH, University of New Hampshire Press, 2013, 11-31.

COLERIDGE, Samuel Taylor, Selected Poems, Richard Holmes, ed., London, Penguin, 1994.

DELANO, Sterling F., Brook Farm: The Dark Side of Utopia, Cambridge, MA, Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2004.

DELANO, Sterling F., “‘We have abolished domestic servitude’: Women and Work at Brook Farm,” Toward a Female Genealogy of Transcendentalism, Jana L. Argersinger and Phyllis Cole, ed., Athens, GA, University of Georgia Press, 2014, 179-201.

DIMOCK, Wai Chee, Through Other Continents: American Literature Across Deep Time, Princeton, Princeton University Press, 2006.

EMERSON, Ralph Waldo, The Collected Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson, 10 vols., Robert E. Spiller and Alfred R. Ferguson, eds., Cambridge, MA, Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1971-2013.

FENTON, Elizabeth, Religious Liberties: Anti-Catholicism and Liberal Democracy in Nineteenth-Century U.S. Literature and Culture, New York, Oxford University Press, 2011.

FRANCIS, Richard, Fruitlands: The Alcott Family and Their Search for Utopia, New Haven, Yale University Press, 2010.

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FRIESEN, John W. and Virginia Lyons Friesen, The Palgrave Companion to North American Utopias, Basingstoke, Palgrave, 2004.

FULLER, Margaret, The Essential Margaret Fuller, Jeffrey Steele, ed., New Brunswick, Rutgers University Press, 1992.

FULLER, Margaret, The Letters of Margaret Fuller, 6 vols., Robert N. Hudspeth, ed., Ithaca, Cornell University Press, 1983-1994.

FULLER, Margaret, Margaret Fuller, Critic: Writings from the New-York Tribune, 1844-1846, Judith Mattson Bean and Joel Myerson, eds., New York, Columbia University Press, 2000.

FULLER, Margaret, “These Sad But Glorious Days”: Dispatches from Europe, 1846-1850, Larry J. Reynolds and Susan Belasco Smith, eds., New Haven, Yale University Press, 1991.

GILROY, Paul, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness, Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press, 1993.

HUDSPETH, Robert, “Margaret Fuller and Urban Life,” Margaret Fuller and Her Circles, Brigitte Bailey, Katheryn P. Viens, and Conrad Edick Wright, eds., Durham, NH, University of New Hampshire Press, 2013, 179-205.

LEVITAS, Ruth, The Concept of Utopia, New York, Philip Allan, 1990.

MATTESON, John, The Lives of Margaret Fuller: A Biography, New York, Norton, 2012.

MORE, Thomas, Utopia, Paul Turner, ed., New York, Penguin, 2003.

REINHOLD, Meyer, Classica Americana: The Greek and Roman Heritage in the United States, Detroit, Wayne State University Press, 1984.

REYNOLDS, Larry J., European Revolutions and the American Literary Renaissance, New Haven, Yale University Press, 1988.

ROBINSON, David M., “Margaret Fuller, Self-Culture, and Associationism,” Margaret Fuller and Her Circles, Brigitte Bailey, Katheryn P. Viens, and Conrad Edick Wright, eds., Durham, NH, University of New Hampshire Press, 2013, 77-99.

SHALEV, Eran, Rome Reborn on Western Shores: Historical Imagination and the Creation of the American Republic, Charlottesville, University of Virginia Press, 2009.

THOREAU, Henry D., Walden, J. Lyndon Shanley, ed., Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1971.

VIEIRA, Fátima, “The Concept of Utopia,” The Cambridge Companion to Utopian Literature, Gregory Claeys, ed., Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2010, 3-27.

WINTHROP, John, “A Model of Christian Charity,” The Norton Anthology of American Literature, 7th ed., vol. A., Nina Baym, ed., New York, Norton, 2007, 147-58.

WORDSWORTH, William, The Prelude: The Four Texts (1798, 1799, 1805, 1850), Jonathan Wordsworth, ed., London, Penguin, 1995.

NOTES

1. These phrases come from Coleridge’s poem “Pantisocracy” (1794). 2. Sterling Delano has also discussed the extent to which Fuller’s friendship with Channing drew her more closely into the Brook Farm circle, even to the point of expressing the “Hope” she initially distrusted in others (Brook Farm: The Dark Side of Utopia, 138-9).

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3. For more detailed investigation of women’s roles and opportunities at Brook Farm, see Delano’s article “‘We have abolished domestic servitude’: Women and Work at Brook Farm.” Delano suggests that Fuller may have been inspired by the relative freedom women enjoyed at Brook Farm to imagine more fluid, expansive futures for women in her writings of this period (182). 4. Richard Francis comments on this letter as evidence of Fuller’s “guarded” attitude toward Bronson Alcott in general, and specifically toward his utopian dreams (67). 5. Vieira places Marx and Engels within a utopian genealogy as she observes, “Although they claimed their theories to be scientific, the truth is that both Marx and Engels’s thought was clearly utopian, in that it pointed to the future and offered promising images of freedom, stability and happiness” (13). 6. For more on “intentional communities,” which are “initiated through deliberate effort in order to realize a set of specific goals,” see Friesen and Friesen, 15. 7. Fenton, 83-84. See Fenton’s thoughtful study for further discussion of Fuller’s evolving view of Pius IX in relation to theologically inflected conceptions of representative democracy at home and abroad. 8. Reynolds calls Mickiewicz a “revolutionary,” and I have extended the term to refer to others in this group as well. 9. In “The Bean-Field” chapter of Walden, as well as elsewhere in the book, Thoreau reveals that his utopian experiment is in part a classical fantasy. He imagines himself as “[a] very agricola laboriosus” in the eyes of passers-by and draws upon Roman writers Cato (De Agri Cultura) and Varro (Rerum Rusticarum) to support his argument for the “sacredness” of farming (Thoreau, 157, 163, 166). Reinhold points to the profound influence that “the rural values and moral exaltation of agriculture” contained in texts such as Virgil’s Georgics exerted on the early American imagination (227).

ABSTRACTS

Transcendentalist New England was animated by utopian dreams throughout the 1840s, but even as she occupied its intellectual center, Margaret Fuller stood apart from these enthusiastic projections. Instead, she expressed skepticism of Brook Farm and Fruitlands, predicting empty rhetoric and certain failure. As she moved onward to New York and then to Europe, Fuller’s thinking and writing became more and more utopian, fired by the revolutionary impulses at work in France and Italy in the years leading up to 1848. Ancient Rome, once a source of rigid discipline in Fuller’s childhood, became a place of Romantic possibility as she advocated for the cause of the Roman Republic. Unexpectedly aligning herself with Henry David Thoreau’s efforts to give utopianism new roots in his bean field at Walden Pond, Fuller embraced the radicalism of her own transatlantic experiment, hoping for a wider world of innocence born from Transcendental experience.

Au cours des années 1840, le mouvement transcendentaliste de Nouvelle-Angleterre fut animé par des rêves utopiques. Bien qu’elle en fût l’une des figures majeures, Margaret Fuller se tint à distance de ces visions enthousiastes; elle exprima au contraire un certain scepticisme à l’égard de projets tels que Brook Farm ou Fruitlands, qui ne pouvaient, selon elle, que se réduire à de beaux discours creux et se solder par un échec. Lorsque Fuller partit à New York, puis en Europe, sa pensée et son écriture se laissèrent progressivement gagner par un utopisme que les élans

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révolutionnaires en France et en Italie nourrirent au cours des années qui précédèrent 1848. Alors que la Rome antique avait constitué un modèle rigide de discipline dans son enfance, elle devint pour Fuller un champ des possibles romantiques lorsque cette dernière soutint la cause de la République romaine. Rejoignant de manière inattendue les efforts de Henry David Thoreau, qui cherchait à offrir de nouvelles racines à l’utopisme dans son champ de haricots à Walden Pond, Fuller adopta le radicalisme qu’avait fait germer en elle sa propre expérience transatlantique, espérant ainsi voir advenir un monde d’innocence issu de l’expérience transcendantale.

INDEX

Mots-clés: Margaret Fuller, utopisme, Transcendantalisme, Rome antique, Révolution romaine, Romanticisme, Bronson Alcott, Henry David Thoreau Keywords: Margaret Fuller, utopianism, Transcendentalism, Ancient Rome, Roman Revolution, Romanticism, Bronson Alcott, Henry David Thoreau

AUTHOR

LESLIE ELIZABETH ECKEL Associate Professor of English Suffolk University

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“Orpheus’ Sermon”: Making a Case for an Antiquer Dickinson

Eric Athenot

1 Readers of Emily Dickinson’s letters and poems will have noted their constant stream of classical references and allusions. While her Puritan legacy has been amply commented upon, both the context in which the poet acquired her classical culture and the breadth of her classical allusions have been largely ignored by biographers and critics. While insisting on Dickinson’s relationship to “the Valley’s tradition which she inherited and the dynasty into which she was born” (Johnson, 1955, 7), Thomas H. Johnson’s biography does not offer one single comment on her classical studies. Richard B. Sewall, who is to be credited with having compiled the first truly “interpretive” and thoroughly researched biography of the poet, writes in glowing terms about Dickinson’s time at Amherst Academy: If ever there was a blossoming period in her life, full and joyous, the years at the Academy—seven in all, with a few terms out for illness—were it. This remarkable school with its enlightened curriculum; its young and enthusiastic administrators and teachers, and its close association with Amherst College, was an influence of first importance in Emily’s formative years (Sewall, 1974, 337).

2 He reprints a letter, sent to parents by the Academy a dozen years before the poet and her sister Lavinia enrolled, revealing how centrally classics featured in the girls’ education: There is both a classical and English department. The learned languages will be taught in such a manner as to make the study of text-books a study of interesting facts and sentiments, as well as of words and their grammatical relations. Instead of confinement to the dry details of agreement and government, there will be constant endeavours to excite interest by adverting to ancient literature, politics, manners and customs (Sewall 1974, 338).

3 Sewall further remarks—a point of no small import to this article—that “‘[t]he classical Department,’ which Emily entered in 1842, offered studies that began with Nepos and Caesar and took the usual route through Vergil, Cicero, Sallust, and the Greek Testament” (349). The teaching of the New Testament in its original Greek version demonstrates philological preoccupations on the part of the Academy looking forward

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to the impact German Higher Criticism was to have on American biblical scholarship in the last decades of the century. Sewall, furthermore, insists on Dickinson’s fondness for her Latin teacher, Helen Humphrey, “the older sister of Emily’s great friend and correspondent, Jane,” who “had much more than a professional relationship with Emily” (340). Yet, while he is very good at referencing scientific allusions in the poetry, he remains utterly silent about Dickinson’s relationship to classics and classical languages.

4 A much-discussed article, published in 1978 by Lois A. Cuddy, analyses Dickinson’s bold rhetorical innovations as resulting from her familiarity with the Stoddard and Andrews Latin textbook used at Amherst Academy. The article contends that “Dickinson’s forms —the functional metres, capitalization, and internal punctuation—are integrally linked to Latin quantitative metrics and caesurae” (Cuddy, 1978, 74). Quoting a couple of Ovid lines printed in the textbook, Cuddy concludes that “when Dickinson reverses the syntax and deletes words, she is using the Latin textbook as her guide in recreating poetry modelled after some of the greatest writers in Western history—the poets of the Latin Golden Age” (76). Yet, when reviewing such tropes as anastrophe or hypallage— listed and analysed in the Latin textbook and accommodated by Dickinson—, one cannot but conclude that, even if they are found in condensed form in the poems, such tropes had undeniably been part and parcel of English-language poetry for centuries and that their presence in Dickinson’s poetry cannot be convincingly accounted for through her mere exposition to Latin prosody.

5 The present article approaches Dickinson as a poet who seized upon the classics and the Latin language as correctives, if not potent antidotes, to the long-lasting impact of Calvinism upon her native region and her family.1 Dickinson’s deceptively discreet yet constant reliance on classical references and languages will be examined not as part of an escapist strategy or as evidencing the kind of reactionary politics too commonly and too easily thrust upon her in standard Dickinson scholarship. This feature will on the contrary be regarded as contributing the tentative portrait of a creator fully immersed in the intellectual debates agitating her times and keenly aware of the ideological—and gendered—significance of the classics in post-Jacksonian America, during the Civil War, and beyond. The reliance on the antique throughout Dickinson’s poetry, it will be suggested, is part and parcel of a counter-teleology unfolding through the years in her verse, in which an increasingly scathing rebuttal of New England Calvinism combines with the rejection of an essentialist and fundamentalist version of history and the lessons her male contemporaries insisted on deriving from it.

Dickinson as a classical scholar

6 The following statement by Caroline Winterer could well have been made about Dickinson herself: “Next to Christianity, the central intellectual project in America before the late nineteenth century was classicism” (Winterer, 2002, 1). Winterer paints the picture of a society “dazzled […] by ancient Greeks and Romans,” and “quarr[ying] the classical past for more than two and a half centuries” (1). She is keen to show that this influence was not limited to men: American women were denied access to higher education until the second half of the nineteenth century, and only a small proportion in the antebellum era learned the ancient languages in seminaries or academies or from private tutors at home.

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Yet so pervasive was the habit of looking to antiquity that we find classical motifs and images forming a part of the ideological vocabulary of educated American women even in the eighteenth century (Winterer 2002, 2-3).

7 Dickinson was fortunate enough to learn Latin in a forward-looking academy, about which Winterer has this to say: Among the remarkable transformations in the early national period was the proliferation of female academies and seminaries between 1798 and 1850. Equally significant was the flourishing in those academies of the study of classical antiquity. […] Classical learning became not just a badge of middle-class, female accomplishment, but a portal of entry into a rudimentary public life of writing and speaking (146).

8 What Dickinson’s relation to public learning was to be does not exactly fit Winterer’s portrayal but classical learning did greatly contribute to her polish as a poet. Far from being a backward-looking frame of reference, Winterer argues that “well into the nineteenth century the Greco-Roman past represented the dazzling avant-garde in science, art, and literature” (2). It is known, from Alfred Habegger, that Dickinson studied Latin for at least three years, from 1842 to “at least May 1845, according to a letter of that month, suggesting that in all (ignoring the terms spent at home) she had three and possible four years of the language,” a period of learning which enabled her to acquire “a substantial foothold in the Aeneid” (Habegger 2001, 140).2

9 Dickinson’s earliest extant lines smack of classicism (reminiscent, in the speaker’s reliance on the muses, of the opening of the Iliad more than of the Aeneid): Awake ye muses nine, sing me a strain divine, Unwind the solemn twine, and be my Valentine! (Dickinson, 1999, 15)

10 The use of leonine rhyme and alexandrines—instead of pentameters—points to a poet resisting the conventions of English-language poetry from the start of her career. The alexandrine, a line devised in thirteenth-century France and later associated with French classicism, shows Dickinson not as honing her poetic skills through imitation— as most poets are reputed to do—but as approaching poetry from a crooked angle. Dickinson, as early as 1850, clearly exhibited a keen awareness of poetry as part of a historical development to which she was about to contribute so significantly and in so unique a fashion.

11 Dickinson’s disruptive strategy might be said to be inherent in the definitions Noah Webster gave, in 1844, of the adjective and noun antique, and to which Dickinson will be shown strictly to adhere in her poetry. Webster conferred a dynamic power to the adjective antique by ultimately placing it on the side of the unconventional. The first two definitions cover a relatively familiar ground: 1. Old; ancient; of genuine antiquity in this sense it usually refers to the flourishing ages of Greece and Rome; as an antique statue. 2. Old, as respects the present age, or a modern period of time; of old fashion, as an antique robe.

12 The third, however, links antique to antic (actually defined with this spelling six pages up): “Odd; wild; fanciful; more generally written antic.” To go from antique to antic is to tread the ground Dickinson may be considered to have travelled from the opening lines of her first extant poem to the far-reaching disruptions carried out by her later and better-known poems.

13 From Athens, in Fr 1606,3 to Thessaly, in Fr 491, from Amphitrite, in Fr 255, to Prometheus, in Fr 1143, Dickinson’s texts first seem to approach the antique from a

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well-known perspective. They apparently direct the reader towards a familiar figure, story or place that he or she is expected to be in a position to identify and whose relevance to the poem he or she is expected to work out by him- or herself. Depending on whether the reader is able to identify the classical allusion or not, the latter’s presence in a poem can be regarded as a gesture of proffered complicity or, in the event of this complicity being impossible, as one more obstacle to a full understanding of the lines.4 Dickinson’s classical references serve two functions at least. First, the elements alluded to—generally by being simply named—test the reader’s culture. By doing so, they reinforce Dickinson’s metapoetic strategy. In Fr 76, for example, Cato stands for the practitioner of a kind of public rhetoric, which the poem’s speaker declares to be inferior to nature’s power of speech (more of which at the end of this article):5 My flowers turn from Forums – Yet eloquent declare What Cato couldn’t prove me Except the birds were here! (Fr 76)6

14 The well-known myth of the Golden Fleece features in Fr 910 as an example of the pointlessness of quests, with the quotation marks hinting at the various narratives inspired by the myth—from Ovid to Dante, and here taking on the form of a play in five acts—or, perhaps, as the poem seems to make plain, as a sign of the speaker’s rejection of myth as untruth: Finding is the first Act The second, loss, Third, Expedition for the “Golden Fleece”

Fourth, no Discovery – Fifth, no Crew – Finally, no Golden Fleece – Jason, sham, too. (Fr 910)

Dickinson’s Antique Paradigms and the Civil War

15 Dickinson’s classical allusions and references prove to be even more arresting when, as often as not, she combines them with deceptively conventional Calvinistic considerations. Although in doing so she borders perilously close to blasphemy, such an attitude may be regarded as an offshoot of women’s classical training such as analysed by Winterer. The latter is of the opinion that “classicism could thrive in the female academies in part because of the seamless melding of pagan texts with Christian ethics that had long characterized women’s classical reading” (Winterer 2007, 152). This, if we are to believe her, was in keeping with the coexistence, noticeable ever since the creation of the American republic, of Christian revelation and paganism, a seemingly paradoxical situation made possible by the general perception of the superiority of the former over the latter. “These two traditions,” Winterer writes, “the biblical and the classical, nevertheless coexisted in American higher learning throughout the century. Athens and Jerusalem had everything to do with one another, although they occasionally conflicted” (9).

16 This scholarly tradition may account for Dickinson’s ironic juxtaposition of Christian and classical elements in many of her poems. Such a juxtaposition, as will be seen shortly in Fr 524, not only leads to an undermining of Calvinistic tenets but frequently appears to lay bare an ethical code presented as exclusively—and in the case of the Civil

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War, violently—devised by men. The selfless sacrifice of Spartan soldiers at the battle of Thermopylae may, in this respect, be seen in Dickinson’s poetry as one of the most arresting examples of such a strategy of ethical deconstruction through classical references.7

17 Fr 1584, for example, offers a highly ironic conclusion through the reference to Thermopylae: “Go tell it” – What a Message – To whom – is specified – Not murmur – not endearment – But simply – we obeyed – Obeyed – a Lure – a Longing? Oh Nature – none of this – To Law – said Sweet Thermopylae I give my dying Kiss – (Fr 1584)

18 The poem alludes to the famous epitaph of Simonides laid, as recorded by Herodotus (228), on the site where the last soldiers gave their lives: “Go tell the Spartans, stranger passing by, That here, obedient to Spartan law, we lie.”

19 The poem appears to be a stuttering dialogue—note the many dashes—between Nature and “sweet Thermopylae,” a somewhat oxymoronic reference to a murderous battle in which no fewer than 1500 men are reported to have died. This sweetness may be construed to imply that war, by causing death, entails the disappearance—the irrelevance?—of human laws just as armed conflict carries them out to their fullest, lethal potential. The battle may also be “sweet” because the poem kisses away the historically sanctioned illusion that human laws are eternal and unvarying—thereby rejecting as pointless the human sacrifice these laws brought about in 480 BC, and again, as will be seen shortly, in the Civil War. The present simple—instead of the more logical past—points to this as a timeless truth. The poem appears to have been written in 1882, or some seventeen years after the Civil War. According to Victor David Hanson, the battle of Thermopylae became known down the ages as the allegory of European freedom fighting against Asian despotism,8 a reading which Dickinson seized on to address the topic of male heroism in the US during the Civil War.

20 Written in 1863—the year Gettysburg was fought—, Fr 524 tells another story, in which the reference to Thermopylae, reflecting as it does on contemporary events, serves precisely to complicate, if not qualify, the traditional perception of soldierly sacrifice. This poem stands as perhaps one of the aptest illustrations of Dickinson’s art of paradox, if not of antiphrasis. On the one hand, it seems to offer a familiar celebration of Civil War casualties by alluding to a battle of epic fame. On the other, this allusion may equally be seen subtly to befuddle the reader once he or she becomes aware of the ironic gender game played by the poem’s speaker in commenting on the Christ-like dimension granted to the Union’s “unsustained Saviors”: It feels a shame to be Alive – When Men so brave – are dead – One envies the Distinguished Dust – Permitted – such a Head –

The Stone – that tells defending Whom This Spartan put away What little of Him we – possessed

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In Pawn for Liberty –

The price is great – Sublimely paid – Do we deserve – a Thing – That lives – like Dollars – must be piled Before we may obtain?

Are we that wait – sufficient worth – That such Enormous Pearl As life – dissolved be – for Us – In Battle’s – horrid Bowl?

It may be – a Renown to live – I think the Men who die – Those unsustained – Saviors – Present Divinity – (Fr 524)

21 The surface meaning of the poem could probably be summed up through the following question: “Are we, civilians, worth the price paid by our Christ-like soldiers, who sacrifice their lives in order to save us and U.S. democracy?” The intricacy of the wording, however, is compounded by the deceitful reference to Sparta and Thermopylae in stanzas two and four. The poem’s opening lines express not so much a feeling of shame at being alive as one that appears to endorse the conventional—and through the impersonal pronoun it, abstract and shallow—Christian feeling that being alive “feels a shame.” As a corollary, being dead as a result of act of selfless bravery appears to be preferred to being alive as the consequence of other men’s sacrifice.9 This, if taken at face value, will not come as too much of a surprise to readers familiar with Dickinson’s Civil War poetry.10

22 The transition from stanza one to stanza two prepares the reader for the convoluted allusion to the afore-quoted epitaph of Simonides celebrating the Spartans’ sacrifice and its celebration down the ages. In Fr 524, Fr 1584’s “sweet Thermopylae” is metamorphosed, through a metaphor taken from chemistry, into “Battle’s – horrid Bowl.” The tortured syntax seems to mimic the amputation inflicted upon the Union by the seceding Southern States (see ll. 3-8).11 Such a striking form of amputation occurs on the word “headstone,” broken into two (“a head / Such a Stone”) and is compounded by the many nonrecoverable deletions at work in the second and the final quatrains.12

23 The reference to Sparta, however, is all but conventional and may owe in part to Lydia Maria Child’s Philothea, published in 1836—some fourteen years before the country’s tensions were to come to a head over the Fugitive Slave Law. Child’s novel depicts Spartan society as brutal towards its helots, when Athens, a flawed, Jacksonian-type democracy, is praised for being a haven to runaway slaves. Child’s Sparta’s “views of slavery and slaves,” Winterer writes, “resembled precisely those of the antebellum South” (Winterer 2007, 174).13 The dust accumulating over the Spartans’ epitaph may therefore ironically suggest that their noble sacrifice was but the selfish expression of free men fighting to preserve their own liberty. In doing so they may be seen to have upheld unjust laws and to have acted out of the base fear of being reduced to the condition of their own helots.

24 But, what is more, Fr 524 should not be read too hastily as paying unqualified tribute to the Union dead. Paul Crumbley, writing of Dickinson’s “refusal to acknowledge history as the material expression of divine order,” makes a convincing case for the poet

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refusing “to view historical processes that had consistently excluded women from positions of public authority as providing adequate precedent for female self- expression in a democratic age” (Crumbley 2010, 70). The poem’s running financial metaphor may serve as a reminder of how unjust the Union’s own war policy was, when well-off men could buy their own way out of the conflict and others could not afford that exemption. A few months after this poem was written, Dickinson’s own brother, Austin, was precisely to take advantage of this policy and pay $500 for a substitute.14 This biographical fact seriously undermines the Union’s claim to “Renown” by pointing to the social inequalities at its core. The running economic metaphor that appears to celebrate the Union soldiers’ sacrifice may be there precisely to indict the unjust economic foundations underlying American democracy in a time of war and beyond. Is benevolent Athens, in this respect, really better than brutal Sparta? The reversal of capitals, from “Us” to “unsuspected – Saviors”, may not simply be understood to reproduce in writing the loss of a firm Union binding the different states together— symbolised by the initials US. This reversal may also be read as mirrorring on the page —albeit in hand-written form since the poem was never printed in Dickinson’s lifetime —the idea that this Union can only come into being—can only made ‘[p]resent’’— through the act of giving, something the Union soldiers teach the rest of society by paying with their own lives.

25 This running economic metaphor may, to echo Crumbley’s argument, be read as the choice weapon wielded by a woman who had taken men’s exclusion of women to its furthest possible logical development by excluding herself almost completely from social life in favour of a secluded writing life which gave form to the poems that we know.15 It is “Men” who are “so brave” in stanza one. The final lines, though, if one follows the logic of truncation at play in the poem introduced through the afore- mentioned “Head / The Stone”/ “Headstone” pun, may paradoxically be seen to raise questions about women’s relationship to the Union’s “unsustained – Saviors”. If one reverses the word order from “The Men who” to “The who Men” (“the women”, perhaps appearing spectrally in stanza two in the pronoun “Whom”), one will end up with a poem offering an entirely different conclusion from the one it appears at first to reach. The pronoun I appears just once in the poem, in the very same line as the words just quoted. This final twist may express a woman’s horror at the sacrifices women, and not just men, had to consent to in a war whose course was left entirely to the latter, “so brave” or, as in Austin Dickinson’s case, not “so brave.” Thermopylae, in this context, may serve as a reminder that women on both sides of the conflict had no more political rights than slaves. It was women therefore, just as much as male soldiers, by being kept on the margins of a slaughter over whose course they had no constitutional power and which made them victims too, who could be viewed ultimately to teach the ultimate lesson in selfless “divinity.”

Being antiquer, or anachronism as female translation

26 Dickinson uses the adjective antique in no fewer than six poems.16 She does not shy from providing it with a superlative form which traditional grammar usually denies it.17 In a handful of poems, antique is imbued with somewhat negative connotations, while ancient (an adjective used five times throughout the poems and granted a comparative form)18 seems to ring more positive.19 In Fr 311, however, ancient and antique are used as

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variants for each other in the phrase “Some Ancient [Antique] Brooch”. One will note that, in this particular instance, in order for either word to stand for the other, one will need to stress the first syllable of Antique. This brings us back to the third of Webster’s definitions of the term: “Odd; wild; fanciful; more generally written antic,” and its trochaic stress pattern.20

27 Dickinson’s later poems are more compact in form and increasingly scathing towards Calvinism. Fr 1577, in this respect, sounds like a direct echo of Sarah Grimké’s feminist critique of the translation of the Bible by generations of men. In 1838, she had expressed the opinion that the Bible was the product of male translators and that women, once they had access to classical languages, would be sure to unearth new, egalitarian readings repressed by men: “[I] must enter my protest against the false translation of some passages by the MEN who did that work, and against the perverted interpretation by the MEN who undertook to write commentary thereupon. I am inclined to think, when we are admitted to the honor of studying Greek and Hebrew, we shall produce some various readings of the Bible a little different from those we now have” (Grimké 1838, 16). Dickinson knew neither Greek nor Hebrew but had studied Latin. She may have attempted a “commentary” of her own in Fr 1577: The Bible is an antique Volume – Written by faded Men At the suggestion of Holy Spectres – Subjects – Bethlehem – Eden – the ancient Homestead – Satan – the Brigadier – Judas – the Great Defaulter – David – the Troubadour – Sin – a distinguished Precipice Others must resist – Boys that “believe” are very lonesome – Other Boys are “lost” – Had but the Tale a warbling Teller – All the Boys would come – Orpheus’ Sermon captivated – It did not condemn –21

28 The poem’s blasphemous character is immediately apparent, not least because of the Holy Spirit having been replaced with “Holy Spectres.” The lines offer a jumbled version of sacred history that culminates in the most “antique” figure among all those quoted here, and a pagan, mythological one at that—Orpheus. The various biblical references are listed anachronistically (Judas coming before David, for example), and are provided with sarcastic secular rewordings, mixing religious, literary and private history. This may point to Dickinson regarding the Good Book, like the Aeneid or the Iliad, as no other than a classical text of literature, no other, indeed, than “an antique Volume,” which, historically speaking, it is. Among the most ironically anachronistic portraits are “David – the Troubadour” or “Judas, the Great Defaulter,” while “Eden – the ancient Homestead” may be an oblique reference to the estate known by this name, built by her grandfather, Edward, and where Dickinson spent most of her life. As to the “lost” boys, one cannot but be reminded of Dickinson’s own refusal to give in to the religious pressure exerted on her at Mount Holyoke, a harrowing decision to which she adhered all her life, and which caused her at the time to be listed among those “without hope” (Sewall 1974, 358-67). This commitment to truth may explain that just as, in Fr 524, the dust accumulating on the epitaph at Thermopylae betrayed a respect for brutal

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slaveholders and was proof of male history’s selective memory, so here the Puritan condemnation of other people’s sins is humorously branded in this poem as “distinguished” (both exclusive, and affecting other people).

29 For Dickinson, the Bible’s antiquated nature appears clearly to be due to its male authors (and not, as in Grimké’s outburst, mere translators). Or, to quote the end of Fr 1094, “[I]t an Antique fashion shows – / Like Costumes Grandsires wore.” The poem eventually advocates Greco-Roman mythology and concludes with the reference to “a warbling Teller,” the quasi-oxymoronic expression of the speaker’s higher (and feigned?) regard for natural artistry.22 This higher form of singing, as we saw at the beginning of the article, may be what Dickinson aimed at all her life, with a view not to conforming to the description of Sappho provided by Higginson23 but to becoming a female Orpheus, thereby freeing women from their position as minor poets or Eurydice-type lyrical objects.24 Accordingly, the last three letters of the concluding verb —“condemn”—offer a recombination of the word “men,” whose version of history the present poem may be read as rejecting and rewriting through anachronistic juxtapositions. In this regard, in this poem as in Fr 524, men are “condemned” by being conned out of their monopoly over poetic creativity through this female poet’s ambiguous yet ultimately captivating warbling.

30 Poetry could only hope to be revitalised through a return to natural artistry, which would recapture the ancient art of lyric singing. The poet, in full command of playful anachronism, summed this up in an earlier poem25 by punning on the word “opera,” which, from a plural word in a classical language—Latin—, evolved, apparently unchanged but now singular, into a handful of modern languages. “Opera” may in this respect have enabled Dickinson to crystallise the ever-newness and ever-adaptability of the antique. A Protean word if there ever was one, it used to be plural and is now singular, it refers to an art-form mixing all other art-forms of the nineteenth century while referring to the actual building in which it is performed.26 For the speaker in Dickinson’s poem to boast that her art is “full as Opera” may simply point to the depth and breadth of her achievements. The antique, it is not to be doubted, played a crucial role in enabling her to “dance upon [her] Toes” (Dickinson 1999, 175) and turn her into a modern classic.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

CHILD, Lydia Maria, Philothea: A Romance (1836), Boston, Otis, Broaders & Co, 1936.

CRUMBLEY, Paul, Emily Dickinson and the Sovereignty of Democratic Thought, Tuscaloosa, The University of Alabama Press, 2010.

CUDDY, Lois A., “The Latin Imprint on Emily Dickinson’s Poetry: Theory and Practice,”American Literature, vol. 50, n° 1, March, 1978.

DICKINSON, Emily, The Poems of Emily Dickinson (ed. R. W. Franklin), Cambridge, Mass., The Belknap Press, 1999.

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---, The Letters (ed. Thomas H. Johnson), Cambridge, Mass., The Belknap Press, 1958.

GRIMKÉ Sarah, Letters on the Equality of the Sexes and the Condition of Woman, Boston, Isaac Knapp, 1838.

HABEGGER, Alfred, My Wars are Laid away in Books: The Life of Emily Dickinson, New York, Random House, 2001.

HERODOTUS, The Histories (1954), New York, Penguin Books USA, 2003.

JOHNSON, Thomas H., Emily Dickinson: An Interpretive Biography, Cambridge, Mass., The Belknap Press, 1955.

MILLER, Cristanne, Emily Dickinson: A Poet’s Grammar, Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University Press, 1987.

SEWALL, Richard B., The Life of Emily Dickinson, London, Faber and Faber, 1974.

SHALEV, Eran, Rome Reborn on Western Shores: Historical Imagination and the Creation of the American Republic, Charlottesville, University of Virginia Press, 2009.

WINTERER, Caroline, The Culture of Classicism: Ancient Greece and Rome in American Intellectual Life, 1790-1910, Baltimore, The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002.

---, The Mirror of Antiquity: American Women and the Classical tradition, Ithaca, Cornell University Press, 2007.

NOTES

1. Biographers on the whole offer no evidence of Dickinson having studied Greek. Was she aware of the Greek New Testament classes at all? If she was, she never mentioned them in her letters. 2. Habbeger bases his argument on the copy of “[a] surviving school edition of Vergil bearing the written names of “Miss Emily Dickinson” and Abby Maria Wood” (Habegger, 2001, 142). 3. This article has adopted the convention of referring to the poems in Franklin’s edition as “Fr + the poem’s number.” 4. Etymology reminds us that alludere means “to play or joke with,” implying the reader’s participation in the process. 5. Cato’s presence during Revolutionary times has been chartered by Eran Shalev in his important book, Rome Reborn on Western Shores. He dwells in great detail on the Roman figure’s ubiquity in post-Revolutionary America. Of particular note is the use of his name as a pseudonym by one of “the twenty-nine original (Massachusetts-based) writers” who, from September 5, 1787 and February 12, 1788, argued in pamphlets over the Constitution. “Cato and Caesar” embodied conflicting positions about federalism, the former standing for staunch republican virtues, the latter for anti-republican ambition. This opposition, Shalev notes, was how “Roman history was re-enacted in America” (Shalev 2009, 170-8). 6. The same philosopher reappears in Fr 149, through an allusion to his daughter Portia, wife to Caesar’s assassin Brutus. About Portia, Shalev notes that “American women [in the late colonial period] could have identified with and embodied classical virtues with the aid of protagonists such as Portia, Cato’s daughter and Brutus’s wife who committed suicide when her republic—and husband—were destroyed.” (Shalev 2009, 26). Shalev also mentions “Abigail Adams’s self- fashioning as “Portia in her correspondence with her husband, John.” (165). 7. There are at least two references to the battle in the letters. The first is a letter sent to Thomas Wentworth Higginson, in September 1877, on the occasion of the death of his wife: “She reminded me of the Thermopylae—Did she suffer—except to leave you? That was perhaps the

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sum of Death” (Dickinson 1958, 592). The second is to be found in a missive, sent on 19 July, 1884, to Mabel Loomis Todd: “How martial the Apology of Nature! We die, said the Deathless of Thermopylae, in obedience to Law” (Dickinson 1958, 826). 8. “[A]lmost immediately, contemporary Greeks saw Thermopylae as a critical moral and culture lesson. In universal terms, a small, free people had willingly outfought huge numbers of imperial subjects who advanced under the lash. More specifically, the Western idea that soldiers themselves decide where, how, and against whom they will fight was contrasted against the Eastern notion of despotism and monarchy—freedom proving the stronger idea as the more courageous fighting of the Greeks at Thermopylae, and their later victories at Salamis and Plataea attested.” Victor David Hanson on http://www.300spartanwarriors.com/ thermopylaeauthors/victordavishanson.html This, as Winterer notes, seems not to have been lost on the orators at the consecration of Gettysburg Cemetery: “The dedication of the cemetery at Gettysburg in 1863 provided the opportunity to cast the Civil War as a battle that was Greek in its nobility and meaning. If the American Revolution had been cast in the language of Roman antiquity, the Civil War would be the victory of brave Greeks against the almost overwhelming forces of ‘Oriental’ Persia in 490 [sic] BCE. This feat was accomplished not by Abraham Lincoln in his famously terse, three-minute ‘Dedication Remarks’ […], but, instead, in the fluid, Latinate amblings of Edward Everett’s two-hour ‘Oration,’ which preceded Lincoln’s short speech” (Winterer 2007, 188). 9. One will note multiples echoes of Fr 524 in Fr 668 (Shame/Disgrace, Brave Man, Brave, Pelf, feels, etc.), written the same year: There is a Shame of Nobleness – Confronting Sudden Pelf – A finer Shame of Ecstasy – Convicted of Itself –

A best Disgrace – a Brave Man feels – Acknowledged – of the Brave – One More – “Ye Blessed” – to be told – But that’s – Behind the Grave – (Fr 668) 10. See, for example, Fr 419, where death is “Of Earl and Midge / The Privilege”, or, Fr 545, with soldiers dropping “like the Petals from a Rose.” 11. Whitman, in “The Wound-dresser,” made amputation the central metaphor for the country’s internal conflict (cf. http://www.whitmanarchive.org/published/LG/1881/poems/). 12. “[N]onrecoverable deletions,” Cristanne Miller notes, “may serve primarily to increase the density of a poem. It may also affect a poem’s meaning more directly, by creating a syntactic or logical ambiguity” (Miller 1989, 18). 13. The most telling moment in that respect is found in the following passage: “‘I heard this same Lysidas, the other day,’ said Philæmon, boasting that the Spartans were the only real freemen; and Lacedæmon the only place where courage and virtue always found a sure reward. I asked him what reward the Helots had for bravery or virtue. ‘They are not scourged; and that is sufficient reward for the base hounds,’ was his contemptuous reply. He approves the law forbidding masters to bestow freedom on their slaves; and likes the custom which permits boys to whip them, merely to remind them of their bondage. He ridicules the idea that injustice will weaken the strength of Sparta, because the gods are enemies to injustice. He says the sun of liberty shines brighter with the dark atmosphere of slavery around it; as temperance seems more lovely to the Spartan youth, after they have seen the Helots made beastly drunk for their amusement. He seems to forget that the passions are the same in every human breast; and that it is never wise in any state to create natural enemies at her own doors. But the Lacedæmonians make it a rule never to speak of danger from their slaves. They remind me of the citizens of

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Amyclæ, who, having been called from their occupations by frequent rumours of war, passed a vote that no man should be allowed, under heavy penalties, to believe any report of intended invasion. When the enemy really came, no man dared to speak of their approach, and Amyclæ was easily conquered. Lysidas boasted of salutary cruelty; and in the same breath told me the Helots loved their masters” (Child 1836, 113). 14. To this detail must added the death, in March, 1862—Dickinson calls it the murder—of Frazer Stearns, the son of the President of Amherst College, and a friend of Austin’s (cf. Letter 256, in Dickinson 1958, 398-399). 15. Hundreds of women did famously enrol as soldiers while passing themselves off as men. Female nurses volunteered in the thousands. Women spoke in meetings on both sides of the conflict. But they were still excluded from any political decision-making affecting the course of the war. One of the arenas left open to them, as Winterer reminds us, was that of public debates: “‘As it had in the revolutionary period, the classical world helped structure some of the major national debates of the Civil War era. Far more than they could ever have been in the eighteenth century, women were now major participants in these debates’” (Winterer 2007, 190). 16. Cf. Fr 180, 311, 569, 887, 1094, and 1577. 17. The quatrain in which those two variants are to be found is “Antiquest felt at noon / When August burning low / Arise this spectral Canticle / Repose to vivify” (Fr 895). 18. “The Lilac is an ancient shrub / But ancienter than that / The Firmamental Lilac / Upon the Hill tonight” (Fr…). 19. Fr 180’s “Antique trinket” may find an antithetical echo in Fr 289’s “Ancient Brooch.” 20. Dickinson’s fondness for stress ambiguity can be seen at least twice to bear on the adjective “present,” as at the end of Fr 524 or, perhaps more famously, in the first quatrain of Fr 409: “The Soul selects her own Society – Then shuts the Door – To her divine Majority – Present no more.” While the iambic reading of “present” makes more sense metrically in the two instances, the meaning appears more consistent with the rest of both poems when the word is read as an adjective, and therefore as a trochee. 21. In Thomas H. Johnson’s edition of the poems, Fr 1577 comes after a belated mock- Transcendentalist quatrain: “Who has not found the Heaven – below – / Will fail of it above – / For Angels rent the House next ours, / Wherever we remove – ” 22. In that respect, those lines are reminiscent of Fr 721, which concludes that “‘Nature’ is what We know – / But have no Art to say – / So impotent our Wisdom is / To Her Sincerity.” 23. Gloria Shaw Duclos regards Higginson’s fictional Sappho as a woman embodying “a contest between two social systems,” with Lesbos serving as a haven to the kind of woman the Homeric- Aeolian system had until then honoured and encouraged, as against the more overtly patriarchal Ionian-Athenian system. Yet, according to Higginson, Sappho’s contemporary equivalent was not to be found in Emily Dickinson but in Harriet Beecher Stowe (Duclos 1984, 406-407). 24. “Like her great contemporaries,” Sewall notes, “she had the Orphic urge to wake up a sleeping world, to arouse her fellow mortals to the joys of living. She soon found, apparently, that these strains were not her permanent voice. But there is more than a hint of the Orphic in her later attitudes” (Sewall 1974, 691). 25. The poem is the gender-oriented Fr 381, whose final quatrain reads “Nor any know I know the Art / I mention – easy – Here – / Nor any Placard boast me – / It’s full as Opera –” 26. It may not be a coincidence that the first two operas ever to be composed—Peri’s Euridice (1600), and Monteverdi’s Orfeo (1607)—were devoted to Orpheus.

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ABSTRACTS

The article discusses Dickinson as seizing upon the classics and the Latin language as correctives to the long lasting impact of Calvinism upon her cultural environment. It seeks to offer Dickinson’s classical references as the expression of a gendered approach to her society’s most crucial issues, namely slavery, war, and the role of women in the public sphere. All of which questions find a resolution of sort in her appropriation of the Orphic voice in her later poems.

Cet article se propose de relire l’utilisation par Dickinson des classiques et de la langue latine comme un correctif, voire un antidote, apporté à l’héritage calviniste qui a si lourdement pesé sur son milieu. Au fil d’allusions mythologiques ou historiques, sa poésie fait montre d’une conscience aiguë des enjeux de son époque, l’esclavage, la guerre, le rôle des femmes dans la sphère publique, qu’elle aborde par le biais d’une stratégie genrée qui culmine dans une posture orphique.

INDEX

Mots-clés: Antique, classiques, genre, guerre, Orphée Keywords: Antique/antic, classics, gender, war, Orpheus

AUTHOR

ERIC ATHENOT Université Paris Est-Créteil, Institut des Mondes Anglophone, Germanique et Roman (IMAGER – EA 3958), F-94000 Créteil, France

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Proserpine upon the Coin: Melville’s Quest for Greek Beauty in “Syra”

Bruno Monfort

Melville’s Journal and Melville’s Poem

1 In 1891, Melville published Timoleon Etc, a collection of 42 poems of varying length in a 25-copy edition. The penultimate section, “Fruit of Travel long ago,” arranged to suggest a journey that takes the prospective reader from Italy to the Holy Land, includes “Syra,” one of the longest poems in the section, much longer in any case than the other poems dedicated to evocations of Classical Greece and the Greek landscape.

2 When it comes to examining, investigating or discussing the text of the poem, editors of Melville’s poems do not usually consider the Timoleon collection as a relevant context. In the recently published volume of Melville’s Poems in the Northwestern- Newberry edition, they take it for granted that “Melville constructed the ‘Transmitted Reminiscence’ in ‘Syra’ largely out of impressions and speculations that he recorded in his journals on two separate visits to the Greek island in the Aegean in early and late December 1856.” (844-7) Howard P. Vincent had put it hardly differently in his edition of the poems dating back to 1947: “it was the return visit that furnished him with most of the details transferred to the poem.” (478) Editors tend, as is predictable, to relate the poetic text to Melville’s Journal and the assumed biographical information that it contains.

3 Biographically speaking, Melville visited Syra or Syros both going and returning during his 1856-1857 journey through Europe and the Near East, a journey that he could financially ill afford, but because the family feared for his mental health, his father-in- law Judge Lemuel Shaw paid for it in the hope that travel would contribute to his recovery. He arrived there for his first visit on board the steamship Egyptian on Tuesday, December 2, 1856. Syra was never praised or recommended in any guidebook for ruins worth the admiration of visitors (there were no ruins to speak of) and we may gather that Melville himself was not impressed by the beauties and amenities of the place (they were few). What was the point of going there?

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4 Melville presumably never wanted to go there in the first place. But any ship sailing through the area would have made Syra her port of call. This is not mere speculation. On Syra was located, at the time, the largest and most important commercial harbor in the newly formed state of Greece. It was aptly named Hermoupolis/Ermoupoli to celebrate Hermes, the ancient god of commerce. It rose to be the main coaling station in the Aegean Sea and more broadly in the Eastern Mediterranean and the premier port and warehouse in the new Greek state.1 For decades, it had the busiest commercial traffic of all Greek ports (Delis, April 2015)2 before it was finally superseded by Piraeus in the early 1890s (notably after the opening of the Corinth Canal in 1893), subsequently losing its role as the hub of commerce in this part of the Mediterranean to gradually become a sleepy backwater after WWI. Throughout the past centuries, the 86km² island had always been poor, and it had none of the magnificence and beauty of neighboring islands such as Delos; no temples, no ruins, no associations with the ancient civilization of Greece, almost nothing of archeological interest that would have been an attraction to prospective visitors in those early days of tourism. But so much for tourists.

5 What, to its inhabitants, had proved to be its most tangible asset was of a religious and political order: following a long period of Venetian occupation, Syra was the seat of a Catholic bishoprick (it was known as “l’Isola del Papa” until the early nineteenth century) and a majority of the population was Catholic in an area where Muslim and Christian Orthodox creeds were strongly dominant. For this reason, and because it was constantly raided by pirates, its inhabitants had not called without good cause unto the Catholic ears of a mighty Christian prince: the island had been under protection of French authorities since the reign of Louis XIII of France, and the Turks dared not invade it as they did the rest of the archipelago during the war of Greek independence that started in 1821. It served as a refuge for a great number of Orthodox Greek families who had been evicted by the Turks from all those other islands in the vicinity, when they had not committed suicide, been killed or eliminated. They eventually settled there because they had nowhere else to go. In a matter of years, the island, which up to then had been an impoverished dry, bare and barren rock,3 became the thriving center of maritime traffic in the area, a major shipbuilding zone as well, and a bustling spot of economic prosperity which attracted its share of shady characters.

6 The first few lines of the poem offer a social and historical perspective on how Syra was settled and, though it does not tell the whole story, Melville’s account is substantially correct as to the way in which the Orthodox immigrants settled on or near the shore when they arrived on the island, while the older Catholic population kept living in its mountain fastnesses at a distance from the sea and relatively safe from marauding pirates. We may come to the conclusion that, even if we leave out all other considerations, the poem is historically far more documented and elaborate than the Journal ever was.4

7 Compared to the poem, then, the Journal appears to have been written with a surprising lack of perspective, by a Melville who had more narrow, more immediate concerns in mind. Melville kept a day-to-day chronicle of his journey in his Journal of a Visit to Europe and the Levant; he recorded his impressions of his visits to Syra in a number of journal entries for December 1856. Maybe, as Hershel Parker suggests, he intended to pile up a treasury of preliminary remarks, leaving room for later elaboration, or maybe he did not. No sign is extant that Melville had any plans to revise his rough, offhand

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notations for use in more definite purposes. He did not have the poem in mind when he wrote his Journal. Though he knew what he had written in it when he composed the poem.

8 Critical opinions, and critical assumptions, regarding this poem have consistently dismissed latent difficulties. They seem to have changed little over the last 60 years, and with the appearance of good reason: the assumption of most editors, those I have mentioned and others, is that Melville, when he composed his poem at some unknown period—probably during the 1880s—quarried his Journal for primary material that was readily available, and it would be hard to deny that Melville’s visit to Syra is documented in these two separate texts. It is, however, by mere force of critical habit that editors have come to consider the material in the journal had not reached a full degree of elaboration and can legitimately be construed in retrospect as preparatory to the poem. The close reading of the journal hardly vindicates such critical opinions, and there is little in the comparison between poem and journal to substantiate such a claim. The poem is altogether a very different text, and what it owes to the Journal cannot be characterized as just the “biographical material” obligingly provided by Melville in its unprepared native state: no pure “recording” of raw data occurred in the Journal. Poem and Journal were written at different periods, though the difference involves a change in perspective, and what “different” amounts to is meaningful, not merely in terms of the time elapsed between the writing of the journal and the composition of the poem. My claim is that the relationship the poem bears to the journal, and vice versa, needs to be clarified.

The Beauty that Used to be Greece

9 To give a sense of its latent complexity, let me begin by saying that, in his Journal, Melville does not seem to object to the fact that, of all places in the Greek Islands, Syra is probably the one least likely to offer physical and visual contact with evidence that there ever was such a thing as the classical heritage that Greece as a whole owes its reputation to. Yet Melville was later to include this island visit to Syra in a series of poems that reflect an interest in the grandest beauty spots of Greece, or those visited or evoked by his poetical forebears, especially Lord Byron. Syra, however, is not much of a landmark, because it displays so few of those traces that may help measure the extent to which the classical past has been erased or adulterated there. Coming to Syra, you have to make allowance for this blunt fact that classical Greece was never lost or in decay there because it never was there at all to begin with. Comparing poem and journal gives the measure of what is implicit or unexpressed in the journal. At this stage, we need a few samples for analysis: Animated appearance of the quays. Take all the actors from the operas in a night from the theaters of London and set them to work in their fancy dresses, weighing bales, counting codfish, sitting at tables on the dock, smoking, talking sauntering,— sitting in boats &c—picking up rags, carrying water casks, bemired &c—will give some notion of Greek port. Picturesqueness of the whole. Variety of it. Greek trousers, sort of cross between petticoat and pantaloons. Some with white petticoats and embroidered jackets. Fine forms, noble faces. Mustache &c. […] Poor people live here. Picturesque. Some old men look like Pericles reduced to a chiffonier – such a union of picturesque and poverty stricken. […] Carpenters and blacksmiths working in the theatrical costumes. Scavenger in his opera costume going about with his opera costume through the streets, and

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emptying his pan into panniers of an ass.—No horses or carriages—Street merely made for foot passengers […]. (83-4)

10 Melville’s journal writing is chaotically instinctive, repetitive and haphazard; something is going wrong; his visit to Syra is making him alarmingly self-conscious: it reveals to him the strange incapacity he was in to find anything truly authentic and original on the island (the quays are not just “animated,” Melville’s phrase may suggest their animation is an appearance) and he derived from his visit a sense as though he had been there before, as though he had already seen the many sights, though he clearly never was there on any prior occasion. The problem with Syra is that it seems to fulfill rather than frustrate Melville’s unformulated expectations, which must be the wrong kind of expectations because they cannot be reconciled. Melville discovered to his own surprise and dismay that Syra was very much that modern Greek island in the midst of an economic boom, with attendant consequences: the kind of perception entailed by the thriving economic situation existing at the time on the island was not fit to be idealized, it could hardly be poeticized. There is something disquieting in the juxtaposition of the mean and the stagey: the sanitation anecdote is extremely telling. How can you look like a conventional Greek character in a play and be materially collecting real garbage in the actual city streets? Syra, to the extent it looked like a living duplicate of all kinds of cultural stereotypes, clearly did not carry the full weight of the cultural passions that Greece had elicited in the rest of Europe for the previous 20 or 30 years. Melville realized that his appreciation of Syra could not be dependent on what Shelley’s or Byron’s heroic vision of Greece, ancient and modern, could have been.

11 Melville’s tentative depiction of the place in his journal conveys a sense that it did not exist except as a duplicate that owes whatever reality it may claim to its similarity with a preexistent picture of itself, an artifact depicting life as the result of its own depiction in the artifact concerned. A self-validating artifact, then. Such is the predominant weird impression of the place recorded in Melville’s Journal. He senses the unreality permeating an actual scene that looks originally like an imitation of itself, with the commercial activity that animates the cityscape looking not like the current of exchange that weaves itself into the texture of any scene in real life but already like an image of life recorded in prior pictures or frozen in stereotypes that have displaced life itself; with the topography and landscape a painted backdrop before which traders and people in various walks of life are busy performing some virtual operatic play, where events and occurrences seem entirely staged even as they are happening right there before the viewer’s eyes.

The Strange, the Real and the Spurious

12 The word “picturesque” summarizes Melville’s impression, a blasé feeling of déjà vu, but not even quite that. The viewer realizes that whatever detail he is in a position to record existed in his mind and eye before he was ever in a capacity to see it. No shaking off the clichés that have invaded his psyche, as he finds them present and alive and ubiquitous in all parts of the city and on the island at large. Whatever he views thus looks over-familiar, the changing scene is constantly in the act of replicating any feature that would fit the definition of the picture of them, and the Greeks look exceedingly like colorful facsimiles of themselves in a sort of large-scale tableau vivant. This is a typically Victorian form of entertainment, but it seems to have taken a

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disproportionate size on Syra; it is not the usual playlet patterned after a pre-existing picture or narrative that would have rejoiced family and friends during social occasions in Victorian parlors but a blown-up affair of operatic dimensions acted out by a whole community of local people, the Genius Loci expanding into an exhilarating parody of itself. Peculiar signs of locality and typicity of costume and dress, with their theatrical impracticality, seem to coincide with the cheap, conventional versions of them that originated in far away London, a long way from the actual place where they would be truly meaningful – the characteristics of the local garb appear to the viewer’s eye as embarrassing imitations of the artistic/iconic stereotypes that serve as the basis for all Greek-looking stage costumes at London’s many theaters and operas. It is this bizarre coalescence of the spurious with the real, the absent strangeness of the scene, which challenges Melville’s capacity for full-bodied adequate description in the journal. Unfinished nominal sentences, use of imperative, the style used for jotting down his observations is that of a “long telegram” to echo Robert Milder (Milder, 2007, 208), and it lends itself to casual treatment of the Greek figures in Melville’s various journal entries. No description is likely to be adequate when the Greeks themselves have managed to look like actors trying to look like them.

13 Melville’s implicit diagnosis of the secret disease affecting the scene could be phrased this way: Greeks are not Greeks except by the standards of the picturesque. Such is the ironic reward of too much interest in what Greece had come to symbolize for Europe, for Britain, and for the Romantics, such as Shelley and Byron: the heritage of Greek culture had been carried over to London like the Elgin Marbles and a derivative version percolated back to the remotest outposts in the land. London then had captured if not confiscated the true spirit of Greece; it had, poetically as well as materially, appropriated all that’s truly Greek. Greece, as Melville knew, or as Melville could not but know, had been (re-)invented in London and, in the eyes of Melville the American Poet, the Greeks had re-imported the markers of their cultural identity from that distant city in Europe, along with other commodities. Melville’s American eye registers the alien status of what supposedly constitutes visible emblems of the so-called “national character,” an entire fabrication, as they were all manufactured abroad.5

14 The typical Greek scene, which strikes the eye as “picturesque,” inevitably bears a staged, fabricated look because its genuineness was certified elsewhere,6 and generates a surfeit of “Greekness” that the viewer has no choice but to negotiate with as he tries to write about it, and to convey a feeling that it contributes to the construction of the reality it purports to describe. It is hardly surprising that it should act, visually speaking, as a warning signal to Melville. As he reported about the views provided by the occasional excursion to this or that part of the city or the island of Syra, he showed a degree of resistance to the widespread Hellenomania so characteristic of the first half of the nineteenth century. Hellenomania7 reinvented Greece to serve the dream of classical age jointly with the romantic and post-romantic ideals of the struggle for national freedom.

Complications of Irony

15 Never mind then that there are so few physical/material traces of the past on Syra. It is fortunate, or ironically unfortunate, that you need no stone monuments to serve as mementoes of past grandeur. The lineaments of the ancient past may survive not just

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in stones but in people, chiefly as glorious reminders of noble descent in a depleted present. They ironically measure in the present the social and cultural fall from the grace and glory of the classical ages: the poorest mendicant or tramp still looks like he was descended straight from Pericles, which does not greatly help him and sheds a sad light on the condition that modern economic realities have reduced a Pericles to: Above a tented inn with fluttering flag A sunburnt board announced Greek wine In self-same text Anacreon knew, Dispensed by one named “Pericles.”

16 Undeniably sounded in the journal, the note of derision is ambiguous enough to warrant revision in the poem. For indeed, on the other hand, the beggarly figure has effectively retained that Pericles look in his downfall: the derision need not go all the way, and the poem stops short of vindicating the reader’s sense of irony, should he be tempted to go all the way. For this purpose, the journal is revised on this point, the tramp’s status heightened, the Pericles namesake promoted to innkeeper.

17 That irony ceases does not mean that commiseration takes over when the poem starts, but I would argue the poem originates where the ironies inherent in the theatricality of the mercantile economic scene of Syra take up a different meaning. Journal and poem could not be more different in their tone, and in the drift of the affects and perceptions they convey. For all that, the poem is not apologetic or nostalgic or even retrospective in the least, never presents itself globally as a revised more lucid version of the journal, because the poem’s voice is simply different: it tries, with the benefit of hindsight, to make sense of the present moment in a way Melville never could on his visit to Syra, discovering at that time that, even as he was writing his journal, he was not in unmediated contact with something rugged and raw his pen attempted to record, but caught up in the entanglements of self-consciousness, and in his own deeply ironic sense of the vanishing immediacy of the scene.

18 The subtitle of the poem (“A Transmitted Reminiscence”) underscores the paradox of a “reminiscence” that will not serve to take stock of the past; it will simply be “transmitted” but not to vindicate the sort of romantic fallacy that casts all objects as truer and more authentic when bathed in the golden light of memory, or restored to their “pastness.” The power to “transmit” a reminiscence belongs to the poem when it reinstates the present that did not have a chance to be fully appreciated and enjoyed for what it is. The present moment of 1856 is more unmediated now in the poem than it was back then. Bridging the time gap between now and then is only part of the poem’s object; the other part is reconciling what was beautiful in “now” with an adequate perception of its beauty, and such perception may well be delayed or deferred if through deferral it is achieved at all in the iterative version of “now” that the poem offers. The poem revisits the place, not the memory of the place as recorded in the Journal, and therefore need not invalidate the terms in which the prior visit was depicted.

Primitivism Revisited

19 Quite interestingly, then, the poem does, though tentatively and not too explicitly, refer to the journal (“I saw it in its earlier days”) and does not contradict or revise the journal except on a very limited number of admittedly crucial points. The

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impracticality and theatricality of the local scene have been largely retained in the poem, but their meaning has changed radically, for mostly, the poetic voice now insists, they contribute along with the frolicking and general childishness of the people, to the enactment of the primitive: to Melville in 1856, Syra was embarrassingly modern and mercantile, the picturesque scene the result of fabrication. To the biographical voice of 1856 Melville, reality’s presence coincided with its virtual non-existence because it was interlarded with stereotypes. To the largely fictive voice of the poem’s utterer, Syra is very much the site where a presentified version of the ever ancient and ever primitive may materialize itself through the mercantilist features that were used against it back in 1856. They are now tentatively construed as topical manifestations of what should remain a permanent source of enjoyment that harks back to the recovery of its intimate connection to the classical period when Greece was in its early days. The poem develops a paradoxical sort of orientalist vision, which uncovers for the reader the innocence and spontaneity of the scene, not the exotic and the typical. The theatrical quality of it is still undeniable, but it is now combined with indications that none of it is calculated, not here as by design to meet the standards of the orientalist vision, even though the whole scene does indeed meet the requirements of orientalism.

20 The poetic voice never tries to detect the cliché hidden behind the apparent truth, and never complains that the scene looks overmuch like what it is supposed to look like. To a certain extent, the poem tries to remain as non-descriptive as it can, takes the form of a catalogue registering chaos and chance, to match the unpredictable, putting forward the fact that all the mercantile activity in Syra took place without, by European standards, adequate facilities: sheds and shanty-shops instead of docks and warehouses, no piers and quays available, so they used the strand. No master plan ever presided over the venues and activities that make up the attraction of the whole scene, nothing was ever planned ahead: What busy bees! no testy fry; Frolickers, picturesquely odd, With bales and oil-jars lading boats, Lighters that served an anchored craft, Each in his tasseled Phrygian cap, Blue Eastern drawers and braided vest; And some with features cleanly cut As Proserpine’s upon the coin. Such chatterers all! like children gay Who make believe to work, but play. I saw, and how help musing too. Here traffic’s immature as yet: Forever this juvenile fun hold out And these light hearts? Their garb, their glee, Alike profuse in flowing measure, Alike inapt for serious work, Blab of grandfather Saturn’s prime When trade was not, nor toil, nor stress, But life was leisure, merriment, peace, And lucre none and love was righteousness.

21 The people are “busy bees,” implying they are not self-consciously efficient; there is no explicit logic or general meaning to the juxtaposed items that follow each other in the list, just as accumulated goods suggest no latent order, and people generally do not seem to be acting for any definable purpose. They are traders, not referred to as

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committed to any kind of rational business model, but the trading does take place and is clearly recognizable as such. They are altogether, chatty, playful and frolicsome. “Alike inapt for serious work:” this might sound definitely patronizing, and dangerously like colonialist discourse. They are languidly oriental, but not in imitation of our preconceptions regarding the character of orientals. They are morally, legally as well as sexually rather ambiguous, but this need not detain us more than the rest, as the poem moves on to enumerate more items in non-directional sequential order.

22 The poetic voice thus gradually empowers itself to dissociate that sequence of impressions from the cultural logic of pre-existing representations, in the speaker’s mind or the reader’s. A strange medley of self-consciousness and spontaneity, the scene predictably brings to mind the most received notions of what an exotic place should look like, but, precisely because it does so, and does it spontaneously and not intentionally as a calculated effect, it refuses to endorse the encroachments of cultural memory, simultaneously calling upon and invalidating those signs that denote conformity with preexisting models in the field of history, economy or visual/cultural representation.

23 The scene is thereby rescued from the picturesque. Not representations objectified as lived events, or vice-versa, but the living of the events by the people who live them. Melville’s poetic voice thus makes the poem into the expression of a purely aesthetic moment, sharing in the enjoyment of life as it goes, no longer dependent for its significance on the recognition that it exhibits itself as the accomplishment or enactment of concepts, notions, ideas, patterns or schemes. The mediation of abstract or pre-existent ideas is edited out. The joy, the pleasure that the appreciative tone of the poem emanates from, is elicited by a sense that a correspondent alacrity makes itself felt to the utterer’s level with the common life of people there. The poetic voice has immersed itself in it.

24 What, by the end of the poem, could appear as Melville’s renewed allegiance to the ideals of Classical Greece as the mother of western civilization should be interpreted with caution. The utterer’s words in praise of the plain equivalents that keep Anacreon, Homer and Pericles very much alive are humorously intended, but mostly tend to indicate that, to put it bluntly, the islanders have managed to effectively retain some primordial and archaic features that prove appealing to the Melvillean voice because they make them the western equivalents of the Marquesans, Melanesian or African peoples who were supplying the raw forms of a new style of art that western artists adopted from the 1880s onward. In several other poems in the same collection, Melville’s voice laments the fact that his journey through the Mediterranean made him aware of the loss he had incurred when he compared Greek islands to the lush paradise of the Pacific Islands he had known earlier. We might apply the definition of primitive as uninhibited expression, free of conventions and rules to which to conform. This would relocate/reinscribe Melville’s poem in the context of the 1880s. But this would be misleading, if not contradictory: the islanders are never presented as free of the burdens of history and traditions. What they do, their signal achievement, is that they manage to live such lives as can be a source of aesthetic pleasure and enjoyment in lieu of those works of art they seem to worry very little about. Their lives, social, economic and moral, not their art, are so “primitive” because they are in more ways than one “artless,” and for that very reason their life is reinstated as a choice subject for the poem because it is identical to, it is what life was like in the 5th century BC. Enjoyment

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of the period life need not be mediated by contemplation of artworks from 5th century BC. They need not produce artworks as such to be the object of the same enjoyment as anything else from that period, including the poetry of Homer and Anacreon, which we can still enjoy now because the life that inspired it is there to provide it with present relevance, and more poetry need not be written in this line because all the poetry we need was already written 2500 years ago and is still relevant.

25 Melville’s tentative equation of life on modern Syra with the supposed primitivism, childhood, freedom and play of 24 centuries before is not a statement inspired by aesthetic naïveté but a highly political move: we might find an echo of Schiller’s idea in his Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man that the aesthetic mode of contemplation can be extended to all phenomena and not just confined to art objects, and (especially in letters XIV and XV)8 that the “play drive” (or “play impulse”) promotes man’s freedom when necessity and reality lose their earnestness and man truly plays where he is satisfying no material need nor achieving any purpose, and thus expresses the purpose and destination of his humanity. Life, including economic or mercantile life, on Syra might thus be described as driven by the sense of play that contributes to the creation of an aesthetic order inherent in the life itself.9

Beauty of Greek coinage

26 But this is something we have to read into the text. Something else, not quite of the same order, we do not have to read into it though it may look mysterious or cryptic: when the faces of some islanders are compared to “Proserpine’s on the coin,” the import of the allusion is not supposed to be lost on the reader. Melville’s obliqueness in this matter underscores the degree of sophistication that constitutes a prerequisite to interpreting the utterance of his poetic voice when it refers the modern present of Syra to its potential significance as the “primitive.” The allusion here is to one or several passages in Winckelmann’s works that Melville may have read directly, or that he may have found the substance of in The Penny Cyclopaedia, which he used for documentation on many other occasions. Roughly summarized, Winckelmann’s idea is that the beauty of Greek art was for centuries past not known to men through the contemplation of full-scale statues that had not been recovered but was in fact transmitted through attention paid to heads stamped on coins, which were themselves of superlative beauty. 10 One of Winckelmann’s favorites, and a prime example that he repeatedly used, was a very spectacular tetradrachma from SYRAcusa which the Penny Cyclopaedia, following Winckelmann, who did not differentiate between the two deities mentioned, describes thus: “a better specimen cannot be adduced than the celebrated Syracusan coin representing the head of Arethusa or Proserpine.” (article “Basso Rilievo,” 7)11 My claim here is that Melville, through his allusion, titillated his reader’s curiosity and relied on his reader to take the full measure of the latent implications: if, as Winckelmann claims, coins were in fact the unacknowledged source of the beauty that was handed down to us from Ancient Greece, coins were never full-fledged works of art and the beauty thus transmitted emanates from an object intimately connected to the common run of economic exchange or mercantile life. It is a signal expression of the kind of beauty that Melville’s poem claims may reside in the very existence, be it the fruit of historical forces and mercantile concerns, of a group of men when, and because, they live the same ordinary lives together at widely distant periods of time. This is

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something he owes directly to Winckelmann and indirectly to Lord Shaftesbury from whom is derived the political side of Winckelmann’s aesthetics, here shared by Melville, to the effect that beauty may pertain to people who live in freedom. But Melville may show himself more radical than Winckelmann: when it comes to perceiving beauty, no work of art will replace, as an object of contemplation, the insuperable, playful presentness of the day-to-day childlike existence of its inhabitants. The faces like Proserpine’s on Winckelmann’s coin are here to suggest that the ordinary commercial activity itself generates as its (monetary) sign the same sense of beauty as the statues that happen to be unavailable, and are therefore largely superfluous for the purpose.12 As a result, the spectacle of trade leads to an ambiguously utopian time “when trade was not.”

27 When, on his landing at Syra, Melville saw the island in its commercial heyday, he seems to have known right away that the whole venture would not last beyond the two or three generations ahead. It is fascinating to contemplate the idea that Melville may have anticipated the demise of Syra at first sight. In the poem, the physical and cultural barrenness of the island has turned to an asset; the text develops an intuition that there was something beautifully gratuitous and unsubstantial to the island and the commercial activities of the people, something which made the living sights of mercantile civilization in full swing precarious, short-lived and impermanent: indeed, no statues, temples or ruins were required for admiration; the life of the people itself was art and could be enjoyed aesthetically as the ultimate freedom of men in full play.13

Illustration 1

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Herman Melville from Timoleon Etc “Fruit of Travel Long Ago”. New York: The Caxton Press, 1891. [Text provided here is from this first edition, 25 copies published] Illustration 1 shows title page of first edition of Timoleon Etc, table of contents and the poem as it appears in the book.

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Illustration 2a

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Illustration 2b

Illustration 2a shows a tetradrachm from Syracuse minted under the Reign of Agathokles (317-289 BC), a warlike tyrant. It belongs to the second series of silver coins that were produced under his rule, and marks the beginning of a series of novel numismatic designs, deviating from traditional types. By the end of the fourth century BC, the designs of Syracuse tetradrachms and dekadrachms exclusively pictured the local spring nymph Arethusa, generally facing left. The design on this coin is of Persephone/ Proserpine, facing right and wearing similar earrings to Arethusa, shown in illustration 2b, whose head is shown crowned with seaweed and surrounded by dolphins. Persephone is crowned with grain and the name Kore is engraved left. Variants of the chariot with four horses led by the driver to victory were traditional on Arethusa coins, accompanied or not by an inscription to identify the city-state (as here “syrakousion”). The design of the reverse face on the Kore coin is unprecedented in Syracuse: it shows an elegantly standing winged figure of Nike—the goddess of victory—putting the finishing touches to a military trophy constructed from the spoils of war, alluding to the successful invasion and short-lived occupation of part of North Africa by Agathocles (whose name appears left instead of that of his country) and his initial victory over Carthage. It was not uncommon by the eighteenth century to mistake the figures of the two divinities, possibly due to their relatively similar designs.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

BENT, Reverend James Theodore, The Cyclades or Life among the Insular Greeks, London, Longman, Green & Co, 1885. Electronic text of first edition available: https://archive.org/stream/ cycladesorlifea01bentgoog#page/n327/mode/2up/search/304

DELIS, Apostolos, “Modern Greece’s First Industry? The Shipbuilding Center of Sailing Merchant Marine of Syros, 1830–70,” European Review of Economic History, April 1, 2015.

---,“A Mediterranean Insular Port-City in Transition: Economic Transformations, spatial Antagonism and the Metamorphosis of Landscape in Nineteenth-Century Hermoupolis on the Island of Syros,” Urban History, vol. 42, n° 2, May 2015, 225-245.

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EISNER, Robert, Travelers to an Antique Land: the History and Literature of Travel to Greece, Ann Arbor, The University of Michigan Press, 1991.

GEORGOUDAKI, Ekaterini, “Herman Melville’s Trip to Syra in 1856-57,” Melville Society Extracts 74, September 1988. http://people.hofstra.edu/John_L_Bryant/Melville_Extracts/Volume%2074/ extracts074_sep88_pg01.html

GUTHENKE, Constanze, Placing Modern Greece: the Dynamics of Romantic Hellenism, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2008.

HEKMAN, Jan Jaap, “The Early Bronze Age Cemetery at Chalandriani on Syros (Cyclades, Greece),” Doctoral Dissertation, RUG [Rijksuniversiteit Groningen], 2003. Electronic text available: https://www.rug.nl/research/portal/publications/the-early-bronze-age-cemetery-at- chalandriani-on-syros-cyclades-greece %288dd13d8e-d4a4-40bc-91a6-1bb57ce032c5 %29.html .

MELVILLE, Herman, Timoleon Etc.: “Fruit of Travel Long Ago,” New York, The Caxton Press, 1891. http://digitalcommons.unl.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1018&context=libraryscience

---, Collected Poems of Herman Melville, Howard P. Vincent, ed., Chicago, Hendricks House, 1947.

---, Journal of a Visit to Europe and the Levant, October 11, 1856 - May 6, 1857, Howard C. Horsford, ed., Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1955.

---, Journals, The Northwestern-Newberry Edition of the Writings of Herman Melville vol. 15, Historical note by Howard C. Horsford, Evanston & Chicago, Northwestern University Press and Newberry Library, 1989.

---, Published Poems, Battle-Pieces, John Marr, Timoleon, The Northwestern-Newberry Edition of the Writings of Herman Melville, vol. 11, Robert Ryan, Harrison Hayford, Alma MacDougall Reising and G. Thomas Tanselle, eds., Historical Note by Hershel Parker, Evanston & Chicago, Northwestern University Press and Newberry Library, 2009 .

---, Derniers poèmes, Agnès Derail et Bruno Monfort, éds., avec la collaboration de Thomas Constantinesco, Marc Midan et Cécile Roudeau. Paris, Editions Rue d’Ulm, 2010. [An annotated edition of Melville’s late poetry.]

MILDER, Robert, “‘The Connecting Link of Centuries’: Melville, Rome and the Mediterranean, 1856-1857,” in Roman Holidays: American Writers and Artists in Nineteenth-Century Italy, Robert K. Martin and Leland S. Person, eds., Iowa City, The University of Iowa Press, 2007, 206-225.

The Penny Cyclopaedia of the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge, vol. 4, London, Charles Knight, 1835-1836.

RANCIERE, Jacques, Aisthesis. Scènes du régime esthétique de l’art, Paris, Galilée, 2011.

ROESSEL, David, In Byron’s Shadow: Modern Greece in the English and American Imagination, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2001.

SCHILLER, Friedrich von, The Aesthetic Letters, Essays, and the Philosophical Letters of Schiller, translated and with an introduction by J. Weiss, Boston, Charles C. Little and J. Brown, 1845. Electronic text available: https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=dul1.ark:/13960/t1ng77h1j;view=1up;seq=108

SPENCER, Terence, Fair Greece, Sad Relic: Literary Philhellenism from Spencer to Byron, London, Weidenfeld & Nicholson, 1954.

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STEFANIS, C., C. Ballas and D. MADIANOU, “Sociological and Epidemiological Aspects of Hashish Use in Greece,” in Vera Rubin ed., Cannabis and Culture, The Hague, Mouton, 1975, 303-326.

TURNER, Frank M., The Greek Heritage in Victorian Britain, New Haven, Yale University Press, 1981.

WINCKELMANN, Johann Heinrich, Reflections on the Painting and Sculpture of the Greeks and Instructions for the Connoisseur, Translated from the German Original of the Abbé Winkelmann by Henry Fuseli, London, printed for the Translator and sold by A. Millar, 1765.

---, The Story of Ancient Art among the Greeks, translated from the German of J. Winckelmann by Henry Lodge, London, John Chapman, 1850 [first edition Boston: J. Osgood, 1849].

NOTES

1. By 1828, there were almost 15,000 inhabitants in Hermoupolis, a bustling harbor city created virtually from nothing only a few years before, and at the time a larger city than Athens. Its development was meteoric, just like the growth of commercial and manufacturing activity. The demographic, cultural and economic status of Syra cannot be overestimated. Syra became the first example of a modern urban-commercial society in the newly formed Greek state that was still largely rural and pastoral, and the process of urbanization brought its fair share of deviant behaviors: Syra is known by all accounts as the starting point of hashish smuggling networks that appeared in Greece after 1850, introduced from the East and rapidly spreading to the area and the mainland afterward (see C. Stefanis, C. Ballas and D. Madianou, 311). 2. See also the relevant bibliography in this important article, as well as in the other article by the same author mentioned in the “Works Cited” section of this paper. 3. The bleak, barren, desolate aspect of Syra is a staple of travel narratives to the area. Reverend Bent starts chapter XIII of his The Cyclades; or Life Among the Insular Greeks (1885) with notations to this effect : “ Of all the Cyclades, none is so bleak and barren as Syra; yet the island possesses an attraction of her own, and a curious history of modern development […] But the flourishing commercial center on the island of Syra is due to the spontaneous outburst of mercantile activity

F0 incident to the recovery of freedom. […] Whatever was left of vitality in Greece […5D found itself drawn to rocky, ungainly Syra.” (304) Therefore Syra was a “modern” island, with very little on it to call up to mind the “classical period” that is the glory of Greece. As we are reminded by Jan Hekman’s dissertation about archeological excavations on Syra, there were very few monuments of note on the island, which is mentioned hardly more than a dozen times in the whole corpus of ancient literature. If, as I argue, Melville (or Melville’s voice in the poem) was in fact fascinated by the “innocence” of the commercial activity that was the island’s main claim to greatness, it is indeed a feature other travelers had been sensitive to, and Syra was experiencing the beginning of a paradoxical “classical period,” whose expression was trade-in-progress rather than material artworks, just when Melville visited the island. It is worth noting that Reverend Bent’s remarks about the bustling activity on the island incident on its recovery of freedom exactly parallel Winckelmann’s remarks about artworks also as fruit of political freedom among the peoples of Ancient Greece. 4. In a Melville Society Extracts article, Ekaterini Georgoudaki makes the point that because Melville is unfamiliar with Greek and local history he is somewhat confused about the difference between Ano or Pala Syra (the oldest part of Hermopoulis built on a steep hilltop to escape pirates’ raids) and the far more recent harbor city dating back only a few decades, noting that “The first stanza repeats the wrong journal information that Ano Syra was founded in the early nineteenth century by refugees from Scios…” (p. 4). My joint reading of the journal and poem may suggest otherwise and lead to the following conclusion: Melville’s alleged confusion is

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deliberate because history is to a certain extent irrelevant to his own way of construing life on the island. A similar objection applies to Georgoudaki’s remarks about Melville’s three visits coinciding with the context of the Crimean War, of which he seems to ignore the economic effects. A number of assumptions about the importance of Syra in the context of Ancient Greece seem to me clearly overstated. Georgoudaki’s well-documented article contains much historical and bibliographical information about Syros/Syra that is not repeated here. 5. Something of this order was also recorded in a small way by Reverend Bent in the chapter he devotes to Syra in The Cyclades or Life among the Insular Greeks: “The quay, too, was gay with small hucksters’ shops. One man had a pile of ikons or sacred pictures […] another man had besoms, his neighbor sold Russian tea-bowls and large wooden spoons, whilst a third offered for sale brilliantly coloured handkerchiefs which, though made in Manchester, are particularly Eastern in appearance.” (306) 6. First of all in Germany as Constanze Guthenke explains in Placing Modern Greece: the Dynamics of Romantic Hellenism. As is well-known, Hölderlin, one of the major zealots of the Greek revival in German culture, never set foot in Greece. 7. Hellenomania is the somewhat polemical term now frequently used to refer to what was formerly known as philhellenism. The word, which was coined recently, suggests the pathological love of Greeks and their country. It is used to deplore the eurocentric bent of classical studies and the tradition of reverence and admiration for all things Greek, based on the primitivist notion that the highest summit of human achievement is as distant as the fifth century B.C. 8. We may quote from Letter XV in a translation that could have been available to Melville: “Then to sum up all briefly, man only plays, when, in the full signification of the word, he is a man, and he is only entirely a man when he plays. This principle, which at this moment perhaps appears paradoxical, will contain a great and deep meaning, when we have advanced so far as to apply it to the twofold seriousness of duty and destiny; it will uphold, I assure you, the whole fabric of aesthetic art, and of the yet difficult art of life. But this principle is only startling in science; it long ago lived and acted in the art and the feeling of the Greeks, as their most distinguished master; but they transplanted to Olympus what should have flourished upon earth. Guided by truth itself, they caused both the seriousness and the toil, which furrow the cheeks of mortals, and the vain pleasure which smoothes the vacant countenance, to disappear from the forehead of the celestials,— they freed the ever-happy from the fetters of all motive, all duty, all care,— and made indolence and indifference the enviable lot of divinity; a merely human name for the freest and noblest existence.” (Schiller, 74) 9. My reading here differs radically from the one that might easily be derived from the notion developed by Frank M. Turner in The Greek Heritage in Victorian Britain: “Winckelmann’s views on the character and environment of the Greek people were transmitted to Britain partly through translations of his books and partly through the works of late German writers […] They also frequently portrayed the Greeks as an aesthetic people who resembled children and who were in fact the intellectual and artistic children of western civilization […]. Greece functioned as a metaphor for a golden age inhabited, if not by prelapsarian human beings, at least by natural children who made use of their imagination to comprehend the world and their reason to restrain their passions against excess […]. The metaphor of childhood was used variously to mean that the Greeks actually thought like children or that because of their earlier position in history their civilization was the childhood of later cultures […]. Most often, when representing the Greeks as childlike, a British writer was simply regarding them as exemplifying human virtues and normal healthy impulses that were repressed in an evangelical Christian culture.” (Turner, 41) 10. “Coins and engraved gems, or impressions from them, are to be obtained even in lands which have never seen any admirable work from a Greek chisel, and from these the whole world can

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form an idea of the lofty conceptions expressed in the heads of the divinities. […] The head of Ceres, on silver coins of the city of Metapontus, in Magna Graecia, and the head of Proserpine, on two different silver coins of Syracuse, in the royal Farnese museum at Naples, surpass anything that can be imagined.” (Winckelmann, 1850, 152) 11. The article was probably written by Charles Eastlake, an important luminary among Victorian art critics. The text continues: “In addition to the propriety of its style, this head is remarkable for its beauty; and is classed by Winkelmann [sic] among the examples of the highest character of form.” (Penny Cyclopaedia, 7) 12. “The heads on all the coins of their free states have forms above nature, which they owe to the line that forms their profile. Might not Raphael, who complained of the scarcity of Beauty, might not he have recurred to the coins of Syracuse, as the best statues […] were not yet discovered? Farther than those coins no mortal idea can go.” (Winckelmann, 1765, 264-5). Such a text lends itself to a reading that is a likely source of inspiration for Melville, to the effect that you need not wait until you see a statue to get a sense of the Beauty that ancient Greeks were both in quest of and in a capacity to express/display even as they transacted their daily business with such supernally magnificent coins. Winckelmann, himself an avid coin collector, was murdered because he carried his prized collection around with him as he travelled to and from Rome. 13. Such conclusions have been partly suggested by Jacques Rancière in Aisthesis. Scènes du régime esthétique de l’art.

ABSTRACTS

When Melville visited the Greek island of Syra in 1856, he discovered a thriving harbor city with no ancient monuments to speak of, and little to remind the traveler of the glories of Ancient Greece that Shelley or Byron used to celebrate. Melville’s poem resists the still persistent hellenomania of the period: old stones and antique statues vanish from the poet’s field of vision as he comes to realize that the humble people he meets, traders, innkeepers or street-cleaners, have inherited the noble features transmitted through the ages from the days of Ancient Greece. Confronted to the mercantile realities of modern Syra, the poet acknowledges that the people there spontaneously lived primitive, innocent lives with little concern for the clichés and prejudices of Orientalism. No preconceptions of the kind encroached upon such lives, never idealized and hardly in keeping with prevailing notions of the picturesque that kept haunting the poet’s and the reader’s minds. The past is thus reconstructed as pure aesthetic enjoyment of life materialized by a coin engraved with the head of Proserpine, a hint at Winckelmann’s conception of what beauty was like when experienced by the Ancient Greeks. Not a work of art proper, such a coin was a sign that the common run of commerce could be attended by aesthetic value emerging from the freedom inherent in playful, carefree lives uncommitted to the earnestness of business transactions.

Recelant peu ou pas de vestiges antiques, l’île de Syra, lorsque Melville la visite en 1856, est essentiellement un port au commerce florissant qui n’évoque rien de la glorieuse période classique de la Grèce – telle que célébrée par un Shelley ou un Byron. Dans son poème consacré à Syra, Melville résiste à l’hellénomanie, et ainsi l’absence de vieilles pierres et de statues libère son champ de vision. C’est ironiquement dans le menu peuple, ses pauvres, ses mendiants, ses

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humbles commerçants, que le poète redécouvre, transmis à travers les âges, les traits hérités de Périclès, ou d’Homère et de l’antique grandeur grecque. Devant la Syra moderne et mercantile, la voix poétique célèbre l’innocence primitive et la spontanéité d’un peuple qui n’a cure de se conformer aux clichés de l’orientalisme. Le poème reconstruit alors l’expérience passée comme un moment de pure joie esthétique dans lequel « la vie comme elle va » n’est plus enrôlée au service du pittoresque ni vouée à l’illustration de schèmes ou d’idéaux préconçus. Ainsi, dans la mention un peu énigmatique d’une pièce de monnaie gravée à l’effigie de Proserpine, se repère une allusion à Winckelmann qui considérait les pièces grecques comme une source inexploitée de la beauté antique. Liée aux échanges commerciaux ordinaires, la pièce, sans être une œuvre d’art à proprement parler, apparaît néanmoins comme un signe esthétique invitant à contempler une beauté qui réside entièrement dans la liberté d’une existence joueuse et insouciante. Le spectacle de ce commerce innocent, en quelque sorte gratuit, renvoie le poète à la vie elle-même qui est au cœur de l’expérience esthétique et à l’évocation d’un temps utopique où le commerce n’existait pas.

INDEX

Mots-clés: Poèmes d’Herman Melville, littérature américaine et antiquité gréco-latine, commerce et esthétique, héllenomanie Keywords: Poetry of Herman Melville, American literature and the Ancient World, commerce and aesthetics, Hellenomania

AUTHOR

BRUNO MONFORT Professeur Université Paris Ouest Nanterre-La Défense

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Henry James’s Spectral Archaeology

Stefano Evangelista

Freud’s Archaeology

1 In his early essay “The Aetiology of Hysteria” (1896), Freud sets up a significant parallel between archaeology and psychoanalysis to which he will return in various ways in the course of his career: Imagine that an explorer arrives in a little-known region where his interest is aroused by an expanse of ruins, with the remains of walls, fragments of columns, and tablets with half-effaced and unreadable inscriptions. He may content himself with inspecting what lies exposed to view, with questioning the inhabitants— perhaps semi-barbaric people—who live in the vicinity, about what tradition tells them of the history and meaning of these archaeological remains, and with noting down what they tell him—and he may then proceed on his journey. But he may act differently. He may have brought picks, shovels, and spades with him, and he may set the inhabitants to work with these implements. Together with them he may start upon the ruins, clear away the rubbish, and, beginning from the visible remains, uncover what is buried. If his work is crowned with success, the discoveries are self-explanatory: the ruined walls are part of the ramparts of a palace or treasure-house; the fragments of columns can be filled out into a temple; the numerous inscriptions, which, by good luck, may be bilingual, reveal an alphabet and a language, and, when they have been deciphered and translated, yield undreamed-of information about the events of the remote past, to commemorate which the monuments were built. Saxa loquuntur! [the stones speak] (Freud, 1962, 192)

2 The psychoanalyst is like Freud’s skeptical explorer (“Forscher”), the one who is not contented with what is under his eyes, but always carries picks and spades with him and works through all manners of impediments in order to push the boundaries of knowledge beyond the visible, into the uncharted and unknown. Archaeology and psychoanalysis are similar in that they both look for origins (the Greek αρχή from which modern archaeology takes its name) by means of deep reading. Both are disciplines of excavation that bring the past back to the surface and re-assemble it, making it legible. Digging the earth, archaeology endeavors to find the origins of a

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given civilization; whereas psychoanalysis digs inside the mind to look for the hidden origins of the present self, which are buried within the individual psyche by unconscious mechanisms of repression.

3 It is significant that, in order to present the challenge of psychoanalysis to established forms of knowledge, Freud should refer to archaeology rather than other disciplines for the study of the ancient past such as philology, textual criticism, history or art history. Writing at the end of the nineteenth century, Freud was aware of the fact that, over the past few decades, archaeological research had caused a minor revolution within classical studies: its practitioners were questioning the very notion of the classical ideal made popular in the eighteenth century by Johann Joachim Winckelmann and his neo- classical followers. Recently recovered objects, like the Greek Tanagra figurines and archaic statuettes that Freud was fond of collecting, strongly suggested that an authentic view of antiquity would look much more primitive and altogether less “classical” than previously thought. To give a simplified account, we could say that in the course of the nineteenth century, as the science of antiquity (Altertumswissenschaft) became more and more advanced, antiquity itself became paradoxically more and more remote and obscure, as researchers delved into the pre-classical pasts of an ancient civilization and into those aspects of its daily life that had remained unrecorded by writers and historians.

4 Freud’s analogy therefore seems set up in order to suggest that archaeology and psychoanalysis are both caught within this dialectic between the known and the unknown, juxtaposing as it does the visible and the invisible, memory and forgetting, transmission and occlusion of meaning. As Richard H. Armstrong has noted, though, at this early career stage Freud also turns to archaeology as a “paradigm of success,” implicitly comparing the emergence of psychoanalysis to well-known episodes such as the remarkable achievements of Heinrich Schliemann’s excavations of Troy and Mycenae in the 1870s (Armstrong, 2006, 112).1 Armstrong, who playfully speaks of “spade envy” to denote Freud’s “yearning for a clear and distinct body of demonstrable evidence,” emphasizes the imagery of material riches in the previous quotation, reading the narrative of archaeological discovery as a rhetorical strategy of self- assertion (Armstrong, 2006, 112). Indeed the extract puts forward a belief in revelation and perfect legibility: the remnants are easily reassembled into buildings, the unknown alphabet and language are easily deciphered. In this enlightenment parable all is both “undreamed-of” and “self-explanatory”: the efforts of the bold explorer are repaid with spectacular findings. But, if we take a closer look at the relationship between language, text and stone set up by Freud, the rational scaffolding begins to crack under pressure from irrational elements.

5 The brief extract from “The Aetiology of Hysteria” gives a realistic snapshot of nineteenth-century archaeology, full of vivid detail: it describes a voyage of exploration that leads to conquest and dispossession, like Schliemann’s, or one of the many other expeditions that were breaking new ground in Greece, Egypt and Mesopotamia, and that were unearthing the artistic treasures that were transported to the museums of European capitals like Vienna, Berlin and London. The political implications of nineteenth-century archaeology do not go unnoticed by Freud, who gives us a glimpse of the encounter between foreign explorer and “semi-barbaric” natives, as the two parties negotiate the different cultural and material values of the ruins. The realism of the passage, though, and its analogical function, are twisted and transfigured in the

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abrupt climax, “Saxa loquuntur!” (the stones speak) which, as Derrida has noticed, undoes Freud’s logic: the image of the speaking stones effectively renders the labor of the archaeologist void, as the ruins are shown to be capable of revealing their meaning by themselves, without the intervention of the expert interpreter (Derrida, 1998, 92-3).2 Derrida is right in seeing something “hallucinatory” in this abrupt change in register (Derrida, 1998, 94). The Latin words mirror the return of the ancient ruins on the level of textuality: they introduce a voice from the remote past which brings with it elements of foreignness, mystery and myth that complicate the simple narrative of revelation-as-enlightenment. The dead language comes back to disturb the realism and ethos of Wissenschaft expressed by the German language in the scientific essay, like a spectral presence. It erupts from the sentence like a survival: these ancestral, foreign words which are not Freud’s introduce into the passage what lies beyond the boundary of translation and domestication. For there is a sense that the language of the stones will always, at best, elude the efforts of the scientist or, at worst, disrupt them, revealing, by spectral analogy, the failure, not the success, of enlightenment ideology.

6 Freud’s extract from “The Aetiology of Hysteria” is therefore not so much an archaeological analogy as an archaeological fantasy. As such it taps into a substantial canon of uncanny and fantastic literature associated with archaeological recoveries that had been growing in popularity since the early decades of the nineteenth century. By endowing the material remnants of the past with uncanny powers, the archaeological fantastic (not unlike psychoanalysis) bares the hidden dark side of Altertumswissenschaft: it reveals the crisis of knowledge that gnaws away at the heart of the science of antiquity, and manifests it in the form of a psychological meta-critique of reason, desire and ambition. This sub-genre of the fantastic developed alongside the popular genres of archaeological reportage and archaeological memoir especially in countries that were then at the forefront of archaeological research, such as the German-speaking lands, France and Britain. Freud himself would turn to the literature of the archaeological fantastic in his essay (1907) on Wilhelm Jensen’s short story Gradiva (1902), in which he formulates one of his most powerful cases for psychoanalysis as a method of literary analysis.

Statues and Transgressive Desires in Henry James

7 My analysis of the archaeological fantastic goes back to the 1870s—a crucial decade in the history of classical archaeology. It focuses on an early story by Henry James, “The Last of the Valerii,” in which, like Freud, James draws on archaeology in order to investigate the relationship between the buried secrets of the soil and the hidden desires of the individual mind. At the same time, James also self-consciously looks backwards to the international canon of the archaeological fantastic, especially to Prosper Mérimée’s “La Venus d’Ille” (1837), which is the buried ur-text within “The Last of the Valerii.” Less visible but equally foundational to James is a body of writings on the aesthetics of ancient sculpture by critics such as Walter Pater, Winckelmann and Goethe, with which the story engages. I aim to show how this relatively little-known short story sets up an intricate set of relations and metaphorical correspondences between stone and language, sculpture and literature, antiquity and modernity, aesthetics and psychology.

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8 “The Last of the Valerii” was first published in the Atlantic Monthly in January 1874, when James was thirty-one years old; subsequent versions appeared in the collections A Passionate Pilgrim and Other Tales (1875) and Stories Revived (1885), the latter with fairly substantial revisions. The tale is set in modern Rome, where a wealthy American young woman named Martha marries Count Camillo Valerio, an impoverished but strikingly attractive Roman aristocrat. Fascinated by the heritage into which she has married, Martha persuades her husband to undertake some archaeological excavations in the grounds of their villa—a giant, somewhat dilapidated park located within the walls of Rome, filled with fragments of antiquities. When they unearth a majestic marble statue of Juno, the story takes a supernatural turn. The Count seems to undergo a strange conversion to paganism, as he starts worshiping the statue, hides its broken hand in a silver box that he keeps in his cabinet and, at the same time, becomes alienated from his wife, shunning her physical contact. Eventually Martha decides that the only way to rescue her marriage is to re-bury the Juno, in a bizarre ritual re-enactment of a Christian funeral. The story ends as Count Camillo seems restored to normal behavior by the re-interment, although we then find out that, years later, the broken hand of the Juno is still his treasured possession. The events are narrated from the point of view of Martha’s American godfather, who acts as a detached observer.

9 In an influential reading J. Hillis Miller has seen “The Last of the Valerii” as shaped by the conflicting drives of prosopopoeia, or “giving a face, a body, and a name to an inanimate chunk of stone,” and its reverse, depersonalization or reification (Miller, 1990, 218). Central to this dynamics, according to Miller, is James’s use of the archaeological fragment, which becomes interchangeable with the human body part, creating a deliberate confusion between the way we “read” people and things that is at the core of the aesthetic and ethical problems that James works out. Miller reads James’s tale within a long tradition of exploiting the trope of prosopopoeia that stretches back to Ovid’s Metamorphoses. More immediately, though, James’s evocative use of archaeology places “The Last of the Valerii” within the nineteenth-century genre of the archaeological fantastic, as later picked up by Freud, with which it shares a number of important characteristics: the uncanny return of the past, the power of the recovered object to unleash repressed desires, the clash between the old and the new world. Like Freud, James uses the trope of the speaking stones to confer a spectral agency to the material remains of antiquity. The narrator confesses to the habit of lingering about the “nameless statues and noseless heads and rough-hewn sarcophagi” scattered on the grounds of the Roman villa, “half-expecting they would speak and tell me their stony secrets—whisper heavily the whereabouts of their mouldering fellows, still unrecovered from the soil” (James, 1978, 263). Later in the story his impression of the Pantheon is haunted by the same fantasy: here the “huge dusky dome seems to the spiritual ear to hold a vague reverberation of pagan worship, as a gathered shell holds the rumor of the sea” (274). The aural metaphor conveys an impossible desire for knowledge, disclosure and decipherment. James pictures antiquity revealing itself without archaeology, to the sensitive observer rather than the scientist: spectrality is the medium through which the “stony secrets” of the past manifest themselves to the present. These fantasies are the more striking since they take hold on the narrator whose suspiciousness and pragmatism are designed to offset the impressionable vulnerability of the Count, lending credibility to the improbable events in the eyes of the reader.

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10 Indeed, while the voices of the stones remain consigned to fantasy for the narrator, they certainly take on a much more embodied form for the Count who, by his own admission, sees the statues as “ghosts” and who cannot bear to look at them in the face because he “seem[s] to see other strange eyes in the empty sockets,” adding, in a revealing non sequitur, “I hardly know what they say to me” (266). Focusing on the Count’s psychosexual degeneration, the story exploits the same equivalence between archaeological and psychological excavation that Freud would spell out clearly in 1896. Digging the ground of the Roman villa, which Martha imagines being “as full of buried treasures as a bride-cake of plums” (265), is like a journey of exploration into the mechanisms for the management and repression of male sexual desire. The earth hides the memory of the past, in the form of the buried statue, just as the Count’s psyche hides deep-seated instincts and desires that, once released, threaten his mental equilibrium and the social contract represented by his marriage.

11 If James’s suggestive image of the Roman soil as a “bride-cake full of plums” is a prelude to Freud’s fantasy of archaeology as a science of easy and substantial gains, it also nods back to a long novelistic and critical tradition of presenting post-classical Rome as a city that was literally built on an invisible, vast, unstructured underground museum. Most relevant in this sense is Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Marble Faun (1860), a novel that represented for the young James an example of an exquisitely and distinctly American way of writing about Italy—an opinion that James would modify later on as he came to appreciate its limitations, especially its inability or refusal to embrace a truly cosmopolitan point of view (James, 1914, 382-4). In The Marble Faun, Hawthorne puts forward a spatial understanding of history as material accumulation of layer upon layer of hidden objects, which has clear echoes in James: A spade can scarcely be put into that soil, so rich in lost and forgotten things, without hitting upon some discovery which would attract all eyes, in any other land. If you dig but a little way, you gather bits of precious marble, coins, rings, and engraved gems; if you go deeper, you break into columbaria, or into sculptured and richly frescoed apartments that look like festive halls, but were only sepulchres. (Hawthorne, 2002, 328)

12 In Rome the soil becomes richer and richer the deeper you dig into it, but it is telling that the deepest and most splendid layer is also a memento mori. The festive hall-as- sepulchre shows the special power of the archaeological object to make the present face its own inevitable destruction: the uncanny yoking of life and death causes modernity to imagine itself, projected into a remote future, as having become obsolescent or spectral.

13 As a recovery of “forgotten things” archaeology for Hawthorne is a discipline of re- membering in the double meaning of recovering through memory but also piecing back together, working to repair the dismembering of ancient civilization by the hand of time and history. Because of its relationship of mimesis with the human body, the recovered statue is a particularly powerful symbol of this double meaning: as the rhetoric of intrusion and invasion in the previous passage reveals, unearthing the material remnants of the past always has an element of profanation, of waking the dead or deliberately looking for ghosts. Hawthorne explicitly alerts his readers to the uncanny relationship between sculpture and corpse in a scene that immediately follows the previous quotation, in which the American protagonist, Keynon, discovers, scattered in the soil, the fragments of a “wonderfully delicate and beautiful” (328) ancient statue, which he easily pieces back together to reveal a Venus:

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Placing these limbs in what the nice adjustment of the fractures proved to be their true position, the poor, fragmentary woman forthwith showed that she retained her modest instincts to the last. She had perished with them, and snatched them back at the moment of revival. For these long-buried hands immediately disposed themselves in the manner that nature prompts, as the antique artist knew, and as all the world has seen, in the Venus de Medici. (328-9)

14 What is particularly interesting in this twist on the fantasy of archaeology as spectacular revelation is that Hawthorne deliberately sexualizes the archaeologist’s physical incursion into the past. The atmosphere of voyeurism, necrophilia and sexual violation is accentuated by the grotesque image of the personified sculptural nude (the “poor, fragmentary woman”) modestly shielding its sex and breasts in the famous attitude of the Venus de Medici, as if it were a reanimated corpse suddenly become conscious of its nakedness under the erotic touch of the Pygmalion-like archaeologist.

15 In a greatly influential essay on the aesthetics of ancient sculpture, which had recently been reissued in book form when James wrote “The Last of the Valerii,” Walter Pater depicts the neoclassical critic Johann Joachim Winckelmann at work in the Roman collections of ancient art, as he “fingers those pagan marbles with unsinged hands, with no sense of shame or loss” (Pater, 1980, 177).3 Playing on the uncanny resemblance between human body and sculptural nude, Pater deliberately creates a slippage between the study of aesthetics and sexual pleasure similar to that described by Hawthorne. Winckelmann’s touch is a daring act of archaeological recovery in that it undoes the “loss” caused by the historical distance between the present and the classical past. The erotic touch as action that generates meaning and memory is a permutation of the fantasy of “saxa loquuntur”: the humanized archaeological object unlocks hidden meanings that cannot be accessed through the rational idiom of scholarship. Pater’s image contains a hint to Winckelmann’s homosexuality—a type of desire that conjured negative connotations at the time and that is accessible in the essay only on the level of subtext, through indirect reference, euphemism and allusion.

16 As well as evoking the perverse archaeology of The Marble Faun, count Camillo’s obsessions with the Roman goddess in “The Last of the Valerii” may therefore be an echo of Pater, who argued that Winckelmann had made himself a pagan in Rome in order to be fully attuned to the culture of antiquity. In fact, James’s story falls into a widespread nineteenth-century tradition of equating paganism with unregulated or perverse sexual desire, recently brought to the renewed attention of Anglophone readers not only by the allusive Pater but also by the succès de scandale of A.C. Swinburne’s Poems and Ballads (1866). We are given to understand that the encounter with the unearthed Juno frees a deep-seated sympathy with pagan religion that was latent in the Count all along. There is something playful in James’s use of paganism as disturbing element in the couple dynamics between an American Protestant and a Catholic Italian aristocrat—a situation with which James experiments here for the first time and would later reuse, to greater effect, especially in The Golden Bowl (1904).4

17 But the tone of the narrator is entirely serious when he diagnoses the Count as having “reverted to the faith of his fathers” (James, 1978, 279). The aristocratic Valerii can trace their lineage all the way back to Roman times and the narrator sees this “interminable ancestry” in degenerative terms as a “heavy heritage” and the Count himself as “a dark efflorescence of the evil germs which history had implanted in his line” (272). The Count’s direct genetic link with the classical past makes him especially susceptible to being haunted by it:

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What a heavy heritage it seemed to me, as I reckoned it up in my melancholy musings, the Count’s interminable ancestry! Back to the profligate revival of arts and vices,—back to the bloody medley of mediaeval wars,—back through the long, fitfully-glaring dusk of the early ages to its ponderous origin in the solid Roman state,—back through all the darkness of history,—it seemed to stretch, losing every feeblest claim on my sympathies as it went. Such a record was in itself a curse […]. (272)

18 As his present self is refracted and fragmented in this mise en abyme of family history, the Count takes on the same patina of history as the statue, acting as a material link between the nineteenth century and the darkest ages of history, which the narrator views with an evident sense of distaste.

19 Despite his impressive aristocratic pedigree there is something semi-barbaric about Count Camillo, which recalls the native inhabitants of Freud’s archaeological wonderland, and which in James’s text is described as part and parcel of his national heritage. The Italian man in charge of the archaeological excavation—a Pan-like figure reminiscent of Heinrich Heine’s gods in exile—corroborates the narrator’s suspicions: claiming to have learnt “a multitude of secrets” by fumbling “so long in the monstrous heritage of antiquity,” he explains that “[t]here is a pagan element in all of us—I don’t speak for you, illustrissimi forestieri” (278). The clash between past and present staged by “The Last of the Valerii” is therefore not only that between the material culture of antiquity and its modern interpreters, but between the Old World, morally weakened by its long history, and the New World, whose modernity makes it immune to this draw towards regression. The transatlantic marriage has the potential to heal this rift but the underground supernatural plot works against a natural resolution as the Count is pulled back towards his own ancestral pagan origins and turns away from his wife.

20 The currency that Martha brings to the marriage is therefore not so much, or not only, money, as the story explicitly declares from the start, but blood: the modern healthy blood that has the capability to strengthen and re-invigorate the weakened genetic line of the Count. The narrator is aware of this symbolic economy when, at the height of the crisis, he exclaims that Martha should have given herself instead to “some wholesome young fellow of our own blood” (272). Blood and stone are the two symbols around which the psychosexual narrative is constructed: the one connected with health, change and regeneration; the other with disease and regression. The perverse communion between the two symbols is revealed in a crucial scene, when Martha and the narrator discover freshly spilled blood on an improvised altar made of “a nameless fragment of antique marble” (280), and realize that the Count has made a blood sacrifice to the statue. This episode—perhaps a euphemistic rewriting of Pliny’s anecdote of a man who left a semen stain on the Knidian Aphrodite as obscene evidence of his lust—is a clear indication of the wasting of the Count’s healthy sexual energy, easily interpreted by both the characters within the story and the readers (Pliny, 1962, 10:17).

21 In 1907, roughly twenty years after he first employed the image of archaeological discovery for the retrieval of the unconscious, Freud returned to examine the parallel between archaeological and psychoanalytic method in his well-known essay on Wilhelm Jensen’s novella Gradiva: A Pompeiian Fantasy (1902)—a short fiction that is also based on the perverse substitution of stone images for bodies of flesh and blood. This time Freud’s encounter with archaeology is openly mediated by a literary text and, as Cathy Caruth suggests, it takes on the self-reflexive quality, later picked up on by

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Derrida, of a meditation not only on the relationship between psychoanalysis and literature but also on the very possibility of memory in psychoanalysis (Caruth, 2013, 82-4). Freud famously claims that in the Gradiva, the deus ex machina Miss Zoe Bertgang takes on the role of the psychoanalyst as she manages to redirect the protagonist Harold’s sexual desire from statues to real women by means of an impromptu session of the talking cure (Freud, 2009, 117 ff.).5 Borrowing Freud’s interpretation of Jensen, we can see “The Last of the Valerii” as a proto-psychoanalytic tale, arguing that James uses the archaeological fantastic in order to represent both the symptoms and the cure of a psychosexual neurosis. In “The Last of the Valerii” both the narrator and Martha are cast in the role of diagnosticians as they try to make sense of the Count’s transformation into an impotent husband. While the narrator takes no steps beyond declaring the Count “a precious psychological study” (276), it is, as in Jensen’s tale, the woman who attempts treatment. Understanding that the statue represents a form of desire that needs to be counteracted if her husband’s sexuality is to resume its proper function, Martha devises the literal re-burial of the Juno that is the story’s denouement. The ending of the story emphatically redeploys the sexually-loaded metaphor of burial, as the apparently repentant Count “buried his head in [Martha’s] lap” (283), in a gesture that seems to hint at the resumption of his conjugal obligations. Martha is a bad psychoanalyst, though, because her cure is based on a violent act of repression rather than dialogue. When we discover that the broken arm of the Juno stays behind in the Count’s cabinet we realize that the cure is only apparent, as the title of the story ironically underlines. Camillo is the last of the Valerii not, as auspicated by the narrator, in the sense that he will be the last pagan in his family line, but in the literal sense that his marriage will remain sexless or at least sterile, stones prevailing over blood in the end.6

Textual Archaeology: From James to Mérimée

22 As several critics have noted “The Last of the Valerii” is heavily based on Prosper Mérimée’s “La Venus d’Ille” (1837), a short story that James knew very well, having attempted to publish his own translation of it a few years previously (see Durand- Bogaert, 1999). “La Venus d’Ille” is also about a recently disinterred ancient statue—a bronze Venus recovered in the South West of France—which gets in the way of a modern sexual relationship: in Mérimée the animated statue mysteriously crushes a groom to death on his wedding night, before the marriage can be consummated. And like James’s tale, “La Venus d’Ille” ends with the disposal of the ancient object, as the Venus is melted down and turned into a church bell in order to prevent further disruption. Writing “The Last of the Valerii,” James in a sense continued the labor of translation that never made it in print, rendering the source text in a different form. In so doing he kept close enough to encourage the reader to compare the two works, as is emphasized by James’s decision, in November 1875, to publish a French translation of his tale in the Revue des deux Mondes, the same journal in which Mérimée’s tale had first appeared nearly forty years earlier. In his reading of Freud’s Gradiva essay in Archive Fever, Derrida suggests that, in Freud’s psychoanalytic understanding of memory, the desire for archiving and the desire for remembering through inscription and obliteration go hand in hand in an uneasy but inevitable alliance. Borrowing this paradigm that is itself formulated on the basis of archaeological fiction and applying it to the way in which James remembers Mérimée, we could argue that within “The Last

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of the Valerii”—a story about the potentially disruptive power of unearthing the past —“La Venus d’Ille” functions as a buried object from the literary past: James’s archaeological imagination performs a contradictory act of bringing to light, as it were, Mérimée, for English readers, while at the same time repressing and erasing Mérimée’s tale by superimposing his own textual stratum on it; or, building on another of Derrida’s images, James practices an art of creative “translation” that is in fact a spectral projection of Mérimée’s supernatural tale (Derrida, 1998, 84).

23 James had been introduced to Mérimée in his early American years by his friend, the Franco-American artist John La Farge. In the months surrounding the publication of “The Last of the Valerii,” James published two reviews of works by Mérimée in the Nation and the Independent respectively. In the second review, he declared it “a capital offence in a young story-teller to put pen to paper without having read [his tales] and digested them”—the metaphor of digestion being a physiological analogue for the process of remembrance as obliteration and spectralization suggested by Derrida (James, 1878, 391). The same sense of qualified admiration reappears much later, in Notes of a Son and Brother (1914), where, looking back on his early years, James speaks of “the square and dense little formal garden” of Mérimée’s style, conveying the impression of an exquisite but austere and somewhat impenetrable literary model (James, 1914, 92). James’s archaeological or digested version of Mérimée departs from the original most obviously in the shift of focus signaled in the title, from haunting object to haunted subject, whose psychology is much more developed in James than in Mérimée. The other major revision is the change from Venus to Juno. In a macabre updating of the ancient cult of the goddess, Mérimée’s Venus returns to the modern world in order to officiate a perverse marriage ritual, in which the deflowering of the bride is substituted by the brutal killing of the groom. Like Mérimée, James forges his supernatural plot out of mythic elements specific to his goddess, for the Roman Juno is of course connected with sexual jealousy and marital trouble; Juno’s more ambivalent femininity, as critics have observed, turns her into a phallic mother, adding to the atmosphere of fetishism and gender blurring that dominates this tale, which Donatella Izzo and John Carlos Rowe among others have seen as playing out a problematic ambivalence towards femininity (Izzo, 2001, 58-76; Rowe, 1998, 38; Miller, 1990, 231).7

24 Most relevant in the context of this essay, though, is the way in which the two writers interact with the archaeological imagination as it developed in the course of the nineteenth century. Aside from being the author of successful exotic tales, Mérimée was a well-respected scholar and archaeologist. In “La Venus d’Ille” he draws attention to archaeology as a science of interpretation by making his narrator an archaeologist and by including small learned puzzles that work as reality effects, engaging the philological competence of the reader: used in this way, archaeology functions as the link between the realism and the fantastic in the story, setting up the same uncanny relationship between Wissenschaft and dream that would fascinate Freud. 8 But the tale was also clearly meant to call to mind an actual historical event which would have been fresh in the memory of his contemporary French readers: the recovery, in 1820, of the Venus de Milo, which was installed in the Louvre in 1822 and immediately became one of the icons of nineteenth-century Hellenism. The story of the accidental discovery of the statue by a Greek peasant, the mystery of its missing arms and its move to Paris were reported widely both in specialized publications and in the popular press (see Curtis, 2005). Mérimée’s tale is in dialogue with this body of popular archaeological

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reportage, transposing its use of romance into the supernatural and thereby highlighting the ambiguous cultural valence of archaeology as both revelation and a source of further myth-making and mystification.

The Head of the Juno

25 “The Last of the Valerii” was also published during a period of intense and extremely fruitful archaeological activity. When the story came out in January 1874, Schliemann had been excavating ancient Troy for some time and the news of his recovery of the so- called Treasure of Priam in 1873 attracted widespread attention in the international press. James’s story, though, unlike Mérimée’s, does not seem to point to any specific archaeological find. In many ways its historical archive is to be found in James’s impressions of Rome, as recorded in his travel writings and private correspondence from these years. James visited Rome for the first time in 1869, before the Italian Unification, in the last days of the Popes’ government, when the city appeared to him, as to most foreign tourists, as a charming relic of bygone ages, which had somehow escaped the inevitable forces of modernization. His letters to his family are full of a sense of aesthetic revelation and, writing to Grace Norton, he captures this pervading presence of the past describing the “air” of the city as “thick with the presence of invisible ghosts” (James, 2006, 2:202). When James came back to Rome in 1872, for an extended stay, he immediately noticed a change of atmosphere, reporting to his father “a kind of modernized air in the streets, a multiplication of shops, carts, newspaper- stalls” (James, 2008-11, 1:163; see also Mamoli Zorzi, 2013).

26 The Villa Valerii described in the story conjures the magic atmosphere of the old, pre- Unification Rome that was fast disappearing after the city’s annexation to the Italian Kingdom in 1870s and its proclamation as Italian capital in 1871. Its buildings and park are a fictional bricolage of various old Roman villas that James visited in the early 1870s, but several clues in the text point directly to the Villa Ludovisi as the author’s main source of inspiration. The seventeenth-century Villa Ludovisi left a particularly strong impression on James who remarked in a travel sketch from this period that there is “nothing more blissfully right in Rome, nothing more consummately consecrated to style” (James, 1992, 191). Like the park of the fictional Villa Valerii, the grounds of the Villa Ludovisi had long been a treasure-trove for archaeological finds and, at the time of James’s writing, they housed one of the world’s most important open-air collections of antique sculptures. In particular its casino, which in the late nineteenth century was open to the public, contained a jumble of sculptural remains that included a colossal head of Juno known as the Juno Ludovisi, a fragment of what must have been a gigantic statue that has now gone lost. The “Casino” (269) or garden-house in which Count Camillo Valerii installs the Juno and carries out his pagan rites bears an obvious resemblance to the casino Ludovisi, where in 1873 James saw “the head of the great Juno […] thrust into a corner behind a shutter,” as he describes in the same travel sketch (James, 1992, 191). James belonged to the last generations of tourists to see the statue in situ: for, a little after ten years from the story’s publication, the grounds of the Villa Ludovisi would be the object of one of the most reckless property speculations of United Italy. The grounds of the villa were sold off by their impoverished aristocratic owners and “developed” into the Rione Ludovisi, which became an example of modern urban planning and modern hygiene, dotted with state-of-the-art international hotels;

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at the same time the collections of sculptures were moved into publicly-owned museums. The redevelopment of the Villa Ludovisi was an act of symbolic re- orientation of the Eternal City from the past to the future. In 1874 “The Last of the Valerii” captures this moment of historical transition with astonishing foresight. In staging a violent clash between the past and the present, the fantastic archaeological narrative provides a snapshot of the city as it grapples with its historic and material heritage, readjusting itself from being the anachronistic city of the Popes to having become the capital of a modern nation state, and asking fundamental questions about the proper ownership and display of its artistic treasures. In the story, these geo- political questions are transposed onto the domestic plane occupied by the odd marital triangle made up of the rich American bride, the impoverished Italian Count and his antique statue.

27 Could the head of the Juno glimpsed by James behind the mysterious screen in the Villa Ludovisi be the original material object that hides behind his archaeological fantasy? Attempting an answer to this question takes us beyond the problem of sources. While Mérimée’s story plays with the emerging genre of archaeological reportage, James’s tale of haunting engages with a canon of writings on aesthetics, establishing a dialogue with critics who theorized the cognitive and psychological processes at work in aesthetic responses to sculpture. Unlike the Venus de Milo, the Juno Ludovisi had been around for centuries when James published his story and had long been celebrated as an icon of eighteenth-century and romantic Hellenism. In the History of the Art of Antiquity (Geschichte der Kunst des Alterthums, 1764), Winckelmann had praised it as the “most beautiful head” of the goddess in existence, drawing particular attention to the quality of her glance, which he described as “commanding, like a queen who wants to rule, be revered, and inspire love” (Winckelmann, 2006, 203). James’s fantastic story literalizes this interpretation.

28 Within the tradition of modern Hellenism, though, the most influential response to the Juno Ludovisi did not come from Winckelmann, but from his follower and critic J.W. Goethe, who singles it out as the best example of a peculiar type of sculptural sublime that he associates with the city of Rome: When, as is the case in Rome, one constantly finds oneself in the presence of the plastic arts of antiquity, one feels as when one is in the presence of something infinite or unknowable in nature. The impression of the sublime, the beautiful, beneficent though this may be, disturbs us: we would like to set our feelings and our vision into words; first of all, however, we are required to recognize, see, understand; we begin to separate out, to differentiate, to organize, and this too we find, if not impossible, then certainly very difficult; and so we finally revert to the simple visual pleasure of admiration. [...] The first claims on our attention were made by the Juno Ludovisi, which was the more highly valued and revered as one got to see the original so seldom and fortuitously […]; because none of our contemporaries approaching her for the first time may claim to be a match for this sight. (Goethe, 2004, 545-6)9

29 Borrowing from contemporary accounts of the natural sublime, Goethe claims that ancient sculptures place the modern viewer in contact with the infinite and the unknowable (“Unendlichen,” “Unerforschlichen”), triggering an unsettling psychological phenomenon linked to the collapse of logic: the rational individual falls apart in Goethe’s description, and is forced to revert to a pre-rational and pre-linguistic mode of artistic contemplation entirely based on pleasure and emotion. Once again, it is interesting to see how this passage looks forward to Freud. Goethe provides another

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ur-text for the saxa loquuntur trope as he shows the material object usurping the rational faculties of the observer. Both writers base their archaeological fantasies on speech. Freud’s speaking stones are at once the opposite and uncanny double of the image of the silenced interpreter with which Goethe’s description culminates. For Goethe, the Juno Ludovisi is pre-eminent among the sculptures capable of provoking this uncanny experience partly because of its impressive size: the colossal fragment physically dwarfs the viewer by suggesting what it lacks as well as representing what has been preserved, evoking the unimaginable extent of the classical civilization that is lost to the moderns and conjuring the void onto which, literally, their knowledge of antiquity is based. It is a quintessential archaeological object because it simultaneously embodies meaning and loss, memory and forgetting.

30 In the Italian Journey (1816-17), Goethe relates how, during his stay in Rome, his intense fascination with this work led him to acquire a cast and place it in his Roman apartment. Goethe’s autobiographical account of this episode deploys the same slippage between aesthetic and sexual desire on which James bases his story: “This was my first love affair in Rome, and now I possess her. No words can express this feeling. It was like a song of Homer” (Goethe, 2004, 154).10 This further variation on the theme of the speaking stones places Goethe in dialogue with the literature of the archaeological fantastic that I have examined in this essay; the more clearly so as he goes on to credit the ancient fragment as the material and almost subliminal inspiration behind the Roman reworking of his neo-classical tragedy Iphigenia (1786), which many critics regard as his fullest penetration into the classical spirit. Goethe’s desire to possess and domesticate the statue, which is rendered more remarkable by the fact that the colossal dimensions of the Juno make it an unlikely presence in a domestic setting, went on beyond his Roman stay, as he eventually installed a copy in his house in Weimar, where it still is to be found nowadays as part of the Klassik Stiftung Weimar. Goethe’s biographical tale of obsession bears striking similarities with Freud’s own acquisition, following his work on Jensen, of a copy of the Gradiva relief, which he hung in his study in Vienna. Both authors used the archaeological object (or its copy, as it happens) as part of the public mise en scene of their success.

31 It is unclear how familiar James was with Goethe’s Italian writings in the 1870s. But the textual archaeology of “The Last of the Valerii” takes us back to Winckelmann and Goethe’s writings on aesthetics as well as forwards to Freud’s experiments with psychoanalytic deep readings of the mind. In Roderick Hudson, a novel published one year after “The Last of the Valerii,” James comes back to the Juno Ludovisi in a passage that is conspicuous for being the first glimpse of the Roman setting that would play such an important role in the novel. Elements of the archaeological tale re-emerge from the more even surface of the realist text as the encounter with the statue creates “the spell […] of supreme romance” in the two main characters, who linger in the avenues of the ancestral park of the villa, and the impressionable young Roderick ends up drained, declaring that “he would go nowhere else, that after the Juno it was a profanation to look at anything but sky and trees” (James, 1994, 63). Roderick’s sense of fatigue and mental paralysis are similar to the emotions described by Goethe. But readers of “The Last of the Valerii” might well recognize here the perverse effect of a familiar face, reading the words “spell” and “romance” in their full uncanny significance and knowing, together with Freud, how tempting, but also how dangerous it is to hear the stones speak.

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BIBLIOGRAPHY

ARMSTRONG, Richard H., A Compulsion for Antiquity: Freud and the Ancient World, Ithaca, Cornell University Press, 2006.

CARUTH, Cathy, Literature in the Ashes of History, Baltimore, Johns Hopkins University Press, 2013.

CURTIS, Gregory, Disarmed: The Story of the Venus de Milo, Stroud, Sutton, 2005.

DAVIS, Whitney, Replications: Archaeology, Art History, Psychoanalysis, University Park, Pennsylvania State University Press, 1996.

DERRIDA, Jacques, Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression, translated from French by Eric Prenowitz, Chicago and London, University of Chicago Press, 1998.

DURAND-BOGAERT, Fabienne, “Henry James ou la difficulté du partage,” in Revue Française d’Etudes Américaines, vol. 80, n° 1, 1999, 95-103.

FREUD, Sigmund, “The Aetiology of Hysteria,” (1896) in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, vol. 3, translated and edited by James Strachey, London, Hogarth Press, 1962.

---, Der Wahn und die Träume in W. Jensens Gradiva. Mit dem Text der Erzählung von Wilhelm Jensen und Sigmund Freuds Randbemerkugen (1907), Frankfurt a.M., Fischer, 2009.

GOETHE, Johann Wolfgang, Italienische Reise, DTV, Munich, 2004.

HAKE, Sabine, “Saxa loquuntur: Freud’s Archaeology of the Text,” boundary 2, vol. 20, Spring 1993, 146-73.

HAWTHORNE, Nathaniel, The Marble Faun (1860), Oxford and New York, Oxford University Press, 2002.

IZZO, Donatella, Portraying the Lady: Technologies of Gender in the Short Stories of Henry James, Lincoln and London, University of Nebraska Press, 2001.

JAMES, Henry, The Complete Letters of Henry James, 1855-1872, 2 vols, ed. by Pierre A. Walker and Greg V. Zacharias, Lincoln (NE) and London, University of Nebraska Press, 2006.

---, The Complete Letters of Henry James, 1872-1876, 3 vols, ed. by Pierre A. Walker and Greg V. Zacharias, Lincoln (NE) and London, University of Nebraska Press, 2008-11.

---, French Poets and Novelists, London, Macmillan, 1878.

---, “From a Roman Note-Book,” in Italian Hours (1909), ed. by John Auchard, University Park, Pennsylvania State University Press, 1992.

---, Notes of a Son and Brother, London, Macmillan, 1914.

---, Roderick Hudson, Oxford and New York, Oxford University Press, 1994.

---, The Tales of Henry James, vol. 2 (1870-1874), ed. by Maqbool Aziz, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1978.

MAMOLI ZORZI, Rosella, “Rome Changing: James’s ‘Lugubrious Modern Capital,’” in Transforming Henry James, ed. by Anna De Biasio, Anna Despotopoulou and Donatella Izzo, Newcastle, Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2013, 65-76.

MAVES, Carl, Sensuous Pessimism: Italy in the Work of Henry James, Bloomington, Indiana University Press, 1973.

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MÉRIMÉE, Prosper, “The Venus of Ille,” in Carmen and Other Stories, translated from French by Nicholas Jotcham, Oxford and New York, Oxford University Press, 2008.

MILLER, J. Hillis, Versions of Pygmalion, Cambridge Mass. and London, Harvard University Press, 1990.

NAIBURG, Suzi, “Archaic Depths in Henry James’s ‘The Last of the Valerii,’” Henry James Review, vol. 14, n° 2, 1993, 151-65.

O’DONOGHUE, Diane, “Negotiations of Surface: Archaeology within the Early Strata of Psychoanalysis,” Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association, vol. 52, n° 3, 2004, 653-671.

PATER, Walter, “Winckelmann” (1867), in The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry, ed. by Donald L. Hill, Berkeley and Los Angeles, University of California Press, 1980.

PLINY, Natural History, 10 vols, translated by D.E. Eichholz, Cambridge Mass. and London, Harvard University Press, 1962.

RAND, Nicholas, and Maria TOROK, Questions for Freud: The Secret History of Psychoanalysis, Cambridge Mass. and London, 1997.

ROWE, John Carlos, The Other Henry James, Durham and London, Duke University Press, 1998.

THOMAS, Jane, “Icons of Desire: The Classical Statue in Later Victorian Literature’, Yearbook of English Studies, vol. 40, 2010, 246-72.

VANCE, William L., America’s Rome, 2 vols, New Haven and London, Yale University Press, 1989.

WINCKELMANN, Johann Joachim, History of the Art of Antiquity (1764), translated from German by Harry Francis Mallgrave, Los Angeles, Getty Publications, 2006.

NOTES

1. For a different take on the relationship between archaeology and psychoanalysis vis-à-vis art- historical practice, see Davis (1996). 2. O’Donoghue (2004) provides an interesting reading of the words “saxa loquuntur” in relation to Viennese topography; while according to Hake (1993), Freud sets up a comparison between archaeological sites and the female body. 3. The essay originally appeared in the Westminster Review in 1867 and was reprinted in the first edition of The Renaissance in 1873. This sentence remained unchanged in subsequent editions. 4. It is also possible to see Portrait of a Lady (1880-81) as a later development of the same theme: in this novel the Italianized American Gilbert Osmond takes the place of the authentically Italian and aristocratic Count Camillo. On the Count as model for Prince Amerigo, see Maves (1973, 142). William L. Vance reads the story in a tradition of American writing about neo-paganism in Italy that goes from Hawthorne to Gore Vidal (Vance, 1989, 1: 158-60). Vance’s argument that the story anticipates The Ambassadors (1902) as a tale of an American that undergoes a transformation in Europe is disputable in that here it is the Italian Count who is affected by the transformative power of the past, while the two main American characters remain relatively unchanged by it. 5. For a lively literary account of Freud’s essay and an interpretation of Jensen’s tale that takes issue with Freud’s diagnosis of the protagonist’s sexual repression, see Rand and Torok, 1997, 47-75. 6. The relevant passage emphasises the therapeutic concerns of the story: “He has proved himself one of the Valerii; we shall see to it that he is the last, and yet that his disease shall leave

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count Camillo in excellent health” (280). For a different interpretation of James’s story in the light of Freud’s Gradiva essay, see Izzo, 2001, 58-63. 7. Izzo reads “The Last of the Valerii” as enacting a symbolic process of petrification of the living woman; while for Rowe the story represents James’s attempt to deal with the difficult legacy of the American feminist Margaret Fuller. Much of the extant criticism of “The Last of the Valerii” pursues the comparison with Mérimée, focusing in particular on James’s change of the goddess from Venus to Juno; see for instance Maves (1973, 158) and Naiburg (1993, 156). See Thomas (2010) for a comparison with works by Thomas Hardy and Vernon Lee. 8. The use of archaeology as reality effect is particularly evident in the long discussion over the meaning of the inscriptions found on the base and the arm of the statue (Mérimée, 2008, 142-4). 9. My translation. “Wenn man, wie in Rom der Fall ist, sich immerfort in Gegenwart plastischer Kunstwerke der Alten befindet, so fühlt man sich wie in Gegenwart der Natur vor einem Unendlichen, Unerforschlichen. Der Eindruck des Erhabenen, des Schönen, so wohltätig er auch sein mag, beunruhigt uns, wir wünschen unsre Gefühle, unsre Anschauung in Worte zu fassen: dazu müssten wir aber erst erkennen, einsehen, begreifen; wir fangen an zu sondern, zu unterscheiden, zu ordnen, und auch dieses finden wir, wo nicht unmöglich, doch höchst schwierig, und so kehren wir endlich zu einer schauenden und genießenden Bewunderung. [...] Den ersten Platz bei uns behauptete Juno Ludovisi, um desto höher geschätzt und verehrt, als man das Original nur selten, nur zufällig zu sehen bekam und man es für ein Glück achten musste, sie immerwährend vor Augen zu haben; denn keiner unsrer Zeitgenossen, der zum erstenmal vor sie hintritt, darf behaupten, diesem Anblick gewachsen zu sein.“ 10. My translation. “Es war dieses meine erste Liebschaft in Rom, und nun besitz’ ich sie. Keine Worte geben eine Ahnung Davon. Es ist wie ein Gesang Homers.”

ABSTRACTS

This article examines the depiction of archaeology in Henry James’s short story “The Last of the Valerii” (1874). Looking, at the same time, back to Prosper Merimée’s use of the fantastic in “La Venus d’Ille” (1837) and forwards to Sigmund Freud’s parallel between archaeology and psychoanalysis in “The Aetiology of Hysteria” (1896), James sets up an intricate set of relations and metaphorical correspondences between stone and language, sculpture and literature, antiquity and modernity, aesthetics and psychology. “The Last of the Valerii” participates in a literary tradition of the archaeological fantastic that developed alongside the rise of classical archaeology as a tool of Altertumswissenschaft, in which authors employ narratives of the return of material objects from antiquity in order to explore difficult questions to do with transgressive desires, repression and sexual identity.

Cet article s’intéresse aux représentations de l’archéologie dans « Le dernier des Valerii », nouvelle de Henry James publiée en 1874. En revisitant les usages du genre fantastique dans « La Vénus d’Ille » (1837) de Mérimée tout en anticipant le parallèle que Freud propose entre l’archéologie et la psychanalyse dans « L’Étiologie de l’hystérie » (1896), James met en place un jeu complexe de relations et de correspondances métaphoriques entre les pierres et le langage, la sculpture et la littérature, l’Antiquité et la modernité, l’esthétique et la psychologie. « Le dernier des Valerii » s’inscrit dans la tradition littéraire du fantastique archéologique, qui se développe à une époque où l’archéologie devient une véritable science de l’Antiquité (Altertumswissenschaft),

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et dont les intrigues fondées sur le retour d’objets antiques permettent d’explorer la question de la transgression du désir, du refoulement et de l’identité sexuelle.

INDEX

Mots-clés: esthétique, archéologie, Jacques Derrida, fantastique, Sigmund Freud, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Hellénisme, Wilhem Jensen, Henry James, Juno, Villa Ludovisi, Prosper Mérimée, Walter Pater, psychanalyse, Rome, sculpture, sexualité, surnaturel, Vénus , Vénus de Milo, Johann Joachim Winckelmann Keywords: aesthetics, archaeology, Jacques Derrida, fantastic, Sigmund Freud, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Hellenism, Wilhem Jensen, Henry James, Juno, Villa Ludovisi, Prosper Mérimée, Walter Pater, Psychoanalysis, Rome, sculpture, sexuality, supernatural, Venus, Venus de Milo, Johann Joachim Winckelmann

AUTHOR

STEFANO EVANGELISTA Trinity College, University of Oxford

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Exploiting Exploitation Cinema

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Exploiting Exploitation Cinema: an Introduction

David Roche

1 What is exploitation cinema? Exploitation cinema is not a genre; it is an industry with a specific mode of production. Exploitation films are made cheap for easy profit. “Easy” because they are almost always genre films relying on time-tried formulas (horror, thillers, biker movies, surfer movies, women-in-prison films, martial arts, subgenres like gore, rape-revenge, slashers, nazisploitation, etc.). “Easy” because they offer audiences what they can’t get elsewhere: sex, violence and taboo topics. “Easy” because they have long targetted what has since become the largest demographic group of moviegoers: the 15-25 age group (Thompson and Bordwell, 310, 666). The exploitation film is not a genre, and yet it is often described as such.1 This is, no doubt, because these movies do, as a group, share common semantic, syntactic and pragmatic elements that, for Rick Altman, make up the “complex situation” that is a film genre (Altman, 84). 2 Semantic characteristics include excessive images of sex and violence, bad acting, poor cinematography and sound; syntactic characteristics include taboo themes, and flat characters or basic character arcs. Evidently, these can mainly be put down to the mode of production. The arguments for considering the exploitation film as a genre are, then, mainly pragmatic: fans and critics often speak of the “exploitation film” as if to designate a specific genre. That these movies have often been exhibited in similar venues—grindhouses, drive-ins and today direct-to-DVD—reinforces their commonality. Exploitation is not a genre, then, but a label.

2 Cinephiles, film critics (Ken Knight, Richard Meyers) and scholars (Pam Cook, Thomas Doherty) tend to associate exploitation cinema with a specific period: the late 1950s, 1960s and 1970s. For Doherty, exploitation cinema as we know it emerged in the 1950s with the advent of low-budget teenpics. In the mid-1940s, exploitation designated “films with some timely or currently controversial subject which [could] be exploited, capitalized on, in publicity and advertising”; the A-feature The Pride of the Yankees (Samuel Goldwyn / RKO, Sam Wood, 1942) is one such example (Doherty, 6), though one could argue that producer Darryl Zanuck’s taste for the “headline type of title story” was already exploitative in that sense (Bourget, 99). In 1953, still, a musical like The

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Band Wagon (MGM, Vincente Minnelli), as Sheldon Hall kindly pointed out to me in an email, could be promoted as “the exploitation picture of the year” simply because it promised to be highly successful [Fig. 1]. So it wasn’t until the mid-1950s that “exploitation” came to mean both “timely and sensational,” and came to have such a “bad reputation” (Doherty, 7).

Fig. 1

Advertisement for The Band Wagon © Variety (July 1953)

3 Both Felicia Feaster and Brett Wood’s Forbidden Fruit: The Golden Age of the Exploitation Film and Eric Schaefer’s “Bold! Daring! Shocking! True!” A History of Exploitation Films trace the history of exploitation cinema even further back by examining a body of lesser known films of the 1920s-1950s that Schaefer calls classical exploitation films. The emergence of this industry on the margins of the U.S. film industry filled a vacancy left by the latter in the 1910s. With Hollywood desperately trying to improve its image (the Thirteen Points were issued in 1921), studios like Universal and Triangle stopped making films about sex hygiene and the white slave trade; the enforcement of self- censorship, with the Don’ts and Be Carefuls of 1927 and the Production Code of 1930, confirmed that imagery and narratives involving sexuality, homosexuality, drug use and miscegenation were inappropriate. Exploiteers thus stepped in to profit from an existing market for sex hygiene films, drug films, vice, exotic and atrocity films, and nudist and burlesque films. With the exception of burlesque, all these genres were meant to be simultaneously sensational and educational, some of the sex hygiene films having been solicited by the state or army (Schaefer, 27-28). Posters promised nudity and often stressed the topicality of the film by drawing on headlines, using words like “exposé” and “story” and asking questions audiences would expect the film to answer

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(Schaefer, 106-9, 114) [Fig. 2]. Because of their emphasis on spectacle rather than on narrative, these films, Schaefer argues, owed more to the “cinema of attractions” of early silent cinema, as analyzed by Tom Gunning (2004) (Schaefer, 38). Thus, “the classical exploitation film was a form firmly rooted in modes of representation, financing, production, distribution, and ideology left behind by the mainstream movie industry after WW1” (Schaefer, 41). Indeed, these films changed very little from the 1920s to the 1950s and could sometimes be re-released with a new poster and title as long as ten years after their initial release—this was the case of Midnight Lady (Chesterfield, Richard Thorpe, 1932), re-released as Secret of the Female Sex, and of Polygamy (Unusual Pictures, Pat Carlyle, 1936), re-released as both Illegal Wives and Child Marriage (Schaefer, 59-60). The ballyhoo surrounding the event was instrumental in drawing audiences: exploiteers suggested local displays, sold themed books, included nurses and strippers, and invited so-called specialists to give lectures (Schaefer, 118, 126-27). Audiences probably saw these movies just as much to learn about shameful taboo subjects as to enjoy the sexual titillation and carnivalesque atmosphere of the show: they “were encouraged to look on their attendance at an exploitation film as an experience with multiple dimensions, one that would arouse, thrill, entertain, and educate” (Schaefer, 110).

Fig. 2

Advertisement from press book for The Desperate Women (1954) Public domain

4 Schaefer attributes the disappearance of classical exploitation cinema both to the retirement and death of the first generation exploiteers, and to the fact that the Hollywood industry, because of competition from television, increasingly explored forbidden topics in order to draw a more mature audience (Schaefer, 326-37). Classical

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exploitation made way for sexploitation. Historically, there are some connections between the two. Russ Meyer was initially asked to make a classical exploitation nudist film when he directed The Immoral Mr. Teas, which Schaefer considers to have largely contributed to initiating sexploitation (Schaeffer, 338). And the infamous Edward D. Wood, Jr. launched his career with Glen or Glenda (1953), a movie about tranvestites that retains the educational intent of classical exploitation [Fig. 3], before moving on to horror (Bride of the Monster, 1955; Plan 9 from Outer Space, 1959) and sexploitation (Nympho Cycler, 1971). But sexploitation distinguished itself from its predecessor because it had no claim to educate and adopted an ironic tone: Sexploitation films can best be described as exploitation movies that focused on nudity, sexual situations, and simulated (i.e., nonexplicit) sex acts, designed for titillation and entertainment. Such films no longer required explicit education justification for presenting sexual spectacle on the screen—although they often made claims of social or artistic merit as a strategy for legal protection. (Schaefer, 338)

5 The pictures made by Allied Artists, DCA, Howco and AIP (American International Pictures) have, Schaefer argues, more in common with the B-movies the Hollywood industry stopped making in the 1950s (Schaefer, 330-31), namely that they are narrative films. So like their predecessors, the new exploitation films filled a vacancy within the mainstream industry.

Fig. 3

Poster of Glen or Glenda (1953) Public domain

6 They also testified to the industry’s growing awareness of the significance of the youth market. In the 1950s, consumer society started not only to target teenagers directly, but attempted to address them differently; teenage advice books, for instance, were no

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longer written from the superior perspective of the parent or teacher, but provided insight on how to become popular at school (Doherty, 47). In Teenagers and Teenpics: The Juvenilization of American Movies in the 1950s, Doherty links the rise of the exploitation teenpic to the opportunity to profit from the youth audience (Doherty, 12), either by creating genres dealing with issues and topics they were interested in (the rebel or rock’n’roll movie), or simply by integrating youthful characters in pre-existing genres (like horror and sci-fi). With its hero who fails to “adjust” and its gratuitous song and dance scenes, I Was a Teenage Werewolf (Sunset Productions, Gene Fowler, Jr., 1957), one of the top grossing films that year, does both (Fig. 4) (Doherty, 131).

Fig. 4

Advertisement for I Was a Teenage Werewolf and I Was a Teenage Frankenstein (1957) Public domain

As a production strategy, the 1950s exploitation formula typically had three elements: (1) controversial, bizarre, or timely subject matter amenable to wild promotion (‘exploitation’ potential in its original sense); (2) a substandard budget; and (3) a teenage audience. Movies of this ilk are triply exploitative, simultaneously exploiting sensational happenings (for story value), their notoriety (for publicity value), and their teenage participants (for box office value). (Doherty, 7)

7 In spite of these differences—the target audience, the educational claims or lack thereof, the emphasis on spectacle or narrative—the North American exploitation film has always addressed topical issues and resorted to exploitative images snubbed by the mainstream industry in order to exploit the concerns of a specific market. In a sense, the overt topicality of classical exploitation cinema made way, in sexploitation, to more diffuse but just as pregnant themes, while I Was a Teenage Werewolf and The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (Vortex, Tobe Hooper, 1974) prove that the tabloid title remained effective. Moreover, one of the main strategies Schaefer identifies in classical exploitation cinema—the recycling of stock footage or images from previous films—was just as central to later exploitation films (Schaeffer, 56-57). Clearly, exploiting exploitation cinema entails not only the economic exploitation of an audience and subject matter, though it is its primary concern, but also the repeated exploitation of

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the form: in both cases, this exploitation is deliberately excessive in order to make up for its (chiefly economic) lacks, and it is, I would argue, in its excesses that potential disruption of the mainstream lies.

8 I started by noting that the use-value of the “exploitation film” is the main reason it is sometimes considered as a genre. It is, in fact, the “uses” made of exploitation cinema that will concern us here. As Pam Cook has noted, There is also a challenge for film-makers in the necessity of shooting fast and cheaply, in displaying ingenuity and in injecting ideas that do not entirely go along with hardcore exploitation principles. In other words, the director can also exploit the exploitation material in his or her own interests, and have fun at the expense of the genre. (Cook, 57) The paradox of “exploit[ing] the exploitation material in his or her own interests” is, in effect, at the heart of many of the political and ethical ambiguities that this issue will draw attention to. We aim to explore the extent to which specific filmmakers, producers, actors and viewers have exploited exploitation cinema as both an industry and a cinematic form characterized by high economic constraints and, at least in some respects, by a greater degree of latitude because of the necessity to display taboo imagery and topics. In other words, to what extent do some filmmakers and screenwriters turn the necessity to exploit transgressive material into an opportunity to produce a subversive subtext and/or aesthetics, one that challenges dominant and potentially oppressive discourses and practices?

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9 Before the rise of the film school generation of the 1960s and 1970s, the exploitation industry was a viable training ground for many filmmakers and actors. Director/ producer Roger Corman was to boast the “discovery” of many of the big names of the period. His company, Filmgroup Productions, founded in 1959, distributed the first movies starring Jack Nicholson—The Wild Ride (Harvey Berman) and The Little Shop of Horrors (Roger Corman), both released in 1960—and produced Dementia 13 (1963) [Fig. 5], written and directed by Francis Ford Coppola, who had started out making nudie pics (The Bellboy and the Playgirls, Defin Film/Rapid Film/Screen Rite Picture Company, 1962). As a producer and director for AIP, founded in 1954, Corman cast Robert De Niro in his own Bloody Mama (1970), one of the actor’s first parts, and produced Martin Scorsese’s second feature film, Boxcar Bertha, in 1972, and Brian De Palma’s Sisters in 1973. With New World Pictures, which Corman founded in 1970, he launched the careers of Joe Dante (Piranha, 1978), Jonathan Demme (Crazy Mama, 1975) and Jonathan Kaplan (Night Call Nurses, 1972). AIP and New World Pictures were the major players of U.S. exploitation cinema, also producing some of the most successful blaxploitation films, Coffy (1973) and Foxy Brown (1974), both starring Pam Grier and directed by Jack Hill, and distributing exploitation fare from Australia (Mad Max, George Miller, 1979), Canada (The House by the Lake, William Fruet, 1976), Sweden (Thriller, Bo Arne Vibenius, 1973), Italy (the films of Mario Bava), Japan (the Godzilla movies of the 1960s and 1970s) and Great Britain (many Hammer films of the late 1960s and 1970s). The exploitation industry also provided opportunities for women directors like Stephanie Rothman, “produc[ing] some fascinating feminist films, which remain relevant” (Cook, 64). Many of these exploitation films have retrospectively gained a legitimacy they lacked upon

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release because fans and critics now view them not just as exploitation films, but as early works evidencing the talent and sometimes even personal signatures of major actors and directors. In short, they have been salvaged by auteur theory, which has long been integrated in both production,3 marketing and cinephile practices (Saper, 35; Verevis, 9-10; Roche, 2014, 13). Most of the articles in this issue confirm this trend by recuperating auteurism to study specific filmmakers.

Fig. 5

DVD cover Dementia 13 (1963) © Ovation Home Video

10 The transformation of some exploitation films into auteur films was facilitated by the fact that many were independently produced. Fourteen of Russ Meyer’s films—from The Naked Camera (1961) to Cherry, Harry & Raquel! (1970)—were produced and distributed by Eve Productions, co-owned by his wife. David F. Friedman and Herschell Gordon Lewis founded their own company to produce Blood Feast (1963) and 2,000 Maniacs! (1964), as did George A. Romero for Night of the Living Dead (1968), and Kim Henkel and Tobe Hooper for The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974). Wes Craven’s debut The Last House on the Left (1972) was produced by his friend Sean S. Cunningham’s company. And unlike many of the blaxploitation films that imitated it and that were produced by exploitation companies like AIP and sometimes even by major studios (MGM for Shaft, Gordon Parks, 1971), Melvyn Van Peebles’s Sweet Sweetback’s Baadassss Song (1971) was produced by the director himself who sought to arouse the interest of African American investors (most famously Bill Cosby).4 These films were then distributed by companies specialized in exploitation and sometimes pornography (Bryanston Distributing, which distributed The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, had distributed the hit Deep Throat in 1972). Though usually not directly associated with exploitation cinema, John Waters operated very much like the exploiteers of classical exploitation cinema (Feaster and Wood, 194-95), as Elise Pereira-Nunes shows in this issue, producing and distributing three films from Pink Flamingos (1972) to Desperate Living (1977) through his

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company, Saliva Films. Many of the exploitation films of the period that have since garnered the recognition of fans, critics and scholars are, in fact, independent films.5

11 This explains, at least in part, the relative freedom the filmmakers had to experiment artistically and sometimes to ground exploitative imagery in radical political subtexts. In the early 1970s, many filmmakers integrated techniques initiated by the French Nouvelle Vague and/or 1960s underground cinema.6 Pam Cook notes that the “drug- induced fantasy scenes” in Rothman’s The Student Nurses (New World Pictures, 1970) are “more in line with European art cinema than the rough and ready codes of exploitation” (59) [41:01-45:10; 61:23-62:22]. Sweet Sweetback’s contains many scenes edited in jump-cut (when a white cop fires at Sweetback on a bridge [70:30-70:58]), a scene with the hero running that utilizes the split screen technique to portray a character trapped by the city and the police [64:47-65:34], and ends on a freeze frame of the hills where the black man is now lurking [96:04], recalling the end of another ode to rebellion, François Truffaut’s Les quatre cent coups (1959).7 Waters’s Female Trouble (1974) similarly ends on a freeze frame of Dawn Davenport’s distorted face as she thanks her wonderful fans while being electrocuted on the electric chair [96:37]. Coming from the underground movement (Muir, 90), the penultimate scene of The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, the mad dinner party, orchestrates an escalation of extreme closeups of the victim’s (Sally Hardesty’s) face edited in jump-cuts [74:50-76:40] (Thoret, 73; Roche, 2014, 200), so that, unlike the famous shower scene in Hitchcock’s Psycho (1960) which also utilizes jump-cuts, the editing does not mimic the physical violence (no one is stabbing her yet) but effects the psychological violence of the scene; the sense of anxiety that permeates the film is forcibly rendered by the physicality of the concrete music score, composed and performed by Wayne Bell and Hooper himself (Roche, 2014, 191-201). Filmmakers could also play with generic conventions. Pam Cook argues that exploitation films “parody rather than emulate” the mainstream productions they exploit (56). This explains the ironic tone noted by Schaefer that can then be negotiated from a camp perspective. In his analysis of The Toolbox Murders (Dennis Donnelly, 1978) included in this issue (“Unnatural, unnatural, unnatural, unnatural unnatural” . . . but real? The Toolbox Murders and the Exploitation of True Story Adaptations”), Wickham Clayton analyzes the consequences of Donnelly’s placing the famous “based on a true story” trope of exploitation horror at the end of the film, unlike the famous opening carton of The Texas Chain Saw Massacre; here, the exploitative claim to timeliness provides an excuse for both the film’s ambiguous polics and incoherent narrative.

12 Early defenders of independent horror of the 1970s, however, were mainly interested in its political potential. Robin Wood famously stated that it became “in the 70s the most important of all American genres and perhaps the most progressive, even in its overt nihilism—in a period of extreme cultural crisis and disintegration, which alone offers the possibility of radical change and rebuilding” (76). As a Marxist and gay activist, Wood was interested in how films like The Texas Chain Saw Massacre attacked capitalist patriarchy (Wood, 82; Williams, 2014, 188, 194). North American horror films of the 1970s have often been said to reflect or address some of the cultural anxieties of the time, including the Vietnam War, the state of the economy, the civil rights movement and the women’s movement (Waller, 12; Worland, 231; Roche, 2014, 28). A director like Wes Craven encouraged this reading of the violence of his first film The Last House on the Left as an expression of “the newsreel footage of the American carnage in Vietnam playing on television every night” (Robb, 24), a sort of way to “bring the war home,” as

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the slogan went. Canadian director Bob Clark’s Dead of Night (aka Deathdream, 1974) tells the story of a Vietnam veteran who, on his return home, becomes a ghoul addicted to violence, his monstrosity clearly operating as a metaphor for PTSD. If Romero discouraged reading Vietnam into Night of the Living Dead (Fig. 6), 8 his fourth film, The Crazies (1973), which depicts a military quarantine in a small town turning into a fascist regime, relies on imagery of guerilla warfare and human bonfires (like the monks in 1963) that audiences would have associated with the war [47:42-50:29].

Fig. 6

Screen grab from Night of the Living Dead (1968) Public domain

13 Romero’s second zombie movie, Dawn of the Dead (1978), set in a mall, delivers a critique of consumer society, the line between the living and the dead appearing increasingly thin as both have internalized the drive to consume (Williams, 2015, 91). Canadian filmmaker David Cronenberg had previously recycled Romero’s zombie imagery in order to assault the capitalist structures—the apartment building in Shivers (1975), the clinic in Rabid (1977)—that repress basic drives and thus fashion the subject into a consuming body (Roche, 2006, 165-70). In The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, the cannibal family’s economic status—several members have lost their jobs while others operate a gas station that is out of gas—is a synecdoche for the nation in which energy is lacking, and yet the cannibals are driven to waste energy in their pursuit and destruction of human bodies (Roche, 2014, 22-24). All these films exploit the taboo of cannibalism as a perversion of consumerism, its most quintessential expression, and contain it within a microcosm (a family house) that metonymically represents the macrocosm (U.S. society).9 The paradox in this political exploitation of exploitation cinema is, of course, that it critiques the economic system that sustains those very films that are, above all, made to be exploited.

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14 The subtexts of these particular films are exceptionally coherent, yet this is not the case of the majority of exploitation films whose politics are far more ambiguous. Nowhere is this more patent than in the portrayal of female characters and the treatment of race, sexuality and gender. The most obvious and famous example is probably Russ Meyer’s Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! (1965), which exploits a trio of bombshell pinups twofold by fetishizing their bodies and depicting their sadistic violence on normative society (the couple, the family), an attitude that is later justified by the patriarchal family that legitimizes rape. In the end, order is restored, as Linda avenges her previous boyfriend (Tommy) and saves her new one (Kirk) by slaying Varla.

15 Cook claims that many of these films were made in response to public demand for more woman characters, and Jack Hill’s The Big Doll House (1971), or Joe Viola’s The Hot Box (1972), celebrated a popular version of “Women’s Lib”. In spite of the potential here for more active roles for women, these sexual role-reversal films generally cast super- aggressive women as mirror-images of men, without questioning those images too much. (61) She-Devils on Wheels (Herschell Gordon Lewis, 1968), which Kristina Pia Hofer’s “Exploitation Feminism: ‘Trashiness, Lo-Fidelity and Utopia in She-Devils on Wheels and Blood Orgy of the Leather Girls’” analyzes in this issue, initially seems to prove Cook right: the bikers “treat men like they’re slabs of meat” [7:30], have contests to determine who will get first pick and reject members who want to commit to a relationship [28:20-33:42]. That said, if the female characters basically do unto men what they would do unto women, unlike Meyer’s pussycats, the Maneaters form a heterogeneous group both in terms of physique and social class (not, however, in terms of race), accepting a newbie who rides a mere scooter! The characters’ bodies are not fetishized—a shower curtain and towel are used to conceal Karen’s body when she steps out of the shower [48:49]—only the male victims’ in gory close-ups [43:24-48:48]. This utopian matriarchy is a microcosm in a world of men (pointedly, they are the only female biker gang in the film, they fight a male car gang for turf and the police is comprised of men). The end of the film can be read as a reversal of Faster, Pussycat!, as Karen gives up the possibility of founding a family and thus integrating normative patriarchy to stay with her sisters [75:00]. The film’s feminist potential, which the music reinforces, Hofer argues, is an exemplary case of exploiting exploitation cinema, and may have something to do with the female screenwriter’s (Allison Louise Downe) appropriating man’s (Fred M. Sandy) highly original idea.10

16 The Big Doll House (Jack Hill, 1971) exploits a genre that has existed since the 1930s: the women-in-prison film. These films seem to cater to the heterosexual male fantasy of spying on women who are all alone, offering glimpses of beautiful women taking showers and sharing close quarters. The film shamelessly fetishizes the prisoners, keeping the promise in the title. Some of the women pleasure themselves and each other in the shower [31:20-37:22]. One of the main characters (Alcott), however, rejects lesbian sex and prefers to perform for a male character (Fred) peeking at them through a window. Fred, here, embodies a stand-in for the male spectator. The irony is that he abandons the voyeuristic position when the female character ceases to act as a passive performer and returns his gaze. In other words, he is scared off by her desire to share in the pleasure. Logically, then, the following scene has Alcott enacting the male characters’ fantasy by trying to rape Fred in the storeroom, demanding that he “get to

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work,” skip foreplay and that he “get it up or [she]’ll cut it off.” Clearly, Alcott’s sexual assertiveness is phallic, castrating, “masculine,” confirming Cook’s argument. Another limitation to the film’s sexual politics is that lesbian sexuality is typically imagined as a mere replica of heterosexuality: the character of Grear, who calls her girlfriends “baby” and says she likes “being on top” [7:43], mistreats them just as men mistreated her [22:25], almost behaving like a pimp [64:15]. Yet The Big Doll House is more ambiguous and hesitant in its gendered terms. The prison is first presented as a matriarchy run by Miss Dietrich and her female guards; patriarchy is soon introduced as the overarching frame when we find out that Miss Dietrich works for Colonel Mendoza, a man who only comes to watch the women get tortured. In the end, Mendoza turns out to be Miss Dietrich in disguise. In other words, the sadistic male gaze was a sadistic female gaze all along, a revelation foreshadowed by the utilization of a POV shot when Lucian, the female guard, looks at her victims through the bars [61:00-61:52]. Thus, four years before Laura Mulvey’s famous “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” The Big Doll House offers counter-examples to the equation between male and camera gaze, replacing the “male” with the “masculine female.” The sensationalistic exploitation of heterosexual male fantasies thus leads, quite unexpectedly, to subvert the conventions of classical cinema.

17 Jack Hill’s later and more famous films, Coffy and Foxy Brown, which exploited the success of Sweet Sweetback’s and Shaft, are particularly ambiguous because their basic premises—a beautiful black woman uses her body to get revenge—allow them to indulge in sex and violence on a background of identity politics involving gender, race and class. For one, the fetishization of the female body for the male gaze is dramatized within the film as a strategy to manipulate the diegetic viewer. In Coffy, for instance, the heroine’s body is displayed in a slow frontal zoom-in when she undresses to seduce one of her future victims, King George [38:20-38:59]. Typical of exploitation cinema’s ambiguous politics is the all-girl fight scene [42:52-45:11]. To draw the attention of an Italian mafioso, Coffy starts a fight with a group of white prostitutes, thus performing the racist stereotype of the “wild animal” the white man desires. The scene inverts the outcome of the mudfight scene in The Big Doll House, with the black woman coming out victorious thanks to the razor blades concealed in her afro. Yet this figure of beauty, power and cunning also enables the film to cater to the audience’s desire for nudity, as she neutralizes her opponents by tearing off their clothes. Foxy Brown is, in this respect, far less exploitative: the brief glimpse of Foxy’s naked body in the shadows in the opening scene turns out to be a false promise [6:00-6:15], and the film systematically distinguishes scenes where Foxy is performing the aptly named “Misty Cotton,” a racist and sexist stereotype she has constructed to seduce her opponents (usually wearing a wig and a sexy dress or gown) from scenes where she is herself (wearing more casual clothes with her hair done in a afro or wrapped in a turban). On the surface, Foxy Brown further develops the racial politics when the heroine allies herself with a local group of Black Panthers; in the scenes where she visits their headquarters, Foxy is even framed with portraits of Angela Davis in the background to underline the physical likeness [73:31-74:10]. Yet I would argue that this only serves to reinforce the divide between black and white in a manner typical of blaxploitation. Indeed, the representation of the criminal world in Coffy is more complex as a site of intersectionality between gender, race and class: Coffy’s journey takes her from a black pimp to the Italian mafia to a black politician, confirming what her friend Cater, a black policeman, had told her from

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the outset [11:56]. On this level, at least, Foxy Brown’s increased coherence diminishes the film’s political potential.

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18 We have already noted that a few exploitation films have been acknowledged as promising works or even masterpieces through auteur theory, even when the movie happens to be by far a director’s crowning achievement (this is clearly the case of Tobe Hooper and even, to some, of Wes Craven). But it is, no doubt, the ambivalent politics of the exploitation films of the 1960s and 1970s, combined with the ironic tone noted by Schaeffer, that explains, at least in part, why many still enjoy cult standing today. If these movies often targeted young heterosexual rural white males, the audiences for these films have diversified. As Anne Crémieux explains in this issue in “Exploitation Cinema and the Lesbian Imagination,” some of these films, in spite of their predominantly sexist and homophobic attitudes, have been recuperated by contemporary LGBT audiences for whom negative representations are less problematic than they were in the 1960s and 1970s. Members of these communities single out specific moments for celebration. At festivals notably, audiences can negotiate images of strong women, lesbian and (albeit less frequent) gay characters from a camp perspective.11 This is especially true of lesbian communities who can tap into an abundance of fantasies initially tailored for young heterosexual males—Michelle Johnson’s Triple X Selects: The Best of Lezsploitation (2007) even tries to salvage the Canadian nazisploitation Ilsa: She Wolf of the SS (Don Edmonds, 1975)! Thus, one of the pleasures provided by exploitation cinema is akin to that provided by genre films: audiences often seek in them “an increasingly intense counter-cultural genre pleasure” which then “create[s] an invisible bond among fans of the same genre” (Altman, 155, 165).

19 Some of these fans went on to make films. The tradition of low budget exploitation continued well into the 1980s, as Kristina Pia Hofer’s piece on Blood Orgy of the Leather Girls (Michael Lucas, 1988) shows. TV shows like Charlie’s Angels (ABC, 1976-1981), Crémieux points out, bear the influence of the strong female characters of exploitation cinema. The Rocky Horror Picture Show (Twentieth Century-Fox, Jim Sharman, 1975) taps into both the transgressive potential of exploitation horror and the utopian potential of the musical12 to propose a world free from oppressive heteronormalcy. An early example of a fan of exploitation cinema exploiting his influences in a very personal way is, no doubt, John Waters. Elise Pereira-Nunes’s “Sex, Gore and Provocation: the Influence of Exploitation in John Waters’s Early Films” shows how he appropriated imagery from the nudies pics of Russ Meyer, the gore movies of Herschell Gordon Lewis and the Mondo Film tradition from Italy in his films of the 1960s and 1970s. Each influence operates on a specific level in terms of politics: the subversion of gender and sexual identity, by modeling the persona of Divine on Meyer’s bombshells, and the implication that Americans are essentially primal animals like any other. More generally, celebrating these lower forms is, of course, a provocative act in itself and largely participates in the assault on propriety that is at the basis of Waters’s aesthetics, an aesthetics which appealed to student and gay audiences of the 1970s and contributed to the emergence of a camp sensitivity.

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20 Exploitation films of the 1950s-1970s have also had a direct influence on the films of contemporary American filmmakers, including two of the most famous: Tim Burton and Quentin Tarantino. The imagery we often describe as Burtonian is a mix of Disney animation, the classic monster movies of the 1930s, and exploitation horror and scifi of the 1950s-1970s. The presence of Vincent Price in the short film Vincent (1982) and Edward Scissorhands (1990) pays tribute to the films of Roger Corman, while specific shots—the low-angle establishing shots of the Inventor’s castle [4:30, 8:55] or the high- angle shot of artificial hands [81:30] in Edward Scissorhands (1990), the medium closeup of the Corpse Bride unveiling her face in the 2005 film [16:30]—cite, as Sarah Hameau (2015) has noted, The Curse of Frankenstein (Hammer Films, Terrence Fisher, 1957). I would argue that Burton’s integrating exploitation imagery and material in mainstream films is, in effect, an aesthetic project with political implications: it celebrates the “lower” form by evincing its poetry. This project is notably carried out across three films made back to back: Ed Wood (1994) is a celebration of the creative energy of the man who is said to have made the worst movie of all time, Mars Attacks! (1996), a parody of 1950s scifi like Invasion of the Saucer Men (AIP, Edward L. Cahn, 1957) and a political satire of the 1990s U.S.; Sleepy Hollow (1999), both a remake of Disney’s 1949 adaptation and Burton’s “love letter to Hammer, Corman’s Pit and the Pendulum (1961), and Mario Bava’s neo-baroque La maschera del demonio (The Mask of Satan, 1960)” (Carver, 121).

21 Tarantino’s project is similar to Burton’s but more radical insofar as his films celebrate lower forms that have yet to be redeemed. Like Burton, he refers to exploitation cinema by casting actors associated with it (Pam Grier, David Carradine), recycling specific characters (Pai Mei in Kill Bill Vol. 2, 2004), citing specific motifs (in Kill Bill, Elle Driver wears an eye patch like Frigga, the heroine of the Swedish rape-revenge film Thriller, Bo Arne Vibenius, 1973), and using music from Italian exploitation films (often composed by Ennio Morricone). In his article for this issue entitled “Quentin Tarantino : du cinéma d’exploitation au cinéma” Philippe Ortoli argues that Tarantino’s exploitation of exploitation cinema is not just fannish; it is grounded in a view of art as repetition with difference, which, in Django Unchained (2012), is incarnated in the exchange between Django and the character of Franco Nero, the original Django of 1966 who spawned a host of others: exploitation cinema, a form founded on the recycling of spectacular images, would thus epitomize this view. Tarantino’s approach is more comprehensive not only because he taps into exploitation cinema on an international level and across various genres (Italian Westerns, martial arts movies), but also because it explores the political ambiguities of exploitation cinema Burton tends to ignore. This is most obvious in Jackie Brown (1997) and Death Proof (2007). The first is a critical homage to blaxploitation that simultaneously invokes blaxploitation (via Grier, Ordell Robbie’s look and the music Roy Ayers composed for Coffy) and counters the ambiguous politics of these films by making Jackie a strong woman who achieves her goals without resorting to sex and self-fetishization; by portraying an interracial romance, Tarantino’s film also rejects what Crémieux calls “the schism between blacks vs. whites” blaxploitation films antagonized. As the second part of Grindhouse, Death Proof invokes one of the modes of exhibition of exploitation cinema, but the film proposes to revisit various exploitation genres (the slasher, rape- revenge, the car movie) through the prism of feminist film theory: in so doing, it reveals that generic conventions are gendered, and thus that subverting these conventions can potentially deconstruct binaries like “male”/“female” and

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“masculine”/“feminine,” revealing them to be constructs (Roche, 2010); the scene where Stuntman Mike takes pictures of the girls in the airport parking lot, in particular, undermines the Mulveyan equation of male gaze by opposing image and sound, as the music, “Unexpected Violence” (Morricone), is borrowed from The Bird with the Crystal Plumage (L’uccello dalle piume di cristallo, Dario Argento, 1970), a movie in which the stalker is a woman [65:33-66:31].

22 Other filmmakers have basically followed Tarantino’s lead, especially in the horror genre. Directed by Robert Rodriguez, Planet Terror, the first part of Grindhouse, is a zombie movie in the Romero tradition: the ensuing chaos reveals how dysfunctional existing institutions (the army, science, the family) are and ultimately promises a brave new world with Cherry Darling at its center; the limitation, however, is that the matriarch’s power stems from the phallic machine gun the hero (Wray) has endowed her with. Eli Roth’s recent Knock, Knock (2015) falls into similar trappings, as this inverted rape-revenge fantasy—Keanu Reeves gets raped by two beautiful young women—seems to prove the sexist point that all men are essentially the same (at least so far, as one of his tormentors says). In other words, roles are reversed, but underlying structures are maintained. Roth’s earlier films, Hostel I and II (2005, 2007), pursue the critique of capitalism of 1970s exploitation horror while retaining one of its main ambiguities, since “the film can be read as the critique of its main selling point” (Ortoli, 437, my translation). Hostel II is, in my opinion, more intelligent than the first installment, not so much because it counters the sexism of the first by focusing on female characters, but because the Final Girl survives by inverting the villain/victim binary through capital: the film’s ultimate statement on the state of global capitalism is that the only reason she survives is that she can lay out more money than her oppressor; in other words, capital, not the torture devices, is the real weapon of choice. Thus, Hostel I and II, Pierre Jailloux argues in his article for this issue entitled “Quentin Tarantino : du cinéma d’exploitation au cinéma,” dramatize how actual bodies and their virtual images have become indistinguishable in a hyperreal globalized world where reality has dissolved into images. The films, I would contend, not only represent unlikely examples of Gilles Deleuze’s “crystal-image,” i.e., an image for which it is impossible to tell the actual image and its virtual image apart (Deleuze, 93-94), but they suggest that our “reality” has become a “crystal-image.”

23 The films of Rob Zombie also pursue the critique of the family and capitalism of independent horror of the 1970s, but also seek to rehabilitate the figure of the redneck by emphasizing their status as social victims in American society and by eliminating racial oppositions between black and white—through the friendship between Captain Spaulding and Charlie Altamont in The Devil’s Rejects (2005). In this respect, Zombie pursues the exploration of social class effected in the films of Romero. His remake of John Carpenter’s Halloween (1978) is particularly illuminating as a critique of the politics of the original film, endowing the character of Michael Myers with a pathology and celebrating the assertive sexuality of all the female characters (Roche, 2014, 112-13). Zombie’s animation feature, The Haunted World of El Superbeasto (2009), as Pierre Floquet demonstrates in this issue in “The Haunted World of El Superbeasto: An Animated Exploitation of Exploitation Cinema,” is perhaps less coherent both in terms of politics and aesthetics. On the one hand, Zombie mixes genres like Tarantino in Death Proof (in this case, the wrestling movie, the zombie movie, nazisploitation, the biker movie) and depicts a female superheroine (Suzi X) like Cherry Darling in Planet Terror, but on the other, Zombie shamelessly fetishizes Suzi X who ultimately serves to

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reinstate order. In the end, Zombie fails to tap into the animation medium’s potential for flexible bodies to subvert essentialist conceptions of the body. Rodriguez, Roth and Zombie have in common that they are somewhat aware of the ambiguities of the exploitative material they themselves exploit, but they do not always succeed in consistently resolving these ambiguities, perhaps because they remain fascinated with the spectacle itself, or perhaps because these ambiguities remain as unresolvable as the paradox of creating a consumer product that criticizes consumer society.

24 In any case, each article in this issue attempts to pinpoint and address those very ambiguities and how they can be “used.” As I have attempted to show in this introduction, these ambiguities can be viewed as limitations imposed by the imperatives of exploitation cinema, but they also have the potential to be appropriated by filmmakers and audiences who, by recycling transgressive images, sounds and, more generally, exploitation conventions, can make them resignify through irony, parody, a camp sensitivity, sometimes all three, and can, in the process, invent an aesthetic, personal or group identity founded on the practice of recreation. It is this practice that can, in effect, be subversive and contribute to changing the normative discourses and practices. Exploiting exploitation cinema is not just about making money, learning one’s craft or launching one’s career. It is a recognition that the potentials within the constraints are endless because the industry and form are founded on the very process of recycling. This, no doubt, explains why the ambiguities of exploitation cinema remain even when filmmakers and audiences strive to work through them. It also entails that exploitation cinema, as Tarantino’s films suggest, is, by its very excesses, the quintessence of cinema: both an industry and a medium founded on recycling forms and images with variation.

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RAYNER, Jonathan, “‘Terror Australis’: Areas of Horror in the Australian Cinema,” in SCHNEIDER, Steven Jay Schneider and Tony WILLIAMS, eds, Horror International, Detroit, MI, Wayne State UP, 2005, 98-113.

ROBB, Brian J., Screams & Nightmares: The Films of Wes Craven, Woodstock, NY, Overlook Press, 1998.

ROCHE, David, “David Cronenberg : une mission utopique,” in DUPERRAY, Max, Gilles MENEGALDO and Dominique Sipière, eds., Éclats du noir : gothique, fantastique et détection dans le livre et le film, Aix-en-Provence, Publications de Provence, 2006, 163-84.

---, “Quentin Tarantino’s Death Proof (2007): Subverting Gender through Genre or Vice Versa?” in DEL MAR AZCONA, María and Celestino DELEYTO, eds., in Generic Attractions: New Essays on Film Genre, Paris, Michel Houdiard, 2010, 337-53.

---. Making and Remaking Horror in the 1970s and 2000s: Why Don’t They Do It Like They Used To?, Jackson, MS, UP of Mississippi, 2014.

SAPER, Craig, “Artificial Auteurism and the Political Economy of the Allen Smithee Case,” in BRADDOCK, Jeremey and Stephen HOCK, eds., Directed by Allen Smithee, Minneapolis, MN, University of Minnesota Press, 2001, 29-49.

SCHAEFER, Eric, “Bold! Daring! Shocking! True!” A History of Exploitation Films, 1919-1959, Durham, NC, Duke UP, 1999.

She-Devils on Wheels, dir. Herschell Gordon Lewis, written by Allison Louise Downe, with Betty Connell (Queen), Nancy Lee Noble (Honey Pot), Christie Wagner (Karen) and Rodney Bedell (Ted), Mayflower Pictures, 1968, DVD, Image Entertainment, 2000.

The Student Nurses, dir. Stephanie Rothman, written by Don Spencer, based on a story by Stephanie Rothman and Charles S. Swartz. With Elain Giftos (Sharon), Karen Carlson (Phred), Brioni Farrell (Lynn) and Barbara Leigh (Priscilla), New World Pictures, 1970, DVD, New Concorde, 2003.

Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song, written and directed by Melvin Van Peebles, with Melvyn Van Peebles (Sweetback), Simon Chuckster (Beetle), Hubert Scales (Mu-Mu) and John Dullaghan (Commissioner), Yeah, 1971, DVD, Arte Editions, 2003.

The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, dir. Tobe Hooper, screenwriters: Kim Henkel and Tobe Hooper. With Marilyn Burns (Sally Hardesty), Allen Danziger (Jerry), Gunnar Hansen (Leatherface), Teri McMinn (Pam), Edwin Neal (Hitchhiker), Paul A. Partain (Franklin Hardesty), Jim Siedow (Old Man or Cook) and William Vail (Kirk), Vortex, 1974, DVD, Universal Pictures, 2003.

THOMPSON, Kristin and David BORDWELL, Film History: An Introduction, 3rd Edition, New York, McGraw Hill International Edition, 2010 [1994].

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THORET, Jean-Baptiste, Une Expérience américaine du chaos : Massacre à la tronçonneuse de Tobe Hooper, Paris, Dreamland, 1999.

VEREVIS, Constantine, Film Remakes, Edinburgh, Edinburgh UP, 2006.

WALLER, Gregory A., ed, American Horrors: Essays on the Modern American Horror Film, Urbana and Chicago, U of Illinois P, 1987.

WILLIAMS, Tony, Hearths of Darkness: The Family in the American Horror Film, Jackson, MS, UP of Mississippi, 2014 [1996].

---, Knight of the Living Dead: The Cinema of George A. Romero, London and New York, Wallflower Press, 2015 [2003].

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WORLAND, Rick, The Horror Film: An Introduction, Malden, MA, and Oxford, UK, Blackwell, 2007.

NOTES

1. For instance, one fan’s blog speaks of “[t]he exploitation genre” (See accessed on 2/25/2016). Another describes exploitation film as “[t]his film genre” (See accessed on 2/25/2016). The wikipedia page speaks of “this genre” (see accessed on 2/25/2016). 2. The semantic refers to “linguistic meaning, i.e., the meaning in the dictionary, the syntactic to “textual meaning,” i.e., meaning derived from the structure. Semantic elements might be common topics, shared plots, key scenes, character types, familiar objects or recognizable shots and sounds,” while syntactic analysis focuses on “deeper structures,” such as “plot structure, character relationships or image and sound montage” (Altman, 79). Pragmatic analysis addresses the “use factor” and “must constantly attend to the competition among multiple users that characterizes genres” (Altman, 210). 3. In Roy Frumkes’s documentary Document of the Dead (1985), producer Richard P. Rubinsten explains that he and Romero functioned in a European fashion and followed auteur theory. 4. Baadasssss Cinema. Dir. Isaac Julien. Independent Film Channel, 2002. 5. Thompson and Bordwell include companies like AIP and NWP and directors like Meyer and Romero in independent cinema (491). 6. Wes Craven was directly involved in the New York avant-garde (Becker, 44). 7. Van Peebles has always denied the influence although he lived in France in the 1960. Accessed on February 16, 2016. 8. Critics like Sumiko Higashi (1990) and Tony Williams feel that the “grainy black-and-white still images” at the end of the film recall photos of World War II concentration camps or Vietnam [89:17-95:38] (Williams, 2015, 30). 9. This is equally true of the Australian film The Cars That Ate Paris (Peter Weir, 1974), which delivers a “comic but unflinching critique of capitalism and consumerism as cannibalism and murder” (Rayner, 102). Its opening credits, like those of Shivers, resemble a commercial. 10. Apparently, it was also Downe who “got real women bikers as actresses” (Quarles, 37). 11. These are nonetheless based on homophobic stereotypes. In Blacula (AIP, William Crain, 1972), for instance, the gay couple, Billy and Bobby, are coded gay, notably because they talk with a lisp

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and are incapable of defending themselves, and their death eliminates “a threat to heteronormative masculine identity” (Novotny, 112-13). 12. See Richard Dyer (1992).

AUTHOR

DAVID ROCHE Université Toulouse Jean Jaurès, CAS

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Exploitation Cinema and the Lesbian Imagination

Anne Crémieux

At the heart of the exploitation movie is the issue of the destructive nature of female sexuality (Zalcock, 2001, 59)

1 The sexism and homophobia of most exploitation films is unmistakable. Lesbian vampires and gay hitchhikers are obviously meant to be warnings against homosexuality. Yet to modern audiences no longer worried about the once very real fears that would turn into very real rejection, such camp storylines can now be enjoyed as pure fantasy and even convey a form of empowerment. 1 After all, the hitchhikers in Vanishing Point (Richard C. Sarafian, 1971) may be slimy hijackers, but they are also unashamedly flamboyant on their way to San Francisco with their broken-down car that says “just married,” and they carry a gun in case somebody does not like it. Even more enticing is Mircalla, Hammer’s lesbian vampire in The Vampires Lovers (Roy Ward Baker, 1970). She may not be of reputable character, but she is certainly skillful at wooing young debutantes whom she mesmerizes with her painted eyelashes and well- rounded breasts. She is rather straightforward, too, as when she admits she is jealous of a male lover and adds: “I want you to love me for all your life.” And that in itself is a rare enough sight to be thoroughly enjoyed, along with the not-so-subtle subtext. Mircalla haunts her future victims’ dreams, resulting in orgasm-like trances, or attacks them from behind the camera, extending her hand into the frame towards the sleeping maiden. The all-around homophobic and phallocentric set-up, with a beautiful foreigner whose seduction of heterosexual women is fatal and who seems to be following the orders of a shadowy horseman figure, can easily be disregarded by modern queer audiences as a mark of yesterday’s fears and obsessions. Yet such readings outline the transgressive potential of exploitation films whose camp qualities are being reevaluated by modern queer audiences, including some who rejected the films when they first came out (Rich, 1995).

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New Readings from a Safer Place

2 The renewed interest for exploitation cinema and its camp aesthetics is based on detachment. Modern audiences can laugh at forms of sexism and homophobia that seem so extreme they feel detached from present-day issues and are received as remnants of a bygone past. In the process, the same audiences can enjoy images that fulfill a need for earlier forms of representation, whether they are positive or (most often) not. Exploitation films with explicit homosexual content are being viewed today by LGBT audiences, whose self-image has been transformed by their elders’ victories. Although discrimination and hate crimes are still part of their lives, the forms of exclusion that queer people must face is in no way comparable to life in the 1970s, so that queer audiences are also aware of the diminished effect of negative images on the general audience. The impact of a national distribution and the often homophobic publicity2 that may have accompanied such films in the past have also disappeared. Older films are often seen in festivals; many of the critics and viewers quoted here may have re-discovered the films at such events, surrounded by a like-minded audience. Such displacements transform films that may have prompted queer people to protest in the past; they are being re-read today with a new imagination, largely freed from the political context in which they were made.

3 A remarkable example of this phenomenon is William Friedkin’s Cruising, a film that is not strictly speaking exploitation3 and that was picketed when it came out in 1980. Community members had actively disturbed the crew when filming in New York’s West Village in 1979 (Berkowitz, 1979, 17-18). Today, however, Cruising has become a “classic” that is shown in LGBT festivals. The plot is typically exploitative, with a gay twist and an interesting subtext. As the police suspect a serial killer of targeting gay men, officer Steve Burns (Al Pacino) is chosen to infiltrate the New York gay S&M leather scene because he resembles the victims. While the killer is revealed to be a gay man full of self-loathing, it is suggested that the detective is progressively drawn into the gay lifestyle he is investigating.4 The ambiguity is present in the title itself, as “cruising” can refer both to gay men cruising for sex and to police officers on patrol. However, the complex psychological dimension of the main character may have been largely invisible to most people at the time, blinded as they were by the counterbalancing effect of the gay serial killer plot in a highly prejudiced society.

4 Beyond this interpretation of the film, Cruising was also rediscovered because it offered the rare sight of the pre-AIDS cruising scene in actual S&M bars. Friedkin insisted on filming at bars of the West Village and did so in spite of major disturbances during shooting. Apparently, permissions were first obtained rather easily, without making the script available to the extras who were, for the most part, genuine gay West Villagers (Berkowitz, 1979). The result is still unsettling for its rough, documentary quality, in spite of countless more explicit films made since, and is received as a form of semi-fictional archive by the next generation.5 Although not unique, such occurrences are rare and sought out by queer audiences in search of a largely undocumented past (Crémieux 2013). What is valued today is not so much related to any particularly camp aesthetics but, rather, to the film’s documentary value and ambivalent subtext, largely overlooked at the time. The same is true of token or derogatory lesbian representations in many exploitation films.

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5 A lesbian equivalent of Cruising in terms of reclaiming can be found in Russ Meyer’s 1965 Faster Pussycat! Kill! Kill!, although realism is not part of what the film has to offer. Faster Pussycat was famously reassessed by queer critic B. Ruby Rich in a 1995 Village Voice review, in which Rich recalls how she first dismissed the film as “retrograde male objectification of women’s bodies and desires further embellished by a portrait of lesbianism as twisted and depraved” (Rich, 1995, 56).6 It was 1970; a male friend had provided the 16mm copy that Rich showed a party of feminist friends on her projector. They collectively rejected it as soft-core porn. Dave Kehr, the man who had brought the film and who would become a famous film critic, left the party feeling unjustly attacked (Myers, 2014).7 Obviously, he had not seen the film with the same eyes; nor would Rich twenty-five years later, once the film’s sexist and homophobic non-plot could simply be ignored in favor of its more interesting features: images of female strength (albeit brainlessly murderous) in a Citizen Kane spoofing style that largely contributed to its posterity. Rich concludes: Faster Pussycat seen through a 1995 filter is a veritable Rosetta stone of contemporary attitude; ironic, irreverent, sexually polymorphous, mixing high and low forms, reversing camera angles as handily as it does power and prurience, bending dialogue to suit its whims and wits . . . See, Mr. Meyers, we’ve caught up. (Rich, 1995)

6 B. Ruby Rich describes a phenomenon she has been studying for years as a film critic and festival organizer: “how the audience writes the film.”8 With few exceptions,9 gay and lesbian characters of the exploitation era are hardly role models, and yet they are sought out by modern audiences who reinterpret them by spotting what has since been branded as “camp” (Rich describes them as “ironic, irreverent, sexually polymorphous” characters) and feels so provocative and ahead of its time, while discarding the sexist and homophobic elements that have become more or less innocuous with time. While it is true that, in Faster Pussycat, stunning women with big attitudes and bigger breasts kill off men with karate moves, they also kill women, including each other. They seem to have no other motive than senseless villainy as their characters are simply not supposed to make sense (an argument that can be extended to the whole film), so that they turn up barefoot in a bathing suit in the burning desert and start go-go dancing to radio music. As suggested by the title, Faster Pussycat is ripe with sexual energy. Varla, the dominatrix, and Billie, the blonde bimbo, are clearly bisexual, while Rosie is a lesbian in love with Varla. Although very clear, this is never made explicit in words or action, contrary to Varla and Billie’s lust for men. Yet in the end, the film is so engrossed in parody and clearly limited by the censorship of its time (all villains must die), that its fake misogynistic morals and exploitative aesthetics are simply enjoyable by modern, queer audiences who revel in the vital force expressed through sheer villainy.

7 Films like Pussycat or Cruising, both received as homophobic and/or sexist when they came out, offer unexpected visibility as compared to the undecipherable subtexts of more mainstream films of the time. The capacity of exploitation cinema to explore lurid themes and showcase excess is what makes it so attractive today, when minority audiences can safely assume no one else is taking them seriously anymore. In that sense, by taking everything with the pinch of salt that directors like Meyer or Friedkin sprinkled on their films at a time when the prevailing prejudice numbed most people’s taste buds, modern audiences may well feel they are “catching up” with directors now

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considered avant-garde geniuses instead of provocateurs banking on the homophobic zeitgeist.

8 Interestingly, in July 1994, Rich screened Pussycat along with Basic Instinct (Paul Verhoeven, 1992) as part of a festival on “Scary Women” (Rich, 2014). Basic Instinct, a much more recent film, had also raised controversy over its depiction of lesbianism as a cult-like, violent hatred of men. Rich, however, had appreciated the film as a rare presentation of a man-killing woman rather than the opposite, and by screening it as part of a festival that made this spectatorial position very clear, Basic Instinct took on a different, empowering meaning.

Badass Supermamas

9 The revival by feminists of films that they would have hated at the time (although Rich enjoyed Basic Instinct when it came out and simply shared her reading of the film) is made possible only by a distancing that raises more complex issues when discussing white-produced blaxploitation films.10 In an article about the reemergence of 1970s “retro products and pop cultural icons,” Jennifer Brody looks at the new reading by black feminists of blaxploitation icons, especially Cleopatra Jones in The Watermelon Woman (Cheryl Dunye, 1996) and Set It Off (F. Gary Gray, 1996), also discussed here. She starts off by asking the following question: What can it mean that these feminists (and black lesbian feminists in particular) have revived Cleopatra Jones? What might be taken to be familiar about Cleo’s character for such readers? Are the previous citations nostalgic representations that express an impossible desire for what never was? In order to (mis)recognize Cleo as a “queer” black heroine, these readers have creatively deformed and erased aspects of the film character’s initial reception. In other words, the image of Cleopatra Jones can be “queered” only through a canny counterreading that privileges different desires that result from spatiotemporal distance. (Brody, 2000)

10 Brody, of course, willingly takes part in these new queer readings or, rather, counterreadings of blaxploitation heroines. She starts by reviewing some of the academic readings of the film, including by male authors, and acknowledges how feminist and lesbian readings can be assumed to have been rare at the time (in fact, there seems to be no record of such readings at all). Yet they are clearly perceptible today. Brody’s own feminist reading uncovers the sexual undertones of the collaboration of Cleopatra Jones (1973) and her Asian homologue, local detective Mi Ling Fong, in Cleopatra Jones and the Casino of Gold (Charles Bail, 1975). What was correctly received as a female buddy film at the time is later re-read through the same homoerotic lens that male buddy films have been subjected to since (see Fuchs, 1992, 194-212), so that Brody’s connection of the last scene, in which Cleopatra Jones waves from the door of her departing plane, to the final scenes of heterosexual romances such as Casablanca (Michael Curtiz, 1942) and The Bodyguard (Mick Jackson, 1992), seems perfectly sound. What’s more, both Cleopatra Jones films pit a black heroine against a white female villain, Shelly Winters in the first installment as Mommy, an evil lesbian drug lord, “replaced” in the second film by Stella Stevens as the Dragon Lady, also a white lesbian drug lord, whose presence is only made more unlikely by the Asian context, since the mission takes place in Hong Kong and Macao. The presence of lesbian villains and their overt objectification of the heroines only make it easier for lesbian viewers to project their own readings of the main characters’ potential sexuality. In

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both films, including the second one in Asia, the black/white antagonism mirrors the male blaxploitation film formula of pitting a black hero against a white evil mastermind, who is, however, never gay. Blaxploitation heroes, on the contrary, usually engage in consensual interracial sex, unlike their female counterparts (with the notable exception of Pam Grier’s character in Jack Hill’s 1972 The Big Bird Cage). Because the movies are promoted as exploitation films with a black female lead, the relative heterosexual chastity of some of the heroines only makes the lesbian subtext more easily readable. In Cleopatra Jones and the Casino of Gold, Mi Ling Fong and Cleopatra Jones clearly admire each other for their brains, combat skills and beauty. They repeatedly compliment each other on their fit bodies and skin tone. It is more than clear that, if one of them were a man (which is not too hard to imagine given their incredible combat skills and Tamara Dobson standing 6 feet 2 inches tall), they would sleep together, especially in a movie that is otherwise fairly sexually permissive (the Dragon Lady engages in lesbian orgies and woos the two black drug dealers by letting them enjoy themselves with her girls). The fact that Tamara Dobson never had any known romantic attachments and kept her private life very private until her early death in 2006, at the age of 59, only contributes to such readings of her roles. She also refused roles that involved nudity. Perhaps due to her Kung-Fu/Drag-Queen persona in Cleopatra Jones, Dobson is one of the rare iconic figures to have a following among both gays and lesbians,11 along with other strong females, from Joan Crawford to Madonna.

11 One scene from The Watermelon Woman illustrates this lesbian following and connects Cleopatra Jones with other films featuring strong central female characters. In The Watermelon Woman, the main character, Cheryl (played by director Cheryl Dunye), is an aspiring filmmaker and video store clerk working on a documentary about a forgotten black actress from the 1930s, credited as “The Watermelon Woman.”12 Dunye’s film is full of references not only to race movies—the title itself being a possible reference to Watermelon Man (Melvin Van Peebles, 1970)—but to a great variety of productions. Early on in the film, as a secondary plot to her filmmaking efforts, Cheryl picks up a white girl in a video store (Guinevere Turner playing Diana) by suggesting that she rent Cleopatra Jones, which Diana had picked out, or, alternately, Carrie (Brian De Palma, 1976), Alien (Ridley Scott, 1979) and Repulsion (Roman Polanski, 1965), three relatively old movies with central female characters, rather than the lesbian classic Personal Best (Robert Towne, 1982), which Diana had first selected. Diana ends up renting Cleopatra Jones and Repulsion (it’s a two for one deal). Because she is interested not only in older explicit white lesbian films (Personal Best) but also in strong blaxploitation female figures and their possible lesbian subtext, Diana is established as someone Cheryl might enjoy dating. In return, Cheryl shows she is interested in all kinds of films that have strong female characters and does not narrow her film fantasies down to blaxploitation.

12 While The Watermelon Woman mentions Cleopatra Jones in passing, the much more confidential 16-min video Badass Supermama,13 produced the same year, pays full tribute to blaxploitation female stars, specifically Pam Grier. Badass Supermama (Etang Inyang, 1996) offers a close commentary of a number of cult scenes from Foxy Brown (Jack Hill, 1974) and “Sheba, Baby” (William Girdler, 1975), including the famous all-white lesbian bar sequence in Foxy Brown. In this scene, Foxy Brown (Pam Grier), a self-taught detective working undercover as a prostitute meets up with her protégée, Claudia (Juanita Brown), who has unknowingly wandered into a lesbian bar and is being chatted

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up by a butch blonde named Bobbie. When Foxy tries to pull Claudia away, Bobbie starts a fight that quickly gets out of hand. While Foxy’s encounter with lesbian life is less than cordial, one patron does recognize her as a “friend” that should be left alone. The scene, however, ends in an outrageous bar-brawl.

13 Inyang, who superimposes her image to place herself in the bar, rejects this outcome: This chaos did not make sense to me at sixteen. I grew up surrounded by women loving women. Women who created a family. A sisterhood all their own. It was hard to watch women fighting women; black fighting white. Gay fighting straight. Now tell me, Foxy, whose fantasy is this? All the lines are drawn. There is no sisterhood in your world. (Hankin, 2002, 85) Inyang suggests that the lesbian world depicted here is a fantasy she cannot work with —it is aggressive, racially divided and in fact, all-white, creating a fitting enemy to the black heroine, in keeping with blaxploitation’s racial politics of antagonizing the schism between blacks vs. whites, whether male or female. Kelly Hankin pointedly comments: Inyang’s refusal to accept Foxy Brown’s vision of racially divided lesbian bar space, as well as Badass Supermama’s insertion of Inyang within that space, foregrounds the figure of the representational and spectatorial black lesbian, whose existence Foxy Brown disavows. (Hankin, 84) As a black lesbian, Inyang feels excluded from a scene that opposes black heterosexual women and white lesbians, as was the formula in several blaxploitation films to follow. And yet she goes on to explain that she inevitably counter-fantasized a relationship between Foxy Brown and Claudia. How is it possible that white producers and filmmakers intent on exploiting women’s sexuality create images that fulfill a young black lesbian’s desire for identification? In her study of mostly exploitation films entitled Girl Gangs on Film (2001), Bev Zalcock remarks about the Women in Prison (WIP) films that they were “peopled with characters from groups marginalized or excluded by mainstream Hollywood, namely women of colour and lesbians” (36). This is true of a lot of exploitation films, especially blaxploitation, so that female-driven, action-packed blaxploitation films are being re-read in a context of much more explicit queer representation and production.

14 In her 1995 article “Black Lesbian Spectatorship and Pleasure in Popular Cinema,” Z. Isiling Nataf also posited some unexpected lesbian identification moments in early blaxploitation movies. In one of the first scenes of Melvin Van Peebles’s Sweet Sweetback’s Badassss Song (1971), Sweetback (Melvin Van Peebles) is giving a transvestite sex show. He plays a very butch lesbian who passes for a man, reveals her/his bra and dildo, pleasures the woman he/she picked up as a man, before fully undressing and unstrapping to use his own penis, whose appearance is summoned by the “Good Dyke Fairy Godmother” and her magic wand. Sweet Sweetback has routinely been criticized by film scholars as particularly demeaning to women, and Nataf readily agrees that “a reading of this scene in the first instance results in the myth that lesbians want to be men, that butch lesbians are proof of that and that femme lesbians are not really lesbians” (74).14 Yet Nataf also believes Van Peebles casting himself as the “man alias lesbian” (as scripted) offers the black lesbian a representation of a familiar scenario: “a black butch-femme coupling in which the femme is visibly satisfied with the lovemaking and the butch’s dildo” (75). She further comments that the scene introduces a film where “all marginalized black people are invited to identify with this outlaw white cop-killing black stud” (Nataf, 74), which echoes Zalcock’s connection between exploitation cinema and the representation of marginalized people, but from

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the point of view of the audience: exploitation cinema, with the added distance of time, may indeed allow marginalized people to identify with its violent heroes and heroines.

15 Zalcock further remarks about the sexuality of women in gangs that “there is, anyway, always a suggestion in exploitation films that groups of wild and violent women are somehow ‘deviant’ and this is frequently plugged into a repressed lesbian sub-text” (128), a statement I believe can be extended to all strong women in exploitation films. In contradiction with often overtly homophobic plots, female exploitation heroines display a form of masculinity that transcends the exploitatively sexy clothes to create a strong lesbian subtext. Blaxploitation icon Pam Grier’s lesbian following was celebrated when she was cast in the Showtime series The L Word (2004-2009), as Bette Porter’s straight sister Kit. This came only a few years after her return to fame thanks to Tarantino’s 1997 Pam Grier vehicle, Jackie Brown, a veritable homage to her as a star and to exploitation cinema in general.15 Jackie Brown’s cold plan to steal Ordell’s money and get him killed makes for one strong female heroine. She does not indulge in any kind of sex (except for one kiss) and does not seem afraid of anything. Ordell (Samuel Jackson) says she is “too cool for school,” and indeed, she’s certainly too cool to be any straight exploitation chick, a role played by Bridget Fonda’s Melanie who has a few snappy lines typical of exploitation cinema.

The Sexuality of Angels

16 Most explicit perhaps in its blaxploitation homage with a lesbian twist is Queen Latifah’s Cleo in Set It Off (1996). Following on the success of his debut film Friday (1995), F. Gary Gray created a classic heist film with four working-class black women and childhood friends as the unlikely girl gang. Three of them have good reasons to engage in this high-risk criminal activity. Stoney (Jada Pinkett) wants revenge for her innocent kid brother who was gunned down by the police for resembling a bank robbery suspect; Frankie (Vivica A. Fox), having been fired from her bank teller job for knowing a robber although she had nothing to do with the plan, is happy to go along; T.T. (Kimberly Elise), who is at first reticent, needs money to keep social services away from her child. The fourth member of the gang, Cleo (Queen Latifah), has no such motive and is the only true “gangster” of the lot. She is also a butch lesbian who flaunts her peroxide blonde girlfriend Ursula (Samantha MacLachlan) and ignores her girlfriends’ signs of disgust for her sexuality. While in the exploitation films of the 1970s strong black women fought against lesbian villains, in the 1990s they have become the gangster heroes instead of the men, and the lesbians are amongst them.16 The Wire (HBO, 2002-2008) combines the two formulas: police detective Kima Greggs (Sonja Sohn), along with her alter-ego, hit-woman Snoop, renew the blaxploitation female aesthetic as strong and charismatic lesbian characters.17

17 Set in a female prison today, Orange is the New Black (Netflix, 2013-), described as “the love child of Oz and The L Word” by The New Yorker (Nussbaum, 2013), harks back to many women in prison (WIP) movies of the past. For example, the main plot of a naive blonde girl discovering the world of hardened criminals is reminiscent of Caged (John Cromwell, 1950), while the beetle contest episode (S02E01) is reprised from The Big Doll House (1971). Directed by Jack Hill and starring Pam Grier, The Big Doll House is remarkable for its openly lesbian character perplexingly called Grear, an ex-prostitute who now hates all men and therefore is a lesbian who “likes to be on top” (facetiously

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referring to the bunk beds). The equally good-looking women who are masterminding their collective escape are unambiguously straight except for Grear’s lover, a self- destructive junkie who ultimately kills her, in keeping with stereotypical lesbian narratives of the times. Most importantly, the guards are horrible lesbian predators (as in Caged and many WIP narratives). The sadistic lesbian guard is a staple character, epitomized by the nazisploitation classic Ilsa: She Wolf of the SS (Don Edmonds, 1975), and a close cousin of the blaxploitation white lesbian gangster (Kathryn Loder also plays the female, albeit heterosexual villain in Foxy Brown). While Orange is the New Black directly references these exploitation films—Ilsa aside—the evil guards are male and the female guards may well be lesbians, or potential lesbians, but they are never demonized, on the contrary. Orange is the New Black manages to rewrite the WIP narrative and its previously very negative lesbian content and ironically create what could be a sequel to The L Word, if Jenny’s murderer got caught and sent to prison. The show may well elicit new readings of exploitation WIP films such as The Big Doll House (or even Ilsa!), which have yet to be reclaimed by lesbian audiences.

18 Although she gets killed in The Big Doll House, the Grear character resurfaces as Blossom (still Pam Grier) in the non-sequel follow-up, The Big Bird House (Jack Hill, 1972). The reincarnation is accompanied, as possibly suggested by her much more feminine name otherwise rather at odds with her personality, by a change of sexuality. It is made very clear that Blossom thoroughly enjoys rough and playful sex with her male partner in the revolution, Django, played by Sid Haig, also the prison guard trying to get into Grear’s pants (not that she ever wore any) in The Big Doll House. The 1972 film is remarkable for starring—in an otherwise white film—a black heroine with a strong character and some unlikely kung-fu moves. These strong and/or violent female characters of 1970s exploitation films greatly influenced television and its own exploitation shows, albeit expunged of a lot of the sex, race and violence that the movies allowed. A series like Charlie’s Angels (ABC, 1976-1981) owes great debt to the exploitation genre as it was reimagined, and much attenuated, by late 1970s television networks.

19 Contrary to Orange is the New Black, and perhaps because it centers on upper-class women, The L Word contains few direct exploitation film references. One episode of The L Word (S05E03, Jan. 2008), however, includes a pre-credit sequence that is a parody of Charlie’s Angels and its three now very camp heroines. Shane (Katherine Moenning), Alice (Leisha Hailey) and Helena (Rachel Shelley) are the three Angels who work with Bosley, impersonated by Tina (Laurel Holloman). Playing on the lesbian following of the original series, The L Word sequence introduces the Angels as lesbians on lesbian missions. Indeed, they follow Charlie’s instructions, voiced by Bette (Jennifer Beals), who greets them with a “good morning, lesbians,” which Bosley/Tina echoes with his “Okay, lesbians,” instead of the expected “angels.” The lesbians’ mission is to determine Jenny’s (Mia Kirshner) ambiguous sexuality thanks to their gaydar guns, which, interestingly enough, prove somewhat inefficient (what gaydar isn’t?). The lesbian angels move in slow motion, with a lot of hair flinging. This underlines the artificiality of the initial series and its focus on sex appeal as much as action and bravado, not entirely unlike The L Word. The lesbian angels are even reassured by Charlie that their mission is not going to affect their looks: “I promise you, girls, I won’t let anything happen to your hair or makeup.” But the parallel goes both ways: the sequence not only underlines The L Word’s much criticized sexploitation aspects, it reveals Charlie’s Angels as a lesbian fantasy. In a study of this sequence, Julie Scanlon

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comments: “Recontextualisation in The L Word can act to resignify and reclaim those past products, creating or revalidating their status as lesbian or queer, making visible the invisible.” (Scanlon, 236) By spoofing Charlie’s Angels, The L Word casts a queer eye on straight culture, perhaps with a will to influence the perception the straight majority has of itself and of its connections with queer people.

20 The L Word sequence came in the wake of the 2000 Charlie’s Angels film whose very campy, always tongue-in-cheek script never explores the angels’ bisexual potential, although the trio’s love interests are consistently unsatisfactory and generally incompatible with a superheroic lifestyle. Contemporary queer audiences, however, recognized Charlie’s Angels’ lesbian potential as the L Word prologue proves: the sequence is the result of a script contest won by one Molly Fisher, a fan of the series. Her queer vision of Charlie’s Angels, both the series and the film, is shared by many and directly induced by the film’s camp humor.

21 Indeed, although the 2000 film keeps the angels on a straight eye-candy diet (including Matt LeBlanc and Luke Wilson), this does not preclude gender-bending and counter stereotypes. For example, the angels usually don exceedingly revealing outfits when going undercover, except when they must cross-dress to impersonate two male executives to bypass a bio-technological security system. Although they are straight, the angels defy a few gender stereotypes. Dylan (Drew Barrymore) is a womanizer in reverse. She sleeps with men whose names she cannot remember and whose egos she easily crushes, only to use them again later. Natalie (Cameron Diaz) is the only one who seems desperately romantic, though answering her cell phone in the middle of a fight does make it difficult to focus on her boyfriend’s conversation. As for the villain Vivian (Kelly Lynch), she seduces Bosley (Bill Murray) to get what she wants and keeps berating her associate in crime, Eric Knox (Sam Rockwell), observing his incompetence with lines such as: “Never send a man to do a woman’s job.” Concerning women’s traditional “jobs,” everything Alex (Lucy Liu) attempts to cook turns into a weapon due to sheer domestic incompetence—it explodes, or comes out of the oven as hard as a rock. And while Alex can cope with her trailer being riddled with zillions of bullets, when as a result, her perfect soufflé caves in, she is ready to seek revenge! The increasingly impossible stunts of the four highly trained women also question the validity of similar male-driven action scenes. Both The L Word sequence and the 2000 Charlie’s Angels film are reading 1970s exploitation action heroines through a feminist, gender-bending lens without ever scripting explicit lesbian heroines, in keeping with the original.

22 Angela Robinson’s short (2003) and then feature film (2004) D.E.B.S., on the contrary, is an earlier Charlie’s Angels parody that pulls the lesbian subtext right to the foreground. Four knock-out high-schoolers are recruited by an F.B.I.-like agency called D.E.B.S. (Discipline Energy Beauty Strength) through tests hidden in SAT multiple choice grids. They wear plaid skirt uniforms, answer to a hologram, Ms. Petrie (Holland Taylor), and are dispatched by Mr. Phipps (Michael Clarke Duncan). The tagline describes them as “crime-fighting hotties with killer bodies.” That is, until their leader, Amy, falls for archenemy Lucy Diamond (named Lucy in the Sky in the short film) and the action can really begin. Contrary to the 2000 Charlie’s Angels adaptation, D.E.B.S. foregrounds the lesbian element so much that it was received as an LGBT festival favorite much more than as an action film. Lucy is identified as a lesbian from the start and Amy’s

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disinterest for her boyfriend makes the revelation of their mutual attraction less than a surprise.

23 Each of the D.E.B.S.’ sexy personas is based on a coded characteristic, not unlike the Fox Force Five of Pulp Fiction fame18: Dominique is French, Max loves guns, and Janet is an air head with a killer instinct. Amy’s sexiness remains undefined. In spite of being the best, she questions her calling. Can she trust the agency? Should she go to art school in Barcelona? That is, until she finds out who she really is, a lesbian in love with her archenemy. D.E.B.S. validates lesbian fantasies about sexy spies from the past fighting villains who, in seventies exploitation films, more often than not were lesbians. The heroine’s potential lesbianism remained an evil fantasy, happily embraced by today’s queer audiences and filmmakers. It is only fitting that Angela Robinson would go on to direct episodes from The L Word and participate in the series that “made visible the invisible.”19

Conclusion

24 This mission, which could be said to be part and parcel of lesbian cinema, is also shared by exploitation cinema. It may be why, with time, it became an improbable vehicle for feminist and lesbian fantasies. According to Bev Zalcock, a connoisseur of trash cinema, what separates the exploitation picture off from the more respectable, higher budget Hollywood movie, as Pam Cook has observed, is that its mechanisms are more overt […] and as such, function to reveal rather than conceal the underlying patriarchal codes […] (Zalcock, 2001, 34) Could this capacity of the exploitation genre to reveal the vulgarity of oppression be why LGBT-festival audiences are enjoying seeing films that do not condemn discrimination? Could it be why so many films that were once rejected are being revisited from a queer point of view? The distance of time and the transformation of society have certainly altered the way queer characters of the 1970s are perceived today. Even though the sexual identities of queer villains are only very remotely connected to the social reality of the times, they nevertheless reveal a too often concealed past, including the representation of prejudice and fantasy.

25 The overt mechanisms of exploitation films and TV shows of the 1970s are certainly part of what makes them so prone to being parodied in productions that revive the interest for the genre, as Jackie Brown undeniably did. Following Zalcock, the very nature of exploitation cinema seems almost bound to automatically create a lesbian subtext. A film like Jackie Brown, in its efforts to reproduce the feel and strength of exploitation cinema, does seem to inescapably, and most likely involuntarily, call for lesbian fantasies through a strong, no-nonsense, independent Black woman, even though she is characterized as straight. In the same way, lesbian rewritings of exploitation cinema and its televised offspring seem almost inevitable.

26 The exploitation genre is being largely reassessed, including by creative queer filmmakers and audiences. Twenty-first century audiences have gained the freedom to love, hate, denigrate—and enjoy denigrating—films that were neither made for them or by them, but whose fleeting, incongruous LGBT characters are an endless resource for the queer imagination.

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BIBLIOGRAPHY

BERKOWITZ, Rick, “Cruising: Or How I Spent My Summer Vacation,” The Independent, October 1979.

BOGLE, Donald, Toms, Coons, Mulattoes, Mammies, and Bucks: An Interpretive History of Blacks in

F0 F0 American Films, New York, The Continuum, 2013 5B 1973 5D .

CERVULLE, Maxime “Les monstres aussi vont au cinéma : films d’horreur et contre-publics queer,” in CinémAction 143, Les minorités dans le cinéma américain, Paris, Corlet, 2012.

CREMIEUX, Anne, “LGBT Cinema as Collective Memory,” in Zeenat Saleh and Melvyn Stokes, eds., Memory in/of English-speaking Cinema/cinéma comme vecteur de la mémoire dans le cinéma Anglophone, Paris, Houdiard, 2013, 80-89.

DeFINO, Dean J., Faster Pussycat! Kill! Kill!, New York, Columbia University Press, 2014, 36-37.

DEVERE BRODY, Jennifer, “The Returns of Cleopatra Jones,” in The Seventies: The Age of Glitter in Popular Culture, Shelton Waldrep (ed.), New York, Routledge, 2000, 225-48. A previous, somewhat different version of this article with the same title was published in Signs, 25.1 (Autumn 1999), 91-121.

EBERT, Roger, “Cruising,” on RogerEbert.com, February 15, 1980, http://www.rogerebert.com/ reviews/cruising-1980 (last accessed in Jan 2015).

FRASIER, David K., Russ Meyer: The Life and Films, Jefferson, McFarland, 1990.

FUCHS, Cynthia J., “The Buddy Politic,” in Steven Cohan and Ina Rae Hark, eds., Screening the Male: Exploring Masculinities in the Hollywood Cinema, New York, Routledge, 1992, 194-211.

GUERRERO, Ed, Framing Blackness, Philadelphia, Temple University Press, 1993.

HANKIN, Kelly, Girls In The Back Room: Looking At The Lesbian Bar, Minneapolis, U. of Minnesota Press, 2002.

KEHR, Dave, “Russ Meyer: Back to Porn and Parody,” in Reader: Chicago’s Free Weekly, 4 (5): 4, 12, Oct. 25, 1974.

MURAT, Pierre, “Genre: Trouble every day,” in Télérama, janv. 22, 2011, http://www.telerama.fr/ cinema/films/cruising-la-chasse,7428.php (last accessed in Jan 2015)

MYERS, Emma, “Profiles in Criticism: B. Ruby Rich,” Criticwire.com, February 7, 2014, http:// blogs.indiewire.com/criticwire/profiles-in-criticism-b-ruby-rich (last accessed September 22, 2014).

NATAF, Z. Isiling, “Black Lesbian Spectatorship and Pleasure in Popular Cinema,” in Paul Burston and Colin Richardson, eds., A Queer Romance: Lesbians, Gay Men, and Popular Culture, London, Routledge, 1995, 62-88.

NUSSBAUM, Emily, “Vice Versa,” The New Yorker, July 8, 2013, available online http:// www.newyorker.com/magazine/2013/07/08/vice-versa-2 (last accessed January 2015)

RICH, B. Ruby, “Lethal Lesbians,” in New Queer Cinema, Durham, Duke University Press, 2013, 103-22.

---, “Lethal Lesbians,” Village Voice, April 25, 1995.

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SCANLON, Julie, “The L Word: Producing Identities through Irony,” in Karen Ross, ed., The Handbook of Gender, Sex and Media, Chischester, UK, Wiley-Blackwell, 2012, 226-40.

SONTAG, Susan, “Notes on Camp,” The Partisan Review, 1964, full text available online http:// faculty.georgetown.edu/irvinem/theory/Sontag-NotesOnCamp-1964.html (last accessed January 2015).

ZALCOCK, Bev, Renegade Sisters: Girl Gangs on Film, New York, Creation Books, 2001.

NOTES

1. The notion of camp is often restricted to gay culture. No such limits, however, can be put on camp. Although Susan Sontag dedicates her “Notes on Camp” to Oscar Wilde, whom she quotes at length and presents as the camp avant-garde, she never equates camp with gay and her list of camp figures of androgyny include “the haunting androgynous vacancy behind the perfect beauty of Greta Garbo.” 2. For instance, the official trailer for The Big Bird Cage (1972) establishes the main bad guy as “a half-man” for whom women “do not have anything [he]’d be interested in.” He is later referred to as a “fat pansy” and a “savage degenerate.” In the film, he eventually gets castrated by the heroine, as the last images of the trailer clearly suggest. Less prominently but still very clearly, the Foxy Brown trailer (1974) includes the “black belt in bar stool” line (discussed later in this article). The Vanishing Point (1971) trailer includes a few seconds of the gay hichhiker scene: just after the voice-over explains that “everybody’s after Kowalski,” the image cuts to one of the hitchhikers menacingly saying “because you think we’re queers.” 3. The definition of an exploitation film can be limited to the early seventies or go back to the 1920s and span to the present, depending on the author, and viewer. Regardless of time frame and geography, exploitation cinema is usually defined as cheaply produced “B movies” involving no major stars (at the time) that “exploit” contemporary anxieties that most classically include sex, violence, racial tension and sometimes, homosexuality. A film like Cruising was not received as an exploitation film at the time, although it certainly exploits the voyeuristic attraction of the gay underground and a deeply ingrained homophobia. 4. Among many others, film reviews such as Pierre Murat’s for Télérama in 2011, which praises the main character’s not-so-ambiguous ambiguities, can be compared to Roger Ebert’s exasperated review on the same issue when the film came out in 1980. Generally speaking, reviews of the film vary much in their praise or criticism, with a 50% tomatorater on Rottentomatoes.com (last visited January 12, 2016). The DVD collector release in 2007 did not give rise to comparable gay protest. 5. An example of this cult following is the 2013 James Franco and Travis Mathews film, Interior. Leather. Bar., presented at the International Sundance Film Festival, in which the two gay filmmakers work together to recreate the 40 minutes of Cruising that William Friedkin had to cut out to avoid an X rating. 6. For a longer discussion of Rich’s change of heart, see DeFino, 2014, 36-37. 7. Dave Kehr wrote several articles about Faster! and Russ Meyer’s films in general. In a 1974 article for Reader: Chicago’s Free Weekly, he likens Meyer’s films to Preston Sturges’ comedies filmed in Sergei Eisenstein style, as reported by David K. Frasier in Russ Meyer: The Life and Films (164). 8. For more on lesbianism and violence, and how feminist historians have researched rumored couples of the past, see Rich’s “Lethal Lesbians” chapter in New Queer Cinema (Rich, 2013, 103-122).

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9. One notable exception is the gay bartender that lives across from Shaft’s apartment building in Gordon Parks’ 1971 Shaft, an MGM production that tapped into the blaxploitation phenomenon. The bartender and Shaft seem to be casual friends, showing that Shaft is comfortable not only across the racial line (the bartender is white) but also sexually. Shaft is established early on as a smooth and successful ladies’ man, so hip as to be unthreatened by homosexuality. 10. Interestingly enough, blaxploitation female stars were exclusively directed by white males, unlike in nineties urban movies such as Set It Off (F. Gary Gray, 1996) and Poetic Justice (John Singleton, 1993). 11. The queerest homage to Tamara Dobson to date may be African American drag queen performer RuPaul’s Starrbooty (2007) about a supermodel agent (RuPaul) who must go undercover as a hooker to save her niece who has been kidnapped by a human organ smuggler. The references to blaxploitation, James Bond and John Waters abound, but Starrbooty as a character is most connected to Cleopatra Jones, with her Kung-Fu skills and big hair. RuPaul has shared his lifelong admiration of Tamara Dobson in several interviews. 12. Cheryl’s investigation uncovers a rich past for black lesbians in film, which is revealed to be entirely fictitious, as a number of unlikely coincidences suggest. Cheryl discovers the Watermelon Woman’s real name was Faye Richardson, that she was the lover of director Martha Page, a Dorothy Arzner look-alike, before making race movies with Liberty Studios. When black- cast movies faded out, she turned to singing and met June Walker, a black woman she spent the rest of her life with in Philadelphia, and who is interviewed in The Watermelon Woman. Other interviews include a zany Camille Paglia and a peppy volunteer at C.L.I.T, the Center for Lesbian Info and Technology. C.L.I.T. happens to have a whole box of material on black lesbians in Philadelphia, and the watermelon woman’s photos are right on top, dedicated “To June Walker, special friend.” 13. I have not been able to see this short film and can only trust Kelly Hankin’s long description of it in Girls in the Back Room: Looking at the Lesbian Bar (2002). 14. Donald Bogle feels that “the film debased the black woman, depicting her as little more than a whore” (Bogle, 2001, 236), while Ed Guerrero denounces Sweetback as a “sexploitative pimp, hustler hero,” “raping a woman at knifepoint out of ‘revolutionary’ expediency” (Guerrero, 1993, 91). 15. Jackie Brown is full of references to various exploitation films. The title is a conflation of Jack Hill and Foxy Brown, with lettering that is identical to that of Foxy Brown (Jack Hill, 1974). “Across 110th street,” the theme song from Barry Shear’s 1972 action-crime film, is used during the credit sequences. The film begins with blaxploitation star Pam Grier walking the halls of an airport whose walls carry the marks of time; the LAX walls, also to be found in the similar opening sequence from Superchick (Ed Forsyth, 1973). The gangster-copper plot starts off with Jackie’s arrest for smuggling money and drugs, followed by a short stay in a women’s prison. The required amount of violence is carried out by gun-smuggler/drug-dealer/pimp Ordell Robbie, who must first get rid of a potential snitch. The film is punctuated by bursts of lethal aggression. The sex and nudity, however, are scarce and mostly concern secondary character Melanie. Pam Grier, in contrast to her seventies films, remains fully dressed at all times. 16. All blaxploitation she-roes are either prisoners, detectives or vigilantes; they are not gangsters like most blaxploitation heroes, such as Superfly or Black Caesar. 17. While, unlike Kima, Snoop is never shown in a lesbian relationship, in the scene when she and Chris are arrested by Bunk, Freamon and Kima (season 4, episode 13), she does tell detective Bunk that, just like him, she is “thinking about some pussy.” Snoop is portrayed as trans first and foremost, but it is also always assumed that she is not straight. 18. In Pulp Fiction (Quentin Tarantino, 1994), Mia Wallace (Uma Thurman) tells Vincent Vega (John Travolta) how she starred in a TV-pilot that never got picked up: “It was a show about a team of female secret agents called Fox Force Five. Fox as we’re a bunch of foxy chicks. Force as

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we’re a force to be reckoned with. Five as there’s one ... two ... three ... four ... five of us. There was a blonde one, Sommerset O’Neal from that show Baton Rouge, she was the leader. A Japanese one, a black one, a French one and a brunette one, me. We all had special skills. Sommerset had a photographic memory, the Japanese fox was a kung fu master, the black girl was a demolition expert, the French fox’ specialty was sex...” This connection adds to the referential nature or parodic lesbian culture, Tarantino having greatly contributed to the rediscovery of exploitation cinema. Much like D.E.B.S., Fox Force Five sounds like a Tarantino remash of the Charlie’s Angels concept. 19. Angela Robinson directed nine L Word episodes, not including S05E03 and its Charlie’s Angels mashup.

ABSTRACTS

When they were first released, exploitation films were harshly criticized for their depiction of women and homosexuals. However, with the distance of time and the transformation of society, feminist audiences are reclaiming films whose quaint queers they can now enjoy not only as a trace of the past, but also as subversive characters they are seeing in a new light. This paper focuses on exploitation films such as Faster Pussycat! Kill! Kill! (1965) or Cleopatra Jones and the Casino of Gold (1975), and their reassessment, including in films and TV series that pay homage to female action heroines of the past.

À leur sortie, les films d’exploitation ont été critiqués pour leur représentation des femmes et des homosexuelles. Cependant, le recul du temps et les transformations de la société permettent aux publics féministes de s’approprier des films et leurs curieux personnages queer qu’ils peuvent désormais apprécier non seulement comme traces du passé, mais aussi comme des personnages véritablement subversifs. Cet article évoque des films d’exploitation comme Faster Pussycat! Kill! Kill! (1965) ou Cleopatra Jones and the Casino of Gold (1975), ainsi que leur relecture a posteriori par des films ou des séries télévisées qui rendent hommage à leurs héroïnes.

INDEX

Keywords: cinema, exploitation, sexploitation, blaxploitation, feminism, queer, reception, lesbian, gay, LGBT Mots-clés: cinéma, exploitation, sexploitation, blaxploitation, féminisme, queer, réception, lesbienne, gay, LGBT

AUTHOR

ANNE CRÉMIEUX Université Paris Ouest Nanterre la Défense

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Exploitation Feminism: Trashiness, Lo-Fidelity and Utopia in She-Devils on Wheels and Blood Orgy of the Leather Girls

Kristina Pia Hofer

Introduction: Trashing Male Supremacy? Man-Eaters and Leather Girls, 1968 and 1988

Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! (Russ Meyer, 1965), Teenage Gang Debs (Sande N. Johnson, 1966), The Mini-Skirt Mob (Maury Dexter, 1968), The Hellcats (Robert F. Slatzer, 1968), Sisters in Leather (Zoltan G. Spencer, 1969) or The Female Bunch (Al Adamson, 1971): from the mid-1960s onwards, American exploitation cinema has spawned a number of male- directed Girl Gang movies that present audiences with rather ambivalent politics. On the one hand, these films feature active, strong, outspoken female protagonists who claim privileges that mainstream cinema at the time often only granted male characters: these female protagonists routinely assert physical violence, organize in closely-knit, gender-segregated gangs or lead mixed gender groups, resist hegemonic and patriarchal family norms, carry weapons, ride fast cars and motorcycles, compete with male rivals (and among each other), express an unapologetic and autonomous sexuality, and generally take great delight in being “bad” (Zalcock, 1998; Hatch, 2004). On the other hand, however, the overt sensationalism and unflinching commercial motivation typical of exploitation cinema also often put these unusual female protagonists on display as a freakish, sexualized spectacle (Cook, 2005, 55f). As a consequence, the potential of various Girl Gang films to challenge androcentric and heteronormative modes of representation have been hotly disputed in both academic and fan contexts (see, for instance, Cook, 1967; Rich, 1995; Zalcock, 1998; Despineux and Mund, 2000).

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This article seeks to contribute to, but also complicate, the existing debate by discussing the aesthetics of two rather idiosyncratic Girl Gang films from two very different production backgrounds: first, Herschell Gordon Lewis’ female outlaw biker movie She-Devils on Wheels (1968), which made sufficiently satisfactory revenue at drive- ins and hardtops in the late 1960s (Vale and Juno, 1986, 35) and presently enjoys a second life being re-released in various digital formats by fan labels specialized in the fringes of “vintage” exploitation cinema,1 and second, Michael Lucas’ 16mm Budget Rock film Blood Orgy of the Leather Girls (1988), which never premiered in a theater, only saw a single small-run VHS release in the late 1980s, and remains relatively unknown to this day (Fielding, 2010a). The two movies stand out from the bulk of Girl Gang fare because their narratives and camera work consistently represent the female protagonists as badass exploitation heroines in charge. Too often, Girl Gang films resort to the common formula of punishing unruly women in a final moral twist, or domesticating them through heterosexual romance (Zalcock, 1998). She-Devils and Blood Orgy, in contrast, not only steer clear of moralizing and romantic normalizations, but also allow for ambiguous endings: both Lewis’ Man-Eaters2 and Lucas’ Leather Girls perpetrate serious crimes without justification, show no remorse, and still go free in the end. The films are equally unusual in their representation of violence and sex. While other Girl Gang movies often seem to stage fighting female bodies predominantly for the benefit of male viewers,3 the camerawork in She-Devils and Blood Orgy often lingers on hurt, broken male bodies [She-Devils, 33:30-33:43, 47:43, 68:50, 73:12; Blood Orgy, 23:05, 48:06-49:20, 68:22-68:52]. When showing sex, the two films do not display female nudity so much as bare male chests [She-Devils, 24:16, 25:26, 61:40, 65:36; Blood Orgy, 38:30, 39:58]. In She-Devils, the Man-Eaters round their prospective sex partners up in a “stud line,” from which the women pick and choose while commenting mockingly on the men’s physical frame and supposed sexual prowess, thus turning back the objectifying, heteronormative gaze usually cast on women characters in biker films of the time [19:34-22:48; 55:13-58:13]. In Blood Orgy, the only sex scene (between a Leather Girl and one of her male captives) is rendered in a colorful, experimental whirl of dizzying, rapidly cut, extreme close-ups of unidentifiable body parts [41:06-41:15], which recall Second Wave feminist avant-garde filmmaking (like, for instance, Carolee Schneeman’s Fuses, 1967) rather than typical exploitation techniques. True to this form, the scene climaxes in an almost poetic take on the Leather Girl’s hand crushing an empty beer can [41:20]. Though the two films’ representation and characterization of their female protagonists have been the main concern of other notable discussions (see, for instance, Zalcock, 1998; Fielding, 2010a; Choi, 2014), this article will adopt a slightly different focus. In the following, I explore a dimension that seems equally outstanding in the two movies, but has not yet garnered a similar amount of empathetic attention: namely, the two films’ extreme (and extremely materially manifest) trashiness, in particular their overwhelming sonic excess. As is often noted in reviews, She-Devils on Wheels abounds with sloppy takes, cheap makeshift props, flimsy, handicraft costumes, and dirty, distorted lo-fi sound. Similarly, Blood Orgy of the Leather Girls is a scratchy, noisy no- budget production brimming with overdone getups, tacky fabrics, bad hair, abundant domestic detail in indoor backdrops, and an original musical score dominated by the ear-shattering feedbacks of screechy Budget Rock guitars, reedy combo organs, and the drone of basic analog synths. Interestingly, fan reviews that see absolutely no feminist

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potential in either film often enforce their argument by pointing to these excesses: no serious feminist message, they insist, would ever come wrapped in such a shoddy package—see, for instance, the FilmBizarro (no date) review of Blood Orgy, or Celluloid Nightmares (no date) and Jabootu’s Bad Movie Dimensions (2010) on She-Devils. My discussion will counter this projection by arguing that She-Devils’ and Blood Orgy’s pronounced trashiness is, in effect, key to understanding the particular critical impulses the two films can provide for a feminist reception of Girl Gang exploitation cinema today.

Engaging Excess: From Second Wave Feminism to Exploitation Feminism

I am by no means the first to highlight exploitation cinema’s trashiness as a useful resource for research. In 1995, Jeffrey Sconce suggested that the aesthetic excessiveness of exploitation audiovisuals be read as an “alternative archive” of subcultural articulations, fashion and musical styles, and sexual politics and identities past (Sconce, 1995). In 2011, Elena Gorfinkel elaborated on this idea. She argues that, since the trashiness of exploitation cinema often generates from an unusually high visibility of filmic labor, it warrants investigation beyond textual and diegetic frames. Trashiness, Gorfinkel argues, can also bespeak “documentary facts”: glitches, mistakes, bad acting, and a general failure to establish cinematic verisimilitude would reveal a film’s historical conditions of production and mark traces of actual historical bodies, objects, and practices. Many present-day viewers, she suggests, recognize (and enjoy) these traces as explicitly “dated,” that is, as both belonging to and demarcating a specific period of pop culture history (2011, 105f). Thus charged with historical immediacy, exploitation productions seem to invite readings as outsider, alternative, or underground historical sources. Exploitation cinema’s often blatant topicality makes such a reading even more attractive. Acutely aware of how promises of tackling timely concerns would lure audiences into the theaters, late 1960s exploitation films usually offered a sensationalist take on nascent social, cultural and political movements, ranging from psychedelic hippie cults to the so-called “sexual revolution” (Schaefer, 1999; Syder, 2002; Gorfinkel, 2011). For present-day viewers, this dated timeliness promises retrospective glances at how things looked, felt, “were” in the past—ideally, without the distortions or omissions imposed by mainstream cinematic conventions and production codes (Sconce, 1995). Retrospective fan pleasure in watching exploitation films, Gorfinkel suggests, often lies in “plumb[ing] their depths for their political and aesthetic transgressions” (2011, 96; also see Shiel, 2003). When debating the feminist potential of Girl Gang films, it seems seductive to read She- Devils on Wheels as such an archive of transgressive acts and ideas of the past. As a movie about a female motorcycle gang engaged in a violent “battle of the sexes,” it begs to be examined for possible traces of early radical feminism, or, more generally, of early feminisms of the so-called Second Wave, which blossomed in the late 1960s. The often-quoted anecdote that Lewis cast “real” female bikers—that is, women who were actually riding motorcycles and participated in motorcycle club subcultures in their offscreen lives (for instance, in Quarles, 1993, 37ff; Zalcock 1998, 63f)—created its own myth of the film as historical witness to female empowerment.4 Other extra-filmic echoes seem to strengthen the case. The film’s rhetoric of monstrosity (of “She-Devils”

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and “Man-Eaters” who are “riding their men as viciously as they ride their motorcycles,” as one newspaper ad for the film would have it) corresponds with historical radical feminism’s flirt with exploitation aesthetics, which manifests in activist collectives with names like W.I.T.C.H. (short for “Women’s International Terrorist Conspiracy from Hell”) and historiographies bearing titles like Daring to Be Bad (Echols, 1989). Moreover, the Man-Eaters’ hands-on approach to solving conflicts resembles how contemporary American media often portrayed radical feminists: as sensationally irrational, disturbingly deviant from expected gendered behavior, and excessively belligerent for no good reason (cf. Dow, 2003). In fact, Lewis himself has referred to his film as “the ultimate statement of gender equality.”5 Superimposing this “gender equality” on the historical Second Wave, however, would be a bit of a stretch, if not a deliberate misinterpretation. A closer analysis complicates the straightforward reading of She-Devils on Wheels as an underground archive of actual feminist activism. For one, the feature was released before the spectacular, “New York Radical Women”-initiated Atlantic City Miss America Pageant Protest that helped historical radical feminists to public notoriety. The film hit the theaters in May 1968, while the protest took place in early September of the same year.6 Until then, the nascent feminist movement was still virtually absent from American mass media (Dow, 2003, 130). Alice Echols, one of the first historiographers of the Second Wave, even speaks of the movement’s “obscurity” before September 1968 (1989, 93). It remains doubtful that an exploitation film like She-Devils on Wheels would rely on an obscure social phenomenon to attract audiences. The film strongly alludes to the then widely popular outlaw biker movie cycle, picking up themes and tropes shared by films like Wild Angels (Roger Corman, 1966), Thunder Alley (Richard Rush, 1967) and Hell’s Angels on Wheels (Rush, 1967). These similarities suggest that Lewis hoped to cajole viewers with generic pleasures, providing them with settings and characters they were already familiar with. At this point in time, when Second Wave feminism was still mostly known to the very activists involved, the movement would more likely have turned up in a Mondo-style mock documentary7 than in a biker feature. The Man-Eaters are thus probably best understood as a fantastic, exaggerated projection of what female emancipation could look like, rather than an actual reflection of the Women’s Rights activism that concurrently took place in the real world. The fact that echoes of historical radical feminism do appear in a later Herschell Gordon Lewis feature—here, however, as a social phenomenon to poke fun at— strengthens the case against reading She-Devils as a reflection on the feminist movement. Indeed, The Gore Gore Girls (1972) shows a group of militant “women’s libbers” storming the stage of a strip club to violently attack one of the (female) dancers [30:57-34:17]. The scene playfully picks up on a popular anti-feminist sentiment that often met early radical feminist action of the Second Wave: namely, that feminism was all about women envying other prettier women (cf. Dow, 2003, 130). The activists carry signs sporting slogans like “Women right On!,” “Lewd is Crude,” “Take Off is a Rip Off,” and “Quit with Tit,” or simply showing the so-called woman-power symbol (a clenched fist encircled by the symbol for Venus) on plain white or yellow ground. While the slogans are ironically modified versions of Second Wave rhetorics,8 the woman-power symbol is directly taken from the actual movement without modification, as if to make sure that audiences recognized the attackers as the real- world radical feminists they would have seen on the news.

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The representation of The Gore Gore Girls’ women’s libbers, who have so much in common with historical radical feminists, contrasts starkly with that of the Man-Eaters in She-Devils on Wheels. While the fantastic, historically implausible Man-Eaters are tougher and more in charge than the rest of the characters, and thus easily accommodate fantasies of female empowerment as possibly cool, sexy and impressive even in the androcentric, stereotype-ridden cosmos of exploitation cinema, the Second-Wave-inspired women’s libbers only serve as the butt of a joke. This difference is also expressed in the very different musical scores assigned to the two groups. When the feminists storm the stage in The Gore-Gore Girls, they do so to an unnerving, seemingly endless loop of the first bars of Johann Strauss Senior’s Radetzky March (1848). The piece—not exactly a somber composition to begin with—is rendered in a bouncy fairground version arranged for a circus orchestra of brass, glockenspiel, and marching drums. The loop not only contrasts starkly with the film’s general musical theme, which consists of minimal guitar-and-drum Rock’n’Roll instrumentals and Exotica numbers closely resembling those that would be compiled as “music to strip by” (or, sometimes, as “Titty Shakers”)9 in the decades to come, but also to the Garage Proto-Punk soundtrack of She-Devils on Wheels. With its emphasis on the brass section, especially the glide of the trombones, the Radetzky March loop conjures up clown acts and dirty jokes about sex gone wrong. Radical feminist action, the gaudy music seems to suggest, is far from being sexy—nor can it be taken serious politically. In contrast, the Man-Eaters’ signature instrumental numbers are charged with a savvy underground sophistication that marks these women protagonists as bona fide exploitation heroines. Herschell Gordon Lewis’ work obviously features two very different takes on feminism, which calls for a careful discrimination of terms. I will thus refer to the speculative, hyperbolical, fantastic feminism that drives She-Devils on Wheels (and, as we will see below, Blood Orgy of the Leather Girls) as exploitation feminism, as it very much depends on some of the key modalities of exploitation cinema and deploys them to its advantage. Lewis’ exploitation feminism thrives from the fact that exploitation cinema operates with flat, wooden characters and one-dimensional stories, while at the same time offering a wealth of excess trashiness that draws attention to its material underpinnings. The critical potential of She-Devils on Wheels’ exploitation feminism unfolds in the tension inherent in this exact coupling: the rather banal message the narrative conveys—that the empowerment of women equals a dirty battle fought out between amoral, power-hungry, violent, heterosexual women versus similarly rotten heterosexual men—is accompanied by an abundance of dirt, decay and imperfection, which communicates a much less determinable meaning (cf. Thompson, 1986, 140; Paasonen, 2011, 98), inviting audiences to a more contingent engagement with the Girl Gang narrative. However, key to understanding this potential is a willingness to take the film’s material trashiness seriously on its own terms. This means moving past treating trashy textures as a mere passageway to the “real” of historical feminisms, and asking for the utopian feminist potential such trashiness harbors. As I will demonstrate below, Michael Lucas’ Blood Orgy of the Leather Girls makes liberal use of She-Devils on Wheels as an archive—however, not as an archive of historical traces, but as an archive of material excess, where spillover textures lend themselves to reworking and to the re-imagination of exploitation feminist promise.

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Spillover Sound: Texture, Meaning, and the “Incredibly Strange”

One practicable way of approaching the trashiness of exploitation feminist articulations in Girl Gang films is sounding their specific textures. Texture is a matter of materiality (Hofer, 2014). In everyday usage, texture shows the stuff things are made of, indicates the weave and pattern of objects, and hints how shapes and surfaces may feel to the touch.10 Experiencing texture, however, is not limited to moments where “physical substrate” contacts the skin (Birtwistle, 2010, 15, also cf. Marks, 2000, 2002). While defining texture as a surface’s “qualities if touched, brushed, stroked, or mapped,” Renu Bora nonetheless highlights that these qualities “can usually be anticipated by looking” (1997, 98). For a seemingly immaterial medium like film, texture may thus be apprehended from the quality, detail and scale of the objects visible on screen (cf. Paasonen, 2011, 98). In addition, texture becomes perceptible in visual properties that draw attention to film as film stock: grain, color, and flicker, for instance, bespeak the photochemical and mechanical processes specific to film as medium (Birtwistle, 2010, 14). The latter aspect also manifests in medium-specific wear and decay, as in scratches on the film’s surface (and other traces of the film strip’s handling), in alterations in the emulsion due to heat, humidity and other environmental influences, or in the disintegration of the chemical and carrier elements effectuated by the passage of time (Watkins, 2013, 58f). The important role of the haptic and the visual notwithstanding, touch and sight are not the only senses crucial in perceiving filmic texture (Altman, 1992; Chion, 1994). Reminding us that film is an intrinsically audiovisual medium, Andy Birtwistle (2010) insists on considering the materiality of sound as an equally important component of filmic texture. He argues that much like visual texture, the materiality of film sound unfolds in sonic properties pointing to the shape, form and structure underlying specific sonic events, like “complexity, amplitude, tonal qualities, timbre, duration, development over time” (2010, 15). As with the materiality of images, sonic texture shapes according to the rendering and playback technologies employed: the quality of the microphone will determine the dynamic range of the voice captured, as will the dust gathered inside an aged magnetic tape machine add grit to the playback (cf. Birtwistle, 2010, 16, 85ff). In fact, one of the most prominent textures in both She-Devils on Wheels and Blood Orgy of the Leather Girls is manifest in the films’ soundtracks and, more precisely, in their sonic excess. The two films offer rough, ragged sonic surfaces that are shot through with unexpected peaks in volume and pitch, uncomfortably intense drones, and confusingly dense moments of different sounds competing and overlapping. While standard film sound design aims towards sleek, smooth sonic surfaces that would not only successfully conceal the labor underlying the production (Doane, 1980, 48), but also “repress” any spillover generating from filmic materiality itself (Birtwistle, 2010, 88), She-Devils and Blood Orgy sport lo-fidelity textures that place dirt and distraction over cleanliness and transparence. Consonant with Kristin Thompson’s observation that filmic materiality announces its presence loudest when at odds with cinematic conventions (1986), She-Devils and Blood Orgy become excessive by defying what film scholars have discussed as the “sonic hierarchy of classical cinema” (Birtwistle, 2010, 57; also see Doane, 1980; Altman, 1992; Spadoni, 2007). Unlike mainstream film, the two

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features do not privilege dialogue, but often leave the spoken word to drown in music and sound effects. In addition, both films are exceptionally rich in ambient noise, which further distracts the listener’s attention away from the sound events motivated by narrative. Moreover, the “sound of technology” (Birtwistle, 2010, 85) suffuses both features: even in moments of silence—that is, moments where no external signal was recorded—blank magnetic tape and optical soundtrack crackle and hum. Textural roughness also spreads throughout the musical tracks. She-Devils on Wheels’ Garage Rock’n’Roll theme song, “Get Off The Road” (Robert Lewis Band, 1968), for instance, bears the sonic marks of its lo-fidelity production practices throughout. Lewis relates that he did not employ professional personnel specialized in popular music, but produced the song with the film crew.11 Recording live—that is, with the complete band performing at the same time—with two microphones, all vocals and instruments were simultaneously channeled onto one single track on 1/4" magnetic tape, using the same Uher reel-to-reel recorder the crew employed for rendering sync sound. As a result, the song bears the same cluttered sonic signature as the rest of the film’s soundtrack. The fact that all audio was mixed down into a single track and converted into optical print in post-production heightens the effect. Measured against conventional standards of signal-source fidelity, the sonic texture of “Get Off The Road” is marked by spillover, unwanted sound, sound that does not immediately propel a story, communicate meaning or make sense (Hofer, 2014; also cf. Thompson, 1986; Birtwistle, 2010, 2). It thus qualifies as one of those parts of a film that Kristin Thompson identifies as unfit for “a tight analysis,” “incomprehensible,” and even “disturbing” (1986, 133, 140). For exploitation cinema, however, such “disturbing” excess of seemingly meaningless material spillover actually seems to be a quite productive modality. As Lewis observes on the audio commentary to She-Devils on Wheels,12 incomprehensible textures can be exactly what draws audiences to certain films. The combination of trashily produced, exaggerated tales of female-on-male violence gone rampant with a lo-fi Garage Rock’n’Roll soundtrack has led exploitation fans to label She-Devils as “incredibly strange,” an attribute employed, in this case, almost lovingly (see V. Vale and Andrea Juno’s edited volume Incredibly Strange Films of 1986). With exploitation cinema, which privileges stock figures over rounded characters, lurid tales over complex deliberation, and spectacle over narration (Schaefer, 1999; Sconce, 1995; Jancovich 2002; Sconce, 2007; Shipka, 2011), getting to the bottom of what a film was “really” trying to say is not a top priority for seasoned viewers. The pull of “incredibly strange” films probably resembles more the dynamics Susanna Paasonen describes as “resonance” (2011). Paasonen argues that excessive genres become meaningful and pleasurable not just in an audience’s attempts at deciphering, understanding and making (intellectual) sense of them, but also in the moments where viewers and listeners yield to affective and emotional intensities like excitement, amazement, arousal, and thrill, and the bodily sensations that are connected to these movements. Spillover textures, as haptic audiovisual residue that is not easily decoded in terms of language and signification, play a crucial role in sparking these impressions (Paasonen, 2011, 13f, 190, 196f). The way “Get Off The Road” resonates with exploitation aficionados may have less to do with the significatory content of the song’s nursery rhyme lyrics (“We are the Hellcats nobody likes, Man-Eaters on motorbikes. Get off the road before we have crossed . . . or you might get your rear-end tossed”), and more with the exhilaration effectuated by the combination of such lyrics with the rough sonic textures—and excessive visual spectacle—described above.

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Paying attention to the pleasure fans invest in the strangeness of lo-fi materiality can offer a different take on the historicity conveyed by exploitation trashiness than the direct “documentary” charge suggested by Jeffrey Sconce (1995) and Elena Gorfinkel (2011, 106). Reading rough textures as imprints of the past means treating them as signs transporting a clear message: if decoded correctly, they would release historical facts congealed into filmic materiality. Engaging with a film as “incredibly strange,” on the other hand, allows for texture to become meaningful not only for the information it possibly carries, but also for the speculations, fantasies, and associations it invites. Renu Bora observes that while an engagement with texture always implies questions regarding an object’s concrete history (“How did [it] get that way?,” 1997, italics in original), it also encourages musings about what could be done with a certain intriguing texture, how it could be reworked, or how a certain material could be “act[ed] upon” (1997, 94). Thus, the critical potential of the rough sonic textures of the Garage Rock’n’Roll songs used in She-Devils on Wheels might lie not in bearing material witness to extra-textual, possibly feminist transgressions of the past, but rather in lending the film’s very own exploitation feminist projections to appropriation and adaptation in later works.

Appropriations: Lo-Fidelity, Untimeliness, Utopia

Blood Orgy of the Leather Girls is one among many appropriations of Lewis’s exploitation feminist take on the Girl Gang narrative,13 that equally places great emphasis on wild music and trashy sound. It was directed and produced by San Francisco Budget Rock musician Michael Lucas in the mid-1980s. Like Lewis’s Man-Eaters, Lucas’s Leather Girls are stereotypically flat characters whose individual traits aim for sensational exploit rather than psychological verisimilitude.14 Echoing the Man-Eaters’ one-dimensional projection of “gender equality,” the Leather Girls’ idea of emancipation boils down to physically assaulting men. In addition, Blood Orgy offers an equally fantastic imagination of feminist payback for the late 1980s as She-Devils did for the context of the late 1960s: Lucas drafted the Leather Girls as an exploitation feminist alternative to the “Dworkin-esque” radical feminism that trash film screenings in San Francisco at the time were often met with (Lucas in Fielding, 2010b). Shot with a budget of $10,000 on 16mm, the film failed to play the Bay Area art house circuit it targeted (Fielding, 2010b) and was released directly to video in 1988 by Forbidden Cinema Archives, a company that has no other titles to its name and was most likely brought into being for the very occasion. Though a soundtrack LP of the same title was released in 1994 and drew moderate attention in North American and European Garage Rock circles, the film itself remains marginal, and has never been officially re-released on DVD.15 One of the reasons Blood Orgy all but vanished into obscurity may be that it pushes material excess to an extreme. Reviewers cautioned that watching the movie was “like watching a filmed headache.”16 Michael Lucas describes the particular trashiness of Blood Orgy of the Leather Girls as a product of its very own time and place (Lucas in Fielding, 2010b). In fact, Lucas’s Girl Gang conforms to the style codes of 1980s North American Garage Rock’n’Roll sub-cultures: the Leather Girls wear their white school uniform shirts one size too large and with the tails out; their Ramones-style leather jackets sport studs and band names (Crime, Iggy and the Stooges) in white marker; their cars and bedrooms are decorated with plastic bats, spiders and skeletons; and

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gang member Fleabrain rides a slim, red skateboard to school [8:56]. Nevertheless, the exploitation feminism staged here also conveys a strong sense of pop culture datedness when measured against its contemporary context of the late 1980s. For instance, Lucas intersperses the performance of his timely protagonists with after-the-fact voiceover commentary by an “Inspector Joe Morton” [8:54, 20:03, 23:18, 25:17, 30:06, and so on], which recalls the “square-up” storytelling strategies of “classical” exploitation cinema17 ( cf. Schaefer, 1999, 69ff). In addition, the musical soundtrack includes a number of Rock’n’Roll, Surf and Doo Wop songs from the 1950s and 1960s, like “Nite Owl” (Tony Allen & The Champs, 1955), “Homicide” (Myron Lee & The Caddies, 1958) and “Scream” (Ralph Nielsen & The Chancellors, 1962). In a most notable reference to the historical roots of all-female proto-punk sensibilities, a scene that shows the Leather Girls cruising around town in an open convertible blasting “What A Way To Die” (The Pleasure Seekers, 1964), a mid-1960s Garage anthem to underage drinking by a young Suzie Quatro’s first band [9:22-11:36]. References to 1950s and 1960s pop culture notwithstanding, the Leather Girls do not conjure up pre-1980s exploitation feminism without a twist. Adopting the terminology discussed in the previous section, Blood Orgy does not copy or mimic the historicity of She-Devils on Wheels, but offers, rather, an “incredibly strange,” offbeat resonance that disrupts the (out-)datedness of Girl Gang cinema’s aesthetics deliberately. After all, an additional, more tentative reference to a less specific past generates from the film’s musical soundtrack. Steering clear from all period purism, Blood Orgy also features uncredited minimal synth tracks and songs by two of Lucas’s own bands, The Wild Breed and The Phantom Surfers. Two lengthy scenes in which the Leather Girls chase male victims (that strongly resemble the “What A Way To Die” car cruise scene described above in both their dynamics and subject matter) are accompanied by two of Lucas’ original instrumental pieces, “Pursuit” (David Nudelman and The Wild Breed, 1988) [30:52-32:22] and “Horror Beach” (The Phantom Surfers, 1988)18 [43:25-45:07]. Though these tracks are much younger than the Pleasure Seekers song, their rough textures nevertheless make them “feel old” (cf. Birtwistle, 2010, 93). This dated quality owes to the very audible presence of technology manifest in the lo-fidelity recordings. As Budget Rock bands, The Wild Breed and The Phantom Surfers do not push for polish, but produce as quickly and efficiently as possible, with whatever equipment is affordable or available at the time. Instead of meticulous engineering, Budget Rock favors live recording, first takes, and minimal post-production. As a result, material detritus of the technologies used—static hiss, feedbacks, coarse grain, print-through echo, dropouts, limitations in frequency and dynamic range—is heavily inscribed in the productions’ sonic texture. As in film, sound currency and timeliness are measured by how well a technology can suppress its materiality (Birtwistle, 2010, 89f), the lo-fi production value of “Pursuit” and “Horror Beach,” which cannot or does not want to meet the standards of the state of the art, registers as out of time. Though contemporaneous to the film in their origin, the songs appear strangely out of sync with the sleek 1980s. Other original tracks featured in Blood Orgy pick up on this asynchrony: “Fleabrain” (Lucas & Rosenthal, 1988), for instance, a theme song that introduces the Leather Girl of the same name in an opening montage [7:14-7:51], also seems more akin to much older recordings, like the Robert Lewis Band’s “Get Off The Road” (1968) featured in She-Devils. Even the film’s recurring, flat, slow-cooking “mood” score [16:01-17:28; 20:00-21:07; 23:39-24:19; 34:11-35:08, and so on], arranged for rather

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un-nostalgic synthesizers and electronic drums, is so rugged in texture that it blends in perfectly with 1950s songs like “Homicide.” Though Blood Orgy seems to consciously adopt such outmoded aesthetics for its reworking of exploitation feminist themes, I am reluctant to address this appropriation as “retro.” Recent literature connects retro sensibilities to a nostalgic longing for the comforts of commodity and pop cultures of the recent past (see, for instance, Gorfinkel, 2011; Reynolds, 2011; also cf. Thorne, 2003, 102). For “vintage” exploitation film fandom, this nostalgia often generates from later audiences investing the dated artifacts with utopian potential. Here, the audibility of outdated technologies and production processes, like direct and live sound recording with analog equipment, gets to stand for the handmade, for “craftsmanship” (Thorne, 2003, 103), and for an empowerment of the producing subject. Textural excessiveness is interpreted as the result of daring, experimental auteurs freely expressing themselves in aesthetics that defy the dullness of uniform mainstream artifacts (see Vale & Juno 1986, 4f; or Jeffrey Sconce’s 1995 discussion of “paracinema” fandom). This strand of retro appreciation charges outmoded trashiness with an almost instant subversiveness. Adopting Rosalind Krauss’s (2000) observations on the role of outmoded formats in post-medium artworks with some liberties, the re-appropriation of obsolete technologies for pop cultural artifacts promises to release the utopian potential of these technologies once more in the present, and possibly blasts one’s own creation out of the confines dictated by the commodity market (cf. Thorne, 2003, 107). Reading Michael Lucas’s appropriation as a retro articulation would mean to assume that Blood Orgy channeled part of Herschell Gordon Lewis’ crafty ingenuity to the present, which not only places an uncomfortable emphasis on the role of the individual (male) auteur in the utopian potential of exploitation feminism, but also glosses over the intimate entanglement of retro’s obsession with salvaging something “original” from the past with existing commodity markets. Paradoxically, retro fandom often revolves around commodity consumption. Fans invest considerable amounts of energy and labor not only in the preservation of hard-to-find, lost and forgotten “incredibly strange” films, but also in making these artifacts accessible to broader audiences. Since the precarious status of these artifacts often depends on the obsolescence of the formats they come in, providing access also means transferring content to contemporary formats like DVDs or digital streams. This strategy shows a central contradiction in the utopian potential that retro sensibilities confer on outmoded technologies: truly untimely technologies like 16mm film and VHS tape, which seem to realize the resistant promise of dated media most readily by having lost their commercial use value long ago, are shunted exactly because their unyielding materialities get in the way of convenient consumption (cf. Skoller, 2005, 171f). The dilemma also manifests itself in the seemingly opposite strategies adopted in contemporary emulations of retro aesthetics. Here, retro sensibilities often translate into an obsession with “authentic” vintage equipment, which in turn elevates outmoded gear to the very sellable status of the sought-after rarity, and ups its value on special interest markets. Either way, “shopping and owning” (Skoller, 2005, 170) appear to be central axes of retro engagements with incredibly strange pop artifacts. Blood Orgy of the Leather Girls, in contrast, seems uninterested in a meticulous re-staging of “authentic” 1960s Garage Rock’n’Roll sound with expensively restored vintage instruments and devices, and thus removes from its exploitation feminism the promise

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of creating subversive potential by merely resuscitating 1960s trash pop culture. In a scene that shows David Nudelman and The Wild Breed perform an excessively mangled version of “Hate Teen” (The Wild Breed, 1988) at the “St. Jerome School for Girls First Afternoon Tea Dance” [26:56-30:46], for instance, the guitars sound much too screechy and high on treble, and the vocals and drums lack the pronounced, yet delicate reverb to register as typical Sixties revenants. A concrete periodization of this performance by way of sonic signature seems futile anyway. In fact, the historical characteristics that the different types of music used in the film may bear in their sonic debris are lost in the VHS release version, which, according to Michael Lucas, was launched without having received any of the “necessary post-production stuff” (Lucas in Fielding, 2010b). As a result, the datedness of the sonic textures in Blood Orgy fails to recall a specific point or period in historical time, and suggests its specific exploitation feminism as something very different from a rehearsal of some transgressive acts of the past. To argue that this mash-up bespeaks a nostalgic hope for redeeming the utopian promises inherent in some kind of “original” Girl Gang exploitation cinema seems quite beside the point. After all, sonic dirt here figures as dirt, as blemish, as distraction, as excess, and not as a marker of authenticity. If the film’s untimely sonic textures harbor utopian potential, this potential is not realized in the sanitation, restoration and conservation of a “vintage” or “authentic” exploitation feminism, but in the accommodation of contingency and change. If the exploitation feminism of Blood Orgy of the Leather Girls points towards change, however, its trashy, excessive material underpinnings still prevent this openness from promoting teleological ideas of progress. Discussing the work of Jack Smith, who also shares a love for detritus, the rejected, and the incredibly strange (though, in Smith’s case, of Hollywood film culture), Juliane Rebentisch argues that an excess of dated materiality can also call attention to the decay all history is subject to (2013, 169). According to Rebentisch, embracing this decay uncloses a utopia that differs from “escapist and aestheticized visions of the past”19 prevalent in retro culture. She senses a desire for a utopian “community” based not on possession, but on the understanding that all human and object lives are perishable and vulnerable to the passage of time. This utopia envisions people and matter entangled in empathic “interrelations” not of exploit, but of care (2013, 171ff, also cf. Thorne, 2003, 114). A very similar empathy for decay and the contingencies it accommodates also manifests itself in the Blood Orgy soundtrack LP Lucas compiled for Planet Pimp Records in 1994. Released at a moment in time that saw “paracinema” and “cult film” fandom consolidated in a growing number of reissues (Seattle-based label Something Weird Video had been active since 1990), increasing academic interest (Jeffrey Sconce was about to publish “‘Trashing’ the Academy: Taste, Excess, and an Emerging Politics of Cinematic Style” in Screen, see Sconce, 1995), and the first surges of a mainstream cinematic retro wave reinterpreting 1960s and 1970s exploitation sensibilities for the multiplexes of the world (Pulp Fiction by Quentin Tarantino came out in 1994), the album displayed an unorthodox approach to dealing with Girl Gang exploitation cinema’s pop culture history. In spite of its title, and although the back cover spins a tragic tale of unfettered creativity, crushing debt, and suicide supposedly connected to the production of Blood Orgy of the Leather Girls of 1988, 20 the collection of songs assembled for the 12" vinyl record had nothing to do with the music featured in the film. Most notably, all 1950s and 1960s tracks had been ditched in favor of more recent 1990s Budget Rock and Indie productions—though a cover version of The Pleasure

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Seeker’s “What A Way To Die” by The Mummies (1991) pays homage to the Girls In The Garage-vibe21 of the film music. Moreover, none of the tracks by Lucas’s own bands featured in the film were included on the record—they had been substituted by other tracks by the same bands (The Phantom Surfers contribute “11th Frame” instead of “Horror Beach”), or by tracks by some of the director’s other, lesser-known side projects (like Three Stoned Men, which features members of The Wild Breed). In addition, a number of then very current Californian bands that formed long after the release of the movie, like Tiger Trap and the Trashwomen, contributed original tracks to the collection, thereby injecting it with a timely, post-Riot Grrrl update on the film’s Girl Gang theme. Still, film and LP soundtracks match in a material way. For one, a sense of continuity between this new track list and the music used in the movie is instilled by voiceover snippets rendered from the film audio that intersperse the record. Furthermore, what connects the 1994 soundtrack songs with the sound of the movie is their own pronounced dirtiness, their embrace of sonic debris, and their shared investment in seemingly meaningless, excessive, spillover presence of the sound of lo-fi technology: as Budget Rock productions, the songs collected here sound just as excessive as the film does. In other words, the soundtrack album privileges the material trashiness of exploitation feminism, which is obviously subject to transformation over time, over claims of authorship,22 origin or “authenticity.” The Blood Orgy soundtrack release demonstrates that dated textures can serve as a living archive of material excess, which accommodates a “potentiality” for change (Rebentisch 2013, 170). In a way, the record gives room to a playfully repeated rehearsal of the exploitation feminist themes that appear in She-Devils on Wheels and Blood Orgy of the Leather Girls in both its narrative and material dimensions: namely, the bold proposal that the fictional women characters of exploitation can be as bad (and badass) as male figures. A track by The Troglodykes, for instance, is titled “Empowerment” (1994), and the contribution by the all-female Sacramento group Tiger Trap is called “Girl With Guitar” (1994). Both tracks function as a successful and meaningful provocation only when read in the context of a hierarchical two-sex, two- gender system, where exploitation film fandom or playing guitar in a Rock’n’Roll band were still predominately male privileges, and where female protagonists, in fact, inhabited an ambivalent place of the “incredibly strange” of their own (cf., for instance, Baldauf and Weingartner, 1998; Hollows, 2003; O’Shea, 2014). The heavy presence of spillover materiality, however, releases a utopian potential that is quite different from mimicking or celebrating historical examples of toppling over these tenacious gendered dynamics of the past. Elena Gorfinkel argues that exploitation productions that combine wooden characters with an overload of texture and materiality often conflate the world of objects and subjects, and at times “create [...] an ideological equivalence between the human and the thing” (2011, 123). Songs like “Girl With Guitar,” whose conjunction of exploitation feminist cockiness with an outdated, excessive texture makes heroines like the Man-Eaters and the Leather Girls appear as thing-like as the sonic debris the track flaunts, also marks these characters and the gendered ideologies that continue to produce them as subject to decay, as human- made, sustained, but also open to change in shape and texture by history, and thus also as open to re-working. Exploitation feminist utopia, then, is a place where the ruins of reductive, sensationalist, arguably exploitative imaginations of “gender equality” and the empowerment of women point towards the possible collapse of much larger structures underlying and governing dynamics such as the two-sex system and the

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limited, heteronormative matrix of subject positions that it encourages real people (and fictional characters) to claim.

Conclusion: A Genealogy Without Origin

This article has addressed the material trashiness of She-Devils on Wheels and Blood Orgy of the Leather Girls not as traces of actual, historical feminist movements of the Second Wave, but as constitutive of an excessive, utopian, fantastic exploitation feminism that imagines and projects the potentialities of feminist empowerment rather than document it. This exploitation feminism does not communicate its politics on the level of content or intellectual reasoning. Rather, it stages ludicrous narratives and simple stock “feminist” figures in conjunction with spillover sound and rough sonic textures to point to a utopia where the norms that bring forth such limited narratives and figures have withered, and are open for negotiation and re-imagining over and over again. Mistaking this strategically simplistic exploitation feminism for a telltale trace of Second Wave feminism not only renders invisible important controversial feminist discussions that are historically accounted for, but also runs the risk of fixating feminist projects as teleological, where infant (or “primitive”) stages needed to be overcome by more enlightened versions of the now (cf. Adkins, 2004, Hanafi el Siofi et al., 2010). The exploitation feminism emerging from these films by Herschell Gordon Lewis and Michael Lucas, in contrast, deploys a very different temporal logic. As it primarily revisits, rehearses, and fantasizes emancipatory projects that have not and could not have as happened such, it shows the past and present as interconnected with each other, and draws our attention towards tenacious gendered ideologies, norms and structures that often underpin politics of reform, however “progressive” they may seem (cf., for instance, Wetterer, 2005; Leonard, 2007). At the same time, however, the exploitation feminism of She-Devils and Blood Orgy is no retro project rooting for a better, more radical solution for current problems in a recent past. Exploitation feminism, I have argued, generates from appropriations and reworkings, gaining momentum from how earlier and later sonic materializations resonate with each other. This upsets the logic of origin and originality that infuses retro sensibilities: without Blood Orgy of the Leather Girls, She Devils on Wheels might indeed have gotten stuck in its own moment, “unable to transcend it” (Gorfinkel, 2011, 96). Folding over each other in appropriations, however, locates the two films’ take on emancipation in a more complex temporal space, which is neither wholly caught up in retrospective, nor exclusively oriented towards the future. Enter potentiality.

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NOTES

1. See, for instance, http://www.somethingweird.com/product_info.php?products_id=37957. Accessed on January 14, 2015. 2. Confusingly, the gang in She-Devils on Wheels does not refer to itself as the She-Devils but the Man-Eaters. 3. In The Mini-Skirt Mob, for instance, serious, narrative-fueling acts of violence are exclusively committed by male gang members, while the women, clad in short skirts that all too readily reveal their underwear as they are rolling around on the ground, engage in “cat fights” that are intercut with reverse shots of leering males, who cheer them on, comment on their bodily features, and speculate about what sex acts they would yield to [20:00-21:24]. To a degree, such stagings also happen in She-Devils and Blood Orgy, for instance, when a Man-Eater’s shirt rides up during a knife fight, and the camera zooms in to catch a good look at her bra [47:27]; or when a Leather Girl takes her time putting on a transparent raincoat over a sexy black body stocking before setting out to dismember a victim [46:14]. Nevertheless, both films forgo an androcentric, heteronormative focalization through male characters. 4. The “real women biker” aspect is also subject to lengthy discussion in the Herschell Gordon Lewis / Mike Vraney audio commentary on the Something Weird DVD edition (2000) of She-Devils on Wheels. Here, Lewis insists that the women he hired were not organized in a club. Lewis repeats this statement in an interview with Ian Johnston of March 2011, http:// louderthanwar.com/the-wizard-of-gore-herschell-gordon-lewis-interview. Accessed on January 15, 2015. 5. See the cover of the Tartan Video DVD edition (2002) of She-Devils on Wheels. 6. See http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0063595/releaseinfo. Accessed on January 26, 2015. 7. “Mondo” movies are mock documentaries that aim at serving audiences with sensationalist glimpses at ethnographic others, who could be located both in faraway exotic places or in exclusive contexts in the immediate vicinity, staging rituals like “annual celebration[s] in which men smash in a garage door using their heads,” as Boyd Rice explains (in Vale and Juno, 1986,

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153). Mondo narratives usually frame these Others’ practices as deviant, primitive, novel or scandalous. 8. “Quit with tit,” for instance, echoes the bra-burning myth that US media created after the “Freedom Trash Can” action at the Atlantic City Miss America Pageant protest. The myth, which firmly linked being a (radical) feminist to a compulsion to burn brassiere, helped to establish an image of feminists as both obsessing over and militantly oppressing sex and sexiness (Dow, 2003, 129f). 9. See the popular Las Vegas Grind (Crypt Records), Tabu (Paris Hollywood Records) and Jungle Exotica (Strip Records) compilation series, or the TT Shakin singles re-release series on Jazzman Records London. 10. See definitions at http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/texture. Accessed on January 14, 2015. 11. All information concerning equipment and production of She-Devils on Wheels is taken from a personal e-mail correspondence between Herschel Gordon Lewis and the author of this article, August 26 and 27, 2013. 12. Herschell Gordon Lewis and Mike Vraney state on the audio commentary: “There is a rawness to it that defies polish. [...] Polish can get in the way of emotional impact.” 13. Michael Lucas explicitly names Herschell Gordon Lewis as an influence for Blood Orgy of the Leather Girls (Fielding, 2010b). It is also noteworthy that Lucas has backed Lewis in musical performances with a Jug band called Hiroshi Hasegawa’s Poontag Wranglers in the 2000s. 14. See, for instance, Michael Lucas’ comments on Fleabrain (Fielding, 2010b). 15. Bootleg copies are available from a UK-based burn-on-demand service, a full version of the movie, though with a voiceover fan commentary track, has recently been made available on Youtube (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mUQtSWGW5E8, last accessed on 30 July, 2014), and Michael Lucas will sell VHS copies for $12 when contacted per e-mail. 16. critcononline.com/horror%20a%20-%20c.htm. Accessed on July 30, 2014. 17. As if to further ground Blood Orgy in this tradition, the film opens with a “staple” of “classical” exploitation film: stock footage of a human birth (cf. Schaeffer, 1999, 39, 86). 18. A later, slightly cleaner version of the song appeared on the album 18 Deadly Ones!, Norton Records, 1991. 19. All translations from German are my own. 20. For a detailed discussion of the soundtrack album, see Hofer, forthcoming. 21. Girls In The Garage is a compilation series on Romulan Records that has anthologized marginalized productions by all-female beat and proto-punk bands of the 1960s and 1970s since 1987. 22. For a detailed discussion of authorship and Blood Orgy of the Leather Girls, see Hofer, forthcoming.

ABSTRACTS

From the mid-1960s onwards, American exploitation cinema has spawned a number of Girl Gang movies whose potential for challenging androcentric and heteronormative modes of representation have been hotly disputed by fans and academics alike. This article discusses this potential by sounding the trashy material textures of two outstanding Girl Gang films: She-Devils

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on Wheels (Herschell Gordon Lewis, 1968) and Blood Orgy of the Leather Girls (Michael Lucas, 1988). To date, excessive materialities in exploitation cinema have often been understood as traces of actual, historical bodies, objects, and practices. This paper suggests a different approach: by addressing how Lucas appropriates and reworks the outdated aesthetics, especially the untimely lo-fidelity sound, that distinguish Lewis’s earlier Girl Gang film, I will show how both films propel a utopian, fantastic, exaggerated “exploitation feminism,” instead of documenting historical feminist movements of their times. Taking the potential of trashy (sonic) textures seriously on their own terms, I will discuss the particular critical impulses such materially excessive exploitation feminisms can provide for a feminist reception of Girl Gang exploitation cinema today.

Le grand nombre de Girl Gang films que le cinéma d’exploitation américain a produit depuis les années 1960 a fait l’objet de discussions entre les fans et les critiques concernant son potentiel à remettre en question les modes de représentation androcentrique et hétéronormatif. Cet article s’interroge sur ce potentiel en se concentrant sur les textures trash de deux Girl Gang films notoires : She-Devils on Wheels (Herschell Gordon Lewis, 1968) et Blood Orgy of the Leather Girls (Michael Lucas, 1988). Les matérialités excessives manifestes dans le cinéma d’exploitation ont, à ce jour, souvent été analysées en tant que traces de corps, d’objets et de pratiques historiques réels. Cet article propose une approche différente : en s’intéressant à la manière dont Lucas s’approprie et retravaille une esthétique datée, et tout particulièrement le son lo-fidelity, caractéristique du Girl Gang film antérieur de Lewis, je souhaite montrer comment les deux films, au lieu d’attester les mouvements féministes historiques de leurs époques respectives, proposent un « féminisme d’exploitation » utopique, fantastique et exagéré. La prise en compte du potentiel des textures sonores trash permettra de s’interroger sur les pulsions critiques particulières que ces féminismes matériellement excessifs peuvent offrir à la réception féministe de ce genre de cinéma d’exploitation aujourd’hui.

INDEX

Keywords: exploitation, feminism, materiality, texture, historicity, sound, retro Mots-clés: exploitation, féminisme, matérialisme, texture, historicité, son, rétro

AUTHOR

KRISTINA PIA HOFER Department of Art History, University of Applied Arts Vienna

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Sex, Gore and Provocation: the Influence of Exploitation in John Waters’s Early Films

Elise Pereira Nunes

Introduction

1 Born in Baltimore in 1946, American filmmaker John Waters soaked in movie culture as a child and a teenager, fascinated with Hollywood melodramas and female icons, the “nudie cuties” of exploitation cinema, horror movies and the independent productions of underground filmmakers. His first home-made productions, which he started making when he was sixteen, testify to the influence of these very different approaches to cinema in terms of production, distribution and promotion, as well as genres and themes.

2 Drawn to rival movie cultures—Hollywood productions and major studios theaters on the one hand, and local, independent theaters and drive-ins on the other (Doherty, 2002, 92)—he decided to teach himself how to make his own movies and modeled his films on the exploitation and underground filmmakers he idolized (Waters, 1991, 44). The significance of exploitation and underground cinemas that both exploit Hollywood as a model to either hijack, parody or question is indubitably observable in his work. This article intends to explore the filmmaker’s appropriation and exploitation of characteristics defining exploitation cinema through the study of three exploitation films whose aesthetics and pragmatics Waters revisits. Two exploitation “masters,” sexploitation filmmaker Russ Meyer and gore genre pioneer Herschell Gordon Lewis, appear to be the most influential exploitation filmmakers on Waters’s explorations of sex and violence in his early films, while the sway of the mondo film genre enhanced his works’ shock value—their potential ability to provoke emotions such as fear, disgust or anger. Consequently, Waters’s own early films can be compared to exploitation films and promote transgressive politics through the emergence of a humorous and provocative trash cinema questioning society’s gender roles. The many uses of the term

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“trash” all apply to Waters’s cinema, whether discussing the garbage his film crew picked up and used as props and décor, the lowlife characters he gave life to, his sleazy, poor-quality movies, or even the mockery he makes of society’s gender norms conveyed by Hollywood. His hybrid movies should be considered as part of what Jeffrey Sconce defines as “paracinema”: Paracinema is thus less a distinct group of films than a particular reading protocol, a counter-aesthetic turned subcultural sensibility devoted to all manner of cultural detritus. In short, the explicit manifesto of paracinematic culture is to valorize all forms of cinematic “trash,” whether such films have been either explicitly rejected or simply ignored by legitimate film culture. (Sconce, 1995, 372) As his first three films were never distributed (Hag in a Black Leather Jacket, 1964; Roman Candles, 1966; Eat Your Makeup, 1968), this article will focus on his first feature-length movies from the late 1960s-early 1970s, which established the basis of his shockingly entertaining cinema: Mondo Trasho (1969), Multiple Maniacs (1970), Pink Flamingos (1972) and Female Trouble (1974).

Modes of Production

3 When Waters decided to make movies, the first difficulty he was confronted with was his lack of funds. Mondo Trasho was made on a mere $2,000 budget, thanks to his father who lent him the money. However, these budgetary restrictions became an opportunity to develop his creativity and made him turn to techniques used by exploitation and underground cinema to reach his goals. Since it was impossible to pay for professional technicians, he produced, directed, wrote, filmed and edited his films himself. Most of the budget was spent on film rolls and costumes. Pink Flamingos1 was the first film for which he managed to employ a handful of technicians and an editor to improve the sound and image quality. In the style of many exploitation and underground filmmakers, his early productions were mainly shot in as few takes as possible, with minimal cuts to save time, film roll and money. Most of the scenes were shot outside, on location, using natural light, while basic electric lights were used for indoor scenes, giving his films a raw, unfiltered, sometimes overexposed look.

4 Another constraint came from the technical limitations of his equipment. Like his underground idols, the Kuchar Brothers’ (Stevenson, 1996), his first untraceable films were shot with an 8mm camera, with which he could not record sound and picture together. Even with the 16mm camera he later used, sound had to be recorded on a separate recorder, and Waters had trouble synching sound as he could not afford synch sound equipment (Waters, 1991, 17). This is the main reason why there is almost no dialogue in Mondo Trasho. Yet this constraint led Waters to emulate another master of underground cinema such as experimental filmmaker Kenneth Anger, whose movies generally count no dialogue. Their soundtrack, consisting of cautiously selected tracks added end-to-end, becomes as important as images themselves (Tyler, 1995). The audio track Waters edited for Mondo Trasho is a compilation of songs from his personal record collection. Consequently, Mondo Trasho was never released because he would have had to pay for license fees. The complete soundtrack counts pop songs and love songs that sets the tone and testifies to his diverse musical and filmic inspirations.2 A recurrent aspect of his use of music comes from the exploitation of songs both linked with the pictures onscreen and the contrast made with the situation displayed, generally creating a humorous tone. The use of the 1956 song “I’m Not a Juvenile Delinquent” by

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American doo-wop band Frankie Lymon & the Teenagers in one specific scene from Pink Flamingos appears as particularly relevant and off the wall [17:05]. Indeed, the song begins the moment Babs Johnson, played by Divine, enters a grocery store, asks for steak, then furtively sticks the slice between her legs and leaves the shop without paying for it.

5 Like dialogue, color also required a higher budget. Black-and-white film rolls were cheaper, which explains why both Mondo Trasho and Multiple Maniacs were shot in black and white, like many exploitation films (Schaefer, 53). With a $10,000 budget to shoot Pink Flamingos, Waters could at last purchase color film rolls and take bad taste to another level; its main character’s tacky makeup and huge body squeezed in a coral cocktail dress are some of the many elements that can disturb some viewers.

6 Waters’s low budgets also determined the location where his films were shot. Most scenes were filmed in his parents’ house or later in his own apartment. Being a local also helped him shoot scenes in some local businesses whose owners either did not care or were amused to let him use their store. Others were shot in Baltimore’s public and private spaces, for which the film crew usually had no authorization; they would have had to detail the kind of scenes they intended to shoot and never would have been allowed to openly film nude scenes, for instance. On one occasion, the film crew got arrested for “conspiracy to commit indecent exposure” while attempting to shoot a naked hitchhiker on Johns Hopkins University Campus one Sunday morning during the shooting of Mondo Trasho (Waters, 1991, 56). But the actual ballyhoo that went with the trial only made them more famous locally and aroused people’s curiosity and interest from the press, something Waters could only have dreamed of at the time. Any free publicity was welcome, for Waters did not have sufficient financial resources to attract much attention otherwise and low budgets meant limited promotion and distribution.

Distribution and Exhibition

7 The controversial topics he exploited made his films the targets of local censorship. Before Pink Flamingos, Waters did not even bother submitting his first works to the Maryland State Board of Censorship. Those movies were hardly watchable because of their very poor visual quality, due to a lack of budget and techniques, and displayed far too controversial topics and nudity to be advertised or distributed in local theaters or even given an X rating. Waters nevertheless succeeded in having his films shown in alternative venues. In spite of many profane and nude scenes in Mondo Trasho, he got an open-minded reverend to let the crew schedule shows at a local church (Waters, 53). Additionally, Waters caught the attention of the anti-Hollywood Film-Makers Cooperative created in New York in 1962 by Jonas Mekas among others (Noguez, 1985), and midnight screenings were scheduled on Friday, Saturday and Sunday nights.

8 Even so, Mondo Trasho’s distribution remained limited to underground circles; the film was popular among niche audiences, mainly in Baltimore, New York and San Francisco where local counterculture youth were looking for movies that would challenge established order and mainstream norms promoted by Hollywood. With his next film, Multiple Maniacs, Waters decided to take distribution one step further and started traveling across the country to reach more theaters and audiences, going door-to-door, in the tradition of early mobile exploiters:

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I took off for Santa Barbara with another print of Multiple Maniacs in the trunk of my car. […] [I] went through the movie ads and selected a theater that had weird enough programming to possibly show the film. Armed with posters and handouts sheets, I talked the owner into giving me several midnight shows and began my relentless one-man promotional campaign. (Waters, 1991, 67) He also sent Variety-type ads to local newspapers and created promotional items by himself, making posters and imagining catch lines that would attract people’s attention, a practice he perpetuated till he secured bigger budgets: “Posters and handout sheets were designed featuring a shot of Divine […] with the catch line ‘The Filthiest People Alive!’ […] Laundromat bulletin boards became our billboards, and street corners and bars took the place of TV talk show personal appearances” (Waters, 21). Waters and his crew progressively gained a form of early celebrity, which was partly due to the fuss they were generating at all their movie premieres, where they appeared excessively dressed, mimicking the attitudes of Hollywood stars, regardless of the number of people attending the showing.

9 Waters’s first confrontation with censorship occurred when the illicit showings of Pink Flamingos became quite popular among students from the University of Baltimore, and the press talked more and more about the local filmmaker who had created his most elaborate film so far. He managed to avoid most censorship by using artificial genitals for some scenes, a widespread practice in the film industry in order to get more flexible ratings and reach wider audiences. He nonetheless obtained an X-rating but was at least able to distribute it in wider spheres. He then signed with the film firm New line Cinema, recently created in 1967 by Robert Shaye, who had started distributing his films on college campuses and wanted his company to focus on films that were appealing to niche audiences.3 This was the beginning of a creative partnership of funding and distribution that helped Waters turn from a self-taught filmmaker into a counterculture icon who, nowadays, cameos in popular television shows such as The Simpsons (Fox, 1989-), My Name is Earl (Fox, 2005-2009) and Saturday Night Live (NBC, 1975).4

10 The “trashiness” which permeates his films can also be found in the actors he was casting and directing, as well as the characters portrayed. Since he lacked Hollywood headline icons to catch people’s attention, he made stars out of friends who played in almost all his films, their gang being known as “the Dreamlanders.” Andy Warhol, one of Waters’s biggest influences, had already parodied Hollywood star system conventions by creating his own “Superstars,” whether nobodies or underground performers such as drag queens.5 He also followed the tradition of early exploitation filmmakers who could not hire Hollywood stars but would emphasize the potential appeal of their lead actresses through the use of catch lines.6 This is exactly what Waters did when he and Glenn Harris Milstead created the drag queen persona Divine.

Sexploitation and the Outbreak of a “Divinely” Grotesque Female Icon

11 From the beginning, the filmmaker advertised Divine as “the most beautiful woman in the world” while displaying an obese drag queen. Her appropriation of artificial female attributes both cross-references the role models who inspired the creation of Divine’s persona and establishes the artificial construction of femininity, which can be

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remodeled and taken over. American gender theorist and philosopher Judith Butler, one of the founders of constructionist gender theories, uses Divine’s performance of femininity in order to assert societies’ construction of gender roles. Her approach challenges essentialist theories defending the idea that nature universally defines gender roles: [Divine’s] impersonation of women implicitly suggests that gender is a kind of persistent impersonation that passes as the real. Her/his performance destabilizes the very distinctions between the natural and the artificial, depth and surface, inner and outer through which discourse about genders almost always operates. Is drag the imitation of gender, or does it dramatize the signifying gestures through which gender itself is established? […] Divine notwithstanding, gender practices within gay and lesbian cultures often thematize the “natural” in parodic contexts that bring into relief the performative construction of an original and true sex. (Butler, 1990, [2006] xxx-xxxi)

12 Moreover, in the light of constructionist theories, Divine’s impersonations of women tend to stress the dictatorial norms of aesthetics regarding women in Western societies, as her grotesque body, makeup lines, hairdos and clothes parody the mainstream representation of women and femininity. In A Theory of Parody (1985), Linda Hutcheon reminds the reader that parody can only work if the viewer is already familiar with the object that is parodied for him/her to comprehend its exploitation and the new angle it is given: “parody is indeed in the eye of the beholder. But beholders need something to behold; we need signals from the text to guide our interpretation, and the degree of visibility of these signals determines their potential for assisting us” (xvi). Accustomed to Hollywood’s limited representations of femininity, the viewer is capable of reading Waters’s humorous exploitation of Hollywood and sexploitation female icons through Divine’s reenactments and is given new trashy role models. For Hutcheon, parody is “also often a more extended form of transtextual reference today. Parody, then, is related to burlesque, travesty, pastiche, plagiarism, quotation, and allusion, but remains distinct from them. It shares with them a restriction of focus: its repetition is always of another discursive text” (43), “a repetition with critical distance, which marks difference rather than similarity” (6). Thus, Divine’s appropriation of female attributes always humorously questions mainstream definitions of womanhood through the distorted representations proposed by a biological, overweight man. Divine’s parodic performance of artificial femininity can be referred to as “camp,” according to the definition established by Susan Sontag in her groundbreaking essay, “Notes on Camp” (1964): “The essence of Camp is its love of the unnatural: of artifice and exaggeration” (105). Through her multiple female characters highly indebted to the heroines of American filmmaker Russ Meyer, Divine’s overflowing exploitation of ‘”feminine” attributes asserts her position as a constructed persona challenging society’s dictatorial establishments of gender roles and definition(s) of femininity and masculinity. “Sex” is a biological term: “gender” a psychological and cultural one. […] Every society believes that its own definitions of gender correspond to the biological duality of sex. […] If the proper terms for sex are “male” and “female,” the corresponding terms for gender are “masculine” and “feminine”; these latter may be quite independent of (biological) sex. Gender is the amount of masculinity or femininity found in a person…” (Robert Stoller, quoted in Oakley, 1972, 115-6)

13 Exploitation cinema has long been defined as a form attempting to “grab an audience by offering something unavailable elsewhere—films that pander to our baser instincts,

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pique our curiosity, salaciously sell us the seamier side of life, but do so knowingly and for one basic reason—to make money” (Ross, 1995, 63). It is no wonder, then, that sex has been one of the taboo themes exploited by this industry. In the 1950s, following on the growing success of films exploiting sex (including burlesque and hygiene films), Hollywood needed to lower the restrictions of its Production Code in order to allow major studios to exploit sex and generate more profit while taking audiences’ expectations into account (Benshoff and Griffin, 232). However, as Hollywood was not ready to use sex and nudity as its primary appeals yet, an entire independent sexploitation cinema emerged, with several subgenres including the nudie film. The popularity of sexploitation contributed to weaken both local and state censorship laws. Among others, Russ Meyer became one of the most influential and successful soft porn filmmakers from the late 1950s to the late 1970s. In Waters’s words, Russ Meyer is the Einstein of sex films […] A Russ Meyer film is instantly recognizable—top-notch production values, split-second editing, low-angle shots leering up at almost deformed, big-busted, domineering sex-starved heroines […] Russ Meyer makes films about sex and violence and you can tell he is proud of his work. He writes, produces, directs, films, and edits his own productions, and they all make money. (Waters, 192) A big breast fetishist, Meyer made sexy, heavy-chested women his brand label and intended to taunt male heterosexual audiences who would pay in order to see films displaying oversized bosoms. Even though Meyer’s heroines are highly objectified and submitted to the male viewer’s gaze,7 they also transgress traditional gender roles by appropriating generally “masculine” behaviors, such as fighting, swearing, killing and especially being promiscuous. Their overall attitude impugns society’s patriarchal authority by refusing to embrace the passive, home-centered life conveyed by mainstream Hollywood. Meyer’s female characters’ excessive bodies and sex drives, as well as his depiction of untamed youth, deeply affected Waters’s representation of sex and gender roles. The Meyer film that most influenced Waters is undoubtedly Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! (1965), his “favorite movie of all time”: “I first saw [Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill!] in 1966. […] Russ’s nasty ‘pussycats’ became a ‘role model’ for all the characters in my productions—especially Divine” (Waters, 192).

14 The superimposition of constructed signifiers of beauty and sexualization of women— high heels, tight clothes, heavy makeup, long hair, thin bodies, big bosoms and rounded bottoms—is meant to turn the audiences on. Meyer also exploits famous Hollywood actresses’ tropes such as “the blond bombshell,” “the femme fatale” or “the exotic foreigner,” and makes their whole body visible to the viewer’s eye, their most popular attributes being exaggeratedly showcased. His exploitation of Hollywood female role models inspired Waters to invent his own. Hollywood star Elizabeth Taylor largely influenced Divine’s appearance as a brunette femme fatale in Multiple Maniacs, while American blond bombshell Jayne Mansfield, an icon of glamorous Hollywood and a sex symbol in sexploitation productions, highly inspired the creation of the blond character played by Divine in Mondo Trasho.

15 In this film, Divine appears for the first time wearing a blond wig, gold Capri pants and six-inch shoes as a tribute to Waters’s favorite blond actress and Playboy Playmate [21:50]. She is also driving “a red ‘59 Cadillac Eldorado convertible” (Waters, 56), a mythic car evoking Mansfield, who used to drive a pink Cadillac Eldorado convertible herself, so that a parallel is clearly drawn between these two emblematic sexually objectified figures: “Cadillacs are to cars what Jayne Mansfield was to women: big,

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flamboyant, brazen, and extreme. She was a sex symbol; a Cadillac is a sex symbol and more” (Stern, 1990, 62). In this scene introducing the character of Divine, Waters humorously imitates the filming technique of generating close-ups of specific female body parts and plays with a process exploited by both Hollywood and exploitation which satisfies the heterosexual male viewer’s eye through the fragmenting of the woman’s body. He successively shoots significant parts of Divine’s body as she checks her hairdo and makeup in the rearview mirror, as well as parts of the car, its fender skirts and twin bullet taillights, thus parodying a gendered view of cars as female enforced by advertisement. Another reference to Jayne Mansfield shows through the use of the song “The Girl Can’t Help It,” performed by American musician Little Richard for the eponymous 1956 musical by American filmmaker Frank Tashlin, starring Mansfield in the lead role. However, Divine’s overweight body and her discomfort as she keeps on holding her pair of Capri pants to prevent them from slipping turn her performance into a parodic, trashy version of female glamorous role models [31:04].

16 Meyer’s female characters’ appearances also emphasize the idea that a whole range of artifices are available in order to propose multiple versions of femininity. The depiction of the three female heroines in the opening scene of Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! immediately suggests the kind of femininity they will perform. The film opens on a black screen. The voice of an off-screen narrator rises in order to warn the viewer about the different shapes violence can take. In this case, the shape of a sex-craved, indomitable woman: Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to violence, the word and the act. While violence cloaks itself in a plethora of disguises, its favorite mantle still remains: sex. […] Yet violence doesn’t only destroy—it creates and molds as well . . . Let’s examine closely, then, this dangerously evil creation, this new breed, encased and contained within the supple skin of woman […]. But a word of caution–handle with care and don’t drop your guard! […] Who are they? One might be your secretary! Your doctor’s receptionist! Or a dancer in a go-go club! [0:03] Thus, from the beginning, the primarily male viewer is led to expect a movie that will display wild sexy female characters, as promised on posters promoting the movie. In the next scene, three burlesque dancers performing in a strip club appear on screen. As they are filmed in low angle, with close-ups of their shaking hips and chests, the viewer can identify with the male clients enjoying the show. The close-ups of the audience’s faces reveal their sexual arousal at the sight of these tempting creatures. However, the angle from which the dancers are seen also asserts their enjoyment of their control over their male audience. The lead female character, Varla, played by actress and exotic dancer Tura Satana, embodies the ultimate sexy and deadly “femme fatale” throughout the movie. Fearless, her heavy makeup and plucked eyebrows make her look menacing, while the tight black overalls she wears in the following scenes reveal her impressive cleavage. Her appearance and aggressive behavior suggest new provocative opportunities for female characters that Divine will later exploit to build up her persona.

17 Like Meyer’s insubordinate heroines, Divine’s evil characters blow up mainstream gender role dictates. As single parents at the head of their family, they take up traditionally male roles such as the figure of the breadwinner and reject the concept of the traditional nuclear family generally promoted as “natural.”8 Indeed, they have children of their own but also consider any friend that would embrace their lifestyle as

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a family member. They are also sexually active, a behavior generally considered as inherent to manhood but as a deviance in women: Men initiate sexual contact, […] assume the dominant position in intercourse, […] ask females to go to bed with them, or marry them, or both: not vice versa. The female sexuality is supposed to lie in her receptiveness; […] it extends to the whole structure of feminine personality as dependent, passive, unaggressive and submissive. […] That these stereotypes persist can be seen from any women’s magazine and almost any fiction dealing with sexual relationships. (Oakley, 77-8) In control of their sex lives, they freely express their cravings and use their sexual attributes in order to manipulate people. The portrayal of sexually active women looking for recreational sex can be seen as provocative as they are not submitted to men’s sex drives. Their sexuality can then be defined as queer as they alternate from having straight, heterosexual sex to pleasurable, non-reproductive sex.9 Contrary to sexploitation movies meant to sexually tantalize the (heterosexual male) viewer, even if some elements such as excessive groaning may appear funny to the viewer, every single sex scene in a John Waters movie proposes a vision of the sex act that is at once comical and transgressive.

18 In these films, heterosexual sex is desacralized and challenges what poet Adrienne Rich called “compulsory heterosexuality,” a term that evokes the enforcement of sexuality between a man and a woman exclusively, promoted through the media and denying visibility to homosexuality and other forms of sexual practices (Rich, 1980, 23). Many sex scenes between a man and a woman fail to achieve the main goal of heterosexual sex which is reproduction, as they depict sexual practices never leading to a potential pregnancy and focus on the subjects’ atypical access to pleasure instead, such as toe- sucking in Mondo Trasho and Pink Flamingos. Furthermore, some heterosexual sex acts cannot be performed without the intrusion of a third element, like animals (the chicken in Pink Flamingos) or phallic objects (the hammer in Female Trouble). Pink Flamingos also broaches the taboo of incest, one of the most morally and legally condemned sexual practices among human societies (Levi-Strauss, 1948), in a scene where Babs performs fellatio on her own son, an act that she defines as “the greatest gift a mother can give to her child” [64:30]. This graphic sex scene transgresses legal, moral and religious rules while also appearing as ludicrous. Indeed, the viewer is fully aware that Divine is a male actor underneath his costume, so that the scene can actually be viewed as a gay sex scene.

19 Finally, the most incongruous heterosexual sex act occurs in Female Trouble when Dawn Davenport has sex with a filthy man on a fouled mattress at a dump. The series of close- ups of the two characters allows the viewer to see that actor Glenn Milstead Harris is playing both parts. The absurd and comical dimension of this extract reaches its climax when pregnant Dawn calls Earl to ask him for money. He simply tells her to “go fuck [her]self,” which is exactly what Divine the performer did during the sex scene. Through these perverse, ludicrous and graphic depictions of sexual practices, Waters exploits sex in order to mock society’s inhibited perception of sexuality as a taboo topic. Another behavior often thought of as “masculine” and appropriated by Waters’s female characters is their inclination for violence.

20 Regardless of mainstream morals, Waters’s female characters live by their own code, including violence and crime, not only as a means to fulfill their ambitions (such as fame or wealth), but also as a lifestyle. The protagonist of Female Trouble is thus a worthy successor to Babs Johnson and an emulation of Varla. Dark-haired, violent,

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selfish and self-determined, Dawn embraces crime as a career and the ultimate form of beauty. After exploiting sex as a means to tease and make the audience laugh at ludicrous depictions of sex acts, Waters exploits violence and its appropriation by female characters in order to transgress society’s gender roles and turn them into dominant figures not subjected to a male domination that he desacralizes. To enhance his female characters’ potential dangerousness and add shock value to his films, Waters borrows techniques specific to the gore film subgenre and its depiction of graphic violence.

The “King of Gore”10 and the Exploitation of the Gore Film Genre

21 Part of the trashy dimension of Waters’s movies originates in his appreciation for films that display atrocities in order to unsettle audiences. American gore genre pioneer Herschell Gordon Lewis was a role model for Waters on different levels. In the early 1960s, he invented the gore (or “splatter”) film, a horror subgenre, with Blood Feast (1963). This first opus of the “Blood Trilogy” depicts explicit gore scenes, such as mutilations of the human body emphasized by close-ups of dismantled limbs and fake red blood. Even if the horror movie was already popular in Hollywood thanks to filmmakers such as Alfred Hitchcock, neither Hollywood gothic horror films nor B movies had ever displayed such realistic violence. In gore films, the exhibition of violent primal instincts within individuals meets the exploitation of the human body as mere meat (Thoret, 2000). Introducing a whole new level of visual transgression, these films mainly attracted teenagers, thus drawing the attention of theater owners willing to exploit this potentially lucrative audience: “That’s exploitation—elements the promoter can grab on to and shake in the face of theater owners to get them to play the picture and in the face of the public to get them to see it” (McCarty, 1995, 39).

22 Lewis’s introduction of new special effects such as fake blood also gave these movies a whole new true-to-life dimension. Lewis was able to shoot Blood Feast in color, which heightened the realism of the murders and gave the viewers what the title promised: I gave the title Blood Feast and knew some newspapers would reject that title, since the word blood was controversial in those antediluvian times […]. More important than plot or cast was blood. The traditional kind of stage blood we’d used in some of our earlier films looked purple, which didn’t matter in a black and white film but we intended to make Blood Feast in color. […] we came up with stage blood that as far as I know the laboratory is still selling. (McCarty, 48) Supernatural elements can be found in both Blood Feast and Two Thousand Maniacs! (1964). The killer in Blood Feast, an Egyptian caterer, murders women in the most gruesome fashion and collects some of their limbs to perform a cannibalistic revival ritual for Egyptian goddess Ishtar whom he worships. In Two Thousand Maniacs!, crazy Southerners lure six “Yankees” into their ghost town to playfully slaughter them. The figure of the “white trash” is often exploited as an image evoking potential craziness and violence against urban citizens (Clover, 1993, 161-63). In Pink Flamingos, Babs Johnson lives outside the city limits in a lousy trailer next to the woods. Her extreme lifestyle reflects mainstream urban people’s fantasies regarding rednecks’ alleged filth and madness, whereas ultimately, the villains of the film happened to be Bab’s enemies, the Marbles. To all appearances they seem to perfectly fit mainstream society’s social standards as a white, well-established, middle-class married couple from the suburbs

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when they secretly live a criminal lifestyle and are sickly jealous of Bab’s fame and freedom.

23 Lewis’s gory special effects heavily influenced Waters for the making of Multiple Maniacs. The title refers directly to Two Thousand Maniacs! and includes gory scenes that focus on the action of killing rather than on the death of a character itself. Waters uses a great amount of fake blood to increase the horror of Lady Divine’s crimes, especially at the end of the film when she eviscerates her victims and feeds on their guts. Another echo of the Blood Trilogy is the birthday party scene in Pink Flamingos, where the characters partake in cannibalism. First, the scene opens on a regular birthday celebration [54:11]. The camera frames Babs’s trailer where the party is in full swing. A non-diegetic song, “Pink Champagne” (The Tyrones, 1957), also establishes a party atmosphere. Then an establishing shot presents the guests: some hillbillies, homosexuals and transvestites, and a Nazi. In the next scene, a medium-full shot focuses on Babs opening her birthday presents. The expression of delight on her face at the sight of the hatchet her son has given her provides clues regarding her taste for murder. Indeed, the graphic depiction of killings in the following scene enables the viewer to understand the potential extent of Divine’s revenge and anticipates the movie’s resolution. When four policemen reach the party, all the guests pounce on their preys like bloodthirsty hounds. Babs, the leader of the pack, starts slaughtering them. In a low-angle shot that mimics the victims’ point of view, Babs seems to turn into a laughing hyena, brandishing a bloody bone as a trophy. The “party animals,” literally turned into bloodthirsty predators, tear the policemen’s bright red guts and limbs apart. The constant movement of the camera accentuates their frenzy and the chaos triggered by this cannibalistic feast. As anthropophagy is generally restricted to “primitive” culture or is a means to survive in desperate times, its reenactment within a modern society is considered as one of the highest transgressions and suggests the dehumanization of its perpetrator, whose lower instincts have taken over reason and morality. The theme of cannibalism is regularly exploited in order to reinforce a movie’s outrageous value.11 In Multiple Maniacs and Pink Flamingos, both characters played by Divine commit acts of cannibalism and turn into flesh-eating animals, incapable of interacting with society without threatening its balance. Divine’s transformations into monsters can either be read as a mainstream punishment for transgressing norms, or on the contrary, as a means to reach higher power by becoming physically strong and threatening. Her fusion of the woman figure subjected to patriarchy and the monster figure challenges their legitimacy, and becomes an act of rebellion and a sign of empowerment. This hybrid creature, half Diva, half Godzilla, has the will and the power to terrorize mainstream society and its abject body appears as a threat to order. In Powers of Horror, Julia Kristeva defines abjection as “what disturbs identity, system, order. What does not respect borders, positions, rules. The in- between, the ambiguous, the composite” (Kristeva, 1982, 4). After showings of his films, Waters and Divine would receive letters from viewers either celebrating Divine’s filthy lifestyle or on the contrary accusing them of being lunatic “freaks,” a term that Waters was glad to see his Dreamlanders likened to (Waters, 33). As a form of abnormal behavior or physical appearance, the figure of the freak is intrinsically found at the margins of mainstream society, which simultaneously rejects “it” for not fitting its norms and needs “it” to exist in order to reinforce those norms: The norm governs intelligibility, allows for certain kinds of practices and action to become recognizable as such, imposing a grid of legibility on the social and defining

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the parameters of what will and will not appear within the domain of the social. The question of what it is to be outside the norm poses a paradox for thinking, for if the norm renders the social field intelligible and normalizes that field for us, then being outside the norm is in some sense being defined still in relation to it. (Butler, 2004, 42)

24 Highly influenced by Tod Browning’s 1932 controversial horror movie Freaks, Waters himself exploits many different aspects of the figure of the freak in order to play on the viewer’s feeling of rejection and attraction. Lady Divine’s “Cavalcade of Perversions” does not display deformed bodies but deviant behaviors and lifestyle, America’s contemporary freaks, including fetishists, masochists, exhibitionists, homosexuals, a puke-eater and a drug addict, making the mainstream viewers of the show feel ill at ease and express disgust while staring at them [03:15]. They eventually get punished for their voyeuristic curiosity when they get attacked and robbed at the end of the performance. The overall grotesque dimension of Waters’s gore scenes can’t help but make the viewer smile or laugh even if s/he might feel uncomfortable or grossed out at the sight of such behavior. Nevertheless, through these exaggerated representations, Waters gives visibility to those regarded as second-class citizens and celebrates human “deviance” as an act of freedom. The association of gory elements with ludicrous displays of “deviant” sexual practices highlights mainstream society’s outdated feeling of fear inspired by the potential threat to norm and order represented by the very existence of the Other, being inherently different or deciding to follow other paths than the ones promoted and encouraged by society.

25 The filmmaker’s appropriation of processes exploited in the mondo film genre—the fake journalistic portrayal of primitive living forms and behaviors—endows the disgusting or inappropriate scenes with a realistic dimension and gives the audiences the opportunity to intrude in spaces featuring human practices their society regards as backward or even insufferable.

Shockumentaries and Mondo Films

26 The mondo film genre was inspired by documentaries from the first half of the twentieth century, exploiting the exotic practices and habits of primitive societies all over the world. Later, it became an inspiration for many “mockumentary” films of the 1960s. In 1962, an Italian import entitled Mondo Cane by filmmakers Paolo Cavara, Gualtiero Jacopetti and Franco Prosperi, who intended to unsettle Western viewers by confronting them with supposedly realistic and immoral human behaviors around the world, led to the emergence of this subgenre: Mondo Cane became a smash international hit […] In the guise of education travelogues, the mondo pictures promised to sicken and disgust with the worst the world had to offer […]. Sometimes real, sometimes faked for the camera, it was yet another cinematic equivalent of the carnival freak show. (McDonough, 2005, 126)

27 At the very beginning of Mondo Cane, a voice-over both asserts and warns the audience about the authenticity of the shocking images and scenes they are about to see, while the camera follows a dog on a leash being taken by force to a pound as other dogs behind the fence nervously bark as they watch it: “All the scenes you will see in this film are true and are taken only from life. If often they are shocking, it is because there are many shocking things in this world” [1:19]. The direct address to the audience would probably make them apprehensive as to what they will be confronted with, the

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noise of the dogs barking evoking a feeling of unease. Nevertheless, this opening scene also arouses the audience’s curiosity, as they are about to witness everyday life scenes they are not used to experiencing, especially inappropriate behaviors attesting to men’s primitive or pernicious instincts. Exploiting the worst in human nature, mondo films became an inspiring genre for many filmmakers who understood their potential shock value but also the second-degree humor they could infuse their movies with, especially through the use of a narrator: The Mondo films encourage viewers to laugh at, or along with, the “voice of sobriety.” We are drawn into the narrator’s attitude—“let me show you this strange thing or event.” We agree and accept the contract because it gives us the gratification of naughty transgression in the mocking guise of epistophilic discovery. (McCarty, 1995, 106) Different filmmakers appropriated the codes of the mondo film genre to sensationalize certain controversial themes. In 1966, Russ Meyer shot Mondo Topless in only five days on a $12,000 budget, in order to make profit out of the exploration of the 1960s decadence of strip clubs in San Francisco (Frasier, 1990). Waters’s Mondo Trasho, whose title is also a direct tribute to Mondo Topless, exploits the mondo film genre’s capacity to depict humanity’s potential real life trashiness and gross out his audience. Mondo Trasho’s opening scene displays real shots of chickens getting their heads chopped, thus emulating mondo films such as Mondo Cane and its ritualistic animal killings perpetrated by primitive tribes. Waters did not shoot this footage himself and used cheap stock footage he had bought instead, on which an executioner with a dark hood and a leathery tunic seizes one chicken after another and beheads them with an axe [0:04]. As the chicken killings are filmed in subsequent shots, the viewer has no choice but to believe that they are real, thus setting the tone for the movie. Besides, it was shot in black and white, as Waters’s own scenes, yet another way of saving time and money without impairing the effect of continuity between the introduction scene and the following ones. Waters also clearly intended to blur the line between his fictional characters and what his actors were capable of in the extradiegetic world. Indeed, these white American citizens seem to commit acts associated with the primitive and considered as abject when enacted within a “civilized” society that finds itself confronted with “those fragile states where man strays on the territories of animal” (Kristeva, 12). Thus, Waters’s bad taste is debunking the dichotomy between the civilized and the primitive and asserts the existence of primal drives within modern human societies.

28 In Multiple Maniacs, he further exploits the newsreel genre in order to scare and repel his audience regarding his characters’ lifestyle. Lady Divine is a thief and a murderer who implies that she killed American actress and model Sharon Tate, married to Polish filmmaker Roman Polanski.12 Multiple Maniacs was shot just a few days after the killing, which had shocked the American press and people. As no suspect had been found yet, Waters wanted his characters to claim the killings, which would be regarded as profoundly outrageous and offensive. But when the Manson Family members were identified before the end of the shooting, Waters felt that he had to change the ending of the film. He made it clear in the plot that Divine had not really done it but that she was crazy enough to commit such gruesome crimes instead: “We wanted to scare the world, just like the unheard-of Manson Family, but we used a movie camera instead of deadly weapons. […] As I was completing the film, the Manson Family was caught, so I

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quickly changed the ending […]. Nobody, not even Divine, could upstage Charles Manson” (Waters, 62).

29 The lack of a clear distinction between the characters and the actors who play them reaches its climax in the final scene of Pink Flamingos [91:05]. Waters’s voice, parodying mondo film narrators, comments on Divine’s action and directly addresses the audience: “Well, you think you know somebody filthier? Watch as Divine proves that not only is she the filthiest person alive in the world, she is also the filthiest actress in the world. What you are about to see is a real thing.” As Divine, Crackers and Cotton are hitchhiking to get to Boise, Idaho, Divine suddenly stops when she sees a man walking his dog looking for a spot to do its business. Once again, a non-diegetic song, “(How much is) That Doggie in the Window?” (Patti Page, 1952) is used to establish a humorous contrast between Divine’s actions and the song, as the naïve lyrics are far removed from the disgusting behavior on screen. Divine’s intentions are clear as several medium close-ups of her face and body show her staring at the dog, licking her lips and rubbing her stomach with anticipation. A low-angle shot then shows the dog getting ready to defecate on the pavement. Divine sits next to it, picks up the feces and eats them while looking at the camera, hence breaking the fourth wall.13 In so doing, she gives both Waters and the audience a “shitty grin” and winks at the camera, while the camera zooms in on her delighted face and dirty teeth. Since there is no discontinuity between the shot of the dog defecating and Divine picking up the feces, the viewer has to believe that the actress really is eating dog feces, which definitely makes her the filthiest person/actress alive. This single scene, arguably Waters’s most famous, built his reputation as the “Pope of Trash” and helped establish his early movies as exploitation cinema: “Divine picked up the dogshit and put it in her mouth. She chewed it and gave a shit-eating grin to the camera. And presto–cinema history! A first and a last in the annals of exploitation and a finale to one of the cheapest feature- length movies ever made” (Waters, 12). When the film was eventually released, The Maryland State Censor Board received complaints, most of them directed toward this last scene, but nothing could be done to have it removed, for neither bad taste nor trash humor were illegal (Waters, 91).

Conclusion

30 The emergence of a cinema which emulates the techniques, aesthetics and politics of a form at the margins of the dominant Hollywood model testifies to a desire for more freedom to deal with taboo topics and make money in the process. It also reflects Waters’s political stance on the American society of his time, which he conveys through the creation of an alternative vision of the world. By rejecting the major studios’ rules and embracing the exploitation of human appeals for lower impulses, Waters humorously celebrates the potential decadence of human beings, gives visibility to those that mainstream society despises, challenges gender roles and exploits bad taste as a device to desacralize norms Hollywood was very seriously trying to preserve. After all, according to him, “bad taste is what entertainment is all about” (Waters, 2). In the 1970s, his derivative use of codes from exploitation cinema drove him to make films that would speak to specific audiences looking for models Hollywood films failed to provide. Today, countless major studio productions lucratively exploit sex, gore,

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violence and trash humor to target and appeal to male teens and young adult audiences.

31 It has not been the intention of this article to be exhaustive regarding the influence of exploitation on Waters’s moviemaking. As an unquenchable moviegoer, his productions are full of references to the different films and filmmakers that have influenced him most. His exploitation of exploitation films, along with his access to bigger budgets and evolutions in the movie industry, partly explains how he has become an eccentric Hollywood outsider and a pop culture icon. Hairspray (1988), Waters’s least provocative film and a teen movie parody, was highly successful among mainstream audiences.14 From then on, he benefitted from much bigger budgets and started hiring Hollywood stars such as Kathleen Turner in Serial Mom (1994) made on a $13,000,000 budget. From the late 1980s on, his films have hardly displayed such trashy, explicit bad taste compared to his first productions that are somewhere between exploitation and underground cinema. Yet his later films might lead more people to get a taste of Waters’s politics. They continue to question society’s norms and still display a certain amount of camp and toilet humor, intended to make the viewer laugh rather than feel sick. If these films cannot be defined as exploitation themselves, they constantly pay tribute to his influences, especially Cecil B. Demented (2000), a black comedy that celebrates underground and exploitation cinema through many characters’ obsession with cult filmmakers, including Kenneth Anger, Herschell Gordon Lewis, Rainer Werner Fassbinber and Andy Warhol.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

BENSHOFF, Harry and Sean M. GRIFFIN, America On Film, Representing Race, Class, Gender, and Sexuality at the Movies, Malden, Wiley-Blackwell, 2009 [2004].

BELL, Elizabeth, Theories of Performance, Thousand Oaks, United States, SAGE Publications, 2008.

BLOOD FEAST, directed by Herschell Gordon LEWIS, written by Herschell Gordon LEWIS, et al., with William Kerwin (Detective Pete Thornton), Mal Arnold (Fuad Ramses), Connie Mason (Suzette Fremont), Lyn Bolton (Mrs. Dorothy Fremont), Scott H. Hall (Frank), Toni Calvert (Trudy Sanders), Box Office Spectacular, 1963, Something Weird Video, 2000.

BUTLER, Judith, Gender Trouble, New York, Routledge, 2006 [1990].

---, Undoing Gender, New York, Routledge, 2004.

CARTMELL, Deborah, et al., Trash Aesthetics, Popular Culture and its Audience, London, Pluto Press, 1997.

CLOVER, Carol J., Men, Women and Chain Saws: Gender in the Modern Horror, New Jersey, Princeton University Press, 1992.

DOHERTY, Thomas, Hollywood’s Censor: Joseph I. Breen and the Production Code Administration, New York, Columbia University Press, 2007.

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FASTER, PUSSYCAT! KILL! KILL!, directed by Russ MEYER, written by Russ MEYER, and Jack MORAN, with Tura Satana (Varla), Haji (Rosie), Lori Williams (Billie), Susan Bernard (Linda), Stuart Lancaster (The Old Man), Paul Trinka (Kirk), Russ Meyer, 1965, The Russ Meyer Collection, Arrow Films, 2006.

FEMALE TROUBLE, written and directed by John WATERS, with Divine (Dawn Davenport/Earl Peterson), David Lochary (Donald Dasher), Mary Vivian Pearce (Donna Dasher), Mink Stole (Taffy Davenport), Edith Massy (Ida Nelson), Cookie Muller (Concetta), Susan Walsh (Chicklet Fryer), New Line Cinema, 1974.

FREELAND, Cynthia A., The Naked and the Undead: Evil and the Appeal of Horror, Boulder, Westview Press, 2000.

FRASIER, David K., Russ Meyer—the Life and Films: a Biography and a Comprehensive, Illustrated, and Annoted Filmogprahy and Bibliography, Jefferson, NC, McFarland & Company, Inc., 1990.

HAVILAND, William A., et al., Cultural Anthropology: The Human Challenge, Belmont, CA, Wadsworth Publishing Co Inc., Twelfth Edition, 2007 [2005].

HURTREZ, Lionel, Film Analysis in English, Paris, Editions Orphys, 2013.

HUTCHEON, Linda, A Theory of Parody, The Teachings of Twentieth-Century Art Forms, Urbana and Chicago, University of Illinois Press, 2000 [1985].

JOHNSTON, Denah A., No Future Now, A Nomadology of Resistance and Subversion, New York, Atropos Press, 2012.

KRISTEVA, Julia, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, New York, Columbia University Press, 1982 [1980].

LÉVI-STRAUSS, Claude, Les Structures Élémentaires de la Parenté, Berlin, New York, Mouton de Gruyter, 2002 [1948].

MANNIX, Daniel P., We Who Are Not As Others, Hong Kong, RE/Search Publications, 1999 [1976].

McCARTY, John, The Sleaze Merchants, Adventure in Exploitation Filmmaking, New York, St. Martin’s Press, 1995.

McDONOUGH, Jimmy, Big Bosoms and Square Jaws, The Biography of Russ Meyer, King of the Sex Film, New York, Three Rivers Press, 2005.

MEYER, Moe, The Politics and Poetics of Camp, London and New York, Routledge, 1994.

MONDO CANE, written and directed by Gualtiero JACOPETTI, et al., Cineriz, 1962.

MONDO TRASHO, written and directed by John WATERS, with Mary Vivian Pearce (The Bombshell), Divine (Divine/Greaser in Alley), David Lochary (Asylum Inmate/Dr. Coathanger), Mink Stole (Homeless Woman/Asylum Inmate), Dreamland Studios, 1969, VHS Cinema Group Home Video, 1989.

MULTIPLE MANIACS, written and directed by John WATERS, with Divine (Lady Divine), David Lochary (Mr. David), Mary Vivian Pearce (Bonnie), Mink Stole (Mink), Cookie Mueller (Cookie Divine), Edith Massey (Edith the Barmaid), New Line Cinema, 1970, VHS Raven Video, 1998.

MULVEY, Laura, Visual and Other Pleasures (Language, Discourse, Society), Bloomington, Indiana University Press, 1989.

NEWMAN, Barbara M., et al., “Peer Group Membership and a Sense of Belonging: Their relationship to Adolescent Behaviour Problems,” Adolescence, vol. 42, n° 166, 2007, 241-63.

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NOGUEZ, Dominique, Une Renaissance du Cinéma, le cinéma “underground” américain, Paris, Klincksieck, 1985.

OAKLEY, Ann, Sex, Gender and Society, Farnham, Ashgate, 1972 [2015].

PELA, Robert L., Filthy, The Weird World of John Waters, Los Angeles, Alyson Books, 2002.

PINK FLAMINGOS, written and directed by John WATERS, with John Waters (narrator/Mr. J), Divine (Divine/Babs Johnson), David Lochary (Raymond Marble), Mink Stole (Connie Marble), Mary Vivian Pearce (Cotton), Danny Mills (Crackers), Edith Massey (Edie), Cookie Mueller (Cookie), New Line Cinema, 1972, Metropolitan Video, 2006.

RICH, Adrienne, “Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence” (1980) in Adrienne Rich, Blood, Bread and Poetry: Selected Prose 1979-1985, New York, Norton and Company, 1994.

ROSS, Jonathan, The Incredibly Strange Film Book: An Alternative History of Cinema, New York, Simon and Schuster, 1995.

SCHAEFER, Eric, Bold! Daring! Shocking! True!: A History of Exploitation Cinema 1919-1959, Durham, Duke University Press,1999.

SCONCE, Jeffrey, Sleaze Artists, Cinema at the Margins of Taste, Style, and Politics, Durham, Duke University Press, 2007.

---, “Trashing the Academy: Taste, Excess and an Emerging Politics of Cinematic style,” Screen, vol. 36, n° 4, 1995, 371-93.

SONTAG, Susan, A Susan Sontag Reader, “Notes on Camp”, New York, Vintage Books, 1983 [1964].

STERN, Jane, and Michael STERN, The Encyclopedia of Bad Taste, New York, HarperCollins Publishers, 1990.

STEVENSON, Jack, Desperate Visions, The Journal of Alternative Cinema–Volume 1, “Camp America, The Films of John Waters and George & Mike Kuchar,” London, Creation Books, 1996.

TEPPERMAN, Lorne, Deviance, Crime and Control, Beyond the Straight and the Narrow, Canada, Oxford University Press, 2010.

THORET, Jean-Baptiste, Une expérience américaine du chaos: Massacre à la tronçonneuse de Tobe Hopper, Paris, Dreamland, 2000.

TWO THOUSAND MANIACS!, written and directed by Herschell Gordon LEWIS, with William Kerwin (Tom White), Connie Mason (Terry Adams), Jeffrey Allen (Mayor Buckman), Shelby Livingston (Bea Miller), Box Office Spectaculars, 1964, Something Weird Video, 2000.

TYLER, Parker, Underground Film, A Critical History, Boston, Da Capo Press, 1995 [1969].

WATERS, John, Crackpot, The Obsessions of John Waters, New York, First Vintage Books Edition, 1987 [1983].

---, Shock Value, A Tasteful Book about Bad Taste, London, Fourth Estate, 1991.

NOTES

1. The title of the movie refers to plastic pink lawn flamingos that were massively produced from 1957 on in the United States. “Cheap, mass-produced, artificial and unusually neon pink,” they have become an icon of pop culture and a signifier of kitsch and bad taste.

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http://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/17/opinion/17price.html?_r=0 (Accessed on January 4 th, 2016) 2. http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0064683/soundtrack. (Accessed on November, 2nd, 2014) 3. The company built its reputation on distributing many low-budget films outside the mainstream, such as the hit slasher film A Nightmare on Elm Street, directed by Wes Craven in 1984. http://www.fundinguniverse.com/company-histories/new-line-cinema-inc-history/ (Accessed on January 23rd, 2016). 4. The Simpsons, “Homer’s Phobia,” Season 8, Episode 168, Fox Network, aired on February 16th, 1997; My Name is Earl, “Kept a Guy Locked in a Truck,” Season 2, Episode 14, NBC, aired on January 28th, 2007; Saturday Night Live, Season 36, Episode 13, NBC, aired on January 29th, 2011. 5. Andy Warhol named his “Superstars” using superlatives in order to exaggerate the artificiality of their stardom (Benshoff and Griffin, 2009, 193). 6. “Lacking recognizable stars, exploitation press books attempted to promote their players as new discoveries with stories like ‘First-Timers in Shock Drama’ […] and ‘Picture Boasts All-Native Cast’.” (Schaefer, 114) 7. In “Visual Pleasures and Narrative Cinema” (1973), Laura Mulvey explores the theory of the male gaze, asserting that the viewer tends to identify with dominant male characters. Her essay also evokes the fragmentation of women bodies, subjected to men’s voyeuristic desires, the camera itself becoming a tool used to objectify women as each body part is independently fetishized. 8. The nuclear family was highly widespread and promoted in post-World War II America as a traditional and natural model of stability (Haviland, Prins, Walrath, McBride, 2007 [2005], 220-21). 9. A modern usage of the word “queer” intends to define sexuality and sexual identities as much more complex and fluid, thus breaking with their binary categorization as solely heterosexual or homosexual (de Lauretis, 1991; Sedgwick, 1990; Duggan, 1991). 10. Lewis himself told Waters that he has been called the “King of Gore” since Blood Feast (Waters, 204). 11. Shot in 1979-1980 by Italian filmmaker Ruggero Deodato, cult horror movie Cannibal Holocaust itself was influenced by mondo films and tells the story of a documentary film crew looking for primitive, cannibalistic tribes in the Amazon Forrest. 12. On the night of August 9th, 1969, members of the “Manson family” followed the orders of their charismatic leader Charles Manson and slaughtered Sharon Tate who was eight-month pregnant and three of her friends. For further reading, see: Bugliosi, Vincent, Gentry, Curt, Helter Skelter, the True Story of the Manson Family, 1974.Many references to the murder case appear in Waters’s films. In Pink Flamingos, a graffiti on a wall downtown reads “Free Tex Watson,” one of the convicted members of the Manson family. 13. In Theories of Performance, Elizabeth Bell reminds us that this concept, originally linked with theater and the relationship between the audience and the performers, also applies to cinema and television (2008, 203). 14. A musical was even directed by Adam Shankman in 2007, based on Waters’s film and its Broadway adaptation from 2002, featuring Hollywood stars such as John Travolta and Michelle Pfeiffer.

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ABSTRACTS

A self-taught filmmaker working with very low budgets, fascinated with Hollywood’s glamor as well as exploitation and underground cinema, John Waters has appropriated techniques and modes of production, distribution and promotion specific to exploitation from the beginning of his career in the late 1960s. The illicit, controversial topics addressed in his early movies, traditionally brought up by exploitation in order to attract audiences whose voyeuristic desires would not be fulfilled by Hollywood’s promotion of moral standards, have predictably put him at the margins of mainstream movie culture. Many exploitation filmmakers have had a strong impact on the filmmaker’s aesthetics and politics—among them, American filmmaker Russ Meyer, a master of sexploitation, whose strong female characters inspired the creation of Waters’s lead female heroines embodied by American drag queen Divine. A pioneer of the gore subgenre, Herschell Gordon Lewis and his exploitation of graphic violence and blood in order to take the horror genre one step further has influenced the gruesome aesthetics of Waters’s films. Likewise, Waters’s emulations of the mondo films, pseudo-documentaries depicting sensational topics and supposedly real barbaric human behaviors all around the world, have also contributed to gross out his audiences. This article will focus on the filmmaker’s choice to borrow specific codes and motifs of exploitation cinema, leading to the elaboration of a hybrid, trash cinema humorously proposing an alternative vision of the world, giving visibility to social outcasts, questioning society’s norms and debunking gender roles. His first feature-length movies, Mondo Trasho (1969), Multiple Maniacs (1970), Pink Flamingos (1972) and Female Trouble (1974), which account for the influence of exploitation on the filmmaker’s career, can be described as exploitation cinema themselves to a certain extent and assert the emergence of Waters as the “Pope of Trash.”

Cinéaste autodidacte subjugué par le glamour hollywoodien et intrigué par les cinémas d’exploitation et underground, John Waters se lance dans la production et la réalisation de ses premiers films au cours des années 60. Les budgets très restreints dont il dispose le poussent à imiter les techniques et modes de production, distribution et promotion du cinéma d’exploitation. L’esthétique de ses films et les sujets controversés qu’ils abordent témoignent de son admiration pour certaines grandes figures du cinéma d’exploitation : parmi eux, le cinéaste Russ Meyer, « L’Einstein du Sexe », maître de l’exploitation du sexe et de la nudité dont les personnages féminins indomptables ont inspiré la drag queen Divine pour l’élaboration de ses rôles. L’esthétique et les modes de production d’Herschell Gordon Lewis, le « Roi du Gore », ont contribué à établir la dimension horrifique de nombreuses scènes macabres de ses premiers films. Waters emprunte également les codes des films d’exploitation « mondo », caractérisés par leur représentation réaliste et racoleuse des comportements humains les plus immoraux. L’appropriation des moyens de production et de l’esthétique propre à ces différents genres de cinéma d’exploitation permettent à John Waters de créer son propre genre cinématographique, mêlant gore, érotisme, provocation et transgression des normes visuelles et sociales, et de s’imposer dès lors comme le « Pape du trash ». Plus que de simples hommages à ses différentes sources d’inspiration, ses premiers longs-métrages, Mondo Trasho (1969), Multiple Maniacs (1970), Pink Flamingos (1972) et Female Trouble (1974), peuvent être eux-mêmes définis, dans une certaine mesure, comme relevant du cinéma d’exploitation.

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INDEX

Mots-clés: mauvais goût, monstres, genre, gore, icône, norme, mondo, parodie, sexploitation, transgression, trash Keywords: bad taste, freaks, gender roles, gore, icon, mainstream, mondo film, parody, sexploitation, shock value, transgression, trash

AUTHOR

ELISE PEREIRA NUNES Université François Rabelais (Tours)

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“Unnatural, unnatural, unnatural, unnatural unnatural” . . . but real? The Toolbox Murders (Dennis Donnelly, 1978) and the Exploitation of True Story Adaptations

Wickham Clayton

Introduction

1 In broaching the question of what exploitation cinema exploits, and even how it exploits what it does, the possibility arises that a film’s style and narration is itself engaging in the exploitative process. Dennis Donnelly’s 1978 film The Toolbox Murders is a useful case study in terms of style, construction, narrative, and genre. The Toolbox Murders centers on the murders of several young women at an apartment complex, and the kidnapping of one teenage girl, Laurie Ballard. The film follows the police investigation, the independent investigation of Laurie’s brother John, and Laurie’s captivity at the hands of the building’s superintendent, Vance, and ends after Laurie’s breaking free from her abductor with an intertitle stating that the film is based on true events. While not transcending its widely regarded status as “exploitation,”1 it does demonstrate the possibility of being either aesthetically and narratively sophisticated or clumsy. However, when the possibility of the film being based on a true story arises, the perceived flaws woven into the film begin to appear a by-product of adapting a “real-life” event, and accepted as a necessary part of the narrative, in spite of the fact that there is no record of such events ever having occurred.

2 My aim, therefore, is to explore this particular text, which closely adheres to traditional conceptions of exploitation cinema,2 to demonstrate how The Toolbox Murders exploits viewer cognition through the use of “true story” framing and acknowledgement to excuse what can be understood as incoherent narration, based on

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the definition established by Todd Berliner (2010). To do so, I will engage with discourse on true story adaptation to show how the trope functions within the framework of the story.

3 Eric Schaefer (1999) highlights the fact that the marketing of exploitation films has regularly tried to situate narratives within the realm of “real life.”3 Schaefer writes: “Closely tied to the timeliness of a film, but also to sexual and other aspects was veracity” (109). He further explicates that “[a]udiences were encouraged to put aside what reservations they might have about seeing a disreputable film because it was ‘true’ or ‘factual’” (109). However, The Toolbox Murders is anomalous, as the implication that the film is based on a true story is (1) part of, but not central to the marketing campaign,4 and (2) necessary to the justification of narrative incoherence and ideological incongruity in the film.

4 I refer in this essay to narrative incoherence in the manner explored by Todd Berliner in Hollywood Incoherent: Narration in Seventies Cinema. Berliner explains that he uses “the word ‘incoherence’ […] not in its common metaphoric sense of irrationality or meaninglessness but rather in the literal sense to mean a lack of connectedness or integration among different elements. The incoherencies in seventies cinema are like those of a drawer full of knickknacks” (25). In other words, Berliner’s primary thesis rests on the consideration of these seemingly disconnected, unrelated elements as fundamental to experiential complexity for the viewer. Such a consideration is key to the pleasures provided by the viewing of The Toolbox Murders, and therefore highly relevant to an analysis of the film’s narration. Similarly, Schaefer notes the commonality of these types of incongruities and incoherencies, stating that “although I will argue that exploitation films operated out of particular ideological positions, these positions were filled with fissures due to the fractured, delirious nature of the films” (94). The Toolbox Murders adheres closely to Berliner’s description, though perhaps without the eloquence of his particular case studies.5

5 It is, however, in the narration of its story that The Toolbox Murders becomes an unusual case study. This presents three separate problems: (1) does the process of adapting a true story affect the way in which traditional narrative elements are presented, particularly when the process of storytelling is rendered atypical of classical narration? (2) how does the film itself present these narrative elements, and (3) to what effect?

Approaches to True Story Adaptation

6 Adapting true or historical events is not unproblematic, particularly where theory and theoretical conceptions of adaptation are concerned. Aside from fundamental philosophical questions like “what is true?” and “can truth be known?”,6 we start to delve into linear narrative conceptions of history. Linda Hutcheon writes that “[t]he seeming simplicity of the familiar label, ‘based on a true story,’ is a ruse: in reality, such historical adaptations are as complex as historiography itself” (18). The implication here is that, in recounting history, even academically adhering closely to supported accounts, one must still be selective and carefully choose how the information is organized. Taking such events and fictionalizing them further complicates the process, resulting in the alteration of facts and accounts and favoring storytelling over veracity.

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7 Screenwriter Ronald Harwood addresses this concern when discussing his script for The Pianist (Roman Polanski, 2002): The Pianist also deals with a dreadful historical event. You can’t start glamorizing it, you can’t start trying to soften it. You have to tell it as you believe it is. And there is no ultimate truth of it because you can’t explain that to anybody, so the truth is very difficult to get at. But whatever the truth is within one on that subject, you have to be true to that truth. (Wilkinson and Price, 2007, 103) Therefore, Harwood admittedly gauges truth and history from a subjective positioning, which, in turn, allows him to develop an appropriate form and structure for the narrative. However, this form takes on different ramifications precisely because of its relative context to “real” events.

8 With regards to violent films like The Toolbox Murders, the acknowledgement of the text as having a source in real events becomes an explanation or excuse for the content. Joel Black argues that “[a]rtistic depictions of violence are less likely to seem gratuitous and sensational when, as in the case of In Cold Blood, they re-enact actual incidents and can be considered a form of psychological or social documentary” (2002, 113). This statement echoes Schaefer’s statement about audiences overcoming their reservations of content based on claims to veracity. However, critical discourses problematize this view. Violent films particularly can be critically accused of disrespectfully sensationalizing or trivializing a tragic event.7

9 William Verrone argues that discerning the validity of such criticisms is based entirely upon a larger understanding of context: “[a]ttempting to understand how adaptations interact with sociocultural contexts allows us to see how and why directors make certain choices in the adaptation process” (2011, 33). This, in my view, risks placing too much emphasis on the role that culture plays in the establishment and form of an adaptation. I will, however, later humor this position, establishing the film’s socio- political context specifically in light of the progress made with women’s liberation and feminism in the 1970s, to show how, even within this view, The Toolbox Murders proves unusual and ideologically murky.

10 Thomas Leitch places the “true story” adaptation within the context of marketing and expectation: “[g]iven that the claim to be based on a true story is always strategic or generic rather than historical or existential, what exactly does it mean? One thing it does not mean is that the film is an accurate record of historical events” (2007, 282). Leitch’s comment here is quite apt, as, despite the ending intertitle for The Toolbox Murders, there is no recorded evidence for the film actually being based on a true story. Although it purports to have changed the names of the characters, the events have not been connected to any similar events in 1967.8 While this problematizes an analysis of the film as an adaptation of a previously existing text or events, reading it as an adaptation, using relevant theory, reveals the way in which an incoherent narrative can be cognitively processed as, at minimum, acceptably incoherent.

The Narration and Cognitive Effect of The Toolbox Murders

11 I have chosen this film to analyze with respect to adaptation and the exploitation thereof because the film’s structure and form are so unusual that it only becomes sensical and in some cases acceptable once it purports to have a basis in reality.9

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Furthermore, I argue that it is the appropriation and exploitation of the “true story” guise that affects the viewer’s cognitive reading of, and response to, the film. The film not only proves to exploit female nudity and extreme violence (“atrocity” or “gore”), but it exploits a specific adaptive framing to excuse a messy and incoherent narrative.

12 The film begins inside a car as it is driven at night, religious radio stations are heard on the soundtrack. Interrupting this sequence, there is a flashback to a car crash in which a young woman is killed, with the past event and the current event ambiguously blurring into each other.

13 After this introduction, we see a large man wearing all black and a ski mask with a toolbox. He goes into an apartment building, and the film follows him as he uses keys to enter two separate apartments and brutally murder three women, using different items from the toolbox. The police then become involved, begin an investigation, and we are introduced to Vance, the landlord and caretaker. The next sequence presents Laurie Ballard, a 15-year-old girl, Joanne, her mother, and her older brother, John and their home life—the family is close but Joanne works late nights at a bar. The following night, a woman who lives in the apartment below the Ballards is murdered with a nail gun after masturbating in the bath, and Laurie is abducted by the murderer. The police return, but become so concerned with the sex lives of the victims, they miss any useful evidence. John, trying to find his own evidence as to Laurie’s whereabouts, goes into the apartments and runs into Kent, a classmate, and Vance’s nephew, who is cleaning the apartments. It is then revealed that Vance is the killer, and has tied Laurie up in his house and is dressing and feeding her, treating her as a surrogate daughter to replace his own who was killed in the car crash shown at the beginning of the film. He reveals his religious mania which is the motivation for his murders, as the things those women did were “dirty” and “unnatural.”

14 The police regularly appear, making no progress at all on the investigation, still fixated on the sex lives of the victims. John discovers Vance’s involvement, and Kent confronts and kills John in order to protect his uncle. Kent then confronts Vance and informs him that he used to have sex with Vance’s daughter, Kent’s cousin, often, and she therefore wasn’t as innocent as Vance thought. Kent kills Vance, begins to untie Laurie, but then rapes her. She seems resigned to staying with Kent until she finds out that he has killed her brother and Vance. In the final moments, she is shown looking at the scissors lying next to her that were used to cut her binds, with Kent lying next to her, and in the final shot she is walking through a deserted parking lot at night covered in blood. An intertitle appears, saying: The events dramatized in this film actually took place in 1967. “Laurie Ballard” spent from 1967 until 1970 in a mental institution. In April 1974 “Joanne Ballard” was killed in a single car accident. In 1975 “Laurie Ballard” married. She and her husband now have one child and live in California in the San Fernando Valley approximately four miles from where her brother and “Vance” and “Kent Kingsley” died. This synopsis provides a simulacrum of the reasonable cause-and-effect logic of the story itself, but the structure of the narrative is of use here. The film runs 93:4910. The first murders retain little narrative import, yet consist of the first 16:49 of the film. The plot does not gather momentum until that point, when the police arrive to begin their investigation. At 19:41, Laurie, the central female character, appears. Even at this point, the uneven balance and pacing of the film becomes evident. At the end of the first of three acts, at 29:02, Laurie is abducted, showing a swift progress from her introduction

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as a significant character to her being immediately threatened. At 50:51, just over halfway through, the identity of the masked killer is revealed. This is an unusual step, particularly considering how the film takes pains to disguise the killer’s identity—after the first murder, wherein the killer’s ski mask is removed, the camera closely follows the mask itself as the killer pulls it on and fixes it over his face, in a way that prevents the viewer seeing who is underneath. Compare this to Halloween (John Carpenter, 1978) from the same year where the killer’s identity is revealed at the outset and is never a point of narrative tension or suspense, or Black Christmas (Bob Clark, 1974), which turns the killer’s identity into an element of the narrative drive, supposedly revealed at the end. While the climax occurs over the last 22 minutes, which is not particularly unusual as this comprises the bulk of the final act, the last of the police investigation is shown immediately prior to this at 67:48, with no valuable information revealed.

15 The police investigation is a significant point of discussion. While an ineffectual investigation is not unheard of,11 The Toolbox Murders uses it in an unusual way. The introduction of this investigation is typical of this sort of film, especially as it becomes an impetus for John to begin his own investigation because he feels that nothing valuable is being turned up. The problem is that the film returns to the investigation multiple times, each time with no new information and with investigators consistently fixated on the victims’ sex lives. This is particularly interesting as sex is an important reason for which the women were killed, and Laurie’s relative innocence is why she was abducted, but their repetitive insinuations that Laurie may be highly sexually active feel excessive. Therefore, the frequent reiterations of these sequences prove superfluous with no real narrative import.

16 The murders at the opening are extremely violent, quite graphic, and contain little narrative import, or at least, not enough narrative import to warrant the screen time used. The problems with narrative logic is highlighted in the sequence where Vance reveals he is the killer [50:51]. He seems to ultimately want a surrogate daughter to replace his dead one, but why kill women he feels are unvirtuous? The only explanation given is his religious fervor, which doesn’t feel like a satisfying explanation for his actions. In fact, that all of these “toolbox murders” occur within the first act and do not reappear for the last two acts of the film not only indicate the title as something of a misnomer, but reveal the inconsistent nature of the film’s narrative structure. The murders in the finale, though violent and brutal, are framed in a wholly different way than those in the first act.

17 So how does the “true story” label affect the reading of this film? Hochberg and Brooks, in outlining a model of cognitive processes in film viewing, explain that:

F0 F0 5B f5D irst, there is the answer or confirmation to be obtained by the next glance. Second, there are the next expected features or landmarks, not immediately imminent, implied by the current action. Third, the viewer has a set of abstract readinesses, primed by previous events, for whatever may come afterward. Then, if a contradiction or some appeal by the film itself requires it, the viewer can consult and revise the story structure as far as it has developed. (1996, 381) Using this model, a scene-by-scene viewing experience of The Toolbox Murders can result in experiencing a sort of cognitive disarray. The film manages, on a sequence-by- sequence basis, to provide nearly unpredictable narrative information (three death sequences in a row, or the revelation of Vance as the killer at the halfway point), or predictable but useless narrative points (the police investigation), which, when the viewer consults and revises the story structure, manages to find a difficult precedent

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for further predictions. However, if the film is watched to the conclusion, the intertitle at the close [90:09] unifies the incoherent narrative in the viewer’s mind, not only explaining that the events witnessed led to further events not depicted, but that the events actually happened and that the filmmakers cannot be made fully culpable for narrative flaws. While technical problems can be placed at the doorstep of the people behind the camera,12 exploiting viewer expectation and the cognitive force of the information that the film is based on a “true story,” whether that is true or not, could be seen as a concerted attempt to not only deflect attention from the filmmakers, but somehow magically absolve them from what would generally be considered a wildly incoherent narrative.

Ideological Incongruities

18 To return to Verrone’s comments regarding context, I will suspend my reservations towards this argument momentarily to explore how exploitation and sociocultural context are seemingly at odds, and how The Toolbox Murders supports the muddying of the ideologies of sociological politics and the exploitation film industries. Berliner addresses, in a less broad sense than I will be exploring,13 what he calls “[m]oral or ideological incongruities, which denote a discrepancy between different ethical beliefs or belief systems. For example, war is noble vs. war is senseless and vain (Patton, 1970)” (26, emphasis and parentheses in the original). This is utilized by Berliner as one element of what he deems “conceptual incongruity” (26).

19 The feminist movement was a major cultural force in the mid-to-late 1970s in America, and based on Verrone’s stance, it would be valid to argue that The Toolbox Murders is a product of this culture. Although I make no claims to representing any particular approach or theory to feminist or gender analysis, I will at this point explore how the film approaches representations of women and sexuality, as this is a significant sociocultural/political subject at the time of production. Ultimately, I would have difficulty coming to a definitive conclusion about The Toolbox Murders’ representation of women, primarily because, with regards to gender representation, the film engages with a form of ideological incongruity that Berliner discusses. Accusations of misogyny would not be unfounded: the first act shows nameless women in various states of undress being brutally murdered, their bodies being objects of lust and violence. In arguably one of the most famous sequences of the film, one which is prominently featured on posters and home video covers, as well as the most heavily censored sequence in the UK, the masked killer watches an attractive woman masturbate in her bathtub14 [23:43] before chasing her around her apartment with a nail gun 15 [25:33]. What was cut from the British Board of Film Classification-approved version and makes the sequence even more emotionally confused, if (with regard to the character at least) clearly misogynistic is that the nude and understandably hysterical woman is consoled on her bed by the killer. She begins to relax and he puts his arm around her, stroking her hair [26:48]. The dynamic becomes vaguely sexual, but once she tries to escape, and the killer (as well as the film itself) visually links the woman with the dead girl in the car at the opening, he attacks again and kills her. This scene in itself ticks two major exploitation boxes—eroticism (an overtly sexual situation and a long period of nudity) and graphic murder—and provides key visuals for the film’s marketing strategy. There is a clear suggestion of the fetishization of the victims’ bodies prior to their murders,

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and in the case of the woman in the bathtub, there is a fetishization of her body as she masturbates, as she runs from the killer (long shots of her naked body as she runs, some in slow motion [26:00]) and following her murder, with a shot showing her lifeless eyes, the nail in her forehead, and her bare breasts [27:37]. The film itself appears to engage in and indulge a kind of problematic objectification that it later clearly decries.

20 Once the first half of the film is complete, the story reveals the problematic views of the murderer, who overtly adheres to a conservative, patriarchal, and masculinist worldview: women with sexual agency need to be cleansed, and the purest women are infantilized and need to be secured and protected, forcefully if necessary. It could even be argued of Vance’s crimes against Laurie that the kidnapping is secondary to the humiliation of infantilizing her. Vance’s masculinism is also a view that is implicitly spurred by the character’s religious fanaticism. The latter, if considered in retrospect, could be undercut by the sequence with the naked woman in the bathtub. Vance, as the masked killer, watches with seeming relish as the girl masturbates in the bath, and is even appeased when sitting next to her on the bed, venturing to touch her. The sexual implications are directly at odds with the unmasked Vance’s consistent decrying of the “unnaturalness” and filthiness of anything sexual [53:53].

21 However, the film also retains a consistency with an observation made by Berliner: “[a]lthough many horror films temper ambivalent emotional responses to fusion figures by making their monsters uniformly repulsive and threatening [...], others exploit the genre’s underlying conceptual incongruities in order to intensify spectator ambivalence” (136). Vance is an ideal example of this type of incongruity: in spite of his patriarchal positioning, female infantilizing, and misogynistic murderous intent, he is still a severely mentally ill person struggling to cope with, and is essentially in denial of, his daughter’s untimely death. There is more than a hint of pathos in Vance’s death via stabbing at the hands of Kent [82:49], who is portrayed as far more unlikeable immediately prior to killing Vance. While Vance is ultimately an abject figure, Kent is, in the end, an incestuous rapist, more comfortable with the death of women than their own sexual agency, as evinced by his simultaneous fascination with a gory crime scene and his extreme aversion to discovering the victim’s dildo [42:34]. The two characters that are violent perpetrators, whether sympathetic or not, are first and foremost unambiguously misogynistic, placing them as the exemplars of an antagonistic ideology, in spite of a potential invitation at the outset to enjoy spectatorially the view of naked women being murdered.

22 The police in charge of the investigation are also exemplary of the film’s depiction of misogynistic men. The fact that the police, representatives of the patriarchal law, are fixated on the victims’ sex lives and sexual activities, and hence fail to advance the investigation successfully, demonstrates the film’s negative consideration of patriarchal virginal gatekeeping. By being fixated on feminine sex and sexuality, the police address the heart of the murders, but not the way to successfully rescue the victim—the fallacious assumption is made that she is part of this sexually active pattern. Instead of seeking useful clues and following other lines of investigation (such as locations and movements of the residents and employees of the apartment complex), the police continue to return, repeatedly and disturbingly, to the sexual habits of young women. Although the viewer has insight into the fact that Vance is killing these women due to what he perceives as their sexual impurities, the fixation of the police on

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unproven sexual activity manages to align the police with the killer based on a voyeuristic obsession on the victims’ sexuality.

23 Furthermore, and this is key to an analysis of the treatment of gender and sexuality in the film, the rape in the climax is neither shown, nor eroticized. Laurie is screaming, crying and clearly saying “no.” She in no way enjoys it, nor responds positively to Kent’s advances [87:00]. Even more significantly, the concluding sequence deals explicitly with the fallout of rape—Laurie, now emotionally broken, drained, and fragile, sits in bed and listens numbly as Kent talks about getting married [87:58]. Upon discovering that Kent has probably killed her brother, it is then supposed that Laurie kills Kent, and she is seen in the final shot walking trancelike through the city covered in blood [89:35]. The acknowledgement of this point would severely affect the way the film is read from a representational point of view, and would make the film stand out amongst contemporary exploitation cinema.

24 This is important to note with regards to narration: the rape is unusually conveyed with regards to its generic contemporaries. The Toolbox Murders refuses to exploit this plot point or to mine it for sexual and erotic possibilities. Whether positively or negatively rendered, the tragedy of the story is more potent and is simultaneously at odds with traditional narrative development, or at least cognitive development, resulting in a further undermining of viewer familiarity and experience. The end of the story puts a distinctive cap on a film that consistently pushes against narrative coherence and tells a story that only just makes sense. And it is in the wake of this sequence, during a period in which the viewer is processing his/her emotions that s/he is presented with the intertitle that suggests that the film may be based on actual events, an ending that appears to work to absolve the film’s ideological and moral incongruities as much as its narrative incoherencies, the latter being the overarching framework for which the former, at best, support, at worst suggest.

What is being exploited?

25 In addressing The Toolbox Murders and its status as an exploitation film, I have made pointed references to unusual but significant facets and modes of aesthetic and narrative exploitation within the film. It is here useful to detail the process by which I have pinpointed these sources of exploitation, and to highlight what precisely The Toolbox Murders exploits, and how this form of exploitation can be conceived as shocking and subversive.

26 The Toolbox Murders, at least in its first act, adheres closely to conceptions of the gore film, as addressed above. However, there is a distinct failure to sustain the graphic violence and sexuality that is densely utilized in the earlier part of the film. What is significant is that the remainder of the film serves an active role in the justification of the exploitative elements largely limited to the first act. The focus on narrative and characterization that marks the last two acts appears to be a trade for the apparently unbridled, episodic, and little contextualized serial murders of four women, one who appears topless and another who is overtly sexual.

27 It is not, however, only the sexual elements and violence that are exploited, though these may be the key marketing points for the film, both foregrounded in advertising materials. As we have seen, the use of the “true story” frame is also exploited, not only as a marketing tool, but also as a narrative device. The fact that the film purports to be

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based on fact is used in some promotional material, and within the film itself at the conclusion. This means that the viewer could possibly be aware of this either in advance or in retrospect. While it would be difficult to argue for the “true story” film to be a genre unto itself, and even more difficult to determine whether The Toolbox Murders adheres to the structure of such a genre should it exist, it nonetheless remains that this information carries the weight of expectation during viewing—particularly the idea that a “true story” arguably deals with timely, difficult, or uncomfortable subject matter.16 The Toolbox Murders adheres to this not only through graphic violence and prolonged sexual sequences, but also through narrative points such as kidnapping, voyeurism, incest, mental instability, and religious fanaticism. The combination of all these elements, whether the film adheres to a specific generic structure17 or not, potentially resonates as “true-to-life.” That these expectations are established, supported, and exploited by the filmmakers through claiming to be a “true story” adds a more complex element to The Toolbox Murders and its claim to being an exploitation film.

28 Furthermore, exploitation is often deemed subversive due to what is being exploited. Each of the above listed narrative points aids the film’s overall subversive nature, and I would argue the film’s pretension to being based in fact is itself subversive. Through the film’s final intertitle before the credits, the filmmakers both exploit and undermine the trust of the viewer. First, by placing the characters’ names in inverted commas within the intertitle, the film implicitly and semiotically suggests that the characters are based on people with different names, who are being protected for any number of reasons. With this the film refers to something outside itself, bringing into relief for the viewer both the real and the fictional world, and creating distinct points of convergence between the two. Secondly, by using specific dates, the film places the so- called “real” events within living memory and a believable rendering of the past, even if elements such as fashion have been contemporized, the events in the film are given a specificity which would render this detail superfluous, were it not real. That the detail is superfluous and the events not real works as a deliberate deception from the filmmakers directed at the viewers. It also achieves the goal of utilizing an incoherent element (details of no narrative import—conceivably one of Berliner’s “knickknacks”) to render an incoherent narrative coherent. Finally, by explicating the later actions of the characters, even the narratively peripheral Joanne, which have no bearing or connection to the events of the film (i.e., Joanne’s death by car accident and Laurie’s marriage and current area of residence), the film again includes narratively superfluous detail to support the veracity of the events depicted in the eyes of the viewer. In other words, the viewer is prompted to ask: “Why would the film tell me this if it wasn’t true?”

Conclusion

29 An online review of the film Compliance (Craig Zobel, 2012) on the website birthmoviesdeath.com by poster and regular contributor FilmCritHulk—a critical persona that adopts character traits of the Hulk for his reviews, including an all-caps yelling style—says that the “true story” title card: AUTOMATICALLY PUTS THE MOVIE-WATCHER IN SOME WEIRD SORT OF BIND. WE KNOW WE ARE NOT WATCHING A DOCUMENTARY, OR EVEN NARRATIVE NON- FICTION. IT’S A MOVIE. THUS WHATEVER WE’RE ABOUT TO SEE TAKES ON A

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QUALITY OF TRUTHINESS; A VAGUE SENSE OF REALISM TO LEND CREDENCE TO THE PROCEEDINGS. (2012, n.p.) This statement is also applicable to The Toolbox Murders. Its atypical narrative structure is briefly rendered acceptable by appropriating the guise of being based on real events. The work addressed by Black, Verrone, Harwood, Hutcheon and Leitch all point to what a messy affair adapting history and reality to the cinema can be, and assuming this is at least an unconscious acknowledgement by the viewer, anomalous elements of structure and style are given the opportunity to be overlooked. Particularly as the final title card in this film goes into such detail: putting the names in quotes, providing specific years, acknowledging geography, and even revealing the eventual actions of the people this is supposedly based on.

30 The format is taken even farther than in similar films that assume the “true story” framing addressed by Leitch, like The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (Tobe Hooper, 1974) and Fargo (Ethan and Joel Coen, 1996). These films provide minimal information in relation to the characters and events. Significantly, these two examples are useful counterpoints, as the intertitles suggesting “true story” adaptations which are not necessarily so precede the narrative, unlike The Toolbox Murders; The Texas Chain Saw Massacre takes such significant liberties with the Ed Gein mythos as to be almost unrecognizably connected, especially as the opening suggests the veracity of invented elements of the story, such as characters and dates. The opening of these films appear as a warning of sorts: a way of suggesting that unpleasant events are to come, whereas The Toolbox Murders only claims links to actual events at the end, seemingly by way of explanation, as well as an invitation to re-reading the foregoing events. American Graffiti (George Lucas, 1973) and Animal House (John Landis, 1978) also include such “where are they now?” captions at the close, but refrain from revealing that the names are not real and do not list dates. This demonstrates a strong attempt to convince the viewer that it is, in fact, based on a true story, therefore attempting to make the film’s structure more palatable. Hence, The Toolbox Murders exploits and undermines the traditional relationship between a viewer and a film text that purports to be based on a true story. A close cinematic predecessor is The Honeymoon Killers (Leonard Kastle, 1969), which, while based on the actual case of “The Lonely Hearts Killers” takes liberties with the facts of the case even within its claim to factuality.18 The Toolbox Murders, however, wholly fabricates its factual source in addition to its fictional narrative, making its narration, including this claim, a unique point of fascination.

31 Ultimately, the film still appears to excuse its incoherent narrative through this false claim to being based in fact. FilmCritHulk does not appear to condone this type of approach, stating “HULK SAYS IT ALL THE TIME, BUT ‘THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN FICTION AND NON-FICTION IS THAT FICTION HAS TO MAKE SENSE.’” (2012, n.p.)

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BIBLIOGRAPHY

BERLINER, Todd, Hollywood Incoherent: Narration in Seventies Cinema, Austin, The University of Texas Press, 2010.

BLACK, Joel, The Reality Effect: Film Culture and the Graphic Imperative, London, Routledge, 2002.

FILMCRITHULK, “SXSW Movie Review: COMPLIANCE And The True Story Complex,” 2012, http:// birthmoviesdeath.com/2012/03/22/sxsw-movie-review-compliance-and-the-true-story-complex. Accessed April 11, 2016.

HOCHBERG, Julian and Virginia BROOKS, “Movies in the Mind’s Eye,” in David BORDWELL and Noël CARROLL, Post-Theory: Reconstructing Film Studies, (eds.), Madison, The University of Wisconsin Press, 1996.

HUMPHRIES, Reynold, The American Horror Film: An Introduction, Edinburgh, Edinburgh University Press, 1991.

HUTCHEON, Linda, A Theory of Adaptation, New York and London, Routledge, 2006.

LEITCH, Thomas, Film Adaptation and Its Discontents: From Gone with the Wind to The Passion of the Christ, Baltimore, The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2007.

NDALIANIS, Angela, The Horror Sensorium: Media and the Senses, Jefferson, NC: McFarland and Company, 2012.

SAXTON, Libby, Haunted Images: Film, Ethics, Testimony & the Holocaust, London, Wallflower Press, 2008.

SCHAEFER, Eric, “Bold! Daring! Shocking! True!”: A History of Exploitation Films, 1919-1959, Durham, NC, Duke University Press, 1999.

THROWER, Stephen, Nightmare USA: The Untold Story of the Exploitation Independents, Surrey, FAB Press, 2007.

The Toolbox Murders, directed by Dennis Donnelly, written by Robert Easter, Neva Friedenn and Ann Kindberg, with Cameron Mitchell (Vance Kingsley), Pamelyn Ferdin (Laurie Ballard) and Wesley Eure (Kent Kingsley), Cal-Am Productions / Tony DiDio Productions, 1978, BluRay, Blue Underground, 2010.

VERRONE, William, Adaptation and the Avant-Garde: Alternative Perspectives on Adaptation Theory and Practice, New York, Continuum, 2011.

WILKINSON, David Nicholas and Emlyn PRICE (eds.), Ronald Harwood’s Adaptations From Other Works Into Films, Trowbridge, Guerilla Books, 2007.

WOOD, Robin, Hollywood From Vietnam to Reagan, New York, Columbia University Press, 1986

NOTES

1. See Thrower (513), Ndalianis (129), and a bevy of independent online reviewers, including user reviews on the Internet Movie Database. 2. The Toolbox Murders fits comfortably within a development of what Eric Schaefer terms “The Atrocity Film.” Schaefer states that “the purpose of the atrocity film was primarily to repulse with images of violence, carnage, or bloody ritual” (285). The Toolbox Murders itself follows the

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tradition discussed by Schaefer: “[n]ever as popular as other exploitation genres, the spectacle of the atrocity film still forged a fresh path which a new generation of exploiteers would explore more thoroughly with ‘gore films’ in the 1960” (285). One can see muted traces of the films of Herschell Gordon Lewis in the first act of the film. 3. Schaefer defines the exploitation film, or to use his term “classical exploitation film” as having five distinct qualities: 1. “Forbidden” subject matter, 2. Low production budget and values, 3. Independent distribution, 4. Mainly exhibited in cinemas without affiliation with the majors, 5. Fewer prints in release than mainstream films (4-6). This definition is appropriate to the themes, production, distribution, and exhibition of The Toolbox Murders. 4. This can be evinced by the fact that the U.S. one-sheet poster, and the two primary radio spots for the film (comprizing the cover, and part of the extras on the Blue Underground U.S. BluRay release) do not make overt mention of it being based on a true story. The film trailer and TV spot available on the same release do implicitly suggest the film’s veracity, and the voice-over at the end of both states that it is “A true story.” 5. In fact, I would argue that, although there is theoretical overlap, Berliner’s approach is more applicable to The Toolbox Murders than Schaefer’s, as I find the experience of viewing the film closely linked to Berliner’s statement that “[a]lthough narrative incongruities trouble a film’s organic unity, they add richness and variety to a film that would otherwise come off as merely linear and logical.” (32) 6. My answers being “nothing” and “no,” respectively. 7. For an example of this discussion at a different point of the spectrum of representations of violence and atrocity, see the discussion of the gas chamber sequence in Schindler’s List (Steven Spielberg, 1993) in Libby Saxton’s Haunted Images: Film, Ethics, Testimony and the Holocaust (76-91). 8. The voice-over in the U.S. theatrical trailer claims the events occurred on 23 July 1977, which is not only a full decade later than claimed in the film but, according to the March 1978 release date cited on the Internet Movie Database (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0078405/? ref_=nv_sr_2), in an amusing turn, would likely put that as the approximate time of production. In a sense, these events did occur near that date, as they would have been the very events filmed. 9. With respect to the slasher genre, Reynold Humphries acknowledges that The Toolbox Murders sets itself apart from its contemporaries. In explaining that killers in slasher films as a standard tend to use butcher knives, he isolates the film, saying “The Toolbox Murders goes out of its way to be different: the killer carries a toolbox around with him and dips into its contents to perpetrate his assorted murders” (139). 10. Timings based on the 2010 Blue Underground USA BluRay release. 11. Alfred Hitchcock regularly used ineffectual police in his films, such as I Confess (1953) and The Wrong Man (1956). 12. Such an example is available in the film: a visible crew member appears in one shot of the lethal confrontation between Kent and Vance. 13. See Berliner’s damning, and in my view, agreeable, assessment of Robin Wood’s (1981) discussion of ideological incongruity (26). This is why I make no claims to represent any ideological position, but merely aim to highlight how this ideological incongruity supports, reflects, and points to the extensive incongruous narratological template of the film. However, at this point I will forego my apprehensions and explore for the sake of argument, Wood’s “concern for contradictions in what [...] films are ‘trying to say’ [1986: 50]” (26, brackets mine). 14. This appears in what I would argue is a sequence displaying masterful editing. 15. The choice of weapon itself is loaded with phallic implications. 16. Even lighter fare like I Love You Philip Morris (Glenn Ficarra and John Requa, 2009) aims to confront social issues. Even the zany The Men Who Stare at Goats (Grant Heslov, 2009) aims to draw attention to the absurdities of U.S. military experiments, structure, and spending.

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17. And, I argue, the perceived veracity of the film is aided by the lack of familiar structure and narration. 18. The case went to trial: see People v. Fernandez et al. 301 NY 302, 93 N.E. 2d 859. Court of Appeals of New York, July 11, 1950.

ABSTRACTS

1970s horror film and exploitation staple, The Toolbox Murders (Dennis Donnelly, 1978), is here used as a case study in incoherent narrative strategy and ideology and explores the incoherencies of this relationship to adapting “true stories.” Through an overt intertitle, the film itself implicitly suggests that the events actually happened, listing specific years, current locations, and suggesting pseudonymous protection of the people involved. This comes at the conclusion of a film which contains a number of narratological incoherencies and ideological incongruities, as is typical of exploitation films of the period. Through engaging with Todd Berliner’s work on incoherent narration, along with theories of, and approaches to, true story adaptation, this article addresses not only how the film functions, but how it works as an adaptation of “actual events.” Furthermore, it addresses how The Toolbox Murders is positioned as an exploitation film. Apart from exploitative uses of sex and violence, this paper posits that the appropriation and use of claims to veracity is itself exploitative of both generic exploitation and the viewer’s cognitive reception of the closing intertitle trope. This article ultimately asserts that all of these elements work together to create a complex and unusual cinematic experience.

Cette étude de The Toolbox Murders (Dennis Donnelly, 1978), classique du cinéma d’exploitation d’horreur américain des années 1970, porte sur les incohérences à la fois narratives et idéologiques d’un film « basé sur une histoire vraie ». En effet, l’intertitre qui conclut le film affirme non seulement que les événements ont effectivement eu lieu, mais indique également des années précises et les lieux actuels afin de protéger l’anonymat des personnes impliquées. En s’appuyant sur le travail de Todd Berliner sur les narrations incohérentes, cet article analyse le fonctionnement du film et son statut à la fois en tant qu’adaptation d’un fait réel et en tant que film d’exploitation. Hormis l’exploitation du sexe et de la violence, cet article avance que prétendre à une vérité est, pour un film, une forme d’exploitation du public aux niveaux à la fois générique et cognitif. Les incohérences du film, si elles sont somme toute assez caractéristiques du cinéma d’exploitation des années 1970, en font néanmoins une expérience cinématographique singulière.

INDEX

Mots-clés: adaptation, exploitation, histoire vraie, incohérence, narration, The Toolbox Murders Keywords: adaptation, exploitation, incoherence, narration, The Toolbox Murders, true story

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AUTHOR

WICKHAM CLAYTON University for the Creative Arts in Surrey, UK

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Quentin Tarantino : du cinéma d’exploitation au cinéma

Philippe Ortoli

Introduction

1 Les liens entretenus par Quentin Tarantino et le cinéma d’exploitation sont régulièrement proclamés par la critique française1 sans que leur nature se prête pour autant toujours à des analyses sérieuses : écrire par exemple que Pai Mei est un « maître d’arts martiaux centenaire, respecté » (Sauvage, 2013, 89), dans Kil Bill, volume 2, alors que le Wu Xia Pian l’a toujours introduit comme maître, certes, mais haï pour sa félonie2, ou que « le combat avec O’ren Ishi », dans Kill Bill, volume 1 (2003), « mêle musique de variété japonaise et flamenco », alors que s’y enchaînent la chanson de Lady Snowblood (Fujita, 1973) et la reprise (disco latine de Santa Esmeralda) de Don’t let me be misunderstood) (Chauvier, 2012, 78) riches en échos intertextuels et ne se résumant pas à un simple effet-choc d’hétérogénéités géographico-stylistiques, témoigne de la méconnaissance d’une culture fondamentale pour tous ceux qui souhaitent réfléchir sur le cinéaste. Au demeurant, nous ne nous étendrons pas sur cette ignorance (voire ce mépris) du populaire manifestée par des plumes pourtant soucieuses de s’en réclamer, parce que, ce faisant, nous paraîtrions faire le jeu de ceux qui veulent réhabiliter cette notion en décrivant de façon appuyée les conditions d’émergence de certaines de ses manifestations, donnant l’impression qu’ils dissèquent un objet extérieur à toute dimension artistique uniquement compréhensible par le milieu social et ethnique de ses spectateurs et concepteurs, c’est-à-dire réduit à un statut d’objet culturel. Cette vision, qui a son intérêt dans une perspective sociologique (Esquenazi, 2012 ; Sellier et Burch, 2014), nous semble parfois mener à une impasse esthétique, dans la mesure où elle pose une grille d’interprétation extérieure aux œuvres pour tenter d’en décrypter la dimension esthétique soumise, de fait, aux lois qui inscrivent son responsable dans un espace et un temps donnés, repérables, déterminants. Or, il nous semble que c’est dans la manière dont les films « populaires » redéfinissent constamment ce qui les fait (simplement) films que se trouve l’intérêt de les aborder,

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autrement dit, il s’agit de chercher au sein du cinéma d’exploitation ce qui permet d’en faire l’expression du cinéma. Avant d’entrer plus avant dans son exploration, il nous faut préciser ses critères définitoires.

1. Quelques attributs du cinéma d’exploitation

2 Le cinéma d’exploitation est originellement conditionné par une composante économique. Cette estimation quantitative (la faiblesse des sommes consacrées à son existence) semble, au préalable, ne nous donner qu’une valeur marchande ; la critique prendrait dès lors comme critères de différentiation entre les œuvres les mêmes que ceux des producteurs, estimant la nature des films en fonction de l’investissement financier. Dire que le cinéma d’exploitation désigne un ensemble de films produits avec un budget représentant au moins un quart de celui d’une œuvre « de prestige » (sur ce point, l’équivalent avec la série B est patent) nous en révèle pourtant quelques traits structurels : il n’emploie pas de stars, ne déploie pas de trésors d’effets spéciaux, ne multiplie pas les décors3. Sa qualification de parent pauvre uniquement destiné à l’exploitation, c’est-à-dire aux salles et, par extension, à un profit considéré comme la finalité de sa fabrication, nous aide, par ailleurs, à saisir quel déficit majeur il peut incarner. Pour tous ceux qui vilipendent Hollywood – on pourrait y rajouter la Shaw Brothers, la Toho, ou Cinecitta, entre autres fabriques de rêves, mais les studios de la vallée de Cahuenda possèdent indiscutablement la plus forte puissance symbolique –, le cinéma d’exploitation est la preuve même de la faiblesse artistique du cinéma, c’est-à- dire la confirmation qu’il est une industrie destinée à fabriquer des produits afin de les vendre. Le constat est confirmé – c’est là encore une exploration possible de son terme – par le fait qu’il se définit aussi comme une série de décalques d’une œuvre de prestige dont il exploite le succès, sur le modèle des Dents de la mer (Spielberg, 1974) engendrant des Chasseurs de monstres (Castellari 1978), Mort au large (Castellari, 1980), voire des Monstre de l’océan rouge (Bava, 1984). Parce qu’il est inféodé à l’industrie, il semblerait l’ennemi idéal de ceux pour qui l’ambition initiale du 7ème Art, être la forme esthétique majeure de la modernité, a échoué4, mais il peut tout de même espérer recueillir quelques miettes de leur attention : ainsi, il arrive que la manière dont il organise ses métaphoriques haillons lui garantisse une sympathie condescendante – on l’appelle alors « nanar », et il sollicite un regard au second degré (Baubias, 2008, Laperrière, 2008) qui renvoie à une attitude dandy aussi ancienne que la littérature5 – , voire suscite une certaine curiosité, auquel cas on lui réserve une autre identité, celle du cinéma-bis – dont Aknin (2013, 9) explique qu’il recoupe « plus ou moins » le cinéma d’exploitation, sans dire précisément ce qu’est ce « plus ou moins » – , allant jusqu’à lui conférer une place dans les séances de la Cinémathèque française, tel un alter-cinéma. Néanmoins, c’est souvent comme un « vautour », terme employé jadis par Roger Tailleur pour parler de Sergio Leone (Cèbe, 1984, 31), venant se nourrir des restes du noble art qu’il est considéré. C’est qu’en sus de ces caractéristiques, il en possède une autre qui le détache de la plus respectable série B – à laquelle un séminaire est d’ailleurs consacré à l’université de Paris-Diderot par Matthias Kusnierz6 et dont la définition la plus minimale (Paucard, 1995, 20), celle d’« un film à petit budget », ne rend pas compte de l’admiration que lui vouent certains critiques ou universitaires au nom de l’inventivité formelle convoquée par cette économie restreinte (Tesson, 1997 ou Schefer, 2013) – : il pallie son manque de moyens par une propension accrue et remarquée à développer tout ce que l’on peut abriter sous le terme de

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sensationnalisme, alors que la série B développerait plutôt la poésie de la suggestion, du moins suivant les arguments habituellement défendus. Il se place alors résolument sous le régime de l’obscène, si l’on admet, avec Serge Tisseron (2002, 117), que le terme désigne ce qui lutte contre la métaphore pour faire accéder à la visibilité le figuré dont elle transfère habituellement les pouvoirs déstabilisants sur son figurant. Le psychanalyste ne parle que du domaine pornographique qui, pour être représentatif du cinéma d’exploitation, n’en constitue qu’une infime part ; pour autant, son propos reste valable pour bon nombre des multiples sous-genres subsumés sous le terme qui donne son thème au présent numéro : du rape and revenge (films dans lesquels une femme, après avoir été violentée, se venge de manière sauvage de ses agresseurs, par exemple, I spit on your Grave (Zarchi, 1978 / Monroe, 2011)) au slasher (dans lequel plusieurs personnages, généralement en groupes, sont la cible d’un tueur utilisant une arme blanche, par exemple, Maniac (Lustig, 1981 / Khalfoun, 2012)) en passant par le Chanbara (film de sabre japonais situé vers le XVIIIe siècle, par exemple, Baby Cart, le sabre de la vengeance, Misumi, 1972) ou le gore (films d’horreur ou d’épouvante bâtis sur des scènes sanglantes très explicites, par exemple, Hostel (Roth, 2007)) ; du cannibal film (bâti sur la confrontation d’un groupe de personnes issues de la « civilisation » avec des tribus cannibales, et comportant des scènes de dévoration, par exemple, Cannibal Ferox (Lenzi, 1980)) au W.I.P. Film (se déroulant dans des prisons de femmes mêlant l’érotisme et l’ultra-violence, par exemple, Femmes en cage (Franco, 1976)), en passant par le Vigilante Film (centré sur les vices et les vertus de l’autodéfense, par exemple, Le droit de tuer (Glickenhaus, 1980)), le principe consiste bien à miser sur l’exhibition de ce que l’ordinaire des films camoufle, principalement la violence et le sexe. On tient aussi la raison pour laquelle il peut être considéré comme subversif, ce que démontrent ouvertement certaines œuvres comme La nuit des morts-vivants (Romero, 1968), Le grand Silence (Corbucci, 1968) ou La colline a des yeux (Craven, 1977), et, plus généralement, transgressif, puisqu’il consiste à franchir les limites permises, et, donc, à excéder la mesure du cinéma tout court.

3 Il nous faut, semble-t-il, dépasser ces jugements, recevables par ailleurs dans les contextes où ils sont posés, pour interroger à notre tour ce terme, et voir ce qui le lie au cinéma de Tarantino. Il convient d’abord de revenir sur le caractère sensationnel et de constater qu’il n’est pas simplement lié à la brisure des tabous : le cinéma d’exploitation comporte des productions (les films du duo Terence Hill / Bud Spencer, par exemple, ou certains carsploitation films) dans lesquelles il y a peu, voire pas, de représentations d’actes brutaux ou grivois. Si les grosses bagarres d’On l’appelle Trinita (Clucher, 1970) ou les courses de voiture de La grande casse (Halicki, 1974) comportent un point commun avec les geysers sanguinolents produits par les sabreurs de Baby Cart : l’enfant massacre (Misumi, 1972) ou la dévoration des testicules du cameraman de Cannibal Ferox (Lenzi, 1981), c’est le fait de se constituer en spectacle. Et elles le font en s’inscrivant dans un fil narratif qui prend leur réitération comme point d’articulation. Que le spectacle titille les plus basses pulsions de son visionneur, voire encourage ses penchants sadiques – n’oublions pas que le premier (faux, bien sûr) snuff- movie, Snuff (Findlay, 1976) est considéré comme un film d’exploitation ! –, est incontestable, mais ce qui l’est tout autant, c’est que le fait d’offrir à la vue une représentation destinée à la capturer voire à l’exciter, par la présence d’éléments hors du commun, compose, en définitive, un programme. C’est en cela que le cinéma d’exploitation marque sa dissemblance avec le cinéma de genre qui enrôle sous sa bannière des œuvres plus respectables – l’exemple canonique en serait Tigre et dragon

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d’Ang Lee (2000), unanimement salué comme wu xia pian « grand public » – et/ou cossues (voir le récent World War Z de Mark Forster (2013), film de zombie post- apocalyptique avec Brad Pitt, nanti d’un budget très conséquent). Le cinéma d’exploitation n’en partage pas moins avec le cinéma de genre plusieurs traits définitoires. Si les deux traits les plus marquants tiennent dans la volonté spectaculaire et narrative7 qui détermine leurs productions, c’est ontologiquement que leur similitude se manifeste : en effet, chaque production d’une des deux catégories propose, à partir de catégories créées de manière empirique, d’en honorer les éléments récurrents tout en les modifiant de façon plus ou moins perceptible, au point d’inventer de nouveaux sous-genres lorsque ces transformations deviennent, à leur tour, des traits constants (c’est, de manière empirique, la façon dont Stanley Cavell explique la naissance du sous-genre qu’il a lui-même créé, la « comédie du remariage » (Cavell, 1993, 33)). La notion de différence, en ce qu’elle désigne cette déviation, ce pas de côté qui, chaque fois, distingue chaque film du précédent auquel il ressemble, prend pourtant plus de force dans le cinéma d’exploitation car, s’il partage avec le cinéma de genre le fait, majeur, que cet écart est celui creusé entre chacune des productions relevant de la même appellation, y compris au sein de déclinaisons sérielles (les Dracula ou les Maciste, par exemple), il manifeste sa singularité dans son rapport au cinéma mainstream, dont il est une reformulation naturellement outrancière.

Le refus de la copie

4 Si c’est au cinéma d’exploitation qu’échoit ce rôle de révélation, par le fait qu’il exprime la différence au moyen d’effets visibles tout en répétant un moule narratif et figuratif repérable, comment s’identifie-t-il au sein des fictions tarantiniennes qui, Reservoir Dogs (1992) mis à part, n’appartiennent nullement, en termes économiques, à son domaine ? Comme nous l’avons déjà écrit (Ortoli, 2012, 29-30), ces dernières sont entièrement amarrées à une histoire, dans la mesure où le temps qu’elles structurent, même s’il semble déconstruit, est bâti sur la recherche d’un manque à combler – qu’il s’agisse d’une mort à venger (Kill Bill, Inglourious Basterds, 2009, Boulevard de la mort, 2007), d’un objet à quérir (Jackie Brown, 1997, Django Unchained, Pulp Fiction, Reservoir Dogs), il faut rétablir ce qui a été déséquilibré –, et elles sont toutes fondées sur l’idée que l’apprentissage nécessaire pour accomplir ce programme se résume à l’acquisition d’un savoir-faire se confondant avec un savoir-être. C’est là une constante des récits de quête : devenir le sujet capable de lutter dignement pour accomplir le programme fixé et, pour cela, passer des épreuves de qualification. Sur ce point, la référence à Siegfried dans Django Unchained est éclairante dans le contexte mythologique de cette œuvre. Seulement, sa reconduction l’est dans un cadre qui n’est pas celui de l’agôn, mais de la mimicry (pour citer Caillois, 2006, 50-57 et 61-67), chaque personnage devant apprendre à imiter plusieurs modèles dépositaires d’un pouvoir essentiel, celui de tuer, qui est aussi, à l’écran, un art et un style. Ce n’est qu’après avoir prouvé (ou pas) cette aptitude mimétique que le personnage peut prétendre à l’existence, et ne pas y parvenir équivaut, pour lui, à périr – on en a un exemple savoureux avec la référence à Naissance d’une nation (Griffith, 1914) dans Django Unchained, où les membres du Ku Klux Klan, menés par un Don Johnson jubilatoire, se retrouvent aveuglés par le fait qu’ils possèdent des cagoules trop étroites ! Mais, sitôt qu’on a établi ce lien crucial, on n’a effectué que la moitié du chemin : il reste à concevoir l’action d’imiter comme incluant la transgression du modèle même. Ce qui est ici la clef des récits et de l’univers

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fictionnel qu’ils érigent l’est également de l’esthétique du réalisateur, concentrant son travail de composition sur la manière de créer une dissemblance dans la semblance, qui à la fois conserve et tranche. Ce travail révèle que – contrairement à ce que soutient Elie Faure qui a écrit combien la révélation de la plasticité du cinéma lui est venue en méprisant totalement l’intrigue du film (Faure, 1964, 25), suivant en cela un certain discours rigoriste propre au cinéma français dit d’avant-garde (Epstein, 1974, 87 ou Léger, 1971, 49) qui méprise l’histoire au profit du choc sensible provoqué par les images – ce n’est que par l’articulation du narratif et du plastique que le film nous semble affirmer la totalité du cinéma.

5 Les œuvres de Tarantino racontent donc des histoires dans lesquelles se trouve sans cesse exposé le fait que, pour qu’un personnage parvienne à ses fins, il doive emprunter toutes les parures dévolues à un imaginaire déjà codifié par le cinéma d’exploitation (le policier doit apprendre à être un voyou, le tueur à gages un dieu vengeur, l’ancien esclave un pistolero invincible, l’hôtesse de l’air une truande de haut-vol), qu’en s’appropriant ainsi ces modèles, il les met à l’épreuve et qu’en marquant par là une singularité toujours traversée par les échos de ce qu’il a cherché à répéter, il s’affirme. C’est donc en tant que productrice de fantasmagorie (Phantasma, souvent traduit par ectoplasme) et non de copie (eikon) platonicienne (Platon, 236c) que se situe l’opération artistique de Tarantino, et là est la précieuse différence que certains ne veulent ou ne peuvent pas saisir, préférant asséner des lectures socioculturelles convenues de ses films. Si interroger sa misogynie ou son racisme, ainsi que le fait Célia Sauvage (83-116), témoigne d’une vue réductrice partagée par un certain nombre d’auteurs lus sur Internet (par exemple, Gamard ou Rougier, 2015) qui y répondent directement par l’affirmative (là où l’auteure de Critiquer Quentin Tarantino est-il raisonnable ? donne au moins l’impression de poser la question), c’est avant tout parce que le rapport du cinéaste aux catégories sexuelles et raciales qu’il est accusé (au mieux) de caricaturer se noue au niveau des images qu’elles ont déjà suscitées et non au niveau d’un réel de toute manière insaisissable hors de son reflet et qui se retrouve alors à sa vraie place, celle qui l’établit comme le résultat d’une action dont on s’imagine parfois qu’il est la cause. Edgar Morin l’a écrit : le seul réel que nous pouvons estimer est la représentation et « tout le réel perçu passe par la forme image. Puis il renaît en souvenir, c’est-à-dire image d’image » (Morin, 1985, X). Cette action est celle qui permet de le reproduire et la répétition ne saurait se concevoir sans l’imitation, car c’est cet acte volontaire qui, faisant revenir l’action ou la situation, la délivre sous l’angle du possible par le fait même que son résultat se différencie de ce qui l’a suscitée – ce à quoi le mécanisme même du défilement cinématographique parvient automatiquement, à travers l’enchaînement des photogrammes. L’acte de création ne s’exerce ainsi pas à partir d’un moment fondateur, mais bien à travers les répétitions produites par les imitations successives que ce dernier a pu occasionner. Au fondement de ces naissances successives, que trouve-t-on ? Nul inconditionné : c’est l’acte lui-même de sortir pour se faire autre, et par là même de permettre à un Être de révéler son territoire, acte par lequel le simulacre prend la place de son modèle, reconduisant ce phénomène de reproductibilité technique, au fondement du cinéma dont il problématise l’ontologie, puisqu’il résume la transcendance à l’émergence, au-delà du noir initial, d’un être qui, pour ex-sister, doit sans cesse se répéter et comprendre, dans les modalités de cette répétition, l’événement même qui consigne la poursuite d’un processus vital. Avant d’observer en détails cet acte, il convient de revenir rapidement sur les modalités par lesquelles le cinéaste évoque ces fantômes.

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Tarantino, territoire du cinéma d’exploitation

6 Si Jackie Brown et son inclusion dans le Blaxploitation, déjà repérable à travers les personnages de Jules et Marcellus Wallace dans Pulp Fiction, établissent le cinéma d’exploitation comme inspirateur de Tarantino, c’est littéralement avec son projet Grindhouse qu’il se drape officiellement dans cette bannière. Nantie du nom donné aux salles spécialisées dans les films d’exploitation, l’entreprise consistait en un double programme, accompagné de fausses bandes-annonces – dont l’une d’elles a donné lieu à un vrai film, Machete (Rodriguez, 2010). Cette forme n’ayant pas été opératoire commercialement aux États-Unis et n’ayant pas, de fait, été reconduite en Europe s’est alors vue divisée en deux films, l’un de Rodriguez (Planète terreur) et l’autre de Tarantino, Boulevard de la mort (2007), distribués de manière autonome, avec des durées rallongées. C’est ensuite au moyen de références plus ou moins directes que le cinéaste revendique l’ancrage susnommé, mais plus dans les annexes de son territoire de réalisateur qu’à l’intérieur de ses propres frontières : Planète Terreur, Hostel (Roth, 2005), Hell Ride (Bishop, 2007) ou Sukiyaki Western Django (Miiké, 2007), films auxquels Tarantino est associé de diverses manières (c’est-à-dire à titre d’acteur et/ou de producteur), par exemple, soulignent cette appartenance d’une façon plus explicite que Reservoir Dogs (1992) ou Inglourious Basterds (2009), sans même parler des productions qui, telles la série télévisée tirée d’Une nuit en enfer (Rodriguez, 2014) ou le crossover du comic inspiré de Django Unchained (2013) – Django et Zorro (Tarantino-Polls/ Wagner- Polls, 2014) –, la développent par le transmedia. Par ailleurs, il évoque ce remous fondateur dans les bonus DVD : sous forme d’interviews – Castellari dans le DVD d’Une poignée de salopards (1978) –, ou de présentations – Jack Hill dans celui de Switchblade Sisters (1974) –, par le titre de sa propre collection DVD (Rolling Thunder, du nom d’un Vigilante movie de 1974, réalisé par John Flynn avec William Devane et Tommy Lee Jones), également société de distribution – The Host (Hill, 1961) –, voire par le fait d’accoler son nom à moult sorties DVD avec des slogans du type « le film qui a inspiré Quentin Tarantino » qui, globalement, des rééditions Shaw Brothers aux coffrets Blaxploitation, se retrouvent partout. De là à dire qu’il y a quelque chose de matriciel dans le cinéma d’exploitation pour Tarantino, il y aurait un pas que nous ne franchirons pas, puisque nous pensons que l’idée même d’une source unique d’où tout découlerait est fondamentalement incompatible avec celle de son cinéma qui, de Von Sternberg à Leone, de Godard à Kubrick, en passant par Hawks, Aldrich ou Welles, ne cesse de citer des origines diverses et variées. Effectivement, son œuvre ressemble à un océan traversé de courants plus ou moins violents qui font, certes, remonter à la surface des fragments, mais rendent ces derniers difficilement identifiables sous une forme pure, car ils semblent déjà agglomérés – nous nous y sommes attardés dans la réflexion que nous avons entamée sur la bâtardise cinématographique (Ortoli et Lefait, 2012, 1-17) –, et sont par la suite disloqués. La manière dont Tarantino travaille le cinéma d’exploitation dans sa globalité témoigne d’une volonté qui n’est rien moins que tourbillonnaire. Son œuvre fait fi des orientations qui prévalent dans certaines approches cinéphiliques, en entendant justement décloisonner les cadres sécurisants pour s’ouvrir sur une mémoire cinématographique bouillonnante. L’ensemble des survivances qui s’y organisent – nous employons à dessein ce mot précisément lié à la pensée d’Aby Warburg, tracé autant par lui-même (Warburg, 2011, 75) que par ses spécialistes (Saxl, 2011, 143, Didi-Huberman, 2005, 50) – propose une synthèse en

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perpétuel devenir, et si le cinéma d’exploitation entre dans sa composition, c’est comme principe directeur puisqu’il est celui qui existe en affichant sa différence fondamentale par et dans la répétition, autrement dit qui mime de manière volontairement excessive (en accentuant les traits, voire en les noircissant) une des « bases physiques » – j’emprunte le terme à Cavell (1999, 145) – majeures du cinéma (qui ne vit que de la différence niée et conservée sur le mode dénégatif, dans son mécanisme physique de défilement de photogrammes).

7 On comprendra alors que ce qui importe, ici, c’est l’intervalle, là où les forces se rencontrent et se mêlent avant de se disperser, pour assurer l’illusion d’une continuité qui se défait en même temps qu’elle se crée : ces films ont la fragilité des images qui les constituent et témoignent, par leur mutabilité chronique, de ce qui conditionne leur existence, le fait de donner toujours l’impression qu’ils empruntent le même cheminement et qu’ils s’en éloignent. La répétition est et n’est jamais identique comme le fleuve d’Héraclite (12, 49a), et le cinéma d’exploitation le dit avec une naïveté sauvage remarquable. En cela, il dévoile, plus que tout autre genre, le caractère dialectique de l’image cinématographique. Cette notion forgée par Walter Benjamin qui a tant suscité de copier-coller et de citations de seconde main (Guérin, 2015), désigne le fait qu’elle est lieu d’un passage, collision d’un autrefois et d’un maintenant qu’elle donne à saisir, simultanément en un éclair (Benjamin, 2012, 479). Nous pensons qu’elle ne peut se limiter à être lisible à l’arrêt, mais peut et doit se concevoir également dans le mouvement. Car, que fait le cinéma d’exploitation, dans son trait identitaire majeur ? Il façonne des plans, des séquences et des films qui ne se conçoivent que dans la fulgurance, puisque, en même temps qu’ils hèlent les modèles qu’ils reproduisent, ils appellent les nouveaux simulacres qu’ils vont susciter. Montrer les éclats de cet éblouissement est le projet du réalisateur dont l’œuvre est un champ de forces, une dynamique nourrie de ce qui la traverse et qu’elle rend autre en l’incorporant.

2. L’horizon fantomatique

8 De ce fait, le cinéma d’exploitation auquel se réfère Tarantino n’est pas limité, loin s’en faut, aux États-Unis, et sa façon de renvoyer autant, sinon plus, au western italien qu’à l’américain, démontre bien à quel point son horizon n’est que mélange et impureté. Nous n’aborderons pas, ici, la richesse des références japonaises, chinoises, italiennes, voire suédoises ou françaises qui parsèment son œuvre, mais resterons dans le domaine spécifiquement américain, suffisamment riche de sens : ainsi, Jackie Brown ou Django Unchained participent de la Blaxploitation, Boulevard de la mort du rape and revenge, du slasher et du car movie – Roche rajoute le buddy movie, ce qui, dans sa perspective, est tout à fait pertinent (Roche, 2010, 278). Mais une telle liste ne rend pas hommage à la manière dont Tarantino passe d’un genre à l’autre en semblant conserver une unité qui est effectivement celle du cinéma d’exploitation. On peut alors pointer les divers éléments qui établissent des références directes à ce dernier, mais toujours en rappelant la nature du lien qui les insère ainsi dans la fiction : oublier d’en tenir compte est préjudiciable à qui veut véritablement étudier Tarantino (y compris pour le dénigrer). Car il est un cinéaste du réveil et non du sommeil : agissant, quand il est « imminent […], comme le cheval de bois des Grecs dans la Troie du rêve » (Benjamin, 2012, 409) ; ce n’est pas le maintenant des films qui reproduit leur autrefois, mais la façon dont ce dernier vient investir et hanter ce maintenant qui fait œuvre. Cette

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position dialectique se manifeste donc sur/dans plusieurs modes. Si la citation intégrale est assez rare – pour rester dans le pur domaine américain, on peut signaler Larry le dingue, Mary la garce (Hough, 1974) regardé à la télévision, dans Jackie Brown8, par Max et Mélanie (jouée par Bridget Fonda, fille de Peter, acteur du film original), véritables antithèses du couple vedette en ce que leur liaison, commencée par un bref coït et conclue par un coup de feu rageur, est l’exact opposé de la fusion passionnelle –, c’est qu’elle se manifeste plutôt par d’autres biais : la musique et la chanson – l’utilisation du « Across 110th Street » de Meurtres dans la 110ème rue (Shear, 1972) de Bobby Womack, réorchestré et réenregistré, dans Jackie Brown ; l’emploi d’un fétiche, qu’il soit costume – l’uniforme de latex noir de « la chose » dans Pulp Fiction évoque celui du propriétaire sadique (Everett McGill) du Sous-sol de la peur de (Craven, 1991) – ou objet – la souche d’Inglourious Basterds rappelle celle de L’ouragan de la vengeance (Hellman, 1965), le personnage qui s’échine à la fendre dénonçant, comme son modèle, les innocents qui sont sous son toit, en dissimulant son acte par une parole à double sens – ; l’évocation d’un sujet de discussion – Charley One-Eye évoqué dans le club où se pratique le « Mandingo » de Django Unchained, en référence au film de Don Chaffey (Charley le borgne, 1973) –, d’une réplique – le fameux « My name is Buck and I’m here to fuck » du Crocodile de la mort (Tobe Hooper, 1977) repris dans Kill Bill volume 1 par l’infirmier félon –, l’emploi de personnages immédiatement reconnaissables (les violeurs de Pulp Fiction, directement issus du survival), d’acteurs (le fait que, dans Jackie Brown, le juge qui envoie Jackie en prison soit joué par Sid Haig qui se retrouve de nouveau face à Pam Grier après plusieurs films passés à la violenter – Black Mama, White Mama (Eddie Romero, 1973), Coffy, la panthère noire de Harlem (Hill, 1973), Foxy Brown (Hill, 1974) –, de situations – Django suspendu par les pieds et nu avant sa castration interrompue renvoie à Blaise (Yaphet Kotto) torturé dans la même position au sein de L’enfer des mandingos (Carver, 1975) –, de plans – celui de la main de « la Mariée » sortant de terre en profondeur dans Kill Bill volume 2 évoque Evil Dead (Raimi, 1981), en se souvenant de Tire encore si tu peux (Petroni, 1967) –, ou de séquences – la trajectoire meurtrière de l’infirmière dans Kill Bill volume 1 qui épouse celle de Réincarnations (Sherman, 1981), en ravivant aussi celle de Dahlia (Marthe Keller) dans Black Sunday (Frankenheimer, 1977), son bandeau sur l’œil évoquant Patch (Monica Gayle) dans Les loubardes (Hill, 1975), comme Frigga (Christina Lindberg) dans Crime à froid (Arne Vibenius, 1974). Comme nous l’avons dit, ces références entrent souvent en résonance avec d’autres, et il est difficile d’attribuer une unique provenance aux fantômes qu’un simple détail paraît invoquer, parce que le propos consiste justement – en développant les échos qui témoignent d’un autre horizon, soit géographique, soit économique (Citizen Kane (Welles, 1941) ou La prisonnière du désert (Ford, 1956) ressurgissent aussi dans les images tarantiniennes et ce dans des perspectives ouvertement originaires), soit artistique (la série télévisée ou la bande dessinée) – à situer la référence au croisement d’un mouvement dont sa reconnaissance constitue l’équilibre momentané, mais nullement le figement. C’est que le cinéma d’exploitation est conçu comme une déclinaison permanente (sérielle, thématique, sous-générique) du fleuve héraclitéen « où nous sommes et ne sommes pas ». C’est parce qu’il pousse à l’incandescence ce principe d’un accomplissement par la répétition que son englobement est effectivement fondateur.

9 Qu’est-ce qui induit ce renouvellement ? Sur quoi porte cette différence naturellement comprise dans le processus de répétition ? Est-ce le sensationnalisme outrancier, c’est- à-dire la propension, là aussi tant mise en avant par la critique pour la dénoncer sous l’angle de la leçon de morale, à exalter la violence ? La découpe d’oreille de Reservoir

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Dogs, le combat à mort d’esclaves de Django Unchained, l’arrachage de membres de Kill Bill, le scalpage de nazi dans Inglourious Basterds, ou la terrible collision mutilatrice de Boulevard de la mort dressent la liste des excès de brutalité une fois encore largement tributaire de traditions hors états-uniennes – Django (Corbucci, 1966) pour l’oreille sectionnée, ou Baby Cart (Misumi, 1972) pour les combats sanglants de Kill Bill. Ces exemples illustrent bien une tradition, celle de la violence faite au corps considérée comme spectacle, et stigmatise, de fait, la volonté purgatrice autant qu’outrancière du cinéma d’exploitation. Certes, on ne peut nier cette fascination pour la violence ni, d’ailleurs, le rappel de certaines des configurations-phares qui l’ont élevée à la dimension d’un rituel, du « triel » – en usage dans Le bon, la brute, le truand (Leone, 1966) et que d’aucuns appellent Mexican stand-off – aux gunfights au ralenti, en passant par l’usage du sabre ou de la voiture comme arme : il y a indubitablement chez le cinéaste une volonté marquée de rappeler combien c’est la maîtrise de la pulsion de mort qui détermine une certaine iconographie de l’excès (allant jusqu’au point extrême du gore, c’est-à-dire de l’exploration de la profondeur du corps, extrémité à laquelle Tarantino, dans ses films, ne s’est jamais soumis, mais qui demeure un de ses horizons possibles, comme en témoigne son implication dans les Hostel (Roth, 2005, 2007) ou dans Planète terreur, qui s’en réclament plus frontalement (Ortoli, 423)). Cette violence participe d’un imaginaire cinématographique qui a installé le tueur (saisi dans son sens le plus large) en figure héroïque ou maléfique, suivant les motivations qui le faisaient agir, mais qui, dans tous les cas, l’isolait du reste des personnages par sa seule maîtrise du geste meurtrier. Toute l’iconographie somptueuse que déploie le cinéaste à travers la ressuscitation de certaines figures actorielles (par exemple Harvey Keitel, Gordon Liu, Lawrence Tierney, Kurt Russell, Sid Haig ou Franco Nero) n’est liée qu’à cette sublimation de la pulsion de mort par le style. Dans le cinéma américain mainstream, cette maîtrise a souvent été l’apanage des mâles blancs et elle a même été la cause d’une mythologie écranique persistante qui possède sa propre contestation interne – des œuvres comme Impitoyable (Eastwood, 1992) ou Soldat bleu (Nelson, 1969) ont largement démonté ses rouages, et Ford, en son temps, en avait exposé le principe de création. Ce qui relève proprement du cinéma d’exploitation, c’est d’avoir offert à d’autres supports physiques la maîtrise de ces gestes, mais nous devrions plutôt parler de schèmes. Ce sont celui de l’« animé », relié à l’imaginaire thériomorphe (Durand, 1992, 72) auquel le cavalier westernien emprunte un de ses grands symboles, le cheval, désignant l’avancée permanente comme production du changement, et celui que Durand range sous l’appellation de « diaïrétique » – dans lequel on peut voir une possible dérivation du Spaltung de la psychanalyse – consacrant la purification obtenue par percussion, rattachée à toute la tradition symbolique des armes tranchantes, frappantes ou punctiformes, dont l’utilisation, centrale dans ces œuvres, inaugure aussi la répétition d’un modèle divin – l’arme permet métaphoriquement à l’éclair et à la foudre, attributs naturels des divinités pré-métallurgiques, de se propager, suivant la mythologie du fer contenu dans l’acier (Eliade, 1977, 82). En cela le seul film de Tarantino se revendiquant entièrement du film d’exploitation, Boulevard de la mort, mêle trois sous-genres : le slasher (mais, là encore, il vaudrait peut-être mieux parler de giallo, tant la référence à Argento, via la réutilisation des musiques que Morricone a composées pour ses films, est patente) ; le car movie, avec en point d’orgue Point limite zéro (Sarafian, 1971), mais également Cours après moi shérif (Needham, 1978) et le rape and revenge, qui ont déjà été partiellement imbriqués – Duel (Spielberg, 1971) est un slasher/car movie – mais jamais sous une forme aussi littérale, la voiture remplaçant ici

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l’arme blanche dans sa capacité à trancher (les membres sectionnés des premières victimes) et parcourir…

10 Fort de cette tradition, Tarantino entreprend donc de l’éprouver en la révélant au sein de ses propres images. Comment ? En partant de l’exemple de Boulevard de la mort, il convient de regarder plus en détail en quoi le cinéma d’exploitation est le fond sur lequel se détache le « féminisme » de Tarantino qui en est sûrement l’expression la plus remarquée.

Exploitation du féminisme ?

11 C’est par le genre du rape and revenge que, dans les années 70, la représentation des femmes d’action est advenue : jeune sourde-muette muée en nonne vengeresse (Zoë Lundt), dans L’ange de la vengeance (Ferrara, 1981), qui abat méthodiquement un cercle de voyous belliqueux ; écrivain (Jennifer Hills) castrant dans sa baignoire son violeur, dans Œil pour œil (Zarchi, 1978), ou jeune mannequin fonçant avec sa voiture sur le chef des pillards, dans Week-end sauvage (Fruet, 1976). Le cinéma américain a développé dans les années 70 cette figure singulière, puisant dans la mythologie du cinéma japonais – Lady Snowblood, mais aussi la saga de La femme scorpion (Ito, 1972), toutes deux avec Meiko Kaiji, ou Le couvent de la bête sacrée (Suzuki, 1974) – et, plus lointainement, dans celle du Wu Xia pian où les femmes, sur le modèle de L’hirondelle d’or – on pense à l’immortelle Chang Pei Pei dans le film de Hu (1964) –, ont été les égales des hommes dans la maîtrise des arts martiaux9, à la fois dans la peinture des sévices prodigués aux femmes par des meutes masculines et dans celle de la cruauté méthodique avec laquelle elles s’en vengeaient. Il est un fait que lorsque Tarantino fait de Beatrix Kiddo l’héroïne de ce qui est sans doute son film le plus épique (le diptyque Kill Bill) ; de Pam Grier le cerveau capable de tromper et les policiers et les truands dans Jackie Brown ; ou des cascadeuses de Boulevard de la mort celles qui seront capables de vaincre physiquement et symboliquement le psycho-killer de la route qu’est Stuntman Mike ; quand il met au cœur de son uchronie revancharde, Inglourious Basterds, Shohsanna Dreyfuss, dont le gros plan ricanant flotte sur la pulvérisation des dignitaires nazis par le nitrate de cellulose, il s’ancre dans cette tradition liée précisément au cinéma d’exploitation dont la diversification des attributs sexuels ou ethniques des protagonistes fait aussi partie des critères de différentiation d’avec la production courante, en même temps qu’elle manifeste un souci économique, celui d’attirer une partie spécifique de la population vers ses objets10. En incorporant par des détails figuratifs (le costume jaune de Hai Tien dans Le jeu de la mort (Lee-Clouse, 1978) ; le sabre d’Hattori Hanzo dans Shadow Warriors (Kansai Telecasting / Toei Company, 1980) pour Beatrix Kiddo ou la voiture de Kowalski dans Point limite zéro pour les cascadeuses) la puissance de figures masculines tutélaires, les héroïnes de Tarantino composent des images qui se présentent comme les « interface[s] des différentes strates d’une épaisseur archéologique », celle qu’évoque Didi-Huberman (2007, 505) lorsqu’il développe la notion d’intervalle dans le Ménmosyme warburgien. Elles récapitulent l’épopée d’une reconquête tout en en précisant le futur dont le très beau plan sur le visage de Pam Grier à la fin de Jackie Brown est sans doute la meilleure incarnation, même si celui de Shoshana possède le bénéfice du symbolique, tant il ressemble à ces simulacres épicuriens, puis lucrétiens, qui se détachent des corps pour « faire apparaître des figures étranges ou les ombres de ceux qui ne jouissent plus de la lumière » (Lucrèce, IV, 33-61). C’est donc en s’admettant comme fiévreux territoire de survivances que ces personnages peuvent accéder à la dimension

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recherchée : exister comme image indépendante. Dans cette perspective esthétique, déplorer le fait que « les femmes puissantes » sont condamnées à ne ressembler qu’à des « hommes comme les autres »11 nous semble particulièrement pauvre, d’abord parce qu’on omet alors l’essentiel (ce ne sont pas des hommes comme les autres), ensuite puisqu’on néglige la dimension critique du montage pratiqué. En aucune façon, il n’y a fusion, c’est-à-dire « création factice d’une continuité temporelle à partir de “plans” discontinus agencés en séquences », ainsi que le dit Didi-Huberman (2007, 474) du montage dans Mnemosyne : la façon dont les héroïnes endossent des parures révélatrices d’un pouvoir iconique masculin met en valeur ce qui sépare dans ce qui rassemble, autrement dit montre la collure, l’interstice fondamental dont le comblement est le programme d’action de l’héroïne. C’est par ce travail sur la maîtrise du corps pour qu’il prenne la place centrale de l’écran (Le Pallec-Marand, 2011, 35) que se définit une pensée qui identifie clairement le cinéma d’exploitation à une iconographie et le féminisme à un imaginaire à construire. C’est la raison pour laquelle nous trouvons que le jugement proféré contre un Tarantino misogyne relève d’un contre sens.

Tarantino exploite-t-il la « blaxploitation » ?

12 On pourrait étendre ces propos, non pas à la question des Noirs américains à l’époque de l’esclavage, mais à celle des images cinématographiques qu’elle a déjà suscitée – pour enfourcher l’autre cheval de bataille des critiques actuelles, à savoir la légèreté avec laquelle Tarantino prétend s’approprier la mémoire des Africains Américains (voir Sauvage, décidément en verve sur ces questions, 104-15). Le cinéma d’exploitation est le principal dépositaire de deux des trois grandes matrices figuratives et narratives de Django Unchained, à savoir le western italien et le western blaxploitation, le southern movie étant marqué, lui, par des productions beaucoup plus prestigieuses (même si Tarantino considère Mandingo (Fleisher, 1978) comme « le plus grand film d’exploitation jamais produit par un grand studio » (Udovitch, 1998, 172), il n’en demeure pas moins une production de prestige). Son ambition globale est celle de montrer la naissance d’un héros noir, à la manière de la « trilogie » impulsée par Fred Williamson, dite des Nigger Charlie – Libre à en crever, The Soul of Nigger Charley (Spangler, 1973) et Boss Nigger (Arnold, 1975)12 –, à la différence près, donc, que le modèle avéré nominalement, celui de Django, appartient à une branche du western que l’on pourrait globalement qualifier de critique et d’apatride, et qu’en outre, son intrigue s’appuie sur la trajectoire inverse des fictions dont il s’inspire – Buck et son complice (Poitier, 1972) ou Joshuah (Spangler, 1976) –, partant de l’Ouest pour aller vers un Sud dont les grandes figures tutélaires de l’iconographie cinématographique sont déclinées : l’oncle Tom à qui Samuel Jackson fait songer à travers une création particulièrement critique et jouissive (cela fait hurler Camille Rougier qui y voit le signe évident que Tarantino engage la responsabilité des noirs dans un esclavage dont ils ont été victimes) ; Tara d’Autant en emporte le vent (Fleming, Cukor, Wood, 1939) qui se trouve pulvérisé dans un final résolument révolutionnaire ; les mandingos de Fleischer, comme de Steve Carver (1976) ou le Ku Klux Klan de Griffith et des frères Coen (O’Brother, 2000). L’originalité du cinéaste n’est pas tant de donner le rôle principal à un noir dans un genre longtemps dominé par les blancs : d’autres l’ont fait avant lui, y compris sur le mode mainstream – voir La bataille de la vallée du diable (Nelson, 1966), Les chasseurs de scalp (Pollack, 1968) ou Les cent fusils (Gries, 1968) – et, quant aux violences perpétrées sur les blancs, dans un esprit

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ouvertement revanchard, les films de Willamson sont allés au moins aussi loin que lui (ainsi que le note Harris). Ce qu’il cherche, c’est à montrer comment un noir doit apprendre à devenir un héros de western, et non le héros de la communauté noire (ce que déplore, dans son article, Anne Crémieux) c’est-à-dire une image, d’abord en tenant un rôle dans une fiction – tous les conseils de Doc Schultz quand il explique à Django comment jouer un personnage ou qu’il l’entraîne au tir évoquent la séquence mémorable où Mr. Orange apprend à devenir gangster dans Reservoir Dogs, en ce qu’elles participent de la même affirmation du pouvoir du jeu comme fondement principiel –, ensuite, en acceptant la résurgence de créations antérieures puisque, loin de simplement récupérer un patronyme, le personnage est hanté par tous les Django du western italien, celui de Corbucci, certes, mais également ses épigones (le fait que nombre de personnages de westerns italiens aient été rebaptisés « Django » après le succès du film de Corbucci témoigne du caractère bâtard de leur ascendance, dont le héros du film de Tarantino peut tout autant se réclamer.13) Ce point est d’importance, car il éclaire l’apparition de Franco Nero à côté de Foxx [1.04.38-1.05.24] : loin d’être un clin d’œil destiné à alimenter les articles en quête d’exemples éloquents (avec le tant commenté « I know » prononcé par l’Italien quand l’Américain explique que le « d » de son nom ne se prononce pas14), cette apparition témoigne de la différence entre un modèle virtuel et ses actualisations – qui, elles, possèdent une physicalité et, donc, une couleur de peau – un modèle qu’en aucune façon elles n’épuisent puisqu’il n’existe qu’à travers elles. La manière dont Nero (campant ici un esclavagiste adepte de mandingos) s’avance vers le comptoir où se tient déjà le héros, se positionne à côté de lui, le plan saisissant les deux bustes dans une parfaite symétrie, est destinée à permettre au maintenant et à l’autrefois de se côtoyer. Mais cette proximité n’est nullement synonyme d’une passation de pouvoir ou d’une filiation : si l’image est justement dialectique, c’est parce qu’elle ne se conçoit qu’entre les deux, dans cet impossible mouvement que Benjamin lisait au centre d’Angelus Novus de Klee (Benjamin, 2001, 434). Django est cette impossibilité même : ce qui doit se métamorphoser pour exister et qui, comme d’autres figures clefs de Tarantino – au premier chef desquelles Pai Mei, dans Kill Bill volume 2, incarné par Gordon Liu qui, dans des films et sous des défroques antérieures, l’avait déjà vaincu (Ortoli, 227) –, démontre l’essence profondément volatile de l’étant cinématographique, en même temps que la densité des reflets qui l’animent. Et il faut que ces derniers se métamorphosent sans cesse pour ne pas risquer de devenir ces formes fossiles (Mamie Van Doren, Buddy Holly, etc…) qui hantent le restaurant de Pulp Fiction parce qu’elles n’ont pas su dépasser la puissance de leurs simples attributs figuratifs. C’est le souvenir de ce qui n’a pas été, sinon sous l’angle du transitoire, que ranime le cinéaste à travers la réunion de ces deux personnages au même patronyme. Un autre exemple nous le prouve : il concerne une composition visuelle et sonore typique de l’auteur, celle qui ouvre le film.

3. Exemple benjaminien et warburgien : générique de Django Unchained

13 Les premiers plans de Django Unchained [00.00.26] dévoilent des hommes noirs enchaînés, menés par deux cavaliers blancs : ces vues larges, plusieurs fois entrecoupées de zooms, incluent ceux qui ne sont encore que des corps anonymes dans un paysage minéral glissant vers la nuit. Le profil de l’un d’entre eux (joué par Jamie

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Foxx) se détache nettement sur une roche grise floutée, suivant un système aussi vieux que le cinéma, celui de la mise au point [00.1.27-00.1.32]. L’ensemble du générique est enveloppé par la chanson de Luis Bacalov « Django » (1966), dont les paroles expriment gravement la douleur d’un amour perdu qui distille un désespoir assuré de n’être pas définitif, tandis qu’un chœur hèle le nom de celui à qui s’adresse cette promesse : la citation est explicite, puisqu’il s’agit bien de la même chanson accompagnant le film éponyme de Corbucci, qui débute par la vision d’un paysage boueux parcouru par un individu vêtu d’une vareuse de l’armée nordiste recouverte de crasse, et tirant un cercueil derrière lui. La désolation de l’ensemble s’éclaire sporadiquement par le bleu du regard de l’homme contrastant avec le sombre de son visage mangé de barbe (Franco Nero). En lui faisant revêtir le corps noir et douloureusement symptomal (on voit les cicatrices du fouet sur le dos de l’esclave) du tragique, propre à son modèle et à son maniérisme revendiqué, Tarantino fait ressurgir cette figure dans une image encore vierge de tout itinéraire fictionnel, mais déjà explicitement marquée. Parce qu’elle évolue dans cette mélopée, la forme épuisée et stoïque regarde à la fois vers le passé qui résonne comme une légende en gestation et vers le futur (son profil tendu) qui l’engage à s’en montrer l’égal, voire à le dépasser. C’est qu’il est lui-même ce fardeau que traîne l’autrefois qui le télescope.

14 On se souvient des propos de Spike Lee, relayés par certains penseurs de la communauté africaine américaine (Rousselot, 2015) et de la manière dont ils ont été commentés – entre autres par Célia Sauvage (2015) qui les approuve – sur l’outrecuidance pour un blanc d’oser parler de l’esclavage à travers un « western spaghetti », propos préoccupants en ce qu’ils illustrent un problème patent de nos civilisations, celui posé par le fait que des communautés et leurs défenseurs se revendiquent comme seules autorités légitimées à représenter leur histoire, voire à se représenter tout court (pour rester dans le cinéma, on en avait eu une illustration éclatante dans les attaques menées contre le western italien et particulièrement Sergio Leone (Ortoli, 1994, 12). On voit d’ailleurs à travers notre simple exemple combien ces dires, au-delà de leur portée liberticide, sont déplacés. Tarantino cherche à ouvrir l’image sur elle-même tout en la projetant sur ce qu’elle sera : une incarnation de la souffrance devant se dépasser par la lutte pour affirmer moins une identité nominale que réelle, c’est-à-dire cinématographique. L’autrefois devient, par là, présent dans le maintenant. Il y a, bien sûr, le motif de la chaîne à briser, du corps voûté par le destin, de la trajectoire funeste, et, plus encore, l’impavide indifférence du ciel, mais ce que l’on peut identifier dans le clivage introduit par cette image, clivage qu’elle établit en même temps qu’elle en indique la négation, c’est la permanence d’une figure, celle de l’ostracisé, du banni, du répudié : on sait que le western italien s’est bâti entre autres choses sur le fait de conférer une valeur héroïque à des personnages connotés, figurativement, par la saleté et la négligence vestimentaire, ne conservant de leurs aînés que la propension à la vitesse de tir et dont les surnoms eux-mêmes, quand ils les annonçaient, trouvaient leurs origines très loin des États-Unis (Django, Keoma, Trinita). Si le film de Corbucci émerge ici dans ce générique (plus fortement encore que dans l’apparition de Franco Nero), c’est en tant qu’il ranime l’opprimé erratique (de ce point de vue, nous comprenons les reproches adressés par Vanina Géré au film qui ne tiendrait pas les promesses faites par son cinéaste au cours de ses conférences de presse, à savoir offrir sa contribution personnelle à la réparation des horreurs de l’esclavage) : la démarche critique de Tarantino n’en est pas pour autant dépourvue de sens politique, mais elle le développe au sein de l’histoire des images au lieu de le

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dégager des images de l’histoire15. Le propos est d’importance, et on se souvient, par exemple, que, dans Inglourious Basterds, lorsqu’il s’agissait d’expliciter le principe inflammatoire de la pellicule au nitrate de cellulose, le réalisateur ne recourait pas à une quelconque archive documentaire, mais bien à un extrait de film de fiction (Agent secret, Hitchcock, 1936) : en se référant ainsi à un contexte exclusivement cinématographique, y compris – et c’est une des raisons des polémiques invoquées – comme univers de référence, Tarantino peut donner l’impression d’entretenir une cohérence factice qui ne tiendrait nullement compte des environnements culturels de chacune des images qu’il invoque (et on pourrait même le taxer de révisionnisme, ce qui a été le cas, lors d’un débat au Mémorial de la Shoah sur Inglourious Basterds (2010)). C’est tout au contraire une subtile entreprise de division qui est déployée au sein de cette homologie d’apparence : le choc des confrontations n’a pour but que de mettre en valeur l’« éclair » dans lequel « l’image du passé » « s’offre à la connaissance » avant de « s’évanoui(r) pour toujours » (ainsi que l’écrit Benjamin, 2000, 430, sur le concept d’histoire). Qu’il parvienne ou pas à dégager cette connaissance de manière infaillible a peu d’importance : l’essentiel tient dans la poursuite même de la recherche et, derrière elle, autant que le comment, c’est le pourquoi même des images qu’elle scrute qui est en jeu. C’est qu’il ne s’agit pas uniquement de mettre côte à côte deux séries de photogrammes animés et sonores pour constater qu’elles se suivent. Il faut aussi mesurer – et c’est tout le travail de la restructuration permise par la chanson16 – les différences : dans le générique de Django Unchained, le montage virtuel introduit ici rend compte aussi des disparités entre les images entremêlées. Le visage de Foxx et son dos s’inscrivent dans une iconographie bâtie par le cinéma depuis Libre à en crever (Goldman, 1972) et Mandingo : celle de l’esclave, désignant, après l’Indien et avant le Chinois, l’une des principales dénégations du western classique. Par là, Tarantino, puissamment, trace un passage qui interroge sa conception de l’histoire de l’art : le plan, ici, intimé par la chanson, s’élance vers d’autres images pour former avec elles une véritable constellation. Et c’est cette constellation qui occupe son cinéma, car la trouver, c’est admettre que le lien (Django-Foxx et Django-Nero partageant la même chanson) prévaut sur les éléments qu’il rassemble. Quand Schultz apprend à Django à trouver sa panoplie, puis à tirer, le faisant passer par plusieurs défroques avant de parvenir à celle, finale, qui évoque l’élégance d’un Williamson dans La chevauchée terrible (Margheriti, 1974), il lui indique moins une finalité qu’un processus, celui de la création. L’image, de fait, ne se fige jamais sur ses attributs figuratifs, mais se détermine par et dans la répétition. L’intervalle mis en valeur entre ces deux séries de plans en-chantés est tout l’enjeu d’une œuvre qui ne se conçoit que dans et par les passages qu’elle creuse. Le paria corbuccien ressuscite dans l’esclave (il est même) et, en même temps, marque sa différence avec lui (il est autre), consolidant l’idée d’un cinéma où tout se joue dans l’entre-deux du passage. C’est le concept de montage qui, ici, est en jeu, comme souvent d’ailleurs chez Tarantino, dont on pourrait dire, poursuivant le résultat des analyses que Didi-Huberman (2007, 475) tire de Mnémosyme, qu’il inaugure une nouvelle forme de comparatisme en inscrivant des éléments apparemment disparates au sein du même plan pour consacrer leur ressemblance, tout en faisant de leur mode d’apparition l’explication même de leur dissonance. Est-il présomptueux d’y lire la poursuite du principe même de l’atlas warburgien, attaché à chercher les « opérations mentales » mises en œuvre par les « valeurs expressives » conservées par la mémoire et permettant de rendre compte des « préfigurations antiques ayant contribué, à l’époque de la Renaissance, à forger le style de la représentation de la vie

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en mouvement » (Warburg, 2012, 54), au sein d’un domaine pour l’heure encore largement inhabité par les penseurs sur l’art ? Nous ne le croyons pas. Le fait qu’ici c’est au spectateur que l’on demande de construire cet entre-deux constitue une démarche salutaire – là où une référence, cinéphiliquement plus respectable, comme Godard, parfois envisagé comme proche de cette pensée warburgienne (Dubois, 2014, 76, Michaud, 1999-00, 52, ou Natali, 2014), en bâtissant lui-même ce montage, en intime simplement sa validation.

Conclusion

15 Les formes tarantinesques ne peuvent donc être étudiées hors de l’acte qui pousse les fantômes qui les hantent à se manifester. Et c’est en ranimant les incarnations sucessives qu’elles ont déjà revêtues avant de les dissiper que la mémoire du cinéma s’impose comme leur seule réalité possible. Reprendre en ravivant, ressusciter en reproduisant : la démarche du cinéaste rejoint celle du mythe qui trace avec le cinéma d’exploitation un lien aussi fécond que vivace. Car c’est bien là le maître mot de la démarche tarantinesque, la raison de son obsession de l’oralité (raconter des histoires ou les commenter, celle de Siegfried, comme de Superman) et de l’écrit (consigner en permanence toute forme de choses pour en garder une trace, du carnet de Cabot dans Reservoir Dogs aux reçus de Schultz dans Django Unchained), qui se retrouvent combinés comme fondement de la nature si spécifique du mythe cinématographique tel qu’on le trouve décliné dans le cinéma d’exploitation : montrer les étapes de la constitution d’un mensonge qui n’est qu’un moment de la vérité. Reprocher à Tarantino de ne se référer qu’au cinéma pour représenter des minorités à l’histoire douloureuse, sans chausser justement des godillots plus respectables – mais lesquels ? Ceux de Spielberg (Amistad, 1997) ? De Steve Mc Queen (12 Years of Slave, 2013) ? –, c’est faire acte de cécité, non seulement parce qu’en disant cela on refuse à un artiste de réfléchir aux conditions mêmes de son art, mais surtout parce qu’on ne cherche pas à voir que ce dernier n’est nullement clos sur lui-même, qu’en se proposant d’y voir resurgir les spectres les plus persistants de l’histoire, ceux qui, depuis les recherches de Pausanias et malgré les critiques de Fontenelle ou de Barthes, ont toujours dissimulé une réalité dans leurs fictions, il l’inclut dans une véritable histoire culturelle. Qu’en conserve-t-il ? Un processus qui nie tout privilège à un original introuvable, pour ne promouvoir que le mécanisme de sa répétition, en tant qu’il consiste toujours à se différencier. Et quelle est donc cette vérité, soigneusement dissimulée dans les plis de ces mensonges répétés de films en films, de pages en pages, de voix en voix, sinon celle d’un ce-qui-a-été insaisissable car conditionné par sa nécessité à sans cesse renaître par un acte d’imagination ? C’est la défense de cet acte, comme privilège de la création, qui confère au cinéma d’exploitation une armature d’exemplarité et à l’œuvre de Tarantino sa grandeur.

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SAUVAGE, Célia, « Django Unchained", ou l’ambiguïté de la violence dans les films de Tarantino », http://leplus.nouvelobs.com/contribution/764523-django-unchained-ou-l-ambiguite-de-la- violence-dans-les-films-de-tarantino.html, 15.03.2015

---, Critiquer Quentin Tarantino est-il raisonnable ?, Paris, Vrin (Philosophie et cinéma), 2013, 83-116.

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SCHEFER, Olivier, Figures de l’errance et de l’exil : Cinéma, art et Anthropologie, Pertuis, Touge profound (Débords), 2013.

SELLIER, Geneviève, et Noël Burch, Ignorés de tous… sauf du public : 15 ans de fiction télévisée française passée au crible, Paris, INA Éditions (Médias Histoire), 2014.

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TESSON, Charles, Photogénie de la série b, Paris, Cahiers du cinéma (Albums), 1997.

TISSERON, Serge, entretien réalisé par Ghislain Deslandes et Jocelyn Maixent, in La voix du regard, n°15, L’obscène, acte ou image ?, automne 2002, 113-24.

UDOVITCH, Mim, in « Mim Udovitch / 1996 », in Gerald Peary, Quentin Tarantino : Interviews, Jackson, University Press of Mississipi, 1998, 166-75.

VION-DURY, Philippe, « Polémique : « Django Unchained », le dernier Tarantino, est-il raciste ? », http://rue89.nouvelobs.com/rue89culture/2013/01/16/polemique-le-dernier-tarantino-est-il- raciste-et-violent-238658.

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VIRMAUX, Odette et Alain, Les surréalistes et le cinéma, Paris, Seghers (Ramsay / Poche / Cinéma), 1988 [1976].

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NOTES

1. Citons juste deux propos journalistiques, l’un qui fait de Kill Bill une « compilation énervée de ses fixettes de cinéaste junk-food gavé depuis des lustres de tous les produits possibles et imaginables de la sous-culture planétaire » (Péron, 2003), l’autre qui évoque, à travers le même film, « une cinéphilie qui est placée sous le signe du cinéma d’exploitation et qui transpire à chaque plan » (Hospiyan, Tarantinoxploitation, 2015). 2. Pai Mei est un personnage du kung fu pian généralement présenté comme l’un des principaux responsables de l’extermination du temple Shaolin (il sert les Qing, dynastie mandchoue impériale) – sans que la validité historique de cette destruction soit avérée. Les œuvres centrées sur cet épisode font de Pai Mei – ou Bai Mei suivant les cas, « Sourcils blancs » en VF – un membre de la secte du lotus blanc, maître d’arts martiaux taoïste associé au régime en place et participant à sa politique d’extermination, c’est-à-dire utilisant ses pouvoirs redoutables – aux vertus quasi surnaturelles – pour les mettre au service des Mandchous. Puissance maléfique et quasi-invincible, Pai Mei est crédité dans Le Poing mortel du dragon (Lieh, 1980) de l’invention d’une technique consistant à frapper 7 poings vitaux – utilisée également en acupuncture – : dans ce film, suite et remake des Exécuteurs de Shaolin (Chia-Liang, 1976) outre la possibilité de rétracter ses testicules pour coincer les attaques de ses adversaires entre ses jambes et les déstabiliser, sa force et son savoir sont symbolisés par ses longs sourcils blancs et sa barbichette qu’il ramène d’un côté ou de l’autre pour manifester son contentement. Il fait figure de mal absolu pour les infortunés disciples de Shaolin qui, après la destruction de leur lieu de vie, sont traqués et n’aspirent qu’à se venger de lui. La dimension démoniaque de l’homme a toujours été entretenue, le plus explicite restant son incarnation chez Chang Cheh – Le monastère de Shaolin (Cheh, 1974) – où, alors qu’il est lié au conseiller occulte du pouvoir, responsable majeur de toutes les exactions, il n’est qu’une voix répondant, calmement, aux inquiétudes de Zhui-Chan – le traître – et expliquant la faille à exploiter pour abattre le héros, puis une ombre, où l’on reconnaît sa barbichette opulente et son chapeau. Mais la façon dont Lu-Chiu-Liang l’introduit dès le générique des Exécuteurs de Shaolin, combattant le grand prêtre Shaolin, sur fond uniformément rouge, et son nom apparaissant avec son interprète – Lo-Lieh –, n’en est pas moins martiale. Dès le départ, le combat est ponctué, chaque fois qu’il tombe – et se redresse –, de ralentis qui accentuent sa dimension surnaturelle, comme s’il maîtrisait la vitesse pour mieux dominer le temps. Ce personnage est une composante-clef de la mythologie du Kung-Fu Pian, dans la mesure où il associe l’autorité et la maîtrise à la félonie (nous avons développé cet aspect longuement dans notre ouvrage (Ortoli, 2012, 225-232)). 3. On peut, pour les caractéristiques principielles, s’appuyer largement sur Doherty (1989, 14) et sur Schaefer (1999, 5) qui les déclinent dans une perspective historique. 4. Sur les témoignages désabusés quant à cette démission des pouvoirs artistiques du cinéma devant les exigences du commerce, les propos les plus éclairants sont ceux tenus par les surréalistes et ce, dès les exhortations d’Apollinaire (01/12/1918) à prendre à bras-le-corps le cinématographe : « [Apollinaire] les [les poètes] engageait avec insistance à “composer des images pour des esprits méditatifs et plus raffinés qui ne se contenteront point des imaginations grossières des fabricants de films ” » (Virmaux, 1988, 17). André Breton (1951) disait : « Ici comme ailleurs, on ne peut se défendre d’une certaine nostalgie à l’idée de ce que le cinéma eût pu être

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et permettre si la sordidité de l’époque, jointe aux conditions, pires que toutes autres, de sa propre “exploitation”, n’avaient été pour l’amputer des ailes dès le nid » (Virmaux, 1988, 281) ou Benjamin Péret (1951) : « [Le cinéma] est aussi capable de l’(le spectateur) abrutir au lieu de le réveiller, et c’est, hélas ! ce qu’on a pu constater à mesure que le cinéma, de moyen culturel sans précédent, se transformait en industrie, soumise aux lois d’un marché sordide, et incapable de distinguer une œuvre de l’esprit d’un sac de farine » (Virmaux, 1988, 283). 5. Songeons à Rimbaud (1999, 139) : « J’aimais les peintures idiotes, dessus de portes, décors, toiles de saltimbanques, enseignes, enluminures populaires ; la littérature démodée, latin d’église, livres érotiques sans orthographe, romans de nos aïeules, contes de fées, petits livres de l’enfance, opéras vieux, refrains niais, rythmes naïfs » 6. http://www.univ-paris-diderot.fr/formation/DocFormation/ Brochure_Master_Cinema_2015-2016.pdf (20/10/2015) 7. Même, s’il est vrai, et nous suivons sur ce point Schaefer (1999, 19-29), que le cinéma d’exploitation tient, historiquement, plus du « montré » que du « narré », se structurant essentiellement autour de l’« attraction », et retrouvant, par le fait, une prédominance que Tom Gunning (2015) identifie, via Méliès, comme constitutive de l’ère dite primitive du cinématographe, nous pensons qu’il n’en est pas moins soumis à ce qui caractérise la majorité des films, à savoir l’obligation de raconter des histoires. 8. Cité également dans Boulevard de la mort. 9. Il va de soi que d’autres grandes figures, comme Vienna dans Johnny Guitar (Ray, 1954) ou Jean Arthur dans Une aventure de Buffalo Bill (De Mille, 1936) ont montré que, même de façon minoritaire, le cinéma américain a aussi présenté des figures de femmes d’action. 10. C’est la même raison qui a engendré dans les années 50 la vogue des films de blousons noirs qui s’apparentaient peu ou prou aux mélodrames criminels des années 30 mais dont les attributs des dits criminels, perfecto et gros cubes, témoignaient de l’air du temps. 11. Voir Cervulle, 2009, cité par Chollet, 2015. 12. Il est d’ailleurs éloquent que l’inclusion de ce terme, nigger, dont l’utilisation dans les films de Tarantino a fait couler tant d’encre inutile n’ait jamais levé le moindre opprobre chez Spike Lee et ses adeptes américains et français (pour un résumé de cette polémique, consulter Vion-Dury et Rousselot, voire, pour des avis d’internautes, http://forum.fnnation.com/archive/index.php/ t-103070.html ). 13. On compte au bas mot une bonne vingtaine de westerns italiens reprenant, au moins dans leur titre, le nom Django. 14. Relevé, entre autres, par Dozol, et déjà considéré comme « culte » lors des 7 minutes présentées à Cannes en 2012 (Bosio, 2015). 15. En ce sens, le film est l’opposé d’une œuvre admirable de retenue et de puissance, mais se référant, elle, aux lieux réels comme aux archives de l’esclavage des Africains déportés aux États- Unis, Little Senegal (Bouchareb, 2001). 16. Et sur ce point, l’utilisation finale qui en était faite dans Sukiyaki Western Django était déjà éloquente, puisqu’elle accompagnait l’affirmation suivant laquelle le jeune héros, Django, enfant japonais d’un Far West nippon, allait, plus tard, devenir célèbre en Italie.

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RÉSUMÉS

Que Tarantino ait contribué à rendre le cinéma d’exploitation, sinon universel, du moins acceptable à un public élargi loin du cercle initial de ses adorateurs est une évidence. Certains critiques, qui regardaient cette catégorie avec une certaine hauteur, se sont soudain trouvés obligés, devant les films du cinéaste de Pulp Fiction (1994), de faire valoir leur magistrale connaissance d’une production cinématographique dont, originairement, ils étaient plutôt les contempteurs. Pourquoi et comment cette position, souvent assumée de manière maladroite, s’est-elle avérée nécessité ? Voilà, sans doute, un constat premier qui croise des réflexions ne datant pas de Reservoir Dogs (1992) et qui ne sauraient demeurer à l’état sociologisant qu’ordinairement elles requièrent : loin de ne promulguer qu’un panthéon du 7ème Art différent de celui que l’ordinaire de ses chronologistes a instauré, l’œuvre de Tarantino témoigne d’une volonté marquée de revisiter les catégories de l’histoire du cinéma et, donc, de l’histoire de l’art, ce qui aboutit à une redéfinition de l’objet premier de cette quête, le cinéma, bien évidemment, et, en son centre, le concept d’image. Cette volonté se décline en divers projets dont le plus audacieux, sans doute, consiste à penser le cinéma d’exploitation en tant qu’expression singulière du cinéma par sa capacité à faire de la répétition et de la différence un principe et un objet. Par là même, cette conception (largement partagée mais jamais dévoilée avec une telle puissance) pulvérise les frontières prudemment installées par les gardiens du temple cinéphilique et sociologique.

It is fairly obvious that Tarantino has contributed to making exploitation cinema, if not universally popular, at least acceptable to a wider audience than its initial niche fans. So much so that, following on the success of Pulp Fiction (1994), critics and scholars who previously frowned upon exploitation cinema were now displaying vast knowledge of these films. How has this (sometimes awkward) position suddenly become a necessity? This first observation should not be limited to the sociological perspective that has often been adopted since Reservoir Dogs (1992). Indeed, the films of Tarantino do not so much promote a pantheon of films that differs from that erected by the archeologists of cinema, but are driven by a desire to revisit the categories of film history, and thus of art history, ultimately leading to a redefinition of the very object of this quest: cinema, of course, and more generally, the image itself. This desire is developed in a variety of projects, the most audacious being, no doubt, the view of exploitation cinema as a singular expression of cinema because of its capacity to make of repetition and difference both a defining principle and an object. In so doing, this view, which, though widely shared, has never been revealed to this extent, destroys the boundaries cautiously upheld by the keepers of the temples of cinephilia and sociology.

INDEX

Mots-clés : Quentin Tarantino, répétition, différence, intervalle, Django, blaxploitation, western, survival. Keywords : Quentin Tarantino, repetition, difference, interval, Django, blaxploitation, western, survival

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AUTEUR

PHILIPPE ORTOLI Université de Corse / Aix-Marseille Université (LESA)

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Hostel (Eli Roth, 2005 et 2007), le torture-porn et le cinéma d’exploitation : l’être humain à l’ère de sa reproductibilité technique

Pierre Jailloux

1 De jeunes Américains franchissant l’Atlantique pour rencontrer l’horreur sur le Vieux Continent : voici un possible résumé du diptyque Hostel 1. Trois étudiants venus passer du bon temps en Europe croient trouver en Slovaquie l’Éden qu’ils recherchaient, à savoir une vaste zone de non droit où s’assouvissent sans restriction tous les désirs de la chair, accordés par une gent féminine peu farouche. Leurs conquêtes s’avéreront être les rabatteuses d’un sombre commerce des corps, livrés à des individus prêts à débourser beaucoup d’argent pour satisfaire leurs plus bas instincts, torture et mise à mort y compris. Le deuxième opus suit une trame semblable, en amenant sur les mêmes lieux de perdition trois jeunes Américaines, dont le point de vue alterne cette fois avec celui des bourreaux, en la personne de deux compatriotes souhaitant s’abandonner aux frissons du meurtre.

2 Le terme torture-porn, accolé depuis les années 2000 à ces deux films, comme à d’autres aussi divers que la série des Saw (inaugurée, en 2004 par James Wan, et engendrant six suites à ce jour), le Français Martyrs (Pascal Laugier, 2008), ou encore le Japonais Grotesque (Gurotesuku, Koji Shiraishi, 2011), désigne un sous-genre du film d’horreur qui intègre grossièrement les œuvres « a) réalisées généralement après 2003, b) comportant rapt, bandage, captivité, et torture (mentale ou physique), et c) appartenant plus largement au genre horrifique » (Jones, 2013, 8, je traduis)2. Autrement dit, le torture-porn semble condenser et proposer la quintessence même du film d’horreur, en dénudant une histoire qui s’efface devant l’événement abominable et se résume à sa seule acmé3. Prélevant de la pornographie son mépris de la narration au profit de l’attraction, il délaisse le récit pour n’en conserver que les performances. À ce titre, l’exploitation désigne ici un cinéma réduit à son plus simple appareil, dévêtu de ses ornementations scénaristiques, dramatiques ou psychologiques. Les processus de

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résistance, l’instinct de survie et la pulsion de vie qui sous-tendent des sous-genres voisins tels que le slasher, le survival, ou encore le rape and revenge (comme le suggèrent leurs appellations)4, sont déniés au torture-porn, qui ne retient de l’horreur ni l’avant ni l’après, mais seulement le climax. Si les dénominations sont flottantes, les délimitations incertaines et poreuses, le terme même de torture-porn a surtout le mérite de mettre en avant la substantifique moelle du film d’horreur, en en retirant la peau (la fable) pour n’en garder que la chair (l’horreur). Cette dimension explique aussi la présence du gore, avec lequel il partage le goût de l’écorchement. Aucune échappatoire dans ce dispositif tout entier dédié au plaisir masochiste, à la perversion libérée de toute censure, qu’elle soit endogène ou exogène. En lui attribuant cette étiquette, on stigmatise donc en Hostel les penchants voyeuristes du spectateur, venus se repaître d’humiliations et avides d’outrances sanguinaires. L’idée de payer pour provoquer, et donc contempler, la souffrance renvoie irrémédiablement à la posture du spectateur : il s’agit de contenter ce plaisir primaire et décomplexé, en exploitant un cinéma qui était déjà d’exploitation – celle des bas instincts, sexuels ou létaux.

3 Hostel a donc la particularité de manifester la pleine conscience de son appartenance à une certaine tendance du cinéma, dont il n’hésite pas à recycler les codes, en mettant en scène l’exploitation même de la souffrance à travers cette entreprise lucrative de torture sur mesure. Une analyse de la représentation de l’abomination permet d’en relever la dimension spectaculaire, qu’il convient de resituer dans une société livrée au bien-être et avide de représentations distancées. Ce faisant, le diptyque prolonge en l’actualisant le discours économique et politique des films dont il s'inspire, à travers une réification et marchandisation de l’humain. Des auteurs tels que Jean Baudrillard ou Gilles Lipovetsky nous aident à comprendre la société de consommation et du loisir, et leurs implications sur les mutations et le comportement de l’homme contemporain, dont Pier Paolo Pasolini a retranscrit la part sombre en termes cinématographiques dans Salo ou les 120 journées de Sodome (1975) ainsi que dans ses écrits politiques. La violence du regard porté sur la société dans le cinéma d’exploitation des années 70 (on F0 F0 pense à Zombie et Dawn of the Dead de George A. Romero 5B 19785D ) est remise au goût du jour dans cette version modernisée que constitue la série des Hostel, produite par Quentin Tarantino5. Exploitation des désirs les plus refoulés et exploitation de l’homme par l’homme vont de pair dans ces deux films : du recyclage cinématographique au recyclage humain, le dispositif mis en place par Eli Roth trouve dans la pensée d’un Walter Benjamin (L’oeuvre d’art à l’époque de sa reproductibilité technique, où l’analyse des évolutions technologiques est inséparable de son versant politique) un éclairage utile pour en comprendre la logique mortifère. La reprise des motifs génériques, dans Hostel, porte une critique virulente et acide d’un système fondé sur l’exploitation d’autrui et l’inhumanité des rapports sociaux.

Recyclages de l'horreur

4 Héritier au premier abord du cinéma d’exploitation à tendance horrifique, Hostel n’hésite pas à son tour à exploiter ses aïeux pour en révéler la substance plus ou moins retenue jusque-là. Aussi retrouve-t-on quelque chose des premiers films gore de Herschell Gordon Lewis – Blood Feast, 1963, ou 2000 Maniacs, 1964 – dans la propension du diptyque à s’appesantir sur les sévices infligés (ou plus exactement leurs préliminaires, en évitant la vision de l’acte lui-même) au détriment de tout enrobage

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narratif, expédié avec une certaine désinvolture. Non pas que Hostel soit dénué d’articulation et de propos logique : mais son concept s’appuie a priori sur le seul plaisir de la souffrance d’autrui, à travers une organisation lucrative et rationnelle. Torture et meurtre se délestent de toute justification narrative (vengeance, besoin vital, réflexe défensif...). Roth reprend en effet la trame de départ de 2000 Maniacs, avec ses yankees venus participer aux festivités d’une ville du sud ravagée par la guerre civile. Comme les Américains de Hostel en visite dans une Europe centrale inconnue et pittoresque, ces touristes de leur propre pays seront la proie des habitants d’une cité justement baptisée Pleasant Valley, lieu de tous les plaisirs, à commencer par ceux de ses habitants, qui feront de leurs hôtes les jouets du sadisme le plus débridé. L’aspect ludique et décomplexé de la mise à mort du film de Lewis voit son prolongement dans Hostel, s’y retrouvant absorbée et intégrée à un circuit commercial répondant aux règles communes de la transaction, fondée sur l’offre et la demande.

5 L’hypertrophie de l’acte meurtrier et la surreprésentation de l’humiliation trouvent également leurs racines dans d’autres pans du cinéma d’exploitation. Ainsi, la structure du rape and revenge – du calvaire interminable d’une victime sacrifiée sur l’autel du plaisir sadique, à la revanche proportionnée aux extrémités commises – charpente également chacun des deux Hostel (avec une nette dissymétrie, cependant, en faveur de la première partie), échouant systématiquement sur les représailles de la victime transformée en bourreau. Dans le deuxième opus, une scène semble directement issue de La Dernière maison sur la gauche, lorsque les jeunes étudiantes se retrouvent piégées dans un wagon par des hommes leur promettant un peu d’herbe [15 :50-17 :06], ne laissant aucun doute sur l’intention des mâles à leur égard pour qui a vu le film de Wes Craven dans lequel deux jeunes femmes sont prises au piège dans un appartement, pour les mêmes raisons. La ressemblance physique entre les meneurs de groupe de chacun des deux films ne relève certainement pas de la coïncidence.

6 La trajectoire limpide du survival est aussi suivie par les films d’Eli Roth. Cependant, l’intérêt du dispositif primaire de ce sous-genre du film d’horreur ne réside pas tant dans sa ligne ténue (avec la survie pour seul horizon) que dans ses implications idéologiques : lointain rejeton des Chasses du comte Zaroff (The Most Dangerous Game, Ernest B. Schoedsack et Irving Pichel, 1932), dont le titre original insiste sur la portée ludique, le survival dépeint le monde et les relations humaines comme une partie de chasse. L’individu n’y a droit qu'à deux fonctions : chasseur ou proie (ces deux positions pouvant s’avérer interchangeables). Autant dire que cette perspective conduit tout droit à la réification de l’Autre, avec lequel toute interlocution semble impossible en dehors de cette répartition des rôles. C’est le cas, exemplairement, dans Massacre à la tronçonneuse, qui va jusqu’au bout de la logique cynégétique d’un Délivrance (Deliverance, John Boorman, 1974), lui-même dans le prolongement des Chasses du comte Zaroff, en réduisant l’être humain à sa plus simple expression : la chair et les os. C’est pour cette raison que, dans le film de Hooper, la famille de Leatherface, ancienne employée de père en fils des abattoirs locaux, s’emploie au recyclage de ses victimes, pour en faire de la nourriture, des tentures ou encore des abat-jour. Les corps suppliciés puis entassés dans les chariots de Hostel réduisent l’horreur à son épure, en repliant le recyclage d’un genre sur celui de l’humain.

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Au marché des images

7 L’exploitation d’un cinéma qui déjà ressortait de l’exploitation conduit inévitablement à interroger les images pourvoyeuses de l’abominable. Constatant la « nature encyclopédique » de l’évolution du cinéma « fantastique »6, devenu « déversoir généralisé », Charles Tesson précise : « Le corps est le terrain privilégié de cette encyclopédie. Sa cible, son centre. Le cinéma fantastique s’intéresse au premier lieu à son image, à son aventure. La matière même du corps, son image, ont une histoire, étroitement mêlée » (Tesson, 1982, 9, je souligne)7. Le corps, passé à la moulinette de l’image, est donc livré à toutes les manipulations : comme dans le cinéma burlesque, le poids du corps, au centre des attentions, se retrouve malléable à merci, déformé, soumis aux aléas de son environnement, sculpté par son interaction avec le cadre. Autrement dit, le cinéma d’horreur, et singulièrement le torture-porn, prend le corps humain comme terrain de jeu, marionnette dont on tire les ficelles. À cet égard, la série des Saw, avec ses dispositifs diaboliques, ne fait qu’entériner et exhiber la dimension ludique de l’horreur, voire son aspect sportif : à la fin de Hostel II, la tête d’une rabatteuse décapitée fait office de ballon de football, avec lequel des enfants entament une partie [85:14-85:39].

8 On distingue vite le versant sinistre, voire cynique, de cette approche. Le diptyque pratique l’autopsie du corps innocent, nourrissant les penchants voyeuristes et sadiques du spectateur à des fins mercantiles – « Soyez prudent, vous pourriez dépenser l’argent que vous possédez là-dedans », prévient le cinéaste japonais Takashi Miike lors de sa seule ligne de dialogue [Hostel, 52:34], lui-même pourvoyeur de déviances sadiques (en 1999, Audition culmine dans un lancinant acte de torture) « dont la présence ironique souligne accessoirement la nature du contrat sadomasochiste passé entre le réalisateur-tortionnaire de film d’horreur et son public : il s’agit de produire des images qui font mal » (Bou, Thoret, 2006, 92). Selon Jean Baudrillard, la quiétude du spectateur de la prospérité et du bien-être a besoin, pour s’exalter, de perpétuelle violence consommée. C’est son obscénité à elle. Elle est friande d’événements et de violence, pourvu que celle-ci lui soit servie chambrée. Caricaturalement, c’est le téléspectateur relaxé devant les images de la guerre du Vietnam. L’image de la TV, comme une fenêtre inverse, donne d’abord sur une chambre, et, dans cette chambre, l’extériorité cruelle du monde se fait intime et chaleureuse, d’une chaleur perverse (Baudrillard, 2006, 33-34).

9 C’est ce confort ambigu que Hostel entend remettre en question, en revisitant le cinéma d’exploitation ; la référence de Baudrillard aux images télévisées du Vietnam renvoie d’ailleurs au contexte bien connu dans lequel s’épanouissent les représentations de l’horreur dès la fin des années 60 aux États-Unis (comme le montre notamment Robin Wood dans Hollywood from Vietnam to Reagan, en particulier son chapitre « The American Nightmare. Horror in the 70s »).

10 Philippe Ortoli rappelle comment Hostel I et II « ne sont pas dupes de toutes ces images

F0 F0 atroces : 5B ils5D ne font qu’imiter d’autres images […] et, par là, les vident de toute dimension autre que formelle » (Ortoli, 2012, 436-437). L’horreur des scènes de torture plonge dans les soubassements du film d’exploitation, en prolongeant une vieille tradition gothique, mise en exergue par le meurtre à la faux de Hostel II, héritière des sévices de la comtesse Bathory, baignée dans son sang [47:03-49:55]8 – avec l’usine désaffectée comme ersatz tardif du château de Dracula. Comme le remarque Ortoli, la scène donne accès aux coulisses présidant à son installation [45:13-49:54] : déplacement

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de la victime au-dessus de la baignoire, allumage des chandelles... De la même manière, la visite d’un musée des tortures dans le premier volet – spectacle sons et lumières à grand renfort de mannequins et de hurlements [30:10-31:40] – exhibe sans fard la dimension méta-filmique et la lucidité du film quant à sa représentation de la violence, dernier rejeton d’une longue lignée sanguinolente qu’il n’est plus possible de tout à fait prendre au sérieux. L’immonde se fait alors pastiche, jeu, délesté de son poids de chair, pour de faux. Les nombreux clins d’œil à une cinéphilie déviante et tarantinienne (outre Takashi Miike, et entre autres exemples, on retrouve parmi les « clients » le réalisateur italien Ruggero Deodato, sur lequel nous reviendrons) signifient aussi l’assimilation du gore à une esthétique du recyclage, de la reconnaissance, qui ne dépare pas une société de l’artifice et de l’auto-référence.

L’horreur inoffensive

11 Le réemploi d’images éprouvées intègre l’horreur à un vaste réseau et échange de représentations, où la réalité se retrouve prise au piège de la toile référentielle, recyclée par la machine intertextuelle. Pour Baudrillard, l’événement de la société de l'image ne devient « consommable » que filtré, morcelé, réélaboré par toute une chaîne industrielle de production, les mass media, en produit fini, en matériel de signes finis et combinés – analogues aux objets finis de production industrielle. C’est la même opération que réalise le maquillage sur le visage : substitution systématique aux traits réels mais disparates d’un réseau de messages abstraits, mais cohérents, à partir d’éléments techniques et d’un code de significations imposées (le code de la « beauté ») » (Baudrillard, 2006, 194-95).

12 C’est ainsi que la séance de torture des jeunes femmes, dans Hostel II, fait l’objet d’une préparation soigneuse pour le « client » [58:26-59:20 ; 60:21-60:50] : le « produit » doit être présentable, et pour cela maquillé, pouponné, adapté à un certain idéal. D’autant que l’une des victimes est choisie pour sa ressemblance avec l’épouse du tortionnaire, qui veut infliger à son simulacre ce qu’il est contraint d’épargner à son modèle [72:40]. Sa proie ne figure donc bien qu’une enveloppe vide, un symbole (l’Épouse), un packaging conforme à ses pulsions de consommateur. Dans le premier film, un raccord proposait une solution de continuité entre des tenailles sur le point d’arracher un doigt de pied et une jeune Japonaise en train de se couper les ongles [32:39]. Et c’est en apercevant son reflet dans une surface réfléchissante, justement, que le même personnage se rend compte de la défiguration subie par son visage, la conduisant au suicide [81:07]. C’est donc par l’intermédiaire d’une simple surface que l’horreur prend forme pour elle (dont l’énucléation sauvage signale l’aveuglement), équivalente à l’image cinématographique en deux dimensions : le film ne produit que des ersatz de réalité, fantômes sans épaisseur ni substance. C’est le sang de la réalité, en revanche, qui va asperger et toucher ceux qui se trouvent aux abords des rails9.

13 L’existence même d’un diptyque, donc d’une suite, participe de cette circularité des images, engluées dans une auto-référentialité mortifère. Si la fin du premier film voyait le triomphe d’une sorte de loi du talion digne du rape and revenge, elle s’annule avec l’ouverture du deuxième, et la liquidation du survivant [9 :03], qui laisse la voie libre au recyclage ainsi qu’à la logique commerciale du sequel et des franchises d’horreur (Halloween, Freddy) des années 1980. On a beau remplacer étudiants et appâts par leurs homologues féminins, tout recommence : l’appel du dérèglement des sens en territoire

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slovaque, les sortilèges de l’auberge, les abominations de la torture, la survie inespérée10. À l’intérieur même du premier film, un étudiant à la recherche de ses compagnons de route et revenant sur les lieux d’origine, assiste au même rituel – reflet de femmes plantureuses, et dans le plus simple appareil, riant dans leur chambre et l’invitant à les rejoindre au sauna en prononçant les mêmes phrases [17:30-19:00 ; 45:00]. Signe qui ne trompe pas, on repasse en boucle Pulp Fiction (Tarantino, 1994) à la télévision de l’accueil : l’univers des Hostel semble abolir le temps et interdire l’évolution, la fable11 étant condamnée à se mirer dans le miroir de ses propres répétitions, à l’instar d’un monde tarantinien nourri d’un imaginaire cinéphile tendant à l’exclusion du réel. Celui-ci est à fuir, de la même manière que le tortionnaire qui détourne le regard du visage défiguré de sa victime dans le premier opus. Tout semble surtout converger vers une stratégie marketing destinée à attirer le consommateur de chair fraîche pour le prendre à son propre piège et le transformer à son tour en produit de consommation. À titre d’exemple : la femme ayant attiré un personnage dans le centre de torture, traitée de « pute », rétorque : « Tu m’as fait gagner beaucoup d’argent. Ce qui fait de toi ma pute » [55:18], l’insulte renvoyant à la face de l’Américain son comportement assimilable à celui d’un touriste sexuel.

14 Le fantôme d’une horreur cette fois-ci réelle, la barbarie nazie, s’évapore à son tour dans les vapeurs inoffensives du simulacre, voire de la caricature (le premier opus a des relents de nazisploitation) et de la muséification. La première proposition des touristes débarqués à Amsterdam est ainsi d’aller visiter la maison d’Anne Franck devenue vestige sans portée historique d’une réalité révolue et transformée en objet de consommation. La proposition est d’ailleurs immédiatement rejetée, au profit d’un coffee shop, passage obligé garantissant la dissolution de tout ancrage terrestre [2:45]12. Rappelant la fameuse assertion de Marx distinguant la portée réelle de l’événement historique principiel et sa répétition sous une forme dégradée et grotesque, Baudrillard décrit une réalité devenant simple « référence légendaire » : Ainsi la consommation culturelle peut être définie comme le temps et le lieu de la résurrection caricaturale, de l’évocation parodique de ce qui n’est déjà plus – de ce qui est « consommé » au sens premier du terme (achevé et révolu). Ces touristes qui partent en car dans le Grand Nord refaire les gestes de la ruée vers l’or, à qui on loue une batte et une tunique esquimaude pour faire couleur locale, ces gens-là consomment : ils consomment sous forme rituelle ce qui fut événement historique, réactualisé de force comme légende (Baudrillard, 2006, 147). Les touristes de Hostel visitent aussi les hauts lieux d’une horreur non pas réelle, mais référencée, cadastrée dans l’histoire des formes, reproduisant le geste même d’un cinéma d’exploitation se nourrissant d’autres images.

Le devenir-image du corps

15 C’est en s’inspirant d’un autre sous-genre de l’exploitation cinématographique, le film de cannibales, qu’Eli Roth entend interroger le devenir-image du corps. La fascination du cinéaste américain pour cet avatar exotique du survival n’est pas un mystère – depuis le caméo de Ruggero Deodato, réalisateur italien de Cannibal Holocaust (1980), en tortionnaire se délectant des organes de sa victime, dans Hostel II [74:24-75:20] jusqu’à son dernier film The Green Inferno (2014), directement issu de cette veine (des étudiants américains perdus dans la forêt amazonienne y sont les proies d’une tribu anthropophage). Le film séminal de Deodato est plus qu’un signe de reconnaissance à

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destination des initiés : ce n’est pas seulement la passion anthropophage de sa filmographie qui s’expose sur la table et dans le plan en guise d’hommage ; ce qui est livré au regard lucide et sans concession de la caméra d’Eli Roth, c’est surtout la confusion entre réalité et fiction, savamment entretenue par le film dans le film Cannibal Holocaust, du faux snuff au mondo13 en passant par le réalisme documentaire de La Dernière maison sur la gauche déjà cité. Comme l'explique Barthélémy Amengual, « les proxénètes du porno exploitent la ressemblance dans le film comme d’autres proxénètes exploitent la femme dans la putain » (Amengual, 1999, 856). L’affirmation peut s’appliquer à l’horreur, autre forme d’exploitation de l’analogie de l’image filmique avec la réalité14. Mais ici, la roublardise est remise à sa place par l’outrance de la mise en scène : la dégustation d’un homme sur fond de musique classique, respectant le cérémonial du dîner domestique [74:24-75:20], qui dissipe toute ambiguïté sur la possibilité d’un « cinéma-vérité », et rappelle que tous les éléments par lesquels la représentation d’un événement se donne comme réelle […] relèvent d’un dispositif de la représentation, c’est-à-dire de la fiction pour faire croire à son sérieux et, par là même, pour mettre en évidence son pouvoir (faire oublier la fiction, la représentation, au profit de l’événement, de la réalité brute). Mais c’est, d’un autre côté, contre la prétention du snuff movie, affirmer en fin de compte le pouvoir absolu de l’image, de la représentation, dans la mesure où elle peut produire une fiction qui se donne comme la réalité (Dufour, 2006, 179).

16 Par conséquent, si la mise en spectacle du corps souffrant n’empêche pas la « résistance de la vie – et, donc, de la réalité – sur tout ce qui essaie de la nier » (Ortoli, 2012, 440), c’est finalement l’image qui impose la virtualisation du monde, par delà sang et viscères. Mais cet évidement de la vie par son double est justement la conséquence du dispositif cinématographique. Celui-ci condamne tout d’abord la réalité à sa « reproductibilité technique », entraînant de fait son modèle réel à l’artifice et l’inauthentique, d’après les thèses bien connues de Walter Benjamin. La possibilité de duplication à l’infini prive le monde enregistré de son hic et nunc auratique, de la singularité qui en fait le prix. L’original s’évanouit au profit d’une série indéfinie de répliques. Ainsi peut-on parler sans détour d’une « ontologie obscène du cinéma » (Bayon, 2007, 33), qui réduit le « corps à une valeur marchande, un objet sans valeur réelle puisque copiable, infiniment reproductible » (ibid., 43), désincarné et voué à la mécanisation. Ce commerce des images accompagne l’entreprise sanguinaire des deux Hostel de Roth : l’être humain y devient marchandise, doté d’une valeur (un Américain étant davantage côté qu’une autre nationalité), soumis à la même consommation que n’importe quel autre produit, grâce à une logistique de multinationale (dont les différents maillons nous sont progressivement dévoilés, de la clientèle issue de pays favorisés, à la sous-traitance dans une zone émergente et encore fragile) et une organisation rationnelle, ramenant le cinéma d’exploitation à l’ère de la globalisation.

17 Le cinéma participe de la transformation du monde en spectacle. Certes, l’horreur réelle succède à l’horreur simulée, et « le grand guignol n’est plus ici ce qui déréalise l’horreur représentée mais l’agent de sa révélation » (Bou, Thoret, 2006, 95) à travers les résurgences d’une Histoire refoulée ou négligée. Malgré cela, les « véritables » tortures subies par les personnages masculins sont contaminées par les mises en scènes macabres en même temps qu’artificielles du musée de la torture dans le premier Hostel, de même que les sévices infligées aux jeunes filles prolongent les grimages macabres de la fête de la moisson et d’un spectacle de marionnettes innocemment violent dans le

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deuxième [31:07-31 :31 ; 39:00-39:27]. Lorsqu’une future victime est emportée dans les couloirs de l’usine, dans le film inaugural, loisir lui est donné de voir défiler les différentes salles et la variété des sévices délivrées à ses compagnons d’infortune [55:25-56:14]. Chaque salle se succède ainsi à l'écran, comme une suite de plans reliés par le montage, et comme autant de vues à sensation, de saynètes dignes du cinéma primitif. Dans le deuxième film, la tentative de fuite d’une jeune femme est observée sur les écrans de surveillance par des gardiens rigolards [59:50-60:20].

18 « On fait grief au cinéma porno de traiter la femme en objet. Mais tout ce qu'il montre y est objet pour cette raison qu'il n’est question que de regarder. Comme au zoo », écrit Barthélémy Amengual (Amengual, 1999, 848). Ou comme aux origines foraines du cinéma-exhibition, comme on allait visiter, aussi, les morgues en famille au XIXe siècle, tradition poursuivie par les exécutions enregistrées de par le monde par la firme Pathé. On explique ainsi à un étudiant encore libre que ses amis, en fait capturés, sont à une performance (« art show ») ou une exposition (« exhibit ») [49:45]. Rappel, également, de la séquence finale du Salo de Pasolini (le « Cercle du sang ») dans laquelle la mise à mort des adolescents est perçue à travers les jumelles des notables, tout à la jouissance de leur voyeurisme. Après la frontalité clinique des cercles précédents, le point de non- retour est mis à distance, distance imposée par l’impuissance du cinéma à présenter la mort, plutôt qu’à la représenter, le cercle noir entourant les images subjectives reproduisant les contours des premiers temps du cinéma.

19 Malgré l’autopsie favorisée par le gros plan et le dévoilement de l’intériorité corporelle (sang, vomi, organes divers...), la violence est ainsi condamnée à être spectacle, soumise à la distance imposée par la reproduction technique (sans même parler de l’artifice des effets spéciaux). L’envahissement du cadre par un signifié ostensiblement livré en pâture au spectateur n’empêche pas l’effacement du contexte spatio-temporel par le gros plan, ni sa condamnation à l’abstraction.

La réalité découpée

20 Les outrances « réalistes » du cinéma d’exploitation sont donc ramenées à leur dimension spectaculaire et illusoire. Mais c’est peut-être du regard filmique sur la réalité que provient cette anamorphose, issue d’une fusion contre-nature du monde et de la machine cinématographique qui se l’approprie. L’un des tortionnaires du premier volet évoque sa carrière contrariée de chirurgien, qui lui aurait permis de « tenir la vie entre ses mains », d’être « proche d’elle » et même d’en « faire partie », quand le commerce est « si routinier » [41:10]. Le même homme, rencontré auparavant dans le train, disait aimer le « contact avec la nourriture », qu’il prenait avidement à pleines mains pour l’ingurgiter [14:00]. Walter Benjamin rapproche respectivement le geste du peintre et celui de l’opérateur de film, à celui du mage et du chirurgien, dont il oppose le modus operandi : l’imposition des mains pour le premier, l’intervention pour le second. Benjamin note que « le peintre observe, en peignant, une distance naturelle entre la réalité donnée et lui-même », quand « le cameraman pénètre en profondeur dans la trame même du donné ». L’image produite diffère ainsi radicalement : « Celle du peintre est globale, celle du cameraman se morcelle en un grand nombre de parties, qui se recomposent selon une loi nouvelle » (Benjamin, 2013, 38-39). C’est donc le dispositif filmique qui déforme le réel, justement en s’introduisant en son cœur et en se confondant avec lui.

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21 Le réel au forceps de la fiction cinématographique n’est jamais aussi flagrant que dans l’enfermement du monde produit par l’encadrement que lui impose le film, et par conséquent dans le découpage qui soumet le réel à une déconstruction / reconstruction monstrueuse. Lorsqu’ils reçoivent une photographie du comparse islandais sur leur portable, les futures victimes du premier Hostel ne voient qu’un gros plan, c’est-à-dire un visage coupé au niveau du cou [31 :54]. Le plan suivant nous montre la réalité : la tête du touriste sur un plan de travail. Par ce raccord, le film ne manifeste pas seulement la tromperie des sens induite par l’image, mais rappelle la violence à laquelle le cinéma soumet les corps et le monde en général. Cette violence se manifeste par une réification de l’être humain, dont l’intégrité physique se trouve niée au profit d’une fragmentation en divers morceaux devenus signes déconnectés de la totalité et, par conséquent, sans signification15. C’est ainsi que « le corps nu (de la femme ou de l’homme) se refuse comme chair, comme sexe, comme finalité du désir, instrumentalisant au contraire les parties morcelées du corps dans un gigantesque processus de sublimation, de conjuration du corps dans son évocation même » (Baudrillard, 2006, 209). Ce que l’on recherche : le trophée du réel plutôt que le réel lui- même, transformé en signe comme un animal empaillé, ou les têtes exposées en rayonnages et découvertes par une captive dans le deuxième épisode [62:00].

22 Il n’est qu’à considérer la mise en scène et aux enchères d’une victime de Hostel II [22:20-24:15]. Le split-screen permet de montrer de manière simultanée plusieurs personnages à l’écran en des lieux différents. La multiplication des images provoque la fragmentation et l’éparpillement d’une réalité devenue ainsi incertaine et abstraite. La plénitude apparente du cadre avoue son arbitraire et son artifice dans cette exhibition du monde fait plan. Les personnages sont enfermés dans un cadre (aseptisé : surface lisse de l’entreprise, green de golfe poli, slogan familial...) qui condamne les bourreaux au stéréotype (businessman encravaté, père de famille, PDG japonais accompagné d’une armure de samouraï comme pure convention symbolique...).

23 La société du spectacle déréalise jusqu’au plus charnel et concret, à savoir le corps, qu’elle manipule, décompose et recompose à sa guise. C’est pourquoi la souffrance représentée se manifeste souvent par le découpage d’un membre (tête, doigts, tendon d'Achille, œil...), de la même manière que le plan découpe un corps qu’il expose sur la surface de l’écran et exhibe au spectateur. On peut donc avancer que le sang qui gicle de tous ces prélèvements brutaux est celui d’une réalité violentée, charcutée par les coups de ciseaux assassins du cadrage, donc du montage et du film. Avant d’être dépecée à la faux, la jeune fille de Hostel II l’est par le cadre, qui la coupe ostensiblement au niveau des épaules, violant son intégrité physique [46 :57]. De quoi se repaît la nudité vorace étendue dans sa baignoire ? Du sang régénérant d’une vierge, certes, fidèle en cela à la tradition vampirique, mais aussi de la virginité souillée de la réalité, dont s’abreuve son rôle et sa copie de comtesse maléfique. La dissolution de la réalité dans l’image et la violence que celle-ci exerce sur les corps ne font donc qu’exaspérer le tropisme naturaliste du cinéma d’exploitation, dont il retourne les effets de réel pour en révéler la virtualité, voire le grotesque.

Le monde-écran

24 Mais le caractère indolore de cette absorption du corps dans les vapeurs de l’image rejoint les séductions vénéneuses des sociétés décrites par les films : après les avoir

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attirés, les sirènes finissent toujours par dévorer les naufragés échoués sur leurs côtes. Cette conscience du médium, sous le haut patronage tarantinien dont on retrouve la célébration du recyclage, est donc indissociable d’un regard désenchanté sur le monde contemporain, celui de la marchandisation et de la reproductibilité, du simulacre au détriment de la réalité. En cela, il reprend à son compte un discours subversif, récurrent bien que souterrain, de certains des films d’exploitation des années 70, élevés au rang de canons par des critiques tels que Robin Wood16. Le dispositif cinématographique, pour le meilleur et pour le pire indissociable de cette nouvelle économie du réel, permet à Hostel de trouver l’écrin esthétique adapté à son message politique : Devant l’appareil enregistreur, l’interprète sait qu’en dernier ressort c’est au public qu’il a affaire : au public des acheteurs qui forment le marché. Ce marché, sur lequel il ne se vend pas seulement avec sa force de travail, mais en chair et en os et en se faisant sonder les reins et le cœur, au moment où il accomplit la tâche qui lui est destinée, il ne peut pas plus se le représenter que ne peut le faire un quelconque produit fabriqué en usine. (Benjamin, 2013, 33, je souligne)

25 L’être humain, enregistré et projeté par la machine filmique, reproductible à l’infini (ce qui nie toute notion d’« original », c’est-à-dire d’authentique), devient lui-même la matière première destinée à la satisfaction de son client, spectateur avide d'images et de spectacles. Simulacre en deuil d’original, le cinéma s’adresse aux masses, dont il étanche la soif de nouvelles icônes, qu’il peut s’approprier jusqu’à mettre le monde de côté. Hostel ausculte les rouages de l’image, en dissèque les motivations, mais surtout en écorche la peau illusoire, les velléités véristes et trompeuses. Ce qu’il y trouve n’est pas beau à voir. De sa valeur cultuelle à une valeur d’exposition, l’art est passé à une valeur d’exploitation : exploitation de l’être humain jusqu’à en nier la réalité, à l’ère de sa reproductibilité technique.

26 Le film dans le film Cannibal Holocaust, en flattant notre pulsion scopique sous prétexte d’en dénoncer les sollicitations médiatiques, n’exhibait pas seulement l’horreur cannibale. Avant cela, le document enregistré par les reporters en quête de sensations fortes étale sur l’écran les exactions auxquelles les journalistes se sont livrés durant leur périple (massacre de populations locales, viol...). La confrontation met en miroir le comportement de chaque camp (les Occidentaux s’opposant aux « Indigènes » de la même manière que les yankees de 2000 Maniacs pouvaient s’affronter aux rednecks méprisés), où l’anthropophagie constituerait finalement la version extrême d’un comportement néocolonial irrespectueux de l’autochtone. La réification de l’Autre, mise en exergue par un film d’exploitation tel que Cannibal Holocaust, innerve donc secrètement le propos des Hostel. Ce n’est plus la jungle et ses tribus qu’explorent les personnages d’Eli Roth, mais le « Vieux Continent », dans sa partie a priori la moins réductible à une vision de carte postale. Avatar dégénéré du « Grand Tour » destiné à parfaire l’éducation des classes supérieures européennes et des artistes aux XXVIIIe et XIXe siècles, le point de vue du touriste américain sur ce territoire et ses habitants (invariablement perçus comme sauvages, inquiétants et édentés) reste cependant sensiblement le même que celui de l’occidental sur les autochtones de la forêt amazonienne. Ni tuerie ni viol ne ponctuent le parcours des étudiants, certes : le regard, pourtant, n’est pas si différent.

27 L’auberge du titre désigne un lieu de passage, ou plutôt un « non-lieu »17, tant son existence coïncide avec ses qualités fonctionnelles, au détriment de toute personnalité et de toute forme d’intimité. Inutile de s’approprier un tel espace, de le faire sien. La

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nature impersonnelle et multinationale de l’auberge de jeunesse renvoie à la superficialité du regard porté par l’individu en transit sur le milieu environnant, réduit à un cadastre abstrait de codes et de conventions : la carte plutôt que le territoire. Le premier plan du premier volet fait d'ailleurs apparaître la devanture « Hostel » dans une flaque d'eau, avant qu’un panoramique ne nous entraîne dans la fiction et devant l’auberge, d’où sortent les trois étudiants dont le récit donnera à suivre le calvaire [2:10]. Cette vision indirecte introduit le titre de l’œuvre par l’intermédiaire de son reflet, faisant coexister un référent réel et son double. Ce n’est pas la réalité de l'auberge qui nous est livrée, mais son image, son signifiant (le mot « hostel »), sa valeur paratextuelle (le titre du film Hostel). Autant dire que la fiction interroge sans ambages sa propre qualité de fable : après avoir esquivé la représentation de la réalité, au profit de son évocation conceptuelle, le récit exhibe sa valeur de signe et les relations troubles qu’il entretient avec son modèle.

28 Ce n’est pas un autre regard que portent sur leur environnement les étudiants parcourant le continent européen, ou plutôt glissant sur lui, avec l’avidité du collectionneur : à Amsterdam, venus de Paris et en instance de départ pour Barcelone, il sont enfants de la mondialisation, s’interrogeant sur l’absence de Hollandais dans leur propre capitale, ou, en compagnie d’une Russe et d’une Tchèque dans un sauna, s’essayant à la chanson russe dans un charabia à la signification flottante [20:30]. Les étudiantes de Hostel II sont parcourues par la même frénésie de trajectoires, croquant à grands traits ce qu’elles voient, au lieu de l’explorer – on les découvre prenant un cours de dessin en Italie [10:14-11:37]. Le stéréotype s’impose aux touristes autant qu’au spectateur qui subit le « caractère pré-fabriqué de ce qu'il voit et nous donne à voir » (Ortoli, 2012, 427). Les choses y sont appréhendées à travers le filtre de l’image : le portable avec lequel on se prend en photo devient une machine à fétichiser un événement, que l’on met à distance spatiale et temporelle. Il s’agit là d’une autre forme de cliché (produit d’une appréhension codée et prédéfinie des choses) servant une cause commune : celle de la déréalisation du réel. Il paraît donc logique que la réduction du monde à ses symboles débouche sur la visite d’un Disneyland pour adultes (« X-rated Disneyland », selon les mots de Roth rapportés par Bou et Thoret, 2006, 92)18 : le village slovaque est découvert en sons et lumières émerveillés [17:00], avec en son centre une auberge rustique peuplée de naïades à disposition. Filmé comme un Éden épargné par l’Histoire, ce territoire se pare d’autant plus volontiers des atours de la féerie qu’il évoque une terra incognita, a fortiori pour l’Américain moyen bien incapable de situer le pays sur une carte, qu’il pense même être en guerre comme la jeune étudiante de Hostel II (« Tu confonds avec la Bosnie », lui rétorque-t-on). Dans le premier opus, on dit même que le sexe féminin y est majoritaire, à cause des hommes tombés sur le front. Remarque étrange dans les années 2000, surtout lorsqu’on sait que la Slovaquie s’est séparée de la désormais République tchèque au cours de ce que l’on appelle la « révolution de velours » (1993). Le choix de ce territoire n’est donc pas anodin, mais se justifie par son anonymat et son invisibilité géopolitique, qui fait même de sa naissance un événement passé inaperçu, version light d’accouchements nationaux autrement plus sanglants19. Scène aseptisée, donc, page blanche aussi nue que les corps des hôtes qui défilent comme autant d’appels à la volupté. Dans Hostel II, la longue arrivée des deux clients sur les lieux de torture s’accompagne, à la faveur d’un effacement des sons d’ambiance, d’un air traditionnel slave [63:25-66:30]. La réduction de la musique au folklore va de pair avec la présence désincarnée de ces deux hommes, passés sans

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transition et à la faveur d’un simple plan de leur lointaine Amérique au cœur du Vieux Continent, où l’aristocrate Dracula est remplacé par le capitaliste jouisseur.

29 Le regard du touriste, ici, réifie son vis-à-vis ; méduséen, il pétrifie l’Autre pour le transformer en artefact – dans Hostel : une jeune femme à l’esprit engourdi par la drogue et donc à disposition illimitée [2:50], un couple s’abandonnant sous l’effet de la drogue au plaisir charnel, sans prêter attention au spectateur assis à ses côtés comme devant son écran de télévision [9:25], des prostituées exhibées en vitrine ou cloîtrées dans des cabines individuelles [6:00-7:00], des photographies de corps emmêlés dans l’extase [10:20]; dans Hostel II : un modèle de peinture dans le plus simple appareil, entouré de regards concupiscents davantage qu’esthètes. L’Autre, celui que l’on tient sous son regard, n’apparaît que comme coquille vide, limitée à son enveloppe charnelle. L’exhibition des corps contamine l’étudiant islandais, qui ne cesse de dévoiler des parties cachées de son anatomie, ou les jeunes femmes de la sequel, admirant leurs formes dans une glace avant de se rendre à une fête, se livrant donc volontairement à leur propre devenir-objet – les futures victimes sont d’ailleurs montrées se trémoussant en même temps que leurs acheteurs durant la vente aux enchères de leur corps. Cette extériorité semble toute virtuelle, tant l’attitude de l’observateur se confond avec celle du spectateur, confronté à une simple image. Que l’on contemple des vitrines, un objet à reproduire, ou des couples en plein ébat, le regard ne fait qu’effleurer la surface sans la toucher, et le dispositif rejoint celui qui gouverne la vision d’une photographie. C’est que le corps mannequin n’est que « forme » et « abstraction », et non « corps ». Il s’agit là d’une réduction de toutes les valeurs concrètes, les « valeurs d’usage » du corps (énergétique, gestuelle, sexuelle) en une seule « valeur d’échange » fonctionnelle, qui résume à elle seule, dans son abstraction, l’idée du corps glorieux, accompli, l’idée du désir et de la jouissance – et par là même bien sûr les nie et les oublie dans leur réalité pour s’épuiser dans un échange de signes. (Baudrillard, 2006, 207-208) Dans les Hostel, autrui n’est pas humain mais pur simulacre destiné à la satisfaction des yeux, reflet d’un concept répondant à son avidité de consommateur.

L’ego du bourreau

30 Réification et négation d’autrui ne font qu’un ; et du sensuel, voire de l’ouvertement sexuel, au morbide, il n’y a qu’un pas, que la saga franchit en mettant classiquement sur le même plan l’obscénité du corps sexuel et celle du corps sanglant. Hostel trace ainsi une ligne continue entre la contemplation libidineuse des corps et leur exploitation macabre, de la même manière que les deux apprentis tueurs de Hostel II posent explicitement une équivalence entre la première relation sexuelle et le premier meurtre, qui tous deux « changent un homme » [42:44-43:35]. Le tortionnaire ne se comporte pas autrement que le touriste venu se repaître de chair fraîche, victime d’une semblable réification d’autrui : qu’ils soient sexuels ou meurtriers, le film insiste toujours sur la tarification des plaisirs. Ce « versant primitif du capitalisme moderne » (Ortoli, 2012, 430) se signale comme l’avatar dégénéré et la conséquence exaspérée de « la stimulation de modèles individualistes euphoriques invitant à vivre intensément. Partout le procès de personnalisation démantèle la personnalité ; côté jardin, l’éclatement narcissique et pacifique, côté cour, l’éclatement énergumène et violent » (Lipovetsky, 2008, 296-7). C’est ce que vivent les deux Américains de Hostel II, incarnés par deux maris soumis de la série Desperate Housewives (ABC, 2004-2012), que l’on devine

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par conséquent gangrenés par la frustration, une frustration que la pratique de l’assassinat se doit d’épancher. Pas de justification ou de motif aux gestes meurtriers dans Hostel ; simple défouloir, ils sont là pour combler des désirs insatisfaits, ou prouver sa virilité. Cette motivation purement autocentrée s’incarne donc aussi bien dans le culte du corps (le jogging, la performance sexuelle, l’affirmation de la virilité comme valeur absolue), que dans une criminalité hard, sans projet, sans ambition, sans imaginaire. Le procès de personnalisation qui travaille à accroître la responsabilité des individus favorise en fait des comportements aberrants, instables, indifférents en quelque sorte au principe de réalité, comme tels en consonance avec le narcissisme dominant et son corrélat, le réel transformé en spectacle irréel, en vitrine d’exposition sans épaisseur, par la logique des sollicitations. (Lipovetsky, 2008, 299) La réification de son alter ego ne serait donc qu’une conséquence de l’hypertrophie de son ego, niant tout ce qui est en dehors de lui, l’exposant dans ces « vitrines » comme les prostituées limitées à leur corps, pures surfaces de fantasme. Le meurtre ne va pas plus loin que la satisfaction, parfois désordonnée et maladroite, de son auteur.

31 L’abolition des contraintes et la dissolution des repères autorisent la jouissance sans entrave. Dans cet univers, rien de stable ni de figé, puisque tout y est soumis aux desiderata du consommateur, lui-même maillon d’une chaîne plus importante que lui : les deux bourreaux de la deuxième partie sont mis hors-jeu, l’un dévoré par les chiens pour s’être arrêté en chemin et avoir enfreint les règles, l’autre émasculé, pour être moins doté financièrement que sa victime. Le capitalisme et le règne du plus fort n’ont pas de visage. C’est ainsi que les personnages se retrouvent prisonniers d’une logique industrielle et d’un système qui les contraint à s’adapter et à utiliser les mêmes armes que leurs adversaires (le sadisme pour le premier rescapé, l’argent pour la deuxième survivante) : triomphe assuré et absolu d’une société qui récupère et digère ceux qui en contestent la légitimité. Autrement dit, le corps comme valeur marchande possède la caractéristique d’être interchangeable et délesté de toute individualité. La séparation entre victime et bourreau tend à s’estomper : non pas tant à cause d’une logique de la vengeance tendant à faire adopter à la proie le comportement du chasseur – lieu commun de tout survival –, mais par la grâce d’une dissolution de la personnalité à l’ère de la marchandisation généralisée et du simulacre intégral, où la survie passe par la monnaie d’échange (Hostel II). Là où le film d’horreur traditionnel met en scène la lutte pour l’intégrité physique, exprimant la valeur de la vie, celle-ci semble s’être perdue dans les souterrains de Hostel.

L’humain consommable

32 La proximité de ce marché (commercial, mais aussi cinématographique) du corps avec une marchandisation généralisée par un libéralisme économique sans limite a été soulignée à plusieurs reprises (voir notamment Bou, Thoret, 2006), et accomplit en l’exacerbant ce qui couvait dans le cinéma d’exploitation. Via la nazisploitation, le principe d’analogie introduit l’idéologie nazie dans la satire du consumérisme comme fille naturelle de la négation de l’humain et de sa réduction au corps « traité » dans les camps en vertu d’une logique industrielle et rationnelle : l’usine désaffectée, théâtre du crime, et jumelle des camps avec sa cheminée ou ses fours crématoires ; l’entassement des corps que l’on jette au four ; l’Allemand tortionnaire du premier film qui échange dans sa langue natale avec sa proie [59:10-59:50], évoquant à Bou et Thoret les accents

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germaniques des bourreaux de Marathon Man (John Schlesinger, 1976) ; l’allure générale des vigiles, crânes rasés et tout de noir vêtus ; le rappel régulier de la judéité de l’un des étudiants du même opus ; la volonté de puissance et le culte de la virilité de l’Américain du deuxième, etc. Ce sont là autant de traces de la nazisploitation, dont le parangon Ilsa, la louve des SS (Don Edmonds, 1975) et ses suites (sans compter ses innombrables imitations italiennes) s’attachent à dépeindre les sévices de tous ordres infligés par une dirigeante de camp de concentration à ses détenu(e)s – certaines mutilations telles que l’énucléation du premier Hostel [75:26] ou l’émasculation qui clôt le deuxième [83:14], exhibitions les plus notables de la violence graphique des deux films, sont aussi des morceaux de bravoure d’Ilsa. Cependant, le propos des Hostel s’éloigne du fétichisme mis en œuvre par la nazisploitation pour l’intégrer à un discours à charge.

33 En cela, les Hostel de Roth, prenant à leur compte une imagerie d’exploitation, rejoignent le propos d’un film tel que le Salo de Pasolini, qui est, en un sens, sa version politique – et plus respectée. En situant son action dans la République fasciste de 1945, Salo parlait aussi de son époque, celle de 1975, traversée par le néo-capitalisme pourfendu par le cinéaste et polémiste italien, et de la marchandisation afférente de tous les pans de la société, à commencer par l’être humain, victime d’un « génocide culturel ». Abjurant sa « Trilogie de la vie », où l’exhibition des corps et une sexualité épanouie, innocente, restaient les seuls remparts face à « l’irréalité de la sous-culture des mass media et donc de la communication de masse », Pasolini fait le constat de l’impossibilité, dans la société contemporaine, d’un tel épanouissement: « la “réalité” des corps innocents a été elle-même violée, manipulée, dénaturée par le pouvoir consumériste. Bien plus, cette violence sur les corps est devenue la donnée la plus macroscopique de la nouvelle époque humaine » (Pasolini, 2002, 82), ce qui conduit à la description du corps humilié de Salo. L’être humain est menacé d’extinction, livré à un nouveau « fascisme » bien plus dangereux (car consenti et intégré par la population) et inlassablement dénoncé par Pasolini derrière le masque bienveillant de l’hédonisme contraint et de l’uniformisation totalitaire.

34 Lorsque Pasolini pose cette équivalence, il déplore la virtualité dans laquelle nous plonge la société nouvelle du fait de la transformation du monde en vaste supermarché. L’être humain, cliché photographique ou touristique, se trouve réduit à son stéréotype. Certaines valeurs ne sont plus qu’images mortes, comme en témoigne cette scène où un futur tortionnaire, dans Hostel II, reçoit l’appel de son ami lui annonçant leur future virée en Slovaquie [24:16-25:10]. La famille de l’homme, épouse et enfants, est plongée dans le flou de la profondeur de champ. Seul se détache de ce magma informe et indiscernable un dessin, « Love family », unique trace, sous forme de slogan publicitaire, d’un référent disparu ou artificiel. Ironiquement, sur une bouteille de lait figure un appel à témoin (« Missing »), qui pourrait s’adresser à la valeur familiale évanouie et remplacée par un amas de symboles, sans lien avec une quelconque réalité.

35 Cette virtualisation du monde est donc aussi la négation de l’Autre. Les allusions au nazisme disséminées par Roth rejoignent des considérations et surtout des images beaucoup plus récentes impliquant plus directement son pays. Ainsi, le camp de présumés terroristes de Guantanamo, ouvert après les attentats du 11 septembre 2001, et surtout la prison d’Abou Ghraib en Irak, utilisée dès 2003, ont fait l’objet de témoignages photographiques dévoilant le traitement dégradant réservé aux détenus, dont Roth revendique l’influence à plusieurs reprises. Les actes de torture et d’humiliation représentés illustrent le mépris de l’humain, dans des clichés mettant

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parfois en scène leurs auteurs, posant sur des souvenirs de vacances. Tout renvoie à ces images, de la disposition des victimes encagoulées, aux amoncellements de corps enlacés dans une orgie sexuelle (les photographies montrées aux touristes du premier Hostel, vantant les promesses de la Slovaquie), qui ne sont pas sans rappeler leur version abjecte dans les clichés de détenus entassés de la sorte dans la prison d’Abou Ghraib20.

36 La réalité de ces atrocités transpire dans les images fictives de torture des deux Hostel, et semble finalement inviter à tirer les conséquences extrêmes de l’attitude du touriste américain (et peut-être même occidental) en terre lointaine : l’indifférence à l’égard de son environnement, la désinvolture vis-à-vis de l’étranger, le refus de le considérer comme son alter-ego, rejoignent les reproches souvent formulés à l'encontre de la politique internationale des États-Unis, que l’on dit arrogante, unilatérale, insensible aux différences. Le système est d’autant plus puissant qu’il est adoubé et encouragé par l’ordre légal, coupable d’institutionnaliser des pratiques injustifiables. Dans Hostel, cette complicité revêt le visage des forces de l’ordre étatiques, qui semblent à chaque instant couvrir les agissements sanguinaires de l’organisation clandestine, où les élites et notables de la planète se retrouvent pour jouir de la souffrance des plus faibles. La suprématie économique des États-Unis, chantre du néocapitalisme étendu à la planète, s’expose aux mêmes critiques : le sort infligé aux étudiants présomptueux du premier Hostel semble être le retour de bâton de leur autosatisfaction, faisant d’eux les victimes du système auquel ils adhéraient (la jouissance sans entrave encouragée par le capitalisme, même au détriment d’autrui). Les jeunes femmes du deuxième opus n’apparaissent que comme les victimes collatérales d’une telle attitude, adoptée à leur corps défendant. À regarder les autres comme sa propriété et l’étranger comme un vaste parc d’attraction, on se livre aux représailles cinglantes du réel. Massacre à la tronçonneuse et tout un pan du cinéma d’exploitation ne disaient pas autre chose : les exclus et parias de la société américaine (et plus généralement occidentale), que l’on avait tenté de jeter aux oubliettes de l’histoire, refont surface et se font bruyamment entendre, singeant le système capitaliste en faisant de ses représentants une marchandise comme les autres21. Dans le dispositif mis en place par Hostel, le recyclage du film d’exploitation est indissociable du recyclage de la chair, explicité dans le premier Hostel, lorsque le survivant se retrouve dans la salle d’un boucher découpant au hachoir les cadavres et les jetant dans un four, au cœur d’un imaginaire brassant gothique et nazisme [66:05-68:07]. Hostel s’adonne, par conséquent, à une double exploitation : celle des images, à travers la reprise du genre et sa mise en abyme ; celle de l’humain, en poussant à l’extrême la logique d’un cinéma déviant, déportant notre regard en l’obligeant à voir ce qu’il ne devrait pas.

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NOTES

1. Hostel, chapitre III (Scott Spiegel, Hostel : Part III, 2011) ne sera que brièvement évoqué dans notre étude, à l’occasion d’une note : le film n’a pas été réalisé par Eli Roth, qui se contente de le produire, et n’a bénéficié que d’une sortie en direct-to-video. Ce contexte témoigne d’une distance prise par son auteur et d’une franchisation dont la réflexivité initiale tend à se diluer dans la pure « exploitation » commerciale – le rapatriement de l’intrigue sur le sol américain témoignant à ce titre d’une marche en arrière sur la question de la mondialisation. 2. Texte original : « Torture porn films (a) were made (roughly) after 2003, (b) centralise abduction, binding, imprisonment, and torture (mental or physical), and (c) broadly belong to the horror genre ». 3. Pascal Françaix, auteur d’un essai sur le sujet, estime ainsi : « Le torture porn procède à une « extrémisation » des thématiques et de la violence propres à ce cinéma d’horreur, qui s’est beaucoup aseptisé au milieu des années 80 et dans les années 90, pour céder la place à une horreur parodique, de bonne compagnie » (Françaix, 2016). 4. De Halloween (John Carpenter, 1978) à Massacre à la tronçonneuse (Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Tobe Hooper, 1974), en passant par La Dernière maison sur la gauche (The Last House on the Left, Wes Craven, 1972). 5. C’est l’une des thèses de l’article de Bou et Thoret (2006, 96), selon lesquels Hostel réactive la frontalité politique de ses aïeux, que les remakes des années 2000 tendent à gommer. 6. L'auteur ne parle pas de cinéma d’« horreur », alors même que ce dernier oppose la monstration à l’hésitation fantastique, privilégiant le champ au détriment du hors-champ. 7. L’auteur ajoute de façon significative : « c’est le règne des cinéastes quantitatifs généralement pas très regardants sur la marchandise » (Ibid.). Au-delà du caractère dépréciatif de ces lignes, nous retenons la réduction du sujet de l’horreur, soit le corps, à une « marchandise », à la manière des travers dénoncés de la société de consommation. 8. Elisabeth Bathory (1560-1614), comtesse hongroise accusée de torture et du meurtre de filles et jeunes femmes, dans l’actuelle Slovaquie, où est censé se dérouler le film de Roth. La légende veut qu’elle se soit baignée dans le sang de ses victimes pour conserver sa jeunesse. 9. Les tortionnaires de Hostel sont souvent confrontés à leur propre image dans un miroir, que ce soit dans la salle des tortures ou, à la fin du premier opus, avant d’être égorgés dans les toilettes publiques par le survivant. L’horreur de la situation ménage une distance spectaculaire, qui désigne le tueur dans son rôle. 10. Ce retour du Même exprime aussi, comme le notent Bou et Thoret (2006, 93-94), la globalisation de l’entreprise meurtrière, son extension en dehors des frontières : on retrouve ainsi, à la fin du premier chapitre, l’un des tortionnaires, dont le meurtre dans les toilettes d’une gare fait ressurgir sur le mode cauchemardesque le souvenir des sévices exposés par le film. 11. « Fable » est ici pris au sens où Jacques Rancière désigne, à la suite d'Aristote, « l’agencement d’actions nécessaires ou vraisemblables qui, par la construction ordonnée du nœud et du dénouement, fait passer les personnages du bonheur au malheur ou du malheur au bonheur. »

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Selon Epstein commenté par Rancière, cette logique « contredit la vie qu’elle prétend imiter », car « la vie ne connaît pas d’histoires » (Rancière, 2001, 8). 12. Un personnage historique tel que Lénine subit un sort semblable, devenu simple buste dénué de signification, dans le bar réunissant les complices de cette forme exacerbée de capitalisme que représente la mort tarifée [48:26]. 13. Snuff : film clandestin censé révéler un acte de torture et un meurtre véritablement perpétrés. Mondo : montage d’images documentaires et d’archives racoleuses, autour du sexe, de la violence et de toute forme de « déviance ». 14. Le professeur de dessin, au début du deuxième opus, ne demande-t-il pas à ses étudiants de rechercher la « tendresse de la chair » (« morbidezza del carne »), et non la perfection : non pas un idéal classique, mais l’impression du réel, sa sensation tactile ? 15. Singulier renversement de la vision benjaminienne, qui voyait dans la photographie d’un visage humain le dernier vestige de la valeur cultuelle de l’image, comme trace et mémoire du disparu (Benjamin, 2013, 24). Ici, trace et ersatz tendent à se confondre. 16. Selon l’auteur, le cinéma d’horreur est fondé sur le « refoulé » de « l’Autre », y compris le « prolétariat » et les « autres cultures », qui ne cessent de revenir à la surface rappeler l’ordre à leur bon souvenir, comme le montre exemplairement Massacre à la tronçonneuse (Wood, 2003, 68). 17. Au sens où l’entend l’anthropologue Marc Augé, notamment dans Non-lieux, introduction à une anthropologie de la surmodernité, 1992,à savoir un lieu de transit – moyen de transport, supermarché, aire d’autoroute... – que l’homme ne fait que traverser et consommer, sur lequel on se contente de glisser, comme sur une image, en se gardant bien de le pénétrer. L’auteur assimile d’ailleurs les camps de réfugiés à cette sphère, rappelant l’usine où l’on parque de l’humain et amasse des corps. 18. Le troisième Hostel se déroule à Las Vegas, temple du faux et du toc, ville factice construite sur du sable, et répondant à l’assertion de Baudrillard selon laquelle « ce n'est pas le moindre charme de l’Amérique qu’en dehors même des salles de cinéma, tout le pays est cinématographique » (Baudrillard, 1986, 56-57). 19. La nationalité islandaise du jeune homme accompagnant les deux Américains dans le premier opus véhicule une idée similaire : elle aussi terra incognita, l’île est par ailleurs nimbée d’une aura mythique qui sied aux terres que l’on ignore, idée plutôt que véritable pays. 20. Hostel est aussi né de la vidéo exhibant la décapitation, au Pakistan, du journaliste américain Daniel Pearl, qui traumatisa Eli Roth (Bou, Thoret, 2006, 93). 21. Outre l’essai de Robin Wood déjà cité, voir également Jean-Baptiste Thoret (Une expérience américaine américaine du chaos : Massacre à la tronçonneuse de Tobe Hooper, 2000, et Le Cinéma américain des années 70, 2006) ou David Roche (Making and Remaking Horror in the 1970s and 2000s, 2014).

RÉSUMÉS

Le diptyque d’Eli Roth, Hostel (2005, 2007), s’inscrit dans un sous-genre du film d’horreur, le torture-porn. Produits par Quentin Tarantino, les deux films sont nourris par le cinéma d’exploitation à tendance horrifique. Cependant, loin d’un usage purement ludique de la citation, le système décrit par Hostel (où l’on paie pour avoir le droit de torturer et tuer) permet le déploiement d’une conscience critique du monde contemporain, gouverné par un libéralisme

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sauvage où tout se vend et s’achète. Le recyclage des formules du cinéma d’exploitation y coïncide ainsi avec celui de l’humain, réduit à une marchandise. Se dessine également une vision inquiète des images cinématographiques, qui exploitent les corps pour le plaisir voyeuriste du spectateur.

Produced by Quentin Tarantino, the first two installments of Hostel (Eli Roth, 2005, 2007) belong to a subgenre of horror that emerged in the early 2000s, the torture porn, and are heavily influenced by exploitation films. The system depicted in Hostel (you pay to torture and kill someone) is at the basis of a deliberate critique of a globalized contemporary world governed by rampant economic liberalism according to which anything or anyone can be bought or sold. The recycling of exploitation cinema conventions is more than just playful: it overlaps with the recycling of human bodies reduced to merchandise, ambiguously catering to, and criticizing, the voyeuristic pleasure that devolves from the cinematographic exploitation of bodies.

INDEX

Mots-clés : Eli Roth, cinéma d’exploitation, cinéma d’horreur, Torture-porn, intertextualité, critique des images, capitalisme globalisé Keywords : Eli Roth, exploitation cinema, horror movie, torture porn, intertextuality, critique of image culture, globalized capitalism

AUTEUR

PIERRE JAILLOUX Université Grenoble-Alpes

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The Haunted World of El Superbeasto (Rob Zombie, 2009): An Animated Exploitation of Exploitation Cinema

Pierre Floquet

Introduction

“As cultural elites interrogating a popular medium, film critics frequently bring inordinate amounts of cultural capital to bear on extremely impoverished texts, carrying with them all of the confusion and even contempt of film’s ambivalent relationship to prevailing hierarchies of taste.” (Sconce, 2007, 281) An academic working in film studies, Jeffrey Sconce, paradoxically, does not seem to consider himself as part of what he calls “cultural elites.” Or maybe he is drawing a line between film critics and film scholars, the latter being granted the privilege to cast a self-acclaimed fair opinion on such topics as horror or exploitation films. Academic irony notwithstanding, the term “elite” seems to bear a judgment value, which mirrors the confusion and contempt Sconce precisely deplores among the film critics he targets. Such a “segregationist” and, to my mind, dated point of view is self-defeating. As it is, I intend to go beyond the obsolete low culture vs. high culture dichotomy it entails. Granted, it would be unfair to Sconce to associate him with a discourse he himself opposes. And yet, his position remains ambiguous to some extent, if one follows Alan Cholodenko’s comments in a recent issue of Film-Philosophy: I find telling the quotation marks around “trashing” in the title of Sconce’s seminal article, “‘Trashing’ the Academy”, ironising the trash and trashing thereby. […] So despite its “radical” rhetoric of “subverting and transgressing”, the “paracinematic community”, as Sconce terms it, does not want to bring down the academy, it wants in to it, turning its oppositional, “counter-cultural”, “counter-aesthetic” rhetoric

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into so much hype. [… It] will even trash trash to get in, all the more ironically so given trash culture in key regards was never not aligned, indeed inextricably complicated, with legitimate film culture, to say nothing of trash having long ago trashed itself in hypertrash. (104) Cholodenko, here, highlights the very fine line Sconce walks. Just as much, he incidentally describes the awkward position Rob Zombie puts himself in, when the latter mirrors and plays with both the typical components of exploitation films and the specificities of American society in his own features. Indeed, I do believe in the relevance and the acute need for recognition of alternative points of view related to the aesthetics and reception of films today, what David Roche, following Laurent Jullier, sees as the necessity “to establish a clear set of criteria and to offer rigorous internal and external analyses” (8) when analyzing a specific body of films. As it is, Rob Zombie’s first animation film followed three movies that somehow explored the horror and slasher subgenres (Roche, passim): House of 1,000 Corpses (2003), The Devil's Rejects (2005) and Halloween (2007). None of these films suffered from huge budget restrictions, so in this respect at least, Zombie’s features cannot be labeled exploitation films. And yet they all refer to exploitation cinema, particularly The Haunted World of El Superbeasto. This article seeks to explore the film’s connections to exploitation cinema, notably how Zombie “exploits” the form and its related subgenres. The main two venues explored here consider a reading of the film in terms of the carnivalesque, together with an insight into the film as adaptation. I will focus on the ambivalent use of the medium of animation to deliver a reflexive discourse on subgenres like the wrestling, superhero, zombie and biker movies, as well as nazisploitation and sexploitation. I will eventually question the relevance of resorting to this medium in a film that is itself a mutant filmic object, a doomed, if not haunted, “exploitanimation.”

Cartoonesque and Carnivalesque

The R-rated animated feature made its worldwide premiere on-demand and on pay- per-view on September 7, 2009. It was released in theaters on the 12 and made available on DVD and Blu-ray ten days later. Success at the box office was inversely proportional to the short time between release on screens and on DVD. Heretofore, Rob Zombie had been known for his gothic horror universe, as represented in heavy metal (his band White Zombie, named after the 1932 film), live action films and later on graphic novels. Indeed, The Haunted World of El Superbeasto was first a comic book with sequels.1 The film tells the story of El Superbeasto, a womanizing wrestler, who calls on his sister Suzy X to help him save his love of the moment, Velvet von Black, who has been captured by Otto, Doctor Satan’s servant creature. At the same time, Suzy X expects her brother to help her snatch Hitler’s severed head from a Nazi zombie squad. After seeking help from his Mexican brothers, El Superbeasto falls in a trap during his quest for Velvet. Doctor Satan, who is about to wed Velvet, throws a big party that El Superbeasto and Suzy X attend. The party turns into satanic chaos and ends in a furious female wrestling fight. In an exclusive Amazon interview (Zombie, 2009), the artist delivers a fairly detailed synopsis of his film, which he concludes with: “Yeah, I guess that makes sense in its own way. But within that, it is just an excuse for one giant filthy sex monster comedy . . .” This cynical and yet sincere assessment illustrates the discourse and the reflexive

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point of view displayed in the film. Incidentally, Zombie is no pioneer in this matter, and one may consider early animated porn—Eveready Harton in Buried Treasure (1929)— for example, or later trash films of the 1970s, such as Bakshi’s Fritz the Cat (1972) (Gabilliet, 2015) and Tarzoon la honte de la Jungle (Picha and Boris Szulzinger, 1975), leaving Japanese porn anime aside. Significantly, each of these films is a one-off; what brings them together is their common “explicit” content. Animation, as such, is not particularly typical of exploitation-related forms. Alongside mainstream major studios, which consider animated feature films as an industry as much as an art form, there exists a huge variety of what I would name “animated manifestos,” that is, the expression of very personal and alternative understandings of what animation may be. Most animators/authors/artists usually choose a short film format, rather than a feature, mainly for time and budget reasons. Few films benefit from a proper distribution network and the majority are only be screened at festivals and retrospectives or found online. So animation and exploitation might, though for different reasons, impact similarly “limited” or “elective” audiences. But I would argue that this is, all in all, the major point both forms share. Although Rob Zombie will probably never be one of the independent artists that produce the richest, most creative, imaginative and possibly subversive forms of animation, his contribution to the craft, is to display a fresh attempt at merging animation and exploitation cinema. The Haunted World of El Superbeasto is a sort of exercice de style of implicit and explicit quotes, of pastiche, of winks and hints. Websites like imdb.com provide a list of some, as it does for every entry in their list, yet it is by no means exhaustive.2 Rob Zombie is known for his appreciation of Hollywood classics, and for his repetitive homage to them in his songs and features. From this perspective, one can argue, after Greg Taylor, that Zombie in his animated feature is “cultist,” while celebrating other genres (as well as his own previous films) and abiding by “the prosperous new cultism, typified by the ascent of Quentin Tarantino” (Taylor, in Sconce, 264). The perspective of this article is not to start from an encyclopedic catalogue of every quotation, but rather to consider the string of characters, under the disguise of former filmic individuals, as one long parade in some grotesque animated carnival. Instead of existing for their sole referential value, as for example “guest” animated actors do in Tex Avery’s Hollywood Steps Out (1941), characters in The Haunted World of El Superbeasto, whether sidekicks, zombie Nazi bikers, female wrestlers, luchadores, mad scientists or else monsters, participate in a frantic and surrealistic extravaganza, as well as in the creation of an original universe. On a diegetic level, a parallel can be drawn between the masquerade and wrestling, so that Zombie’s film can be considered as participating in what Bakhtin called the carnivalesque. In his introduction to Rabelais and His World, Bakhtin notes that clowns and fools mix with the folk—their audience as well as the living setting of their performance—so that carnival is not a spectacle seen by the people; they live in it, and everyone participates because its very idea embraces all the people. While carnival lasts, there is no other life outside it. During carnival time life is subject only to its laws, that is, the laws of its own freedom. It has a universal spirit; it is a special condition of the entire world, of the world’s revival and renewal, in which all take part. (7) The entire film resembles one great carnivalesque event in a world let loose: each character is in disguise and yet “acting” for “real” within the diegesis. Here, the word “acting” nurtures and informs the ambiguous filmic status of animated creatures who, essentially, belong to the imagination of animators-manipulators. At the same time,

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they are meant to lure the spectator, and make them believe in their verisimilitude within the diegesis; ultimately, their diegetic behavior may require them to perform an act within the diegesis. The Haunted World of El Superbeasto claims strong links to lucha libre, or wrestling, which evolves round a fictional contract, known as the kayfabe, i.e., setup personalities, gimmicks, and events, on stage and beyond, that wrestlers are meant to abide by and keep true to. So as wrestlers, El Superbeasto and Suzy X intertwine their personal and “professional” appearances and behaviors. In doing so, they also keep true to the world of wrestling, where fights often go on beyond the ring and encroach onto the reality and space of everyday life. The film becomes a sort for lucha libre, when the characters fight in various locations (streets, homes, bars, a graveyard, etc.), until the final confrontation between Suzy X and Velvet von Black actually takes place outdoors, within the symbolical ring of the howling crowd around them. And yet the analogy between the two is ambiguous, since in wrestling the punches and blows are fake ones, whereas the animated characters (or “char-actors”) perform what is supposed to be a “true” fight with “real” stakes within the diegetic world. Not only do the characters act violently, but they also express themselves very crudely. Language is, in effect, a key component of the carnivalesque: as “carnival familiarity,” “[i]t is characteristic for the familiar speech of the marketplace to use abusive language, insulting words or expressions” (Bakhtin, 16). So Zombie should not be only perceived as trivially provocative, but also as true to an ancient tradition. Moreover, setting and characters bear references to a world viewers can easily acknowledge (somewhere sometime in the southern USA) and still not identify as “theirs”. Thus, viewers are allowed to witness their “carnival,” while maintaining a reassuring distance from the transgressive show. If so, Zombie is true to Bakthin’s words, as he provides us—at least in appearance—with a show that “celebrates temporary liberation from the prevailing truth and from the established order” (10). However, we remain safe from the dangers an anarchic carnival might entail and are left free to resume our politically correct existences. The carnivalesque ritual precisely meets the wrestling universe when Doctor Satan (for most of the film) and El Superbeasto (from beginning to end), among others, wear masks. Masks are an important feature in the wrestling gear, a prop that, on both sides of the Mexican-American border, has become “the epitome of lucha libre nowadays.” 3 Doctor Satan wears a dark (bloody) devil mask, so he is directly connoted as a bad guy in the wrestling world. El Superbeasto hides his face behind a blue cover which, together with his name, echoes El Santo, a “dominant cultural force in Mexico after his debut match in 1942. His career lasted over forty years. […] El Santo wrestled evil in his silver cape and silver mask by starring on over 50 films and appearing on numerous TV shows” (Glenday, 37). The cartoon wrestler is a showman, who appears in talkshows and produces and directs X-rated movies in which he also acts! Apparently, like SuperBarrio, a contemporary luchadore who, “ironically, never entered a professional wrestling ring” (Glenday, 38), he no longer fights. In The Haunted World of El Superbeasto, El Superbeasto hides behind his sister and surrogate fighter: Suzy X. She is the one who defeats the Nazi zombies, Doctor Satan, monsters, and wins over her opponent female wrestler Velvet von Black. She mirrors the achievements of El Santo in his films, when beating up vampires, a werewolf, a mummy and Cyclops (ibid.). With all his cowardice and boastfulness, El Superbeasto plays the good guy in the film, the one who, according to the kayfabe, does not break the rules of the fight and is respectful of both opponents

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and public. Thus, Zombie’s portrayal of his title character simultaneously keeps very close both to the set of popular values related to lucha libre and to the mass culture entertainment that wrestling still offers in the US today. Doctor Satan and El Superbeasto are not the only lucha libre-inspired characters. Velvet von Black, Suzy X’s direct opponent, is yet another. However, her name indicates that Zombie’s inspiration both goes beyond the realm of wrestling and takes some liberties with the graphic novel the film is based on. Sure enough, her name would fit nicely in the wrestling catalogue. But the name “Velvet” links her to the Velvet Underground of the late 1960s and its trail of drug abuses, while “Von” is an explicit hint at nazisploitation films; indeed, the character, a jealous sexually-active dominating cabaret dancer, recalls the dark heroines of such 1970s soft porn features as Ilsa: She- Wolf of the SS (Don Edmonds, 1975). Actually, her cartoonesque overexaggerated shapes, vocabulary and behavior add a carnivalesque, humoristic dimension to the character. Nevertheless, the mean, if not sadistic, component prevails in her personality and is reinforced by her name: “Black.” As it is, the film goes one step further than the graphic novel. Indeed, she may be dark-haired and wear black underwear / fighting suit / minimal stage costume in both book and film, but, unlike in the graphic novel, she is colored, talks with a thick ethnic accent, and ultimately appears as a mix of the original drawn character and of undead tramp Vampy Varla Vickers (4). The book presents her as a cliché young girl dreaming of completing her “pottery painting class” (37), who is compelled to (so suggestively) dance in a cabaret (6, 7). It is as if the graphic character were not excessive enough for the movie and required being adapted to the medium and mood of animation. Thus, the character would exemplify the general process of adapting the graphic novel into film.

Adapting exploitation to animation

For Linda Hutcheon, adaptation “is repetition without replication, bringing together the comfort of ritual and recognition with the delight of surprise and novelty. As adaptation, it involves both memory and change, persistence and variation” (173). Incidentally, the concept of ritual widely embraces Zombie’s artistic scope, whether in his 2007 remake of Halloween (John Carpenter, 1978) or more extensively through his systematically quoting, referring to or celebrating previous books and films. I propose to assess whether the “delight of surprise and novelty” operates in The Haunted World of El Superbeasto. In terms of content, Zombie starts from a series of various stories and transposes their characters into a rather original plot. The 2009 re-edition presents the “haunted” world of his heroes in three parts and a series of annexes: “El Superbeasto” (thirteen chapters), “Suzy X” (seven chapters) and “Simon Deadmarsh” (six chapters). This approach is nothing new. As comic artist Cameron Stewart explains, “A lot of comic books are being made to appeal to Hollywood studios—they are being written and illustrated as a film pitch” (quoted in Hutcheon 88). This seems to be common practice these days, even beyond the realm of Hollywood economics. In Rob Zombie’s words, Well, first let’s do it as a comic, because it’s always easier to sell something. Here is a comic, which you can use as a storyboard, and check out. So it just started as one storied and an anthology comic that seemed to be the most popular, and we did eleven issues of that, and from that I pitched it and that’s how it became a movie.

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It seems then inaccurate to speak of adaptation, as the graphic novel was written with the film in mind. Arguably, in terms of marketing and aesthetics, the graphic novel is more like a probe aimed at a potential public than a genuine artistic achievement. Second, dealing with representation, one can note a shift from fairly realistic drawings (with conspicuous variations, depending on drawing artists involved in the different chapters)4 to a more cartoon-like appearance of setting and characters. Hutcheon’s statement that “[t]he familiar move from telling to showing […] is usually seen as the most fraught transposition” is especially true for animation. Think of Spielberg’s The Adventures of Tintin (2011), for instance. In the case of The Haunted World of El Superbeasto, adaptation does not reduce but expands, as the film actually develops and, in its own peculiar way, enriches the original graphic novel. It has absorbed the vitality of the drawings to a point that makes it the ultimate performance of the characters. Zombie claims that: “Now that it’s a film, I can’t see it as a comic anymore—it has taken on a different life of its own” (Wigler, 2009). When it comes to the shift from “telling to showing,” Zombie gives his own definite opinion, which, to some extent, may contradict Hutcheon’s opinion that moving from book to film would be tricky: “I think [the story] works great both ways, [but] the animated version is actually more ridiculous than the comic version. Easier to make big boobs bounce in a film than in a comic!” His point is, tellingly, made when comparing Pat Boutin’s full frontal drawings of Suzy X (“Suzy X”, Chapter 1, 126) to the somehow more decent, yet just as suggestive, animated appearance of the same character during the wet T-shirt contest [13:00] or else to the close-up of her breasts when shooting down the zombies [26:00]. As a matter of fact, Zombie seems to have a fairly limited knowledge of animation, if not obviously as a consumer, at least as an artist. Like other famous directors before him (Spielberg again), he seems to have jumped into the animation fashion-wagon, considering the craft as an alternative “tool” to broaden his artistic production, one he could eventually delegate to other artists. Besides, Rob Zombie and the other two producers of The Haunted World of El Superbeasto (Andy Gould and Tom Klein) use a very typical Hollywood marketing strategy: constructing the director as an auteur in order to tap into the branding potential.5 Beyond the question of authorship, the point here is, rather, to question the impact of such creative behavior upon the finished product. Zombie confesses: I never really had any animation experience on this level. I mean I had done a sequence, a while back, for Beavis and Butt-head Do America (1996), there is one hallucination sequence that I worked on, but that was pretty much it. But since I had done [The Haunted World of El Superbeasto] as a comic, I could see it as a film, and I then started meeting some people. So it is all just a matter of finding the right artists and get[ting] them to try and do, and let them run wild with it . . . Actually, the very short Beavis and Butt-head sequence in question [49:50-51:20] is of much higher quality than what The Haunted World of El Superbeasto offers, no doubt because of the artists Zombie worked with. The themes and iconographic representations of hallucinations are, however, similar. In the conclusion to his interview, Zombie makes a strange comment that suggests his doubts about the quality of animation in his film: “The movie turned out better than I could have ever hoped basically because of the money thing. I mean, you know, as with anything else, the animation can only be as good as the money you have to make it good obviously.” Sure enough, he then compares his budget to the $200-million Pixar features he cannot compete with. Still, his argument is no excuse for those who

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consider his film to be both poorly written and animated. Indeed, there is good quality animation, which has little to do with the money put into it and more to do with artistic mastery, inspiration and dedication to the medium. Some might argue that The Haunted World of El Superbeasto is seriously lacking in this department. The quality issue may also stem from the aesthetic choices Zombie made: We never really tuned it back, we always tried to tune it up, to make it more filthy, but we always wanted to make it funny . . . I wanted it to not seem gratuitous, in the sense that we wanted the animation style to be kind of innocent-looking, not realistic, so we thought that if we kind of do with a sort of like an old-school Sponge Bob / Scooby Doo approach, then we’d get away with the wilder stuff, and it won’t seem gratuitous. And so well, it’s kind of cute in a way even though it’s kind of disgusting at the same time.

The ambiguities of redneck politics

The point is that the added value given by animation enables a (distanced) ambivalent message about the repressive status of our societies. Indeed, as animators recreate their own perceptions of reality or fantasy through shapes, textures and movements, animation per se offers an aestheticized interpretation of a given mood, behavior and/ or context. In Chapter 6 of Hollywood from Vietnam to Reagan and Beyond, Robin Wood compares various horror films and their discourses from a socio-political point of view, suggesting that some are “Art,” others “Exploitation.” He uses the terms Art and Exploitation here not evaluatively, but to indicate two sets of signifiers that define the audience-film relationship in general terms. […] Both permit the spectator a form of insulation from the work and its implications—Art by defining seriousness in aesthetic terms implying class superiority […], Exploitation by denying seriousness altogether. (110-11) This dichotomy resonates when discussing the reception of animation, which in this case is meant to be both provocative and humoristic. On that ground, The Haunted World of El Superbeasto is “subversive” exploitation insofar as it questions the “bourgeois” state of mind, that is: the accepted set of conventions, taken for granted as a social norm. Cartoon-like aesthetics, because of the childish associations they conjure up, become an ironical narrative device to distance from the material, and, consequently, foster a critical discourse underneath the harmless iconographic surface. In effect, resorting to animation makes it possible to develop yet another distance that is established between the animated film itself and former exploitation horror films: the format provides the distance the topic would not necessarily suggest. So Zombie goes one step beyond the Mexican directors interpreting horror classics of the 1930s, studied by Colin Gunckel: “Rather than lampooning these films, El Signo reproduces many of their conventions (lighting, narrative, mise-en-scène) without irony” (Sleaze Artists, 124). The Haunted World of El Superbeasto is merely another horror nazisploitation sexploitation melting pot, the use of animation adding to the irony. Through this alternative medium, Zombie exploits a filmic pro-text, that is the inspirational bedrock he develops his own work from. The gap that lies between sub-culture and the mainstream is repeated between exploitation film and his animated feature. The kids of yesterday, now post-teenagers, bask in adult content displayed in a universe which recalls their neo-infantile cartoon culture; indeed, such TV channels as Cartoon Network have thrived on this generation (Maier, 2015; Ristola, 2015). Rob Zombie, while developing transgressive issues in an ambivalent mix, relies on

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scandalous material in order to “exploit” specific niche audiences, who keep a nostalgic fondness for the entertainment they consumed as children. While reactionary discourses are still amply prevalent today, part of the political scope of horror films, as well as trash films, is to denounce such a set of codes. Chuck Kleinhans takes “it as axiomatic, that sleaze, as understood by both makers and audiences, depends on an understanding of existing conventions and also on a sense these conventions being worn out” (Sconce, 98). Zombie uses these relations to codes of respectability in his live action features. He plays with these codes reflexively, in what recalls Sconce’s “random moment of poetic perversity” (9), making the film a deviant mix of provocative discourse and counter-reactionary expression wrapped in an alternative (poetic?) iconographic representation. The film’s reception is, no doubt, equally ambivalent, as some viewers claim they go to such shows to laugh at them, assuming a distanced attitude toward the sex and horror, among other things. Still, like other sleaze films, what The Haunted World of El Superbeasto denounces, and relishes in doing so, is a set of reactionary conventions at the origin of the unconsciously accepted (repressed) frustrations of the very same socially formatted individuals who make up its audience. Robin Wood posits that “the release of sexuality in the horror film is always presented as perverted, monstrous and excessive, both the perversion and the excess being the logical outcome of repression” (82). Laughter may be partly understandable as a struggle to liberate oneself from these frustrations; sick jokes and cartoon-like images convey such phenomenon. In The Haunted World of El Superbeasto, vulgarity, considered as an aesthetic category rather than as a value judgment, enhances the director’s will to deliver a discourse that would patently be common and overtly expressed via drawn pictures. Although he claims sexual freedom from mainstream morality, what Zombie ultimately, and disappointingly, depicts is enshrined within a traditional sexist, male chauvinist heterosexual format. As such, it is difficult to claim The Haunted World of El Superbeasto is heralding sexual liberation; rather, it remains very close to the filmic discourse of high school comedies of the 1990s (see Chapter 16 of Wood’s From Vietnam to Reagan). Wood argues that in those films (and the same issue has been leveled at underground comics or graphic novels), “the idea of ‘sexual liberation’ has degenerated into the pursuit of sex for the sake of sex, the thrill of the chase and conquest becoming a major preoccupation” (xxvi). Though one need not adhere to Wood’s conservative comment on “sex for the sake of sex,” still, in this respect, The Haunted World of El Superbeasto is not in tune with contemporary films or TV series like The Lair (E1, 2007-2009) or True Blood (HBO, 2008-2014, especially season 3), which portray, for instance, gay vampires. The animation film seems to be stuck in playing with a somewhat old-style redneck set of conventions, leading one to wonder whether it is not at least partly indulging in a nostalgic celebration of those very same values. El Superbeasto’s coming-out at the end of the story would, no doubt, have been more truly provocative, and could have appeared not in tune with this red-neck mentality Zombie ambiguously addresses. As it is, the film remains bound to the logic of reactionary stereotypes. The main two female characters, whether the whore (Velvet von Black) or the superhero (Suzy X), are scantily dressed, and their figures are more than suggestive in the tradition of Barbie- type sexy objects of male phantasm. The monstrous daughters of Tex Avery girls and pin-up girls, the sisters of sexploitation and wrestling films starlets, Velvet inflates her

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breasts and bottom to arouse men and/or subdue them [18:00], farts and swears. Suzy X is a sexy caricature, as only a drawn creature could be; her provocative attitudes, her suggestive moves and gestures are paired with her robot and his perpetually erect penis. Is this parody or celebration on the part of Zombie? Probably both. Indeed, the overtly sexy and sexist representation of bimbos is not balanced by an equal picturing of the male characters who have very little sex appeal. Their figures echo their personalities: cruel Dr. Satan is skinny and small; the men in the barrio wear mustaches; Otto is so clumsy, sturdy and thick that he resembles an ape (yet eventually and ironically turns out to get the dame in the end); the Nazi Zombies are caricatural; Superbeasto is as fat as he is self-satisfied, vainglorious and dumb. “I recognize this dude. He’s the Little Tramp!” he says when he sees Hitler’s head in a bowl, obviously mistaken for Charlie Chaplin’s parts in The Gold Rush (1925) and in The Great Dictator (1940) [27:00]. Had the film been more radical, one could have expected more contemporary counter- stereotypes questioning the social roles of male and female in society. Discussing TV series, Eric Macé writes: “counter-stereotypes act as if stereotypes did not exist, as if discriminations no longer existed, setting up a ‘postracist’ world.”6 His remark can also apply to gender discrimination in animation. However, it is not really the case in The Haunted World of El Superbeasto. Granted, Suzy X is the real hero in the story, embodying contemporary trends that promote power beyond genders through postfeminist female characters: “Activity, domination, and power are no longer equated with the male, but with the ‘masculine’” (Roche, 117). Suzy X fights with her fists and big guns, and thus boasts more power than her masked—and improbable—brother. And yet not only are female super heroes nothing new in American comics, but Suzy X ultimately functions as a foil to the inadequacy of her brother. Suzy X’s enjoying sex at the end of the film, after turning her robot into a sex toy, could have heralded a liberated female sexuality, had not her robot been modified into a merry go-round. Her suggested climax is mingled with fun fair music, paradoxically keeping her within the realm of childhood fantasy. Moreover, animation angle shots indulge in back and full-frontal views of her naked body, whereas we are only shown a mechanical would-be penis: the gaze remains resolutely “male.” Though Zombie aims at being scandalous by transgressing social and “bourgeois” norms, he never goes past the line, as he does not mean to subvert society nor shake it down from within.

Conclusion

The word “Haunted” in the film’s title refers, of course, to its content and evokes the film’s neo-gothic aesthetics. One may also read this title literally, as an unconscious comment on the existence of the filmic object. A pure fantasy in terms of content and representation, The Haunted World of El Superbeasto lingers in stylistic limbo, suspended in a no man’s land of cinematographic production, both present and yet unseen by the general audience. The stylistic and thematic connections Zombie nurtures with his audience arguably make do for the debatable political subtext (what David Roche identifies as “exploiting form”) and for the relative neglect of original animation (which may side with Roche’s “impoverished form”). In that perspective The Haunted World of El Superbeasto truly echoes the form of the exploitation film under the guise of the animated format.

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Hence, one may perceive the film as a self-ironical and self-reflexive questioning of the conformism into which exploitation cinema has fallen since the heydays of the 1970s and become gentrified in the process. In doing so, the film plays a small part in the highly controversial political performance of counter-culture by showing what Hollywood films have repressed: the unseen of culture. In this process, Zombie highlights the mise en abyme of films within exploitation films, as much as films in animation films. His animated feature would not have been possible without the filmic bedrock he plays with, and somehow mirrors and celebrates. And yet, as a carnivalesque and distanced rendering of horror/zombie/wresting movies, The Haunted World of El Superbeasto occupies an original position in exploitation cinema. Indeed, “[l]ike a true sadomasochist, the trashophile enjoys both points of identification— transported one moment to a magical world of skeletons, dinosaurs, vampires, and spaceships, and in the next, laughing at the cheap chicanery that long ago, both culturally and personally, held the power to captivate” (Sconce, 291). The medium, or perhaps the arguable use of it, apparently prevents the viewer from being transported into a world of magic. Animation in itself, together with the tone of the discourse, also attract both attention and jeers—or maybe even sick laughter. At the same time, one may wonder whether the film’s subtext is fortuitous or intentional, Zombie’s own comments remaining highly ambiguous. Beyond the nostalgia for dated films and shows, or cartoonesque entertainment, if perceived as an awkward and distorting mirror of existing exploitation films, The Haunted World of El Superbeasto may seem to be a sterile meta-discourse made in bad taste and gratuitously and vainly “playing” with conventions. But, if as Cholodenko puts it, “bad is everywhere except in the bad” (101), and if provocation is Zombie’s first motivation, turning progressive concepts into an animated manifesto might well reach far beyond entertainment and perhaps even affect the socio-cultural references of (the pretty much reactionary part of) mainstream audiences, provided the film reach such an audience in the first place!

BIBLIOGRAPHY

F0 BAKTHIN, Mikhail, Rabelais and His World, Bloomington, Indiana Press University, 1984 [1968 5D .

BARTHES, Roland, “The World of Wrestling”, Mythologies, London, Vintage, 1993, 15-25.

CHOLODENKO, Alan, ‘The ABC’s Of B, Or: To Be And Not To Be B’, Film-Philosophy 14.2, 2010, http:// www.film-philosophy.com/index.php/f-p/article/viewFile/102/271, checked October 2nd, 2014.

COOK, Pam, “The Pleasures and Perils of Exploitation Films,” Screening the Past: Memory and Nostalgia in Cinema, London & New York, Routledge, 2005, 52-64.

GABILLIET, Jean-Paul, “Fritz the Cat (1972) : de Crumb à Bakshi, trahison de l'auteur et traduction de l'esprit du temps.” Bande dessinée et adaptation (littérature, cinéma, tv), dir. Benoît Mitaine, David Roche et Isabelle Schmitt-Pitiot, Clermont-Ferrand, UPBP, 2015, 229-243.

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GLENDAY, Dan, “Professional wrestling as culturally embedded spectacles in five core countries: the USA, Canada, Great Britain, Mexico and Japan”, Le catch et…, revue de recherche en civilisation américaine, 4 (2013), http://rrca.revues.org/514, checked October 2nd 2014.

HUTCHEON, Linda, A Theory of Adaptation, New York, Routledge, 2013.

MACÉ, Eric, “Des ‘minorités visibles’ aux néostéréotypes”, Journal des Anthropologues, Hors-série, 2007, http://jda.revues.org/2967?lang=en, checked October 7th, 2014.

MAIER, Lauren, The Adult Appeal of “Steven Universe”, Animationstudies 2.0, http:// blog.animationstudies.org/?p=1325, checked December 3rd, 2015.

ROCHE, David, Making and Remaking Horror in the 1970s and 2000s, Jackson, University Press of Mississippi, 2014.

RISTOLA, Jacqueline, Maturing Animation on Cartoon network, Animationstudies 2.0, http:// blog.animationstudies.org/?p=1318, checked December 3rd, 2015.

SCONCE, Jeffrey, ‘“Trashing” the Academy: Taste, Excess, and an Emerging Politics of Cinematic Style’, Screen, v. 36, n. 4 (Winter), 1995, 371-393.

SCONCE, Jeffrey, ed., Sleaze Artists: Cinema at the Margins of Taste, Style, and Politics, Durham, NC and London, Duke UP, 2007.

WIGLER, Josh, “Discovering ‘The Haunted World of El Superbeasto’ With Rob Zombie,” Thu, October 29th, 2009, http://www.comicbookresources.com/?page=article&id=23501, checked December 3rd, 2015.

ZOMBIE, Rob, (interview), http://www.amazon.com/gp/mpd/permalink/m2ZB3XF62I0RS1/ ref=ent_fb_link. 2009, checked October 1st, 2014.

NOTES

1. Previously published as magazines in the late 1990s as Spook Show International by MVCreations, they were re-edited and published by Image Comics, Berkeley, CA, in 2009. 2. See http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0419724/movieconnections?ref_=tttrv_sa_5. Accessed on October 1, 2014. 3. Notes taken from Christophe CHAMBOST, Carolina ABELLO,: “El Santo’s Legacy : Looking for the revival of Lucha Libre in Colombian Soap Operas”, Le catch et…, CLIMAS international conference, Bordeaux Montaigne University, 2013. 4. For example, one can compare the rather brisk and sketchy drawings of Kieran Dwyer (“El Superbeasto”, Chapters 1 to 6), to the smoother, rounder, more realistic images of Jed Su (Chapters 7 to 11), until the same artist adopts a more manga-related style in the twelfth chapter of Part One. 5. This recalls what Roche says about Halloween (2007): “The producers clearly sought out Rob Zombie to write and direct in order to bank on the latter’s status as rock star and up-and-coming horror auteur” (11). 6. Original text: “Le contre-stétéotype fait comme si les stéréotypes n’existaient pas, comme si les discriminations n’existaient plus, mettant en scène un monde « postraciste »” (Macé, 16).

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ABSTRACTS

It could be argued that, like any exploitation movie, Rob Zombie’s 2009 animation film, while dealing with transgressive issues, relies on scandalous material in order to “exploit” specific niche audiences. Yet the question remains as to whether the movie also means to play a controversial political role in showing what Hollywood films (both direct and animated) have repressed—the unseen of culture—or whether it is merely a distanced animated one-off in the directing career of a multi-skilled artist. This animation film is not just an adaptation of the eponymous graphic novel, but, rather, an exploitation of the tricks and clichés of exploitation cinema in the form of animated cinema. Beyond wrestling, it slashes through several sub-genres, including Nazisploitation, bikerfilms, sexploitation and more, making it a carnivalesque ride. Because the medium of animation highlights and intensifies any original code of representation, the film ultimately questions the mise en abyme of cinema within exploitation films, as much as films within animation films. By crossing and blurring the boundaries between these various cinematic forms, Rob Zombie incidentally raises the issue of defining animation within cinema at large, all the while promoting a somewhat ambiguous, reactionary discourse in spite of his own politics.

Le film de Rob Zombie, sorti en 2009 dans la lignée des films d’exploitation, non seulement se veut transgressif, mais aussi s’appuie sur des sujets scabreux, sinon provocants, afin de viser des publics niches. Son intention est-elle d’exprimer un point de vue politique qui susciterait la controverse en mettant en images la face cachée d’une culture qu’Hollywood étale dans ses films, d’animation ou directs ? Ou bien demeure-t-il une simple expérience distanciée et animée, sans suite dans la carrière de réalisateur d’un artiste multi-formes ? Plutôt que de considérer le film comme une simple adaptation du roman graphique éponyme, il s’agit d’appréhender comment Zombie exploite les clés et clichés du cinéma d’exploitation dans une esthétique d’animation. Autour et au-delà du catch, il s’en prend aux sous-genres, des films de motards à ceux sur les Nazis, en passant par le cinéma érotique et autres ; il entraîne ainsi son récit dans une ronde carnavalesque dessinée. L’essence de l’animation, en tant que médium, lui permet de mettre en avant et d’exagérer tout code de représentation. Ce faisant, Zombie joue sur la mise en abyme de films dans le cinéma d’exploitation, tout autant que celle de films dans le cinéma d’animation. Tout en franchissant et en estompant les barrières entre ces formes de cinéma, Zombie interroge accessoirement la place de l’animation dans l’univers cinématographique. On peut aussi avancer qu’il promeut de façon ambiguë un discours qui demeurerait, bien malgré lui, réactionnaire.

INDEX

Mots-clés: cinéma d’exploitation, film d’animation, adaptation, sous-genre, carnavalesque, esthétique, réactionnaire Keywords: exploitation cinema, animation film, adaptation, subgenre, carnivalesque, aesthetics, reactionary

AUTHOR

PIERRE FLOQUET Bordeaux INP

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Hors-thème

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“The Past Undetonated”: Nostalgia and Storytelling in Philip Roth’s American Pastoral

Tanguy Bérenger

After all, what they sit around calling the "past" at these things isn’t a fragment of a fragment of the past. It’s the past undetonated—nothing is really brought back, nothing. It’s nostalgia. It’s bullshit. Philip Roth, American Pastoral, 61

1 While much of Philip Roth’s American Pastoral is concerned with the 1960s, the novel opens with a grandiose evocation of the Jewish neighborhood of Weequahic in Newark, New Jersey in the 1940s. Now in his sixties, the narrator Nathan Zuckerman conjures up the vibrant atmosphere of his hometown during World War II, fifty years earlier. The novel begins with a description of his childhood idol, Seymour “Swede” Levov, a teenager depicted as a mythical hero worshipped by the entire community. He stands as the epitome of Jewish assimilation with his prowess in football, basketball, and baseball—the holy trinity of American sports. His exploits serve as the catalyst for the hopes and fears of the neighborhood while the war rages on abroad. The first pages of the book are idyllic in tone; Zuckerman is depicting a paradise, as is made clear from the title of the first part of the novel, “Paradise Remembered,” evoking Genesis by way of Milton. However, the tone is also elegiac, as the narrator mourns the disappearance of a world to which he can no longer return.

2 This bittersweet recollection is clearly seen through the soft focus of nostalgia, characterized by both pleasure and pain. The word “nostalgia” was coined in the late 17th century by a Swiss medical student, Johannes Hofer, to describe the affliction suffered by Swiss mercenaries who fought abroad and longed for their native Alps. He coined the word by combining the Greek words nostos, meaning “to return home,” and algia, meaning “pain.” Homesickness was not something new, but Hofer located its effects in the body. He identified it as an actual disease whose symptoms included

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“persistent thinking of home, melancholia, insomnia, anorexia, weakness, anxiety, smothering sensations, and fever” (qtd. in Smith, 510), with potentially fatal consequences. While certainly not as extreme, Zuckerman’s nostalgia presents an idealized version of his hometown, but one that he readily admits is a fantasy. In fact, when he finds out that the Swede’s later life did not conform to the perfect American Dream trajectory he had anticipated but led to a tragic downfall brought about by the bomb his daughter Merry planted to protest the Vietnam War, he decides to imagine a “realistic chronicle” (Roth, American Pastoral, 89) of his story, which takes up most of the novel. Is then the initial nostalgic vision just a mistake to be dismissed or amended? I argue that it plays a crucial role in the construction of the novel, since it contains the creative drive that propels the main narrative.

Past and present

3 To understand the nostalgic outlook of the narrator of American Pastoral, one needs to take a look at his immediate context. The story has a frame narrative in which Zuckerman attends his 45th high school reunion, a particularly fitting event for reminiscing and reevaluating the past. The narrator confesses that the reunion stirs up within him a whole range of memories and emotions. But is this outpouring actually brought about by the past? Common sense leads us to believe that the causes of nostalgia are to be found in the past, but actually it has little to do with how good or enjoyable one’s past actually was, and everything to do with how frustrated one is in one’s present conditions. Fred Davis, in his study Yearning for Yesterday, argues that “Whatever in our present situation invokes it, nostalgia uses the past […] but it is not the product thereof” (10-11). The vision of the past that is thus created is determined by present concerns and shaped by the perceived contrast between past and present situations.1 During the course of the first part of the novel, Zuckerman informs the reader that he chose to live a secluded life in a remote part of the Berkshires, effectively retiring from the world as an active participant. Furthermore, a recent bout with prostate cancer left him both impotent and incontinent. It is no wonder in these conditions that the writer would turn to the past for consolation. Interestingly, these personal circumstances also correspond to another major cause of nostalgia identified by Fred Davis—transitional periods. He observes that people are more prone to nostalgia in certain pivotal moments in life such as the passage from adolescence to adulthood, because such periods are rife with uncertainty and doubts. These events and emotions “pose the threat of identity discontinuity […] that nostalgia seeks, by marshaling our psychological resources for continuity, to abort or, at the very least, deflect” (34–35). Nostalgia is thus inherently connected to identity construction; it is a positive process which helps reassure the self that it is as capable of surmounting present or future difficulties as it was in the past.

4 However, Davis notes that “unlike the nostalgia of the young, that of the old is a nostalgia without end; for, with only an occasional exception, society sees to it that there is no place for them to go but down” (67). In this case, nostalgia cannot help one adapt to life changes, but it could potentially assuage the fear of one’s mortality, since it allows the elderly to dwell positively on their lives. In fact, at Zuckerman’s high school reunion, one of the main subjects of conversation between the participants is the threat of cancer and dying. The narrator wryly comments on this preoccupation:

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“Let’s speak further of death and of the desire—understandably in the aging a desperate desire—to forestall death, to resist it, to resort to whatever means are necessary to see death with anything, anything, anything but clarity” (47). In this context, nostalgia appears as one such reaction against the inevitable prospect of death, as what Blaise Pascal would call “diversion” (divertissement), the tactic of evasion people naturally adopt to fend off the distressing facts of life: “Not having been able to conquer death, wretchedness, or ignorance, men have decided for their own happiness not to think about it” (Pascal, 44). For Zuckerman and his former classmates, nostalgia offers a safe haven, a welcome but only temporary respite from the thought of their mortal condition. Conversely, one can also think of nostalgia as a reaction against the irreversible nature of time. Vladimir Jankélévitch argues in L’Irréversible et la nostalgie that the object of nostalgia is not the actuality of one’s past, but precisely the fact that it is past, what he calls the “pastness” of the past (357, my translation). It is because one cannot return to one’s childhood that it appears so desirable. Thus nostalgia could be seen as a reaction to both the irreversible nature of time (the fact that the past is past) and the inevitable prospect of death, as a desperate attempt to avoid these unpleasant realities.

A Golden Age?

5 By longing for his hometown, Zuckerman is of course also yearning for the days of his youth. Childhood is a privileged object of nostalgic investment because of its bridging of the gap between then and now—it is past and can never be relived, yet it continues to shape and inform our present identity. For the narrator, his childhood is synonymous with a few defining characteristics which seem to contrast starkly with his current situation. Zuckerman now lives the life of the “lonely writers” (35) up in the woods, whereas his evocation of Weequahic is characterized by a definite sense of belonging to a community. From the very first paragraph, the narrator places himself in a collective, with the possessive “our”: The Swede. During the war years, when I was still a grade school boy, this was a magical name in our Newark neighborhood, even to adults just a generation removed from the city’s old Prince Street ghetto and not yet so flawlessly Americanized as to be bowled over by the prowess of a high school athlete. The name was magical; so was the anomalous face. Of the few fair- complexioned Jewish students in our preponderantly Jewish public high school, none possessed anything remotely like the steep-jawed, insentient Viking mask of this blue-eyed blond born into our tribe as Seymour Irving Levov. (3, emphasis mine)

6 Zuckerman merges his own experience with that of the entire Jewish community of Weequahic. He paints a tight-knit neighborhood with a strong sense of cohesion, and it seems he is precisely longing for belonging. Nostalgia is actually one of the means through which a generation or a community coheres, for, as Davis explains, it “mediates the selection, distillation, refinement, and integration of those scenes, events, personalities, attitudes, and practices from the past that make an identifiable generation of what would otherwise remain a featureless demographic cohort” (111). Nostalgia is at the crossroads of the personal and the collective; it connects individual biography with the biography of whole communities or nations through a highly selective way of remembering and forgetting. Historical transitions such as World War II provoke a range of responses shared by millions of people, but this collective process

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necessarily involves getting one’s history wrong.2 Hana Wirth-Nesher notes a glaring absence in the opening chapter of American Pastoral: “the Holocaust is not mentioned anywhere in Zuckerman’s nostalgic rhetoric about growing up in a homogenous Jewish neighborhood in the 1940s” (29). This discordant reality does not accord with the picture of success that the narrator depicts and is thus completely left out. By focusing solely on the Swede and his athletic feats, Zuckerman is staking a claim to belonging to the community and taking part in its myth-making. He goes on to describe how “something powerful united us. And united us not merely in where we came from but in where we were going and how we would get there” (44). This teleological narrative, however, is blind to the atrocities of history.

7 A similar tendency emerges from the character of the Swede’s father, Lou Levov, founder of the glove-making company Newark Maid and the other great nostalgic figure of American Pastoral. The patriarch sees history only through the prism of how it affects his business. When Newark Maid is about to go under, he rejoices over the involvement of the United States in World War II: “The war came along and saved us. Government contracts” (346). This is the beginning of a golden age for him, but it comes to an abrupt end in the sixties, a watershed moment marked by the twin disasters of “the assassination of John F. Kennedy and the arrival of the miniskirt, and together that was the death knell for the ladies’ dress glove” (349). Oblivious to the fate of the nation, Lou’s heart bleeds for the death of his beloved glove. In fact, glove- making encapsulates the values of this idealized lost world and all the weight of tradition. Lou extols the conscientious, hard-working ethics of the industry, its loving trade talk passed on through the generations, and its focus on community: “Most of the glove businesses have been family businesses. From father to son” (130). In reality, his ruthless management of the factory completely belies his words. There is nothing familial in the way he runs his company, except for his paternalistic attitude. His nostalgic longing, however, is passed from father to son, coalescing around a sacrosanct image of the family business of days gone by.

8 Furthermore, Weequahic, as Zuckerman describes it, is a world that makes perfect sense and where everything is accounted for. This, of course, is not possible in the confused and turbulent present, but it is only achievable through the distance that separates us from past events. The past appears as a fixed entity, as David Lowenthal points out: “Nothing more can happen to the past; it is safe from the unexpected and the untoward, from accident or betrayal. Because it is over, the past can be ordered and domesticated, given a coherence foreign to the chaotic and shifting present” (62). Zuckerman pushes this ordering of the past to the extreme, and in the elated speech he writes after the high school reunion, he depicts a neighborhood where everybody knows everybody intimately and where every sign and every detail is known and understood: About one another, we knew who had what kind of lunch in the bag in his locker and who ordered what on his hot dog at Syd’s; we knew one another’s every physical attribute—who walked pigeon-toed and who had breasts, who smelled of hair oil and who oversalivated when he spoke; we knew who among us was belligerent and who was friendly, who was smart and who was dumb; we knew whose mother had the accent and whose father had the mustache, whose mother worked and whose father was dead […] (43)

9 This passage expresses a deep nostalgia for a sense of totality, cohesion and order, for a world in which knowledge is absolute. Once again this concern is motivated by the

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current preoccupations of the narrator. Zuckerman is indeed now convinced that there is no such thing as certainty, asserting later in the narrative that the Swede “learned the worst lesson that life can teach—that it makes no sense” (81). So how can the narrator reconcile these two contradictory positions—a yearning for life making absolute sense, and the belief that it makes no sense at all?

Nostalgia and Fiction

10 Zuckerman’s way of dealing with this discrepancy is acknowledging the illusory nature of his nostalgia. From the very start of the narrative, Zuckerman uses words such as “magical,” “fantasy” (3), and “delusionary” (4) to describe the Swede and the neighborhood. Levov’s brother, Jerry, is even more blunt, describing the reunion as a pointless exercise in “bullshit-nostalgia” (72). During the high school reunion, while the participants are sharing memories, Zuckerman realizes that things were not what they appeared to be at the time. He does not remember Ira Posner, a former classmate who used to hide the fact that he had a brother put in an institution (54). Nor did Zuckerman know that his sweetheart Joy Helpern did not want him to come home with her because she did not want him to find out that she shared a bed with her widowed mother while her brother slept in the kitchen (84). Gradually behind the veneer of nostalgia a darker and more contrasted picture begins to show. These individual revelations erode the notion of absolute knowledge that Zuckerman rhapsodized about in his speech and instead support his claim that “getting people right is not what living is all about anyway. It’s getting them wrong that is living” (35).

11 Roth casts further doubt on his story by repeatedly referring to other narratives in the opening pages of American Pastoral. Levov is successively called a “household Apollo” (4), a “god” (5), and even “Zeus” (17). Besides Greek mythology, Zuckerman also parallels the Swede’s story with the Book of Job and The Kid from Tomkinsville, a juvenile baseball novel with tragic overtones (7-9), as well as Tolstoy’s The Death of Ivan Ilych (30-31). The extent of this intertextual interplay unsettles the story and seems to imply that any ordering of the past in narrative is ultimately a form of storytelling. When trying to make sense of the Swede’s life, Zuckerman resorts to familiar myths and stories. According to Hayden White, histories are indeed “symbolic structures, extended metaphors, that ‘liken’ the events reported in them to some form with which we have already become familiar in our literary culture” (91). Such undermining of his own narrative allows Zuckerman to yield to the temptation of nostalgia while simultaneously keeping it at a distance and making the reader aware of its simplifications and distortions. This delicate balance is at the heart of what Linda Hutcheon has described as “postmodern nostalgia”: “In the postmodern, in other words, (and here is the source of the tension) nostalgia itself gets both called up, exploited, and ironized.” In the case of American Pastoral, this conflicting dimension of nostalgia reveals a deep-seated ambivalence on the part of the narrator, which he uses as material for his fiction.

12 In fact, though it is dismissed as a fantasy, the initial vision of a golden age still hangs over the rest of the novel; it is repeated and reflected under different guises, and this is made possible by the very structure of the narrative. During the high school reunion, Zuckerman chooses to reconstruct his version of the Swede’s later life as a tragedy. To do so, he decides to try and become one with Levov, to focalize on his point of view and

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erase his own presence from the text. Nonetheless, Zuckerman’s presence can still be felt in the distance between his point of view and the Swede’s and in the many parallels between their lives. Levov’s pastoral consists in his buying a huge stone country house in rural New Jersey and living out the American Dream with his wife and daughter. It stands as counterpoint to Zuckerman’s own pastoral, his nostalgia for his hometown— as illusory as the Swede’s, yet seemingly as inescapable. Although the object of their yearning is different, there are similarities. They share a comparable desire for belonging, as Jerry explains to his brother: “You longed to belong like everybody else to the United States of America? Well, you do now, big boy, thanks to your daughter” (277). In addition, Levov’s pastoral fantasy is also characterized by a clear sense of order which is completely shattered by his daughter’s act of terrorism, leaving him picturing “the whole of his life as a stuttering mouth and a grimacing face—the whole of his life without cause or sense and completely bungled. He no longer had any conception of order. There was no order. None” (93). Both men also seem to lament the fall of Newark. If their hometown was a paradise in the 1940s, it is described as hell in the 1960s and 1970s, in the wake of the 1967 riots: “It was Newark that was entombed here, a city that was not going to stir again” (219).3 Understandably, the Swede—as Zuckerman imagines him—yields to a nostalgic tendency of his own: The Swede was giving in to the ordinary human wish to live once again in the past— to spend a self-deluding, harmless few moments back in the wholesome striving of the past, when the family endured by a truth in no way grounded in abetting destruction but rather in eluding and outlasting destruction, overcoming its mysterious inroads by creating the utopia of a rational existence. (122–23)

13 Return, of course, is impossible, since one can never go back in time and, besides, nostalgia conjures up a past that never was, “the past undetonated” (61). Merry’s character represents this impossibility of return. She is the one who effectively detonates the Swede’s life and destroys his illusions. But even before her teenage rebellion, there is something in her that is both uncontrollable and unaccountable. Her stuttering disrupts the flow of language and signals a crack in her father’s narrative even as it unfolds. Furthermore, her speech impediment is also a stark reminder of the failings of nostalgia. According to Susan Stewart, nostalgia is “the repetition that mourns the inauthenticity of all repetitions” (23). Hence, Merry’s perpetual repetition of consonants can be seen as a cruel parody of the Swede’s yearning of the past and his inability to relive it. In fact, Merry’s brand of 1960s leftist radicalism consists in overthrowing the order that is central to nostalgic and utopian thinking, and introducing a Dionysian sense of complete chaos. She opposes everything that her father stands for, including his reliance on family values: “All you can think about, all you can talk about, all you c-c-care about is the well-being of this f-fucking l-l-little f-f- family!” (107) This clash of opposites leaves the Swede rudderless: “There was no order. None. He envisioned his life as a stutterer’s thought, wildly out of his control” (93). All the more reason for him to seek refuge in an idealized past.

14 The Swede’s and Zuckerman’s nostalgic longings may be both illusory, but they are not of the same order. Fred Davis has identified three orders of nostalgia, the first of which he calls “simple nostalgia,” a straightforward yearning to return to an earlier time that is deemed superior. The second order, which he calls “reflexive nostalgia,” is a tendency to “question, deflate, correct, and remind” (21)—in other words, to ask oneself, “was it really like that?” The third order, “interpreted nostalgia,” consists in directing analytically-oriented questions concerning the source and purpose of the

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nostalgic experience—in other words, “why am I feeling nostalgic?” Davis explains that they function as analytical categories and do not exclude the fact that people frequently move from one “level” to another in no specific order while experiencing nostalgia. However, it seems that the Swede’s nostalgia is firmly restricted to the first order—a sincere wish to return to the past—as futile and illusory as his earlier “utopia of a rational existence.” Zuckerman’s nostalgia, on the other hand, navigates between the different orders and reveals a fundamental underlying tension that cannot be resolved.4 This dynamic is clearly at play in the speech Zuckerman writes after the reunion, in which he exalts the boundless energy of his generation: Despite the undercurrent of anxiety—a sense communicated daily that hardship was a persistent menace that only persistent diligence could hope to keep at bay; despite a generalized mistrust of the Gentile world; despite the fear of being battered that clung to many families because of the Depression—ours was not a neighborhood steeped in darkness. (41)

15 Zuckerman regularly inserts concessive clauses throughout his panegyric, as if anticipating criticism, yet these small reality checks are systematically overrun by his nostalgic inclination. This back-and-forth movement reaches a climax in the following passage: Am I wrong to think that we delighted in living there? No delusions are more familiar than those inspired in the elderly by nostalgia, but am I completely mistaken to think that living as well-born children in Renaissance Florence could not have held a candle to growing up within aromatic range of Tabachnik’s pickle barrels? (42)

16 The extravagant claim of the comparison and the painstaking way it is prefaced reveal the fundamental workings of Zuckerman’s nostalgic process: it is a constant oscillation and tension between knowing that nostalgia is an illusion and giving in to a desire to believe. This irrational desire to believe is the irreducible core of nostalgia; it is a suspension of disbelief—an almost unwilling suspension of disbelief. This is precisely what makes nostalgia so appealing for a fiction writer: it is a creative force that he can exploit and channel through a different kind of narrative, one over which he has more control. This transition resembles the progress from involuntary memory to fiction that governs Proust’s method in À la recherche du temps perdu. Roth playfully recreates the famous madeleine scene by having Zuckerman devour the rugelach he receives at the reunion, which unfortunately does not dissolve his “apprehensiveness of death” (47), as was the case with his illustrious literary predecessor. For Proust, it is only through fiction that the essence of time contained in the involuntary surge of memory can be regained.5 As Dorrit Cohn explains, “involuntary memory is merely the precondition— necessary, but insufficient—for recreating the past through narration. The narrative process itself, by contrast, is emphatically conscious, deliberate, and intellectual” (146). Similarly, nostalgia and fiction share common ground, and this affinity allows Zuckerman to operate the transition between his nostalgic musings and his artful reinvention of the Swede’s story.

17 Music plays a key part in this transition, as Zuckerman begins dreaming his “realistic chronicle” while dancing at the reunion to a popular song from his childhood, “Dream,” by Johnny Mercer, whose lyrics, which serve as one of the novel’s epigraphs, enjoin listeners to dream so that their fantasies “might come true.” From its early history on, nostalgia has been associated with music,6 and today it remains a favorite tool of researchers who study the phenomenon.7 Music bridges past and present, it is

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infinitely repeatable yet it also makes us aware of the impossibility of return, as Zuckerman reveals when listening to a piece by Rimsky-Korsakov in The Humain Stain: “The musicians had indeed laid bare the youngest, most innocent of our ideas of life, the indestructible yearning for the way things aren’t and can never be” (207).8 However, music liberates the narrator to elaborate another creation, one in which he will “desimplify” (American Pastoral, 20) his initial nostalgic vision. The “catatonic forties beat” (84) of the song plunges the narrator into a trance-like state in which dreams, memory and nostalgia become the fodder from which his fiction arises.9

18 For Zuckerman, nostalgia is only the first stage of the creative process, but it contains the very spark from which his fiction emerges. The yearning to return to the hometown and its golden age actually turns into a yearning to travel further, as Jankélévitch illustrates when he argues that there is a natural progression from “closed” to “open” nostalgia. Closed nostalgia is the illusion that homecoming is the conclusive cure that will restore everything that the nostalgic felt lacking in his or her exile, as if the return could simply cancel out the departure. But the nostalgic’s desire is not so easily satisfied, since it is directed toward an open-ended destination. Thus the homeland is actually just a pretext, the “symbolic and metaphorical localization of an indeterminate desire” (Jankélévitch, 360, my translation). This lack cannot be named and cannot be fulfilled but it urges us onward, as Susan Stewart argues: “this point of desire which the nostalgic seeks is in fact the absence that is the very generating mechanism of desire” (23), in a language highly reminiscent of Lacan’s objet a, the ever absent cause of desire. Fiction is the place where Zuckerman’s nostalgia takes him to continue this journey. Like his character, Philip Roth could not wait to leave the strictures of his family home and neighborhood when he left for college. Yet he found himself perpetually revisiting his hometown of Newark in his novels, as in American Pastoral. But it is not so much an expression of a wish to return to his childhood home as a desire to explore this locale further in a fictionalized setting, as a starting point for storytelling. In The Tenants, Bernard Malamud has his protagonist, the writer Harry Lesser, profess that “Home is where my book is” (11). This sentence could be a creed for Roth or his alter ego Zuckerman, for whom the true homeland is fiction, both as a point of return and a point of departure.

19 Fiction, however, is not a place without contradictions. Narrative is the medium through which Zuckerman creates and explores the past, but in a certain sense he is also its captive. In fact, the narrator defines himself as “a man who would be seeking his solace, like it or not, nowhere but in sentences” (65). Roth describes a man who has retired from the world and only lives to tell other people’s stories, with fiction as the only medium at his disposition. Narrative is thus opposed to the unmediated experience of the world, which remains tantalizingly out of reach. This opposition between writing and living is further explored in Exit Ghost (2007), the epilogue to the whole Zuckerman series. In this novel, a visit to New York after eleven years of absence throws the aged writer back into the turmoil of the city. The narrator is haunted by ghosts from his past while also reminded of another kind of torment, “The pain of being present in the present moment” (137). Ultimately, Zuckerman prefers to exile himself from lived experience in favor of the unlived realm of fiction, despite its limitations. Narrative, like nostalgia, is indeed a double-edged sword: it provides consolation but it remains only a palliative; it is both the disease and the cure.

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BIBLIOGRAPHY

BARRETT, Frederick S. et al., “Music-Evoked Nostalgia: Affect, Memory, and Personality,” Emotion 10.3, 2010, 390–403.

BOYM, Svetlana, The Future of Nostalgia, New York, Basic Books, 2001.

COHN, Dorrit, Transparent Minds: Narrative Modes for Presenting Consciousness in Fiction, Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1978.

DAVIS, Fred, Yearning for Yesterday: A Sociology of Nostalgia, New York, Free Press, 1979.

HUTCHEON, Linda, “Irony, Nostalgia, and the Postmodern,” University of Toronto English Library, 1998, http://www.library.utoronto.ca/utel/criticism/hutchinp.html (last accessed on January 11th, 2016).

JANKELEVITCH, Vladimir, L’Irréversible et la nostalgie, Paris, Flammarion, 1974.

LOWENTHAL, David, The Past Is a Foreign Country, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1985.

MALAMUD, Bernard, The Tenants, New York, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1971.

MORLEY, Catherine, “Possessed by the Past: History, Nostalgia and Language in The Human Stain,” Philip Roth: American Pastoral, The Human Stain, The Plot against America, Debra Shostak, ed., London, Continuum, 2011, 80–92.

PASCAL, Blaise, Pensées and Other Writings, Anthony Levi, ed., translated from French by Honor Levi, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1995.

PROUST, Marcel, Remembrance of Things Past, translated from French by C. K. Scott Moncrieff and Frederick A. Blossom, II, New York, Random House, 1934.

---, Time Regained, translated from French by Andreas Mayor, London, Chatto & Windus, 1970.

ROTH, Philip, American Pastoral (1997), London, Vintage, 1998.

---, The Human Stain (2000), London, Vintage, 2001.

---, Exit Ghost, London, Jonathan Cape, 2007.

ROUSSEAU, Jean-Jacques, A Dictionary of Music (1767), translated from French by William Waring, New York, Ams Press, 1975.

SHECHNER, Mark, Up Society’s Ass, Copper: Rereading Philip Roth, Madison, University of Wisconsin Press, 2003.

SMITH, Kimberly K., “Mere Nostalgia: Notes on a Progressive Paratheory,” Rhetoric & Public Affairs 3.4, 2000, 505–27. http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/rap/summary/v003/3.4smith.html (last accessed on January 11th, 2016).

STEWART, Susan, On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection, Durham, Duke University Press, 1993.

WHITE, Hayden, Tropics of Discourse: Essays in Cultural Criticism, Baltimore, Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978.

WIRTH-NESHER, Hana, “Philip Roth’s Counter Pastoral: The Return of History,” Reading Philip Roth’s American Pastoral, Velichka D. Ivanova, ed., Toulouse, Presses Universitaires du Mirail, 2011, 27–32.

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NOTES

1. The tension in nostalgia derives precisely from the impossibility of resolving the juxtaposition of then and now, which Svetlana Boym illustrates in cinematic terms as “a double exposure, or a superimposition of two images—of home and abroad, past and present, dream and everyday life. The moment we try to force it into a single image, it breaks the frame or burns the surface” (xiv). 2. “To forget—and I would venture say—to get one’s history wrong, are essential factors in the making of a nation; and thus the advance of historical study is a danger to nationality” writes Ernest Renan in “What Is a Nation;” (qtd. in Boym, 15). 3. Zuckerman’s description of the “pyramids of Newark” (219) is almost biblical, as Mark Shechner points out: “As the Jews once lamented Jerusalem, Roth laments Newark” (166). 4. Svetlana Boym suggests another typology which may also apply here, the distinction between restorative and reflective nostalgia: “Restorative nostalgia stresses nostos and attempts a transhistorical reconstruction of the lost home. Reflective nostalgia thrives in algia, the longing itself, and delays the homecoming—wistfully, ironically, desperately. […] Restorative nostalgia protects the absolute truth, while reflective nostalgia calls it into doubt” (xviii). 5. “By rapidly devouring mouthful after mouthful of these crumbs whose floury richness— blended of butter and sour cream and vanilla and cream cheese and egg yolk and sugar—I’d loved since childhood, perhaps I’d find vanishing from Nathan what, according to Proust, vanished from Marcel the instant he recognized “the savour of the little madeleine”: the apprehensiveness of death. “A mere taste,” Proust writes, and “the word ‘death’ . . . [has] . . . no meaning for him.” So, greedily I ate, gluttonously, refusing to curtail for a moment this wolfish intake of saturated fat but, in the end, having nothing like Marcel’s luck” (American Pastoral, 47). Interestingly, Roth does not quote from Swann’s Way (Du côté de chez Swann), the first volume of À la recherche du temps perdu, in which the madeleine scene originally appears, but from The Past Recaptured (Le Temps retrouvé, translated more judiciously as Time Regained by Andreas Mayor), the final volume—when Proust’s narrator reflects on the earlier episode in the larger context of his decision to write fiction (Remembrance, 995–96). By referring to this passage – a remembrance of a remembrance– Roth echoes Zuckerman’s own process of turning the initial memory into another form of fiction. 6. In his 1767 Dictionary of Music, Jean-Jacques Rousseau discusses the Ranz des Vaches, a traditional folk melody from the Alps “so generally beloved among the Swiss, that it was forbidden to be play’d in their troops under pain of death, because it made them burst into tears, desert, or die, whoever heard it; so great a desire did it excite in them of returning to their country” (266–67). 7. See for instance Barrett et al., “Music-Evoked Nostalgia: Affect, Memory, and Personality.” 8. The Human Stain is also suffused with nostalgia evoked by songs from the 1940s. See Morley; and Shechner 154–173 for further discussion on the role of music in the American trilogy. 9. It is tempting to draw a parallel with another Proustian creation, the “little phrase” of Vinteuil’s sonata, which stirs up the narrator’s emotions and gives him the intuition that art is the medium through which he will be able to express the ineffable and transcend time: “nothing resembled more closely than some such phrase of Vinteuil the peculiar pleasure which I had felt at certain moments in my life [such as] when I tasted a certain cup of tea. Without pressing this comparison farther, I felt that the clear sounds, the blazing colours which Vinteuil sent to us from the world in which he composed, paraded before my imagination with insistence but too rapidly for me to be able to apprehend it, something which I might compare to the perfumed silkiness of a geranium. Only, whereas, in memory, this vagueness may be, if not explored, at any rate fixed precisely, thanks to a guiding line of circumstances which explain why a certain savour has been able to recall to us luminous sensations, the vague sensations given by Vinteuil coming not from a memory but from an impression (like that of the steeples of Martinville), one would have had to find, for the geranium scent of his music, not a material

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explanation, but the profound equivalent, the unknown and highly coloured festival (of which his works seemed to be the scattered fragments, the scarlet-flashing rifts), the mode in which he ‘heard’ the universe and projected it far beyond himself” (Remembrance, 642–43).

ABSTRACTS

This article explores the nostalgia for 1940s Newark exhibited by Nathan Zuckerman in Philip Roth’s American Pastoral. In the first part of the novel, the narrator presents an idealized version of his hometown characterized by a tight-knit community and a clear sense of order, contrasting starkly with his present situation. Although Zuckerman acknowledges the illusory nature of his fantasy, he cannot help but indulge in it. This ambivalent reaction is actually the creative spark from which the main narrative emerges.

Cet article examine la nostalgie pour le Newark des années 1940 qu’exprime Nathan Zuckerman dans American Pastoral de Philip Roth. Dans la première partie du roman, le narrateur présente une version idéalisée de sa ville natale, marquée par une communauté soudée et une impression d’ordre, qui tranche avec sa situation présente. Bien que Zuckerman reconnaisse la nature illusoire de cette chimère, il ne peut s’empêcher d’y céder. Cette réaction ambiguë constitue en réalité l’élément déclencheur du récit principal.

INDEX

Mots-clés: Philip Roth, American Pastoral, nostalgie, narration, illusion, temporalité Keywords: Philip Roth, American Pastoral, nostalgia, narration, illusion, temporality

AUTHOR

TANGUY BÉRENGER Université de Versailles-Saint-Quentin

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L’autobiographie ou l’art de la vie dans A Small Boy and Others de Henry James

Thomas Constantinesco et Agnès Derail

1 Premier volume d’une trilogie autobiographique qui restera inachevée, A Small Boy and Others, commencé en 1911 et publié en 1913 alors que Henry James a 70 ans, se donne comme le récit que fait de son enfance et de son entourage familial un auteur parvenu au faîte de sa renommée. James l’écrit en parallèle à deux romans dont il finira par abandonner la composition, The Ivory Tower et The Sense of the Past, dont les ébauches seront publiées de façon posthume. Tandis qu’il délaisse les deux écrits de fiction, il achève tout de même deux des textes autobiographiques : A Small Boy and Others et Notes of a Son and Brother, qui paraît en 1914. Le troisième volume, The Middle Years, sera interrompu par sa mort en 19161. Très manifestement, l’effort de l’écrivain, au soir de son existence, s’applique à l’écriture d’une vie dont il sait, au moment où il écrit, qu’elle aura été entièrement consacrée, et même sacrifiée, à sa vocation littéraire, et, de ce point de vue, A Small Boy fait retour sur l’enfance d’un artiste et tâche de mettre au jour la genèse d’une vocation, voire d’un destin (Hoffa, 1969, 277-93). Paradoxalement, donc, pour un écrivain qui, toute sa carrière durant, se sera abstenu dans sa fiction, et jusque dans son théâtre, de toute allusion trop clairement identifiable à sa vie, James achève son parcours par des écrits autobiographiques qu’il parvient, pour deux d’entre eux, à mener à terme, tandis qu’il échoue à achever les deux grands romans pour lesquels il a pourtant déjà accumulé des notes en abondance, comme si c’était désormais dans l’écriture de soi que s’exerçait pleinement le désir ou l’urgence d’écrire. La mise en regard de ces deux entreprises – la fiction et l’autobiographie – suscite de fait bien des interrogations. The Ivory Tower, dont l’intrigue se situe dans les riches milieux affairistes du Newport (Rhode Island) d’avant-guerre, est un roman entièrement américain. Le héros, revenu d’Europe pour hériter d’un riche aïeul, renonce à sa fortune, se laisse volontairement spolier par les intrigants d’une Amérique vouée aux valeurs de l’argent et se replie dans une tour d’ivoire, à la façon de l’artiste, pour observer les turpitudes qui l’entourent. De ce roman-ci, on a beaucoup dit qu’il était

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une victime de guerre : James ne se sentait pas le cœur de dépeindre une Amérique mercantile, alors même que les États-Unis retardaient le moment où ils viendraient porter secours à la vieille Europe. L’autre roman, The Sense of the Past, commencé en 1900 et repris en 1914, proposait, a contrario, comme un antidote, le récit d’un impossible retour à l’innocence du passé américain en faisant remonter le personnage principal vers un âge d’or situé au début du XIXe siècle, à la faveur d’un mystérieux voyage dans le temps. Sans entrer dans les raisons pour lesquelles James renonce à ces deux textes, l’un s’efforçant de fuir dans un passé imaginaire le présent affairiste de l’autre (Haviland, 1998, 21-48 et 165-211), on peut à tout le moins constater que ses forces d’écriture sont presque entièrement mobilisées pour l’autobiographie qui, dans le sombre présent de l’immédiat avant-guerre, tente de retrouver « le sens du passé » en revenant sur l’enfance du jeune Henry, d’abord à New York puis en Europe. S’ensuit une première question, à laquelle nous n’apporterons qu’un éclairage partiel : pourquoi le retour au passé, au passé en partie américain, du maître de la fiction est-il désormais seulement possible dans une représentation de soi que James a toujours soigneusement évitée jusque-là ?

2 Il y a au moins un précédent dans la production de James, parfois compté au nombre des écrits autobiographiques : c’est le recueil d’impressions intitulé The American Scene de 1907, récit de voyage où James, revenant au pays natal après plus de vingt ans d’absence, découvre une Amérique dominée par les affaires, un New York qui se hérisse de gratte-ciel, en proie à la spéculation immobilière, et un territoire envahi par les hordes d’émigrants italiens ou d’Europe centrale, qui massacrent la belle langue anglaise et sont aussi indifférents que les nouveaux riches au patrimoine artistique du passé américain, ces hauts lieux de Nouvelle-Angleterre où rôde encore pour le « visiteur » (ainsi qu’il se désigne) l’esprit des Hawthorne et des Emerson2. Dans l’autobiographie proprement dite, ces motifs, que l’on a déjà pu reconnaître dans la fiction, demeurent insistants : l’antagonisme Europe-Amérique, l’opposition du monde des affaires et de celui de l’art, le « sens du passé » et le besoin d’exil. Mais cette fois, ils sont saisis sans le masque d’un personnage fictif, sans intrigue, et dans la continuité d’un récit fait de la juxtaposition d’impressions, si bien que l’on peut se demander ce qui, de la fiction, vient investir le champ de l’autoportrait. Y a-t-il un hiatus entre l’invention de vies fictives dans un scénario planifié et le désir de représentation de soi au terme d’une vie vécue, non selon une trame prévue d’avance, mais selon un parcours que celui qui écrit n’a pas forcément choisi ? Ou encore : quel est le rapport qui se noue entre la vie vécue et la vie écrite, dès lors que ces vies n’en font qu’une – celle d’un seul et même sujet ? S’agissant de James, que ses biographes présentent comme s’étant tenu à l’écart de ce qu’on appelle « la vie » pour se vouer entièrement à l’œuvre (Bell, 1982, 463), s’agissant de celui qui, alors même qu’il compose The Middle Years, déclare, dans une formule fulgurante, que « c’est l’art qui fait la vie3 », il y a ainsi comme un paradoxe à le voir se livrer à l’autobiographie4. Car pour écrire A Small Boy, soi-même en petit garçon, il faut bien remonter à ce temps où, de toute évidence, la vie précède l’œuvre. Il faut avoir été enfant pour mettre plus tard dans l’œuvre le récit de cette vie d’enfant. En ce sens, une tension d’ordre logique se fait jour entre, d’une part, l’idée maîtresse selon laquelle l’œuvre est la matrice de l’existence et, d’autre part, l’autobiographie de l’enfant qui, par définition, n’est pas encore artiste, et c’est précisément cette tension que nous nous proposons d’explorer dans ce qui suit, à défaut de prétendre la résoudre : comment peut-on affirmer que « c’est l’art qui fait la vie » et se lancer en même temps dans l’aventure autobiographique ?

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3 De fait, A Small Boy and Others est placé, dès son titre, sous le signe de la contradiction, car James entend moins retracer sa propre vie que raconter celle des « autres », et en particulier celle de son frère aîné, William, dont il se présente comme le meilleur biographe en raison même de sa proximité avec lui, rendue plus aiguë encore par la mort de ce dernier un an auparavant, qui le plonge dans une profonde dépression. D’emblée, la relation complexe entre soi et autrui est au cœur de cette entreprise de remémoration paradoxale qui consiste finalement à se chercher pour mieux se perdre et qui fait de Small Boy, comme nous le suggèrerons d’abord, l’autobiographie d’un non- sujet, tant le dessaisissement occasionné par le retour sur soi, bien après-coup, vient confirmer et redoubler l’expérience qu’aura été celle de la vie elle-même comme non- vie. Mais en s’absentant ainsi de sa propre vie, le sujet, l’écrivain, la laisse intégralement disponible pour la recréation par l’écriture : il se sera donc agi de « se préserver de façon à créer » (Green, 2009, 154), voire à se créer. Ou encore, dans les mots de Jean-Jacques Mayoux : pour James, vivre revient à « se retenir de vivre pour conserver intacte l’imagination illimitée de la vie » (Mayoux, 1985, 112). Le retrait hors de l’existence permet ainsi au sujet de développer sa capacité d’émerveillement, son aptitude à se faire le réceptacle des innombrables impressions auxquelles il est exposé et que nous le voyons, au terme d’un deuxième mouvement à l’œuvre dans le texte, transformer petit à petit en une succession de scènes qui s’enchaînent les unes aux autres pour former la trame de son existence. Au bout du compte, cependant, loin de s’ordonner en un tout cohérent, la multiplicité des impressions qui affectent la conscience révèle la profonde altérité du sujet à lui-même et finit par désorienter le projet autobiographique, qui ne parvient pas à prendre la forme lisse et rectiligne d’une archéologie des origines qui trouverait son accomplissement dans le destin achevé d’un artiste. Écrire sa vie, comme nous voudrions le montrer pour terminer, ce serait alors raconter comment on est hanté par tous ces « autres » auxquels renvoie le titre et qui font et défont continûment l’identité du sujet autobiographique.

« The failure of my powers »

4 Tout commence par un mouvement de retrait, l’enfance étant ici le moment privilégié de la non-participation à l’existence, le moment où le « je » peut n’être personne. Cet exil hors de la vie est toutefois d’abord vécu par le jeune Henry comme un échec, signe de son incapacité à exister au même titre que les autres. La tentative pour faire le récit de sa venue à l’écriture, l’effort pour rendre compte du développement quasi organique5 du grand écrivain, du génie littéraire qu’il sait intimement être devenu, vient buter sur cette vie qu’il n’aura pas réussi à vivre, mais seulement à écrire, et le texte se souvient d’une enfance solitaire, marquée par le sentiment de la différence et la certitude d’être inapte à la vie même. Mais cette différence, dont la mémoire est particulièrement vive, doit aussi se comprendre comme un arrachement voulu par la famille à l’Amérique affairiste et matérialiste – celle de The Ivory Tower – incarnée par le richissime grand-père, « William James of Albany », dont l’immense fortune aura pourtant permis au père de Henry, Henry James Sr., de tenir la famille à l’abri du besoin et surtout de revendiquer son renoncement à tout engagement professionnel déterminé, son refus d’embrasser quelque carrière que ce soit. Le grand-père paternel est un Irlandais presbytérien qui a émigré en Amérique en 1789, avec peu d’argent et un peu de latin. Il s’installe à Albany, et sa trajectoire suit rapidement le modèle d’une

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success story à l’américaine, avec les ingrédients de la vie de la frontière et de l’entreprise capitaliste. Il s’enrichit d’abord dans le commerce du tabac et dans les transactions financières, avant d’acheter des parts dans la construction du canal de l'Érié, et surtout des terres le long du futur tracé. Il meurt en 1832, la même année qu’un autre homme d’affaires d’Albany, Allan Melvill. Mais alors que le père de Herman Melville, ruiné, laisse sa famille démunie, William James, lui, lègue à ses héritiers la somme de 3 millions de dollars, la plus grosse fortune de l’état après celle de John Jacob Astor, que Melville évoque justement en ouverture de « Bartleby ». Cet héritage est décisif dans le tournant que le fils, Henry James Sr., va donner à son existence et à celle de ses cinq enfants, puisque cet argent lui permet de rompre à la fois avec l’austère foi calviniste de son père et avec le monde des affaires. L’aversion pour le business explique la première migration de la famille James à New York, puis vers l’Europe et ses villes brillantes, ses musées, ses monuments. Henry James a six mois lorsque la famille part pour l’Angleterre et la France, en 1843, pour un séjour de deux ans, le premier d’une longue série. L’exil est d’abord un retrait – retrait de la vie en Amérique, sortie du monde des affaires. Le père de James n’aura jamais de profession et c’est pour préserver ses enfants des vilenies du monde des affaires qu’il les encouragera à suivre son exemple, c’est-à-dire à ne pas choisir de métier, à ne pas choisir absolument, bref, à se retenir de vivre au sens où l’entendent la plupart de ses contemporains. L’anathème jeté sur le business est le trait le plus caractéristique du clan James qui en fait, au regard des mœurs américaines, une entité excentrique (queer6) ou même une « monstrueuse exception » : [Our] consciousness was positively disfurnished, as that of young Americans went, of the actualities of “business” in a world of business. As to that we all formed together quite a monstrous exception; business in a world of business was the thing we most agreed (differ as we might on minor issues) in knowing nothing about. We touched it and it touched us neither directly nor otherwise, and I think our fond detachment, not to say our helpless ignorance and on occasion (since I can speak for one fine instance) our settled density of understanding, made us an unexampled and probably, for the ironic “smart” gods of the American heaven, a lamentable case. (James, 2001, 30) Our consensus, on all this ground, was amazing – it brooked no exception; the word had been passed, all round, that we didn’t, that we couldn’t and shouldn’t, understand these things, questions of arithmetic and of fond calculation, questions of the counting-house and the market; and we appear to have held to our agreement as loyally and to have accepted our doom as serenely as if our faith had been mutually pledged. The rupture with my grandfather’s tradition and attitude was complete; we were never in a single case, I think, for two generations, guilty of a stroke of business; the most that could be said of us was that, though about equally wanting, all round, in any faculty of acquisition, we happened to pay for the amiable weakness less in some connections than in others. (99)

5 Or, cette suspicion collective envers le monde des affaires induit chez le jeune James un sentiment général d’inadéquation et d’isolement. Il lui manque quelque chose que possèdent les autres, y compris ses frères, à commencer par William qui porte le prénom du grand-père – devenant le second William James, le premier à être né sur le sol américain – et qui reçoit dès sa naissance la visite et la bénédiction de M. Emerson soi-même : une compétence qu’on pourrait dire masculine, c’est-à-dire, dans les termes de l’Amérique de cette époque, entrepreneuriale ; un don pour l’arithmétique, une rapidité d’esprit, un sens de la compétition et de la mobilité ou même le goût de prendre part aux jeux des autres enfants, des garçons en particulier. Les premières

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pages du livre présentent Henry irrémédiablement marqué par le retard des seize mois qui séparent sa venue au monde de celle d’un frère qui sera toujours en avance, à chaque phase de leur développement, lui procurant seulement le sentiment vif et douloureux d’une impuissance, d’un déficit de talents ou de dons, qu’il appelle « the failure of my powers » (5). L’échec est particulièrement cuisant lorsqu’il fait l’objet d’une scène d’humiliation publique. Le texte relate le souvenir infâmant d’une des premières « expositions » de l’enfant sur la scène sociale (et théâtrale) de Broadway, lorsqu’au cours d’un spectacle de charité, un magicien de renom attire sur scène le jeune Henry, qui s’avère lamentablement incapable de rendre un compte arithmétique des mouchoirs et des cartes à jouer, subtilisés ou produits par l’homme de l’art au fil de ses tours. Effaré, paralysé, le petit garçon perçoit cependant, venus de la salle, les échanges entendus, à la fois soulagés et moqueurs de ses camarades. That occasion, I am clear, was a concert for a charity, with the volunteer performance and the social patroness, and it had squeezed in where it would – at the same time that I somehow connect the place, in Broadway, on the right going down and not much below Fourth Street (except that everything seems to me to have been just below Fourth Street when not just above,) with the scene of my great public exposure somewhat later, the wonderful exhibition of Signor Blitz, the peerless conjurer, who, on my attending his entertainment with W. J. and our frequent comrade of the early time “Hal” Coster, practised on my innocence to seduce me to the stage and there plunge me into the shame of my sad failure to account arithmetically for his bewilderingly subtracted or added or divided pockethandkerchiefs and playing-cards; a paralysis of wit as to which I once more, and with the same wan despair, feel my companions’ shy telegraphy of relief, their snickerings and mouthings and raised numerical fingers, reach me from the benches. (61)

6 Deux détails, au moins, sont remarquables ici, qui contribuent au pathos maîtrisé du récit : le premier, qui met au compte de l’innocence la possibilité d’une « séduction » poussant l’enfant à s’exposer sur le devant de la scène – une innocence dont les autres seraient comme naturellement dépourvus – et le second, qui témoigne d’une acuité perceptive restée intacte dans le temps même où l’esprit est décrit comme figé. Remarquable aussi la dextérité de l’écriture, en particulier des hypallages de la fin du passage (wan despair, shy telegraphy, numerical fingers), qui atteste plus encore, si besoin était, ce qui, de cette expérience honteuse, a été transformé dans le récit. Non seulement l’esprit (wit), si gourd fût-il à l’époque, était déjà bel et bien là, mais il fait retour sur la scène de l’écriture avec une virtuosité magistrale.

7 Les épisodes d’humiliation, comme celui-ci, ne sont pas montrés comme résultant d’un handicap natif, mais comme l’impossibilité de rendre « spectaculaires » ou simplement publics des dons qui, chez l’enfant, restent en souffrance et dont l’expression requiert qu’ils en passent par l’épreuve désespérante de la non-reconnaissance. La douleur de l’exposition est en quelque sorte nécessaire au développement. C’est ainsi que, dans l’opération mémorielle, ces épreuves sont curieusement mises sur le compte d’un travail de perte (process of waste [5]) par lequel la nature et la fortune, en privant certains êtres des dispositions pour l’action, renforcent en eux la faculté d’imagination et la sensibilité. Mais ces facultés ne pouvant se déployer dans le tout jeune âge, le sujet apparaît seulement (sur scène, à l’école ou dans la cour de récréation) comme la somme de ses défaillances – retard, maladresse ou bêtise – et James se dépeint comme l’idiot de la famille7, pour ainsi dire, le « dunce », comparable au voyageur de commerce qui,

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ayant perdu la clé de la mallette contenant ses marchandises, s’avère incapable, au moment opportun, d’en faire la démonstration : I lose myself in wonder at the loose ways, the strange process of waste, through which nature and fortune may deal on occasion with those whose faculty for application is all and only in their imagination and their sensibility. There may be during those bewildered and brooding years so little for them to “show” that I liken the individual dunce – as he so often must appear – to some commercial traveller who has lost the key to his packed case of samples and can but pass for a fool while other exhibitions go forward. (5)

8 Ici encore la comparaison est ambiguë ou rusée, puisque l’imagination et la sensibilité y figurent sous la forme de marchandises qui, quoique provisoirement en souffrance, pourraient bien finir par être commercialisées et par générer leur part de profit8.

9 Que les qualités qui prédisposent à l’action soient l’apanage de la masculinité américaine implique a contrario que leur déficit se décrive sous la catégorie d’une passivité que le texte associe explicitement à une certaine féminité ou féminisation. Si l’enfant James est dépourvu de talents particuliers qu’on puisse montrer en société, en revanche, l’exhibition de sa petite personne, de ses longues boucles blondes, qui ne seront pas sacrifiées sans larmes, fait la joie de l’entourage féminin. La différence d’avec William, outre sa vivacité qui l’oppose à un Henry « quite blankly innocuous » (9), se marque aussi par une distribution des rôles en termes de genre. La fin du texte rapporte un souvenir frappant où James se revoit auprès de son frère, tel un soupirant dénigré, mais rarement éconduit parce que trop timide pour se montrer insistant, sauf en une occasion mémorable, où William refuse que Henry l’accompagne au cours d’une sortie, au motif que lui, l’aîné, préfère jouer avec des garçons qui n’ont pas peur de proférer jurons et insultes. I try at least to recover here, however, some closer notation of W. J.’s aspects – yet only with the odd effect of my either quite losing him or but apprehending him again at seated play with his pencil under the lamp. When I see him he is intently, though summarily, rapidly drawing, his head critically balanced and his eyebrows working, and when I don’t see him it is because I have resignedly relinquished him. I can’t have been often for him a deprecated, still less an actively rebuffed suitor, because, as I say again, such aggressions were so little in order for me; but I remember that on my once offering him my company in conditions, those of some planned excursion, in which it wasn’t desired, his putting the question of our difference at rest, with the minimum of explanation, by the responsible remark: “I play with boys who curse and swear!” I had sadly to recognise that I didn’t, that I couldn’t pretend to have come to that yet – and truly, as I look back, either the unadvisedness and inexpertness of my young contemporaries on all that ground must have been complete (an interesting note on our general manners after all,) or my personal failure to grasp must have been. Besides which I wonder scarce less now than I wondered then in just what company my brother’s privilege was exercised; though if he had but richly wished to be discouraging he quite succeeded. It wasn’t that I mightn’t have been drawn to the boys in question, but that I simply wasn’t qualified. All boys, I rather found, were difficult to play with – unless it was that they rather found me […]. (135)

10 Dans la récollection de ce souvenir douloureux, la vision qui nous est donnée de William est instable, doublement perdue ou continûment hors de portée, hors de prise, soit que James fixe momentanément une image de son frère occupé à dessiner et ne lui prêtant aucune attention, soit qu’il laisse la vision s’évanouir comme en se résignant à rester hors de la conscience de son aîné, puis en renonçant, malgré l’humiliation, à sa compagnie et en reconnaissant son inaptitude générale à entrer dans la communauté

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des garçons, qu’ils soient ou non des « durs ». Il en vient à conclure à une disqualification unanime de lui-même comme compagnon de jeu, comme compagnon tout court. Tout le passage est sous le sceau de la négation, du dessaisissement, avec une abondance de marques négatives, dans tout l’éventail de leurs formes. Pourtant lorsqu’on y regarde de plus près, alors même que James s’interroge encore sur le privilège de son frère, sur l’identité de ces compagnons auxquels il n’a pas accès, il exerce de son côté une tout autre prérogative, celle, plus avantageuse, de convoquer ou de révoquer à volonté la vision du frère, celle de pouvoir la perdre, ou pas tout à fait, dans le récit du souvenir, dans ce temps d’écriture peut-être rendu possible par la mort de William un an auparavant.

11 Même si le jeune James est contraint d’admettre qu’il n’a pas trouvé moyen d’apprendre à jurer, et s’il est un bon petit garçon, dont les maîtres d’école s’abstiennent d’interrompre la rêverie, A Small Boy n’en est pas moins, à bien des égards, comme Maisie avant lui, un anti-roman de formation, ou une histoire de mauvaise éducation. Le désengagement professionnel à l’origine de l’exil de la famille, devenu une vocation collective dont le père a donné l’impulsion chez les James, s’accompagne d’un relatif désintérêt quant à la question de l’instruction des enfants. Bien que toujours soucieuse de trouver de bonnes institutions, la famille n’est pas adepte de la « méthode », ni partisane d’une formation structurée et exhaustive. Le père, en particulier, se méfiant des fats et des pédants, ne se préoccupe que de « vertu », mais une vertu toujours vaguement honteuse d’elle-même, qui du reste renvoie moins à une qualité morale qu’à une « grâce sociale », à une conduite ou un tempérament. Se défiant de la morale ordinaire, qui encourage le littéral et l’univoque – repère de tous les pédantismes – Henry James Sr. entretient au contraire chez ses enfants le sens de la nuance, voire de la contradiction ou du paradoxe : « The literal played in our education as small a part as it perhaps ever played in any, and we wholesomely breathed inconsistency and ate and drank contradictions. The presence of paradox was […] bright among us—though fluttering ever with as light a wing and as short a flight as need have been […]. » (112) Les enfants changent d’écoles, de précepteurs, au gré des fréquentes partances familiales et reçoivent une éducation singulièrement dépourvue de tout projet pédagogique. On évite les établissements anglais, dont le père considère qu’ils ne valent que pour les natifs et ne sont pour les autres qu’un « cul-de-sac éducatif » (« an educational cul-de-sac » [163]). On promeut l’ouverture d’esprit, l’humanisme, la civilité et la civilisation – c’est cela même qu’on est venu chercher en Europe –, on fait grand cas de l’apprentissage des langues étrangères, on ne recherche pas les institutions les plus huppées et si, en Suisse, les enfants se mêlent aux fils d’expatriés riches et sophistiqués, à Boulogne-sur-Mer, ils fréquenteront le « Collège Communal » (207), une école indéniablement démocratique, au côté des fils d’artisans, de boutiquiers, de mécaniciens. Dans tous les cas, on ne vise jamais à engranger un savoir technique qui pourrait accorder des garanties professionnelles. Cette approche, assez excentrique, fait naître chez l’enfant une double attitude vis-à-vis de sa propre formation et de la singularité de son parcours, que le texte, écrit au terme de sa carrière d’écrivain, tente de restituer sous les catégories qui étaient celles de l’enfant. Comme chez Maisie, à qui les parents refusent les frais d’une préceptrice ou d’un pensionnat, la discontinuité éducative suscite une certaine anxiété. Le départ en Europe est décrit, du point de vue des enfants, comme un « soulagement “éducatif” » (« an “educational” relief » [100]), même si la question des écoles se pose de nouveau de l’autre côté de l’Atlantique. En même temps, l’expérience scolaire

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proprement dite est partout frappée de la même ambivalence. Tout d’abord l’enfant s’ennuie, et ses bâillements répétés constituent l’essentiel de son exercice physique à cette époque ; ensuite, il acquiert la certitude que tout le monde en sait plus que lui, et ses piètres performances dans les disciplines académiques ne font par contraste qu’accentuer le succès et l’aisance de ses contemporains. Mais là encore, le refus de prendre part à la compétition scolaire, l’évasion dans la rêverie, libèrent la conscience pour une autre amplification de l’existence et une transfiguration du réel environnant : Who was it I ever thought stupid? – even when knowing, or at least feeling, that sundry expressions of life or force, which I yet had no name for, represented somehow art without grace, or (what after a fashion came to the same thing) presence without type. All of which, I should add, didn’t in the least prevent my moving on the plane of the remarkable; so that if, as I have noted, the general blank of consciousness, in the conditions of that winter, rather tended to spread, this could perhaps have but had for its best reason that I was fairly gorged with wonders. They were too much of the same kind; the result, that is, of everyone’s seeming to know everything –to the effect, a little, that everything suffered by it. There was a boy called Simpson my juxtaposition to whom I recall as uninterruptedly close, and whose origin can only have been, I think, quite immediately Irish – and Simpson, I feel sure, was a friendly and helpful character. Yet even he reeked, to my sense, with strange accomplishment – no single show of which but was accompanied in him by a smart protrusion of the lower lip, a crude complacency of power, that almost crushed me to sadness. […] How I gave to that state, in any case, such an air of occupation as to beguile not only myself but my instructors – which I infer I did from their so intensely letting me alone – I am quite at a loss to say; I have in truth mainly the remembrance of being consistently either ignored or exquisitely considered (I know not which to call it;) even if without the belief, which would explain it, that I passed for generally “wanting” any more than for naturally odious. It was strange, at all events – it could only have been – to be so stupid without being more brutish and so perceptive without being more keen. (116)

12 Si la physionomie et l’allure de l’élève Simpson, irlandais comme son camarade Henry James, portent les marques d’une stupidité accrue par la fatuité que lui confère la réussite scolaire, c’est que la façon dont sa vitalité et sa force s’expriment trahit précisément un art dépourvu de grâce, une présence sans personnalité. Face à la veulerie d’un Simpson, qui est le corollaire et surtout l’expression de sa satisfaction et de son arrogance – et qui plonge le « petit garçon » dans une grande tristesse –, celle de James, considérée rétrospectivement, n’est que le signe paradoxal d’une absence de « brutalité » (« brutish »), de même que la sensibilité de la perception se traduit extérieurement par un manque de perspicacité et d’à-propos. On voit s’amorcer ici un dédoublement de la conscience qui se divise entre une étendue vide et morne (« blank »), atone et inerte – celle d’un sujet que les maîtres laissent « intensément » tranquille, – et un autre plan, ce « plan du remarquable », regorgeant de merveilles autant que l’autre en est dépeuplé. S’il se rappelle la vie à l’école comme un temps de tristesse, d’angoisse même, ponctué d’effarement et de stupeur, dominé par le sentiment général de sa propre inaptitude et de l’égarement de la conscience apprenante soumise à la discipline de l’instruction, il se souvient aussi que cette conscience, sur un autre plan, demeure « lucide », d’une lucidité qui fait sa valeur, qui lui confère un intérêt très tôt perçu et que l’enfant s’efforce de ne pas perdre. Son « salut » réside dans la puissance de l’imagination (de cette conscience dite lucide) qui lui permet de quitter la scène de l’école, des camarades, des maîtres et instructeurs, et, en s’abstenant de toute relation « réelle », ordinaire, concrète, d’entrer de plain-pied

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dans le monde de la fiction, évoqué ici sous les catégories du fantastique ou du merveilleux, des monstres, mystères et prodiges, des horreurs et splendeurs : I can’t have had, through it all, I think, a throb of assurance or success; without which, at the same time, absurdly and indescribably, I lived and wriggled, floundered and failed, lost the clue of everything but a general lucid consciousness (lucid, that is, for my tender years;) which I clutched with a sense of its value. What happened all the while, I conceive, was that I imagined things – and as if quite on system – wholly other than as they were, and so carried on in the midst of the actual ones an existence that somehow floated and saved me even while cutting me off from any degree of direct performance, in fact from any degree of direct participation, at all. There presumably was the interest – in the intensity and plausibility and variety of the irrelevance: an irrelevance which, for instance, made all pastors and masters, and especially all fellow-occupants of benches and desks, all elbowing and kicking presences within touch or view, so many monsters and horrors, so many wonders and splendours and mysteries, but never, so far as I can recollect, realities of relation, dispensers either of knowledge or of fate, playmates, intimates, mere coævals and coequals. They were something better – better above all than the coequal or coæval; they were so thoroughly figures and characters, divinities or demons, and endowed in this light with a vividness that the mere reality of relation, a commoner directness of contact, would have made, I surmise, comparatively poor. (101)

13 Le renoncement au contact direct avec ceux qui peuplent le monde réel de l’école conditionne la libération ou le déploiement d’un pouvoir fictionnalisant qui produit déjà, bien avant l’âge de l’écriture, des personnages et des figures dont la « vie », l’intensité de « vie », est infiniment supérieure à l’inconsistance de leur existence ordinaire. Par un paradoxe supplémentaire, la « conscience lucide » n’est pas celle qui ordonne, réduit et assimile le réel environnant pour étendre sur lui sa maîtrise, mais celle qui, au contraire, sort d’elle-même, est « hors de propos », ne vaut que par l’intensité du « sans rapport » ou de ce qu’on pourrait dire, en glosant la remarquable expression « the intensity […] of the irrelevance », hors sujet, hors du sujet, à la fois du sujet perçu (ces camarades avec lesquels on n’a pas de rapport) et du sujet percevant, dans la conscience duquel n’entre rien de ce qu’on s’efforce de lui inculquer par toutes les voies ordinaires de l’enseignement, qui demeure vide de tout savoir, et dont la lucidité, ou même l’extra-lucidité, exige la vacuité, ce que James appelle ailleurs « the general blank of consciousness » (116).

14 La conscience lucide d’où s’efface la réalité des vies ordinaires est pourtant une conscience visionnaire, qui imagine le passé plus qu’elle ne s’en souvient. Pour que la vision de ce passé advienne dans l’expérience de l’écriture biographique qui se fonde sur l’anamnèse, un tel effacement est une première condition nécessaire, mais l’effort mémoriel lui-même ne cherche pas à retrouver le temps perdu, à exhumer ce qui, hors de l’écriture, demeurerait enfoui et mort (Hoffa, 1969, 283) ; l’effort consiste au contraire en une ressaisie de la perte, de l’expérience comme perte, car si la mémoire du biographe, qui porte témoignage de la jeune vie de son frère, détient une très grande quantité de vérité, l’opération d’écriture exige un tri, une discrimination parmi la foule des images qui ne pourront être exprimées. Il s’agit non seulement de collecter et remembrer des circonstances éparses et déjà perdues, mais aussi d’en sacrifier d’autres, par nécessité, et surtout de revivre la manière dont le « je » qui écrit en racontant la vie des autres (et c’est bien pour cela qu’il écrit) refait dans l’écriture l’expérience impossible de sa propre vie, préemptée par celle des autres, à commencer

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par celle de William. L’écriture en quelque sorte redouble la perte de la vie, d’une vie jamais réellement vécue : To recover anything like the full treasure of scattered, wasted circumstance was at the same time to live over the spent experience itself, so deep and rich and rare, with whatever sadder and sorer intensities, even with whatever poorer and thinner passages, after the manner of every one’s experience; and the effect of this in turn was to find discrimination among the parts of my subject again and again difficult – so inseparably and beautifully they seemed to hang together and the comprehensive case to decline mutilation or refuse to be treated otherwise than handsomely9. (1)

15 Car le passé dont la porte s’ouvre tout grand devant lui, ce monde qui se compose de lui-même avec sa grâce si particulière et qui devient l’objet de la commémoration aimante de celui qui entreprend de le peindre, est un passé partagé, un passé familial, clanique – celui d’un groupe dont les nombreux membres, pour être différents les uns des autres, forment néanmoins le sujet collectif de cette peinture dont chaque moment, chaque scène, chaque détail demande à être rendu. L’autobiographie est d’emblée, pour ainsi dire, une autobiographie de groupe et se décrit comme un travail d’amour et de loyauté : « a labour of love and loyalty » (1). L’entreprendre, c’est consentir à se perdre dans ce « nous », qui est en réalité la somme de « chacun de nous » (« each of us » [1]), la compilation des détails, des images et des scènes dont chaque fragment recèle la totalité du contenu de la mémoire et de l’affection. Or si celui qui écrit, Henry James Jr., se lance dans l’entreprise, c’est bien parce que lui seul sans doute possède en propre ce « trésor » de vérité où s’est conservée la somme des affects et des impressions. Mais ce « trésor » lui-même, qui assigne à ce sujet particulier au sein du groupe la tâche d’en écrire le passé, de lui redonner vie, ne s’est constitué que de la non-vie de ce même sujet. Pour le dire autrement, les qualités ou les dispositions qui l’ont rendu apte à l’écriture, qui font luire le souvenir dans sa plus vive intensité, sont les mêmes et les seules à travers lesquelles le sujet a fait l’expérience de la vie, comme si les faits de l’existence n’avaient jamais été perçus autrement que comme des visions, des tableaux ou des figures, comme si dans la rétrospection, les moments ou les actes accomplis ne différaient pas des moments ou des actes remémorés, comme si la vie vécue l’avait toujours déjà été sous la forme de la vie ressouvenue ou réinventée après-coup. To which I may add perhaps that I struggle under the drawback, innate and inbred, of seeing the whole content of memory and affection in each enacted and recovered moment, as who should say, in the vivid image and the very scene; the light of the only terms in which life has treated me to experience. And I cherish the moment and evoke the image and repaint the scene; though meanwhile indeed scarce able to convey how prevailingly and almost exclusively, during years and years, the field was animated and the adventure conditioned for me by my brother’s nearness and that play of genius in him of which I had never had a doubt from the first. (1-2)

16 La compétence mémorielle ou visionnaire, où puise l’écriture, est ainsi diagnostiquée comme un défaut originaire (« drawback »), le prisme obligé à travers lequel s’est déroulée l’expérience de la vie, c’est-à-dire de façon indirecte, sans prise immédiate sur la réalité et l’action, sans participation au champ de l’existence, déjà investi par le frère, ordonné à son génie précoce, qui est ici le génie de la vie. Si nous, lecteurs, pouvons établir un lien de causalité entre le déficit de vivre sa vie en première main, et la présence, la proximité, intrusive peut-être, du frère de génie, il ne nous échappe pas non plus que James, pour sa part, s’en abstient, se déclarant presque incapable de savoir par quel mystérieux hasard il n’a eu accès au champ de l’expérience que dans le sillage et l’ombre de son frère. Cette discrétion ou du moins cette réserve, où

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s’expriment ouvertement la déférence et la piété fraternelle envers l’aîné, ne sauraient peut-être tout à fait dissimuler le fait que la plénitude des dons de William James n’est pas, pour celui qui écrit et à l’heure où il écrit, forcément enviable. Peut-être au fond William est-il trop bien pourvu, trop généreusement loti. Et du reste, parmi les enfants du clan James, ceux que le « petit garçon » envie le plus sont ceux de ses nombreux cousins qui ont la chance d’être orphelins (Veeder, 1991, 21). En effet, la maladie et la mort frappent durement l’entourage familial et Henry, dotés de bons parents, et bientôt d’une grande fratrie, grandit au milieu d’une troupe d’enfants dont les parents sont morts et qui sont recueillis par la grand-mère ou les oncles et tantes survivants. Au nombre duquel cousinage, de plus, certains ou certaines sont eux-mêmes voués à une mort prématurée, comme la très admirée Minnie Temple qui servira de modèle à la Milly Theale de The Wings of the Dove. [Our] father’s family was to offer such a chronicle of early deaths, arrested careers, broken promises, orphaned children. It sounds cold-blooded, but part of the charm of our grandmother’s house for us – or I should perhaps but speak for myself – was in its being so much and so sociably a nurseried and playroomed orphanage. The children of her lost daughters and daughters-in-law overflowed there, mainly as girls; on whom the surviving sons-in-law and sons occasionally and most trustingly looked in. Parentally bereft cousins were somehow more thrilling than parentally provided ones […]. They spent scraps of holidays with us in Fourteenth Street, and I think my first childish conception of the enviable lot, formed amid these associations, was to be so little fathered or mothered, so little sunk in the short range, that the romance of life seemed to lie in some constant improvisation, by vague overhovering authorities, of new situations and horizons. (7)

17 Le prestige de l’orphelin, accru par la lecture précoce de David Copperfield et d’Oliver Twist, tient à ce qu’il est d’emblée un personnage de fiction, dont la vie, dégagée de la volonté parentale, se présente sous une forme encore indéterminée, s’annonce comme une suite d’improvisations, de scénarios non encore écrits, c’est-à-dire comme une romance. For the other house, the house we most haunted after our own, was that of our cousin Albert, still another of the blest orphans, though this time of our mother’s kindred; and if it was my habit, as I have hinted, to attribute to orphans as orphans a circumstantial charm, a setting necessarily more delightful than our father’d and mother’d one, so there spread about this appointed comrade, the perfection of the type, inasmuch as he alone was neither brother’d nor sister’d, an air of possibilities that were none the less vivid for being quite indefinite. (64)

18 Ce manque qui affecte l’orphelin à l’orée de son existence – et plus encore l’orphelin qui n’a ni frère ni sœur – recèle la promesse d’une vie plurielle, augmentée, non dans son actualisation ou son accomplissement, mais dans un avenir encore imaginaire, quasi littéraire ou fictionnel, des possibles qui s’ouvrent devant lui. Lorsqu’il commence cette autobiographie, James est bel et bien devenu l’orphelin qu’il n’a pas été enfant. Libre à lui, alors, de raconter sa vie et celles des autres comme des vies possibles, non pas celles révolues qui ont été vécues dans le passé mais celles que l’écriture seule peut encore imaginer futures.

« The wonder of consciousness in everything »

19 Retiré de la vie en raison d’une incapacité à participer à l’existence qui tient à la fois, et presque contradictoirement, de la tradition familiale et d’une sorte d’idiosyncrasie

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(puisque ses frères, eux, semblent posséder ce « talent pour la vie » qui lui fait défaut10), le « petit garçon » est du même coup entièrement disponible, affranchi de toute obligation ou contrainte, et libre d’examiner à loisir, avec un sens aigu de l’observation, ces vies vécues par d’autres, qui sont d’abord autant de signes de cette vie à laquelle lui- même n’a pas accès. Si le sujet autobiographique se pense (et se vit) comme étant privé d’une existence propre, et que la vie reste l’affaire des autres, s’offre du même coup à lui la possibilité d’examiner ces vies dans les scènes du quotidien, ou plutôt de les imaginer. Et l’on perçoit déjà comment l’exil forcé, d’abord envisagé comme la marque d’une faille intime, d’un manque à être constitutif, va peu à peu se modifier pour prendre la forme d’une retenue volontaire : la non-vie devient moins subie que choisie, et c’est précisément en cela que va consister la vie pour l’enfant et, plus tard, pour l’écrivain. De ce point de vue du reste, le retrait solipsiste hors du monde et loin d’autrui n’est que relatif, et le texte atteste au contraire chez le petit James un profond attrait pour ces « autres » que désigne le titre et dont la maison familiale ne désemplit pas. Mais c’est surtout dans les rues de la ville que le jeune Henry se fait le témoin de la vie, qu’il la contemple et l’enregistre ; c’est dans l’espace public qu’il cultive et accroît sa passivité innée pour en faire une qualité esthétique qui le différencie progressivement, et positivement cette fois, de ses camarades apprentis businessmen. Au contact d’un monde urbain débordant d’activité, qu’il soumet à son regard scrutateur mais duquel il reste en lisière, l’enfant nourrit sa capacité à se laisser émerveiller par tout ce qu’il voit, et développe son aptitude à se faire le réceptacle, plus exactement le support, d’innombrables « impressions », fussent-elles suscitées par les détails les plus insignifiants.

20 Cherchant, dans le premier chapitre, à exhumer sa toute première impression, la toute première « scène » de vie dont il ait conservé le souvenir, il remarque : The “first” […] glimmers at me there as out of a thin golden haze, with all the charm, for imagination and memory, of pressing pursuit rewarded, of distinctness in the dimness, of the flush of life in the grey, of the wonder of consciousness in everything; everything having naturally been all the while but the abject little matter of course. (2)

21 L’éclat de cette scène primitive, inaugurale, où la vie s’imagine et s’invente autant qu’elle est remémorée, comme le suggère l’attelage « for imagination and memory » (nous soulignons), tient moins à la nature de l’objet perçu qu’à l’intensité de la perception. Distinctement flou et remarquablement insipide, minuscule et « abject », l’objet du souvenir ne sera pas autrement identifié que sous les allures d’une atmosphère générale qui semble baigner la totalité du monde11. D’une certaine manière, le souvenir est total parce qu’il est infime, parce que, à travers la moindre perception, la moindre impression, et derrière le brouillard du temps passé, c’est la vie elle-même qui se présente, dans toute sa puissance et son excès. En ce sens, l’autobiographie est le récit de la venue du sujet à la conscience dans l’expérience constante de l’émerveillement. « The wonder was the experience », écrira même James plus loin (49) : à bien des égards, il n’y a d’expérience véritable, et d’existence authentique, que dans l’enchantement, et la vie elle-même n’est rien d’autre que la non-vie en tant qu’elle ouvre à cette possibilité infinie.

22 Parmi les très nombreuses scènes d’émerveillement que le texte donne à lire, celle qui clôt le chapitre 2 mérite que l’on s’y attarde, en raison notamment des réflexions qu’elle inspire à l’autobiographe qui s’efforce de ressaisir la singularité de sa condition d’antan, enfantine et émerveillée, celle qu’il aura continûment cherché à préserver une

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fois parvenu à l’âge adulte. Chez James, en effet, l’enfance est moins un moment dans la chrono-biographie d’un individu qu’une condition subjective (Pearson, 2007, 101-19), un état de fascination et d’ingénuité supposée qui, dans la fiction, caractérise souvent les personnages américains, d’Isabel Archer à Verena Tarrant, de Maisie à Strether, par opposition aux Européens, figures d’expérience et de duplicité. L’Amérique, depuis au moins Emerson, se rêve de fait en pays de l’enfance et de l’émerveillement innocent12. Elle s’offre aussi, dans l’imagination populaire, comme le territoire du possible, le lieu d’une liberté sans entraves et la patrie de l’individualisme. Autant de motifs que James reprend tandis qu’il s’emploie à raviver le souvenir de ses « flâneries » urbaines (en français dans le texte), qu’il assimile aux aventures contemplatives d’un esprit pérégrin (« the visiting mind » [13]), laissé libre de vagabonder, sans surveillance et avec la bénédiction parentale, au gré de ses déambulations dans les rues de New York, et plus tard de Londres, Paris et Genève. I see myself moreover as somehow always alone in these and like New York flâneries and contemplations, and feel how the sense of my being so, being at any rate master of my short steps, such as they were, through all the beguiling streets, was probably the very savour of each of my chance feasts. Which stirs in me at the same time some wonder at the liberty of range and opportunity of adventure allowed to my tender age […] I at any rate watch the small boy dawdle and gape again. I smell the cold dusty paint and iron as the rails of the Eighteenth Street corner rub his contemplative nose, and, feeling him foredoomed, withhold from him no grain of my sympathy. He is a convenient little image or warning of all that was to be for him, and he might well have been even happier than he was. For there was the very pattern and measure of all he was to demand: just to be somewhere – almost anywhere would do – and somehow receive an impression or an accession, feel a relation or a vibration. He was to go without many things, ever so many – as all persons do in whom contemplation takes so much the place of action; but everywhere, in the years that came soon after, and that in fact continued long, in the streets of great towns, in New York still for some time, and then for a while in London, in Paris, in Geneva, wherever it might be, he was to enjoy more than anything the so far from showy practice of wondering and dawdling and gaping: he was really, I think, much to profit by it. What it at all appreciably gave him – that is gave him in producible form – would be difficult to state; but it seems to him, as he even now thus indulges himself, an education like another: feeling, as he has come to do more and more, that no education avails for the intelligence that doesn’t stir in it some subjective passion, and that on the other hand almost anything that does so act is largely educative, however small a figure the process might make in a scheme of training. (13-14)

23 Malgré la sympathie rétrospective de l’autobiographe pour sa condition d’exilé, le souvenir opère une dissociation entre l’écrivain parvenu au terme de son existence et le petit garçon qui se tient encore au seuil de la vie et dont James parle à la troisième personne13. Mais cette séparation de soi à soi n’est finalement qu’une manière de renouer le fil de la vie et d’assurer la continuité de l’existence, dans la mesure où l’émerveillement que l’enfant éprouve naturellement au contact des rambardes de la 18ème Rue est précisément ce dont l’écrivain aura fait sa profession : « the so far from showy practice of wondering and dawdling and gaping ». Peu spectaculaire, à l’instar des qualités dont l’enfant est pourvu et qui semblent le rendre moins apte que les autres à la vie, la « pratique de l’étonnement » tient néanmoins lieu d’éducation, en révélant que l’ordinaire est déjà, en lui-même, un spectacle, ce que lui seul est en mesure de percevoir. Tout ou presque fait spectacle et s’ordonne autour de la conscience enfantine qui, où qu’elle se trouve, devient le lieu géométrique d’un réseau

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d’impressions reliées les unes aux autres dans un mouvement d’expansion virtuellement infini. C’est en cela que l’enfance aura préparé à l’âge adulte et que l’on peut, dans l’après coup, voir cette vie prendre la forme d’un destin d’artiste qui viendra rédimer la fatalité de la non-participation du sujet à la vie, la malédiction d’une existence dont James martèle à l’envi qu’elle aura été marquée du sceau du manque et de l’échec : il lui aura suffi de reconnaître et de cultiver cette « passion subjective » qui, se substituant chez lui aux jeux auxquels s’adonnent les garçons de son âge, fait de la passivité une forme d’action14. Et il est remarquable de constater que les moments où les impressions reçues sont au comble de leur intensité coïncident souvent, dans Small Boy, avec des phases de maladie (notamment des accès de malaria, sans doute contractée à Staten Island, mais dont les premières crises ont lieu alors que la famille est déjà arrivée en Europe), comme si l’interdiction ou l’impossibilité de pratiquer quelque activité physique que ce soit était finalement la condition idéale de la perception. Il en va ainsi lors du voyage qui emmène la famille de Lyon à Genève, et que les poussées de fièvre de Henry ralentissent considérablement ; il se revoit alité, calé entre deux coussins, le nez à la fenêtre de la voiture, enivré par le nectar des visions, odeurs et sensations qu’il absorbe : « in my absurdly cushioned state, I took in, as I have hinted, by a long slow swig that testified to some power of elbow, a larger draught of the wine of perception than any I had ever before owed to a single throb of that faculty » (147)15.

24 Dans un premier temps, toutefois, les impressions qu’enregistre la conscience quasi vierge de l’enfant lui demeurent largement inintelligibles. En héritier de la tradition romantique américaine, le « petit garçon » est à la fois le témoin par excellence de la vie et le sujet d’une innocence ignorante (Tanner, 1965, 11-12), et le texte ne cesse de prendre la mesure de l’écart entre le flot ininterrompu des perceptions auxquelles il est « exposé » et sa capacité limitée à les comprendre. Cet écart est d’autant plus grand que, comme Maisie, le petit James voit bien des choses qu’il n’est pas censé voir. Témoin de scènes troubles, voire scabreuses, dont le sens lui échappe en bonne part, l’enfant est ainsi doublement exposé : si l’ouverture à toutes les impressions, quelles qu’elles soient, permet l’expansion progressive de la conscience, celle-ci est simultanément obscurcie par ce qui vient s’y inscrire, car la nature de certaines perceptions entre en contradiction avec l’idéal de l’enfance comme condition d’innocence et de pureté morale. Le développement de la conscience au sens de l’anglais consciousness, dégagée de l’autorité parentale et livrée à elle-même, susceptible de porter son regard où bon lui semble, entraîne presque mécaniquement l’adultération de la conscience morale au sens de conscience. Le mouvement d’exposition comporte donc une part irréductible d’ombre et de violence qui va de pair avec la position de spectateur dans laquelle est placé le petit garçon, qui fait involontairement de lui un voyeur, involontaire certes, mais aussi complaisant ou complice, car l’exposition, pour violente qu’elle soit, n’est pas sans plaisir. C’est le cas d’une scène particulièrement saisissante, qui suit immédiatement l’un des passages les plus connus de Small Boy où James évoque, nous y reviendrons, le daguerréotype qui le représente posant avec son père et qui sert de frontispice à la première édition de l’ouvrage. Alors qu’il cherche à se remémorer les circonstances qui ont conduit à cette auguste séance de pose, remonte en lui le souvenir de ses visites dans une boutique singulière, tenue par une certaine Mrs. Cannon : The day of the daguerreotype, the August afternoon, what was it if not one of the days when we went to Union Square for luncheon and for more ice-cream and more

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peaches and even more, even most, enjoyment of ease accompanied by stimulation of wonder? It may have been indeed that a visit to Mrs. Cannon rather on that occasion engaged us – memory selects a little confusedly from such a wealth of experience. For the wonder was the experience, and that was everywhere, even if I didn’t so much find it as take it with me, to be sure of not falling short. Mrs. Cannon lurked near Fourth Street – that I abundantly grasp, not more definitely placing her than in what seemed to me a labyrinth of grave bye-streets westwardly “back” of Broadway, yet at no great distance from it, where she must have occupied a house at a corner, since we reached her not by steps that went up to a front door but by others that went slightly down and formed clearly an independent side access, a feature that affected me as rich and strange. (49)

25 Si le début du passage insiste sur l’ouverture totale de la conscience et son débordement – le petit garçon est déjà au bord de l’indigestion, de pêches et de glaces comme de perceptions –, la suite du texte restreint la focale, tandis que James décrit son parcours dans le labyrinthe des ruelles en retrait de Broadway où, tapie dans l’ombre, se trouve l’étrange boutique de Mrs. Cannon, dans laquelle on pénètre par une porte de côté. Le mystère s’épaissit lorsque, une fois à l’intérieur, il apparaît que le lieu tient à la fois du salon et de la boutique, et surtout qu’il est destiné à « soulager les messieurs » en manque d’accessoires pour hommes : mouchoirs, cravates, parapluies et eau de Cologne, un mot qui, déformé par sa prononciation américaine, en vient à s’écrire et se dire d’une drôle de manière : « “Cullone”—with a very long and big O », précise James (49). Résumons-nous : un magasin discret, presque clandestin et réservé aux hommes, une propriétaire au patronyme manifestement phallique, une bouteille de parfum dont le nom comporte sans doute un jeu de mots translinguistique scabreux et dont la graphie est elle-même fort suggestive, il n’en faut guère plus au lecteur pour comprendre qu’il se trouve dans un cloaque que tient une « Madame » appelée Cannon et que le père et les oncles du jeune Henry – « the ever remarkable Uncles » (50) – fréquentent assidûment (Nielsen, 1994, 190-198 ; Habegger, 1991, 817). Le petit garçon, lui, continue d’aller de surprise en surprise, car il comprend essentiellement qu’il ne comprend rien, contrairement aux nombreux initiés qui l’entourent. Il finit cependant par percevoir que le salon dissimule la boutique, qui elle-même dissimule des « appartements meublés pour gentlemen », et ce, au terme de visites répétées qui lui procurent une satisfaction que, par contraste, il ne dissimule en rien. Mais le plus grand attrait, le « charme de la scène », tient précisément à la persistance d’une part de mystère et à sa prise de conscience qu’à lui, le petit garçon, bien des choses continuent d’échapper, alors même que la communauté des adultes possède le secret en partage : If I didn’t understand, however, the beauty was that Mrs. Cannon understood (that was what she did most of all, even more than hem pockethandkerchiefs and collars) and my father understood, and each understood that the other did, Miss Maggie and Miss Susie being no whit behind. It was only I who didn’t understand – save in so far as I understood that, which was a kind of pale joy […]. (50)

26 L’exposition à la prostitution, au commerce de la chair, est largement imposée par les oncles, voire par son propre père, qui emmènent le petit garçon avec eux lors de leurs escapades. Le voyeurisme auquel il est d’une certaine manière contraint met forcément à mal son « innocence », mais elle est également chez lui à l’origine d’un plaisir évident, rendu plus vif encore par l’opération de remémoration au cours de laquelle le vieil écrivain jouit de sa double position de spectateur, à la fois expérimenté et innocent, et se délecte de son savoir du non-savoir désormais révolu.

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27 Malgré les risques que comporte l’exposition de la conscience enfantine aux turpitudes des adultes, le plaisir et la « valeur16 » qu’elle procure, c’est-à-dire quelque chose comme un bénéfice net, finissent par l’emporter, car il s’agit bien de contempler le théâtre du monde, de quitter l’intimité de la sphère privée pour se confronter à toutes les impressions que peut offrir la scène publique. Vivre consiste alors à ouvrir la focale de la conscience et l’exposer, telle une plaque photographique, à la lumière kaléidoscopique du monde pour que celle-ci vienne s’y imprimer. New York, et plus généralement les grandes capitales dans lesquelles la famille James séjourne au cours de ses tribulations européennes, sont le lieu idoine puisqu’elles sont toutes marquées, façonnées, par la modernité technologique, mais aussi la publicité, l’art et le théâtre (Goble, 2004, 366). New York et l’Europe, c’est la société de l’image et du spectacle, contrairement au reste des États-Unis, et surtout Albany, frappés d’un irrémédiable provincialisme. Ainsi James évoque-t-il, fasciné, les « vibrations » que suscitent en lui la vue des « écrans » publicitaires annonçant les spectacles du jour le long de la 5ème Avenue (53). Il consacre également de nombreuses pages au récit de soirées passées au théâtre, pour lequel il conçoit une authentique passion qui ne se démentira jamais, malgré l’échec cuisant que rencontreront ses pièces. L’arrivée en Europe, et plus particulièrement à Paris, change cependant la donne, car la famille cesse presque complètement d’aller au spectacle. James s’en explique en suggérant d’une part que le théâtre français s’accorde mal à l’innocence de l’esprit américain et en affirmant d’autre part, et c’est bien l’essentiel ici, que la vie parisienne était en elle-même plus théâtrale que celle de Londres ou de New York : « life in general all round us, was perceptibly more theatrical » (185). Il n’y a finalement pas de meilleur spectacle que celui de la vie elle-même, de sorte que la fréquentation des théâtres n’aura été qu’une étape propédeutique, nécessaire mais insuffisante, pour se préparer à accéder à la scène de l’existence.

28 James délaisse alors le statut de simple spectateur, assis comme les autres dans la salle, pour se faire, non pas l’acteur de sa vie, mais son auteur, et Small Boy atteint l’un de ses sommets lorsque le petit garçon est le témoin du caprice inattendu de sa cousine, Marie Temple, à qui sa mère ordonne de « ne pas faire de scène ». “Come now, my dear; don’t make a scene – I insist on your not making a scene!” That was all the witchcraft the occasion used, but the note was none the less epoch- making. The expression, so vivid, so portentous, was one I had never heard – it had never been addressed to us at home; and who should say now what a world one mightn’t at once read into it? It seemed freighted to sail so far; it told me so much about life. Life at these intensities clearly became “scenes”; but the great thing, the immense illumination, was that we could make them or not as we chose. […] It didn’t in the least matter accordingly whether or no a scene was then proceeded to – and I have lost all count of what immediately happened. The mark had been made for me and the door flung open; the passage, gathering up all the elements of the troubled time, had been itself a scene, quite enough of one, and I had become aware with it of a rich accession of possibilities. (96-97)

29 Tout le passage pivote autour du double sens de l’expression « faire une scène », qui renvoie d’abord, et de manière très évidente, à l’humeur changeante et capricieuse de la cousine. Mais l’on sait combien les enfants James ont appris à se méfier de l’évident, du simple et du littéral, de sorte que c’est très vite dans un autre sens, paradoxalement encore plus littéral que le premier, que Henry entend l’expression qui a sur lui l’effet d’une formule magique. Non seulement il prend conscience que la vie est faite d’une succession ininterrompue de « scènes », c’est-à-dire qu’elle est d’essence dramatique ou

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théâtrale, mais il comprend surtout que vivre consiste à pouvoir choisir de « faire » (ou pas) de telles « scènes », d’en fabriquer, d’en créer, d’en produire – comme il le dira au chapitre 19 : « I composed, in scenes […]. My face was turned from the first to the idea of representation » (136-37). La vie est donc la succession des scènes que se donne la conscience et devient du même coup l’œuvre du sujet, si bien que l’exposition au monde doit se comprendre, non pas comme l’accumulation des données de l’existence dans la psyché, mais bien plutôt comme une projection de la conscience : loin d’être un réceptacle où viendraient s’entasser la somme des impressions, un réservoir qui se creuserait sous la forme d’une intériorité psychologique, celle-ci est au contraire vouée à se porter au dehors d’elle-même et, dans ce mouvement d’extériorisation, à offrir son intimité, à « s’extimer17 », au regard de tous.

30 Vivre revient par conséquent à faire œuvre et, partant, à accéder à la richesse infinie des possibles (« a rich accession of possibilities »). À gloser ainsi librement la formule sur laquelle se clôt cette « archi-scène », on perçoit que les scènes de l’existence constituent bel et bien un trésor qu’il s’agit d’amasser. La capacité à « faire des scènes », à être l’auteur de sa vie, de la vie, assure une série de bénéfices qui sont autrement plus profitables que ceux que peut rapporter le monde des affaires, et l’on ne peut manquer d’être frappé, à la lecture du texte, par la prolifération du lexique économique appliqué à ce savoir-faire scénique ou dramatique, l’écriture autobiographique ayant dès lors pour fonction et pour effet de transfigurer l’échec initial, de convertir en gain la perte originelle : « my having mastered the particular history of just that waste – to the point of its actually affecting me as blooming with interest » (113). De ce point de vue, James se révèle fidèle aux injonctions paternelles qui tiennent en un mot, inlassablement répété : « Convert, convert, convert ! » (111) Cette idée de conversion, Henry James Sr. l’hérite de Swedenborg, grand théoricien des « correspondances » entre les mondes matériel et spirituel, mais aussi d’Emerson, pour qui la vie est régie par le principe de la « compensation » qui permet à tout instant la transformation du négatif en positif, la conversion du manque en profit. Pourtant, et James se situe là encore dans la lignée de son père, cette « conversion » n’est pas décrite, ni vécue, comme un « succès ». Son mouvement et sa conclusion sont même complètement détachés de toute idée de succès ou d’insuccès, comme si sa valeur, ou plutôt sa « vertu », comme il l’écrira plus loin, échappait à l’ordre du mesurable ou du quantifiable. I taste again in that pure air no ghost of a hint, for instance, that the precious metal was the refined gold of “success” – a reward of effort for which I remember to have heard at home no good word, nor any sort of word, ever faintly breathed. […] We were to convert and convert, success – in the sense that was in the general air – or no success […]. (111-12)

31 Il est cependant bien question d’escompter une récompense (« reward ») pour les efforts consentis, et le simple fait de dissocier l’entreprise de conversion de son éventuelle valeur contribue à la rendre incommensurable, c’est-à-dire au fond inestimable (Holly, 1995, 74-104 ; Posnock, 1991, 179-81). Si Small Boy est une success story, qui rivalise de fait avec celle de William, le frère comme le grand-père, c’est donc encore et toujours en suivant la loi de la contradiction tant cultivée par Henry Sr., car il s’agit pour James de porter à son terme « la grande aventure négative », (« a great negative adventure ») pour citer la formule qu’il emploie dans sa préface à The Beast in the Jungle (James, 1984b, 1251), de pousser à son comble le travail de perte (« the strange process of waste » [5]) qui se tient au principe de l’imagination et lui donne tout son pouvoir. Si vivre

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équivaut à convertir, l’opération de conversion assure une perte encore plus grande qui garantit le succès de l’écrivain, la réussite de l’écriture. Comme l’écrivait déjà Emerson dans « Circles » (1841), « The way of life is wonderful: it is by abandonment » (Emerson, 1983, 414). Vivre, c’est perdre et se perdre dans ce mouvement d’abandon, que James nomme ailleurs « self-abandonment […] to visions » (92), ce qui implique que la vie ne relève finalement du régime de l’œuvre que dans une forme de désœuvrement.

« The romance of life »

32 Sans le savoir – mais l’autobiographe, lui, le sait –, l’enfant est donc déjà une figure de l’artiste qui, quoique sur un mode paradoxal, vit sa vie comme une œuvre, et même comme une œuvre littéraire, ce qui explique en partie la relation ambivalente que le texte entretient avec l’autre grande modalité de l’art que James évoque, à savoir la peinture. Il y va plus largement dans Small Boy, comme du reste dans les textes de fiction, d’une tension entre littérature et peinture, les « arts sœurs », dont le conflit répète celui qui oppose souterrainement les deux frères, Henry et William. Il serait peut-être plus juste de dire qu’il s’agit d’« arts frères », tant il est vrai que, dans « The Art of Fiction », James envisage à plusieurs reprises le rapport du peintre et de l’écrivain comme une relation fraternelle (James, 1984a, 50, 53). Or William apparaît justement dans Small Boy, au chapitre 19, sous les traits du peintre et sa virtuosité technique, sa capacité à faire des images, sont la preuve d’un talent bien supérieur à celui que possède son frère en la matière (135-38). C’est notamment ce sentiment d’infériorité qui le conduira à faire le choix de la littérature comme son mode esthétique de prédilection18. Si son attrait pour la peinture, les arts visuels et les images est évident, comme le montrera plus tard l’importance de sa première visite au Louvre, le passage à la pratique est vécu comme une expérience douloureuse qui justifie, en bonne part, sinon le triomphe de la littérature, du moins une forme de « refus du pictural19 », voire de l’image. Refus assez surprenant chez un écrivain qui revendique si souvent une affinité, et une même consanguinité, entre littérature et peinture. Mais le paradoxe est d’autant plus grand que le choix de la littérature n’a en réalité rien d’évident pour James. En effet, l’un des premiers romans auxquels il est confronté, enfant, lui révèle au contraire son inadéquation pour ce médium artistique. Publié en 1854 après être paru en feuilleton dans le New York Tribune l’année précédente, le livre s’intitule Hot Corn et raconte l’histoire d’une jeune actrice américaine sans doute contrainte de se prostituer pour subsister. Son contenu licencieux est d’emblée jugé inadapté au jeune enfant par la communauté des adultes qui se prétend chargée de préserver son innocence, mais au sein de laquelle l’ouvrage circule pour la plus grande satisfaction de ses nombreux lecteurs. Le principe est le même que pour la scène chez Mrs. Cannon (Nielsen, 1994, 197), à ceci près que Hot Corn est l’un des rares objets auxquels l’enfant ne sera pas exposé. Étrangement toutefois, il renverse le rapport qui le relie à l’ouvrage interdit et finit par concevoir avec amertume que ce n’est pas tant le livre qui ne lui convient pas que lui-même qui, d’une manière ou d’une autre, serait impropre à la littérature : The volume, I think, was put into my father’s hand, and I recall my prompt desire to make acquaintance with it no less than the remark, as promptly addressed to my companion, that the work, however engaging, was not one that should be left accessible to an innocent child. The pang occasioned by this warning has scarcely yet died out for me, nor my sense of my first wonder at the discrimination – so

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great became from that moment the mystery of the tabooed book, of whatever identity; the question, in my breast, of why, if it was to be so right for others, it was only to be wrong for me. I remember the soreness of the thought that it was I rather who was wrong for the book – which was somehow humiliating: in that amount of discredit one couldn’t but be involved. (40)

33 Il est cependant une autre façon de rendre compte de la suspicion envers l’image qui n’est pas sans rapport avec le projet autobiographique, au sens d’un effort pour reconstituer la vie dans sa continuité linéaire qui aboutirait à un portrait unifié du sujet. Ce mode autobiographique et le désir de maîtrise de soi qu’il révèle sont nettement perceptibles à la lecture de Small Boy, où les scènes de l’existence s’enchaînent apparemment sans le moindre accroc et avec la plus grande fluidité et où James s’emploie à mettre en lumière l’origine de sa vocation d’écrivain. Cette conception de l’écriture de la vie entre néanmoins en tension avec un second régime autobiographique, plus fragmentaire et discontinu, qui vient contrarier la visée unifiante du premier et laisse apparaître l’altérité constitutive du sujet. Dans cette perspective, la conjonction « and » présente dans le titre (A Small Boy and Others) pourrait presque s’entendre comme la marque d’une équivalence : le « petit garçon », c’est « les autres ». Or la contemplation de sa propre image constitue précisément pour James une expérience de lui-même comme un autre. Et cette image n’est pas celle qui se forme peu à peu au fil de l’écriture, mais un artefact qui relève d’une autre pratique que la littérature : il s’agit du daguerréotype, réalisé en 1854 – l’année où paraît Hot Corn –, qui le représente en compagnie de son père et qui est l’occasion de l’une des scènes les plus célèbres de l’ouvrage, où se rassemblent plusieurs motifs que nous avons esquissés jusqu’ici20. Sharp again is my sense of not being so adequately dressed as I should have taken thought for had I foreseen my exposure; though the resources of my wardrobe as then constituted could surely have left me but few alternatives. The main resource of a small New York boy in this line at that time was the little sheath-like jacket, tight to the body, closed at the neck and adorned in front with a single row of brass buttons – a garment of scant grace assuredly and compromised to my consciousness, above all, by a strange ironic light from an unforgotten source. It was but a short time before those days that the great Mr. Thackeray had come to America to lecture on The English Humourists, and still present to me is the voice proceeding from my father’s library, in which some glimpse of me hovering, at an opening of the door, in passage or on staircase, prompted him to the formidable words: “Come here, little boy, and show me your extraordinary jacket!” My sense of my jacket became from that hour a heavy one – further enriched as my vision is by my shyness of posture before the seated, the celebrated visitor, who struck me, in the sunny light of the animated room, as enormously big and who, though he laid on my shoulder the hand of benevolence, bent on my native costume the spectacles of wonder. I was to know later on why he had been so aroused and why, after asking me if this were the common uniform of my age and class, he remarked that in England, were I to go there, I should be addressed as “Buttons.” It had been revealed to me thus in a flash that we were somehow queer, and though never exactly crushed by it I became aware that I at least felt so as I stood with my head in Mr. Brady’s vise. (46)

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Henry James, Sr., and Henry James, daguerreotype par Mathew Brady (1854) MS Am 1092.9 (4597.6) Houghton Library, Harvard University

34 Alors que dans les épisodes de maladie, l’affaiblissement du corps permet à la conscience de se déployer, lors de l’exposition photographique la conscience de soi dans son enveloppe corporelle et vestimentaire entraîne à l’inverse un sentiment de constriction et un vacillement du rapport de soi à un soi qui est ici doublement médiatisé : par la technique du daguerréotype d’une part, qui nécessite un temps très long d’« exposition », et d’autre part du fait que la scène convoque le souvenir encore frais d’un jour où, vêtu de la même veste ornée de boutons, l’enfant a fait l’objet de remarques taquines et coquines du grand Thackeray venu rendre visite à Henry Sr. Ces quolibets de la part du « maître » (48) anglais produisent chez l’enfant une révélation, une épiphanie de lui-même comme « étrange » (queer), d’une étrangeté liée à la fois à son américanité et à sa tenue de petit New-Yorkais, son « costume natif » (« native costume ») qui suggère qu’il est vêtu comme un sauvage, et qui lui vaudrait le sobriquet de « Buttons » s’il devait aller en Angleterre. L’enfant ne peut pas saisir tout ce que charrie ce mot et ignore vraisemblablement qu’il désigne un domestique portant livrée dont Thackeray a baptisé un de ses personnages, un jeune page, dans A Little Dinner at Timmins’s (1848). Il ne peut pas non plus connaître le sens anatomique du terme, pour ne rien dire des sens argotiques que recouvre cette acception. Il n’en ressent pas moins la condescendance de l’Européen, la morgue sociale et nationale que suscite en l’humoriste anglais l’accoutrement insolite de sa petite personne ainsi que tout le code vestimentaire familial qui trahit, aux yeux du Britannique, une sorte de provincialisme ou d’arriération sociale dont l’exotisme n’est pas dénué d’un sulfureux attrait (« our perversities of dress »). On remarquera, dans le passage, la main de l’écrivain qui se pose sur l’épaule du petit garçon comme plus tard elle se posera sur les frous-frous de la robe d’Alice James (« so young and so depraved » [47]). De cette même main il sera précisé

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à la fin du chapitre que, dans un sens figuré, elle a façonné un jeune peintre, protégé de Thackeray, dont le seul mérite aura été d’être l’un des nombreux « succès » du maître victorien.

35 Le moment photographique est une triple épiphanie avec trois retournements dramatiques dans la conscience de soi (Saltz, 2004, 263-65). Le premier temps est celui du plaisir de la complicité avec le père qui l’emmène se faire daguerréotyper avec lui (c’est Henry sur le cliché qui pose sa main sur l’épaule paternelle). Le deuxième temps (qui lui coïncide) est celui où cette assurance vacille sous le regard un tantinet méprisant de l’écrivain anglais, et le dernier, celui-ci propre au temps de l’écriture, où celui qui se fait désormais appelé le « Maître » se dégage de l’emprise de son aîné anglais pour réaffirmer ses origines américaines si manifestement affichées sur la photographie. Cette « américanité » n’est pas un caractère national, comme pourrait l’être par exemple l’humour anglais, mais elle est ici synonyme d’étrangeté, de singularité, de queerness, dit le texte. Le sentiment de non-coïncidence à soi, révélé par l’inadéquation vestimentaire, est l’un de ces infimes tremblements de la conscience, l’une de ces fissures ou failles où s’ouvre l’espace de l’écriture. Sur le cliché lui-même, l’empilement de ces révélations demeure invisible. Seul le récit permet de rendre à nouveau leur mouvement et leur friction, dans lesquels le soi s’éprouve fluctuant.

36 Ce sont donc dans ces dédoublements de la conscience que l’autobiographie retrace la source de la pulsion d’écriture. L’une de ces scènes – l’un des points d’orgue du livre –, où s’inscrit de nouveau le rapport au visuel, est le récit d’un cauchemar qui fait suite au souvenir de la toute première visite des deux frères au musée du Louvre en juillet 1855. Aboutés dans la narration, les deux épisodes ne sont cependant pas contemporains, car le rêve est postérieur de plusieurs années. Le lieu en revanche, la Galerie d’Apollon, est commun, de même que la présence de deux personnages en plus de Henry, William James dans l’enfance et un « visiteur » fantôme, une « figure », dans le rêve. Dans le souvenir déjà, cette visite à travers la Galerie, sur « les parquets luisants » du musée, est présentée comme une « initiation » au secret du « Style », et s’accompagne du sentiment glorieux et jubilatoire d’appartenir à la grande histoire (en l’occurrence celle du Second Empire), et de jouir par là de la renommée et de la puissance que confère cette appartenance : [My] impression originally best entertained was that of those magnificent parts of the great gallery […]. They only arched over us in the wonder of their endless golden riot and relief, figured and flourished in perpetual revolution, breaking into great high-hung circles and symmetries of squandered picture […]. This comes to saying that in those beginnings I felt myself most happily cross that bridge over to Style constituted by the wondrous Galerie d’Apollon, drawn out for me as a long but assured initiation and seeming to form with its supreme coved ceiling and inordinately shining parquet a prodigious tube or tunnel through which I inhaled little by little, that is again and again, a general sense of glory. (180)

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Galerie d'Appolo, construite par Louis Le Vau (1612-1670). Le décor, conçu par Charles Le Brun en 1661-1663, restera inachevé. La décoration se poursuit au 18e siècle, et se termine en 1861 avec les tapisseries des Gobelins. Aile Denon, premier étage. Département des Objets d'art. Paris, musée du Louvre Photo (C) Musée du Louvre, Dist. RMN-Grand Palais / Franck Bohbot

37 Le lexique, de façon à peine voilée, suggère combien l’initiation au style, l’entrée dans le royaume de l’art, s’apparente à l’accomplissement d’un fantasme qui est aussi d’ordre érotique (Moon, 1998, 44-46) : telles les « parties magnifiques » d’un corps hermaphrodite, le « tunnel » ou « tube » prodigieux de la Galerie s’offre au petit garçon qui y pénètre autant qu’il l’aspire et se l’incorpore. La confusion des genres, au sens de l’anglais gender, qui s’opère ici, et que relaye le spectacle des nus masculins qui ornent les murs et le plafond de la Galerie, en particulier ceux de Delacroix, confirme que le désir esthétique qui emporte et transporte le jeune visiteur relève d’une logique homo- érotique, dont James ne manque pas de noter le trouble qu’elle suscite pour l’enfant qu’il était alors21. Or, ce « trouble dans le genre » paraît déborder les limites de la conscience individuelle pour s’étendre, par-delà les couloirs du musée, à la sphère publique et venir potentiellement y générer des perturbations d’un autre ordre, politique cette fois, ainsi que le laissent entendre les discrètes connotations insurrectionnelles et révolutionnaires qui s’ajoutent à la description des merveilleuses « parties » de la Galerie (« endless […] riot; perpetual revolution »). Si l’épreuve initiatique que constitue la visite au musée est l’occasion d’une découverte des beautés de la forme et de l’harmonie de la « symétrie », que reflète la parfaite régularité allitérative de la prose éminemment poétique du James « dernière manière » (« riot and relief », « figured and flourished », « tube or tunnel »), elle est simultanément à l’origine d’un vacillement de la conscience qui ébranle jusqu’à l’identification au pouvoir impérial que cette même visite avait fait naître chez le petit garçon, révélant toute la puissance de déstabilisation que recèle ce désir esthétique auquel il est pour la première fois

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confronté et qui lui apparaît « nouveau », « étrange » et « peut-être illicite », à l’instar de Hot Corn, mais aussi du Second Empire français auquel il s’était si volontiers associé, lui l’exilé américain (« the Second Empire, which was (for my notified consciousness) new and queer and perhaps even wrong » [181]).

38 Dans le cauchemar, dont on ne connaît pas la date, même si l’on peut supposer qu’alors James a déjà fait son entrée sur la scène littéraire, il est bien question de la même initiation au style, mais elle prend cette fois les allures d’un rite de passage qui requiert un combat terrifiant avec une figure qui se donne à lire comme un autre soi-même, une part enfouie de la psyché collective ou familiale – sinon une figuration de William (le frère, mais aussi le grand-père) –, celle qui peut-être s’opposerait au « Style », compris comme un trope à la fois emphatique et succinct de la création artistique, voire de la vocation de l’écrivain22. The Galerie d’Apollon became for years what I can only term a splendid scene of things, even of the quite irrelevant or, as might be, almost unworthy; and I recall to this hour, with the last vividness, what a precious part it played for me, and exactly by that continuity of honour, on my awaking, in a summer dawn many years later, to the fortunate, the instantaneous recovery and capture of the most appalling yet most admirable nightmare of my life. The climax of this extraordinary experience – which stands alone for me as a dream-adventure founded in the deepest, quickest, clearest act of cogitation and comparison, act indeed of life-saving energy, as well as in unutterable fear – was the sudden pursuit, through an open door, along a huge high saloon, of a just dimly-descried figure that retreated in terror before my rush and dash (a glare of inspired reaction from irresistible but shameful dread,) out of the room I had a moment before been desperately, and all the more abjectly, defending by the push of my shoulder against hard pressure on lock and bar from the other side. The lucidity, not to say the sublimity, of the crisis had consisted of the great thought that I, in my appalled state, was probably still more appalling than the awful agent, creature or presence, whatever he was, whom I had guessed, in the suddenest wild start from sleep, the sleep within my sleep, to be making for my place of rest. The triumph of my impulse, perceived in a flash as I acted on it by myself at a bound, forcing the door outward, was the grand thing, but the great point of the whole was the wonder of my final recognition. Routed, dismayed, the tables turned upon him by my so surpassing him for straight aggression and dire intention, my visitant was already but a diminished spot in the long perspective, the tremendous, glorious hall, as I say, over the far-gleaming floor of which, cleared for the occasion of its great line of priceless vitrines down the middle, he sped for his life, while a great storm of thunder and lightning played through the deep embrasures of high windows at the right. The lightning that revealed the retreat revealed also the wondrous place and, by the same amazing play, my young imaginative life in it of long before, the sense of which, deep within me, had kept it whole, preserved it to this thrilling use; for what in the world were the deep embrasures and the so polished floor but those of the Galerie d’Apollon of my childhood? The “scene of something” I had vaguely then felt it? Well I might, since it was to be the scene of that immense hallucination. (181-82)

39 Corps à corps effrayant où la vie du sujet et son intégrité physique sont menacées par cet autre qui s’approche pour l’agresser dans son sommeil. Mû par l’énergie du désespoir (« life-saving energy »), le rêveur se lance à la poursuite du fantôme qu’il entreprend de terrifier à son tour. Comme dans « The Jolly Corner » publié quelques années auparavant en 1908, la peur change de camp dans une crise où la conscience du dormeur est décrite comme hyper-lucide et portée à sa propre limite (Derail-Imbert, 2010) : conscience soudaine que sa propre peur, retournée comme en miroir contre l’agent de cette peur, projette une image médusante qui met le spectre en fuite et le

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contraint à déguerpir pour se sauver (« he sped for his life » – c’est James qui souligne). L’épouvante initiale est sublimée dans ce renversement, et conduit le sujet du rêve à se voir comme terrorisant l’autre, cette part terrifiante de lui-même, par où s’opère un nouveau dédoublement. Or, la scène se mire dans le lieu où elle se déroule, bien que le texte n’en dise rien, puisque le plafond de la Galerie représente un autre combat : « Apollon vainqueur du serpent Python », peint entre 1850 et 1851 par Delacroix, sur qui James écrira dans les années 1880 et qui est alors, pour lui, le grand représentant de ce qu’il appelle l’École française.

Apollon vainqueur du serpent Python. Plafond de la Galerie d'Apollon : compartiment central. Programme de Charles Le Brun en 1663-1674, resté inachevé. Exécuté lors de la restauration par Duban. Figures des Heures en stuc Delacroix Eugène (1798-1863) Le Brun Charles (1619-1690) (d'après) Paris, musée du Louvre Photo (C) RMN-Grand Palais (musée du Louvre) / Gérard Blot

40 Dans le tableau, le dieu de la lumière, de la Forme, et donc du Style, triomphe des forces obscures et abjectes, figurées par le serpent, dans lesquelles André Green identifie « la désorganisation de la conscience par l’envahissement des pulsions sexuelles et agressives » (Green, 2009, 92) : l’inconscient est à présent ordonné à la sphère sublime de l’art. Dans le récit, l’image (le tableau de Delacroix) est passée sous silence, mais en dépit de cette forclusion, elle se maintient sous la forme – non pas allégorique, mais tropologique – d’un tour spéculaire où se représente l’origine de l’écriture. Escamotée du récit, la victoire d’Apollon reste perceptible dans le travail du signifiant à l’œuvre dans la scène, où son nom rappelle d’abord, pour une oreille française, la lignée des Bonaparte, de « Napoléon » Ier, qui avait entrepris de faire du Louvre un musée à la gloire de ses conquêtes impériales, à « Napoléon » III, à qui l’on doit la rénovation de la Galerie. Mais il s’entend également dans l’adjectif « appalling », deux fois répété (« the

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most appalling yet most admirable nightmare of my life; more appalling than the awful agent »), et renvoie de surcroît au monstre « Apollyon », « l’ange de l’abîme » (Apoc. 9, 11) que finit par mettre en déroute le personnage de Christian dans le Pilgrim’s Progress de Bunyan, comme pour mieux asseoir la place du rêveur au panthéon de la littérature (Moon, 1998, 49-50). Si l’image disparaît en tant qu’image, elle demeure néanmoins en filigrane dans les traces scripturales et spectrales que laisse le signifiant à mesure qu’il se dissémine dans le texte et en compose la trame, qui n’est autre que la vie rêvée du sujet autobiographique en maître de la forme.

41 En un point culminant du livre, le récit de cette « hallucination » grandiose, plus que le matériel onirique lui-même, consacre le triomphe de l’écrivain. La vision en effet s’achève par une tempête et un éclair qui soudain rend visible et révèle au sujet en quel lieu il vient de défaire les forces du chaos : le site auguste et merveilleux de sa victoire, qui est justement la Galerie d’Apollon visitée dans l’enfance, dont il reconnaît les parquets luisants et les hautes fenêtres. Ce que manifeste cette ultime révélation dans le récit rétrospectif de cette vision fantastique, c’est la présence et même la « précédence » ou la préséance (Sayre, 1988, 156) du rêveur au Louvre, dans la Galerie glorieuse du Style, bien des années avant le rêve, bien des années avant son entrée en littérature : la jeune vie imaginative de l’enfant était déjà là, secrètement lovée, recelée à son insu même dans les profondes embrasures du palais de l’art, longtemps avant que l’écrivain ne soit initié à l’écriture, longtemps avant qu’il ne parvienne à terrasser les pulsions obscures qui menacent l’imagination23. Dans la réminiscence onirique involontaire, la vie de l’imagination, la vocation artistique, bien qu’encore en dormance ou en germe dans le musée, précède de façon spectaculaire toute autre forme de vie et en prescrit le futur : le sujet ou l’auteur de l’autobiographie ne réclame pas l’art comme son héritage, il montre plutôt l’enfant comme secrété par lui, comme appartenant, bien avant d’en avoir conscience, à ce qui est peut-être appelé à devenir la « maison de la fiction », c’est-à-dire à l’œuvre.

42 Alors qu’approche la tragédie de la Grande Guerre, où James redoute de voir s’effondrer la culture ou la civilisation – ce sont ses mots – que la famille est jadis venue chercher dans le Vieux Monde24, la fiction, qu’il s’agisse de la romance mâtinée de conte fantastique de The Sense of the Past ou de l’intrigue machiavélique de The Ivory Tower peignant une Amérique régie par les dollars, s’avère incapable de restituer le sens du passé. Ni dans la remontée imaginaire vers un lointain passé anglais fantasmé, ni dans la plongée au cœur de celui, plus récent, de l’Amérique du Gilded Age, James ne parvient à faire « sens du passé », un passé qui ne serait pas la seule remémoration ou continuation d’une tradition esthétique, mais qui recélerait tout à la fois l’origine et la garantie d’une perpétuation et d’un renouveau de l’art. Cette assurance, il ne peut la trouver ni dans l’Amérique mercantile qu’il a redécouverte quelques années auparavant, ni dans la vieille Europe alors menacée par la destruction. Ce n’est donc peut-être que dans sa propre vie, celle qui sera devenue la matière de Small Boy, qu’il peut la retrouver, si ténue soit-elle, car seule l’autobiographie permet de ressaisir le futur antérieur, toujours déjà présent, d’un destin d’artiste et l’offrir au lecteur comme une vie aussi exemplaire qu’exceptionnelle – vouée à l’art et produite par lui, étrange et sublime, queer –, une vie qu’il se sera finalement agi de sacrifier pour mieux la conserver et qu’il aura fallu ne pas vivre pour mieux l’écrire. Et c’est en ce sens au moins que l’autobiographie apporte la preuve magistrale que c’est l’art qui fait la vie.

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BIBLIOGRAPHIE

ANKER, Richard, Henry James, Le principe spectral de la représentation, Paris, Hermann, 2012.

BELL, Millicent, « Henry James and the Fiction of Autobiography », Southern Review 18, 1982, 463-79.

DERAIL-IMBERT, Agnès, « Spéculations spectrales dans “The Jolly Corner” et The American Scene de Henry James », dans Sylvie Bauer, Cécile Roudeau, Marie-Odile Salati, dir., De la peur en Amérique : l’écriture au défi du frisson, Grenoble, Éditions de l’Université de Savoie, 2010, 119-135.

DESIDERIO, Mark, « The Art of Friction: Henry James’s Evasion of the Pictorial », The Henry James Review, vol. 23, n° 3, 2002, 273-82.

EDEL, Leon, Henry James: The Untried Years, 1843–1870, Philadelphie, Lippincott, 1953.

---, Henry James: The Master, 1910-1916, Philadelphie, Lippincott, 1972.

EMERSON, Ralph Waldo, Essays and Lectures, Joel Porte, éd., New York, The Library of America, 1983.

FEINSTEIN, Howard M., Becoming William James (1984), Ithaca, Cornell University Press, 2000.

FOLLINI, Tamara, « Improvising the Past in A Small Boy and Others », The Yearbook of English Studies, vol. 30, 2000, 106-23.

GOBLE, Mark, « Delirious Henry James: A Small Boy and New York », MFS: Modern Fiction Studies, vol. 50, n° 2, 2004, 351-84.

GREEN, André, L’Aventure négative, Paris, Hermann, 2009.

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HOLLY, Carol, Intensely Family: The Inheritance of Family Shame and the Autobiographies of Henry James, Madison, University of Wisconsin Press, 1995.

JAMES, Henry, Notes of a Son and Brother, Frederick W. Dupee, éd., Autobiography, New York, Criterion Books, 1956.

---, The Portrait of a Lady (1881), Nicola Bradbury, éd., Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1981.

---, Literary Criticism, vol. I: American Writers, English Writers, Mark Wilson et Leon Edel, éd., New York, The Library of America, 1984.

---, Literary Criticism, vol. II: French Writers, Other European Writers, The Prefaces to the New York Edition, Library of America, Mark Wilson et Leon Edel éd., 1984.

---, Letters, vol. IV (1895-1916), Leon Edel, éd., Cambridge, The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1984.

---, « The Jolly Corner » (1908), The Jolly Corner and Other Tales, Roger Gard, éd., Londres, Penguin, 1990, 161-93.

---, The American Scene (1907), John F. Sears, éd., New York, Penguin, 1994.

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---, What Maisie Knew (1897), Adrian Poole, éd., Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1996.

---, A Small Boy and Others (1913), Frances Wilson, éd., Londres, Gibson Square Books, 2001.

---, The Ivory Tower (1917), Allan Hollinghurst, éd., New York, New York Review of Books Classics, 2004.

---, The Sense of the Past (1917), Glen Cavaliero, éd., Leyburn, Tartarus, 2006.

---, The Wings of the Dove (1902), Millicent Bell, éd., New York, Penguin, 2008.

LACAN, Jacques, D’un Autre à l’autre, Le Séminaire, Livre XVI, Paris, Seuil, 2006.

MAYOUX, Jean-Jacques, Vivant Piliers : le roman anglo-saxon et les symboles, Paris, Maurice Nadeau, 1985.

MOON, Michael, A Small Boy and Others: Imitation and Initiation in American Culture from Henry James to Andy Warhol, Durham (NC), Duke University Press, 1998.

NIELSEN, Paul S., « How Henry James Regularized the Autobiographical Memory of His Father; Or, That Day in the Whorehouse », The Henry James Review, vol. 15, n° 2, 1994, 190-98.

OHI, Kevin, Henry James and the Queerness of Style, Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 2008.

PEARSON, Maeve, « Re-exposing the Jamesian Child: The Paradox of Children’s Privacy », The Henry James Review, vol. 28, n° 2, 2007, 101-119.

PERSON, Leland S., Henry James and the Suspense of Masculinity, Philadelphie, University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003.

POSNOCK, Ross, The Trial of Curiosity: Henry James, William James, and the Challenge of Modernity, New York, Oxford University Press, 1991.

POWERS, Lyall H., éd., Henry James and Edith Wharton: Letters, 1900-1915, New York, Scribner’s, 1990.

SAYRE, Robert F., The Examined Self: Benjamin Franklin, Henry James, Henry Adams (1964), Madison, University of Wisconsin Press, 1988.

TANNER, Tony, The Reign of Wonder: Naivety and Reality in American Literature, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1965.

TEAHAN, Sheila, The Rhetorical Logic of Henry James, Baton Rouge, Louisiana State University Press, 1995.

VEEDER, William, « The Feminine Orphan and the Emergent Master: Self-Realization in Henry James », The Henry James Review, vol. 12, n° 1, 1991, 20-54.

NOTES

1. La critique a longtemps eu tendance à les considérer d’un seul bloc, à la suite de F. W. Dupee qui en a procuré une édition en un volume en 1956 sous un titre – Autobiography – que James n’avait, semble-t-il, pas envisagé de leur donner. Dans « Improvising the Past in A Small Boy and Others », Tamara Follini plaide au contraire pour une lecture différenciée des trois ouvrages (Follini, 2000, 106-7). 2. Comme le rappelle Leon Edel, James, ayant épuisé les sujets européens et sentant son inspiration se tarir, espère que ce retour aux sources donnera un second souffle à sa puissance créatrice (Edel, 1972, 224-33).

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3. Dans une lettre souvent citée, adressée à H. G. Wells et datée du 10 juillet 1915 : « It is art that makes life » (James, 1984c, 770). 4. Si, comme l’a magistralement montré Richard Anker dans Henry James. Le principe spectral de la représentation, la pulsion esthétique est originaire chez James et chez ses personnages qui sont des figures de l’artiste, force est de constater qu’au soir de sa vie, c’est à travers le récit de soi que James entreprend de lui donner forme. Alors que le sujet actif de la représentation demeure le même, le sujet représenté est différent, au même titre qu’on peut considérer que l’autoportrait d’un peintre diffère de tel autre sujet peint par le même artiste. On a certes souvent dit que toute peinture est un autoportrait de l’artiste, il n’en reste pas moins que le critique peut, voire doit interroger cette différence. 5. Dans The Rhetorical Logic of Henry James, Sheila Teahan évoque la prédilection de James pour la métaphore de la germination, qu’il emploie notamment dans les préfaces à l’Édition de New York pour désigner le processus de la création artistique envisagé comme un développement organique (Teahan, 1995, 1). 6. Ici comme ailleurs chez James, le mot queer renvoie à un « trouble » dans le sujet qui inclut et déborde en même temps la question du genre, au sens de l’anglais gender (Ohi, 2008, 1-32). 7. Dans The Trial of Curiosity, Ross Posnock fait observer que la décision de se représenter sous les traits de l’idiot de la famille, en marge des autres, relève aussi pour Henry d’une stratégie de dé- idéalisation volontaire à contre-courant des codes victoriens de l’autobiographie où il est attendu du sujet autobiographique masculin qu’il corresponde à un idéal de virilité, de puissance et de compétence. S’appuyant sur la biographie de William James par Howard M. Feinstein, Becoming William James, Posnock montre également que le complexe d’infériorité dont fait part Henry dans Small Boy ne fut pas le tout de la relation entre les deux frères, William ayant à son tour, quoique plus tard, envié et imité son frère (Posnock, 1991, 177). 8. Rappelant que le mot « figure », si fréquent chez James, a la double valence de « nombre » et de « trope », Sheila Teahan montre que le réflecteur, construit par le lexique que la narration emprunte à l’économie, dépend précisément de ces tropes, dont il est tenu comptable. Ainsi, la métaphore a un coût : « The center of consciousness is thus doubly indebted by this representational economy: both implicated in a figurative debt by James’s characteristic economic terminology (through metaphors of payment, accountability, bankruptcy, and so on) and held accountable for the figures in which he or she is constructed » (Teahan, 1995, 5). 9. Les termes utilisés font d’emblée de la vie un sujet fictionnel. On les retrouve par exemple dans la préface de Roderick Hudson : « [The work] remains in equilibrium by having found its centre, the point of command of all the rest. From this centre the subject has been treated, from this centre the interest has spread, and so, whatever else it may do or may not do, the thing has acknowledged a principle of composition and contrives at least to hang together. We see in such a case why it should so hang; we escape that dreariest displeasure it is open to experiments in this general order to inflict, the sense of any hanging-together precluded as by the very terms of the case. » (James, 1984b, 1050, nous soulignons.) 10. À propos de son jeune frère Wilky, James évoque en effet ce qu’il appelle « my sense of his superior talent for life » (149). 11. Notons le halo spectral de ce souvenir qui s’apparente à ce que Richard Anker identifie et analyse comme un invariant de l’« archi-scène » du récit jamesien – une archi-scène dont le contenu événementiel, flou et étrange, est antérieur à la conscience, mais où s’origine pourtant la pulsion narratrice et par où le sujet, s’exposant au manque à être qui le (dé)constitue, s’efforce de se représenter à lui-même dans un dédoublement spéculaire qui porte la conscience hors d’elle- même (Anker, 2012, 13 et suivantes). En tant qu’il s’apparente à une forme d’extase, le sentiment d’un émerveillement généralisé en quoi consiste le souvenir rapporté ici, et sur lequel nous souhaiterions plutôt insister, peut également se rapporter à la dynamique d’extériorisation et d’expropriation de la conscience que figure le mouvement de la représentation.

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12. « The sun illuminates only the eye of the man, but shines into the eye and the heart of the child. The lover of nature is he […] who has retained the spirit of infancy even into the era of manhood » (Emerson, « Nature » (1836), 1983, 10). 13. Ce procédé est déjà à l’œuvre dans The American Scene, où le « je » qui conduit la narration cède parfois la place à une troisième personne, désignée sous la catégorie spectrale du revenant, « the returning absentee », hanté par le sentiment de « dépossession » que suscite ce retour au pays natal d’où ont disparu les traces du passé, à la fois national et personnel, notamment la maison familiale de Washington Place (James, 1994, 43, 67, 71). Par contraste, dans Small Boy, la distance marquée par la troisième personne met en relief la liberté d’aventure dont jouit l’enfant au cours de ses flâneries new-yorkaises, et plus généralement la chance de s’être abandonné au charme d’un lieu quel qu’il soit. 14. Cette « passion subjective » rappelle étrangement la « passion de la spéculation » (passion of thought, of speculation) qui anime Isabel Archer et que, dans la célèbre scène du chapitre 42, le narrateur de Portrait of a Lady décrit, au risque du paradoxe, comme « une condition active » (« an active condition ») (James, 1981, 461). 15. Le lexique de James ici n’est pas sans rappeler cet échange entre Ralph Touchett et Isabel Archer au chapitre 15 de The Portrait of a Lady qui assimile l’expérience à un puissant philtre : « “You want to drain the cup of experience.” “No, I don’t wish to touch the cup of experience. It’s a poisoned drink! I only want to see for myself.” » (James, 1981, 160) 16. De ses visites chez Mrs. Cannon, James conclut: « The vision at any rate was to stick by me as through its old-world friendly grace […]. Fit to figure as a value anywhere – by which I meant in the right corner of any social picture, I afterwards said to myself – that refined and composed significance of Mrs. Cannon’s scene. » (50, nous soulignons) 17. Pour Lacan, à qui nous empruntons le concept d’« extime », l’intime ne s’oppose pas tant à l’extériorité qu’il ne se constitue et ne se sait tel que dans un mouvement d’extériorisation : « ce qui m’est le plus intime est justement ce que je suis contraint de ne pouvoir reconnaître qu’au dehors » (Lacan, 2006, 225). 18. Dans Notes of Son and Brother, James évoque le talent de son frère pour la peinture sur un mode paradoxal comme un art de l’échec et de la perte (« the art of missing or of failing, or of otherwise going astray » [James, 1956, 302]) et Ross Posnock suggère que le choix de l’écriture peut ainsi se comprendre, sur fond de rivalité mimétique entre les deux frères, comme une manière pour l’un de trouver sur la page ce que l’autre aura su créer sur la toile (Posnock, 1991, 168). 19. Nous empruntons la formule à Mark Desiderio dans « The Art of Friction: Henry James’s Evasion of the Pictorial » (Desiderio, 2002, 273-82). 20. Leon Edel rapporte que James tenait en main le cliché alors qu’il dictait le texte de la scène à Lois Barker à l’été de 1912, signe de sa charge émotionnelle et imaginale (Edel, 1972, 464). 21. Dans Henry James and the Suspense of Masculinity, Leland Person a mis en lumière l’entrecroisement des logiques homo-érotiques et homo-esthétiques dans la fiction de James, et notamment dans les contes qui mettent en scène des personnages d’écrivains et d’artistes, où le travail de l’écriture construit, complique et perturbe l’identité sexuelle des protagonistes masculins (Person, 2003, 124-48). 22. Telle est la lecture fondatrice de Leon Edel qui voit dans ce souvenir une « scène primitive » au sens freudien (Edel, 1953, 68 et 75). 23. Parmi les abondantes lectures critiques consacrées à ce passage, qui le saisissent sur un fond autobiographique, celle de Richard Anker l’analyse comme se déroulant « sur fond d’une impulsion artiste qui n’est nullement propre au sujet-artiste » (Anker, 2012, 51). Nous insistons au contraire sur la fonction cruciale qu’occupe le lieu de cette scène, la Galerie d’Apollon, comme temple de l’art et du style où s’est tramée en quelque sorte depuis toujours, du moins bien avant que l’enfant n’en prenne conscience, la destinée artistique de l’écrivain. Ainsi, bien que très similaire, le rêve raconté dans « The Jolly Corner », situé dans un tout autre décor, même s’il se

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rapporte à la pulsion esthétique, ne touche que de biais à la vie d’esthète qu’a pu mener le personnage en Europe. Le rêveur de Small Boy, lui, à la faveur d’un dispositif narratif complexe, qui combine le cadre réel et le matériel onirique, se découvre (ou feint de se découvrir) artiste avant que de l’avoir été. 24. Dans une lettre adressée à Edith Wharton le 6 août 1914, deux jours à peine après que l’Angleterre a déclaré la guerre à l’Allemagne, James évoque le sentiment prémonitoire de la catastrophe qui l’habite et le terrifie : « I feel all but unbearably overdarkened by this crash of our civilization » (Powers, 1990, 289). Quatre jours plus tard, le 10 août, dans une lettre à Rhoda Broughton, il revient sur l’imminence d’un désastre qui, quoique longtemps tenu pour impossible et impensable, semble rétrospectivement avoir été inéluctable et vouloir emporter avec lui le monde qui fut le sien : « Black and hideous to me is the tragedy that gathers, and I’m sick beyond cure to have lived on to see it. You and I, the ornaments of our generation, should have been spared this wreck of our belief that through the long years we had seen civilization grow and the worst become impossible. The tide that bore us along was then all the while moving to this grand Niagara – yet what a blessing we didn’t know it. It seems to me to undo everything, everything that was ours, in the most horrible retroactive way. » (James, 1984, 473)

RÉSUMÉS

Bien qu’ayant toujours soutenu que « c’est l’art qui fait la vie », c’est à l’approche de la mort que Henry James se lance dans l’écriture autobiographique et entreprend, sous couvert de raconter la vie de son frère William, de rendre compte de la genèse de sa vocation d’écrivain. La difficile élaboration du rapport entre soi et autrui, où l’admiration pour le frère génial se double de la reconnaissance chez le jeune Henry d’une incapacité à vivre pleinement sa vie, est d’emblée au cœur de cet exercice de remémoration paradoxale qui consiste finalement à se chercher pour mieux se perdre. Autobiographie d’un non-sujet, A Small Boy and Others confirme et redouble l’expérience de la vie elle-même comme non-vie. En s’absentant ainsi de sa propre vie, le sujet, l’écrivain, la laisse toutefois intégralement disponible à la recréation par l’écriture, et le retrait hors de l’existence lui permet de développer sa capacité d’émerveillement, son aptitude à se faire le réceptacle des innombrables impressions auxquelles il est exposé et que nous le voyons transformer petit à petit en une succession de scènes qui s’enchaînent les unes aux autres pour former la trame de son existence. Au bout du compte, cependant, loin de s’ordonner en un tout cohérent, la multiplicité des impressions qui affectent la conscience révèle la profonde altérité du sujet à lui-même et désoriente le projet autobiographique, qui ne parvient pas à prendre la forme rectiligne d’un récit des origines. Écrire sa vie, c’est alors raconter sa hantise par tous ces « autres » auxquels renvoie le titre et qui font et défont continûment l’identité du sujet autobiographique.

Although Henry James always maintained that “it is art that makes life,” he did start writing his autobiography in the last years of his life, telling the story of his calling as a writer under cover of paying tribute to his brother William’s genius. The tension between self and other is at the core of James’s autobiographical project, which consists paradoxically in looking for oneself the better to lose oneself. A Small Boy and Others thus repeats and compounds the small boy’s experience of life as nonlife. Yet in withdrawing from his own life, James leaves it to be re- imagined and recreated, so that his evasion from life allows him to develop his capacity for

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wonder and to become a vessel for the manifold impressions to which his consciousness is exposed and which he transforms into a series of scenes that make up his life. In the end, however, far from coalescing into a consistent and meaningful whole, the multiplicity of impressions disorients the teleological effort underlying James’s autobiography and exposes the very otherness that is constitutive of selfhood. For James then, writing his life as “a small boy” means ultimately telling the story of his being haunted by the “others” that his title hints at and whose inescapable presence around and within him contributes to making and unmaking his sense of self.

INDEX

Mots-clés : Henry James, William James, Henry James Sr., autobiographie, vie, écriture, identité, altérité Keywords : Henry James, William James, Henry James Sr., autobiography, life, writing, selfhood, otherness

AUTEURS

THOMAS CONSTANTINESCO Université Paris Diderot / Institut universitaire de France

AGNÈS DERAIL École normale supérieure / VALE, Paris Sorbonne

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Actualités de la recherche

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The Historical “Dispute of the New World.” European Historians of the United States and European History, Culture and Public Life, International Workshop Fondazione Luigi Einaudi – Turin, September 10-11, 2015

Francesca Cadeddu

1 American studies in Europe and the European historiography of the United States are in recent times two of the topics which have attracted much scholarly interest throughout the Old World. In 2014, Nicolas Barreyre, Michael Heale, Stephen Tuck and Cecile Vidal edited Historians Across Borders: Writing American History in a Global Age: the volume is the output of the research group “We, the People,” which gathered twenty-four scholars from eleven European countries around the topic of Americanist historiography in Europe. The main thesis of their work is that place matters: locational, cultural and institutional factors affect the writing of US history and have an impact on academic scholarship. In September 2015, Maurizio Vaudagna (University of Eastern Piedmont, Italy) organized the International Workshop “The Historical ‘Dispute of the New World’, European Historians of the United States and European History, Culture and Public Life” which was inspired by the idea that European historians of the US, while writing on American past, have been often influenced by personal or cultural values, issues and concerns stemming from their national European locations. As a matter of fact, most of them have not “gone American,” maintaining both their cultural and national peculiarities and their Europeanness.

2 Following Vaudagna’s idea, the two-day workshop sought connections between two levels of reasoning: the first aimed at identifying the peculiarities of various national (or regional) historiographical trends; the second tried to find commonalities and cleavages among various European trends.

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Michael Heale (University of Lancaster) and Stephen Tuck (Oxford University), “A Special Relationship? British Historians of the United States”

3 The British case presented by Michael Heale and Stephen Tuck perfectly fits with the idea that place matters. Michael Heale explained how paradoxical the British academic circles were, especially in the 30 years after 1945: there was much suspicion about American history, but the field took off sharply anyway, for both historical and geographical reasons. The role of the US in Europe during World War II, as well as the need to rethink the British Empire, attracted the interest of scholars and students, and the United States soon stimulated this interest by generously funding academic research. As a result, most of the scholarly works published by the first generation of historians after 1945 was based on Atlantic history, fostering the idea of a special relationship based on Anglo-American connections. During those years, historians of the US faced the suspicions (and stuffiness) of their older colleagues with the apparent vitality and even irreverence of American society, focusing on democratic and egalitarian values. These topics soon came to the ears of the British public, especially in the so-called provincial areas, which were more sensitive to them. For this reason, universities like Manchester and Nottingham were encouraged to establish new chairs in American history. By the time this trend also involved the traditional universities, scholars were already shifting their interest to new areas of study: US historiography was guiding part of their research with topics such as gender and reform, which matched better with the needs of British society.

4 And so it went for the subsequent decades. Stephen Tuck focused on twentieth-first century British historians. He described how, in the first decade, they perceived – and still perceive – themselves as historians of the United States who « happened to be in Britain,» (Badger, 1992, 515) but still looked at American history to find parts of their own history. Currently, the history of the U.S is still a tool for understanding some aspects of British identity, but it is yet to be determined what are the British answers to the British questions that the new historiography of the US will find.

Philipp Gassert (University of Mannheim), “Representing the Most Significant Other: German Historians View the United States”

5 According to Philipp Gassert, during the Nineteenth and Twentieth centuries, European historians of the United States held a common approach to the subject of their inquiry: they looked at the present and the future of their society through the lens of US history. This kind of fascination did not always take a positive perspective. First, the European interest in US history and culture was early, intense, and continuous, but the German institutional academic investment in American Studies did not follow suit, hence the growth of US historiography in Germany was at first limited. Nonetheless, such historiography has since been impressive (Dreisbach and Strupp, 2007). Second, for most of the twentieth century, American studies in Germany were highly politicized and acquired the status of an “applied science.” The subject was limited (if not impeded) especially in post-Nazi Germany, both because of the scholarship’s

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politicization in the previous decades and the priority given to American literary studies in the context of cultural diplomacy. Third, postwar German historiography focused on German-American relations and US diplomacy, but the generational change within history departments and new institutional openings led the trends of national historiography to be better integrated with international and US historiographical debates. Consequently, the German-related focus declined. This is a general trend in Western Europe, but it is not in other European regions. Thus, Gassert argued, although not homogeneous, several national historiographies of the US share many topics such as bilateral/diplomatic/transnational relations; European perceptions of the US; migration; the South and the Civil Rights movement. For this reason, the communities of research are not nation-based but topic-based, and if location matters, it is in the professional viewpoint of the historian, rather than in his/her national belonging.

Sylvia Hilton (Complutense University, Madrid), “Writing US History in Contemporary Spain”

6 The Spanish case was presented by Sylvia Hilton, whose introduction focused on the variety of fields where many contributions to US historiography in Spain are produced. As in most European countries, Spanish scholars mix United States history with anthropology, early modern history, art history, political science, information sciences, economics and law. Looking at the disciplines that are commonly considered as part of American studies, she noticed a general division between historians/anthropologists and English philologists. While the first group concentrates on the connections between the US and Spain, the latter are more likely to focus on US society, culture and history per se. Nonetheless, these boundaries are permeable, so, Sylvia Hilton asked, what are the real boundaries of US historiography? What characteristics make an historian French or Spanish: his/her nationality; affiliation; years on the field? In one of the most important theoretical points of the discussion, she argued that historiography can reflect the values and interests of more than one specific collective identity, which is defined by such markers as, for example, local or regional birthplace, social class, profession, gender, religion and ideologies (Hilton, 2010). For this reason, it might be useful to ponder whether the physical locations of historians – defined by territorial boundaries and by the social and cultural identities which we consider to be their figurative locations – can affect historiographical perspectives.

Ivan Kurilla (European University of St. Petersburg), “Russia and the United States: Diplomacy, Technological Exchanges and Mutual Image Construction”

7 Talking about perspectives, the framework of Russian historiography of the US presented by Ivan Kurilla is surprisingly similar to that of other European countries: from a stage of political activism to the perception of a kind of “special relationship,” from anti-Americanism to fascination and abundant funding. All these steps clearly followed the flow of the bilateral relations between the two countries. Nonetheless, there are two main differences with most of the cases presented before. The first is

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timing: US funds came to Russia only in the 1990s, for about a decade. The second is institutional structure. In most Western European countries the decrease of US soft power and funding led historians and Americanists in general to find new sources and institutional assets. The less they felt pressed by political interests, the more they went “native.” Conversely, in Russia, the subject gradually began to collapse. The reasons are twofold. On the one hand, the new crisis in Russian-American relations and the new rise of anti-Americanism in Russia did not lead to additional financing for studying the US from either the Russian or the US governments; on the other hand, low-quality journalism was detrimental to academic studies because the crisis in US-Russian Studies was narrated as a failure in Russians scholars’ attempts to present Russia to the US, implying that the funding for research had not been put to good use. As a consequence, in the Russian case, place matters again, but it is a challenge.

Tvrtko Jacovina (University of Zagreb), “‘Where, in Hell, is America?’ Yugoslav Historians on the USA: Between Migration and Selected Political Topics”

8 Tvrtko Jacovina presented the Croatian framework starting with a fact: there is no historian in Croatia who works on the United States only. The “parochial” way of thinking that dominates in academia does not allow historians to distance themselves from national history: the general attitude has always been to study topics strictly related to Croatian society and history (with the exception of some studies covering Croatian immigration to the U.S). Such a trend was spread all along the Twentieth century and still stands: even if US soft power brought to Croatia many signs of “Americanization,” historians’ interest remains focused on their national boundaries.

Marcin Fatalski (Jagiellonian University, Krakow), “From Politicized Historiography to Pluralistic Debate? Studies on US history in Poland after the Second World War”

9 Polish fascination for the United States did not influence Polish historiography of the US According to Marcin Fatalski, the historical discourse on the United States in Poland was influenced by two main factors. First, postwar historiography of the United States reflected the political situation of the country, therefore historians looked to the US for examples of social progress and political and economic development and for evidence that US history was somehow in line with the Marxist general vision of development. As a result, the New Deal was a great fascination and the scholarship published on the Presidency tended to present Democratic presidents in a better way than Republicans. Second, Polish historiography was (and still is) very factual, conservative, and mainstream: it does not investigate society or culture, it neglects some new trends in American studies abroad (such as gender, or minorities), and it mainly focuses on foreign policy and bilateral relations. In 1990 new trends paved the way for the opening of new American studies programs, and in recent times several historians have been

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trying to present US history as a complex process, in order to show the various factors that influence it and the relations between the two countries.

Dag Blanck (Uppsala University), “The Significance of Location: Practicing American History in Sweden”

10 Even though Swedish society has always felt a strong connection with the US, historians’ interest did not follow the same path (Runblom, 1985, 390). According to Dag Blanck, within Swedish historiography of the US, location matters a lot because the topics are Sweden-centered (emigration, Swedish immigration to the US, and Swedish- US relations), but it matters less with regards to method and theory. As in the Croatian case, there has been a widespread reluctance among Swedish historians to study non- Swedish history and much attention was paid to the immigration flows between the two countries. On the contrary, in terms of method and theory, Blanck suggested that Swedish historians are quite influenced by international tendencies (as with the cultural and linguistic turns in US historiography), so that both in terms of method and theory, there are opportunities for exchange with other European scholars.

Paul Schor (University of Paris VII Denis Diderot), “French Historians and the History of the State and Society in the United States”

11 In his speech, Paul Schor analyzed the meaning of place when writing history from a French perspective. In his opinion, writing from the outside of a given context is always a way of making a comparison without saying it, because the public is different and the writer – the historian – has to deal with it. Until recent times, French historians of the US were first trained as historians of France, and later turned to the United States as their field of inquiry (Edling, 2014). Given that, from the institutional point of view, there were no historians of the US strictly speaking, Dr. Schor agreed with Silvya Hilton in arguing that the US is often studied from different perspectives (mainly legal or political), and that most of the times historians of the United States belong to other departments than History. However, in the French case location is even more relevant when looking at the topics chosen by scholars, which are generally oriented to the interests of the readers. In particular, close to the turn of the century, race, immigration, and ethnic studies were part of the public discourse in France, both producing attractions and aversions towards the United States. Similarly, when in the 1990s historians turned to sociology and theory of the French State with less ideology and more interest in bureaucracy, the trend was reflected in the area of US history, opening the workshop’s debate on whether it might be possible to launch a research on a European topic regardless of the interests of the specific national public.

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Ferdinando Fasce (University of Genoa), “Fifty Years On. Italian Historians of the United States and Italian History, Culture and Public Life. 1960-2010”

12 The detailed work presented by Ferdinando Fasce about the Italian historiography of the US introduced a set of themes and questions strongly related to location. The first point concerned the professional profile of Italian Americanists that, during the Cold War, changed from “cultural brokers” to “scholars in between,” raising the quantity and quality of their connections and exchanges across the Atlantic. The second is the irony of such a new role: Italian historians of the US have engaged in the international debate but they do not seem able to engage in the same kind of debate in Italy. The third issue presented by Fasce was Italian Americanists’ unfailing interest in the relational fields (migration, bilateral/international relations) and their profound reshaping according to the changing nature of the audience and the complex relations of Italian Americanists with their public. Finally, Fasce left on the table a few questions related to the position of the US: What is the role of US history within the general Italian historiographical community? What is the image of the US that emerges from it? Is the US still relevant for the understanding of Europe?

Roundtable and concluding remarks “European Historians of the United States, European-Wide Views of the American Past, and European History, Culture and Public Life”

13 Alexander Etkind, Federico Romero, Edoardo Tortarolo and Tibor Frank contributed to the roundtable with their remarks on the status of the discipline in Europe and on future perspectives.

14 According to some of the participants, it is difficult to claim that there is a European historiography of the United States because historical events (regional, national, European, Atlantic, world history) have influenced scholarly approaches (e.g. Cold War, national movements, etc.). When looking at macro historiographical areas, Europe seems divided into three main groups. Western, Northern and Eastern countries developed different trends and approaches to general history and to the history of the US. Nonetheless, except for Britain, in all three groups of countries, the discipline has generally been reshaped in response to the cultural needs of new and different audiences. Moreover, the concepts that we use carry different meanings and connotations that change the way scholars mediate/translate/connect the focuses of their scholarship. In many cases, concepts (e.g. middle class, race, unions) really need to be located in order for the writer/historian as well as for the reader/public to understand their meaning.

15 Finally, professional location and identity really depend on institutional issues on the regional or national level: universities, departments, schools, language, denomination of the courses/teachings, funding, teaching jobs, student demands and marketability of the job are “going European” (and, to some extent, even American), but still rely on local dynamics. Ironically, what is shared by the whole group (UK excepted), are the

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pessimistic prophecies about the future of American studies and of the history of the United States. Considering that such studies are often re-directed or not properly supported, most of the participants agreed to the necessity to re-think the field and its future goals.

16 Nonetheless, the effort to look at Europe as a place where the US is seen in a complex, yet comprehensive, perspective seems appropriate. The Europeanization of the historiography of the United States does not preclude local approaches: there is a tension between the European varieties of the field and the efforts to mix, match, put in common issues, questions, points of view. This “Europeanist effort” does not amount to homogenization, but it is rather an attempt to build the cartography of the EU’s Americanist varieties and to see where it is possible to find common approaches. In short, US historiography in Europe is just as diverse as Europe itself.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

References

BADGER, Tony, “Confessions of a British Americanist”, Journal of American History 79, 2, 1992, 515-23.

DREISBACH, Kai and Christoph STRUPP, eds., with the assistance of Patricia C. Sutcliffe and Birgit Zischke, German Americana, 1956-2005: A Comprehensive Bibliography of German, Austrian, and Swiss Books and Dissertations on the United States, Washington, D.C., German Historical Institute, 2007.

EDLING, Max, et al., “Institutions, Careers, and the Many Paths of U.S. History in Europe”, in Nicolas Barreyre, et al., eds., Historians Across Borders: Writing American History in a Global Age, Berkeley (CA), University of California Press, 2014, 56-74.

HILTON, Sylvia L., “Identities and the Usable Pasts of Colonial Borderlands: Spanish Historians and the North Pacific Frontiers of the Spanish Empire”, in Steve Hackel, ed., Alta California: Peoples in Motion, Identities in Formation, 1769-1850, Berkeley-San Marino, University of California and The Huntington Library, 2010, 235-323.

RUNBLOM, Harald, “United States History in Swedish Research and Teaching”, in Lewis Hanke, ed., Guide to the Study of United States History Outside the U.S. 1945-1980, vol. III, White Plains (NY), Kraus International Publishers, 1985, 390-421.

AUTHOR

FRANCESCA CADEDDU University of Cagliari

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Think Tank IdA : « Le processus de normalisation des relations États- Unis/Cuba : défis et perspectives » Institut des Amériques, Maison de l'Amérique Latine, mardi 6 octobre 2015

Shirley Yoselin Rodríguez Paz

Sujet très en vogue ces derniers mois, le rapprochement des relations entre les Etats- Unis et Cuba est aujourd’hui au cœur des analyses de nombreux spécialistes dont les recherches portent sur des champs, notamment, historiques, diplomatiques, économiques, depuis l’annonce officielle faite par les présidents Barack Obama et Raúl Castro le 17 décembre 2014. La séance de Think Tank intitulée « Les processus de normalisation des relations États-Unis/Cuba : défis et perspectives », organisée par l’Institut des Amériques (IdA) en partenariat avec l’Institut des Hautes Études de l’Amérique latine (IHEAL), avait comme principal conférencier le professeur de l’Université de La Havane, Jorge Mario Sánchez Egozcue. Environ 50 personnes étaient présentes à la Maison de l’Amérique latine pour réfléchir sur les possibles obstacles et perspectives issus de cet événement historique. Carlos Quenan, le vice-président de l’IdA a ouvert la séance en affirmant que le « rapprochement » ou la « normalisation » – terme encore à définir – des relations diplomatiques entre les États-Unis et Cuba « ouvre une voie au début de la fin de la Guerre froide », dans une zone pacifique comme celle des Amériques. Olivier Compagnon, directeur de l’IHEAL, a rappelé que la reprise officielle des relations diplomatiques Cuba/États-Unis – après presque 50 ans de conflit – a débuté en l’absence d’une politique latino-américaine du président Obama, depuis 2008. Il interroge la politique latino-américaine du président états-unien : se réduit-elle à la politique cubaine ? Par ailleurs, Compagnon évoque l’existence aux États-Unis d’une obsession pour Cuba dès 1959, et même depuis le XIXe siècle. Il faut rappeler les relations entre Cuba et les États-Unis – sans oublier l’Europe – autour de l’exportation de sucre, ce qui

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va faire de Cuba « le plus grand producteur de sucre au monde » au XIXe siècle (Herrera, 2001, 3). L’intervention du professeur Jorge Mario Sánchez Egozcue porte sur la « perspective cubaine, susceptible de changer » et est issue d’un ouvrage à paraître. La contextualisation diplomatique, économique et juridique, sur cette étape de transition du rétablissement des relations États-Unis/Cuba, a été la partie centrale de son intervention. La question des collaborations académiques, la perception de l’opinion publique et les effets qui peuvent découler de cet accord dans le secteur privé ont été aussi abordées. Enfin, quelques minutes ont été consacrées à répondre aux questions du public qui participait à cette séance. Tout d’abord, Sánchez Egozcue fait un bref rappel historique, depuis l’annonce de décembre 2014, en s’appuyant sur des images publiées par des différents journaux de Cuba et des États-Unis. Ensuite, il dresse un bilan des premières étapes du processus de normalisation des relations entre ces deux pays, dont l’échange de prisonniers : trois prisonniers cubains ont été libérés ainsi que plus de 50 prisonniers états-uniens, parmi eux Alan Gross1. Puis il mentionne la récente ouverture des ambassades qui confirme le rétablissement officiel des relations diplomatiques. Nonobstant, « il n’existe pas encore un agenda » du processus, ni de plan pour la régularisation des rapports entre Cuba et les États-Unis. Pour Jorge Mario Sánchez Egozcue, la révision de la désignation de Cuba par les États-Unis comme un État terroriste est un point central et conflictuel. C'est un sujet gelé depuis près de 20 ans et c'est l’un des sujets qui ont entravé les relations internationales entre Cuba et les pays des autres régions du monde. Le contexte économique cubain et ses incidences internes et externes avaient déjà été exposés en détail par Jorge Mario Sánchez Egozcue durant le colloque consacré à « Cuba sur la scène internationale », organisé par l’IHEAL en 2008 : « Las relaciones económicas Cuba-Estados Unidos en la década del 2000 : mitos y realidades »2. Selon Jorge Mario Sánchez Egozcue, la troisième source de revenus de Cuba provient des transferts de fonds familiaux depuis l’extérieur. Dans les années 1990, 90 % de ces transferts, réalisés par les citoyens cubains vivant à l’étranger, étaient destinés à la consommation familiale. Les changements de caractéristiques de l’immigration cubaine au long des années 2000 posent de nouveaux problèmes au gouvernement cubain : la polarisation des revenus augmente ainsi que l’exclusion sociale. Par ailleurs, ces fonds venus de l’étranger et destinés à la consommation familiale sont en fait utilisés pour faire du micro-investissement. Il s’agit d’un investissement d'un type nouveau et dynamique qui promeut l’offre et la demande. Jorge Mario Sánchez Egozcue a cité quatre importants règlements qui contrôlent le cadre juridique du commerce entre Cuba et les États-Unis : 1) le Cuban Assets Control Regulation (CACR) de juillet 1963 [régulation des actifs cubains]3 ; 2) le Cuban Democracy Act (CDA) ou Torricelli Act de 1992 [résolution sur les restrictions au commerce international de la part de États-Unis] ; 3) le Cuban Liberty Democratic Solidarity Act ou Helms-Burton Act de 1996 ; 4) le Trade Sanctions Reform and Export Enhancement Act (TSREA) de 2000. Ce sont des réglementations et des législations toujours en vigueur. Il existe donc encore des textes officiels selon lesquels Cuba et les États-Unis sont encore ennemis, affirme Sánchez Egozcue. À partir du nouvel accord annoncé en 2014, cependant, une partie importante des restrictions imposées par ces réglementations est maintenant levée. Il existe alors un paradoxe particulièrement américain, assure-t-il, car « tout est interdit et en même temps autorisé ». À son avis,

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aucune loi mentionnant que Cuba et les États-Unis sont ennemis ne devrait encore exister. Il émet également l’hypothèse que le prochain président des États-Unis puisse changer la décision prise par Obama en novembre 2014 car, selon lui, il existe encore un piège juridique et politique. Et, en définitive, la modification du cadre juridique actuel est entièrement entre les mains du Congrès états-unien. Selon Sánchez Egozcue, c’est une fiction de prétendre que ces relations commencent sans aucun préalable. En réalité ce rapprochement avait déjà débuté de manière complexe. En 2014, avant l’annonce de la normalisation des relations Cuba/États-Unis, le New York Times avait publié cinq éditoriaux sur Cuba en un seul mois. Auparavant, ce journal n’avait pas publié plus de deux éditoriaux sur Cuba par an. La fuite d’information était donc évidente, même si on ne le voyait pas – d’anciennes négociations avaient échoué à cause de fuites dans la presse. À cet égard, il mentionne l’article publié par l’avocat Robert Muse « The New Normalisation ? », paru en novembre 2014 dans Americas Quarterly, que personne n’avait alors regardé, commenté ou critiqué. Cet article expliquait comment Obama pourrait utiliser son pouvoir, en tant que président, pour conduire les États-Unis à normaliser les relations avec Cuba : « Le président Barack Obama ou un autre successeur est parfaitement libre d'annuler la proclamation faite par [John F.] Kennedy » (Muse, 2014). Ensuite, Sánchez Egozcue a contextualisé le sens de la résilience et de l’innovation cubain qui a permis le développement stratégique de l’économie de ce pays : en premier lieu, l’exportation de sucre (1960-1989) à travers le Conseil d’assistance mutuelle (COMECOM) ; puis, le tourisme qui avait comme principaux marchés le Canada et les États-Unis (1990-2000) ; finalement, l’exportation des médecins (2004-2014). Maintenant, assure Sánchez Egozcue, il faut clarifier les relations entre ces deux pays et les reconstruire à partir de zéro. Du côté académique, Jorge Mario Sánchez Egozcue mentionne l’Université d’Harvard, qui a organisé plusieurs débats sur les perspectives des deux pays. Puis, à l’initiative de la Coordination régionale de recherches économiques et sociales (CRIES) en partenariat avec l’Université de la Havane et l’American University, s’est organisé, depuis 2009, un atelier académique intitulé The Cuba-United States Academic Workshop (TACE)4. Pendant cinq ans, plusieurs questions sur les possibles progrès dans les relations bilatérales américano-cubaines ont été débattues. L’opinion publique, l’Atlantic Council, des experts et notamment d’anciens employés de haut rang qui ont recommandé à Obama de changer la politique états-unienne envers Cuba, ont été des éléments moteurs dans la décision prise par le président des États-Unis, affirme Sánchez Egozcue. Or, des enquêtes montrent que 49 % des républicains s’opposent à cette nouvelle décision, et que 74 % des démocrates la soutiennent. Josefina Vidal Ferreiro, directrice générale de la Chancellerie de Cuba aux États-Unis et Roberta S. Jacobson, secrétaire d’État adjointe des États-Unis sont les deux femmes aux manettes du rapprochement entre ces deux pays. Cette dernière a présidé les deux premiers cycles de conversation qui ont ouvert le chemin au dialogue pour le rétablissement de leurs relations diplomatiques. Le premier avait pour objectif de discuter des questions migratoires ainsi que des relations diplomatiques. L’ouverture des ambassades a été le sujet central du deuxième. Pour les représentants cubains, il a été très important de créer un cadre approprié pour rétablir les relations diplomatiques et rouvrir les ambassades. À cet effet, ils ont demandé que Cuba soit retirée de la liste des États soutenant le terrorisme. De plus, cette seconde réunion a

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porté sur la question des aires de coopération et d’intérêt commun pour ces pays. La nécessité de respecter les droits civils, politiques, économiques, sociaux et culturels a été ainsi discutée. Pour renforcer ces dialogues, se sont organisés des groupes de travail bilatéraux afin de discuter des questions diverses comme la situation des droits de l’homme, les politiques d’immigration, le trafic humain, ainsi que d'autres sujets sensibles comme le changement climatique, la protection de l’environnement, la transgression des frontières biotiques. Par ailleurs, l’un des sujets les plus difficiles à traiter, selon Jorge Mario Sánchez Egozcue, est la nationalisation des entreprises. Les États-Unis demandent à Cuba une indemnisation de sept milliards de dollars, au nom des dommages dus aux nationalisations de 1960. De son côté, Cuba demande 117 milliards de dollars en contrepartie des dommages subis à cause de l’embargo économique, commercial et financier imposé par les États-Unis depuis les années 1960. Jorge Mario Sánchez Egozcue remarque une dynamique qui commence à sortir du champ diplomatique fonctionnel pour se focaliser sur des aires plutôt diplomatico- commerciales. L’agriculture, le tourisme – et leur infrastructure –, le transport – les avions, les croisières –, les télécommunications, le pétrole, la banque, font également partie des études sur les valeurs approximatives et les risques partagés entre Cuba et les États-Unis et obligent à créer de nouvelles lois. Selon Carlos Quenan, le processus de normalisation montre l’importance historique de Cuba dans l’histoire et la politique des États-Unis. Ainsi, pour le diplomate cubain Carlos Alzugaray « Cuba a toujours occupé une place particulière dans la politique étrangère des États-Unis » (Alzugaray, 2000, 13). En effet, dès la fin du XVIIIe siècle, Cuba avait été l’un des objectifs d’agrandissement géopolitique des Treize colonies de l’Empire britannique qui donnèrent naissance aux États-Unis. Par ailleurs, cet événement est un facteur structurel historique très important dans les relations Cuba- États-Unis : d’autres facteurs démontrent la maturité du processus, dont l’intervention du pape François. Carlos Quenan mentionne également l’importance de l’opinion publique cubaine-américaine ainsi qu’américaine. La fin du mandat du président Obama est un autre facteur important à analyser en relation avec ce moment historique. D’autres acteurs jouent également un rôle important dans cette nouvelle dynamique, en particulier les pays latino-américains, avec notamment la participation du Brésil, grande puissance économique de cette région, ou les pays européens qui interviennent dans la diplomatie économique, sans oublier les relations commerciales entre la Chine et l’Amérique latine. L’ « historicisation » de ce processus géopolitique est l’un des sujets d’intérêt pour Olivier Compagnon et, à son avis, elle doit être étudiée depuis le début du XIXe siècle. Compagnon soulève également la question du rôle et de la place du Venezuela dans cet événement. Un autre participant pose une question sur le rôle de l’Église catholique et sur sa relation avec le gouvernement cubain puis, sur la participation de Cuba dans la négociation avec les Forces armées révolutionnaires de Colombie (FARC) qui ont aussi pu aider au rapprochement Cuba/États-Unis. Selon Jorge Mario Sánchez Egozcue, plusieurs facteurs consolident ce processus déjà irréversible de rapprochement cubano- américain, dont les voyages autorisés à Cuba5, les licences accordées aux entreprises de télécommunications étasuniennes pour introduire leur technologie dans l’île, l’autorisation de transfert d’argent à Cuba, etc. L’un des changements les plus importants est apparu au Parti républicain qui a fait émerger de nouveaux acteurs. Ont

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également été évoquées la collaboration académique, la participation des ONG, la récupération de la religiosité – pas seulement catholique –, la visite du pape, la volonté du gouvernement cubain de normaliser ses relations avec les États-Unis. Les champs économique et commercial, dont le professeur Jorge Mario Sánchez Egozcue est spécialiste, se sont imposés tout au long de son intervention6. Toutefois, plusieurs pistes s’ouvrent à partir de ses hypothèses, ainsi que des contributions de Carlos Quenan et d’Olivier Compagnon et des questions posées par l’assistance : les champs historique, politique, religieux, culturel, juridique etc. sont assurément des sujets à étudier et à approfondir par les chercheurs.

BIBLIOGRAPHIE

ALZUGARAY Carlos, Crónica de un fracaso imperial. La administración de Eisenhower y el derrocamiento de la dictadura de Batista, La Habana, Editorial Ciencias Sociales, 2000.

HERRERA Rémy, « Capitalisme, esclavage et sucre à Cuba. Émergence, essor et déclin de l’esclavage cubain (1511-1886) », Cahiers de la MSE de l’Université Paris 1, 2001, http://docplayer.fr/ 12360178-Capitalisme-esclavage-et-sucre-a-cuba.html (page consultée le 05 décembre 2015).

MUSE Robert, « US Presidential Action on Cuba: The New Normalisation? », Americas Quarterly, 8(4), 2014, 128.

« Quiénes son las dos mujeres que están rompiendo el hielo entre Cuba y EEUU », BBC Mundo, 22 janvier 2015, http://www.bbc.com/mundo (page consultée le 15 octobre 2015).

NOTES

1. Spécialiste des communications par satellite, Alan Gross avait été jugé pour espionnage par la justice cubaine et condamné en 2011 à 15 ans de prison. 2. Vidéo disponible sur http://epresence.univ-paris3.fr/5/watch/403.aspx (page consultée le 12 octobre 2015). 3. Document publié dans le Federal Register le 21 septembre 2015, [en ligne] disponible sur http:// federalregister.gov/a/2015-23587 (page consultée le 17 octobre 2015). 4. Un document de travail a été élaboré par un groupe d’universitaires et d’anciens diplomates cubains et états-uniens, intitulé « Oportunidades para las Relaciones Cuba-Estados Unidos : Propuestas para colaboración en áreas de interés mutuo » et publié en ligne : http:// www.cries.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/06/tace-final-web.pdf (page consultée le 15 octobre 2015). 5. Dans le cadre de missions bien définies : visites familiales, officielles, journalistiques, scientifiques, éducatives, religieuses, culturelles, humanitaires, professionnelles, etc. 6. L’un des ouvrages conseillés par Jorge Mario Sánchez Egozcue pour un approfondissement sur le processus de négociations Cuba-États-Unis a pour titre Back Channel to Cuba : The Hidden History of Negotiations between Washington and Havana (University of North Carolina Press, 2014) : les auteurs, le professeur de l’École américaine d’affaires publiques William LeoGrande et Peter

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Kornbluh, analyste principal des Archives de sécurité nationale, y utilisent des documents et des entretiens menés avec des négociateurs, des intermédiaires et des décideurs politiques qui ont participé à des séances secrètes de négociation.

AUTEUR

SHIRLEY YOSELIN RODRÍGUEZ PAZ Université de Versailles Saint-Quentin-en-Yvelines/Paris-Saclay

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Colloque annuel de l’Institut des Amériques (IdA) : « Ressources et Innovations dans les Amériques » Université Toulouse Jean-Jaurès, 14-16 octobre 2015

Lucile Bentley et Chloé Monasterolo

1 La treizième édition du colloque annuel de l’Institut des Amériques (IdA) s’est déroulée à l’Université Jean-Jaurès à Toulouse les 14, 15 et 16 octobre 2015. Le thème retenu pour ce colloque était le suivant : Ressources et Innovations dans les Amériques. Se sont donc rassemblés à cette occasion des chercheurs de nationalités et de disciplines très variées s’intéressant aussi bien à l’Amérique latine qu’à l’Amérique du Nord. Cela a permis d’établir à plusieurs reprises des ponts entre les sujets et les notions abordés, et de conceptualiser les Amériques comme source très riche d’innovations de rencontre d’idées. Ce colloque comprenait cinq conférences plénières, deux tables rondes (une table ronde a été consacrée aux 30 ans de l’Institut Pluridisciplinaire pour les Études sur les Amériques à Toulouse (IPEAT), créé en 1985) et trois sessions d’ateliers qui se sont organisées autour de cinq thèmes différents. Les thèmes retenus étaient : 1) exploitation des ressources naturelles et gestion des espaces ; 2) innovations scientifiques et technologiques ; 3) formes de gouvernance ; 4) expressions artistiques et innovations ; 5) recompositions identitaires.

2 Sans proposer un compte rendu exhaustif de ce très riche colloque, nous nous concentrons ici sur les communications qui concernent directement les États-Unis de manière à faire ressortir ce que la perspective transaméricaine dit de l'Amérique du Nord.

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David SAVRAN (City University of New York, États- Unis) : « The Broadway Musical as Global Currency – Les comédies musicales de Broadway comme monnaie d’échange internationale »

3 Dans le cadre du thème n° 4 « Expériences artistiques innovantes et programmes sociaux (théâtre) », M. David Savran, spécialiste d’études théâtrales et arts du spectacle, est intervenu lors de la première table ronde, « Innovations et changements sociaux ». Il s’est intéressé à la mise en scène de la comédie musicale West Side Story à l’Opéra- comique de Berlin, qu’il appelle une déterritorialisation de West Side Story. Même si une part d’identité américaine (au sens large, et non seulement états-unienne) se retrouve au cœur des comédies musicales créées à Broadway, force est de constater qu’elles sont largement exportées. West Side Story est la seule comédie musicale de Broadway à mettre en scène des Portoricains et à utiliser une langue vernaculaire d’Amérique latine. Une autre particularité de cette comédie musicale est qu’elle suscite un débat concernant les immigrés et l’appartenance ethnique : il a souvent été dit que cette comédie musicale véhiculait des stéréotypes raciaux.

4 En 2013, Barrie Kosky, le directeur de l’Opéra-comique de Berlin, a évoqué le souhait de changer la musique et la chorégraphie afin que celles-ci soient plus éloquentes pour un public moderne. Mais comment transposer les problèmes d’immigration mis en avant par les scènes d’affrontement entre gangs ? Kosky ne pense pas qu’une simple transformation des Portoricains (le clan des Sharks) en Turcs et des Américains (le clan des Jets) en Allemands d’extrême droite aurait été la bonne solution. Au contraire, la mise en scène berlinoise se débarrasse du glamour typique de Broadway, laissant une scène vide. Les deux clans rivaux ne se différencient que par des tatouages, c’est-à-dire un élément qui est choisi et non transmis héréditairement. La mise en scène vise ainsi à évacuer les problèmes raciaux présents dans la mise en scène d’origine. Ainsi la question de l’immigration est toujours au cœur de la pièce mais elle est déplacée. On peut parler d’un théâtre « post-migration » qui s’intéresse plus à la traversée des frontières qu’à une question d’identité.

Questions et remarques

5 A la suite de la table ronde, le terme « déterritorialisation » employé par M. Savran a été mis en relation avec le terme « transterritorialité » que ce dernier trouve finalement plus adapté pour sa description du transfert à Berlin de West Side Story. Le public s’est interrogé sur le potentiel progressif de la comédie musicale, lequel a été réaffirmé par M. Savran, notamment grâce au débat autour du théâtre « post- migration ».

6 M. Haesbaert, géographe à l’Universidade Federal Fluminense de Rio de Janeiro, a rappelé le rôle des géographes grâce à une comparaison avec les mondes virtuels. Pour lui, le géographe a les pieds ancrés dans la terre et le territoire (ce qui ne peut être le cas dans les mondes virtuels). Ce qui importe, c’est l’occupation d’un espace tangible. La différence entre territoire et territorialité a été rappelée à cet égard, car pour un territoire il faut une base matérielle.

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Lynne CONNER (Colby College, États-Unis): « Taking Back the Arts: Twenty-First Century Audiences, Participatory Culture and the End of Passive Spectatorship »

7 Invitée pour donner la deuxième conférence plénière du colloque, Lynne Conner, dramaturge, spécialiste en Audience Studies, historienne, théoricienne et professeure en danse et théâtre, a parlé de l’innovation culturelle qu’engendre la culture participative grandissante au XXIème siècle, ainsi que de la réticence des professionnels des arts dits « sérieux » à s’adapter à ces nouveaux publics. Elle a expliqué la part importante que joue ce qu’elle appelle « Arts Talk » dans un écosystème artistique prospère. L’analyse et l’articulation du sens sont fondamentales à l’histoire de la pensée, rappelle-t-elle, et ce sont la discussion et le dialogue qui permettent aux individus de créer du sens et d’évaluer leur expérience. En analysant les pratiques participatives dans la culture sportive américaine, Lynne Conner s’est demandé pourquoi cette culture participative ne s’étend pas à une culture des « arts sérieux ».

8 À l’aide de nombreux documents, Lynne Conner a retracé la façon dont cette tradition occidentale de souveraineté du public, dont la participation était censée faire partie intégrante de l’expérience artistique, s’est perdue à la fin du XIXème siècle lorsque s’est opérée une rupture entre les « arts sérieux » et les autres types de divertissements. S’est ensuivi un processus de ce que Lawrence Levine, dans son étude clé Highbrow/ Lowbrow (Harvard University Press, 1988), qualifie de « sacralisation » de la culture. C’est ce processus qui a façonné les pratiques des spectateurs du XXème siècle, lorsque le respect pour les arts devait se traduire par la révérence silencieuse, et que l’interprétation d’une œuvre était réservée à une personne instruite et de « bon goût ». Discipliner les spectateurs aura eu pour effet de désengager les publics populaires des « arts sérieux » sacralisés.

9 Lynne Conner déplore que la remise en question des valeurs lettrées qu’engendre l’arrivée de valeurs numériques ne s’étende que très peu à l’industrie des « arts sérieux ». Son ouvrage Audience Engagement and the Role of Arts Talk in the Digital Era (Palgrave Macmillan, 2013) vise à promouvoir le « Arts Talk » et à ranimer l’esprit d’engagement chez les amateurs d’ « arts sérieux », qu’elle juge trop ancrés dans le modèle d’un public passif.

Questions et remarques

10 Lors de la série de questions qui a conclu cette conférence, Lynne Conner a répondu à David Savran qu’elle faisait effectivement appel à un nouvel ethos et à une nouvelle communauté de l’art qui seraient plus en accord avec la façon dont on envisageait autrefois la place de l’art au cœur du tissu social. Divers formes et moyens d’engagement du public dans le théâtre contemporain, notamment l’engagement politique, ont alors été abordés. Une personne a, de plus, soulevé la question des réactions parfois extrêmes des spectateurs contemporains face aux tentatives de certains artistes pour les faire participer, et Lynne Conner a attribué cela à un certain conditionnement du public.

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Table ronde n° 2 : Les 30 ans de l’IPEA(L)T

11 À l’occasion des 30 ans de l’institut IPEAT, cette table ronde a permis de faire le point sur l’histoire de cet institut. Sa directrice, depuis 2014, Marie-Agnès Palaisi-Robert, a présenté brièvement l’institut, ses directeurs précédents et ses principaux fondateurs. Elle a présenté les deux revues qui lui sont associées : Caravelle et l’ORDA (l’Ordinaire des Amériques). Françoise Coste, directrice-adjointe de l’IPEAT et responsable des formations, a présenté les formations pluridisciplinaires offertes par l’IPEAT et les Masters proposés (professionnel et recherche). Puis, se sont alternés des entretiens filmés de quatre membres fondateurs de l’IPEAT et des interventions des précédents directeurs.

12 Dans un premier entretien enregistré, Daniel Meyran, professeur émérite de l’Université de Perpignan, a retracé la création à Perpignan de l’institut mexicaniste IEM (Institut d’Études Mexicaines) créé en 1974. Le second entretien enregistré était celui de Romain Gaignard qui a contribué à l’institutionnalisation de ce qui était encore alors l’IPEALT (Institut Pluridisciplinaire pour les Études sur l'Amérique Latine à Toulouse). Dans un troisième entretien, le géographe Claude Bataillon a raconté son parcours depuis ses travaux pour l’IHEAL (Institut des Hautes Études de l'Amérique Latine) à Paris jusqu’à son choix de venir à Toulouse pour s’associer à un rassemblement pluridisciplinaire et y créer un groupe de recherche sur l’Amérique latine.

13 L’écoute de ces entretiens était alternée de prises de parole par d’anciens directeurs et fondateurs de l’IPEA(L)T. En premier, Claude Bataillon a insisté sur le rôle des revues comme outil de recherche et sur le soutien institutionnel nécessaire pour faire vivre un projet de recherche. L’historien Richard Marin, directeur de l’IPEALT de 2000 à 2005, a évoqué les difficultés rencontrées lors de son mandat et les réticences de certains latino-américanistes occasionnées par l’arrivée de la recherche portant sur le monde anglophone. Modesta Suarez, directrice de 2005 à 2010, a décrit le passage de l’IPEALT à l’IPEAT, finalisé en 2010, et tous les débats et changements que cela a entrainés. La création de l’IdA, en 2007, a permis l’émergence et la consolidation de l’IPEAT. Sonia Rose, directrice de l’IPEAT de 2011 à 2014 a décrit les processus d’installation et de transition durant son mandat. Pour conclure, Marie-Agnès Palaisi-Robert a évoqué les changements à venir avec la mise en place d’un double diplôme Erasmus.

Ateliers

14 Lors de trois sessions, ont été menés cinq ateliers parallèles qui proposaient des communications sur les cinq thèmes précédemment évoqués : 1) exploitation des ressources naturelles et gestion des espaces ; 2) innovations scientifiques et technologique ; 3) formes de gouvernance ; 4) expressions artistiques et innovations ; 5) recompositions identitaires. La variété des aires étudiées et la pluridisciplinarité des échanges ont permis des regards croisés sur ces thématiques et ont enrichi les débats menés à la suite des communications. Ce sont au total 58 communicants qui ont abordé ces thèmes sous des angles différents et originaux. Le nombre de communications et leur diversité témoignent de la richesse de ce colloque.

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Conclusion

15 Les ressources et les innovations dans les Amériques ont été soumises à l’évaluation de conférenciers et de communicants spécialistes de domaines aussi variés que la géographie, l’histoire de l’art, le droit, la sociologie, la médecine et la littérature. Ces communicants se sont intéressés à des aires géographiques et culturelles diverses et de différentes échelles (Brésil, Argentine, Caraïbes anglophone, Canada…), à l’image du continent américain, permettant ainsi des regards croisés sur la thématique des ressources et des innovations. S’il ressort que l’Amérique latine est au cœur de problématiques de gestion des ressources, elle n’en reste pas moins une zone d’innovations diverses (sociales, politiques, artistiques…). Les innovations artistiques, sociales et environnementales de l’Amérique du Nord ont également suscité de nombreuses interventions, ce qui témoigne de l’aspect fédérateur du thème retenu pour cette 13ème édition du colloque annuel de l’IdA.

AUTEURS

LUCILE BENTLEY Université Toulouse Jean-Jaurès

CHLOÉ MONASTEROLO Université Toulouse Jean-Jaurès

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Compte-rendu de la journée d’étude « Le travail contraint dans les Amériques avant l’abolition de l’esclavage » Université de Poitiers – 16 octobre 2015

Kalilou Barry

1 Le vendredi 16 octobre 2015 s’est tenue à la Maison des sciences de l’homme et de la société (MSHS) de l’université de Poitiers la journée d’étude « Le travail contraint dans les Amériques avant l’abolition de l’esclavage », organisée par Elodie Peyrol-Kleiber (Université de Poitiers), Lawrence Aje (Université Montpellier 3), Anne-Claire Faucquez (Université Paris II Assas-Panthéon) et le MIMMOC (Mémoires, Identités, Marginalités dans le monde occidental contemporain). Nous en proposons ci-après le compte rendu.

2 Elodie Peyrol-Kleiber a ouvert la journée par un mot de remerciement aux intervenants et aux participants avant d’en présenter brièvement le contexte. Les intervenants étaient appelés à s’interroger sur le travail contraint dans l’espace américain et caribéen (Brésil, Barbade, États-Unis, Guyane) du XVIIe au XIXe siècles à travers un regard critique sur ses processus de codifications juridiques et sur ses pratiques. La journée se structurait en deux parties : la première partie portait sur la thématique « Aux origines du travail contraint » et la seconde s’intitulait « Un travail contraint protéiforme ». Elodie Peyrol-Kleiber a ensuite passé la parole aux intervenants non sans avoir soulevé un premier questionnement : quelles étaient les codifications juridiques de la main-d’œuvre contrainte dans l’espace américain et caribéen du XVIIe au XIXe siècles ?

3 Éric Tuncq (Université de Toulon), le premier intervenant, s’est exprimé sur le travail contraint dans le Brésil hollandais (1624-1654) et sur l’échec du transfert au Brésil du modèle des Provinces Unies. Portugais et espagnol, le Brésil fut colonisé à partir de 1630 par la Compagnie des Indes occidentales chargée d’y instaurer le modèle des Provinces Unies. La Compagnie y maintint cependant un système hérité des structures

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politiques et militaires portugaises qui perpétua la soumission des populations indigènes. La communication d’Éric Tuncq abordait la situation du Brésil hollandais sous deux perspectives différentes : l’analyse de deux textes de Pierre Moreau (dont l’un est une traduction française du texte de Roulox Baro, ambassadeur au Brésil pour le compte de la Compagnie des Indes occidentales en 1647) ; et l’observation des conditions des engagés militaires pour le compte de la Compagnie au Brésil. Éric Tuncq a mis en évidence, dans les textes de Pierre Moreau, le souci du bien public de l’« aristocrate » attesté par son intérêt pour « l’échec de la mise en place d’un système publique dans le Brésil par la Compagnie ». S’agissant des engagés militaires, leur utilité en tant que « rempart contre le risque portugais » entraîna leur exploitation par la Compagnie. En observant la situation du Brésil hollandais sous ces deux angles, Éric Tuncq a donc montré que le travail contraint y surgit à cause de la cupidité et de la crainte de la Compagnie et qu’il ne s’y limita pas exclusivement aux Noirs et aux Indiens.

4 Anne-Claire Faucquez (Université Paris II Assas-Panthéon) a examiné dans son propos l’écart entre la législation et la pratique du travail contraint dans la colonie de New York au XVIIe siècle. D’emblée, elle a mis l’accent sur le fait que le travail contraint n’y était pas considéré comme une forme d’esclavage. Elle a ensuite établi une distinction entre la période de la colonisation néerlandaise, où la servitude et l’esclavage n’étaient pas très développés, et celle de la colonisation britannique, où l’esclavage fut progressivement institué. Cependant, un flou juridique existait sur le statut (serviteur, esclave ou engagé libre) des Noirs sous la domination britannique. Si le besoin de main- d’œuvre dans la colonie de New York rendit l’esclavage très important, l’engagement y existait également. Cependant, note Anne-Claire Faucquez, une distinction s’opérait entre les deux, surtout pour les droits et les condamnations. Cette distinction visait surtout à décourager les « solidarités de classes » entre esclaves et engagés qui coexistaient souvent dans les mêmes demeures. En marge de l’esclavage et de l’engagement, Anne-Claire Faucquez a souligné l’existence d’autres formes de travail contraint dans la colonie de New York. En effet, le « travail orphelin » et le système d’apprentissage des mineurs étaient d’autres formes de travail contraint auxquels avaient recours les colons britanniques.

5 La communication d’Anna Thiemann (Université de Münster, Allemagne) portait sur l’étude des conditions des rebelles anglais déportés comme forçats à la Barbade au XVIIe siècle. En réponse à la rébellion de Monmouth de 1685, le roi Jacques II autorisa l’adoption d’une loi pour « l’importation et la rétention des rebelles anglais dans la colonie de la Barbade » qui, selon certains commentateurs et érudits contemporains (Richard Hall, Hilary Beckles, Don Jordan et Michael Walsh), voyageurs (Richard Ligon) et anciens rebelles déportés (Henry Pittman), contribua à rendre les conditions de vie de ces forçats aussi difficiles, voire pires que celles des esclaves noirs. Cet argument était-il légitime ? Anna Thiemann a abordé cette problématique selon deux perspectives : en examinant les codifications juridiques de la servitude et de l’esclavage, afin de déterminer si les rebelles déportés avaient le même statut juridique que les esclaves noirs ; et en examinant les précédentes expériences similaires de forçats à la Barbade, afin de voir si la loi de 1685 et d’autres facteurs socioculturels et politiques affectèrent l’auto-perception des rebelles anglais déportés. Anna Thiemann a montré qu’il existe une grande différence entre le statut juridique des esclaves et celui des serviteurs volontaires (ou involontaires, dans le cas des rebelles déportés). En effet, les deux lois régissant le traitement des esclaves et des serviteurs, toutes deux adoptées

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par l’Assemblée de la colonie le 27 septembre 1661, comportaient bien des distinctions. La première considérait les esclaves comme des biens, tandis que la seconde considérait les serviteurs comme des « fidèles chrétiens » méritant « une protection spéciale ». La distinction entre esclaves et serviteurs se situait également dans le châtiment des crimes et les modalités de poursuites judiciaires. Quant à la loi britannique de 1685, ce n’était qu’une continuité de la loi de 1661 régissant la servitude. Ainsi, l’idée d’une similarité de traitement et de conditions de vie entre les serviteurs anglais et les esclaves noirs dans la Barbade au XVIIe siècle est sans réel fondement. En conclusion, selon Anna Thiemann, l’analyse des forçats anglais déportés dans la colonie de la Barbade passe par l’examen des codifications juridiques dans la colonie, mais aussi des idéologies culturelles et des développements politiques dans la métropole.

6 Dans la deuxième partie de cette journée d’étude, Lawrence Aje (Université Montpellier 3), Augustin Habran (Université Paris Diderot-Paris 7) et Dennis Lamaison (Université de Guyane) se sont exprimés sur la thématique du « travail contraint protéiforme ». Il s’agissait pour ces trois intervenants de mettre en avant les ambiguïtés et les nuances dans les pratiques et d’explorer la pluralité des formes et acteurs du travail contraint.

7 Lawrence Aje a proposé une étude comparative du statut des travailleurs non-libres de Caroline du Sud entre 1670 et 1865. Son propos portait sur la problématique suivante : y avait-il égalité de statut et similarité de traitement entre les esclaves, les « libres de couleur » et les serviteurs blancs (volontaires ou forcés) ? Selon lui, « la Caroline du Sud était farouchement attachée à l’esclavage » comme le montre le nombre d’esclaves dans la colonie en 1775 (61 % de la population totale). Cependant, l’engagement sous contrat (pour une durée de 7 ans) y existait également et répondait à la politique de peuplement encouragée par la Caroline du Sud dans le but d’accroître sa population et de garantir sa sécurité en cas d’insurrection d’esclaves ou de guerre contre les Indiens. Outre l’esclavage et l’engagement sous contrat, Lawrence Aje a montré l’existence d’autres formes de travail contraint comme le système d’apprentissage, qui engageait les garçons jusqu’à 21 ans et les filles jusqu’à 18 ans ou leur mariage, et le travail forcé des rebelles jacobites obligés de signer des contrats de sept ans. Cependant, il existait entre ces travailleurs une différence de statut et de traitement. Contrairement aux esclaves qui n’avaient aucune possibilité de mobilité sociale, les autres travailleurs étaient considérés comme des « sujets sociaux » susceptibles de s’intégrer socialement. Par ailleurs, les esclaves noirs étaient jugés dans les tribunaux inférieurs, tandis que les serviteurs sous contrat étaient jugés dans les tribunaux supérieurs avec un jury populaire. Ainsi, conclut Lawrence Aje, la différence de statut et de traitements entre les travailleurs contraints en Caroline du Sud s’expliquait par une « hiérarchisation socio-raciale ».

8 L’intervention d’Augustin Habran portait sur les nations amérindiennes et leur évolution, entre 1820 et 1861, d’une société traditionnelle et hybride à une société « esclavagiste ». Augustin Habran s’est interrogé sur la manière dont cette évolution contribua à l’émergence des nations indiennes en tant que force géopolitique majeure à la période de la guerre de Sécession. Au début du XIXe siècle, sous l’impulsion paternaliste du Congrès, les nations indiennes adoptèrent progressivement certaines caractéristiques de la culture américaine. Cependant, la remise en question de leur souveraineté par Andrew Jackson à partir de 1820 conduisit à leur déportation vers l’Ouest. Les « nations civilisées » y adoptèrent les valeurs de leurs voisins du Sud, ce qui créa un lien idéologique fort entre eux. Ainsi, les élites des nations se lancèrent dans

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l’agriculture et l’esclavage des Noirs dans une dynamique de « mimétisme volontaire », adaptation volontaire des Amérindiens pour le maintien de leur souveraineté. Cependant, souligne Augustin Habran, attachées à leurs identités respectives, les nations indiennes pratiquaient différemment l’esclavage, ce qui devint une source constante de conflits entre elles. Partagées désormais entre la résistance par acculturation et l’abolitionnisme, elles devinrent, à la veille de la guerre de Sécession, une force géopolitique importante qui se situait « politiquement à l’intérieur des États- Unis et géographiquement à l’extérieur ».

9 Quant à Dennis Lamaison, le dernier intervenant de cette journée, sa communication a porté sur l’histoire des premiers engagés chinois dans la Guyane française (1820-1835) vue sous l’angle des ambiguïtés dans leur statut juridique. Après qu’en 1817 la colonie guyanaise fut restituée à la France au terme de neuf ans d’occupation portugaise, ses administrateurs successifs entreprirent sa mise en valeur au bénéfice de la France. Cependant, en plus d’une présence très faible de colons, la population servile de la Guyane n’avoisinait que 15 000 individus, ce qui rendait son exploitation très difficile. Dès lors, la préoccupation majeure des administrateurs fut de remédier à ce déficit de peuplement. Mais la traite des Noirs, canal traditionnel d’introduction de main- d’œuvre servile, ayant été interdite par le gouvernement de la Restauration depuis 1818, les administrateurs virent dans les Chinois une alternative pour redynamiser la colonie. Cette décision répondit à la fois au souci de peuplement de la colonie et à la politique de production de thé, commerce sûr à l’époque. En 1818, l’expédition de Java et de Chine prit la mer, avec pour objectif le recrutement de 200 Chinois en vue de leur installation à Cayenne. Cependant celle-ci fut un échec puisqu’en 1820, seul 27 Chinois et un Malais, engagés sous contrat avec des promesses d’être propriétaires, débarquèrent à Cayenne. Ces engagés furent pourtant réduits en esclavage dès leur arrivée dans la colonie. Dès 1821, la plupart perdirent la vie à cause des conditions de vie déplorables et ce ne fut qu’en 1833 que les quelques survivants furent rapatriés en Chine. En s’intéressant aux premiers engagés chinois en Guyane, Denis Lamaison a mis en perspective l’écart entre le contrat et la pratique du travail engagé dans la société coloniale guyanaise du XXe siècle.

10 Les problématiques soulevées par les intervenants tout au long de débats très enrichissants questionnent fondamentalement nos conceptions traditionnalistes de l’esclavage et du travail contraint : l’esclavage se définit-il au singulier ou au pluriel ? Les différentes formes de travail contraint entrent-elles dans le cadre de la définition de l’esclavage ? L’esclavage est-il seulement racial ? C’est sur ces interrogations et sur l’évocation des différentes formes d’émancipation qui feront l’objet d’une prochaine journée d’étude que la journée s’est clôturée.

AUTEUR

KALILOU BARRY Université de Poitiers

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Atelier-conférence : Smaro Kamboureli « From CanLit to Canlits : The Re-formation of a Discipline » Université Sorbonne Nouvelle – Paris 3, 17 novembre 2015

Samuel Harvet

1 Cette première séance de l’année du séminaire « Les discours de la mondialisation », organisé par Christine Lorre-Johnston à l’université Sorbonne Nouvelle-Paris 3, a accueilli la professeure Smaro Kamboureli, Avie Bennett Chair in Canadian Literature à l’université de Toronto. Smaro Kamboureli est une spécialiste de littérature canadienne et de théorie critique contemporaine. Elle a rendu compte des recherches qu’elle mène depuis une quinzaine d’années sur l’épistémologie de la littérature canadienne contemporaine. Ces recherches s’inscrivent dans le cadre du TransCanada project, qui a donné lieu à trois grands colloques depuis son lancement, et à la publication de deux volumes de contributions (Kamboureli et Zacharias, 2012 ; Kamboureli et Verduyn, 2014). Le 4ème colloque aura lieu à Toronto en 2017, à l’occasion des 150 ans de l’État canadien, avec notamment pour invitée l’écrivaine Larissa Lai.

Déconstruire « la littérature canadienne »

2 Les recherches de Smaro Kamboureli s’insèrent dans la perspective d’une approche transnationale de la littérature canadienne, qui entend dépasser le modèle théorique du multiculturalisme, dont on connaît au Canada l’influence théorique, sociale et politique. Il s’agit pour Kamboureli d’envisager une voie féconde pour dépasser ce modèle, qui a constitué un précieux paradigme pour penser l’intégration pacifiée des composantes très diverses de la société, mais qui s’est transformé, en s’institutionnalisant, en un quasi obstacle épistémologique pour renouveler l’appréhension des diverses tendances de la littérature canadienne, tout

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particulièrement des écritures migrantes et autochtones. La redécouverte de ces écritures implique ainsi une déconstruction de la littérature canadienne comme discours disciplinaire (Foucault, 1970), des partitions entre le dedans et le dehors de la discipline, et de la manière dont elle a pu être instrumentalisée par l’État-nation comme symbole d’une société unifiée. Ce geste critique ouvre deux perspectives, socio- culturelle et épistémologique : c’est, d’une part, la définition même de l’État-nation canadien qui est mise en cause, notamment à travers la réinsertion des littératures autochtones au sein de « CanLits » pluralisées. D’autre part, une telle démarche interroge le rôle du chercheur littéraire et la part d’engagement de son travail, qui vise notamment à interroger l’inconscient politique du champ littéraire canadien tel qu’il s’est constitué (Kamboureli, 2012, p. 17). À l’horizon, il s’agit de donner à lire la littérature canadienne comme une dynamique en plein essor, plutôt que comme un corpus homogène bien balisé.

Faire face aux évolutions des humanités

3 Le champ de recherches ouvert par le TransCanada project s’insère en effet dans le tournant éthique amorcé dans les cultural studies nord-américaines depuis la fin des années 1980, à partir notamment des travaux de Paul Ricœur, Martha Nussbaum et Richard Rorty (Garber, Hanssen et Walkowitz, 2000). Ce tournant peut être interprété comme une réponse possible des humanités à la mise en question de leur valeur sociale. En rupture avec l’éthique de la lecture prônée par un poststructuraliste tel que J. Hillis Miller, Smaro Kamboureli insiste toutefois sur le caractère plus global que doit adopter une telle approche, en amont comme en aval du moment herméneutique proprement dit, à travers notamment le choix du sujet, du style pour en parler, ou bien des modes de diffusion des résultats de recherche. Elle rejette ainsi une vision dominante d’après elle, dans la pensée néolibérale, selon laquelle le rôle de l’université se limite à être un forum d’expression des différences et des discriminations, ce qui tend à désamorcer son potentiel de déstabilisation de l’ordre social.

4 Le TransCanada project interroge la notion de collaboration au sein des sciences humaines qui ne peut, selon Kamboureli, se contenter d’importer un modèle méthodologique hérité des sciences sociales, mais nécessite une refonte de ses méthodes et de ses critères d’évaluation. Dans le sillage d’une série d’essais qu’elle a consacrés à ces questions, Kamboureli souligne les risques cachés qu’a entraînés la promotion de l’interdisciplinarité, en tendant à privilégier une vision quantifiable et appliquée du savoir, inappropriée au champ des études littéraires (Kamboureli et Coleman, 2011).

« Different, but the same »

5 Smaro Kamboureli présente ensuite l’actualité du TransCanada project, centrée sur la notion de parenté (kinship), comprise non dans son sens généalogique, mais comme un trope qui permet de relier les voix autochtones et celles qui sont mieux représentées de la littérature canadienne. Travailler sur une telle notion soulève des enjeux à la fois méthodologiques et politiques : il s’agit de trouver un moyen de dialoguer avec les cultures autochtones sans les folkloriser ni essentialiser les différences interculturelles. La notion de parenté ainsi redéfinie peut fournir un outil conceptuel puissant pour

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identifier, hors du prisme du « Même » et de l’ « Autre », les points de contact entre communautés culturelles, d’où peuvent surgir des espaces de parole. C’est avant tout un instrument à vocation heuristique : il ne s’agit pas véritablement d’œuvrer à un rapprochement des communautés. Kamboureli rapproche cette démarche de celle de la Commission Vérité et Réconciliation, dont la composition était mixte entre Canadiens d’origine autochtone et immigrée.

6 Smaro Kamboureli a conclu sa communication en présentant sa récente collaboration avec l’écrivaine autochtone, membre de la nation stó :lō, Lee Maracle, dont elle a édité les discours (oratories) dans le livre Memory Serves (Maracle, 2015). Ce recueil de traces orales translittérées par Lee Maracle porte les marques d’une certaine hybridation de la langue anglaise par le rythme et le lexique hérités des langues autochtones. La conférencière note que Lee Maracle est moins l’auteure de ses contes que leur interprète : elle les a traduits à sa manière, fidèle à l’esprit plutôt qu’à la lettre d’un corpus oral non stabilisé. Maracle a recontextualisé ces histoires dans une adaptation créative, en accomplissant un véritable travail de remédiation qui pallie les chaînons manquants de la culture orale autochtone. Fruit d’une collaboration de plus de sept ans entre l’auteure et son éditrice, ce travail incarne l’engagement éthique du chercheur qui met en jeu sa responsabilité dans la transmission d’une parole minorée.

7 Une première question de l’assistance a porté sur le lien que tisse l’individu avec sa parenté : peut-on définir une personne canadienne comme autochtone ou non, en dehors de critères phylogénétiques ? Peut-on choisir sa parenté ? Smaro Kamboureli a répondu en rappelant que si les liens de sang ne sont généralement pas pris en compte au Canada pour définir la condition d’autochtone (à l’exception de la tribu des Mohawk après la crise d’Oka), les anthropologues montrent bien comment l’appartenance ethnique reste un critère d’affiliation identitaire de premier ordre dans tout groupe social.

8 Pour plus d’informations sur le séminaire, vous pouvez consulter la page suivante : http://www.thalim.cnrs.fr/seminaires-et-formations/article/les-discours-de-la- globalisation?id_evenement=2483&lang=fr#evenement_2483

BIBLIOGRAPHIE

FOUCAULT, Michel, L’ordre du discours, Paris, Seuil, 1970.

GARBER, Marjorie, Beatrice HANSSEN et WALKOWITZ Rebecca (dir.), The Turn to Ethics, Londres, Routledge, 2000.

KAMBOURELI, Smaro et Robert ZACHARIAS (dir.), Shifting the Ground of Canadian Literary Studies, Waterloo, Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2012.

KAMBOURELI, Smaro et Christl VERDUYN (dir.), Critical Collaborations: Indigeneity, Diaspora, and Ecology in Canadian Literary Studies, Waterloo, Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2014.

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KAMBOURELI, Smaro et Daniel COLEMAN (dir.), Retooling the Humanities: The Culture of Research in Canadian Universities, Edmonton, University of Alberta Press, 2011.

MARACLE, Lee, Memory Serves, textes réunis par Smaro Kamboureli, Edmonton, NeWest Press, 2015.

AUTEUR

SAMUEL HARVET THALIM, Université Sorbonne Nouvelle – Paris 3

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Journée d’Étude : « Le récit d’esclave, publications récentes et perspectives » Université Paris 13 – 27 novembre 2015

Josette Spartacus

1 La journée d’étude « le récit d’esclave, publications récentes et perspectives » s’est tenue le 27 novembre 2015 à l’Université Paris 13. Elle était organisée par Claire Parfait (Université Paris 13), Marie-Jeanne Rossignol (Université Paris-Diderot), Hélène Le Dantec-Lowry (Université Sorbonne Nouvelle), Claire Bourhis-Mariotti (Université Paris 8), Matthieu Renault (Université Paris 8) et Rahma Jerad (Université de Carthage). Les communications ont toutes eu pour point d’ancrage les problèmes spécifiques liés à la publication des récits d’esclaves que ce soit au XIXème siècle au XXème siècle ou au XXIème siècle. Trois grands axes ont été abordés de manière croisée : 1) la réception de ce type d’ouvrages au XIXème siècle ou au XXème siècle et plus tard ; 2) leur circulation, y compris via des traductions ; 3) le récit d’esclave a enfin été envisagé comme document plutôt que comme œuvre littéraire. Cette perspective ouvre le champ à des recherches originales et a donné lieu à la publication en 2014 d’un numéro spécial de la Revue du Philanthrope, « Écrire sur l’Esclavage » (La Revue du Philanthrope, 5, 2014).

2 Michael Winship (Université du Texas à Austin) a ouvert cette journée avec une communication intitulée « The Penalty in Alabama is Death! For selling My Bondage and My Freedom ». Il a révélé les enjeux de la vente de l’ouvrage de Frederick Douglass My Bondage and My Freedom dans le Sud des États-Unis autour de 1855, où la librairie de William Strickland à Mobile, Alabama, a été le théâtre d’une importante controverse. William Strickland vend l’un de ses deux exemplaires du livre de Frederick Douglass qu’il a disposés dans sa boutique. Il a par ailleurs dans son arrière-boutique 50 exemplaires d’Uncle Tom’s Cabin. À cette époque, la majeure partie des livres était stockée dans l’arrière-boutique, rangés non pas par ordre alphabétique d’auteur, mais par maison d’édition. En effet, les éditeurs envoyaient systématiquement des exemplaires des nouvelles parutions aux librairies dont ils connaissaient l’existence, à charge pour les libraires de renvoyer les exemplaires indésirables ou invendus. Le seul

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acheteur de l’ouvrage de Douglass dans cette ville du Sud estime qu’il a des doutes flagrants sur la moralité du vendeur, Strickland, mais aussi que le livre de Douglass est un dangereux brûlot qui pourrait provoquer une guerre civile. Les enjeux sont politiques et sociétaux avant tout. Il saisit la justice qui fait une perquisition. Les 50 exemplaires sont découverts. Le lendemain une foule se forme. Une corde est préparée pour le lynchage de Strickland et de son associé. Cette sentence populaire est cependant reportée. Strickland et son associé disparaissent pendant la nuit fuyant vers New York. Il faut souligner que Strickland fut condamné non pas seulement pour avoir vendu le livre de Douglass, mais surtout, circonstance aggravante, pour avoir eu en sa possession ces fameux 50 exemplaires de Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Cette affaire qui nous éclaire sur les modes de circulation de la littérature abolitionniste et sur sa réception dans le Sud fut largement diffusée dans les journaux de l’époque du Nord au Sud des États-Unis.

3 Michaël Roy (Université Paris 13) a exploré les circonstances de publication des récits d’esclaves américains et leur diffusion dans sa communication « "A Book by a Bondman!": Le récit d’esclave au prisme de l’histoire du livre ». Contrairement à ce qui se passe aujourd’hui, les formats n’étaient pas standardisés, le corpus de l’historien est donc hétérogène. Michaël Roy relève cependant trois types de dispositifs éditoriaux. Le premier est un dispositif artisanal, le second est lié au mouvement contre l’esclavage et le dernier est un dispositif commercial. Le résultat est que les récits d’esclaves ont eu des histoires éditoriales complexes, hétérogènes et bien souvent assujetties à des stratégies individuelles. L’exemple d’Harriet Jacobs et des époux Craft illustre ce propos : il s’écoule en effet 10 ans avant que le récit de Jacobs ne paraisse avec un tirage de 1 000 exemplaires. Quant au récit de William et Ellen Craft, il est publié à Londres, non aux USA, mais il est évoqué au cours de conférences, dans la presse, illustré dans des almanachs etc. Ainsi ce récit doit sa popularité aux commentaires qui l’ont entouré plutôt qu’à l’ouvrage lui-même. Michaël Roy rend centrale une notion fondamentale du récit d’esclave qui est son intermédialité. L’appellation « récit d’esclave » communément utilisée aujourd’hui se révèle être un concept relativement récent. Au fond, il s’agit de prendre conscience qu’au XIXème siècle, l’objet livre n’était pas nécessairement la meilleure façon de faire circuler le récit d’esclave. Celui-ci était par exemple relayé lors des conférences abolitionnistes, dans la presse, dans les correspondances privées des abolitionnistes etc. La version publiée de chaque récit était donc parfois marginale, mais le récit en lui-même était présent sous d’autres formes, le plus souvent orales.

4 Ces réflexions trouvent leur prolongement dans les communications de Matthieu Renault (Université Paris 8) et de Yohanna Alimi (Université Paris Diderot). Matthieu Renault (« Slave Narratives / récits d’esclaves : histoire(s) de traduction ») s’est intéressé aux phénomènes théorique, scientifique et politique des traductions de récits d’esclaves, et a analysé la façon dont ces récits s’inséraient dans des mécanismes d’oppression et de résistance. Matthieu Renault note qu’il n’y a pas eu de véritable rencontre entre les abolitionnistes français et les abolitionnistes américains, et il souligne la rareté des traductions. Il faudra attendre les années 1970, puis la fin les années 1990 avec le travail d’éditeurs indépendants et militants et de maisons d’éditions universitaires, pour que d’autres traductions soient publiées. Ainsi, ces récits d’esclave apparaissent aujourd’hui comme un exemple paradigmatique des luttes, des combats et des recherches qui peuvent trouver un ancrage nouveau au XXIème siècle.

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5 La communication de Yohana Alimi (Université Paris-Diderot) se concentre sur le décalage spatio-temporel entre les USA et la France qui a empêché ces deux pays d’organiser un véritable mouvement anti-esclavagiste commun, en dépit des récits d’esclaves qui circulaient déjà en France grâce aux traductions et en dépit de leur histoire révolutionnaire commune. Les États- Unis, entre 1830 et 1840, sont en effet en pleine expansion territoriale. Des territoires situés à l’ouest du Texas sont annexés à la suite de la guerre mexicano-américaine (1846-1848). Se pose alors la question essentielle de savoir si l’on doit étendre l’esclavage sur ces territoires. Les débats entre William Lloyd Garrison, Theodore Wright et Lewis Tappan, relayés par les partis politiques en présence, font voler en éclat le bipartisme. Le Free Soil Party émerge, qui érige le principe d’un homme libre sur une terre libre. Nous sommes en 1848 et la France vient d’abolir l’esclavage sur ses territoires. Elle a libéré 250 000 esclaves. Les États-Unis devront en libérer 4 millions deux décennies plus tard. Yohanna Alimi ancre sa lecture de tous ces phénomènes dans l’héritage des Lumières : ainsi Mrs. Chapman, américaine, déménage à Paris en 1848 et entretient un salon où le Duc de Broglie, Lamartine et Schœlcher, entre autres, viennent débattre. Nul doute que cette inter- connectivité entre les États-Unis et la France a permis la circulation des idées religieuses, laïques, sociétales, politiques, humaines, littéraires et philosophiques. La liaison tactique entre les abolitionnistes américains et français n’a cependant pas pu avoir lieu précisément à cause de ce décalage spatial, temporel, philosophique et historique entre les deux pays.

6 La matinée se termine par les commentaires d’Éric Mesnard (Université Paris-Est Créteil) sur les communications, suivis d’une intervention d’Éric Saunier (Université du Havre). Ce dernier dirige en effet la Revue du Philanthrope, projet né de l’absence de mise en perspective de la traite normande. Cette revue propose des numéros en collaboration avec des historiens, des civilisationnistes et des sociologues. Les PURH (Publications des Universités de Rouen et du Havre), qui publient cette revue, ont par ailleurs récemment créé une collection « Récits d’esclaves », présentée ensuite par Claire Parfait (Université Paris 13) et Marie-Jeanne Rossignol (Université Paris-Diderot), qui la codirigent. Cette collection permet aux récits d’esclaves américains d’être mieux connus du public français (comme d’ailleurs le numéro 5 de la Revue du Philanthrope (2014), qui propose de nouvelles perspectives sur les récits d’esclaves). A ce jour, sont déjà parus dans cette collection : Le récit de William Wells Brown, esclave fugitif, écrit par lui-même (Traduction, introduction et notes de Claire Parfait et Marie-Jeanne Rossignol, 2012) et Maîtres accusés, esclaves accusateurs, le procès Gosset et Vivié (Martinique, 1848) de Caroline Oudin-Bastide (2015). D’autres publications sont prévues dans cette collection en 2016 (Sojourner Truth et Henry Bibb), en 2017 (Le récit des époux Craft, celui d’Isaac Mason) et, en 2018, (Moses Roper et Josiah Henson). Cette collection s’inscrit en fait dans un mouvement de redécouverte des voix d’esclaves. Parmi les publications récentes sur la question, l’on peut citer par exemple le dossier « Histoires d’esclaves », dirigé par Nathalie Dessens et Jean-Pierre Le Glaunec (Transatlantica 2-2012), l’ouvrage de Dominique Rogers Voix d’esclaves (éditions Karthala, 2015) et les travaux du CIRESC (Centre international de recherches sur l’esclavage).

7 L’après-midi est consacrée à une table ronde sur les traductions en cours des récits d’esclaves. Après une présentation de l’ouvrage Maîtres accusés, esclaves accusateurs, le procès Gosset et Vivié (Martinique, 1848) par son auteure, Caroline Oudin-Bastide, la journée se termine par une série d’interventions sur les récits destinés à être publiés

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dans la collection « Récits d’esclaves » (voir plus haut). Claudine Raynaud (Université Paul-Valéry, Montpellier), Sandrine Ferré-Rode (Université de Versailles Saint-Quentin en Yvelines) et Claire Bourhis-Mariotti (Université Paris 8) ouvrent des perspectives à la fois de recherche et de travail éditorial.

BIBLIOGRAPHIE

BIBB, Henry, The Narrative of the Life and Adventures of Henry Bibb, an American Slave, Written by Himself, New York, The Author, 1849.

BROWN, William Wells, Le récit de William Wells Brown, esclave fugitif, écrit par lui-même, traduction, introduction et notes de Claire Parfait et Marie-Jeanne Rossignol, Rouen et Le Havre, Presses universitaires de Rouen et du Havre, 2015.

CRAFT, William et Ellen, Running a Thousand Miles for Freedom; or the Escape of William and Ellen Craft from Slavery, Londres, William Tweedie, 1860.

DOUGLASS, Frederick, My Bondage and My Freedom, New York, Orton and Mulligan, 1855.

JACOBS, Harriet, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Written by Herself, Boston, The Author, 1861.

OUDIN-BASTIDE, Caroline, Maîtres accusés, esclaves accusateurs, les procès Gosset et Vivié (Martinique, 1848), Rouen et Le Havre, Presses universitaires de Rouen et du Havre, 2015.

PARFAIT, Claire, Éric SAUNIER et Marie-Jeanne ROSSIGNOL (dir.), « Écrire sur l’esclavage », Revue du Philanthrope, 5, 2014.

STOWE, Harriet Beecher, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Boston, John P. Jewett, 1852.

TRUTH, Sojourner, Narrative of Sojourner Truth, a Northern Slave, Boston, The Author, 1850.

AUTEUR

JOSETTE SPARTACUS Lycée Les Pierres Vives, Carrières sur Seine

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Actualités de la recherche

Arts et littérature

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Symposium “Photo Archives V: The Paradigm of Objectivity” The Getty Center & The Huntington, Los Angeles / San Marino, February 25-26, 2016

Carolin Görgen

1 Given the fairly recent material and digital “turns” in our discipline, photo historians are increasingly confronted with the question of how and where to preserve, appreciate, and disseminate our primary sources in the most efficient way. Starting in 2009, the conference cycle “Photo Archives” has addressed these and other interdisciplinary questions in a series of symposia, the fifth of which was organized in Los Angeles at the Getty Center and The Huntington on February 25 and 26, 2016. Sponsored by these two institutions as well as the Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florence, Italy, the organizers Anne Blecksmith (The Huntington), Costanza Caraffa (Kunsthistorisches Institut Florenz–Max-Planck-Institut), and Tracey Schuster (Getty Research Institute) brought together a considerable number of renowned scholars to discuss the “promise” of the archive in its material and digital forms. After various preceding symposia on the function of photo archives in art history and in the shaping of national discourses,1 this two-day conference examined the paradigm of objectivity which has been attributed to both the photographic medium and the archive, and has dominated discourses on the two from the mid-XIXth century onward. In a time when the future is widely advertised as digital, we need to re-evaluate the function and uses of photographs in the archives and ask ourselves what their materiality means to us. Considering the actors involved in the process of archiving, the agency of the archive is just as undeniable and urgent a matter to confront as the agency of the photographers themselves.

2 Given the variety of thought-provoking sessions, it goes without saying that there was no clear-cut judgment on whether or not to embrace the digital. The question was articulated more subtly through a series of heated debates examining which aspects of the photograph’s materiality are vital, I daresay indispensable, to our research. The sheer variety of subjective (and valid) viewpoints on how to allow the visual potential of images to unfold in the purest, most transparent way made the paradigm of

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objectivity appear redundant right from the start. Even though objectivity might be a perfectly legitimate––perhaps even noble––goal for academic research, it is not a helpful concept when confronting a medium which, by its very nature, is not objective. Given the historically-charged conceptualization of both the photographic medium as “truthful” and the archive as “guardian of memory,” we need to move beyond these conceptual layers and get to the core of these overlapping discourses on the medium and its storage locations. As recently suggested by scholars such as Costanza Caraffa and Elizabeth Edwards, there is a need to acknowledge and to embrace the subjectivity of photographs and their preservation contexts as they allow us to re-approach them as autonomous “objects that exist in time and space” (Caraffa, 2015, vii) rather than mere visual representations on a material or digital support. Concentrating on exactly these temporal and spatial dimensions, the participants set out in four debating sessions to retrace the cultural, socio-political, and disciplinary repercussions of this new contextualization. These discussions sought to shed a new light on photographic and archival practices, the intersections of private and public memory, and more importantly, never failed to connect them to the concrete challenges posed by our digital age.

“Photographic Objectivity?”

3 The first session, entitled “Photographic Objectivity?” (with a question mark), was inaugurated by the Canadian historian Joan M. Schwartz (Queen’s University, Ontario) who was quick to point out the “shared vocabularies” of photography and archives as representing “facts” and being “mirrors” of memories. Mastering the deeper lexical meanings of these vocabularies, Joan M. Schwartz stimulated the participants to question these outdated concepts. Because mirrors verge on magic, illusion, and fragility, shouldn’t they be handled with care? Joan M. Schwartz stressed the persistence of this terminology even beyond the postmodernist attempt to destabilize concepts such as “objectivity” and “neutrality.” Continuing in the same linguistic vein, Schwartz proposed to re-think the paradigm of objectivity in lexical terms: rather than qualifying photos and archives as being objective, we should switch from the adjective to the noun and consider them as having objectives––which is synonymous with goal, aim, aspiration, and desire. This useful shift in perspective allows us to discern more clearly how a canon is constructed through the archives and which actors are involved. As the burdensome “objective” paradigm has transcended the analog-digital divide, its roots need to be traced in order for us to deduce the discourses around such repositories of memory.

4 This theoretical basis set by Joan M. Schwartz connected seamlessly with the next paper by the art historian Hilary Macartney (University of Glasgow) whose case study on the photographic reproduction and digitization of Spanish art works revealed the practical dimension of some of Schwartz’s earlier suggestions. Hilary Macartney reminded the public of the recurring criticism concerning visual reproduction, for example in Goya’s XVIIIth–century etchings which were reproductions of Velazquez’s work but in fact came to be considered as art works in their own right. Goya, by re- interpreting the oil paintings in his etchings, through a different medium, sought the essence of the work. Today’s digitization projects confront the same logic, especially in the case of the 1848 publication Talbotype Illustrations to the Annals of the Artists of Spain,

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on which Hilary Macartney currently works. In this case, an attempt was made to digitally reproduce the album by creating an “ideal facsimile” which would combine the best surviving copies of this rare book. The idea is here to assemble the best material remnants of various albums for digitally reconstructing the images as a coherent sequence. The album would then exist anew, yet in a digital form which is inherently different from any of the remaining material copies. Participants were then right to ask––“Do we know what we look at?” when confronted with this digital version. This project certainly reveals a positive interpretation of the digital which seeks to tap its full potential by creating something new from the material remains––a hybrid digital object with its very own esthetics. This case study not only showed that the intrinsic reproducibility of images had been an issue long before Walter Benjamin and stretches out into our times, but it also helped the public to grasp the long-lived concern with “objectivity” in the reproduction process, be it through etchings, photographs, or digital images.

5 This paper was followed by a series of interdisciplinary questions revealed by Melissa Renn’s (Harvard Business School) presentation which explored the idea of a “truthful” representation of World War II in Life magazine. In the early 1940s, Life hired several painters as “war artist correspondents” who were to depict scenes of the front on canvas. As camera work on site was partly restricted, the painters’ work was strongly endorsed due to its intensity and vividness. However strange it may sound to us as hyper-connected XXIst-century viewers, painting was championed over photography here, as it would, again, reveal the essence of the scenery. By omitting unimportant details and benefitting from a complete color palette, the painters’ coverage was believed to capture the momentum of specific scenes more intensely. Highly aware of photography’s subjectivity, Life’s editors pursued a multifaceted “graphic approach” which would offer their viewers a vast array of visual coverage. Here, the creation of a “visual reality” is not necessarily motivated by a technical medium but rather by the belief in the sensory experience of the picture-maker. Acknowledging the various channels of visual depiction as truth-telling, Life allowed for a full-fledged subjective experience to unfold on their magazine pages.

6 Given the variety of discourses evolving around pictorial truthfulness and reproduction, this first session allowed the public to consider the paradigm of objectivity in its historical dimension. Retracing the diverse forms and processes of reproduction, it becomes clear that the crux of the matter is here to stay: Whether they be etchings, paintings, or digital images, these visual sources are most often shown to us in their representational function, i.e. from an essentialist perspective. The way we approach these sources today is informed by our access to them––in a library or on a digital platform. Even if the digital is capable of creating something new from the remaining scratches, participants agreed that our sensory experience of the source still differs tremendously from the original: flipping through the color reproductions on the pages of Life magazine is not the same as clicking through Google Books on your laptop. And yet, the essence of what we seek––the representation of an object, an event—is nonetheless transmitted.

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Using Photographs

7 These historical explorations provided food for thought for the second session entitled “Using Photographs.” Drawing on a long-term academic project based exclusively on digital images from, among others, the Library of Congress, historian Paul Conway (University of Michigan) sought to highlight the largely underestimated benefits of this digital material. He proposed three forms of academic research (landscaping, storytelling, and discovering) which, by relying on digital source material, would allow to uncover new connections concerning the socio-cultural and geo-temporal frameworks, emotional associations, and hitherto undiscovered details of images. Focusing on the latter aspect, Paul Conway emphasized the discoveries made thanks to digitization through which under-appreciated details come to the fore. More importantly, the digital functions as a booster of the original as it allows the intrinsic quality of the source to unfold. Here, Conway embraced W.J.T. Mitchell’s idea of images as having a meaning in time and space and thereby transcending the status of the picture object.2 A digital image would then be remediated through the screen and gain a quality of its own. In acknowledging that the digital is different from the original, we move beyond the representational paradigm discussed in the previous session. Digital images are not mere copies of something––they are new sources which need to be examined as such, including all the data and meta-data they provide us with. In order to unlock the full potential of such research, however, it would be necessary that digital images be available in their best quality, including all the necessary features. Appealing to public institutions, Paul Conway underlined the necessity of available images in archives to be made accessible digitally. Only under these admittedly idealized conditions, the representational status of digital images could be transformed into a more valuable, autonomous source.

8 This presentation was followed by a more critical paper by art historian Glenn Willumson (University of Florida). Taking photographic campaigns of architecture for art-historical research as a point of departure, Glenn Willumson exposed the enduring belief in the neutrality of photographic reproductions, especially in the form of mathematically calculated, accumulated masses of images. The sheer amount of photographs from all kinds of perspectives would create a neutral distance to the object on which the researcher could rely. Yet, having conducted research with such sources himself, Glenn Willumson was quick to discover the shortcomings of this objectifying approach. In attempting to neutralize the visual experience of an architectural site (for example by systematically photographing its facade), these series of images would alter the personal viewing experience and thereby disconnect the images from their “object biographies.” In other words, the images hide the subjectivity of the site they depict––a subjectivity which cannot be denied. Such calculated, “neutral” series of images would thereby “stage” their content and function. In this, we need to consider the role of the researcher himself whose motivations may lead to new performances of archival material. Therefore, Glenn Willumson stressed the necessity to embrace the inherent subjectivity of images and benefit from these object biographies. Considering his insistence on the work on site, Glenn Willumson was more reluctant to praise the digital in the same way as the previous speaker had done. His focus was clearly set on the contextual and the cognitive experience of the source material in their original storage location in order to

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fully disentangle their functions––as research objects, physical objects, and objects of history at large. The viewer and his individual reception play an equal part in this process.

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10 In this second panel, the Benjaminian “aura” loomed large, especially when the ambivalence of the digitization process was confronted. In a positive stance, we may see the digital as more than a mere copy and thereby embrace its technological possibilities; and yet we should be alert when divorcing the material object from its original context. The replacement function of photographs is remarkable here in its recurrence: photographs were used as surrogates for art historical objects in the archives of the XIXth and well into the XXth century, while today, the screen serves as surrogate for photographs as objects of historical studies. Perhaps we simply need to re-consider the projection surface for our research––be it on photo paper or in a grid of pixels. In the subsequent debate, Paul Conway re-iterated that the move from analog to digital is challenging exactly because of our expectations of the referent to represent. In abandoning the delegate, stand-in function of digital images and shaking off the fear of obsolescence, we may truly be able to discover something new. In this process, the speakers agreed––or at least hoped to consent––that the digital will not make the original redundant. Rather than labeling the digital as a threat to the material object’s existence, it may simply be considered an extension, an enrichment.

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Series and Archives

12 After the first day’s debates at the Getty Museum on the expected functions and the practical uses of photographs and their storage, the second day at the Huntington Library in San Marino, east of Los Angeles, centered on the involvement of the public. The symposium was inaugurated by Huntington curator Jennifer Watts who, hinting at the irony of the location, asked how we could possibly discuss objectivity under the roof of an institution founded by robber baron Collis P. Huntington. Acknowledging, still, Huntington’s deep interest in photography and stressing the importance of the photographic collection in this very location, the public found the time to familiarize themselves with its rich offerings throughout the day.

13 The participants of the morning session entitled “Series and Archives” examined the popular reach of reproduced photographs, especially in the form of albums, in the late XIXth and early XXth centuries. Starting just like the day before with an art-historical case study, the art historian Friederike Maria Kitschen (Gerda Henkel Stiftung) examined a series of popular gallery albums published by the editor Gustav Schauer between the 1860s and the 1890s. Inspired by the idea of a “museum at home,” Schauer had sensed the unquenchable thirst for graphic reproductions of art works by an increasingly cultivated and educated public and seized the occasion to “bring all the museums of the world into the hands of the working man.” His series included photographic reproductions in rigidly designed albums, focusing on “old masters” and famous European art galleries. What is striking about this visual approach is not only the belief in photography as the most apt medium to reach a larger public (thanks to its fairly economical reproduction) but also the formation of an art-historical canon through these publications. Serving the art-historical scholar and the layman alike,

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such albums instilled the public with a visual understanding of which genres and schools were to be considered “masterpieces.” The function of photography as a fairly new and certainly not uncontested medium is especially noteworthy in this process of art-historical canonization.

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15 Given the public reach of photographic reproductions, the second paper by art historian and curator Casey Riley continued chronologically in the same vein by examining Isabella Stewart Gardner’s museum in Boston, which opened to the public in 1903 showcasing her vast personal collection of fine and decorative arts from Europe, the Middle East, Asia, and the United States. In a total of eighteen gallery spaces on three stories and a central courtyard, the multitude of works was exhibited in the arrangement of an enjoyable “visual tumult.” In this setting, the photographs of her art objects and showcases as well as her personal photo collection served various purposes, one of which was her “strategy for self-commemoration,” for example in a series of guest albums. Consisting of informal snapshots of herself and her friends, this more personal arrangement revealed her social network and community, available in a portable visual format. In preserving these albums for posterity, Gardner showed a sensitive awareness of the album as a commemorative vehicle allowing to retrace her legacy. On a larger scale, this case study equally reveals her institutional ambitions as a woman opening a museum in early XXth-century America. Photography would play a major role in the diffusion of her private and public memory, as can be witnessed in the museum even today.

16 Exactly this overlap of the private and the public was taken up in the third presentation by the historian Issam Nasser (Illinois State University), who examined the political undertone and historical repercussions of such albums in Palestine in the early XXth century. Focusing on the example of the young musician Wasif Jawharriyeh who compiled seven albums retracing social, political, and cultural life in Palestine in the early 1900s, Nasser drew the public’s attention to the rarity of such sources as Palestine’s photographic legacy is largely shaped by its architecture––making the people somewhat invisible. Lacking an official national archive, Palestine as depicted in these few surviving albums has become a reference for researchers of the period before the diaspora. The albums perform the function of an archive in this case, mixing the documentation of public events with the subjective gaze of an active participant in the vibrant community life. These albums reiterate the attempt of an individual mapping out his place in the community by placing himself in the midst of historical events. Most of the time invisible in the pictures, Jawharriyeh becomes very much present in the captions which allow to backtrack his activities at the time. In consulting these albums, the viewer becomes keenly aware of Jawharriyeh’s agency in assembling the album and turning himself into the historical point of reference. Conceived as if they were public records, these albums represent a new kind of archival activity blending personal experience with public events. Eventually, by acknowledging his archival agency, we uphold Jawharriyeh’s albums as an act of individual subversion in a period of increasing suppression seeking to establish an official form of objectivity.

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18 This third session effectively showed the impact of photography on a late XIXth- century public which massively consumed but also produced its own images. Albums as a tool for public education as well as blank albums for personal creations allowed the

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public to realize its increasing share in visual culture. In these personal albums, a desire to have impact, to leave an imprint, becomes tangible. The purposeful creation and preservation of the sources place them in a historical narrative directly shaped by its users. Here, private and public memory intersect and reinforce each other mutually, resulting in precious historical sources counting just as many interpretive layers as numbers of pages.

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Photographic Evidence?

20 This dense discussion of public narratives and personal historic sensibilities was prolonged by the fourth and last panel on “photographic evidence?”, closing the cycle of controversies addressed with a question mark. Concentrating on her role as a user of the archives, the American historian Martha Sandweiss (Princeton University) resumed Glenn Willumson’s critical approach to employing photographs for historical research in the digital age. Granting photographs an autonomous status means to detach them from their illustrative function––especially in the historical discipline––and connecting them to their own histories. The material context of photographic production, its circulation and reception, are indispensable elements to our research, although they seem difficult, to say the least, to retrace in a digital format. The visual content of the image, what it represents, must be enriched by its history as an object in its own right. Therefore, the challenge of the digital archive is a double challenge to the historian: not only does he need the physical object, but he also needs the accurate background information. This step is what Martha Sandweiss labeled our “encounter” with the image––an expression which grants a privileged status to the object itself. In the context of a specialized research library, these elements are all adequately furnished, whereas on a digital platform they are far from being granted. Again, in this, we need to identify the actors behind the digitization process and their potential motivations, their “objectives”––to cite Joan M. Schwartz. Judging from her own problematic experiences as a researcher, Martha Sandweiss voiced her criticism on several levels, taking into account the physical transformation of an old object into something new. In the digitization process, the material difference between say a daguerreotype, a cyanotype or a Kodak photograph would be made obsolete as they would all be flattened out by the screen on which we perceive them. The subject––its content–– rather than the object itself would be thus placed at the center. Martha Sandweiss went as far as to reproach those who champion the digital over the original for “visual illiteracy” facing the complexity of our primary material sources. This criticism was enriched by the challenge of dealing with XXIst-century “born digital” images whose “original” and whose location are equally difficult to grasp. In disseminating these digital images, online archives such as Corbus would amass visual data yet without any clear structure or coherence. Not only did Martha Sandweiss criticize the sloppy documentation (caption, size, author) of the original source, but she also denounced the invisible organizational structure of such platforms. In creating an “illusion of access to everything,” digital archives rely on the sheer amount of accessible material to prove their universality––another all-to-familiar hallmark of “objectivity.”

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22 In addressing these decisive issues for historical researchers, Martha Sandweiss provided a compelling set of questions, which was prolonged by historian Jennifer Tucker (Wesleyan University) who dared to take on a more optimistic outlook on the future. In demanding the same critical awareness of the agency of the archive itself, Jennifer Tucker drew the attention of the audience to the construction of corpora in the archive through donations and acquisition policies. The number of actors involved in the process of corpus construction, documentation, and conservation informs the shape of the archive; so do the users themselves who carry their specific desires and expectations to the place, and whose knowledge of the collections is required in order to tap the full amount of sources. The desire to keep everything alongside the XIXth- century belief in history as made by the people is still very much palpable in archival institutions––especially in the seemingly more ‘democratic’ digital format. Jennifer Tucker urged us to renew this dimension with our XXIst-century technological possibilities which, as Costanza Caraffa suggested in a closing comment on this panel, moves beyond a simple division between the material and the immaterial. It is more about the practices of users in archival spaces.

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24 The closing keynote of the conference was delivered by historian Kelley Wilder (De Montfort University, Leicester) who sought to fuse the diversity of views on objectivity voiced thus far. In focusing on the thing, Kelly Wilder re-enlarged our viewpoint to photography itself. In considering a photograph as “a group of things,” we naturally widen our perspective to the material as well as the contextual offerings of the source. As opposed to Nagel’s View from Nowhere,3 and the notion of objectivity being implanted as soon as the private moves into the public realm, Kelly Wilder proposed a “view from everywhere” when approaching photographs. Instead of having expressions of subjectivity straightened out by the weight of a neutralizing public sphere, we admit a multiplicity of viewpoints. Kelly Wilder appealed to our embracing of this abundance of points of view inherent in the photographic medium with numerous visions of the self and the world––not only in the photographs themselves but also in their storage locations. Instead of trying to neutralize their content, we should understand objectivity as a cultural and social construct and react critically to this mise-en-scène of archival corpora. The desire for objectivity would then be (somewhat reduced to) one aspect of the various subjective views inherent in the photograph and its history. We should see it as a process of constant re-negotiation dominated by our own practices, uses, and desires of projection as researchers.

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26 Kelly Wilder’s keynote not only provided ample food for thought and future research endeavors but also gave way to an inspiring closing panel in which the speakers acknowledged that our understanding of the past is always a selection process––in which we actively participate. One way of preserving and literally envisioning the past is taking photographs––not only of concrete sites but also of documents, records, and letters. Photography as a medium is therefore instrumental in shaping our understanding of the past and needs to be embraced in this totality. Yet, our search for completeness and fixity––for example in the stalwart clinging to material forms of archiving rather than digital formats––at times blocks our awareness of new research possibilities. Agreeing, as Martha Sandweiss suggested, that “we love the original thing,” we should nonetheless open up to new data provided to us thanks to the

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internet and its recent phenomena, such as clouds. Our own desire to have impact, to use this impact and channel our knowledge––be it through the various forms of photo albums or digital-born reproductions––is always a non-objective process, and our very awareness of this non-objectivity should be seen as an enrichment. Digitization can be acknowledged here as a starting point, a pull factor for researchers to explore the original location and remedy some of the aforementioned shortcomings of digital resources. And yet, digitization may also come in the shape of a push factor, allowing to create something new and tapping unexpected data. Embracing these new horizons, the speakers of the conference have come to terms with the vexing notion of objectivity and have, in turn, allowed for all participants to re-think their own objectives.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Works Cited

CARAFFA, Costanza, ed., Photo Archives and the Photographic Memory of Art History, Berlin, Deutscher Kunstverlag, 2011.

CARAFFA, Costanza, Tiziana SERENA, eds., Photo Archives and the Idea of Nation, Berlin, De Gruyter, 2015.

EDWARDS, Elizabeth, CHRISTOPHER MORTON, eds., Photographs, Museums, Collections: Between Art and Information, London, Bloomsbury Publishing, 2015.

MITCHELL, W.J.T., Picture Theory: Essays on Verbal and Visual Representation, Chicago and London, University of Chicago Press, 1994.

---, What do Pictures Want? The Lives and Loves of Images, Chicago and London, University of Chicago Press, 2005.

NAGEL, THOMAS, The View from Nowhere, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1986.

PEABODY, REBECCA, “What is the Future of the Photo Archive? A conversation with Archivists Tracey Schuster and Anne Blecksmith”, http://blogs.getty.edu/iris/what-is-the-future-of-the- photo-archive/ (last accessed March 9, 2016).

Resources

Link to program and description: http://www.getty.edu/research/exhibitions_events/events/photo_archives_objectivity.html

NOTES

1. Published in two volumes: Costanza Caraffa, ed., Photo Archives and the Photographic Memory of Art History (Berlin: Deutscher Kunstverlag, 2011) and Costanza Caraffa, Tiziana Serena, eds., Photo Archives and the Idea of Nation (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2015).

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2. W.J.T. Mitchell, What do Pictures Want? The Lives and Loves of Images (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2005). 3. Thomas Nagel, The View from Nowhere (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986).

AUTHOR

CAROLIN GÖRGEN Université Paris VII Denis Diderot & École du Louvre

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One-day symposium “Small Town America” Université Toulouse - Jean Jaurès, 6 novembre 2015

Claire Cazajous-Augé and Jérémy Potier

1 The first in a series of scientific events to be devoted to the exploration of “common places” (CAS 2, “Poéthiques,” Université Toulouse - Jean Jaurès), the symposium “Small Town America” was organized by Nathalie Cochoy and Étienne Février (Université Toulouse - Jean Jaurès) and held on Friday, November 6, 2015 in Toulouse. The morning session focused on the work of Pulitzer-winner novelist and short story writer Steven Millhauser, the guest of honor of the conference. Throughout the afternoon, the panel of experts and the participants were given the opportunity to discuss the highly problematic representation of the American small town—itself a major locus in Steven Millhauser’s fiction—drawing on a variety of materials, including photography and prose. The symposium came to an end at the Cave Poésie, in the heart of the city, where Steven Millhauser and scholar and translator Marc Chénetier (Université Paris Diderot) offered the audience a bilingual reading of the short story “Clair de Lune.”

2 A specialist of the topic, Etienne Février started out by providing the audience with a brief introduction to the writer’s prose work, calling attention to the multifaceted, composite nature of a corpus that resists labeling. Opening a collection of short stories by Steven Millhauser, the reader is drawn from the Arabian nights to the American small town, from the American tall tale to the fairy tale, or from the ordinary to the extraordinary. What he or she is invariably greeted with is the intuition of otherworldly realms on the verge of being revealed. A genuine craftsman, Steven Millhauser succeeds in embedding the gigantic within the miniature, gifting his readers with the experience of an ever-renewed encounter with “a world of worlds.”

Steven Millhauser, “The Ambition of the Short Story”

3 The guest of honor of the symposium opened the morning session by reading out one of his pieces on the art of short story writing. In his essay, Steven Millhauser pointed out

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that the short story is oftentimes thought of as an unassuming form of fiction, one that is condemned to develop in the shade of the much more ambitious novel. Yet, he argued that the strength of brief narratives is to be found in their very form, for after undertaking a process of radical exclusion, the short story writer is free to give perfect shape to what little remains. Unlike the all-embracing novel, the short story might well be fated to deal with “a grain of sand,” but this carefully crafted grain, this insignificant portion of the world, is to unfold, indeed, to blossom, under the eyes of the attentive reader; the short story is ultimately tasked with unveiling universal truths, thereby disclosing the macrocosmic hidden within the microcosmic. The method of the short story, according to Steven Millhauser, lies in revelation, that is, in a relentless process of expansion of the microcosmic. “To see a World in a Grain of Sand” (William Blake)— behind what was identified as a façade of modesty, is the colossal ambition of the short story.

Marc Chénetier (Université Paris Diderot), Nathalie Cochoy (Université Toulouse - Jean Jaurès), Etienne Février (Université Toulouse - Jean Jaurès), “An Interview with Steven Millhauser”

4 The first address was followed by an interview with Steven Millhauser. Answering the questions of Marc Chénetier, Nathalie Cochoy and Etienne Février, the author was given the opportunity to evoke some of the biographical reasons that first led him to write about American small towns. He thus mentioned his childhood feeling of belonging to a community wider than that of a family—a feeling that he believes to be specific to small town life. This early sense of community life has fueled, in turn, his artistic practice. By way of example, the collective voice of rumors—which is part of a broader set of social practices brought about by the close setting of small towns—has proved to be a useful narrative tool, one that may indeed be instrumental in the fictional recreation of space.

5 A significant part of the conversation was devoted to Steven Millhauser’s relationship to margins and boundaries. Small towns were thus defined as ideal playgrounds for an author who rejoices in crossing borders, an author who, for instance, is keen on using realistic precision so as to turn common places into mythical realms. Although he defined himself as a writer of realist prose, Steven Millhauser mentioned his taste for disrupting the traditions attached to the writing of realist short stories. Any piece of literature, he observed, is based on an act of seduction; the step-by-step metamorphosis of realistic descriptions into a fabled fabric therefore surfaces as a way of seducing the reader into a world of fantasy. Likewise, the momentum behind Millhauser’s practice was defined by Marc Chénetier as a relentless movement swinging back and forth between opposite fields, between, that is, sheer description and suggestion, nature and art, or between history and myths. Yet, the author never picks a side; he remains on the fence, or indeed, on both sides of the fence at all times. This desire, he claimed, might be rooted in his growing up in a small town, or in the early appeal for large cities, for otherness, necessarily experienced by an American child growing up in a small town. Finally, commenting on the formal boundary that stands between prose and poetry, Steven Millhauser acknowledged that, although a degree of

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overlap might well allow for playful experimentation, the delight experienced by the writer of fixed form remains specific to verse.

6 Answering Nathalie Cochoy’s remarks on translating Steven Millhauser’s work, Marc Chénetier touched upon the issue of finding the “right” tone to translate a voice or a mood. He also mentioned specific difficulties related to the translation of creative compounds, as well as substantives such as “moon,” which become, in the Millhauser lexicon, genuine icons. For Marc Chénetier, each and every translation project comes with its own set of difficulties, and the delight experienced by the translator arises from overcoming these specific puzzles. Being both a translator and a close reader of Steven Millhauser’s work, he observed that it is his trying to come to a better understanding of the artist’s praxis that eventually helped him translate his work, rather than the opposite. The translator’s practice is therefore continually fueled by that of the academic.

7 Eventually, as though he wished to give further substance to what was previously identified as a desire to stand on both sides of things at all times, Steven Millhauser decided to ask the panel and the audience a question that was to act as a golden thread of sorts throughout the day: is there anything about his short stories that may be defined as American?

Jean Kempf (Université Lumière - Lyon 2), “In the heart of the heart of the country. The Missouri Photo Workshop (1949-2014): Sixty-odd Years of Photographing an American Microcosm”

8 Jean Kempf started his presentation by mentioning how saturated the small town discourse appears to be. Yet, even though fictional works taking place in small towns are a commonplace in American literature, the academic production on the topic is rather scarce. The small town, he pointed out, belongs to the realm of recognition and can be seen as a self-fulfilling prophecy. In order to lay bare the pre-constructed and formulaic character of the definition of such a place, Jean Kempf focused on the example of the Missouri Photo Workshop.

9 Every year since 1949, the Missouri Photo Workshop has gathered junior photojournalists for a week. As Jean Kempf confirmed, the workshop has had an immense impact on the profession; it is considered a training school for aspiring photographers, who, working under the supervision of senior photojournalists, are each year given a subject to shoot and edit in a Missouri small town. Rather than attempting to depict the so-called reality of Midwestern towns, the pictures that are exhibited at the end of each workshop reveal how American society perceives and defines itself. The small town thus functions as a microcosm, a metonymy of the United States. The production of the Missouri Photo Workshop also partakes in unveiling the formulaic dimension that underlies our perception of American small towns. In this regard, the written texts that more often than not come with the photographs shape the small town just as well as they shape the very format of the photographic essay. Because it presents very standardized and repetitive stories—family lives or community service for example—, the Missouri Photo Workshop confirms—and plays a part in the construction of—the way we perceive the American small town: a place

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where family life and the community are built around the resilience of an exceptional character. Studying the work of the aspiring photographers over the years, small towns quickly surface as places where social links are particularly strong, sheltered areas where one might search, and perhaps find, peace and stasis in a constantly changing world. Each year, the Missouri Photo Workshop testifies that, in an age of globalization, there is indeed something like home.

Monica Manolescu-Oancea (Université de Strasbourg), “New Jersey and Artistic Experimentation. On Robert Smithson’s Passaic”

10 Monica Manolescu-Oancea first observed that New Jersey is generally perceived as a non-place, or a place without an essence, and is therefore not readily considered an appropriate site for artistic expression and/or experimentation. Yet, an alternative narrative seeking to unearth the artistic potential of 1960s New Jersey has recently emerged; it was notably articulated through several exhibitions that revisit the topos of suburbia (a pioneer example would be “New Jersey as Non-Site,” the exhibition organized by the Princeton University Art Museum in 2013).

11 In 1967, Robert Smithson published a series of black and white photographs together with a short text entitled “A Tour of the Monuments of Passaic, New Jersey.” Smithson was interested in low-profile landscapes (swamps, deserts, remote islands, etc.) and saw in the banal and abandoned structures of the small town the material he needed to compose his short photographic essay. For instance, he photographed monuments under construction, but waited for the weekend to take pictures in order for the building process to be interrupted. Many artists in the 1960s expressed interest in new constructions rather than in romantic ruins, relishing in the practice of “negative sightseeing.” The construction sites of Passaic appeared to be ruins before they were built and confirmed Nabokov’s observation that “[t]he future is but the obsolete in reverse.” Smithson’s essay also reveals that New Jersey was not simply the negative, or “blank,” opposite of New York City, but formed a more complex urban reality. His tour was thereby endowed with a polemic dimension, as the artist wished to protest against the centralization of the New York City art establishment.

Anne Ullmo (Université François Rabelais - Tours), “‘I know you can’t resist me’: The Metamorphoses of the Department Store in Steven Millhauser’s Small Town America”

12 The characters in Steven Millhauser’s stories are often teenagers who seek to embark on extraordinary adventures. Their restlessness and impatience are epitomized by the sentence “What was it that we wanted?” (from the short story “Elsewhere”). Anne Ullmo thus suggested that Millhauser’s characters seem to be drawn by an irrepressible desire to escape their daily lives so as to experience otherness. Yet, in Steven Millhauser’s stories, otherness is to be found within the very fabric of the ordinary. In

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this view, the metamorphic dimension of the small town, a place which is always under construction, may well lead to experiencing a feeling of unheimlich.

13 In order to disclose how such a process of defamiliarization might work in Steven Millhauser’s fiction, Anne Ullmo focused on the story “The Dream of the Consortium” (1998). Department stores—which are displayed in Martin Dressler already, but also in more recent stories—have exerted fascination on the writer. At first, the numerous lists and descriptions may be thought to convey a sense of realism. But, rather than trying to reorganize the bric-a-brac of the real world (Philippe Hamon), the descriptive process in the story aims at creating the illusion of an all-encompassing world. Inflating the descriptive fabric with long lists and descriptions, Steven Millhauser may well sabotage the referential illusion, but also proves that there can be many worlds in a single page. The writer’s narrative strategy draws on the intermingling of the artificial and the fantastic, of dream and reality, fear and desire. The coexistence of opposites is at the core of Martin Dressler, while the settings of many of Millhauser’s stories, from turn-of-the-century amusement parks to department stores, create a sense of phantasmagoria.

Marie Bouchet (Université Toulouse - Jean Jaurès), “Nabokov’s Small Town America: The Land of the Philistines Re-enchanted”

14 In her presentation, Marie Bouchet wished to leave aside the oft-mentioned Nabokovian habit of mocking America; instead, she chose to explore the aspects of Nabokov’s writing that can be said to re-enchant the American reality. It is in Lolita that Nabokov experiences the thrills of his transformation into an American writer and exposes the beauty of American suburbs. The alliterations, the precision in the description of the shapes, colors and texture of objects, as well as the overwhelming presence of adjectives, all reveal Humbert Humbert’s fascination for American small towns. In this novel, Nabokov’s scientific and artistic delight in details meet, allowing the writer to adopt a taxonomist’s eye in surveying the suburban landscape. According to the author, details are to imbue the work of fiction with life. Nabokov provides clues and details to identify most small towns in Lolita. However, he also occasionally and deliberately blurs those referential traces. Resorting to nighttime visions particularly allows Nabokov to open up gaps in reality and in the textual fabric. Not only does he re- enchant the ordinary, but he also refashions the rules of realistic fiction. As to the paratactic structures that he uses, they do not function as inventories; rather, they reveal Nabokov’s power of invention. The description of bathing suits, for instance, partakes in re-enchanting the most trivial reality: “dream pink, frosted aqua, glans mauve, tulip red, oolala black.”

15 The symposium offered all the participants the opportunity to foreground the duality of the American small town. A crossroads where the banal and the exceptional meet, the small town setting becomes a playground for writers and photographers to reinvent the most familiar things in life and re-enchant the ordinary world. Steven Millhauser and Marc Chénetier, A Reading at the “Cave Poésie,” Toulouse. © Jean Kempf

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BIBLIOGRAPHY

Links and resources

Program available at: http://cas.univ-tlse2.fr/small-town-america-388390.kjsp

Interview with Steven Millhauser available at: http://www.canal-u.tv/video/ universite_toulouse_ii_le_mirail/an_interview_with_steven_millhauser.19390

AUTHORS

CLAIRE CAZAJOUS-AUGÉ Université Toulouse - Jean Jaurès

JÉRÉMY POTIER Université Toulouse - Jean Jaurès

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Colloque international « L’œuvre de Brian Evenson » Université Rennes 2, 21-22 mai 2015

Maud Bougerol

1 Organisé par Sylvie Bauer, Nawelle Lechevalier-Bekadar et Florian Tréguer de l’Université Rennes 2 (ACE, EA1796), ce colloque a permis de réunir des chercheurs français, américains, canadiens et sud-africains autour d’une réflexion sur l’œuvre de Brian Evenson, en présence de l’auteur. Les communications présentées ont permis aux participants d’interroger la fonction du langage dans la poétique evensonienne qui associe un traitement à la fois clinique et violent du corps à une réflexion sur les genres littéraires et l’expérience de lecture. La présence des auteurs Antoine Volodine et Claro, dont les problématiques font écho à celles de Brian Evenson, a donné lieu à des échanges sur le rapport de la fiction au monde, en tant qu’elle problématise la relation qu’entretient le lecteur à la perception et au réel.

Conférences plénières

Anne Ullmo (Université Lille 3), « Poétique des corps suppliciés chez Brian Evenson »

2 Anne Ullmo explore les modalités de déstabilisation du lecteur chez Brian Evenson au sein d’une expérience de lecture avant tout perceptive. La surexposition du corps fragmenté, mutilé, voire sacrifié, intensifie cette expérience sensorielle.

3 Selon Anne Ullmo, les voix narratives, qui se caractérisent ici par leur neutralité, donnent à voir l’implacable crudité du réel. L’impensable est figuré et fascine le lecteur. Pourtant, plutôt qu’une quête herméneutique, ce dernier est amené à vivre une expérience perceptive qui laisse toute sa place à l’incertitude. Confronté à la défamiliarisation d’un environnement dont il ne perçoit que l’altérité fondamentale, le lecteur doit reconfigurer le monde qui l’entoure à l’aide de ses sens.

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4 Le corps volontairement supplicié, dans Last Days notamment, devient la preuve d’une excellence spirituelle. Selon Anne Ullmo, le signe est inscrit physiquement sur le corps du significateur afin de réinscrire les signes sur le corps délinquant qui a échappé un moment aux significations.

5 La violence prend une valeur scopique tant elle ici est liée à la surexposition, notamment dans la nouvelle « Eye », comme le souligne Jean-Yves Pellegrin : l’usage de voix narratives neutres confère une qualité d’« évidence photographique » à l’écriture. La cartographie anatomique devient difficile puisque le corps est donné à voir de manière fragmentaire. Selon Anne Ullmo, le lecteur est pris dans la boucle spéculaire du regard.

Marc Amfreville (Université Paris-Sorbonne), « La réalité psychique et la fiction de Brian Evenson »

6 Marc Amfreville évoque tout d’abord la notion d’obliquité qui permet de mettre en relation la littérature gothique et la prose de Brian Evenson, qui entre en communication avec d’autres œuvres antérieures, notamment à travers la hantise et les représentations de l’aliénation. L’auteur radicalise la proposition gothique suivante : « je suis peut-être un autre ». Il explique que Brian Evenson propose le dérèglement de la langue comme moteur de la fiction : lorsqu’apparaît la figure du double, le vertige autoscopique donne lieu à l’émergence dans la langue de phénomènes d’écart.

7 Selon Marc Amfreville, le principe de réalité psychique est particulièrement fécond ici puisque la névrose des narrateurs malades d’Evenson informe le processus même de création. La maison devient unheimlich jusqu’à n’être plus Heim ; les jeux sadomasochistes enfantins radicalisent le make believe ; l’après-coup traumatique s’immisce dans l’expérience de lecture ; le corps à l’agonie porte les traces étymologiques d’une lutte : le texte fait sienne une réalité différée et attire l’attention sur l’écart entre réalité et perception.

8 Marc Amfreville propose donc que le corps, autrefois rempart de réalité résistant à l’omniprésence de la réalité psychique, fait davantage appel ici à l’absence qu’à une quelconque intégrité : il s’abolit chez Evenson. Dématérialisé, fait uniquement de mots, il n’opère pas le rôle escompté de réel.

9 Cette présentation a donné lieu à une discussion sur le rapport entre le principe de réalité psychique et la question de l’énonciation. Le délire procède de l’énonciation chez Brian Evenson, et la focalisation interne fait que le lecteur n’a pas d’issue. Les repères d’énonciation sont défaillants, créant une fissure dans laquelle le lecteur s’engouffre afin de trouver du sens.

Intervention de Brian Evenson

10 Brian Evenson propose une lecture des notions d’individu et d’œuvre au sein de la théorie d’Alphonso Lingis sur la « communauté de ceux qui n’ont rien en commun » (1994). L’individu voit sa propre réflexion dans la communauté, et devient œuvre en tant qu’elle est à la fois essence et produit de la communauté. L’autre communauté, qui précède la communauté rationnelle, est fondée sur l’interruption du travail, puisque son impératif est celui d’une autre œuvre, plus ouverte, qui émerge de l’individualité

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rationnelle. Cette autre œuvre est, selon Brian Evenson, un murmure que la communauté rationnelle ne peut jamais vraiment éliminer.

11 La lecture de sa nouvelle “The Ex-Father” (The Wavering Knife) lui a permis d’explorer le rôle du langage qui dérange, trouble la rationalité et fait émerger une nouvelle communauté. La destruction du langage permet aux individus de communiquer au sujet de leur douleur commune. Cette nouvelle, au carrefour de la fiction et de la philosophie, permet d’observer comment le récit peut négocier le rapport entre réalité et imaginaire. La structure se désagrège peu à peu, au fur et à mesure que la sœur aînée tente de détruire la réalité. Le but est de faire partager au lecteur l’expérience du personnage.

12 Cette nouvelle permet d’explorer le « murmure » continuel qui file derrière le langage. S’il est un système de sons qui transmettent du sens, le langage poussé à l’excès (« excessiveness in langage ») fait émerger des motifs qui hantent le lecteur. Brian Evenson parle alors d’une interpénétration spécifique sous forme de fuites entre la fiction et la théorie donnant naissance à une relation intrusive qui amène le lecteur à s’interroger sur son rapport au texte et à la communauté qui lui a donné naissance.

Atelier 1 - « Something went wrong »: Approaching Brian Evenson’s Language

Peter Schwenger (University of Western Ontario), « The Zero Effect »

13 Peter Schwenger traite de l’absence au sein même du langage, sur le modèle du paradoxe qu’est le zéro, signe d’une absence plutôt qu’absence de signe. En empruntant à Maurice Blanchot l’idée d’une absence qui est, puisque signifiée, en présence, il attire l’attention sur ce qui est tu dans les textes d’Evenson. Alors même que celui-ci nie l’accès des lecteurs à la connaissance, l’auteur leur indique qu’il y a quelque chose qu’il leur refuse, et fait ainsi émerger l’étrangeté dans le langage. Peter Schwenger emprunte à Roland Barthes la description du moment de l’illumination zen, le décrivant comme un séisme qui ferait vaciller la connaissance et permettrait d’atteindre le satori, moment d’éveil signifiant à la fois présence et absence, le rien et le reste. À travers la figure du double, la contradiction et les fausses pistes, Brian Evenson amène le lecteur non pas à trouver dans le zéro de l’écriture une réponse aux questions qu’il se pose sur le texte, mais bien à voir apparaître une démultiplication des questions elles-mêmes.

Paul Wessels (Rhodes University), « Brian Evenson: An Author without A Body »

14 La communication de Paul Wessels permet de prolonger cette réflexion sur le langage, ici à travers le prisme du post-exotisme d’Antoine Volodine. Dans cette présentation performative, Paul Wessels explore l’absence de médiation dans l’expérience de lecture qui est l’une des caractéristiques les plus importantes du style de Brian Evenson. Selon lui, la violence infligée à un je à la fois individuel et collectif est un dispositif narratif. Le caractère brut et détaché du texte révèle une absence de médiation dans le langage qui a pour conséquence de faire du style l’instrument d’une violence infligée au lecteur. Ainsi, selon Paul Wessels, la subjectivité du lecteur est envahie, et son monde, au même

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titre que celui du texte, est brisé. Ce procédé permet à l’auteur de faire voler en éclats les conventions littéraires, et par là même toute possibilité d’inscrire les textes dans un paradigme politique et social traditionnel.

Andrew E. Colarusso (Brown University), « Mise en abyme in “Windeye” »

15 Andrew E. Colarusso introduit la notion d’inquiétante étrangeté à l’aide du court métrage d’animation « The Sandman », de Paul Berry (1991), relecture du conte d’Hoffmann « L’Homme au sable » (1817) à partir duquel Freud avait théorisé son concept. Produit d’une dissonance et d’un décalage dans le langage, l’étrangeté crée une distorsion et amène le lecteur à s’interroger sur la divergence qui existe entre ce qu’il perçoit et l’idée qu’il se fait de la réalité. Dans la nouvelle “Windeye”, la violence s’exprime dans le non-dit qui émerge lorsque le frère décrit sa petite sœur cherchant un objet non identifié sous la toiture. Selon Andrew E. Colarusso, ce moment prend une dimension érotique incestueuse qui révèle l’habileté de Brian Evenson à installer dans le langage une violence qui s’exprime et s’inflige avant tout dans l’espace intime. L’étrangeté amène le lecteur à questionner son rapport à l’espace divergent.

Atelier 2 - Writing and resistance

Maud Bougerol (Université de Rouen), « Résister à la fin : The Din of Celestial Birds de Brian Evenson »

16 Maud Bougerol explore les formes de la fin dans le recueil The Din of Celestial Birds qui, si elles sont omniprésentes, sont constamment repoussées, laissées en suspens : la fin, corollaire de la satisfaction du lecteur, semble toujours se refuser à lui. La mort est toujours reportée. Le corps, confronté à l’épreuve de la mort, survit et se métamorphose : l’approche de la fin permet à l’auteur de faire éclater la monstruosité en gestation à l’intérieur des corps. Les espaces de rupture sont constamment reconfigurés. Selon Maud Bougerol, la fin devient un lieu où tous les futurs possibles sont en suspens, un espace intermédiaire dans lequel sont contenues toutes les potentialités du récit. Emerge alors une écriture de l’évitement qui laisse le lecteur insatisfait. Le doute devient catalyseur dans les récits de Brian Evenson : le lecteur, face à une multiplicité de vérités, est amené du côté du déconcertant, et doit alors reconfigurer une fiction qui cherche à faire émerger toute la multiplicité des significations possibles. Il participe ainsi à l’élaboration de la plénitude perdue dans ce lieu de frustration et de manque.

Françoise Sammarcelli (Université Paris-Sorbonne), « “And then suddenly, sentences” : Immobility de Brian Evenson, ou le roman post-apocalyptique et la résistance à l’œuvre »

17 Françoise Sammarcelli propose une étude des formes et stratégies utilisées par l’auteur dans ce roman qui revisite la contre-utopie. Le roman s’ouvre sur une citation de Jean- Luc Nancy dont la thèse, dans La Communauté désœuvrée, est que la communauté est en elle-même une forme de résistance. En explorant les interactions violentes entre

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plusieurs communautés dans un monde post-apocalyptique, Brian Evenson propose un roman qui dès le début questionne l’accès au sens notamment à travers une épigraphe de Beckett. Françoise Sammarcelli explique que l’auteur défamiliarise la langue, les signifiants s’écartent de leurs signifiés, et c’est à travers la juxtaposition anaphorique des souvenirs, la redéfinition constante des êtres et la relation que le langage entretient à la conscience des personnages, qu’il créé un monde du post-humain entre variation et répétition, toujours au seuil du mouvement, où l’incertitude domine. Selon Françoise Sammarcelli, le jeu sur l’hybridité à la fois dans le récit et dans le langage excite la curiosité du lecteur en quête de sens.

Nawelle Lechevalier-Bekadar (Université Rennes 2), « “Contagion” ou “l’allégorie fracturée” »

18 Nawelle Lechevalier-Bekadar explore l’image de la clôture dans la nouvelle “Contagion” et, à travers elle, les conditions d’émergence du sens. Selon elle, le dispositif se signale comme une allégorie : le paysage se dématérialise, et la clôture, élément dominant, prend une dimension quasi-hallucinatoire et religieuse. Frontière protéiforme, la clôture comme allégorie fracturée encourage le lecteur à lui donner un sens tout en le prévenant de la vanité de sa quête. En effet, bien que le texte manifeste les symptômes d’un système signifiant bien défini — ici l’allégorie — ce qui est à déchiffrer dans le langage est impossible à reconstituer en tant qu’œuvre. Selon Nawelle Lechevalier- Bekadar, ce qui se joue ici est la fracture du réel : le réel ne peut plus se concevoir sur le mode du dévoilement ; l’allégorie expose l’échec que l’on éprouve en tentant de rationaliser le monde. Le lecteur pressent un sens qui ne se dégage jamais. Le barbelé qui semble cadrer la nouvelle devient une instance supérieure qui, en informant l’écriture elle-même, donne forme au texte en produisant un nouveau langage fonctionnant en miroir des phénomènes du texte : il devient infectieux.

Atelier 3 - Religion and violence

Karl Pollin (University of Tulsa), « Cautérisations (Réflexions en marge de La Confrérie des mutilés) »

19 Selon Karl Pollin, Last Days est une aventure eschatologique dans laquelle une tension existe entre les deux parties du roman. Le personnage de Kline, à l’origine du processus de cautérisation, sert de jonction entre les deux textes. Last Days adopte ironiquement les codes du récit policier. Toutefois, la résolution tâtonnante de l’enquête est parsemée de meurtrissures : le savoir est échangé contre un membre car il existe un rapport fiduciaire entre vérité et métamorphose de la chair. Selon Karl Pollin, les attentes génériques du lecteur sont simultanément coupées et cautérisées. Très vite, l’auto- cautérisation du héros donne lieu à un schisme dans le milieu stérile de la secte et précipite la mise à mort de Kline prévue dès le départ. Dans un second mouvement, Kline se métamorphose en figure messianique, ce qui donne lieu à un deuxième moment de la texture de la prose : entre schisme et cautérisation. La multiplication des fractures schismatiques dans le texte donne une valeur théologico-politique à la cautérisation, comme l’explique Karl Pollin.

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J. Aaron Sanders (Colombus State University), « Avenging Angels: The Nephi Archetype and Blood Atonement in Brian Evenson’s The Open Curtain »

20 J. Aaron Sanders explique l’origine du rituel expiatoire par le sang (“blood atonement”) à travers le mythe de Nephi dans The Book of Mormon. Nephi devient l’archétype mormon lié au sang et à la violence en commettant le meurtre ritualisé des apostats et des pécheurs. Dans The Open Curtain, la relation entre Rudd et Lael est construite sur le modèle des Danites, une organisation de l’Église des Saints des Derniers Jours vouée à la protection et à la pérennisation du modèle mormon. En effet, Rudd tue une famille entière après s’être immergé dans des archives évoquant un meurtre rituel commis au XIXe siècle, et la parole de Lael dans le roman est une retranscription du discours des autorités mormones. J. Aaron Sanders montre ainsi la perpétuation d’influences violentes dans la culture mormone grâce à la réactualisation d’un rituel à travers les mythes transmis de génération en génération.

Karim Daanoune (Université Bordeaux Montaigne), « “If we’re not human what are we?” La question de la communauté dans Immobility de Brian Evenson »

21 Karim Daanoune propose que la circularité est une forme d’immobilité dans le roman : le héros vit un énième réveil qui donnera lieu à d’autres sommeils. Ce thème se retrouve dans l’émergence de communautés perdues « à reconstituer », selon la terminologie de Jean-Luc Nancy dans La Communauté désœuvrée, qui sont en fait autant de post-communautés qui fonctionnent sur le mode de la limite. La fiction de la communauté post-humaine apparaît comme une alternative au désœuvrement du héros, rivé à sa condition d’homme par sa paralysie qui, tout en signalant l’exacerbation de sa propre présence à lui-même, l’empêche d’être totalement. Ce qu’il reste de l’humanité s’emploie à créer une fiction de communauté en problématisant l’identité, notamment grâce à la fraternité, lien ambigu qui ici exclut plus qu’il n’inclut. Karim Daanoune propose que la mort de l’autre détermine le héros en ce qu’elle l’ouvre à la communauté. Le registre de la limite révèle l’espace et la temporalité de la suspension dans laquelle les personnages évoluent, à la recherche d’un « être en commun ».

Evenson and the Arts

Carte blanche à Bruno Dufour-Coppolani (artiste plasticien) : « Pour une lecture plastique d’Evenson »

22 Bruno Dufour-Coppolani, artiste de la région rennaise, présente une histoire de la peinture du XXe siècle, notamment à travers Francis Bacon, mais aussi à travers son propre travail, en miroir des problématiques chères à Brian Evenson : la violence, la plasticité de l’œuvre, et bien sûr le traitement du corps. Sa réflexion sur la matérialité dans les représentations textuelles et picturales du corps malmené, mutilé et métamorphosé lui permet de s’interroger sur le pouvoir de l’artiste dans la

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transformation du corps, mais aussi sur le rapport entre réalité et fiction, représentation et perception. Puisque le rôle de l’artiste est d’amener l’homme à questionner le monde, Bruno Dufour-Coppolani place sa réflexion sous le signe de la réception d’une œuvre vécue comme une expérience dont on ne peut sortir indemne : celui qui la reçoit, interpellé, choqué, ému, interroge ainsi son rapport au réel.

Tables rondes

Les genres de l’imaginaire (Brian Evenson, Antoine Volodine, Claro ; modérateur : Marc Chénetier)

23 Marc Chénetier présente les dynamiques artistiques, thématiques et herméneutiques qui lient ces trois auteurs. Brian Evenson traduit Antoine Volodine et Claro, Claro traduit Brian Evenson, et tous se sont engagés à faire habiter par leurs personnages, mais aussi leurs lecteurs, un monde de l’ailleurs, de l’instable, qu’il soit post-humain, post-exotique, ou tout du moins de l’ordre de la limite. Ils échangent sur la notion d’extrémité en littérature, en rapport avec la réception, puisque, selon Marc Chénetier, la littérature a un impact sur le lecteur en ce qu’elle initie une interaction entre la fiction et le monde. Selon Claro, la lecture doit devenir une expérience, et ce grâce notamment à l’émergence de personnages qui gravitent aux extrémités : cela permet de travailler sur la stabilité de l’identité, notamment celle de l’auteur qui devient un « soi poreux qui écrit et qui laisse entrer des flux d’images ». En termes de réception, pour Claro, c’est le livre qui transforme le lecteur en lecteur de ce même livre. Antoine Volodine mène plus loin cette réflexion sur la position du lecteur : selon lui, le lecteur fait partie du projet du livre puisque la littérature que Brian Evenson, Antoine Volodine et Claro créent s’adresse intimement au lecteur. Brian Evenson rebondit sur cette idée d’une littérature comme performance, qui permet une grande liberté à l’auteur, et plus particulièrement une grande fluidité entre les genres. Le travail du langage permet de créer une tension entre le texte et le lecteur. La vérité qui émerge à l’issue de ce travail doit être, selon Brian Evenson, « infligée » au lecteur.

Translating Brian Evenson (Brian Evenson, Enrico Monti, Claro ; modératrice : Anne-Laure Tissut)

24 Brian Evenson (lui-même auteur de nombreuses traductions en langue anglaise) a pu à cette occasion échanger avec ses traducteurs (Enrico Monti en italien, Claro en français) sur la notion de traduction, mais aussi sur l’influence de cet exercice sur sa propre écriture autour de la problématique suivante : quelles possibilités le langage peut-il exploiter ? Selon Enrico Monti, le travail de la forme a une place très importante dans la traduction des textes de Brian Evenson. Il s’agit pour lui d’être le plus fidèle possible aux structures syntactiques de l’auteur, même si une formulation différente aurait pu fonctionner dans la langue cible. Claro poursuit cette idée en proposant une approche plus globale de l’œuvre, afin de comprendre le texte dans son organisation. Selon lui traduire n’est pas « dire ce que le texte dit » mais « faire ce que le texte fait ». Cette réflexion avait déjà été engagée par Evenson sur un mode comique dans sa nouvelle « Moran’s Mexico : A Refutation by C. Stelzmann » (The Wavering Knife), qui traite de la problématique traduction d’un guide sur le Mexique écrit originellement en

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allemand. Claro pose ensuite la question de la gestion des influences, lorsque le traducteur est aussi écrivain. Selon Brian Evenson, le travail de traduction nourrit la prose d’un auteur et l’amène à s’interroger sur les opportunités que lui offre sa langue.

BIBLIOGRAPHIE

Ressources

Lien vers la page de l’évènement : http://confevens.sciencesconf.org/

AUTEUR

MAUD BOUGEROL Université de Rouen

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4ème conférence annuelle du réseau européen des études sur la Beat Generation (EBSN) Université Libre de Bruxelles, 28-31 octobre 2015

Peggy Pacini et Anna Aublet

1 Co-organisée par Franca Bellarsi (Université Libre de Bruxelles), Oliver Harris (Keele University) et Polina Mackay (University of Nicosia), la 4ème conférence annuelle du réseau européen des études sur la Beat Generation (EBSN) s’est tenue à l’Université Libre de Bruxelles du 28 au 31 octobre 2015. Elle a rassemblé plus de 67 intervenants venus des quatre coins d’Europe, des États-Unis, du Canada et d’Inde. Tout en mettant à l’honneur San Francisco et la Côte Ouest comme autre lieu d’ancrage du mouvement et espace de synergie entre l’Asie et l’Occident, cette conférence voulait rendre hommage à Allen Ginsberg à l’occasion du 60ème anniversaire de la lecture de « Howl » à la Six Gallery. Comment, en 2015, lire « Howl », ou tout simplement lire Ginsberg, Burroughs ou Kerouac ? Comment interpréter, travailler, étudier ou traduire les propositions expérimentales de Ginsberg et de la Beat Generation selon les cultures ? Voilà quelques questions qui ont ponctué ces quatre jours et ont servi de fil conducteur aux 23 ateliers, conférences plénières de Anne Waldman et Daniel Kane, documentaires de Trevor Carolan et Robert McTavish (réalisateur)1, lectures de Franca Bellarsi et Chad Weidner, Beth Huber et Emily Darnell (Western California University), et Arpine Konyalian Grenier, et performances de Anne Waldman, Vincent Broqua, Ulrich Rois, David Giannoni, Benjamin Pottel, The Muttering Sickness et Davide Crimi.

Allen Ginsberg

2 Au fil des ateliers, diverses lectures de « Howl » ont émergé. Tanguy Harma (Goldsmith’s, University of London) a montré comment le poème intègre et transcende la notion d’engagement, et comment le néant sartrien sert une lecture existentialiste du poème en forçant à s’impliquer dans une réalité sociale et historique. Or, les références au sacré dans le poème s’inscrivent en faux par rapport à la doxa sartrienne

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et ont forcé Tanguy Harma à déplacer son cadre théorique sur The White Negro qui permet une lecture existentialiste plus théologique de « Howl ».

3 Dans sa communication intitulée « Ginsberg’s Performative Howl », Robert Holton a tenté de dégager les aspects performatifs et les « opérations de magie sociale » (Bourdieu) du poème. Il a cherché à reconstituer le parcours du poète-prophète qui se fait orateur et chantre, porte-voix de toute une génération qu’il fait lui-même exister par l’acte de nomination.

4 Richard Murphy (poète, écrivain) est, lui aussi, revenu sur les aspects performatifs du poème et de Ginsberg, comme icone-interprète de sa vie, en montrant comment la performance écrite qu’est le poème permet d’évaluer les forces et faiblesses de cette œuvre poétique moderne et postmoderne et de la créativité de l’auteur. Si l’écriture du poème peine, selon lui, à présenter l’irreprésentable, Ginsberg réussit parfaitement à se représenter, à s’incarner comme rebelle-libérateur.

5 À partir d’une lettre de 1962 écrite par Orlovsky et Ginsberg à Charlie Chaplin, Lisa Stein-Haven (Ohio University) a cherché, quant à elle, à comprendre l’intérêt porté par Ginsberg à la vision du monde de Chaplin et au personnage mythique de Charlot. Au fil d’une étude minutieuse, elle a montré la résonance que cette construction éveille dans la vision du monde que le poète exploite de façon référentielle, entre autres dans « Howl ».

6 En s’intéressant tout particulièrement à Cosmopolitan Greetings, Paul McDonald (University of Wolverhampton) a proposé une étude des variations comiques de l’œuvre de Ginsberg, souvent délaissées au profit du tragique. Il a tenté d’y démontrer comment le poétique articule l’humour dans un jeu permanent de décalage des catégories sémantiques pour faire de Ginsberg le parfait trickster, usant de subterfuges pour inverser le haut et le bas bakhtinien.

7 C’est au rôle des avancées technologiques dans le processus d’écriture poétique, au recours au magnétophone dans l’expérimentation d’une écriture plus « orale » qu’Ulrich Rois (Ph.D., musicien) s’est intéressé. En s’appuyant sur la composition de « Wichita Vortex Sutra », il a mis en avant l’importance et la manipulation des sons dans la poésie de Ginsberg, en exploitant tant l’oralité des poèmes que les « visions auditives » qui en sont l’origine. Il a tenté de montrer l’omniprésence de la musique comme facteur compositionnel et la pratique du mantra comme véhicule de la voix prophétique et visionnaire.

8 Bruno Fontes (Universidade de Coimbra), quant à lui, a interrogé la pertinence de la notion d’intermédialité dans Songs of Innocence and Experience de Blake, arrangé et chanté par Ginsberg. À travers cette reconstruction musicale du poème, Bruno Fontes a non seulement voulu mettre en lumière cet héritage commun qui unit deux poètes visionnaires, mais a surtout cherché à ancrer une filiation esthétique dans la pratique intermédiale.

9 C’est à une exploration cartographique des Collected Poems qu’Anna Aublet (Université de Paris Ouest Nanterre La Défense) nous a conviés en proposant un voyage où chaque poème peut se lire comme une légende au déchiffrement de la carte mentale et géographique de l’œuvre. Par une analyse de la relation de Ginsberg à l’espace et de son tracé en filigrane dans le texte, elle a montré que si le territoire américain semble se dérouler au fil de l’œuvre, le New Jersey devient le jardin poétique qu’il va cultiver.

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10 Dans sa communication, Luke Walker (University of Sussex) s’est penché sur l’intérêt de Ginsberg, dès les années 1950, pour les traditions gnostiques du début du christianisme, en particulier les évangiles gnostiques non canoniques et les textes dits hérétiques. Il a notamment montré comment les connaissances gnostiques de Ginsberg lui ont ouvert les portes de l’œuvre de Blake et de son système mythopoïétique. Luke Walker s’est ensuite attelé au décryptage des idées et de la terminologie gnostiques dans « Plutonian Ode » (1978) dans lequel, selon lui, Ginsberg transfère de façon très explicite ses connaissances gnostiques. Et de conclure que Ginsberg est un précurseur des études ultérieures sur les ponts historiques entre religions orientales et occidentales.

11 Cansu Soyupak (Leiden University) a travaillé sur les différentes traductions turques de « America », « Howl » et « Kaddish ». Elle est revenue sur les questions de fidélité, de texte source (« America »), et sur les différentes étapes du projet de traduction de « Howl » et de « Kaddish » qui faisaient la part belle à la spiritualité de Ginsberg. C’est au prisme de cette prépondérance du contexte religieux que Cansu Soyupak a procédé à une microanalyse de certains termes à connotations religieuses de la traduction de Kaddish et autres poèmes, 1958-1960 en turc (2014) pour montrer comment les choix de la traductrice Artemis Gunebakanli concourent à proposer une lecture islamique de cette réécriture d’un texte de la liturgie juive.

12 C’est une lecture comparée de « Kaddish » et de « The Coral Sea » de Patti Smith que Peggy Pacini (Université de Cergy-Pontoise) a proposée. Dans ses premières conclusions, elle a montré comment ces poèmes travaillent le rapport du poète à la muse dans une poétique du deuil dont les différentes étapes (écriture, lecture et performance du poème) et formats (poèmes, lectures, performances, expositions, pièces de théâtre, film) explorent les dimensions émotionnelles, musicales et physiques du texte, et comment ces différents supports viennent l’épuiser dans un acte rédempteur et libérateur.

Réception, legs et dissémination de la Beat Generation en Europe

13 Un grand nombre de communications ont étudié la réception, la dissémination et le legs de Ginsberg et de la Beat Generation en Europe. Anna Wyrwik (Jagiellonian University) s’est penchée sur les différentes prises de positions politiques de Ginsberg sur l’Europe de l’Est communiste, et sur ses rencontres avec le milieu littéraire et artistique polonais afin de mesurer la résonnance de « Howl » et la réception de son œuvre dans le contexte politique de la Pologne communiste (1950-1990).

14 Harri Veivo (Université de Sorbonne Nouvelle-Paris 3) s’est intéressé, lui, au rôle décisif qu’a joué la littérature beat sur des auteurs finlandais comme Pekka Kejonen et Anselm Hollo. Il a montré que, tout en faisant évoluer la littérature nationale, la réception et la réappropriation des Beats dans le débat public en Finlande a permis aux auteurs de ce pays de s’approprier les Beats à leurs propres fins.

15 Dans sa communication, Franca Bellarsi (Université Libre de Bruxelles) a construit un pont entre le Nouveau et le Vieux Monde, en tentant de rapatrier la poésie beat jusqu’en France. Elle a ainsi esquissé des pistes de recherche intéressantes aux confins

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de deux lieux géographiques et linguistiques distincts, ouvrant la voie à une recherche purement « transatlantique ».

16 Jaap van der Bent (Radboud University) et Gregory Watson (Université Libre de Bruxelles) sont tous les deux revenus sur l’héritage flamand, pointant ainsi l’inégale réception et dissémination des œuvres et des techniques beat en Hollande et en Belgique. Jaap van der Bent a mis en lumière le rôle clé des écrivains-poètes Simon Vinkenoog (néerlandais), Hugo Raes, Hugo Claus et Pjeroo Roobjee (belges flamands) dans la diffusion des textes de la Beat Generation tout en pointant la manière dont ceux- ci ont aussi été influencés par des écrivains comme Burroughs ou Kerouac. Gregory Watson, quant à lui, dans sa communication consacrée à Jotie T’Hooft (1956-1977), s’est attaché à travers deux de ses poèmes — Schreeuwlandschap (1975) et Junkieverdriet (1976) — à tisser la filiation à Ginsberg et Burroughs tout en insistant sur l’aspect plus conventionnel de la poétique de ce jeune Flamand qui cultivait l’image du poète maudit.

17 Dans sa communication sur la contribution de la Beat Generation à la théâtralisation des arts visuels, Stefan Wouters (Vrije Universiteit Brussel) est revenu sur l’impact du mouvement et de ses héritiers aux États-Unis et en Europe. Envisagés comme une dialectique centre-périphérie, ces happenings collaboratifs visaient l’expansion de la conscience à partir d’éléments du quotidien et sur la base de l’improvisation. Stefan Wouters a mis l’accent sur ces approches plurielles et ces performances collaboratives transatlantiques (Vinkenoog-Ginsberg-Ferlinghetti-Corso en 1962 ; Jean-Jacques Lebel- Ferlinghetti-Norse en 1963 et Lebel-Corso en 1964) qui voulaient donner à la contre- culture un espace d’inscription et de visibilité.

18 Nuno Miguel Neves (Universidade de Coimbra) est revenu sur ce qu’il considère comme l’essence de la Beat Generation portugaise autour d’un corpus des poètes António Cabrita, Levi Condinho, António Cândido Franco, Abel Neves et João Carlos Raposo Nunes, publiés entre 1976 et 1977 par la maison d’édition portugaise Távola Redonda. Selon lui, ces derniers ne se contentaient pas de se définir comme Beat, ils se réclamaient du même héritage littéraire et philosophique et travaillaient à la réappropriation, production et transmission de cet héritage. Phénomène unique de la scène littéraire portugaise, ils ont contribué, en marge des champs de production culturelle, à l’étude de la contre-culture et de la littérature qu’elle a produite au Portugal.

19 Certains ateliers ont aussi été consacrés aux deux autres figures fondatrices du mouvement (Kerouac et Burroughs), aux figures à la marge du trio (les femmes de la Beat Generation, Norse, Micheline, Sanders et d’autres) et à ceux qu’on a beaucoup associés au mouvement (Miller, Brautigan).

William S. Burroughs

20 Plusieurs communications ont permis de suivre l’avancée des travaux sur les corpus bourroughsien et kerouacien. Ben Heal (University of Kent) s’est attaqué à l’« étrange » représentation des Chinois dans Junkie et Le Festin nu, et il suggère que, loin des clichés, Burroughs travaille l’ironie et la parodie afin de proposer une lecture subversive de cette diaspora dont la représentation textuelle s’attache à gommer les frontières nationales et raciales. Ben Heal a conclu que, à travers ce portrait et l’intégration de ce

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groupe dans ses textes, Burroughs se présentait comme précurseur chez les Beats d’un mode de représentation de l’Autre, ancré dans une sensibilité anti-impérialiste.

21 Thom Robinson (University of Sheffield) s’est intéressé à l’influence de Denton Welch sur Burroughs, notamment cette nostalgie sexualisée de l’adolescence que l’on retrouve chez Burroughs à partir de Wild Boys (1971). La communication a analysé en détail la relation imaginaire de Burroughs avec Welch. Robinson est revenu sur la façon dont l’accident qui a laissé Welch partiellement invalide a poussé Burroughs à refondre la mort de sa femme Joan dans l’écriture de son roman d’apprentissage. La présentation a fait émerger des points de convergences chez les deux auteurs autour de la diade adolescence-homosexualité pour proposer une écriture subversive de l’hétéronormativité.

22 C’est aussi sur l’importance de cette scène primitive, qu’est la mort de sa femme, dans le processus d’écriture romanesque que revient Bent Sørensen (Aalborg University). Selon lui, Burroughs propose une critique de l’écriture freudienne des rêves et rejette l'idée de satisfaction de la pulsion, tout en mettant en avant l’importance des rêves dans le processus d’écriture. Bent Sørensen s’est appuyé sur l’interprétation des rêves dans The Retreat Diaries (1976) où la scène primitive est déplacée sur le fils de Burroughs, William S. III à Tanger et où le rêve se mue en fantasme homosexuel.

23 Arthur Nusbaum (libraire, collectionneur) a présenté une sélection de lettres inédites de Paul Bowles à Herlihy qui insiste sur l’influence qu’a eue Tanger sur Burroughs. Richard English (Brunel University) est revenu, lui, sur un aspect moins étudié du Festin nu : sa mise en page et sa structure. Partant de l’utilisation de la technique du cut-up horizontal qui, selon lui, fait du roman une œuvre expérimentale, il a tenté d’en analyser les tropes, la syntaxe, la voix et la ponctuation pour conclure que cette écriture expérimentale s’ébauche toutefois sur une technique codifiée « traditionnelle ».

Jack Kerouac

24 C’est aussi à un roman d’apprentissage que se sont intéressés Richard Ellis et Ceren Sengerez (University of Birmingham) pour étudier la naissance du geste créateur chez Kerouac. Ils se sont intéressés au dispositif théâtral mis en place par Peter Brooks afin que le comédien se trouve lui-même. Richard Ellis et Ceren Sengerez ont donc pris la métaphore du funambulisme pour expliquer la conception de l’écriture dans The Sea is My Brother, qui propose à travers les deux protagonistes la recherche d’un lieu d’ancrage littéraire et l’exploration d’une écriture expérimentale, d’un langage « agressif ».

25 À travers des études intertextuelles et comparatistes, Diana Schreier et Alexander Greiffenstern (University of Duisburg-Essen) se sont, eux, attaqués au monument On the Road. Diana Schreier s’est attachée à faire sourdre du texte les références intertextuelles au seul livre que Sal Paradise ne lira pas : Le Grand Meaulnes d’Alain Fournier. Après avoir dégagé les thématiques communes aux deux romans, elle a tenté de faire résonner les deux textes. Alexander Greiffenstern, quant à lui, est parti de l’irruption du surnaturel pour analyser le sublime et la fonction du paysage américain dans les romans de la route. Il a fait, pour cela, entrer en résonance deux textes avec celui de Kerouac : The Autobiography of a Brown Buffalo de Acosta et Volkswagen Blues de

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Poulin. C’est à une archéologie de la terre et des fantômes qu’elle a engloutis que s’attaquent ces romans dont les protagonistes se lancent sur les traces de Paradise. En se présentant comme des réécritures ethniques et postmodernes du roman culte, les oeuvres d’Acosta et de Poulin partent à la recherche des fantômes du passé nord- américain et d’une américanité dont Kerouac lui-même est devenu représentatif.

26 Enfin, à travers une analyse du contexte culturel et de l’impact du bouddhisme zen dès les années 1950, Alberto Escobar de la Garma (Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México) s’est attelé à l’étude de l’adaptation-traduction de la vie de Bouddha par Kerouac. Texte singulier, Wake Up présente avec une certaine liberté créative les aphorismes des sutras tout en laissant sourdre les intertextes chrétiens.

Autour des figures tutélaires

27 Pourquoi certains écrivain(e)s beat sont resté(e)s dans l’ombre des Beats ? Pourquoi les femmes de la Beat Generation ont souvent été éclipsées au profit des figures masculines ? Voilà d’autres questions abordées au sein des différents ateliers. Une réponse peut être apportée par la communication d’Hassan Melehy (University of North Carolina), qui a proposé une lecture deleuzienne de la Beat Generation, qui serait une réponse antifasciste à la civilisation occidentale. Mais il a montré que la lecture, parfois erronée, des œuvres des auteurs beat pourrait s’interpréter comme le retour, dans leurs travaux, de la répression même qu’ils visent à contrer.

Les femmes de la Beat Generation

28 Raven See (Boston College), tout comme Thomas Antonic (University of Vienna), a cherché à rendre sa place d’artiste inspirée et innovante à Ruth Weiss, en insistant sur la pertinence de son œuvre au XXIe siècle. Raven See a pris pour objectif de démolir le stéréotype selon lequel les femmes de la Beat Generation n’auraient fait qu’imiter ou tout au mieux emprunter à leurs collègues du sexe opposé. Elle a donc cherché à travers l’exemple de Ruth Weiss à mettre en avant la centralité de ces figures féminines dans le développement d’une poétique beat. Loin du psittacisme parfois attribué aux femmes, son œuvre vient souligner la porosité des frontières entre musique, poésie et film pour créer un nouveau mode de performance artistique. C’est sur ce travail qu’est revenu Thomas Antonic, qui travaille à une biographie de la poétesse-jazz. Comme le souligne le titre de sa communication (« Ruth Weiss – Beat, Jazz, and the Art of Improvisation »), il s’est intéressé à la construction et à l’évolution de l’art de l’improvisation, en s’attachant à mettre en avant une technique personnelle qui, bien qu’évocatrice d’autres poètes ou écrivains beat comme Kerouac ou Baraka, a donné à ses performances un caractère novateur, parfois même avant-gardiste.

29 La publication en 2014 de poèmes et fragments d’Elise Cowen a permis de redécouvrir cette poétesse longtemps célèbre pour avoir tapé le manuscrit de « Kaddish ». Anna Slolina (Uniwersytet Kazimierza Wielkiego) a donc proposé, dans sa communication, un regard croisé sur la poésie de Cowen au prisme du volume édité par Trigilio et des mémoires de Joyce Johnson (Minor Characters), autre figure féminine de la Beat Generation. Anna Slolina a tenté de comprendre pourquoi ces poèmes ont sombré dans l’oubli au regard de l’attitude patriarcale et machiste des membres de la Beat Generation qui, selon elle, leur refusaient tout champ de production.

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30 Chelsea Stripe (Purdue University) a examiné l'œuvre d'une autre femme beat peu connue, Mimi Albert et a proposé une analyse du roman Skirts (1994). Grâce à une lecture analytique, Chelsea Stripe a mis en exergue sa position marginale par rapport à la Beat Generation pour tenter de démontrer comment Albert s’est faite écrivaine de la marge pour mieux effectuer une double critique de la société mainstream et de la culture beat elle-même.

Anne Waldman

31 Invitée d’honneur de cette conférence, Anne Waldman a proposé, lors d’une des deux conférences plénières, d’envisager la Beat Generation comme un squelette qui continue de résonner. Au cours de ce sermon-performance, elle a invité l’auditoire à un voyage dans l’héritage beat dans l’anthropocène — héritage qu’elle continue de perpétuer à l’Université de Naropa depuis la mort de Ginsberg. Dans cette performance entrecoupée de poèmes, elle est revenue sur la fonction du poète dans les ténèbres de notre temps. Dans son recueil Gossamurmur, Anne Waldman effectue un travail d’archiviste avec toutes les connotations mortifères que cela peut impliquer, comme le soulignait Derrida dans Mal d’archives.

32 C’est cet aspect qu’a voulu développer dans sa communication Vincent Broqua (Université Paris 8) en relatant le long pèlerinage effectué par Anne Waldman dans cette poiesis de l’archive où elle met en valeur la matérialité du mot, du nom et de la liste. Il n’a pas manqué de rappeler l’importance oraculaire et prophétique de l’archive, à la fois garante d’histoires et de l’Histoire, et annonciatrice d’un futur.

33 Deux ateliers sont revenus sur l’œuvre de la poétesse, notamment The Iovis Trilogy (2011). La communication de Polina Mackay (University of Nicosia) en a apporté un éclairage nouveau. Dans la lignée des longs poèmes américains (Pound, Williams, Zukofsky, Olson), Iovis se place, selon elle, en opposition par rapport à l’épopée masculine en redéfinissant les frontières du genre par un travail constant de réévaluation du féminin et de la filiation (Sappho, H.D.). C’est aussi l’importance du genre dans la poésie d’Anne Waldman qu’a réaffirmée Estibaliz Pinedo (Universidad de Murcia) en démontrant l’intimité entre gender et genre dans Iovis, qui viendrait, selon elle, faire vaciller les frontières de l’un et de l’autre : du gender et du genre de l’épopée, longtemps resté l’apanage (politique et géographique) des hommes.

34 Maximilian Orsini (Drew University) s’est, lui, concentré sur l’expérience intime du poème en se focalisant sur la résonnance intérieure générée par la performance dans « Said So ». À travers son analyse du processus de déstabilisation des voix antagonistes dans l’antre textuelle de la poésie d’Anne Waldman, il a tenté de montrer comment vide et silence éveillent le désir créateur de la poétesse en produisant l’expérience d’un satori créatif, le poème se transformant alors en un espace d’éveil de la conscience.

35 Laura Martin (Université Libre de Bruxelles) a proposé une relecture écopoétique, voire écoféministe, de la perception de la nature chez Anne Wadman, qu’elle envisage comme multiple — une fusion des notions d’environnement, d’esprit et de soi. Elle a mené son analyse à partir de la poétique de l’eau et de l’omniprésence de la métaphore de la mer, en s’interrogeant sur la possible corrélation entre la poétique de l’eau chez Waldman et chez Kerouac, dont le premier manuscrit, The Sea is My Brother, pourrait, selon elle, permettre d’ancrer la technique de la prose spontanée dans cette poétique de l’eau.

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Laura Martin a donc procédé à une analyse de « I AM THE GUARD ! » pour montrer comment Waldman s’approprie et transforme la « route liquide » de Kerouac.

Norse, Wieners, Kupferberg, Micheline, Sanders, Leary

36 Douglas Field (University of Manchester) et A. Robert Lee se sont attachés, eux, à réintroduire certaines figures marginales dans le canon de la contre-culture. Malgré ses collaborations avec les Beats, et même s’il a joué un rôle de catalyseur dans un certain nombre d’ouvrages publiés par les éditions City Lights (bookstore) et figure dans de nombreuses anthologies de poésie du XXe siècle, Harold Norse fait partie, selon Douglas Field, des oubliés de la Beat Generation. Peut-être plus beat que les Beats, celui dont la maîtrise de l’idiome américain donnait à sa voix un grain puissant est pourtant toujours resté dans l’ombre des figures canoniques. Kupferberg, Micheline, Sanders, Seijo, Jones, Rosenthal, Cowen… A. Robert Lee a voulu, lui aussi, dans une communication sous forme de « bottin téléphonique beat », revenir sur d’autres écrivains de la Beat Generation ou de la contre-culture très souvent délaissés par la critique. Lee, tout comme Field, s’est aussi interrogé sur les questions de classification, d’héritage et de tradition beat, tout en mettant en lumière les éléments biographiques et bibliographiques qui lui ont permis de renégocier la place de ces prétendants au titre de beat dans le cadre de ce qu’il nomme « the whole beat transaction ».

37 Erik Mortenson (Koç University), pour sa part, a choisi de mettre en avant la mise en scène de Still Life de John Wieners (1962) au New York Poets Theater et ainsi montrer que le travail de Wieners visait à promouvoir une nouvelle conception du théâtre en appliquant l’esthétique beat à la production théâtrale.

38 Enfin, deux communications se sont penchées sur Brion Gysin et Timothy Leary. C’est au premier, souvent associé à Burroughs, qu’Alexander Adams (artiste plasticien et critique d’art) a consacré une présentation sur l’étude de sa peinture calligraphique, ses photos et collages afin de faire émerger la dimension et la fonction magiques de l’art. Quant à William Stephenson (University of Chester), il a proposé une analyse de l’influence des Beats dans l’écriture fracturée de Politics of Ecstasy (1968) et High Priest (1968) de Leary afin de montrer comment ces textes participent d’une redéfinition radicale de la conscience humaine.

Miller et Brautigan

39 Par-delà les ponts anecdotiques qu’on retient de l’expérience commune de Henry Miller et des membres de la Beat Generation, Guy Stevenson (Goldsmith’s, University of London) a voulu surtout, à travers sa communication, réhabiliter la figure de Miller comme figure intermédiaire clé entre le trio fondateur de la Beat Generation et l’esthétique des Modernistes. Laissant de côté la période Big Sur gnostique de Miller, il s’est concentré sur l’étude de la trilogie écrite à Paris et sur un style à la fois agressif et eschatologique qui a, selon lui, contribué à mettre en place un nouveau style narratif et une nouvelle philosophie, que la Beat Generation embrassera une décennie plus tard.

40 John Tanner (Bangor University), pour sa part, s’est intéressé à un autre écrivain de la Côte Ouest souvent associé à la Beat Generation de par sa position marginale, ses expérimentations littéraires et son catalogage par les média comme porte-parole des hippies : Richard Brautigan. À travers des micro-études de Trout Fishing in California, il a

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voulu mettre en avant le caractère profondément expérimental de cet opus qui travaille à l’extrême les limites de la narration, du langage et des images. C’est précisément à la ville même de San Francisco que John Tanner a imputé ce terreau fertile à la création expérimentale mais aussi à la déconstruction des normes chez Brautigan.

La Beat Generation et la Côte Ouest

41 Si la Beat Generation est née à New York, c’est à San Francisco qu’elle a trouvé un point d’ancrage et un lieu de dissémination, dont le documentaire de Robert McTavish, The Line has Shattered : Vancouver’s Landmark 1963 Poetry Conference, a rendu compte. C’est sur cette délocalisation et les ramifications du mouvement aux hippies californiens dans les années 1960 que Frédéric Robert (Université Jean Moulin Lyon 3) a concentré son analyse, en s’interrogeant sur les moments clés qui ont ancré San Francisco dans la contre-culture et ont fait de Haight Ashbury une sorte d’exceptionnalisme californien. Selon lui, On the Road a grandement participé à l’attraction des hippies à San Francisco, à cette réhabilitation du quartier de Haight Ashbury et au remplacement de New York par San Francisco comme lieu de la bohème. C’est bien à San Francisco que le 7 octobre 1955 Ginsberg poussait son cri barbare à la Six Gallery. Cette soirée-lecture qui rassemblait quatre autres poètes (Lamantia, Whalen, McClure et Snyder) allait faire date dans l’histoire du mouvement.

42 À travers une recontextualisation de la création de la Six, et l’orientation prise par ses fondateurs Hedrick, Spicer, King, Remington, Simpson et Ryan, Frida Forsgren (University of Agder) a tenté de comprendre comment ce lieu a permis de poser les bases de la production des arts visuels à San Francisco et dans la baie. En faisant résonner installation artistique et performance poétique, elle a montré comment le désespoir existentiel qui se dégageait des peintures de Fred Martin venait reconstruire l’espace visuel de la lecture du poème. Lieu stratégique de la création poétique, San Francisco a aussi vu naître, dès les années 1960, de petites maisons d’édition qui ont grandement contribué à la diffusion de textes expérimentaux et avant-gardistes.

43 C’est sur le rôle clé joué par Donald Allen comme médiateur littéraire de la Beat Generation dans les années 1950 que Maarten van Gageldonk (Radboud University) est revenu. Il a surtout mis l’accent sur son travail d’assemblage de différents paysages poétiques sur les Côtes Est et Ouest, ainsi que sur sa ligne éditoriale dans la publication de l’anthologie New American Poetry 1945-1960 (1960). Van Gageldonk a tenté de montrer comment Allen, chaînon important dans ce rapprochement géographique et poétique, a codifié la poésie des années 1950-60 à travers son engagement dans différentes maisons d’édition (Grove Press, Grey Fox, the Four Seasons Foundation) et par le magazine Evergreen.

44 C’est sur la Côte Ouest aussi par le biais de Snyder et Whalen que les écrivains beat se sont confrontés aux philosophies orientales. Wake up de Kerouac fait partie de cet apprentissage et de cette poétique bouddhiste et environnementale qu’allaient embrasser de nombreux auteurs beat. Paul Nelson, lui aussi poète, s’est intéressé à quelques aphorismes bouddhistes, huayen et latihan pour révéler le lien entre méditation et poétique spontanée. Geetanjali Joshi Mishra (Amity University Lucknow) a proposé une étude approfondie des Aghoris pour dégager des similitudes entre leur

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mode de vie, croyances et pratiques et celles des écrivains beat, et l’influence de l’hindouisme sur ces écrivains, notamment Ginsberg.

45 Trevor Carolan (University of the Fraser Valley) est revenu sur les pérégrinations géographiques et spirituelles de ce dernier en Inde en insistant sur la dimension hybride de sa poétique. Empreinte d’une conscience Est-Ouest inaliénable, elle constitue un terreau métissé, propice au surgissement d’un nouvel art poétique américain et de cette conscience écocritique, dont Trevor Carolan a tenté de proposer une filiation dans son documentaire sur les écopoètes de la Côte Ouest. Si Waldman se place dans une tradition de poètes américains bouddhistes et environnementaux, il en est de même pour Kyger, Snyder, McClure ou Welch.

46 Dans sa communication, David Arnold (University of Worcester) a montré comment le traitement des questions environnementales associé à la pratique bouddhiste dans la poésie de Joan Kyger se répercute dans les débats actuels sur l’écocritique. Selon lui, la perspective bouddhiste appliquée à une cartographie de la conscience utilisée par Kyger pour appréhender le transitoire permet de mieux saisir le rapport de l’homme à la nature, et sa pratique réflexive met à mal la thèse défendue par un courant d’écocritique selon laquelle les écrits bouddhistes américains véhiculeraient une forme d’écopiété.

47 Ewan Clark (enseignant) a, quant à lui, retracé l’itinéraire poétique de celui qu’on associe souvent à Gary Snyder, Lew Welsh, avec lequel il partage l’influence orientale du poète et ermite chinois Han Shan. Clark a donc remis en perspective les poèmes de Welch à la lumière de textes de la poésie chan, mêlant vie érémitique et tradition contemplative de la nature dans la recherche de la sérénité de l’esprit. Comme l’a souligné Ewan Clark, la poésie de Welsh vient s’inscrire aussi dans le constat découlant de cette recherche de plénitude spirituelle et d’Éveil à sa propre nature.

48 Loin de l’ermitage californien, le décor du roman proto-beat de George Mandel Flee the Angry Strangers (1952) semble laisser peu de place à une lecture écocritique. Pourtant Chad Weidner (University College Roosevelt) s’y est attelé. Toute une réflexion sur les questions écologiques se joue dans ce roman et c’est à partir des travaux de Jerry Gifford sur l’écocritique et la pastorale qu’il s’interroge sur la scène underground de Greenwich Village. Toute aussi intéressante, l’étude de Franca Bellarsi consacrée au travail expérimental de Claude Pélieu présente celui-ci comme un précurseur de l’écopoétique et de l’écomontage, qu’elle apparente à une forme de compostage et de recyclage.

La Beat Generation et la scène rock

49 Pour conclure, cette conférence n’a pas manqué de mettre en avant les collaborations, filiations ou hommages de la scène rock à/avec la Beat Generation. Dans sa conférence plénière, Daniel Kane (University of Sussex), a voulu faire un pont entre les Beats, la scène proto-punk de l’East Village et la New York School of Poetry, en mettant en avant les liens étroits qu’ils ont tissés entre musique et poésie, dès 1971 avec le Saint Mark Church Project. Il a offert une analyse stimulante de la porosité de cette scène expérimentale new-yorkaise qui a favorisé cette intimité entre punk et poésie, à travers des figures clés comme Jim Carroll, Ted Berrigan, Ed Sanders, John Giorno ou Patti Smith.

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50 Simon Warner (University of Leeds) a, lui, cherché des hypothèses qui pourraient justifier l’appropriation des textes de la Beat Generation dans le rock (posture ? amour de la littérature ?). Il s’est notamment appuyé sur la version de Tom Waits d’On the Road et le clip vidéo du titre Subterranean Blues de Bob Dylan dans lequel figure Ginsberg. Le titre même de la chanson évoque l’œuvre de Kerouac, bien connue du chanteur. Simon Warner a fait dialoguer les deux cercles d’artistes à la fois rock et beat pour en dégager les lignes parallèles et divergentes tout en s’intéressant aux raisons qui poussent ces musiciens à investir ce corpus de textes.

BIBLIOGRAPHIE

Ressources et liens

Site du European Beat Studies Network : http://ebsn.eu/

Page et programme de la conférence : http://ebsn.eu/past-conferences/4th-annual-ebsn- conference-brussels-october-28-31-2015/

Biographie des keynote speakers : http://ebsn.eu/past-conferences/4th-annual-ebsn-conference- brussels-october-28-31-2015/keynote-biographies/

NOTES

1. http://ebsn.eu/past-conferences/4th-annual-ebsn-conference-brussels-october-28-31-2015/ conference-film-screenings/

AUTEURS

PEGGY PACINI Université de Cergy-Pontoise

ANNA AUBLET Université Paris Ouest Nanterre La Défense

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Journée d’études « Photographie et histoire américaine » Université Paris Diderot, 25 septembre 2015

Eliane de Larminat

1 Le 25 septembre 2015 s’est tenue à l’Université Paris Diderot une journée d’études intitulée « Photographie et histoire américaine », organisée par Carolin Görgen et Camille Rouquet, doctorantes du LARCA-UMR 8525. L’objectif de cette journée était d’examiner des pratiques photographiques comme étant historiquement situées, en allant au-delà de l’idée d’une détermination historique de la photographie ; il s’agissait de penser des objets et pratiques photographiques comme agents de l’histoire américaine.

2 François Brunet introduit la journée en faisant référence à un dossier sur les rapports entre photographie et histoire, dirigé par Miles Orvell et publié dans le numéro d’avril 2015 de la revue American Art, montrant ainsi l’inscription de cette journée dans une actualité transatlantique des recherches sur la photographie. Il faut comprendre cette « actualité » au sens fort : François Brunet nuance en effet l’idée, avancée par Miles Orvell, selon laquelle le rapport entre photographie et histoire serait intrinsèque au médium et aux discours portant sur lui, et rappelle que cette préoccupation est fluctuante. Les approches de la photographie qui sont réunies dans cette journée d’études s’inscrivent bien dans une approche contemporaine du rapport entre photographie et histoire, en ce qu’elles posent chacune à sa manière la question des formes et méthodes de contextualisation, tout en maintenant l’objet photographique au centre de leurs approches. La journée montre aussi comment, tout en étudiant résolument la photographie, il devient possible de s’adresser à d’autres communautés académiques, au-delà de celles qui sont traditionnellement concernées par la photographie.

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Documentation du logement social et des quartiers pauvres

3 Le premier panel rassemble deux doctorantes dont les travaux portent sur des corpus institutionnels, et qui se tiennent dans un rapport de porosité avec d’autres champs historiques — en l’occurrence, l’histoire du logement, de l’intervention de l’État dans le tissu urbain et des représentations de la ville.

Nicole A. Krup (Universität Zürich), « Housing History and the Photographic Archive, Los Angeles in Context »

4 Nicole Krupp ouvre la réflexion sur les rapports entre histoire photographique et histoire américaine en présentant ses recherches sur l’archive photographique de la Los Angeles Housing Authority (LAHA). Il s’agit de comprendre ce qui détermine la constitution de cette archive, ainsi que le rôle qu’elle a pu jouer dans l’histoire de cette institution. La LAHA est instituée en 1938 suivant les spécifications du Housing Act de 1937, qui donne trois missions aux agences locales de logement social : identifier et détruire les taudis (slums), construire des logements bon marché et modernes et y reloger les personnes déplacées, et enfin produire un rapport annuel d’activité. L’archive photographique se développe donc d’abord comme moyen en vue d’une fin, et va permettre en particulier d’illustrer les rapports annuels de la LAHA. Elle participera plus largement des efforts de communication de l’institution, à un moment où il fallait « vendre » à la fois une forme d’intervention publique dans l’espace urbain et d’aide sociale et une nouvelle forme architecturale. Les supports de communication visuelle de la LAHA, qu’il s’agisse des rapports annuels ou de panneaux exposés lors d’événements internes à l’institution ou lors de conférences nationales des agences de logement social, font ainsi la part belle à des séquences photographiques montrant une amélioration – que ce soit par le biais de paires sur le modèle « avant/après » ou de séquences plus longues qui donnent un aperçu historique sur les réalisations de l’agence. Nicole Krupp clôt son intervention sur un objet « obscur », dont les conditions de production et l’usage prévu ou effectif demeurent mystérieux : il s’agit d’un album contenant des photographies de quartiers délabrés. La rareté des informations portées à côté des photographies collées laisse penser qu’il s’agit d’un document à usage interne. L’objet demeure cependant élusif — à l’image de l’ensemble du documentaire social produit à Los Angeles dans les années 1940 à 1960, dont Allan Sekula a noté qu’il correspond à un relatif vide historiographique (Dimendberg et Sekula, 2005, 43).

Eliane de Larminat (Université Paris Diderot), « Then and Now: Photographs and the Historicization of Public Housing in Chicago »

5 L’intervention suivante reste dans le champ des représentations photographiques du logement social mais s’attache à l’exemple de Chicago. Cette ville fut un laboratoire important pour le renouvellement urbain de l’après Deuxième Guerre mondiale, puis pour le nouveau mouvement de destruction-reconstruction qui vit à partir des années 1990 la destruction d’une grande partie d’un parc social « conventionnel » considéré comme trop dysfonctionnel. L’intervention s’attache d’abord à des photographies telles que publiées dans des rapports (et autres supports d’information et de

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communication), et au récit qui est ainsi mis en place par plusieurs institutions (la Chicago Housing Authority et d’autres agences liées au renouvellement urbain). L’observation de ces rapports amène à une vision plus fine et complexe du schéma rhétorique « avant-après », typique des productions visuelles institutionnelles du milieu du siècle. Ce schéma se déploie entre des images mises en regard ou en séquence plus complexes, mais aussi à l’intérieur même d’images ; il devient ainsi un schéma directeur pour la perception des changements urbanistiques en cours, une formule visuelle que l’on retrouve aussi à la fin des années 1950 dans des images de photographes amateurs documentant la ville de Chicago. La juxtaposition de l’avant et de l’après, qu’elle ait lieu entre plusieurs images ou soit cristallisée dans une seule vue, permet d’articuler spatialement un récit de progrès — tout en masquant, simplifiant, ou recodant la manière dont l’on passe d’une forme urbaine à une autre, et cela dans un contexte de déplacement massif de populations urbaines, où l’« avant » et l’« après », comme lieux, ne logent pas forcément les même personnes. L’intervention se clôt sur l’évocation de nouvelles mises en image du logement social à travers le schéma de l’« avant-après » à la fin des années 1990 et au début des années 2000, quand les logements sociaux sont désormais marqués comme l’« avant ». Dans ces deux moments, différentes formes urbaines sont renvoyées dans le passé ; par-delà l’apparente évidence de la formule, l’« avant-après » demande toujours à être historicisé.

Interprétations du pictorialisme au début du XXe siècle

6 Le panel suivant présente des pratiques photographiques ancrées dans la définition d’identités régionales ou artistiques proprement américaines au début du XXe siècle.

Carolin Görgen (Université Paris Diderot), « “Legitimizing” a Region through Photography: San Francisco Amateur Photographers »

7 Si Nicole Krupp avait clôt son intervention sur l’idée d’Allan Sekula selon laquelle le documentaire social du milieu du siècle à Los Angeles constitue encore un point aveugle dans les recherches sur la photographie, Carolin Görgen présente quant à elle un corpus et une pratique photographique peu étudiés, et dont elle met en avant la richesse. Il s’agit de la pratique photographique amateur dans la région de San Francisco à la fin du XIXe et au début du XX e siècle. Carolin Görgen note une vaste lacune dans la recherche sur la photographie dans l’Ouest entre les années 1880 et 1920, c’est-à-dire entre la période du daguerréotype d’une part, et la photographie moderniste d’autre part. La marginalisation de l’Ouest comme région se double d’une vision très réduite en termes sociologiques, qui se concentre sur les professionnels et sur les artistes en oubliant une pratique amateur. Cette pratique est pourtant très riche et cherche à l’époque à se donner une structure collective, autour de la revue Camera Craft et à travers une organisation régionale des camera clubs. La pratique amateur californienne se veut donc régionale, et se distingue en cela du mouvement des camera clubs de la côte Est et de New York en particulier, qui sont marqués par l’élitisme et la valorisation d’artistes spécifiques. Cette approche « régionale » ne se limite pas à des questions d’organisation, mais définit aussi un projet véritablement commun pour la pratique amateur dans la région de San Francisco : il s’agit avant tout de légitimer la Californie comme région, d’une part par sa beauté (d’où une approche marquée par le

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pictorialisme) et d’autre part par sa valeur historique. C’est ce qui fait l’importance des collections de reproduction de sites qui sont retenus comme historiques (la Bancroft Library conserve des exemples de ce type d’albums, et la plupart des villes californiennes comptaient à l’époque au moins une copy gallery permettant de diffuser ces vues), puis du tremblement de terre de 1906 qui permet de poser la Californie comme véritable Italie américaine. Les amateurs de San Francisco, individus engagés dans une entreprise commune, inscrivent leur région dans une histoire visuelle à la fois locale et nationale, qui remonte à la conquête de l’Ouest ; leur rôle est crucial jusqu’à l’exposition « Panama-Pacifique » de 1915, qui marque l’aboutissement du cycle de reconstruction de San Francisco.

Hélène Orain (Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne), « Straight photography : Invention de la modernité américaine »

8 La présentation d’Hélène Orain amène un contrepoint à l’intervention précédente, en retraçant la manière dont la notion de « photographie pure », discutée en Europe dès les années 1860, devient une idée et une pratique américaine dans les années 1910 et 1920. Elle montre comment des débats sur le médium et sur le rapport entre retouche et « vérité » photographique en viennent à être redéfinis plus clairement comme un problème esthétique et moral (qui peut être déconnecté de déterminations vraiment techniques, puisque le rapport entre straight photography et absence de retouche devient moins central). Paul Strand reprend ainsi la notion dans l’article « Photography » de 1917, et la straight photography est acclimatée à New York, puis en Californie avec le groupe f/64 de San Francisco. Cette appropriation se joue en fait beaucoup autour de la notion d’américanité, dans un contexte artistique et plus largement culturel qui, à partir de l’Armory Show de 1913 et de la Première Guerre Mondiale, cherche à se définir à nouveau contre l’Europe.

Construction visuelle de la mémoire des conflits

9 Ce panel présente diverses perspectives sur la production et la réception des images, en temps de guerre et dans la mémoire des conflits.

Sarah Charluteau-Martin (Université Paris-Sorbonne), « L’effort de guerre américain à travers les photographies de l’Office of War Information »

10 Sarah Charluteau-Martin présente un corpus photographique qui est à la fois éminemment inscrit dans son contexte historique, et désormais surtout utilisé de manière illustrative par des historiens — d’où l’importance d’analyser ce corpus dans ses déterminations politiques. L’Office of War Information (OWI) est créé en juin 1942, quelques mois après l’entrée en guerre des États-Unis. Du point de vue institutionnel, le programme photographique de l’OWI est en continuité avec celui de la Farm Security Administration (FSA) ; mais l’évolution est marquée au niveau du contenu idéologique et des déterminations esthétiques. La défense de la politique fédérale, qui était aussi l’objet du programme photographique de la FSA, doit en effet désormais encourager l’effort de guerre. Au niveau du discours, on note une rhétorique martiale, et une mise

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en avant de nouveaux acteurs (en particulier les femmes et les Noirs) sans qu’apparaisse jamais nulle forme de tension, conflit social ou ségrégation. Au niveau esthétique, on observe un nouveau style par rapport à la production de la FSA ; ce style est marqué par l’emphase, des effets de contrastes en particulier dans le traitement des lumières (où l'on peut voir l’influence du film noir), et des cadrages monumentalisants. Par l’effet visé et les moyens mis en œuvre pour l’atteindre, ce corpus photographique apparaît comme construction autant qu’enregistrement, et comme acteur plutôt que témoin de l’histoire. Il impose également de repenser les rapports entre politique, idéologie et propagande (une notion théorisée aux États-Unis dès les années 1920, en même temps que les médias et la communication).

Camille Rouquet (Université Paris Diderot), « The Notion of Media Influence in the Historiography of the Vietnam War »

11 Si le corpus de l’OWI a eu tendance à être utilisé comme une source d’illustrations par les historiens (aux dépens d’une étude de son caractère construit), Camille Rouquet note un phénomène inverse quant au supposé rôle historique joué dans la guerre du Vietnam par les médias, et en particulier par les photographies. L’idée selon laquelle les médias auraient influé sur le cours des événements, voire que les médias auraient été la cause de la défaite, est en effet largement répandue, bien que la notion d’influence soit souvent floue. Face à cette idée reçue, l’intervention présente un vaste panorama des fluctuations de la théorie de l’influence des médias dans l’historiographie, depuis les témoignages d’acteurs clés de la guerre jusqu’au présent. Il est en effet possible de distinguer différentes catégories dans l’historiographie, qui partagent chacune une certaine théorie sur cette influence possible des médias. Les histoires « générales » de la photographie se concentrent sur des « icônes », sans prendre en compte les méandres de la guerre elle-même. Au contraire, les historiens de la photographie de guerre rejettent la théorie de l’influence. Les historiens de la guerre du Vietnam sont attentifs à l’hostilité du gouvernement envers les médias, et, sans vraiment parler d’influence, ils témoignent d’une forte pénétration de la théorie de l’influence puisque le schéma cause/conséquence reste présent. Les journalistes, pour leur part, sont à la fois dans le rejet des accusations et la revendication de leur importance, tandis que les personnalités politiques ou militaires ont véritablement assis la théorie de l’influence. Quant aux travaux sur les médias et la communication, ils ont vu un premier tournant dans les années 1990, qui contredit la notion d’influence (en montrant que des évolutions de l’opinion par rapport à la guerre sont sans rapport avec les médias) tandis que la production des années 2000 se concentre surtout sur la manière dont certaines images sont devenues centrales dans la mémoire du conflit. Ce panorama montre que le concept d’influence est souvent flou ; il trouve en fait son origine dans la rencontre initiale entre des personnalités politiques qui cherchent un coupable, et des médias qui défendent leur profession — tout cela, comme le rappelle Mark Meigs, dans le contexte particulièrement intense du scandale du Watergate, où l’influence des journalistes sur le cours des événements est bien réelle et surtout très visible. Finalement, cette théorie de l’influence correspond à des tentatives, maintenant dépassées, de rendre compte de la place de certaines photographies dans la mémoire du conflit.

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Shakila Zamboulingame (Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne), « Le photojournalisme face à la guerre du Vietnam »

12 Après ce panorama historiographique, Shakila Zamboulingame propose un panorama visuel de la couverture photographique du conflit dans Life et Paris Match en 1965. Le corpus est constitué par les photoreportages publiés dans les magazines principaux du pays qui s’installe dans le conflit d’une part, et du pays qui a mené la guerre coloniale précédente, et dont la perception est donc colorée d’une manière spécifique, d’autre part. Le corpus considéré permet d’observer la mise en place d’un lexique, d’une narration visuelle qui seront réactivés jusqu’à la fin de la guerre. On note en fait la reprise d’une mémoire visuelle avec un renouvellement de certains codes (par exemple, le maquis devient la jungle). Une typologie se met en place, en particulier pour la représentation de la douleur, des blessures, de la mort — en particulier américaines, alors que le conflit fait ses premières victimes américaines. Cette culture visuelle, qui s’installe dès 1965, permet de replacer les images iconiques de Ronald Haeberle ou Nick Ut dans une histoire visuelle.

Didier Aubert (Université Sorbonne Nouvelle - Paris 3), « L’archive et le révérend : Willis Hoover, le pentecostalisme chilien et la mémoire photographique de l’Église méthodiste »

13 Didier Aubert présente un travail en cours sur l’archive photographique de l’Église méthodiste au Chili, qui, sous la direction de Willis Hoover, connut un renouveau pentecôtiste. La mise en place de cette archive (dont les conditions et la date de création sont inconnues) s’inscrit dans le contexte d’un projet d’évangélisation compris comme manifestation d’un empire moral américain. L’archive s’explique en partie par une tendance à la bureaucratisation de l’organisation, liée au développement des sciences sociales appliquées à l’économie et à la société ; elle s’inscrit aussi dans une ambition de centralisation des informations, dans un contexte de mission à l’échelle continentale. Les photographies, réalisées par les missionnaires ou achetées, sont rassemblées dans des albums ; elles ont une fonction pédagogique, permettant d’éduquer les futurs missionnaires dans les Bible institutes qui se développent alors. Mais l’archive sert des fonctions hétérogènes ; ainsi la documentation des bâtiments possédés ou gérés par l’Église méthodiste au Chili peut-elle servir à convaincre l’Église américaine à investir plus de fonds. Didier Aubert clôt son intervention sur une particularité de l’archive : le révérend Hoover a été exclu de l’Église, et a failli être éliminé de l’archive, comme le montre l’ajout de la mention « nix » sur deux photographies où il figure. Ce « détail », cette surprise dans l’album, pose en fait une question de méthode : que faire de l’image qui n’est pas dans la série ? Faut-il se laisser séduire par l’image la plus différente et donc distrayante ? François Brunet suggère que l’idée selon laquelle l’archive correspondrait à un mécanisme ne tient pas devant le caractère relativement chaotique de la plupart des archives, quand on les regarde dans le détail ; il faut penser la rationalisation comme un pôle de la production de ces archives, qui coexiste avec une logique de prolifération assez autonome.

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Photographie du paysage américain

14 Cette journée sur photographie et histoire américaine se termine avec des interventions sur deux photographic surveys, qui se distinguent par leur place dans le canon de l’histoire de la photographie — bien établie pour l’une, et encore à révéler pour la seconde.

Stella Jungman (Universität Zürich), « Viewing Nature through the Camera: The Untouched Wilderness in Carleton Watkins’s Survey Photography »

15 Stella Jungman présente la photographie de paysage produite par Carleton Watkins dans le cadre de ses travaux d’exploration. Elle montre comment Watkins représente la nature comme hors du temps, au-delà de toute intervention humaine (ce qui serait une différence avec le travail de Timothy O’Sullivan, qui aurait plus tendance à montrer des figures humaines dans le paysage). La nature n’est alors plus un contexte historique où pourraient se dérouler des événements, mais un espace mesurable. Le spectateur, passif, est en position de reconnaître le caractère scientifique du travail photographique de Watkins ; l’image peut être conçue comme objective dans la mesure où la même vue pourrait supposément être fixée à nouveau si le photographe se tenait au même endroit, en l’absence d’accident. La dimension scientifique de cette photographie d’exploration demande en réalité à être inscrite dans un contexte culturel spécifique, qui détermine une certaine vision de la nature.

Jordi Ballesta (École National Supérieure du Paysage), « J. B. Jackson et la photographie routière américaine »

16 La journée se termine sur une proposition d’extension du champ des études sur la photographie, par une attention à la photographie comme pratique de recherche et support d’enseignement. Jordi Ballesta présente le travail photographique de J. B. Jackson (1909-1995), géographe américain qui joua un rôle essentiel dans la valorisation du paysage vernaculaire, et en particulier du paysage routier, ainsi que dans la constitution des Landscape Studies comme champ académique. Il s’agit d’un corpus de diapositives produites par Jackson lors de ses déplacements et utilisées pour ses cours à la University of New Mexico entre 1955 et 1989. Jordi Ballesta rappelle la fréquence, la pérennité et l’amplitude des voyages (surtout à moto) de Jackson, plus proche en cela d’artistes qui lient étroitement voyage et photographie que de géographes s’attachant à un terrain de recherche bien circonscrit. La pratique photographique de Jackson correspondait à une pratique de prise de note permettant aussi de structurer la perception — et cela dans le cadre d’un mode de recherche consistant à investir le monde directement, reléguant la consultation d’informations archivées à un statut très secondaire. Les photographies de Jackson constituent en fait un support de recherche qui reste très proche de l’expérience d’un touriste « alerte » (qui constituait le cœur de l’enseignement de Jackson). Après cette présentation de la pratique photographique de Jackson comme pratique de terrain, telle que ses archives permettent de la ressaisir, Jordi Ballesta resitue ce travail photographique dans un contexte plus large où le paysage de bord de route constitue un point de convergence pour des artistes

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photographes et le champ architectural. Il propose d’inclure la pratique photographique des chercheurs dans un champ d’études hodologiques non cloisonné, puisque les circulations sont nombreuses entre architectes (Venturi et Scott Brown), chercheurs (Kevin Lynch, Donald Appleyard), et photographes (New Topographics). Le travail de Jackson, s’il n’est sans doute pas utilement formulable comme « œuvre » (dans la mesure aussi où Jackson ne le valorisait pas comme tel, lui qui publiait des photographies non créditées dans la revue Landscape), n’en fournit pas moins un corpus très riche pour penser la photographie comme recherche et comme savoir — ce qui rejoint l’un des axes de cette journée d’études.

BIBLIOGRAPHIE

Bibliographie

DIMENDBERG, Edward, et Allan SEKULA, « Allan Sekula », BOMB 92, 2005, 38-45.

Ressources

Lien vers le programme : http://www.univ-paris-diderot.fr/EtudesAnglophones/pg.php? bc=CHVR&page=fiche_colloque&g=sm&numevent=217

AUTEUR

ELIANE DE LARMINAT Université Paris Diderot

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Recensions

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Xiaojing Zhou, Cities of Others. Reimagining Urban Spaces in Asian American Literature

Nicoleta Alexoae-Zagni

REFERENCES

ZHOU, Xiaojing, Cities of Others. Reimagining Urban Spaces in Asian American Literature, Seattle and London, University of Washington Press, 2014, 334 pages, ISBN 978-0-295-99403-1, $ 30.00

1 For readers acquainted with the field of Asian American studies, Xiaojing Zhou’s name comes across as familiar, as she is the co-editor of one of the most pertinent critical anthologies published over the first decade of the 21st century—Form and Transformation in Asian American literature—engaging with Asian American writers’ positioning in respect to Euroamerican literary traditions1. With this first book-length study on Asian American writings about Chinatown and about the city in general, Zhou sets out to interrogate interactions, encounters and transformations through a different lens, making a timely contribution to contemporary discussions on the representation of urban and national spaces. Articulating interdisciplinary frameworks of interpretation, “developed in both the humanities and social sciences” (12), she aims to scrutinize the “mutually constitutive and transformative relationship between Chinatown and Chinese American subjectivity, between the identities of Chinatown and the American city” (19). To sustain her arguments pointing to a necessity of critical examination of narrative embedding of the poetics and politics of space, Zhou deploys, in eight chapters, a study of selected works signed by both well-known and neglected contemporary and past writers.

2 Chapter 1, “‘The Woman about Town’: Transgressing Raced and Gendered Boundaries in Sui Sin Far’s Writings”, examines the ways in which Sui Sin Far / Edith Maude Eaton’s stories propose, as early as the end of the 19th century, subversive portrayals of

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urban spaces. Zhou claims that by refusing to privilege a “white gaze” (40), the Eurasian writer granted Chinese immigrants, as well as women, freedom of both perspective and movement, imposing the ethnic and gendered body as “part of the American cityscape” (56). Pursuing the scrutiny of classic texts, the second chapter, entitled “Claiming Right to the City”, focuses on the first novel dealing with Chinese Americans living in New York City and its Chinatown—Lin Yutang’s Chinatown Family (1948). Going against established readings depicting it as catering to a white readership, the critic argues that Lin’s narrative strategies allow his characters to take possession of the city through everyday activities and interactions, undermining, like Sui Sin Far, the privileged notion of the white male flâneur (drawing on Walter Benjamin’s conceptualizations) and challenging the myth of the self-enclosed ethnic enclave as well as that of the American city impervious to the presence of otherness.

3 The third chapter—“‘Our Inside Story’ of Chinatown”—focuses on Fae Myenne Ng’s Bone (1993) which portrays the lives of several members, belonging to different real (and symbolic) generations of a working-class Chinese immigrant family residing in San Francisco’s Chinatown. In a novel where, as Zhou astutely contends, space itself serves as the narrator, the reader’s gaze is taken off touristic topographies “to expose and critique the legacy of racial exclusion and exploitation” (97). Inscribing this alternative reality of Chinatown as “habitation” (116), Ng’s narrative is analyzed as making a case for the “mutually constitutive relationship of the social and the spatial” (116) as well as offering glimpses of limitations and possibilities entailed by this dynamic between space and subject. The examination, in the fourth chapter, of Frank Chin’s writings, enables Zhou to take this idea further and dwell on “Chinatown as an embattled pedagogical space”—as phrased in the chapter title—, “at once the product and instrument of social power, a contested space of competing ideologies, discourses, and representations, which construct identities and constitute subjects” (117). She convincingly puts forward that rather than appearing as merely a background, Chinatown emerges here as a lively, productive and dissonant multicultural community, inventing itself through everyday practices and redefining, by its very existence, the American urban space.

4 Chapter 5, “Inhabiting the City as Exiles: Bienvenido N. Santos’s What the Hell for You Left Your Heart in San Francisco”, delves into the inscription, at the heart of the American city, of loss and dislocation resulting particularly from Spanish and American colonial legacies. According to Zhou, this 1987-published novel by the Filipino American writer departs from the main bulk of contemporary literature to deploy not only an aesthetics and politics of “mourning irretrievable loss” (197) but also of an “active engagement with the past” (196), allowing for limning modes of translational belonging.

5 Building on Mary Louise Pratt’s concept of “contact zone” to refer to “how subjects are constituted in and by their relations to each other within radically asymmetrical relations of power” (20), chapter 6 further explores hyphenated and postcolonial positionings transforming Western metropolises—as reflected in Meena Alexander’s Manhattan Music (1997)—, to point out narrative strategies reimagining New York City as an “open, inclusive space of a diasporic world” (226). Zhou’s choice of pursuing, in the following chapter of her book, the investigation of the racialized cityscape by choosing to probe Chang-rae Lee’s Native Speaker (1995) presents her with the opportunity to eloquently argue for a narrative enactment of “interventional

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possibilities for inhabiting the city not as a closed nation-space” (256) but rather as one of a more inclusive democracy and multiracial coalitions.

6 The final chapter, dedicated to the Tropic of Orange (1997) by Karen Tei Yamashita and the delineation of a global cartography of Los Angeles that relates it especially to the South, puts this novel forward as “show[ing] the spirit and possibilities” (289) for such a coalition; a narrative delving even deeper into the depths of “the politics of space in the era of economic restructuring and globalization” (21), it offers, as stated by Zhou, “an alternative mode of spatial practice and imagination” (262) that not only testifies to the “entanglement of vastly separated places and peoples” (262), but equally gives voice to “interracial community networks and transnational grassroots resistance to exploitation, subjugation, and exclusion” (262).

7 Having convincingly and innovatively taken the transnational dimension to the global South (when connections to Asia remain prevalent in critical examinations), Zhou concludes with the necessity to further open up conceptual frameworks and rethink critical tools to explore Asian American urban literature. The final pages of Cities of Others suggest directions for such redefinitions and expansions by taking up the study of Yamashita’s latest novel—I Hotel (2010)—as well as of The Gangster We Are All Looking For (2004) by lê thi diem thúy. Both novels are seen as embedding in the American landscape and cityscape “visions and voices of those who refuse to be […] made invisible” (298), reinforcing the critic’s conviction that both imaginative and critical engagements have to move the focus from the global cities of the North to situate Asian American spatial experiences and representations in transnational and palimpsestic contexts.

8 With its meticulous, insightful and often refreshing readings and despite the occasional repetitions of the methodologies deployed (a consequence of organizing the book around particular works), Xiaojing Zhou’s study not only engages but equally opens new investigatory trails. It represents an important contribution to the constantly growing body of critical works on Asian American literature and will prove of interest to theorists and scholars of American ethnic studies and American literature.

NOTES

1. Zhou, Xiaojing and Najmi, Samina, eds., Form and Transformation in Asian American Literature, Seattle and London, University of Washington Press, 2005.

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AUTHORS

NICOLETA ALEXOAE-ZAGNI ISTOM & Université Paris Ouest Nanterre

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Ana Manzanas and Jesus Benito, Cities, Borders, and Spaces in Intercultural American Literature and Film

Nathalie Cochoy

RÉFÉRENCE

MANZANAS, Ana and Jesus BENITO, Cities, Borders, and Spaces in Intercultural American Literature and Film, New York, Routledge, 2011, 159 pages, 32 $, ISBN-10 : 1138849669, ISBN-13 : 978-1138849662

1 Consacré à la représentation des zones frontalières, cet ouvrage d’Ana Manzanas et Jesus Benito propose une nouvelle poétique de l’espace urbain dans la littérature américaine contemporaine. En début et en fin d’essai, il offre aussi des perspectives novatrices sur l’approche cinématographique de ces lieux transitoires et babéliens.

2 Se soustrayant à toute définition en termes de limite, d’enceinte, de mur de démarcation, les frontières urbaines sont des lieux où la mouvance devient mode d’habitation. Peuplés de migrants, ces endroits périphériques, mais aussi consubstantiels à la ville, suscitent de nouvelles formes de création littéraire et artistique. Avec finesse et subtilité, Ana Manzanas et Jesus Benito montrent ainsi comment la littérature et le cinéma contemporains révèlent certes l’aliénation, les déchirures intimes et les mutations contraintes des locataires des marges urbaines, mais aussi la manière dont ces derniers parviennent à transformer leur errance et leurs blessures mémorielles ou identitaires en modes d’existence.

3 Dans une introduction magistrale, les auteurs montrent la nécessité de réviser les modes d’approche critiques, à l’abord d’œuvres qui se réinventent afin de manifester, dans leur structure et leur substance, l’essentielle mouvance de vies entremêlées aux

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confins et au coeur des métropoles américaines. En effet, le flâneur de Benjamin, la maison de Bachelard, l’espace social de Lefebvre, la marche orientée de Certeau ou les non-lieux d’Augé apparaissent comme des concepts désormais inaptes à éclairer les dérives multiples, souvent entrelacées et invisibles, de migrants (homeless) en attente ou en souffrance. Dans sa composition même, fondée sur une imbrication inédite de niveaux de spatialité – le corps, la ville, la nation – le livre d’Ana Manzanas et Jesus Benito illustre la nécessité d’envisager l’espace frontalier dans sa dimension plurielle et stratifiée. Les analyses filmiques de The Visitor (McCarthy) et The Terminal (Spielberg) qui encadrent le livre mettent en perspective la situation contradictoire d’exclusion et d’insertion des migrants aux seuils de la ville, dans les centres de détention ou les terminaux d’aéroport. En ce sens, la relecture de l’ambivalence symbolique de la Statue de la Liberté, brandissant une torche ou une épée dans les oeuvres de Kafka ou de Pérec, et des arcanes d’Ellis Island, face aux nouvelles « portes » de l’Amérique où s’effectue un « melting pot à rebours », offre des perspectives stimulantes. De même, opportunément situé au milieu du livre, le chapitre dédié à Borderlands/La Frontera, de Gloria Anzaldua, présente une réinterprétation de la frontière entre le Mexique et les Etats-Unis. L’écriture cinématographique renonce ici à toute vision stable, cohérente et complète de l’Aztlan, en vue de mettre au jour la multiplicité et le métissage d’identités nationales, mémorielles ou langagières.

4 La poétique des frontières urbaines qu’Ana Manzanas et Jesus Benito mettent en œuvre se fonde sur une étude de certains motifs déterminants de la littérature américaine. Ainsi, les auteurs se réfèrent à l’image de l’aigle, dans « The Custom-House » de Hawthorne, mais aussi à la manière dont les rituels routiniers remettent en question la notion de home : « In “The Custom-House” the home has become unhomely, unheimlich. The dwelling place has become estranged not as the result of the introduction of something foreign that threatens to dispossess it of its identity, the composite of place and narrative that comprises the idea of home. Rather, surprisingly, the home becomes its very opposite by the reiteration of sameness » (20). Cette analyse permet de comprendre comment l’occupation de l’espace familier de la ville, dans The Visitor, ne saurait se lire selon des codes et des cartes établis. Annihilée par un quotidien répétitif, la notion de home se trouve étonnamment régénérée au contact de « citoyens de l’ailleurs » qui, vendeurs ou musiciens, interrogent l’idée de territoire américain (« the whereness and being-ness of America »). De même, dans l’étude consacrée à deux textes de Chuck Palahniuk (« Slumming ») et d’Helena Viramontes (« The Cariboo Café »), une référence aux récits de rue de Stephen Crane permet aux auteurs d’esquisser le « simulacre de naturalisme » adopté par des personnages de Palahniuk et au contraire, les mécanismes qui, loin de toute version déterministe ou romantique du vagabond des rues, entraînent les protagonistes de Viramontes vers une inéluctable disparition. Dans leur étude des paysages noctambules de la ville, où émergent de nouvelles formes de simultanéité et de sonorité, Ana Manzanas et Jesus Benito réussissent ainsi à révéler sans les séparer les entremêlements qui constituent l’essence même des confins invisibles de la ville : « The result is a multiple crossing, a liminal state or blurriness made up of different realities that intersect within contested confines » (48).

5 Dans The Tropic of Orange, de Karen Tei Yamashita, ces entrelacements prennent la forme littérale de réseaux autoroutiers. Aux frontières de L.A., Yamashita met au jour une nouvelle forme d’habitation (dwell), fondée sur une harmonisation au flux et aux variations incessantes d’une ville désormais « défaite » (E. Soja). Dans ce monde

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intermédiaire en constant mouvement, nul besoin de se déplacer pour voir la ville : le « marcheur immobile » (« static stroller ») se tient sur une passerelle, au dessus des échangeurs autoroutiers. Comme le montrent Ana Manzanas et Jesus Benito, les personnages de Yamashita inaugurent ainsi une nouvelle forme d’harmonisation au mouvement : « What remains is absolute change – not the repetitive, mechanical transience on the well-defined circles of the freeway, but a mutability that alters the quality of space, time and reality » (63).

6 L’ambivalence de la frontière urbaine, lieu de rupture et de suture, trouve en outre une magnifique illustration dans le chapitre consacré aux images de blessure et de cicatrisation dans la littérature. Ana Manzanas et Jesus Benito soulignent en effet comment l’expérience de l’exil, dans la ville contemporaine, se traduit en des termes très corporels. Désignés comme constamment mouillés (empapados), les migrants chicanos ne cessent de rejouer leur traversée de la frontière dans leurs souvenirs, mais aussi dans leur vie quotidienne. Or, ils parviennent ainsi parfois à convertir la mobilité qui les constitue en manière d’être au monde: « Though dangerously looking into the abyss of nothingness and death, nowhereness and bleeding, the liminal space ceases to be a transient area, a space of non-identity, and is re-created as a space in motion, a floating world of identities in process. » (103). Comme le suggèrent encore les images de blessure ou de suture, les migrants des marges réussissent à transmuer l’expression de leur souffrance en mode de reconnaissance. Dans une superbe analyse du poème de Li-Young Lee, « The Cleaving », Ana Manzanas et Jesus Benito révèlent ainsi comment, semblable à l’auteur qui métamorphose la scène triviale du découpage d’un canard par un boucher en un poème où les ruptures sémantiques ou syntaxiques (« dis- membering ») deviennent source de réminiscence (« re-membering »), l’exilé se réapproprie le rite liminaire de l’arrachement à la terre natale en la revivant au jour le jour : « In refusing to create what Rushdie terms an “imaginary homeland” to relieve the pain of exile, Lee himself represents the figure of the dweller of the nowhere, the inhabitant of the places of nonexistence who struggles to make placelessness his home » (105). Comme l’écriture, la frontière invisible de la ville devient paradoxalement un lieu de réconciliation avec le sentiment de non-appartenance au lieu.

7 En conclusion de leur ouvrage, Ana Manzanas et Jesus Benito choisissent d’évoquer Babel, le film d’Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu. Dans son montage même, ce film réussit à instaurer une forme de relation et de simultanéité entre des histoires, des lieux et des langues initialement dispersés. C’est alors une nouvelle texture de l’espace qui se trouve révélée, niée et néanmoins recréée, par la composition artistique.

8 Cities, Borders, and Spaces in Intercultural American Literature and Film donne un éclairage critique nouveau, intelligent et admirablement nuancé sur les zones frontalières de la ville qui, souvent invisibles, deviennent un lieu de réinvention poétique d’une habitation désormais résolument passagère de l’espace.

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AUTEURS

NATHALIE COCHOY Université Toulouse-Jean Jaurès

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Clémentine Tholas-Disset and Karen A. Ritzenhoff (eds), Humor, Entertainment and Popular Culture During World War I

Trevor Harris

REFERENCES

THOLAS-DISSET, Clémentine and Karen A. RITZENHOFF (eds), Humor, Entertainment and Popular Culture During World War I, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2015, 288 pages, ISBN 978-1-137-44909-2, hardback $ 95, 86,15 €, £ 60.00

1 This well presented, and well illustrated, volume takes up the challenge of placing the horror and devastation of the Great War in the context of the light-hearted responses to it. The potential grotesque at the heart of such a juxtaposition–gueules cassées setting out to se fendre la pipe–brings into focus both the role of humor as propaganda and the absolute necessity for a powerful, re-humanizing strategy among those close, and closest, to the carnage. This is a bold move on the editors’ part since, as Karen Randell reminds us in the Preface, the way we invariably approach the Great War “is solemn, respectful, and most certainly humorless” (xii). Strange, since humor, after all, is often the spontaneous accompaniment to otherwise morbid occasions. This book seeks to allow the fun and the laughs back into the discussion and push to one side the cliché of universally shell-shocked Tommies, or the definitive destruction of pre-war sensibility and its replacement by a world-encompassing waste land: in short, to challenge a presentation of 1914-18 as pure discontinuity. While no one denies the “unspeakable” horror of that conflict, one way in which unspeakable horror was articulated was through humor, however black or bleak: in spite of everything, many people managed to cope.

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2 The book brings together contributions from academics based in Australia, Britain, France, Holland, Italy, and the United States. The sixteen short, sharp essays (but all devote ample space to notes and bibliographical information) are divided into four sections which deal in turn with: “Laughter, Diversion and Nationhood in Great War Films”; “Novels, Newspapers and Illustrations”; “Entertaining on Stage”; “Promoting War Values”. As with any collection of essays, some fit more snugly into their allotted space than others, and some are more readable, more convincing than others. But the editors should be congratulated on bringing together such a wide range of material which deals with reactions at the front, but also in all the main warring powers.

3 In the first section of the book (“Laughter, Diversion and Nationhood in Great War Films”), the unifying thread is possibly best summed up in what Giaime Alonge and Francesco Pitassio, in their study of the film Maciste Alpino (1916), call “body culture and national politics” (53), as governments in the countries at war strove to consolidate the idea of the nation and (re-)generate national energy. This policy was applied in the trenches; but also on the home front, where Hollywood war films, for example, were not afraid to promote the war through what Fabrice Lyczba calls “ballyhoo stunts” (59) and “excessive theatricality” (66). Lyczba’s argument is that this entertaining approach, by allowing the audience to participate in a carefully marketed multimedia version of the war, developed the American public’s “hoax-debunking skills” (69): though whether the entertainments thus conceived made the audience’s aesthetic discrimination more sophisticated or merely kept them in the dark about what was actually going on in Europe is a moot point. Precisely what did audiences take away from these performances? What meanings did they create? Clémentine Tholas-Disset looks at similar uncertainties in the relationship between Hollywood and the official stance on the war, indicating that audiences were not necessarily as streetwise as one might think.

4 Part II (“A War of Witty Words and Images”) opens with a piece in which Jakub Kazecki underlines comedy as mockery in Walter Bloem’s war memoir, Vormarsch (1916). Bloem’s writing produces a relatively state-subservient text in which “the aggressive and chauvinistic elements of humor [bring] Vormarsch very close to the German propaganda images of the time” (99). Koenraad Du Pont’s account of the “Nature and Functions of Humor in Trench Newspapers” underlines, by contrast, the free-ranging content of the newspapers produced–in their hundreds–during the conflict, as well as the variety of types of humor they included: the latter, however, being used more often than not as a safety valve rather than as the articulation of rebellion against authority. Renée Dickason, who looks both at humor in the front line and at home in Britain, also underlines the “uncontroversial” (130), conformist approach adopted in Mr. Punch’s History of the Great War (1919). Punch tends to toe the Establishment line, peddling an image of a Britain which sees itself as superior, firmly in the “moral ascendancy” (127), and which feels comfortable with derision, denigration and demonization where the “Teuton” is concerned. Even the class and gender divisions of pre-war Britain still seem firmly in place, as they do in the “World War I Bande Dessinée” (Anne Cirella-Urrutia), with the mobilization of French children capable of operating “as the subject and the object of propaganda discourses” (137). Indeed, total war affects all sections of the population. Children were thus used as both the motivator and justification of the conflict, with Bécassine being portrayed as France’s national heroine, part of a “psychological strategy to reunite all regions of France and the colonies” (141). Another

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female figure is pressed into service in “Marianne in the Trenches” (Laurent Bihl), where we are shown how the personification of the French Republic fulfills a complex diversity of national roles.

5 The third part of the book is devoted to stage entertainment. Felicia Hardison Londré leads us deep into the atmosphere of the work done by the United States’ “Over There Theatre League”, and the rapport between the theatre’s performers and the young American “doughboys” in France. Although it was anything but a joy ride for the actors–who performed on (at best) makeshift stages and whose average day was exhausting, and run with military precision–, a clear sense of fun emerges: both among the audiences and among the performers themselves. This is a therapeutic, escapist laughter also explored by John Mullen (“Humor and Symbolic Empowerment in Music Hall Song”), the largely working-class audiences eschewing propaganda or strategic German-bashing, and instead bating their own government or indulging in songs based around a risqué or bawdy theme, or just singing along to a comic tongue-twister. The working-class audience may often have given vent to the prejudices of the day, in the music hall they nonetheless found their own voice. Jenna L. Kubly’s piece on J.M. Barrie’s Echoes of the War (four one-act wartime plays brought together for publication in 1920) is more preoccupied with middle-class attitudes to war, which tend to focus on the disillusionment, even the sentimentalism engendered by the conflict.

6 Class-based reactions to the war also permeate the last section of the book. Amy Wells looks at “culinary activism” on the American home front, where wartime sugar shortages served as a pretext for the government to encourage willing patriotic middle-class cooperation in the war effort. Women, particularly, by signing a “conservation pledge”, were incited to help win the war by enforcing frugality in the home: another form of quasi-enlistment for a non-combatant section of the population. Robert Crawford (“Chunder Goes Forth”) investigates the “intersection of humor, commercial interests, and national sentiment” (226) in Australian wartime advertizing. A highly racialized Australian identity is conveyed through the character of “Chunder Loo” used in “Cobra” boot polish advertisements. But in spite of himself, or rather in spite of his Australian creators, as we follow him through the war, Chunder accedes to Australianness, even as Cobra successfully build their commercial brand. T. Adrian Lewis (“Mobilizing morale”) then picks his way through William Stevenson’s At the Front in a Flivver (1917), the memoir of an American ambulancier whose matter-of-fact narrative conveys the absurdity and the horror of war. Its bleak humor functions often through an apparent empathy disconnect, as Stevenson plots the gruesome paradox of dynamic, able-bodied medics rushing around the Western Front collecting the corpses and mutilated men churned out by a static war. Karen A. Ritzenhoff closes the collection with an “illustration of the idiosyncrasies of American society at the time of the conflict and of the changing role of women instigated by the war” (266).

7 In common with their World War II counterparts who “kept calm and carried on”, many of those caught up in the Great War did their best to place sandbags of quotidian ordinariness in the path of on-rushing terror: how else was one to maintain some sense of human agency in view of the hyper-mechanized logic of war? Humor was a cornerstone of this strategy to distill a few drops of normalcy from all the madness and had a number of serious objectives. The fun was often pedagogic, transforming “the war into a humorous tale to make it more palatable and accessible” (79) to the civilians far from the front. But bending the populace to the tasks of war and to the

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government’s purpose could never control all the laughs. Several contributors, inevitably, find themselves alluding to Bergson. But his view of humor as “the mechanical in the human” is here turned on its head, since the argument of much of the book is precisely that what we witness during the war is something irrepressibly human in something mechanical. Some observers of wartime humor will perhaps be tempted to see the laughter and entertainment as so many manifestations of panem et circenses. But the agency of soldiers, and others, cannot be so easily spirited away: who, for example, retained sufficient wherewithal–writing in The Wipers Times–, to encourage “platoon commanders to ask themselves the question ‘Am I as offensive as I might be’” (109)? Just a wisecrack perhaps, but a crack through which leaps a comic spark of wisdom: as the military equivalent of middle management, junior officers were bound to displease. True, the young lieutenants were probably not all dupes, and neither, clearly, were the non-commissioned ranks beneath them.

8 There are limits to what is achievable within a single volume: taking on humor, entertainment and popular culture is ambitious to say the least. Not surprisingly, there are criticisms which might be made: it is a shame, for example, that no historian or colleague currently working in cultural studies in Germany (or Austria) is among the contributors. Some of the English in the book is a little shaky and there are a number of typos (xiii, 41, 67, 81, 83, 84, 92, 114, 135...). But dwelling on the quibbles would not be much fun, or fair. This is a book which, in the end–by the end–has accumulated a momentum which throws Lawrence Napper’s argument in the opening essay into much sharper relief: total war did indeed have its epoch-altering properties. But the confusion, the cock-ups, the mud and the mess, all lent themselves to comic treatment and cried out, come what may, to be sent up, kept at a distance. Creating any sense of perspective when one is so completely up against a wall of monstrosity was bound to test even the most resilient souls. But quite a few somehow managed it, whether retaining their phlegm or by way of slapstick, and tried to make sense of it all using the language available to them: for this, too, we owe them our thanks.

9 The interpretation of World War I as replacing one civilization with another will likely not be shifted easily: the ownership of this part of our communal past will continue to be contested. Although it would be over-stating the case, therefore, to say that Humor, Entertainment and Popular Culture gives us sufficient purchase to prize the Great War out of modernist hands and make a case for a degree of cultural continuity after 1918, the book certainly asks some important questions. There is the war that has been passed down to us, but an important aspect of the war that actually happened is reinstated here.

AUTHORS

TREVOR HARRIS Université de Picardie Jules Verne

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Amélie Ducroux, La relation et l’absolu : Lecture de la poésie de T. S. Eliot

Edward Lee-Six

REFERENCES

DUCROUX, Amélie, La relation et l’absolu : Lecture de la poésie de T. S. Eliot, Paris, Presses de l'Université Paris-Sorbonne, Collection Mondes Anglophones, 2014, 446 pages, ISBN 978-2-84050-925-7, 22 €

1 The “Works” of T.S. Eliot is not as stable as it sounds and its content has gradually been shifting, especially in recent years. Not only has the amount included in the “Complete” Eliot continued to increase by small steps since the Collected Poems (in fact carefully selected) of the sixties, but the appending criticism has been growing by larger increments. At the beginning of the year, the fiftieth anniversary of Eliot’s death was “celebrated” by the first volume of Robert Crawford’s biography, immediately hailed as THE standard account ; in spring, there was a new installment in the epic of the publication of the Letters, with Volume V: 1930-1931 ; and, as 2015 closes, Volume I of a scholarly edition of the Poems now appears (amazingly, the first annotated edition of Eliot).

2 This amplification prompts dual feelings in some Eliot scholars, as this year’s T. S. Eliot Society Annual Lecture illustrated, where, on the one hand, 2015 was savoured as “a good year” (in the words of the Society’s President) for those thirsty for fresh Eliot juice ; while, on the other, this year’s guest lecturer was reeling under the burden of reading: he pointed out that the Letters, the new biography, and the new edition Poems were in multiple volumes (respectively!) ; that it had taken him “hours” to read the critical apparatus to “Prufrock”, which consisted of an “appalling” number of pages, “in really quite small type” at that, and – adding insult to injury – with the “quotes even smaller”.

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3 So we might wonder how we can possibly find time to “READ HIM” – Ezra Pound’s obituary imperative – especially in this new “fully scrutinized” form, and to read the ever growing epistolary, biographical, and critical off-shoots, and to respond to the clarion calls to papers which set our inboxes dinging, and to write the funding applications which absorb our best energies: just reading (let alone re-reading!) poetry can seem like a scandalous inefficiency in today’s academia. And yet it is on this busy stage that Amélie Ducroux’s book makes its timid entry: La relation et l’absolu: Lecture de la poésie de T. S. Eliot (Paris : Presses de l’Université Paris-Sorbonne, 2014) has “discovered” no previously unpublished poem or letter and can make no claim to being THE authoritative... THE standard... THE anything. It’s just a scholarly reading – “Lecture” – of T. S. Eliot’s poetry, foregrounding the most famous works.

4 In its quiet and thoughtful mood, La relation et l'absolu makes some strong points, which gain, rather than lose, by their straightforwardness. After battling with possible meanings of “the penny world” (from “A Cooking Egg”: “But where is the penny world I bought / To eat with Pipit behind the screen?”), Ducroux says simply: “La voix [du poème] ne croit plus en la capacité de ce microcosme aux contours aussi définis qu'une pièce de monnaie (“penny world”) à procurer le bonheur désiré” (56). Here, Ducroux grasps how the penny world is a powerfully succinct statement of the incommensurability of a desire for the measurable or measured, on the one hand, and the roving ambitions of that same desire, on the other. Ducroux is often alive to Eliot’s tangles of incommensurably measuring, and able to frame them for us, making her a particularly good reader of “Prufrock”, a poem that whisks these contradictions up into a tortured song, or, as she puts it elswhere, buries them deeply in the poem's structuring mechanisms (“rouages”) (283-284). Borrowing her language from Bergson, who opposes intuition and analysis, and, separately, “durée pure” and “l'instant”, Ducroux writes: La persona de “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” est constamment dans l’analyse ; elle est engluée dans “la condition relationelle”, dans une fragmentation excessive de l’expérience. [...] Le malaise de la persona de “Prufrock” ne vient pas de son incapacité à saisir “la durée pure”, incapacité commune à tous les êtres, mais du fait même qu’elle tente de la saisir. Être dans la “durée pure”, ce n’est pas être dans l’analyse. (101-3)

5 Here, Ducroux concisely conceptualizes how Prufrock is out of sync with himself, and her underlining the infelicitous meeting of experience with the urge to analyse that experience rings true for the character who has measured out his life with coffee spoons. Beyond whatever we might think of Prufrock, these concepts may help us understand Eliot’s depiction of his hero. Noting the character's breathless style – “And the afternoon... tea and cakes and ices... And in short, I was afraid... And this, and so much more” – she writes: Le recours à la conjonction and, l’emploi de liens logiques non pertinents témoignent de cette impossibilité de relier entre eux des éléments constitutifs de l’expérience qui non seulement sont disjoints, mais dont la fréquence de perception est trop élevée. La parataxe, qui se caractérise par une absence de marquage du rapport entre deux termes ou propositions, apparaît alors comme la structure la plus propre à rendre cette fréquence trop élevée de la perception, qui, empêchant tout recul, toute distance, toute séparation temporelle entre un élément et un autre rend l'analyse impossible. La persona décompose l'expérience sans jamais pouvoir la recomposer. (104)

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6 This concept of destructive analysis becomes a reading aid for Ducroux, who returns to it frequently, dexterously adjusting it so that it speaks specifically about the writing in question. For example, in her work on “Burnt Norton” (published almost twenty years after “Prufrock”) she picks up on the non-reconciliation of the dynamic “dance” with the geometrically abstract “still point” and “axle-tree”, a decomposition of experience that takes place in a disjointed grammar where prepositions and conjunctions fail us (“La coordination ne peut jouer son rôle, parce qu'elle devrait relier deux compléments qui ne sont pas, en réalité, de même nature”, 131-132). Indeed, for Ducroux (following Derrida), creating poetry requires as its precondition a certain “abandon”, so that making begins with unmaking what we think we know about language (393). The coherence of Ducroux’s approach also implies a reading of Eliot's work as a totality, which helps us makes sense of writing which discusses with itself: At the first turning of the second stair I turned and saw below The same shape twisted on the banister [...] Blown hair is sweet, brown hair over the mouth blown, Lilac and brown hair (“Ash Wednesday” (1930), CPP, III, 93)

turns and sees below an earlier shape, it too turning –

Time to turn back and descend the stair, With a bald spot in the middle of my hair – (They will say: 'How his hair is growing thin!') [...] Arms that are braceleted and white and bare (But in the lamplight, downed with light brown hair!) Is it perfume from a dress That makes me so digress? (“Prufrock” (1917), CPP, 14-15)

7 This is what Ducroux calls “l'incapacité à avancer [...] le long de la ligne mouvante du temps” (106), an attribute she sees not just in Prufrock but also in “Animula” and, in a different way, in “Rhapsody on a Windy Night”, where the undoing is bodily rather than temporal, “le rôle du moi phénoménologique posté au-dessus du sujet pour l’observer” (122).

8 In a reflexive way, too, Ducroux’s alertness to the destructive action analysis can have on experience, becomes a salutary cautiousness about her own analysis. She asks herself, for instance, what could be the nature of “le lien entre production philosophique et production poétique” (97) ; or, having affirmed that two interpretations are both valid, “valables”, adds “si tant est qu’un tel qualificatif puisse être employé” (53) ; and, above all, states, in her introduction, the elusive nature of Eliot’s “intentions” and his profound ambiguity (16-17). Ducroux frequently shows such awareness of criticsm’s traps and does not consider herself above these fundamentals. Reading and re-reading Eliot are Ducroux's method for approaching basic interrogations and her book is always respectful of the potential décalage between the relatively small number of pages we might have before us and the numberless hours we might need to spend on those pages.

9 Equally, however, having posed these questions, Ducroux often leaves them unanswered, or provides an answer which is reductive. For example, on the formal differences between Bradley’s philosophy and Eliot’s verse – despite repeated mises-en-

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garde about “les différences entre les deux media employés” (98) – we fall back : “Eliot semble révéler une proximité "naturelle" entre réflexion philosophique et création poétique” (98). The catch-phrasey chime of “réflexion” / “creation” and “philosphique” / “poétique” is doing a bit too much work, here, in forcing a reconciliation when contrast might have been welcome.

10 Indeed, the dominant mood of Ducroux’s book tends towards the unifying and the essentialising, as illustrated by this justification of the natural proximity between philosophy and poetry: “Le problème de l'essence relationnelle de l'existence est au coeur de la poétique d’Eliot” (99). This is a statement which, in different formulations, justifies a great number of Ducroux's contentions and its assumptions are numerous and troubling: that existence has an essence ; that this essence is “relationnelle” (the book leaves me unsure as to the meaning of this word, beyond the loose banality that things – experiences, beings, words – are separate but also linked ; and that there is such a thing as “poétique éliotienne” (91, inter alia), which would also be reducible to a central essence. This unifying mentality often collapses into a lumping together, so that, for example, if Ducroux is right to perceive Eliot's writing as a totality, this nebulous whole remains unstructured in her account, an account which therefore has no space for the many contradictions and arguments that run like fault-lines all over the Eliot landscape. These internal fractures seem at least as interesting to me as the plaster which covers them. Ducroux's belief in unity stretches beyond Eliot: her opening statement that “L'unité du corps, comme celle de l'esprit, est toujours artificielle” (9) turns out to be empty and remains unexplored per se, so that quotations from Bergson's Durée et simultanéité, which was published in 1922, overlap with the Introduction à la métaphysique, from 1903, when it would have been interesting to read about the distinctions between these texts, while the relay baton is passed between the usual suspects of French literary criticism – Derrida, Deleuze, Jean-Luc Nancy, &cie – by the likes of I. A. Richards, B.C. Southam's A Student Guide to the Selected Poems, or Frazer, somewhat too seamlessly for the potentially lively arguments between these voices and types of discourse to emerge.

11 Behind this wishful coherence is a belief in the subject as ultimate agent, and this extends from the sources quoted to Eliot’s characters themselves: J. Alfred Prufrock gets more attention than “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”, such that psychologizing about the character's flaws and struggles drowns out analysis of the poem’s struggles, forgetting that the words “Alfred Prufrock”, in the poem's title, become interesting and meaningful only because of another two words, “Love Song”.

12 The assumption here is that we as readers want Ducroux to unify for us and to iron out the creases: we are “lecteurs en mal d'unité” (passim.) Ducroux is well aware that unifying interpretation has its traps, and yet she never interrogates the starting point that we might be 'motivé par une volonté d'unification et de fixation' (57, inter alia), not considering that some of us may read differently, receptive to, say, a poem’s music, as well as its meaning, reading between sound patterns, rather than in the linearity of logic and print. When reading Le processus de lecture est à la fois un processus d'assemblage de lettres formant des mots, une succession chronologique de mots formant des phrases, et un processus de détection out de compréhension des relations logiques existant à l'intérieur d'un texte et permettant sa compréhension. (22)

13 I feel like replying, “Not for me”, or, “Not necessarily”. The repeated generalizations about the act of reading (“La lecture est une incessante mise en relation” (22) ; “La

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lecture sous-entend l'établissement d'une relation d'ordre intellectuel” (23) ; “Lire signifie articuler des messages verbaux” (29) ; “Lire signifie en partie interpréter” (32, and so on) may not be generally true and place Eliot's poetry in a teleology the ideal terminus of which is the reader's or Ducroux's interpretation: obscure poetry is here taken as an “invitation à l'interprétation” (49 inter alia). It is difficult for criticism to retain its necessary humility and cautiousness with this approach, and to remember that academic writing is merely one response among many to T. S. Eliot's writing. Above all, among these generalizations about what reading is, about what relating is, what being is, language is, it is difficult to grasp what in Ducroux's argument is specific to Eliot: the numerous assertions of subjective individuality are diluted to lip-service by their very generality – “la parole est toujours singulière” (11), for example – leading to confusing claims, in the same breath, that we are individuals and divided (on the first page). Eliot here becomes special in the way that politically correct teachers may have once told us that we were all special, making “you” the same as anyone, as in “If you came this way, | Taking any route, starting from anywhere, | At any time or at any season, | It would always be the same” (Four Quarters, CPP, I, 192). Eliot was acutely aware of the truisms of singularity and generality, depicting and, maybe, denouncing them: I caught the sudden look of some dead master Whom I had known, forgotten, half recalled Both one and many ; in the brown features The eyes of a familiar compound ghost Both intimate and unidentifiable. (Four Quartets, CPP, II, 193)

14 In conclusion, Ducroux attempts a thorough close reading of T.S. Eliot and, through this reading, to answer the most epistemologically daunting questions about his poetry, and, to some extent, about poetry tout court. This approach is laudable, and yields a number of interesting finds. Equally, however, the close reading is too often founded on a loose set of theoretical principles which too often lapse into generalization and do not do justice to the analyses themselves.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

CRAWFORD, Robert, Young Eliot: From St Louis to “The Waste Land”, London, Jonathan Cape, 2015.

ELIOT, T.S., The Complete Poems and Plays, ed. Valerie Eliot, London, Faber and Faber, 1969.

–-, The Letters of T. S. Eliot, V: 1930-1931, ed. Valerie Eliot and John Haffenden, London: Faber and Faber, 2015.

–-, The Poems of T. S. Eliot: Volume One, ed. Jim McCue and Christopher Ricks, London: Faber and Faber, 2015.

POUND, Ezra, “For T.S.E.”, Selected Prose: 1909-1965, ed. William Cookson, London, Faber and Faber, 1973.

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AUTHORS

EDWARD LEE-SIX Trinity College, Cambridge

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Cristelle Terroni, New York Seventies. Avant-garde et espaces alternatifs

Marc S. Smith

RÉFÉRENCE

TERRONI, Cristelle, New York Seventies. Avant-garde et espaces alternatifs, Presses Universitaires de Rennes, Univers Anglophone, 2015, 247 pages, ISBN : 978-2-7535-4200-6, 18 euros

1 New York Seventies est un ouvrage original qui traite des espaces alternatifs qui émergent dans la ville et l’État de New York dans les années 1970. Cette étude se concentre sur trois espaces alternatifs en particulier : le 112 Greene Street et le Artists Space situés dans le quartier de SoHo à Manhattan, ainsi que Hallwalls qui se trouve à Buffalo dans l’État de New York. L’ouvrage retrace la naissance et l’histoire de ces trois lieux de création expérimentale tout au long d’une décennie charnière pour l’avant- garde et le milieu artistique new-yorkais. Pour cela, l’auteur utilise plusieurs axes et outils théoriques s’appuyant sur la sociologie1, les pratiques expérimentales2 et les processus d’institutionnalisation3. Cette triple approche théorique permet d’apporter ouverture et richesse au travail de Cristelle Terroni.

2 À travers l’histoire de ces trois lieux emblématiques, Cristelle Terroni montre de manière très concrète comment l’émergence de ces trois espaces alternatifs est le résultat de facteurs économiques, politiques, artistiques et sociétaux. Tout d’abord, ces lieux répondent à un problème spécifique du marché de l’art de l’époque. Entre les années soixante et soixante-dix, il y a aux États-Unis un nombre croissant de personnes qui souhaitent devenir artistes, tandis que les institutions muséales s’éloignent de l’avant-garde et relèguent aux galeries le soin d’exposer les œuvres de ces jeunes inconnus. Malheureusement, les galeries et les marchands d’art ne s’intéressent qu’à des artistes ayant déjà exposé et ayant acquis une réputation. Une des conséquences est un manque de visibilité des jeunes artistes sur le marché et une difficulté croissante pour trouver des lieux d’exposition. Ces espaces alternatifs sont alors créés pour

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répondre à un besoin du marché, mais ils répondent également à une réflexion nouvelle sur les modes de sélection, de gestion et d’exposition de l’art. Il s’agit également de lieux qui permettent une réflexion sur les médiums artistiques et l’interaction entre l’œuvre, le public et les lieux d’exposition.

3 En parallèle, à la même époque, les États-Unis subissent une crise économique dont beaucoup de quartiers industriels n’arriveront pas à se relever. Petit à petit, de nombreux centres de production industrielle ferment ou bien sont délocalisés. Certaines zones urbaines se retrouvent alors avec un tissu social fragilisé, un taux de chômage en augmentation et de nombreux bâtiments et anciens entrepôts vides. Cristelle Terroni explique comment, dans ce contexte, le gouvernement de l’État et de la ville de New York mettent en place des programmes comme Creative Artists Public Service et Meet the Composer pour aider certains artistes à trouver des locaux et des lieux d’exposition en leur louant des immeubles vides dans des quartiers industriels touchés par la crise. Les artistes, leurs ateliers et leurs galeries deviennent ainsi une force dans la réhabilitation de certains quartiers.

4 Le succès des programmes du New York States Council on the Arts (NYSCA) et de son département Visual Arts Program poussera le gouvernement fédéral à créer le National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) et son programme Workshop Program. Ainsi, avec l’aide du NYSCA et du NEA, ces espaces alternatifs trouvent des aides et des financements qui leur permettent de survivre et de fleurir pendant les années soixante-dix avant la mise en place des coupes budgétaires instaurées par l’administration Reagan.

5 L’auteur montre très bien comment ces trois espaces alternatifs s’insèrent dans une multiplicité de dimensions (économique, politique, artistique et sociétale) spécifiques à l’époque. Tout au long de son étude, l’auteur fait un va et vient constant entre ces différentes dimensions, ce qui a pour effet de placer son argumentaire au cœur de la problématique de l’ouvrage en éclairant de manière convaincante l’interaction entre ces espaces et leur contexte historique, politique et artistique.

6 L’ouvrage est divisé en trois parties, chacune composée de deux chapitres. La première partie sert à ancrer l’analyse dans le contexte économique et politique du début de la décennie. Le premier chapitre montre comment la communauté artistique devient un outil de réhabilitation urbaine après l’abandon du sud de Manhattan par des entreprises délocalisées ou bien en dépôt de bilan. L’auteur explique la manière dont les artistes investissent certains lieux et quartiers et contribuent à retisser du lien social, mais aussi la façon dont de nombreuses associations d’artistes se battent pour la vie de ces quartiers et se mobilisent contre certains projets de construction qui menaceraient ces communautés. Les artistes aident ces quartiers et reçoivent en retour la reconnaissance des gouvernements et des subventions. Que ce soit dans le sud de Manhattan ou bien à Buffalo, l’ouverture des espaces alternatifs apparaît comme une solution temporaire à cette crise économique et amène ces quartiers sur la voie de la gentrification.

7 Le second chapitre montre l’héritage artistique des années soixante et l’influence du post-minimalisme dans ces espaces alternatifs. L’auteur prend ainsi le temps d’expliquer comment ce mouvement alternatif est une opposition directe aux politiques instaurées par les institutions muséales. Cette génération s’élève contre le diktat du cube blanc et la manière dont les espaces d’exposition traditionnels sortent l’œuvre de son contexte d’exposition. Ces espaces deviennent des lieux d’expositions importants, se substituant au marché traditionnel, mais également une forme de

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questionnement du monde de l’art, de l’approche de l’œuvre, ainsi que de la position de l’artiste et des spectateurs face à l’œuvre.

8 La seconde partie s’attache plus à étudier l’engagement politique de ces artistes et la portée de leurs expérimentations artistiques. Les artistes qui occupent ces espaces alternatifs ne semblent pas rentrer dans les débats qui secouent le monde artistique de l’époque, c’est-à-dire l’égalité pour les minorités raciales et les femmes. Leur mobilisation politique semble se faire uniquement contre les institutions muséales et le marché de l’art. Cette contestation et cette réflexion institutionnelle les conduisent dans un premier temps à chercher la transparence dans la sélection des artistes exposés et à créer un espace ouvert à tous. Ces logiques d’ouverture les conduisent vers une plus grande collaboration entre artistes, ainsi qu’une nouvelle forme de gestion. Tous ces changements permettent une complète ouverture à l’expérimentation artistique, ce qui, à terme, amène une reconnaissance de la performance, mais aussi, et surtout, l’émergence d’un nouveau médium, l’art vidéo. Ces espaces deviennent des endroits d’effervescence artistique et débouchent sur un questionnement des catégories artistiques employées par les institutions et le marché d’art.

9 Dans la troisième partie, l’auteur s’interroge dans la troisième partie sur la manière dont ces institutions évoluent et se transforment tout au long de la décennie. Dans le cinquième chapitre, Cristelle Terroni porte sa réflexion sur la conséquence des subventions publiques sur ces espaces alternatifs et l’inégalité qui découle de leur position vis-à-vis des autorités publiques. Ce qui amène à la question de l’influence des subventions publiques sur la programmation, la gestion et, à terme, sur l’institutionnalisation de ces trois espaces. Le 112 Greene Street semble être l’espace qui demeure le plus indépendant face aux autorités publiques, ayant eu le moins recours à certaines subventions publiques ; la conséquence est qu’il demeure le plus en marge des trois. L’Artists Space est fondé par deux anciens employés de la NYSCA ce qui lui donne certains avantages, et Hallwall est très rapidement soutenu par la ville de Buffalo. Ces deux espaces semblent alors intégrer plus rapidement que le 112 Greene Street des schémas de gestion plus traditionnels. L’auteur souligne l’indépendance de la programmation de l’Artists Space et de Hallwall, mais il semble que plus l’argent public est présent, plus ces espaces adoptent rapidement les logiques systémiques du marché de l’art. Ces espaces alternatifs aident à l’émergence d’une nouvelle conception des médiums artistiques et de l’exposition de l’art qui semble se propager dans le monde artistique, tandis que les nouvelles logiques de la gestion institutionnelle ne se diffusent pas.

10 Comme l’auteur le montre dans son dernier chapitre, ces espaces alternatifs deviennent à la fin des années soixante-dix un maillon reliant l’avant-garde et le marché de l’art, à un moment où ni les musées, ni les galeries ne semblaient être prêts à soutenir l’avant- garde. Ces espaces sont les vecteurs d’un double changement et d’une intégration au marché de l’art. À un premier niveau, ils aident à la reconnaissance d’une nouvelle génération d’artistes et d’une nouvelle vision du médium artistique. À un second niveau, ils entraînent une évolution du comportement des galeries d’art envers l’avant- garde, qui s’ouvrent partiellement à l’art expérimental. La lente intégration de ces espaces au marché et ses logiques s’accompagne également d’une relocalisation géographique des marges au centre.

11 Dans un argumentaire à la fois thématique et chronologique, Cristelle Terroni montre clairement comment ces trois espaces alternatifs répondent et interagissent avec leur

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environnement, que ce soit avec la municipalité et le gouvernement de l’État dans des questions urbaines et sociétales, que ce soit avec les institutions artistiques pour redéfinir la gestion, l’exposition et la sélection d’artistes pour tenter de rendre le marché plus ouvert, ou bien que ce soit avec une réflexion plus globale sur l’art pour questionner la place de l’œuvre vis-à-vis des lieux d’exposition et du public en expérimentant avec de nouveaux médiums artistiques.

12 Dans une écriture claire et fluide, l’auteur dépeint de manière convaincante le contexte et l’environnement dans lesquels des artistes comme Cindy Sherman, Robert Longo et Gordon Matta-Clark ont baigné. L’originalité des archives consultées et les entretiens avec des personnes impliquées à l’époque constituent également une force de l'ouvrage. L’auteur arrive alors à dépasser le manque de sources primaires, qui demeure un problème inhérent aux espaces alternatifs de par leur nature.

NOTES

1. Voir en bibliographie de l’ouvrage les travaux de Sharon Zukin et de Diane Crane. 2. Voir en bibliographie de l’ouvrage les travaux de Rosalind Krauss, Brian O’Doherty et Robert- Pincus Witten qui s’opposent à la vision formaliste moderniste de Clement Greenberg. 3. Voir en bibliographie de l’ouvrage les travaux de Donna Binkiewicz.

AUTEURS

MARC S. SMITH Centre Interlangues, UBFC

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Samantha C. Harvey, Transatlantic Transcendentalism: Coleridge, Emerson, and Nature

Thomas Constantinesco

REFERENCES

Harvey, Samantha C., Transatlantic Transcendentalism: Coleridge, Emerson, and Nature, Edinburgh, Edinburgh University Press, 2013, 218 pages, ISBN 978-0-7486-8136-5, £70.00.

1 Samantha Harvey’s Transatlantic Transcendentalism addresses anew a key episode in the history of American literature and philosophy that has become so familiar to scholars of Transcendentalism and Transatlantic Romanticism that they tend to take it for granted: Emerson’s appropriation of Coleridge. Perry Miller’s 1950 anthology of Transcendentalist writings already made it clear: when James Marsh published the first American edition of Coleridge’s Aids to Reflection in 1829, along with a prefatory and retrospectively momentous “Preliminary Essay,” “he put into the hands of Emerson, Parker, Alcott and their group the book that was of the greatest single importance in the formation of their minds.”1 Four years later in 1833, Frederick Henry Hedge’s review of “Coleridge’s Literary Character” in the Christian Examiner further confirmed the centrality of Coleridge for the Transcendentalists, especially for Emerson whose first book and manifesto, Nature (1836), bears the stamp of Coleridge’s thinking method, as well of his philosophical vocabulary. It is perhaps in this respect that Harvey’s contribution to the debate stands out. While taking her reader through Marsh’s and Hedge’s essays, and without contesting that Aids to Reflection was indeed “a pivotal text for Transatlantic Transcendentalism” (27), she demonstrates that Biographia Literaria and The Friend were actually “far more congenial texts for Emerson” (67) and highlights in particular the decisive role of the “Essays on the Principles of Method” published in The Friend, whose reading led Emerson to appropriate Coleridge’s intellectual method of

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applying “a leading idea upward and outward, driving for ever higher vantage points” (69). And Harvey subtly shows that Nature’s ascending structure, which moves from the practical “uses” nature has to offer to its spiritual “prospects,” is largely indebted to Coleridge’s processual method. Although she is not the first to take note of the specific dynamics that animates Nature (and, one may add, nature), it will now be impossible not to see that the ghost of Coleridge haunts almost every page of the book, to which she devotes her most sustained discussion in what constitutes the highpoint of her analysis (119-140).2 More generally, several studies already emphasized Coleridge’s role in what Barbara Packer has elegantly termed the Transcendentalists’ “assault upon Locke” and their struggle against the dominant empirical tradition in early nineteenth- century New England, but Harvey’s study substantiates and refines that reading by showing how Coleridge’s method actually “offered the hope of reconciling science and philosophy, empiricism and idealism” (72) and equipped Emerson with “a philosophical framework that was essentially idealistic, without denigrating the validity of experience derived form the natural world” (41), enabling him to mediate what she calls “the Romantic triad” of interrelated natural, spiritual, and human worlds.3

2 As Harvey states at the opening of her introduction, Coleridge “taught Emerson to think – not what to think, but how to think” (2), a claim that she repeats at regular intervals and that allows her to complicate usefully the notion of influence, or rather to substitute for it the idea of “assimilative relationship” (119). Drawing on Patrick Keane and Thomas McFarland rather than Harold Bloom, she sees in Emerson a paradigmatic example of the “originality paradox” whereby “a profound indebtedness can enable, and even enhance, the originality of a writer” (3).4 Interestingly, this critical configuration owes much to Emerson himself who, as Harvey astutely recalls, once said à propos Coleridge: “Original Power is usually accompanied by assimilating power.”5 Or in the famous words of “The American Scholar”—a text that, curiously, Harvey does not comment or even reference—: “One must be an inventor to read well. […] There is then creative reading as well as creative writing.”6 Yet Harvey provides ample evidence that Emerson was such a creative reader who appropriated, and usually “simplified and poeticized” (65), Coleridge’s categories and distinctions, most notably the couples formed by reason and the understanding—which Coleridge himself (mis)appropriated from Kant—natura naturans and natura naturata, imagination and fancy, symbol and allegory, genius and talent. Her meticulous tracking of traces of Coleridgean vocabulary in Emerson’s work enables her to illuminate what she describes as “cryptic” passages and essays that “suddenly come into focus when they are read through a Coleridgean lens” (89), although her demonstration runs the risk at times of appearing somewhat circuitous, since it essentially boils down to translating Emersonian parlance into Coleridgean lingo and to picturing one philosophy as an often less accurate duplicate of the other. In effect, such readings downplay the differences between Emerson and Coleridge that Harvey quite rightly emphasizes at other times by stressing how much appropriation was, for Emerson, synonymous with distortion and invention. For, as Danielle Follett recently argued, “Emerson, who, as it is generally agreed, was indeed a Coleridgean, was also not a Coleridgean.”7

3 Implicit in Harvey’s narrative of appropriation is the recurring characterization of Emerson as less of a philosopher and more of a poet than Coleridge. For Harvey, Emerson’s essays “[work] much better as literature as [they do] as philosophy” (93), which paradoxically amounts to restoring the boundaries between philosophy and

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literature that her own critical method purported to suspend or even collapse, true to the original interdisciplinary impetus of Transatlantic Transcendentalism, when “the modern boundaries between literature, philosophy, theology, and science simply did not exist” (13). That Emerson was averse to systematic philosophy and quibbling “dialectics” is undeniable.8 What may be debatable, however, is to dismiss entire passages or essays as philosophically unsound (and therefore “poetic,” as if poetry were but flawed philosophy) because they enlarge, displace or misconstrue Coleridge’s categories, and one could suggest instead that Emerson’s philosophy is perhaps best discernible precisely when one does not read him “through a specifically Coleridgean lens” (19). In addition, Harvey’s decision to focus solely on Coleridge as Emerson’s main philosophical source, if it helps her to identify specific borrowings or echoes, thanks in particular to her meticulous survey of Emerson’s annotated copies of Coleridge and her mining of the Princeton 16-volume edition of Coleridge’s Collected Works, forces her to leave out of her equation someone like Victor Cousin for example, whose importance to Emerson and Transcendentalism Joseph Urbas recently reassessed, and to oversimplify the complex tangle of relations that enabled Transatlantic cultural transfers.9

4 Eventually, Harvey accounts for Emerson’s creative misprisions by foregrounding “the malleability of Coleridge’s thought” (140) and portraying him as a “palimpsest” figure, “a multi-layered record of an ongoing reinterpretation of philosophical and theological traditions in a new American context” (141). This leads her, in the final and most original chapter of her book, to follow yet another of “Coleridge’s American afterlives” (26), through James Marsh’s implementation of “a Coleridgean curriculum” during his tenure as President of the University of Vermont (143-150). Although Marsh, an orthodox Congregationalist, came from the opposite end of the religious spectrum as Emerson, who trained as a Unitarian minister at Harvard, he advocated an innovative pedagogy, based on “an elective system, seminar-style classes, and an individualized program of study” inspired from “Coleridge’s vision of education as an organic, individualized, and dynamic process of mental development” (144, 146). This pedagogical revolution had a lasting impact on several generations of students and alumni, the most famous of whom being John Dewey, who recognized that his pragmatist philosophy of education was very much inspired by Coleridge, as well as by education at the University of Vermont (162). Rather than opposing Boston and Vermont Transcendentalism, then, as is too often the case, Harvey argues for their complementarity, even as she reveals the variety of uses—theological, philosophical, literary, and pedagogical—to which Coleridge was put in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century United States.

5 Scrupulously researched, Samantha Harvey’s Transatlantic Transcendentalism is clearly and cogently argued, and one cannot but admire the ease with which she takes her reader through a maze of complex philosophical distinctions without ever losing track of her argument, even if the flip side of her obvious talent for pedagogy is a certain repetitiveness, as the book’s main arguments are often restated using the same phrases and formulas. By focusing exclusively and quite deliberately on the Emerson-Coleridge connection, which proves both an argumentative strength and, at times, an interpretive weakness, Transatlantic Transcendentalism clarifies important philosophical stakes and transfers and provides a welcome contribution to the now inseparable fields of Transcendentalist and Transatlantic studies.

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NOTES

1. Perry Miller, The Transcendentalists: An Anthology, Cambridge, Harvard University Press, 1950, p. 34. 2. On the ascending structure of Nature, see for instance Richard Lee Francis, “The Architectonics of Emerson’s Nature,“ American Quarterly 19.1, Spring 1967, 39-52. 3. See Barbara Packer, The Transcendentalists, Athens, GA, University of Georgia Press, 2007, as well as Leon Chai, The Romantic Foundations of the American Renaissance, Ithaca, Cornell University Press, 1987; Robert Weisbuch, Atlantic Double-Cross: American Literature and British Influence in the Age of Emerson, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1986; Richard Brantley, Coordinates of Anglo- American Romanticism: Wesley, Edwards, Carlyle & Emerson, Gainesville, University Press of Florida, 1993. 4. See Harold Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry, New York, Oxford University Press, 1973; Patrick Keane, Emerson, Romanticism and Intuitive Reason: The Transatlantic “Light of all our Day”, Columbia, University of Missouri Press, 2005; Thomas McFarland, Originality and Imagination, Baltimore, Johns Hopkins University Press, 1985. 5. Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Quotation and Originality,” Emerson’s Prose and Poetry, Joel Porte and Saundra Morris, eds., New York, Norton, 2001, 325. 6. Ralph Waldo Emerson, “The American Scholar,” Essays and Lectures, Joel Porte, ed., New York, The Library of America, 1983, 59. 7. Danielle Follett, “The Tension between Immanence and Dualism in Coleridge and Emerson,” in Romanticism and Philosophy: Thinking with Literature, Sophie Laniel-Musitelli and Thomas Constantinesco, eds., New York, Routledge, 2015, 209. 8. “Life is not dialectics,” Emerson famously wrote in “Experience” (Essays and Lectures, 478). 9. See Joseph Urbas, “In Praise of Second-Rate French Philosophy: Reassessing Victor Cousin’s Contribution to Transcendentalism,” Revue française d’études américaines 140, 2014, 37-51 and David Greenham, Emerson’s Transatlantic Romanticism, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2012.

AUTHORS

THOMAS CONSTANTINESCO Université Paris Diderot / Institut universitaire de France

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Greg Elmer, Ganaele Langlois, Fenwick McKelvey, The Permanent Campaign, New Media, New Politics

Patrick Litsangou

REFERENCES

Elmer, Greg, Ganaele Langlois, Fenwick McKelvey, The Permanent Campaign, New Media, New Politics, New York : Peter Lang Publishing, 2012, 144 pages, ISBN : 9781433115936, 35 euros

Synopsis

1 The Permanent Campaign co-authored by Greg Elmer, Ganaele Langlois and Fenwick McKelvey deals with political communication and confrontation in the digital age. The three scholars argue that contemporary political campaigning is typified by its nonstop character and pronounced polarization. Political wrangling continues online with the circulation of user-generated issue-objects. In each chapter the authors back their assumptions with a case study.

2 The authors begin by tracing the phrase “permanent campaign” to know who first used it and find that Patrick H. Caddell, an advisor to president-elect Jimmy Carter in the 1970s, was its originator. He suggested Jimmy Carter to perpetually campaign to gain public support. But ceaseless campaigning is detrimental to governance : “the perils of permanent campaigning lie in the privileging of partisanship over governance” (3). Indeed after seizing power, politicians have to devote their time to the problems the nation or country is faced with. Once elections are over, campaigns have to stop. Then the authors offer a contemporary definition of permanent campaigning. To them it is the ardent willingness of politicians to harness the possibilities of web 2.0 platforms. They also add that another salient characteristic of contemporary permanent

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campaigning is the exacerbation of polarization. What are the causes of permanent campaigns in the digital age ? The authors assume that “the bureaucratization of political parties and unstable minority coalition governments” (2) are some of the causes of permanent campaigning in the digital age. The authors write that networked permanent campaigning rests on three critical components : web 2.0 platforms (notably social media), political actors (partisans and activists), and lastly issue-objects (blog posts, videos...) that are elements of contemporary political communication.

3 In the second chapter they give a concrete example of permanent campaigning in cyberspace. The content of this chapter is based on the findings from two case studies, the 2008 coalition crisis and the 2009 prorogation crisis in Canada. The 2008 coalition crisis resulted from a Conservative Party-backed bill that would have stripped opposition parties of vital funds. As a consequence the latter planned to form a coalition to defeat the Conservative Party of which the then Prime Minister Stephen Harper was a member. The premier prorogued parliament fearing a vote of no confidence. In other words the Prime Minister put an end to parliamentary activities before the set date. The authors’ findings show that during that crisis polarization was intense both offline and online. Online the number of blog posts dramatically surged as pro-conservative and anti-conservative bloggers debated that issue. The 2009 prorogation crisis was another illustration of contemporary permanent campaigning. It was provoked by Stephen Harper’s decision to suspend parliamentary activities. This time, political wrangling spread to the social networking site Facebook through user- generated objects such as anti- and pro-prorogation Facebook groups.

4 The third chapter is predicated on the formation of issue-publics thanks to social networks. It is the logical continuation of Chapter Two in which Greg Elmer et al. dissected the creation of objects on Facebook. These objects are created by publics engaged in political confrontation in web 2.0 platforms, notably Facebook. Web 2.0 platforms are depicted as spaces where political discourse is conducive to political action. Before moving on to how they intend to show the coming into being of issue- publics, the authors assume that social networks are spaces of expression for ordinary people, unlike the mainstream media that tend to give the lion’s share to the elite. This assumption prepares the reader for the various factors or conditions that paved the way for the emergence of issue-publics.

5 In order to determine whether social networks permit the emergence of issue-publics, the authors studied a couple of cases, notably people’s use of Facebook during the 2007 Ontario provincial election and the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation-sponsored Great Canadian Wish List. The first case study shows that publics mobilized on Facebook both for partisan and issue-based motives. Indeed while the higher percentage of Facebook groups was relating to partisanship, the most popular group in terms of number of members were centered on issues. The authors thus conclude that social networks serve as a tribune for marginalized publics and issues social networking sites allow for the rise of a new type of actor, “the aggregated publics that come into being around specific sets of issues and attempt to change the political agenda by making their issues more visible, using the informational logic of the platform” (68). This assertion is all the more true according to the authors as these publics and issues were ignored by the mainstream media. Indeed the issues that are not or poorly debated in the mainstream media can be abundantly discussed online by people. These publics in the words of the authors, to which the mainstream media did

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not attach much importance, are now a political force thanks to their ever-growing ranks. Their number enables them to have a sort of agenda setting power. Permanent campaigning is also evidenced via the Great Canadian Wish List. It was an initiative of the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation to know Canadians’ top priorities or wishes. Canadians had to vote online on Facebook.

6 The wish that topped the list was the abolition of abortion closely followed by the right to abortion. The authors wonder if that result reflected the wish of most Canadians. They rather think that it is the consequence of a strategic use of social media’s conventions. Pro-life activists massively mobilized and voted online, and so did pro- choice activists, but presumably the extent of their mobilization was slightly inferior to that of their opponents.

7 In the fourth chapter, the authors analyze the unfolding of a political campaign via a social media platform. In anticipation of the 2007 federal elections in Australia, the web’s leading information aggregator, Google, convinced Australia’s chief political parties to upload their campaign-related videos to a website termed “Google votes Australia”. The site became a hub for videos exclusively dedicated to the 2007 federal elections. According to the authors, the Google-sponsored project proves that contemporary permanent campaigning rests on the three components they identified in the opening chapter of the book : actors, platforms and issue-objects. For this case study, actors were partisans and bloggers supporting the different political parties, the platform was jointly offered by Google and YouTube through the “Australia Votes” Portal. The objects were of course the many user-generated videos that were uploaded, commented on, or remixed by actors. Greg Elmer, Ganaele Langlois and Fenwick McKelvey assume that the 2007 federal elections in Australia were a turning point as they offered a template for later online political campaigns. The findings of the case study showed that the Labour Party-sponsored footages were more viewed than those of the Australian Liberal Party. The study also highlights how digital objects (videos) can circulate across platforms. As a conclusion, the authors write on the basis of their findings that the Google Votes Australia Project was a successful instance of campaign or election mediatization. In a nutshell, Google wanted to render the 2007 Australian federal elections media friendly.

8 The fifth chapter consists in an extensive demonstration of the impact of social media platforms’ conventions on the digital objects related to permanent campaigning. To prove this impact, the authors worked in tandem with a team of the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation to analyze the tweets of the live debate between the candidates of the two main political parties during the 2008 federal elections in Canada. The two candidates who debated were the incumbent conservative Prime Minister Stephen Harper and his challenger Jack Layton of the New Democratic Party. After monitoring the activity on Twitter in the course of the live debate, the authors found that the volume of tweets spiked when Jack Layton used a witty remark. The partisans of the New Democratic Party were so impressed by that remark that they retweeted it word for word. Retweeting it again and again was a tactic to increase its durability and visibility on Twitter, a time sensitive platform. But the opponents of the New Democratic Party derided Jack Layton’s words. The authors came to the conclusion that partisans or online activists bypass the conventions of platforms or tactically harness them to expand the visibility of their digital objects (tweets). Their deconstruction of

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the debate-related tweets also proved the nonstop character of political confrontation in the digital age.

9 In the penultimate chapter the authors want to assess the impact of online political campaigning. To do so they do not resort to the circulation of hyperlinks like other new media researchers. They use a tag or keyword-based approach. They justify this approach by assuming that the essence of social networks is the generation and above all the circulation of content. Keywords or tags are among this user-generated content. The tracking of keywords across the web enables scholars to determine the numerous avenues of online political campaigning and its reach. Greg Elmer et al. refer to two examples that are supportive of their claim. They study the cross-platform circulation of the “Stand up for Canada” phrase and the “Yes We Can” slogan of the 2008 Obama campaign. The former was first used on the Canadian Conservative Party’s website and migrated to other platforms proving its reach. The latter went viral and fulfilled many a function. The “Yes We Can” slogan was a pointer to other websites of the 2008 Obama campaign. It was also conducive to homophily as partisans or party members could get in touch with one another. It served too as a political strategy to gauge its online impact via the extent of its circulation and the online actors who shared it within a platform and across others.

10 In the concluding chapter two of the three components of contemporary permanent campaigns are defined : “(...) throughout the book we sought to integrate and define actor as contingent human component in a networked politics, one that develop new skills and literacies (learning the rules of the platforms) in an effort to highlight their issues” (132). Next, the authors throw more light on the concept of object : “the mediated object (images, blog post, video, comment, etc.) is the political issue-object that is uploaded, shared, remixed, liked, commented upon, downloaded, and so forth (...), they come to prove debate, to comment or more proactively, to serve as a call to arms for other forms of political action and campaigning” (132). The authors wrap up their lengthy analysis by writing that “permanent campaigning” signifies not only a willingness or an obligation to make political campaigning media friendly, to mediatize it in the vernacular of new media research but also continuous political confrontation in cyberspace via the circulation of issue-objects.

Discussion

11 The issues discussed by these scholars had already been extensively dealt with at the time the book was published. Their definition of permanent campaign is far from being novel. Their idea of a heightened polarization on account of web 2.0 platforms has been abundantly explored by researchers such Cass Sunstein (2001), Adamic & Glance (2005), Baum & Groeling (2008). The authors also analyze partisans’ or publics’ use of web 2.0 platforms to make themselves heard or increase their visibility as they put it. It is quite predictable in periods of crisis or during major political events such as elections, polarization is intense offline and naturally spreads into the digital space. Cooper (2006) demonstrated it by exploring the Rathergate or Memogate which sparked fierce bickering in the US political blogosphere as progressive bloggers deplored conservative bloggers’ vehement criticisms against Dan Rather, the then CBS anchor accused of trying to discredit president Bush Jr.

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12 The gatekeeping function of the media and the democratization of political activism have been extensively explored too. The authors deal with these two themes when explaining the emergence of issue-publics. Some issues are deliberately ignored by mainstream media either because they are too thorny, ambiguous or because of their triviality. In the vernacular of journalism, they aren’t “newsworthy”. Nonetheless web 2.0 platforms enable publics to discuss them and advocate concrete actions. The authors assume that social networking sites circumvent mainstream media’s agenda setting power and afford a tribune to marginalized publics. A host of authors have already analyzed such questions. On this point, Jacques Gerstlé wrote : « (…) l'engagement dans la conversation politique est la forme la plus achevée de participation politique des citoyens ordinaires » (Gerstlé, 2004, 230). Wallsten (2008) dissected that question in an article in which he tried to determine the functions of political blogs. Among these were conversation starters and mobilizers. Kerbel (2009) in his Netroots : Online Progressives and the Transformation of American Politics also expanded on the question of the democratization of political activism. The concept of mediatization has been vastly explored since the advent of new media. The mediatization of a campaign was studied by among others Bimber & Davis (2003) and Teachout & Streeter (2008). The 2007 mediatization of the Federal elections in Australia wasn’t unprecedented in the sense that, in the late 1990s and early 2000s, the campaign teams of Bill Clinton, Al Gore and, most importantly, Howard Dean, endeavored to mediatize the elections in which they were engaged.

13 If some of the issues discussed in this book have already been extensively analyzed by other academics, it also has several merits. The authors systematically resort to case studies to support their assumptions. They adopt a seldom-used approach to assess or determine the impact of online political campaigning via the tracking of keywords. This must be praised as it could have been easier for the authors to resort to the more commonly used hyperlink analysis. More to the point, the authors endeavor to expose or identify the innumerable implicit functions of these tags. The authors have managed to write a concise, but very informative book on the mediatization of politics that adds to our better understanding of contemporary political communication and confrontation.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

ADAMIC, Linda and Natalie GLANCE, “The Political Blogosphere and the 2004 US Election : Divided They Blog” in Proceedings of the 3rd International Workshop on Link Discovery (LinkKDD'05), ACM, 2005, 36-43, DOI =http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/1134271.1134277.

BAUM, Matthew A. and Tim GROELING, “New Media and the Polarization of American Political Discourse” in Political Communication, vol. 25, n° 4, 2008, 345-365.

BIMBER, Bruce and Richard DAVIES, Campaigning Online : The Internet in US Elections, New York, Oxford University Press, 2003.

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COOPER Stephen D., Watching the Watchdog : Bloggers as the Fifth Estate, Spokane, WA, Marquette Books, 2006.

GERSTLE, Jacques, La Communication Politique, Paris, Armand Colin, 2004.

KERBEL, Matthew, Netroots : Online Progressives and the Transformation of American Politics, Boulder, Paradigm Publishers, 2009.

SUNSTEIN, Cass, Republic.com, Princeton, New Jersey, Princeton University Press, 2001.

TEACHOUT, Zephyr and Thomas STREETER, Mousepads, Shoe leather and Hope : Lessons from the Howard Dean Campaign for the Future of Internet Politics, Boulder, Paradigm Publishers, 2008.

WALLSTEN, Kevin, “Political Blogs : Transmission Belts, Soap Boxes, Mobilizers or Conversation Starters ?'” in Journal of Information Technology and Politics, vol. 4, n° 3, 2008, 19-40.

AUTHORS

PATRICK LITSANGOU Université Paris Ouest Nanterre La Défense

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Alan B. Cohen, David C. Colby, Keith A. Wailoo, and Julian A. Zelizer, eds., Medicare and Medicaid at 50: America’s Entitlement Programs in the Age of Affordable Care

Éveline Thévenard

REFERENCES

Alan B. COHEN, David C. COLBY, Keith A. WAILOO, and Julian A. ZELIZER, eds., Medicare and Medicaid at 50: America’s Entitlement Programs in the Age of Affordable Care, Oxford University Press, 2015, 370 p., US$ 24.95, ISBN 978-0-19-023154-5

1 “Health care is a right, not a privilege”: on the official celebration of the 50th anniversary of Medicare and Medicaid in July 2015, President Obama hailed the programs as symbols of what he claimed to be a “fundamental American belief1.” While one may see this as more rhetoric than reality in a country where access to care is still not viewed as a right of citizenship, the importance of these two landmark programs cannot be contested. One in three Americans now gets health coverage through either Medicare, a federal program which provides health and economic security to elderly or disabled individuals, or Medicaid, a joint federal-state program which is the main health safety net for low-income people. The two also represent a major sector of the U.S. economy, and together with Social Security they have become part of the social fabric of the nation. However, since their inception they have constituted an ideological battleground over differing interpretations of the nation’s institutions, values, and society, and they have fostered bitter partisan conflicts over the role of government. The fractious debate over the passage of the Affordable Care Act and the

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ongoing controversy over the implementation of the legislation have turned them into major political issues.

2 In Medicare and Medicaid at 50, eighteen scholars from diverse disciplines (history, political science, sociology, economics) with recognized expertise in health policy analyze the two programs, “born as part of the Great Society in 1965, but with different origins, evolutions and philosophies guiding them” (xii), and examine their evolution and expansion over the years, the constituencies they created, and their central role in the politics of health care policymaking. Their broader aim is to look at the lessons to be drawn from the history of the programs for the future of health care in the nation, and for the implementation of President Obama’s signature reform.

3 Although each author contributes his/her own perspective on the issues, converging views emerge from this remarkably coherent set of essays which, as the conclusion judiciously points out, perfectly illustrates the policy feedback theory. The two programs have evolved very differently from what their founders had anticipated, largely but not exclusively due to their institutional designs. Medicare failed to become the incremental path to universal health insurance its architects had planned. In contrast, Medicaid did not remain the afterthought, the residual program that its founders had envisaged, but grew enormously even in periods of policy retrenchment to become one of the main vehicles for reform under the Affordable Care Act. And in another departure from the founders’ ideals, the ACA has moved away from the social insurance model as a pathway to universal coverage to include conservative, market based provisions.

4 In the book’s introductory chapter, Julian Zelizer looks at the troubled political context surrounding the adoption of Medicare and takes issue with the commonly held view of an era when parties were willing to work across the aisle in Congress to pass legislation. Although nearly half the Republicans approved the final package, he points out that alliances between Republicans and conservative Democrats created great legislative uncertainty about Medicare until the landslide election of 1964 which swept liberal Democrats into Congress. In his cautiously optimistic conclusion, he argues that “contentious origins do not inevitably produce weak programs” (18), and hopes that the ACA will survive its contested birth.

5 Several authors examine the factors which led to the demise of liberals’ initial hope to turn Medicare into a universal program on the Social Security model. Rashi Fein, a liberal health economist involved in health policy issues within the Kennedy and Johnson administrations, argues that creating Medicare, a successful categorical program for the elderly, built a constituency wary of any change which might constitute a threat to its interests. In so doing, it considerably weakened the support for national health insurance by eliminating its universalist appeal. "Incrementalism has its political advantages, but it also has its political costs” (52). Jonathan Oberlander and Theodore Marmor show that Medicare’s absence of price controls, intended to accommodate the medical establishment, led to a sharp rise in health care costs in the years that followed its enactment. For policymakers, “by the end of the 70s cost control had become the dominant issue in health policy” (65), and prevailed over plans for expanding access to care. In addition, a loss of confidence in government in the wake of the Vietnam War and the Watergate scandal, a rightward shift in the political climate, and retrenchment policies encouraged the turn to market solutions to provide universal coverage. James Morone and Elisabeth Fauquert seek to explain the evolution

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of Medicare by looking beyond the design of the program and placing it in broader historical perspective. They ascribe the failure of the founders’ vision to materialize by contrasting the “Medicare Moment,” a narrow window of relative consensus over social change, and the decades which followed, which saw the loss of liberal Democratic influence, the realignment of white voters towards the Republican party, increased immigration fueling culture wars, and rising inequality. As American society grew more individualistic and moved away from the egalitarian ideals of the New Deal, market- based models of health care reform prevailed over social insurance models even among Democrats. The Clinton plan, the contentious debate over the ACA and the contents of the final reform package which failed to include even a modest “public option” reflect this shift from social insurance to neoliberal principles.

6 One positive impact of the militant, egalitarian climate of the 60s, according to David Barton Smith, was the impact of Medicare on the desegregation of American hospitals after passage of the Civil Rights Act (title 6 prohibited the provision of federal funds to institutions which engaged in racial discrimination). Smith recounts the role of civil rights activists within the Johnson administration who worked ceaselessly in the months preceding the enforcement of the law to ensure hospital compliance with the desegregation guidelines of the Office of Equal Health Opportunity. As a result, “hospitals became the most racially and economically integrated private institutions in the nation” (35).

7 If Medicare did not turn out to be the stepping stone to universal health insurance progressives assumed it would be, both it and Medicaid nevertheless grew over the years thanks to stakeholder influence (several authors note that both programs fueled the growth of the health care industry), public support, and political calculus. Andrea Campbell’s contribution highlights the reasons why public opinion by and large supports both programs, thus preventing major structural changes. Polls show strong overall support for Medicare due to its contributory financing structure and constituency (an earned benefit going to a deserving section of the population), vital, not only to the “independence and freedom” of the beneficiaries, but also of their families. More surprisingly, over the years, as eligibility has expanded and the program has lost its public assistance stigma, Medicaid has also enjoyed growing levels of support. For Keith Wailoo, pragmatic considerations have prevailed over party ideology and led to targeted expansions of Medicare and Medicaid (such as the coverage for end stage renal disease under Nixon, the drug benefit under G.W. Bush, and the children's health insurance under Clinton, among others). The disjunction between small government rhetoric and the realities of policymaking at the federal and state levels also reflect Americans’ perennial ambivalence about government. There is hope that pragmatism will prevail for the ACA too, and that the lure of federal dollars will lead Republican governors to endorse the Medicaid expansion.

8 The challenges the two programs have faced over the course of their evolution have largely reflected the paths set by their founders. Jill Quadagno looks at one of the least anticipated consequences of the 1965 amendments: the trajectory of the Medicaid program, whose image has been recast from welfare medicine to mainstream program over the years. Medicaid’s basic framework as a grant-in-aid program has allowed it the flexibility to innovate incrementally and fill in some of the gaps of the health care system. Initially restricted to the recipients of cash assistance, it now covers a broad section of the population, including low-income workers and people with disabilities,

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and it has become the nation’s main long-term care program. Nevertheless, its ambivalent status persists: access to care can be problematic due to the shortage of providers willing to accept Medicaid patients and their low reimbursement rates. In addition, unlike Medicare, Medicaid’s standing as an entitlement was achieved by a series of court decisions over the years, not written into law. Sara Rosenbaum reviews the landmark cases which created legally enforceable rights for the program’s recipients in the liberal climate which prevailed in the period following Medicaid’s enactment. The right to judicial protection allowed beneficiaries, often through class actions, to challenge the attempts of states in the ensuing decades to deny them access to services they were entitled to. Although Medicaid is now a budgetary and legal entitlement, it lacks the legitimacy of a political entitlement, and as such is weaker than Medicare or Social Security. Its vulnerability might well increase with the litigation over the implementation of the ACA.

9 Frank Thompson analyzes the political dynamics of Medicaid’s evolution since its inception through the lens of federalism. The financial structure of the program, with its federal-state matching funds, has stimulated its growth, allowing the different levels of government to split the costs. The 80s saw substantial Medicaid growth through the efforts of the program’s champion in Congress, Henry Waxman, who fought to expand eligibility, as well as those of state actors who resisted funding cuts. Many of the program’s eligibility expansions were initially state options. Under the Clinton and Bush administrations, states were allowed to experiment with innovative methods to improve coverage and reduce costs via the waiver process. But Medicaid has not entirely shed its poor law heritage, and in times of increased partisan polarization, the statutory provisions and flexibility which allowed it to expand also threaten its adequacy as a vehicle for further expansion under the ACA.

10 If the evolution of Medicaid has mostly focused on expanding access to care, the debate around Medicare has increasingly focused on containing costs. Policymaking for Medicare has been fraught with major political risks for the proponents of structural reforms, but some significant changes have nevertheless been introduced. Economist Uwe Reinhardt notes that it was ironically under Republican administrations that the federal government implemented strategies to retrieve “the key to the U.S. Treasury” (173) which providers “extracted” from Congress in 1965 to concede their support for the program. In order to rein in the excesses of the health care industry, Medicare pioneered a prospective payment system to hospitals in 1983 which was later adopted across the health care industry and by European countries (it is interesting to note, incidentally, that France adopted its own version in 2005). Medicare has since driven innovation in payment and delivery system reforms to improve quality and contain costs. Several provisions of the ACA, if implemented, should confirm the program’s critical role in these areas. However, political resistance to any serious form of cost control has endured, given stakeholder influence.

11 On the other hand, since the mid 90s and the Republican takeover of Congress, the program’s beneficiaries have been offered private insurance options along with traditional Medicare, market competition being touted in conservative rhetoric as more efficient to curb expenditures than government regulation, despite evidence to the contrary. Two of the book’s contributions address the impact of this change on the program’s identity and constituency. Mark Peterson notes that Medicare has now become a hybrid public-private program. Decades of market-oriented reforms of health

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insurance may have undermined the public’s perception of its social insurance character, and although none of the reform proposals to turn it into a voucher program have been adopted, the concept now seems to have become politically acceptable. Mark Schlesinger analyzes the impact of Medicare on the social identity of the elderly. In its early stages, it empowered them politically, creating a constituency ready to mobilize to defend its rights. Looking ahead, the rise of consumer-driven health care and the privatization of parts of Medicare may alter the elderly’s identification with the program and weaken their incentives to mobilize in order to defend it.

12 Judith Feder’s contribution on long-term care insurance (a topic also addressed by Jill Quadagno) is of particular interest since it sheds light on the tensions, contradictions and lapses of health care policymaking in an area where the two programs intersect, but fail to integrate to provide seamless coverage. While Medicare only provides short term post-acute care, Medicaid is the primary provider of long term care services and supports for low income individuals, but it is also the program of last resort for an increasing number of middle class seniors, given the cost of private nursing home care. There are wide variations in quality and access to facilities across the states due to states cost containment strategies. The failure of the long term care insurance component of the ACA, following the failure of previous attempts at providing this benefit, is evidence that the pressure to contain costs prevails over the political will to address this major health policy issue.

13 Concerning the impact of Medicare and Medicaid on the ACA, Jacob Hacker argues that it is risky to rely on Medicare to generate savings across the broader system, which the ACA aims to do, in order to finance the expansion of health insurance (mostly via Medicaid) in a budget-neutral fashion. On the one hand, the projected cuts to providers have generated strong resistance from the industry, on the other, the Republican Party has successfully portrayed the ACA’s Medicare provisions as negatively affecting its beneficiaries and mobilized the elderly against the reform, pitting the seniors against the poor. This has led to a shift in the political allegiance of the elderly from the Democratic Party to the Republicans. Successful implementation of the ACA will require bipartisan deals on cost control without alienating the elderly. In the prevailing polarized climate, this is by no means certain.

14 Like other contributors, Paul Starr attributes the complexity of the U.S. health system and the enduring divide between the two public programs to the political compromises which allowed their creation. He highlights the uncertain future of the ACA due to three factors: the absence of a clearly defined, politically effective beneficiaries’ lobby; the political polarization over the ACA and the Republicans’ determination to repeal or weaken it; and the complexity of the program and the public’s confusion about the way it affects them. He notes pessimistically, but perhaps realistically, that rights are reversible. Medicare and Medicaid were enacted in an era of “ascending rights” (330), whereas in the following decades, the term “entitlement” gradually acquired negative moral connotations, making the two programs appear as legitimate targets of funding cuts.

15 The cautious conclusion of the book underscores the accomplishments, durability and political resilience of the two programs, and their huge social and economic impact on the nation, but warns against undue optimism about their survival under their current form. Medicare’s entitlement status is threatened by its rampant privatization and the burden it represents on public finances. Medicaid’s status is also fragile and could be

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further weakened if the Republicans’ perennial threat to block grant the program should materialize. Medicare and Medicaid have not only transformed the American health care landscape, they have also become part of American political life and face similar challenges. As a consequence, their future and Medicaid’s expansion under the ACA, as well as the crucial issue of long term care insurance, will be determined by the various forces influencing the policy making process in the coming years.

16 Despite some inevitable overlap between a few chapters, the book successfully weaves together the political history of the two programs, their parallel evolution, and their critical role in building the public/private U.S. health care system. It highlights the American tradition of path dependence in social policy and the role of American institutions, government, federalism, and the courts in shaping its development. Interestingly, 2015 also marked the 70th anniversary of the French social security system, one based on the social insurance model. Medicare and Medicaid at 50 provides invaluable keys to understanding why, in contrast to the other’s universalist vision of a welfare state, the tumultuous implementation of the Affordable Care Act bears the legacy of the United States’ bifurcated health care system. If Medicare and Medicaid are causes for celebration for the safety net they provide to millions of Americans, they may also have prevented the passage of broader legislation. The ACA has brought partial solutions and raised more questions. In contrast to the “Medicare moment,” there has not been an “ACA moment,” and the latter’s implementation has been far more contested. Only the future will tell if its contentious origins will produce a strong and durable program.

NOTES

1. https:// www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2015/07/30/presidential-proclamation-50th- anniversary-medicare-and-medicaid

AUTHORS

ÉVELINE THÉVENARD Paris-Sorbonne

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Rona Cran, Collage in Twentieth- Century Art, Literature, and Culture. Joseph Cornell, William Burroughs, Frank O’Hara, and Bob Dylan

Juliette Nicolini

REFERENCES

Rona Cran, Collage in Twentieth-Century Art, Literature, and Culture. Joseph Cornell, William Burroughs, Frank O’Hara, and Bob Dylan, Farnham : Ashgate, 2014, 248 pages, includes 19 black and white illustrations, ISBN 978-1-4724-3096-0, 70 £

1 “There isn’t a 20th century art that was not touched, rethought or merely revamped by the use of [collage]”. In keeping with Pierre Joris’s seminal assertion, Rona Cran’s essay – which is based on her PhD thesis – aims at demonstrating how collage was instrumental in the work of Joseph Cornell, William Burroughs, Frank O’Hara and Bob Dylan. Indeed, many essays in visual arts have been devoted to the analysis of collage as a means to transcend the limits of representation and to open the field of experience to otherness. However, Rona Cran offers an “interdisciplinary approach, navigating a path through plastic art, prose, and poetry” (3) focusing on four creators from diverse fields.

2 The study begins with a comprehensive introduction to the collage aesthetics elaborated upon a large range of sources from art criticism to literary criticism, to more philosophical approaches within modernist and postmodernist trends. For example, David Antin’s article “Modernism and Postmodernism: Approaching the Present in American Poetry” (Boundary 2, 1972) was seminal for Rona Cran’s analysis as he identified collage as a recognizable characteristic in the work of Frank O’Hara.

3 Rosalind Krauss’ “In The Name of Picasso” (October, 1991) is also acknowledged as a key influence. Her tenet is that collage “as a system […] inaugurates a play of differences

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which is both about and sustained by an absent origin”. This formula operates as a leitmotiv in Rona Cran’s essay: “the absent origin is the physical act of pasting” (8) regarding the three writers considered here. Collage is presented overall as “the absent origin of [the] more prominent, non-collage creations” (9) of Cornell, Burroughs, O’Hara, and Dylan. The assertion may seem questionable regarding Cornell whose famous boxes are obviously three-dimensional collages – as well as for Burroughs’ notorious cut-up productions which have long been perceived as proceeding from cut and paste.

4 It is well known that collage occupied a central place in modern visual arts notably as a solution to formal issues in cubism, as a fuel for irony in Dadaism, or as a tool of displacement in Surrealism, to name a few. Collage stems from a two-faced process (5): it is first a fragment of reality which produces “a kind of immediate presence” in the words of Thomas Brockelman (5). On the other hand this fragment calls for the absent context from which it has been extracted. The author also notes how the incompleteness of collage allows these writers and artists to covertly introduce autobiographical features into their work. It also stimulates the reader’s imagination into a “collaborative” act (126).

5 The physical practice of collage in visual arts tends to wane by the mid-century. It expands to other realms such as poetry as its language allows encounters and new possibilities for invention (4) when the form has lost its import in the realm of visual arts. However different these four artists may be, collage is the “chemical process” which “plays as crucial catalyst for their work” (38).

6 The essay starts with Joseph Cornell, who literally used the process of pasting in his boxes and two-dimensional collages. In line with her “anthropological methodology” (45), which encompasses the relationship between work of art and habitat, Rona Cran argues that New York acts as “the fundamental component of [Cornell’s] life’s work” (41). Cornell needed to express the various aspects of momentary experiences in city life and in parallel to reconcile his Manhattan background and his fascination with Europe. In the course of his wanderings throughout the city he collected various objects and images from “Victorian ephemera” to European art.

7 Paradoxically Surrealism served as both trigger and “absent origin” (48) for Cornell. Coming across Ernst’s collage novel Femme 100 têtes in Julien Lévy’s New York gallery acted as a catalyst for the French literature and art amateur, and naturally led him to use collage as a medium. But Cornell was more fascinated by the device than by the “lewd subject matter” (53). The formal proximity with Surrealism goes with a divergence of tenets: rather than favouring chance, Cornell was an adept of “lucid dream” (55).

8 For Rona Cran, the confrontation between Cornell and Ernst is clearly to the disadvantage of the latter. Cornell’s innate gift for the marvellous, his empathy towards women and children is somewhat harshly and even hastily set against Ernst’s more “contrived”, “egocentric” (62), or “quasi-misogynistic air of patriarchy” (68) – with a touch of gendered interpretation which is not always convincing. Overall this tends to reflect the cliché of an innocent and budding America against a sophisticated and jaded Europe.

9 Rona Cran posits that Cornell’s “ingenuousness […] seems able to tap genuinely into the realm of unconscious desires” (62) which makes him “more surrealist than the surrealists” (62). Still, she argues, Cornell’s childlike imagination was saved from

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mawkishness thanks to the disturbing ways of the surrealists. More than his two- dimensional collages Cornell’s boxes expressed a sense of containment in relation to his family life in New York – yet “positive” (82) as it fostered escape impulses expressed in his fairy tales.

10 The second part of the essay is focused on William Burroughs. The “gastric criticism” (89) he has had to endure, according to Rona Cran, is not only due to its disturbing subject matter (“hangings, surgical carnage, explicit sex and graphic depictions of drug-taking”) (90). Their compositional style which she considers as a “textual mess” (91) breeds an unsettling confusion in the reader and fosters the negative critical reception of The Nova Trilogy as against the more linear Junky, Queer or, later, The Red Night Trilogy.

11 Brion Gysin’s (re)discovery of the cut-ups reveals something which was already at work in a less conscious way. The collage form appears to be organically connected to Burroughs’ fragmentary writing (102) and “twisted anti-logic” (91). Even the more accessible works such as Junky, Queer and The Yage Letters, may be a collage of one another according to Oliver Harris (94). The conjunction with the visual arts is in keeping with Burroughs’ tenet – “the written word IS AN IMAGE” – writing can be viewed as a form of painting (93).

12 Collage operates as a tool for freedom allowing Burroughs to escape from the influence of Ginsberg who helped him with other Beat writers in putting together the scraps of Junky and Queer. Collage, like a “war machine”, allows Burroughs to fight with the written word and strip it to the “naked truth” (124), to quote Robin Lydenberg, in a defiance of sentimentality that reminds us of Dadaism or Russian Futurism. Excess and loss are at work here: the viral nature of the word is expressed by the hallucinatory proliferation in imagery (123) which Burroughs endeavours to control by cutting into the flesh. Art and life mirror one another as the “fissures between the fragments” (131) in his writing echo the various shifts and moves in his existence.

13 In spite of the zest which fuels her writing, Rona Cran does not fully convince when she argues that “few [critics] have attempted any sustained analysis of collage in relation to his work, or of his work in relation to earlier uses of the practice.” (36) The issue may appear as a simple matter of terminology since the seminal part of cut-ups – obviously a form of collage – regarding William Burroughs’ writing practice has been largely documented. The discussed relationship with Dada (e. g. Hannah Koch) is fruitful and could have been examined more in depth as part of the issue of transposition from one medium to another.

14 The third chapter focuses on Frank O’Hara and his “poetics of love and theft”. Rona Cran presents O’Hara in the Rimbaldian guise of “a voleur de feu” (164) for whom any ideas, moments, quotations, emotions, thoughts and situations are liable to be incorporated immediately into his poems just as newspaper fragments are pasted into a visual collage. In the 1950s, the art world in New York enjoyed a freedom of creativity lacking in the literary world of the time. O’Hara, like a “poetic bricoleur” (139), assembled his poems as Pollock dripped paint all over the surface of his canvas. Still painting was considered as a model regarding process not product, as Rona Cran is careful to point out.

15 Here again, the influence of Surrealism is noticeable in his early poems made of collaged clashing elements. “Second Avenue” displays a “unique amalgamation of Surrealist technique and Abstract Expressionism intent” (147). But O’Hara’s writing was

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more emotional and less violent as he wanted to “pour the world into the poem instead of tearing it apart” (153). Less dependent on the unconscious, with a “lighter touch” (154), later poems such as “In Memory of My Feelings” explore the “concept of a collaged ego” (155), reflecting O’Hara’s belief in a constantly shifting identity. Collage as a “non-fixed form” (156) embodies the flux of the experience of the poet’s vagrancy throughout New York City. Along the lines of Duchamp’s ready-mades, choice enacts a “decisive creative act” (180) for a direct incorporation of the poet’s lived moments to perform a “catalogue of ‘happenings’ ” (159) as in “The Day Lady Died”.

16 Suiting O’Hara’s “democratic” disposition the non-hierarchical structure of collage allows the juxtaposition of disparate idiosyncratic references, such as names of friends or city-places, or high cultural sources. These may overall be obscure to the reader but do not produce a feeling of estrangement (as may happen with T. S. Eliot) since they constitute a documentary material of O’Hara’s life, Rona Cran argues.

17 The last part of the book is “a sort of coda” (195) which focuses on Bob Dylan and reassesses the advantage of using collage for the production of new forms. Dylan, as a “magpie” (188) collected all sorts of material from personal experience to popular culture and highbrow literature which he assembled in a non-hierarchical way. He is shown as both “hipper-than-hip” and in search of a truth which could be better expressed by a “collage of experience” than by a “straightforward” (202) discourse – the latter unable to render social, political and personal chaos via songs written using a technique born out of political and aesthetic urgency (210).

18 Dylan wanted to achieve the simultaneity of painting and consequently saw plastic art “as a parallel medium” (200). Picasso was influential, and Rona Cran weighs Dylan’s desire to break away from the folk idiom with the painter’s refusal of traditional representation (201). But he wanted to remain intelligible and his attempt at the cut-up technique cut short. Here again some comments may seem a bit broad: the “desire to show things differently” (201) is not only the concern of Picasso and Dylan but of most artists and poets.

19 One may regret the compartmentalization of this essay: the “cross-disciplinary study of collage” (37) which is at stake here would have been better sustained if the author had more systematically analysed the similarities and divergences of the various forms of collage at work in literature and visual arts.

20 Rona Cran’s pleasantly written and energetic book provides an amply documented if not always quite innovative overview of the use of collage in four very different creations.

AUTHORS

JULIETTE NICOLINI Université Sorbonne-Nouvelle

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Daniel Katz, American Modernism’s Expatriate Scene. The Labour of Translation

Roxana Oltean

REFERENCES

Daniel Katz, American Modernism’s Expatriate Scene. The Labour of Translation, Edinburgh Studies in Transatlantic Literatures, 2007, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2014, 208 pages, ISBN-10: 0748625267, ISBN-13: 978-0748625260, Paperback £ 19.99, Hardcover £ 75.00

1 Daniel Katz’s sophisticated and subtle study of an array of (proto)modernist (and not necessarily expatriate) writers and their labors of translation can be approached from the perspective offered by his considerations upon Gertrude Stein as voicing a “dialectic of the domestic and foreign” which is “achingly familiar,” but which also yields particularly intriguing nuances. In fact, Katz’s reappraisal of modernism and expatriation (and the close, yet by no means straightforward, link to translation) dwells on the interstices of that now widely-accepted association to point to the exercise of willed dislocation: “it is not a case of finding one’s true home, a more suitable one than the contingent home in which one happened by chance to be born, but rather of forcibly absenting oneself from it. One settles, precisely, where one does not belong” (Katz 96).

2 The correlation between writing and exile in general has, of course, been amply explored before, from Bhabha and Said to Seidel, to mention only three instances from an impressive critical canon. Similarly, the reflection on the embroilments between expatriation and a global, essentially deracinated identity have also been tackled in studies such as Peyser’s, while more recent investigations into cosmopolitanism as determined by a radical homelessness in nineteenth-century American literature point

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to the early incipience of an awareness of the uncanny (i.e. un-homely) experience of the local (see Tally).

3 In this context, Katz’s own endeavor is fresh not in point of theme, but in point of the insights disclosed in these readings of writers generally included in the expatriate modernist American canon (although the last chapters convincingly extend this legacy into surprising new territory). In fact, Katz himself states, it is the cliché coupling of (modernist) writing and estrangement/exile/expatriation (already conceptualized as cliché by Henry James) that merits a new look. Drawing on Paul Giles’s discussion in Virtual Americas of the “position of estrangement” (Giles 3) and on Ramazani’s vision of transnationalism as “primary” to modernism (Ramazani), Katz emphasizes the extent to which expatriation is “not a flight from American identity, but rather becomes the means for a displaced and dialectical encounter with it,” thus questioning easy oppositions between nativist and internationalist, or cosmopolitan and universalist in the understanding of American modernism. This is fruitfully interwoven with an understanding of the work of translation to reflect on how “cultural appurtenance,” “linguistic identity,” or “translation” and a “specifically “American” literary idiom” (Katz 2-3) are crossed by a sometimes dialectic, sometimes resonant relation between what one might call home and elsewhere.

4 Katz’s book begins, quite naturally, with Henry James, who constitutes the focus of the first two chapters, and whose musings on expatriation and (impossible) return in particular in The American Scene make for an intriguing poetics of estrangement as writerly prerequisite, and of cosmopolitanism as eloquent of an identity at once global and essentially expatriated. Katz interestingly formulates what critics have understood as the Jamesian predicament of American displacement by pointing to James’s awareness “of the transcendental American condition: that of linguistic homelessness” and ponders the wider implications of American as a language already affected by translation because severed from its native location (“how does one live when one’s language is itself a 'translation,' when the native tongue has been separated from its condition of nativity?” (Katz 14)). The Jamesian international theme in this sense emerges as an encounter with the radically other–related by Katz with the uncanny– marked by the need to “transpose that foreign into the comprehensible terms of the domestic” (Katz 15), thus echoing the central quandaries in Jamesian stories of the ghostly, including The Turn of the Screw as well as the “The Jolly Corner,” but also in narratives foregrounding the impossibilities of expression and the need for translation (of children’s perceptions, for example), such as What Maisie Knew. What is of particular interest to Jamesian criticism, one might add, are Katz’s arguments (also continued in chapter 2) about James’s relevance not only in terms of his understanding of expatriation, but also of his “patriotics,” or the “study of the construction of the home and the homely which in James so often begins precisely not at home” (Katz 29), and continuing with its further implication, of cosmopolitanism as an American condition, or James’s construction of “Americannness” as an “originary cosmopolitanism” (Katz 32). Indeed, if one were to turn to the imperial imagination permeating the late Jamesian American settings and characters in particular, not only in The American Scene, but also in writings such as The Ivory Tower, Katz’s observations fruitfully illuminate the cosmopolitan reverberations (also understood as replete with connotations of homelessness and the uncanny) of the American homes that absentees return to, and suggest a complementary image of the intersection between the American and the global imagination, as discussed for example by Peyser. This positioning also leads Katz

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to a consideration of translation effects in James’s The Ambassadors, tuning in to the presence of the foreign, the native, of cosmopolitanism and Americanness in the transatlantic, ethical and erotic negotiations undertaken in that novel, and played out between Strether and a series of maternal instances.

5 Chapter 3, devoted to Ezra Pound, starts from the latter’s casting of James as an “avatar of Americanness” brimming with complex cultural implications, which Katz significantly sums up as “the manner in which James points to translation as an eruption within the native as much as an encounter with the foreign” (Katz 54) and focuses the discussion on the inherently outside perspective through which America is necessarily constructed, also pointing to how “estrangement from cultural identity is, precisely, American identity” (Katz 55). This perspective inevitably engages, one might add, a long-debated (exceptionalist?) twist in American Studies, formulated by Fluck in connection to critics’ privileging of anti-Americanism as expressive of the American ethos. Katz’s subsequent reading of Pound through James, centering on the notion of “provincialism,” but also on travel and exile cast not only as means of escape but also as ways of returning to the native, “against which only the “foreign” can inscribe itself” (Katz 57), also traverses a discussion of (Pound’s) Whitman as a counterpart–even “Doppelgänger” (Katz 60)–to the American identity expressed, in Pound’s vision, by James, and culminates with an analysis of translation effects in Pound’s poems/ translations. These are, Katz argues, informed by a double awareness–translation as a “fight for communication against provincialism” and, at the same time, translation as a “struggle for the recognition of and preservation of difference” (Katz 65)–which only serves to emphasize the bitter irony that Pound’s “humanistic enthusiasm for communication and exchange” and for telecommunication itself became, in effect, fertile ground for “the seeds of his own abhorrent and botched polyglot ambassadorship for Mussolini’s Italy” (Katz 67).

6 The complex expatriate and native legacy informing Pound’s poetics is related in chapter 4 to his view on creation and translation. The discussion, Katz warns, should steer away from extremes: seeing Pound’s translations as a marginal exercise, on the one hand or, on the other hand, regarding the translations as original works in their own right, thereby effacing the foreignness of the Cathay poems for example, which actually seem to provide an “alibi for introducing the sorts of verbal extravagances and liberties that “imagism” often proclaimed to militate against” (Katz 80). In fact, Katz argues, in the logic of modernism’s intrinsic foreignness, the status of translation “is essential to their success, even when considered as original English poems” (Katz 81). The view of translation as “pretext for transgression” (Katz 81) moves Katz’s focus to a discussion of the vernacular in general (and American vernacular in particular) as poetic language, and of Pound’s double Dantesque heritage (Dante Alighieri and Dante Gabriel Rossetti). This leads to particularly salient observations upon the power of the “lively, young but traditionless” vernacular–be it Italian or American English–as alternative to a “conventionalized, normative, essentially “foreign” tongue (Latin or Victorian English)” in providing a “poetic idiom” (Katz 83) which, Katz reminds us, is not actually a real, “live” language, but an imaginary projection of what an Italian or American might have spoken, thus inscribing writing into a Derridean space of death.

7 The complex interplay of foreignness and displacement in the construction of an American literary idiom during the modernist period would certainly not have been complete without a due consideration of Gertrude Stein, whom Katz discusses alongside

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Wyndham Lewis in point of an emphasis on geographical and cultural displacement “as a necessary preliminary to the creative act, particularly writing” (Katz 96). The forcible absence which, as argued above, can be understood as Katz’s key perspective, is addressed here in relation to Stein’s musings on the difference between writing and speaking as echo of, or supplement to, the difference between two civilizations in “An American and France” and Paris France, and also in the context of Wyndham Lewis’s concern with cultural borders and “those that separate writing from speech” (Katz 101). While pointing to the “neo-Nietzschean underpinnings” of Lewis’s opinions in Men Without Art, which condemn influence as running counter “to an ideal of subjective autonomy or self-sufficiency,” thus notoriously expressing a position far removed from Stein’s (Katz 101), Katz pursues a series of surprising, even uncanny (given Lewis’s “distaste for Stein’s work” (Katz 104)) affinities between Stein’s and Lewis’s own transactions with American culture and language, situated at a complex node between Lewis’s disturbing anti-Semitism, Stein’s puzzling and apparently enthusiastic support for the collaborationist Vichy government and her celebration of G.I.s in her later writings (see Katz 110) but also in the context of Stein’s “sense of the evolution of Americanness in literature and language,” concerns which echo “to some degree […] the anxieties pertaining to responsibility, originality, and the relationship between expression, language, and inaugural or executive will which so troubled Lewis” (Katz 111).

8 It is in particular Stein’s “distanced, abstracted reappropriation and display of the 'American' material” (Katz 117) that both accounts for Katz’s placing Stein in an ultimately Jamesian American legacy, and that also accounts for the surprising presence of Jack Spicer in the discussion of modernism and expatriation in chapter 6. In fact, what Katz himself admits may appear an “anomalous” inclusion (Katz 118) can be seen as a test case for one of the central contentions of this study, that expatriation is necessarily linked to the construction of the native element, which in turn allows for the foreign to be perceived and, one might add, that the intensely local is yet another expression of forcible absence from the national scene. In fact, Katz argues, Spicer’s “aggressively regional poetics” is positioned in a dialectic with an “Outside” “enacted notably through translation,” and thus constitutes a “clear inheritance of the expatriate modernists of the previous generation,” meaning that the “typically modernist double engagement with the foreign, implying a new elaboration of the domestic, could be said to come home” (Katz 118). Moreover, Katz’s commentaries on Spicer’s embroilments with Otherness, with translation as an inevitable poetic trope involved in Spicer’s figuring of dictation or even of ghost writing in After Lorca, and with foreignness as lying at the heart of artistic expression, make for a compelling close reading both of Spicer and of the latter’s place in what might be termed an essentially expatriate(d) American tradition but also in a problematized gay canon, all reflected and refracted in Spicer’s translation of Lorca’s “Ode to Walt Whitman.”

9 Katz’s Coda brings Spicer into conversation with Ashbery and Schuyler to elaborate on “uncanny homecomings” and on “the ambiguities of cosmopolitanism” (141), fruitfully relating Ashbery to a modernist sensibility as evinced by his musings on expatriation and on art, and dwelling on the manner in which Ashbery’s and Shuyler’s A Nest of Ninnies engages issues of marginality, foreignness and exoticity echoing previously- discussed transatlantic tropes. The Coda also elegantly brings together the main elements of the modernists’ meanderings and the book’s own complex sinuous arguments, while foregrounding a contrary, but no less modernist-inspired movement:

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“In Spicer, Ashbery, and Schuyler, we see where American transatlantic cosmopolitan modernism also invariably, dialectically tended – the suburbs and the other coast– while the museum, with walls or without, fades into its other which since James at least has also been its double: the shopping mall, which Europe’s ghosts ask no better than to haunt ” (Katz 159). Away from Jamesian Paris as a starting point for expatriation, the book closes with the suburb and the mall, poignantly capturing modernism’s own (re)turn towards home as an experience of the uncanny.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

BHABHA, Homi K, “DissemiNation: Time, Narrative, and the Margins of the Modern Nation,” Nation and Narration, Ed. Homi K. Bhabha, 1990, London, Routledge, 1995, 291-322.

FLUCK, Winfried, ““The American Romance” and the Changing Functions of the Imaginary,” New Literary History 27.3, 1996, 415-57.

GILES, Paul, Virtual Americas: Transnational Fictions and the Transatlantic Imaginary, Durham, Duke University Press, 2002.

PEYSER, Thomas, Utopia and Cosmopolis: Globalization in the Era of American Literary Realism, Durham, Duke University Press, 1998.

RAMAZANI, Jahan, “A Transnational Poetics,” American Literary History 18.2, 2006, 332-59.

SAID, Edward, “Reflections on Exil,” Reflections on Exile and Other Essays, Boston, Harvard University Press, 2000, 173-86.

SEIDEL, Michael, Exile and the Narrative Imagination, New Haven, Yale University Press, 1986.

TALLY, Robert, Poe and the Subversion of American Literature: Satire, Fantasy, Critique, New York, Bloomsbury, 2014.

AUTHORS

ROXANA OLTEAN The University of Bucharest

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Trans'Arts

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Warhol (Un)limited : peut-on encore exposer Andy Warhol ?

Guillaume Mouleux

1 Bien qu’originellement conçue autour du colossal Shadows, œuvre en cent-deux parties montrée ici pour la première fois dans son intégralité en dehors des Etats-Unis, l’exposition Warhol Unlimited qui se tient depuis le 2 octobre 2015 et jusqu’au 7 février 2016 au Musée d’Art Moderne de la ville de Paris offre une véritable immersion dans l’univers de l’artiste. Dès la toute première salle, le visiteur se trouve d’ailleurs entraîné dans une logique très warholienne : comme un pied-de-nez à la célébrité (ici illustrée par l’une des séries les plus emblématiques du « pop art »), il lui faut déjà se retourner pour pouvoir observer dix représentations des fameuses Campbell's Soup Cans réparties de part et d’autre de l’entrée. Dans la même salle trônent quelques autoportraits en sérigraphies, dont une série intitulée The Shadow (au singulier), clin d’œil malicieux à l’attraction principale (ou présentée comme telle) de l’exposition.

2 L’œuvre filmique de l’artiste est ensuite évoquée dans une section dont l’organisation est loin d’être innocente : les murs de la salle sont couverts de projections de Screen Tests, formats courts où Warhol filme en plan fixe durant environ quatre minutes ses modèles immobiles. La disposition des écrans fait converger les regards des modèles vers le centre de la pièce, où sont projetées sur deux écrans des œuvres comptant parmi les plus sexuellement provocatrices de l’artiste : Blow Job et Mario Banana #1 & #2. Ces films évoquent chacun la fellation, mais de façons relevant d’un jeu de chassé- croisé entre le réalisateur et le spectateur : malgré son titre explicite, le premier occulte totalement l’action et consiste en un simple gros plan sur le visage extatique d’un jeune homme, tandis que la série des Mario Banana montre quant à elle l’acteur travesti Mario Montez manger une banane de façon suggestive, donnant à l’acte une dimension burlesque. Honni soit qui mal y pense : suggérée et pourtant invisible à l’écran, la dimension sexuelle n’est donc réalité que dans l’esprit du spectateur, dès lors seul responsable de son éventuel trouble. Ainsi disposées, ces œuvres se voient attribuer un caractère central, sinon dans l’œuvre filmique de Warhol, tout au moins dans la pièce lui étant consacrée – une impression d’autant plus saisissante lorsque le Screen Test de Marcel Duchamp, placé entre les deux œuvres licencieuses et

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perpendiculairement à elles deux, le montre tournant la tête d’un air à la fois curieux et amusé d’un côté, puis de l’autre.

3 La salle suivante juxtapose de façon aussi inattendue que choquante deux œuvres apparemment aux antipodes l’une de l’autre : d’un côté, un papier peint (le même qui orne d’ailleurs la façade du MAM le temps de l’évènement) représentant des portraits de vaches aux couleurs psychédéliques ; de l’autre, diverses représentations en petits et grands formats des Electric Chairs. Thématique, le contraste est également visuel, les couleurs vives mais répétitives du papier peint contrastant grandement avec les nuances variées des engins de mort, comme pour compléter sur le plan chromatique le décalage provocateur initié par la simple cohabitation de ces motifs. De façon troublante, la répétitivité à l’identique des vaches et l’agressivité de leurs couleurs (rose vif sur fond jaune) rend leur présence presque aussi oppressante pour le spectateur que celle des chaises électriques, nourrissant ainsi une réflexion particulière sur la peine de mort : les bovins peuvent ainsi représenter les foules passives ne remettant pas en cause les exécutions capitales, et sont tendus comme un miroir au spectateur davantage troublé par leur présence que par celle des machines à tuer.

4 Autre contraste avec une série de représentations de Jackie Kennedy, dans laquelle l’association (parfois au sein des mêmes œuvres) de photos d’elle prises avant et après l’assassinat de son mari fait se côtoyer insouciance et deuil. On notera le rare Round Jackie, dont le format rappelle les « tondi » italiens mais aussi les icônes religieuses, un choix forcément troublant venant d’un Warhol tout à la fois iconoclaste mais aussi chrétien de rite orthodoxe – un point que l’appareil critique de l’exposition ne relève hélas pas.

5 En face trônent des boîtes, tantôt côte à côte, tantôt empilées, représentant des emballages de produits de série : cartons de corn flakes Kellogg’s, de soupes Campbell, de savons Brillo ou encore de ketchup Heinz, avec pour cette dernière série la présence d’un prototype dont les couleurs plus prononcées rompent de façon troublante l’effet d’uniformité.

6 L’espace dédié aux « Flowers » (un motif de « store bon marché », pour leur auteur lui- même qui les voulait interchangeables) donne d’un côté sur une salle en cul-de-sac dédiée aux représentations de Mao, alors « l’homme le plus connu au monde » selon Warhol. Ses multiples portraits, parfois gribouillés à grands traits de peinture consciencieusement désordonnés, sont exposée sur fond de papier peint aux tons lavande reprenant à l’infini le visage du « Grand Timonier ».

7 Après un nouveau passage par la section fleurie, c’est l’aventure de l’ Andy Warhol's Exploding Plastic Inevitable qui est évoquée. Derrière ce nom cryptique semblant tout droit sorti d’une partie de « cadavre exquis » se cache la collaboration multimédia liant notamment Warhol et le groupe rock « The Velvet Underground and Nico ». Au bout d’un couloir aux murs illustré de photos, de documents et de citations diverses (certaines tirées de critiques assassines à l’encontre du groupe à ses débuts), le visiteur se trouve littéralement cerné par Andy Warhol's Exploding Plastic Inevitable, œuvre audiovisuelle expérimentale de Ronald Nameth composée de quatre films projetés simultanément sur quatre écrans perpendiculaires et représentant le Velvet Underground en pleine prestation de la chanson Venus in Furs, dans une version de 1966 mais aux sonorités résolument agressives et avant-gardistes préfigurant déjà le « noise rock » des années 1980. Le chaos sonore ambiant semble aller de pair avec l’impossibilité physique de regarder les quatre composantes du film en même temps, et

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sa durée légèrement supérieure au quart d’heure semble faire écho à la dernière citation (signée Warhol) affichée dans le couloir précédent : « If they can take it for ten minutes, then we play for fifteen. That’s our policy. Always leave them wanting less ». Près de cinquante ans plus tard, on s’aperçoit qu’à l’inverse, loin de toute lassitude ou de tout rejet, le public a successivement plébiscité nombre de courants musicaux pouvant être considérés comme les héritiers directs ou indirects du « Velvet Underground », du rock progressif au rock bruitiste en passant par divers genres dits « alternatifs ». Mais s’il peut prendre des airs de provocation teintée d’autodérision, le commentaire de Warhol rappelle surtout qu’avant d’être un succès commercial et critique, le rock était avant tout un choix artistique dont le but premier n’était pas de plaire.

8 Datant de 1966, en pleine conquête spatiale, le concept des Silver Clouds évoque l’apesanteur et semble faire se confondre espace artistique et espace intersidéral. La salle dédiée à ces ballons en forme d’oreillers gonflés à l’hélium et susceptibles de se balader dans la pièce au gré des mouvements d’air et autres interactions présente un décor homogène : ballons, murs et ventilateurs (ces derniers ostensiblement disposés à la vue du public dès l’entrée, comme une façon de souligner l’aspect artificiel de l’ensemble puisque le « vent » permettant aux nuages de se mouvoir est faux) sont tous dans des tons argentés, que seules viennent contraster quelques sérigraphies représentant des vaches multicolores – les mêmes qui, quelques salles auparavant, contrebalançaient l’effet des chaises électriques, mais cette fois avec une variété de teintes évitant le caractère répétitif du papier peint.

9 Œuvre immersive, les Silver Clouds avaient à l’origine pour but d’illustrer, par l’interaction du public avec les « nuages », le fait que la notion d’œuvre d’art est constituée par un tout et non un objet. Paradoxalement, cette réflexion n’est ici guère servie par des écriteaux semblant à contrario sacraliser l’Objet en pressant le public de ne pas toucher aux ballons – une consigne d’ailleurs occasionnellement bravée par divers visiteurs (surtout les plus jeunes) dans un acte de désobéissance, sinon citoyenne, à coup sûr très warholienne. Vers le bout de la salle, autre forme de ton sur ton : une interview en vidéo projetée en boucle montre Warhol assumer sans sourciller le caractère répétitif du pop art.

10 La pièce suivante a des allures de salle de cinéma dédiée au film Empire, plan fixe sur l’Empire State Building de huit heures et cinq minutes de long dont la durée délirante finit par rendre prépondérantes les réactions et les sensations du spectateur, plutôt que le sujet en lui-même.

11 Vient ensuite l’heure de ce qui se veut le bouquet final de l’exposition : la salle regroupant les cent deux parties de Shadows, œuvre abstraite basée sur une même photographie tirée tantôt en positif, tantôt en négatif et parée de diverses couleurs. Longue et en courbe, la salle ne fait que renforcer l’impression d’immensité vertigineuse d’une œuvre qui, sous l’effet d’un virage, s’étend très littéralement à perte de vue. Controversée, Shadows est parfois considérée comme la pire des œuvres de Warhol, parfois comme sa meilleure des années 70 : chacun sera en droit de se faire son propre avis, mais nul ne pourra contester le caractère impressionnant de l’installation.

12 De The Shadow à Shadows, l’on pourrait s’attendre à ce que la boucle soit bouclée. Pourtant, l’exposition ne s’arrête pas là mais se poursuit au dehors de ses limites officielles : dès la sortie de la dernière salle franchie, le visiteur peut, en se retournant (comme il avait déjà dû le faire dès la première salle), admirer la vidéoprojection sur le

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mur de Kiss, film de cinquante-quatre minutes constitué d’une juxtaposition de scènes de baisers. Dans le hall du musée, outre la sempiternelle boutique où divers produits dérivés prolongent modestement l’idée de production en série des images, on remarque également une version dépourvue de rideau et ouverte à la vue de tous d’une photocabine automatique où le visiteur peut poser pour obtenir son portrait « façon pop art », imitant le rendu des sérigraphies colorées. Le résultat est immédiatement mis en ligne gratuitement sur un réseau social, version moderne du « quart d’heure de gloire », mais aussi disponible en version papier au prix de deux euros. On peut voir là le summum d’une automatisation semblant parachever avec cynisme les explorations du « pape du pop-art » : le rôle auparavant dévolu à l’artiste-technicien se trouve ici entièrement automatisé, ne laissant de place à l’intervention humaine qu’à travers celle, hypothétique, anonyme, invisible et exempte de toute célébration, du technicien de maintenance.

13 Si Warhol Unlimited tente de rendre justice à l’œuvre de l’artiste en en présentant des aspects variés et parfois méconnus toujours agrémentés de panneaux explicatifs aussi instructifs que pertinents, difficile de parler de rétrospective au sens complet du terme tant certains aspects de son travail mais aussi certaines œuvres indissociables du « mythe Warhol » sont curieusement aux abonnés absents. Par ailleurs, les techniques modernes facilitant largement la reproduction des œuvres, il aurait été appréciable que le visiteur soit invité plus explicitement à une réflexion sur cette question, notamment à une époque où les supports numériques permettent une duplication des films à l’infini, quasi-instantanée et à des coûts dérisoires. De même, si le début de la visite effleure la question du rôle des chiffres et de la symétrie dans l’œuvre de Warhol, et notamment son utilisation récurrente des multiples de trois (nombre de ses sérigraphies représentant neuf variantes du même motif selon une même organisation symétrique en trois lignes et trois colonnes, le nombre des Shadows étant lui aussi un multiple de trois), on pourra regretter que cet aspect ne soit pas davantage développé. Est-ce un simple hasard si ses films, tournée en 16mm à vingt-quatre images par seconde étaient ensuite et pour obtenir un effet de ralenti projetés à exactement 16 images par seconde (le chiffre 16 étant lui-même symétrique : 4x4) ? C’est là l’une des questions avec lesquelles le spectateur à la curiosité piquée devra repartir.

14 Si, dans l’ensemble, cette exposition (forcément incomplète et inégale) propose sa vision du mythe d’un artiste que l’on ne cesse de redécouvrir, il reste néanmoins difficile de ne pas être troublé à l’idée de voir ainsi Warhol célébré d’une façon contrastant sur bien des points avec son propre message, et même avec le « pacte de lecture » conclu dès l’entrée avec le visiteur via un titre d’autant plus prometteur qu’il laisse miroiter une véritable carte blanche laissée à l’œuvre de l’un des artistes les plus excentriques et anticonformistes du XXème siècle. Car au bout du compte, si sur la forme Warhol Unlimited s’aventure effectivement au-delà de ses limites physiques (jusqu’à l’extérieur du musée, à la façade tapissée du fameux papier peint représentant des vaches), l’exposition n’a en réalité d’illimitée que le nom et reste inévitablement prisonnière des restrictions inhérentes à son existence-même à notre époque – qui ne sont pas tant des limites spatiales que celles liées à la conservation tout à la fois de l’intégrité physique des œuvres et des droits à l’image. Ce qui, en partant de ce constat, peut mener à se demander : « Peut-on encore exposer Andy Warhol ? » – ou plus précisément, « Peut-on encore l’exposer sans le trahir ? ».

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15 Mais l’on peut aussi, a contrario, interpréter cela comme une façon détournée de propager son esprit : en institutionnalisant l’artiste via une exposition soumise aux incontournables codes habituels du matérialisme muséal (interdiction de photographier – et donc de contribuer à une forme de multiplication en série des images – dans toute la première moitié de l’exposition, affiches demandant de « ne pas jouer avec les ballons » parmi les Silver Clouds pourtant conçus pour susciter l’interaction, sempiternelles ligne que le visiteur est prié de ne pas franchir…), les organisateurs poussent le visiteur à s’interroger sur ces paradoxes, le conduisant par un procédé tenant de la psychologie inversée à prendre le parti de l’artiste contre une vision patrimoniale et sacralisée de l’art – avec, en filigrane, la menace induite en cas d’absence de réaction d’être réduit au rang de ces bovins passifs dont l’image est récurrente tout au long de l’exposition, à l’intérieur comme à l’extérieur du musée. Après tout, si tel est l’effet produit, libre à chacun de croire (ou non) que c’était à dessein.

AUTEUR

GUILLAUME MOULEUX Université Paris Diderot-Paris 7 (LARCA)

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« Sauter sans sortir du cadre : le portrait gymnastique chez Philippe Halsman »

François Brunet

1 Ce texte est issu d’une communication présentée lors de « Jumpologies : Images du saut, de la gymnastique à l’extase », Journée d'étude consacrée à Philippe Halsman, sous la direction de Joséphine Jibokji, Barbara Le Maître, Natacha Pernac et Jennifer Verraes, le 12 décembre 2015. Il est reproduit ici avec l’autorisation des organisatrices et de Marta Ponsa, responsable de projets artistiques au Jeu de Paume.

2 Je propose de resituer les figures sautantes de Ph. Halsman dans l’art du portrait photographique. Sans être un expert de l’œuvre de Halsman, je m’appuie sur son travail de portraitiste pour faire l’hypothèse que ces images sont à considérer elles aussi comme des portraits. Le « portrait sautant » apparaît d’abord comme un exercice de dépassement : pour le photographe par rapport à ses normes techniques ou sociales, pour le sujet par rapport à l’ethos socialement défini de la présentation de soi. Au-delà de la prouesse technique, il est possible de considérer la gymnastique du corps sautant comme un développement de l’esthétique américaine de l’élévation photogénique du sujet par la lumière, au risque même d’un retournement burlesque de cette élévation. Cependant le risque que je nommerais « sortir du cadre » est plutôt évité dans les portraits sautants de Halsman, qui fonctionnent, en majorité, comme des expansions ou des confirmations des portraits « ordinaires » ou « sérieux ».

3 De la galerie de portraits sautants de Halsman se détachent peut-être d’abord, pour leur notoriété et leur charme, des figures d’actrices (Marilyn Monroe [Fig. 1], Grace Kelly) et d’artistes (Salvador Dali [Fig. 2] en tout premier lieu). Mais il y a dans la série beaucoup d’images de personnages sérieux et importants — des hommes, des hommes politiques bien sûr (Richard Nixon par exemple), mais aussi beaucoup d’hommes d’affaires, des gens qui étaient au moment de la photo chairman ou president : David Sarnoff, grand homme de la télévision américaine des années 50, ou Morse Dial, président de la firme pétrochimique Union Carbide.

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4 Le premier commentaire qui vient à l’esprit devant ces sauteurs est, comme l’écrit la jaquette du livre Jump, que ces personnalités habituées à « poser » (to sit en anglais) pour leurs portraits sont ici amenées à to jump ou, pourrait-on dire, « dé-poser » leurs images. La plupart des sujets de Halsman sont des célébrités. Il y a là, de la part du photographe et de son sujet, une forme de farce, un rire dada, consistant à casser le rituel, la pompe et le décorum, à « sortir du cadre » des conventions et faire surgir le « grain de folie ».

5 Or la quasi totalité des sauteurs sautent verticalement, et plus précisément vers le haut (quelques-uns se livrant cependant à des pirouettes). Si le saut se distingue en général de l’ascension, comme le souligne Natacha Pernac, chez Halsman il s’agit presque toujours d’un saut ascendant. Comment ne pas penser alors que ces personnes illustres, tout en « sautant » le rituel, grandissent ou se grandissent encore en sautant pour Philip Halsman ? Déjà célèbres, souvent riches, ils et elles semblent sauter pour repousser encore leurs limites — repousser le plafond de leur gloire, plus précisément ; s’élever en apesanteur, vers le ciel, vers une forme de divinité peut-être, même en chaussettes comme dans le portrait du Duc et de la Duchesse de Windsor [Fig. 3], pour être « immortalisés » par le photographe, selon la formule consacrée. Ils prennent alors, du moins ils pourraient prendre, un risque (et le photographe avec eux) qui ne serait plus de l’ordre de la plaisanterie potache. Ce risque, c’est ce que j’appellerais « sortir du cadre », comme on peut sortir de la route, et tomber par terre ou hors champ, s’écraser ou s’affaler, figure qui serait alors tout simplement comique ou même ridicule, un peu comme dans la BD. Or ce risque, Halsman et ses sujets ne le prennent pas ou, en tout cas, ne le montrent pas dans les clichés publiés. C’est cette intrigante dialectique — sauter pour sortir du cadre sans sortir du cadre — que je veux explorer un peu plus.

6 On peut utilement situer les jumping portraits dans toute une série de genres iconographiques, entre autres : Ascension du Christ ; cirque ; jumping jacks (pantins) ; analyses du mouvement (Muybridge, Marey) ; super heroes (Spiderman, en particulier) ; peut-être et surtout reportage sportif, notamment dans les trois grands sports collectifs américains (basketball, football, baseball) qui valorisent pareillement la posture d’extension verticale du catcher qui se détend au maximum pour attraper la balle in extremis (voir au basket, le geste si spectaculaire de l’attaquant qui s’envole en alley-oop vers le panier). Ces genres sont tous, par excellence, des genres de l’élévation, et leur objet est en général la figure du corps dans son entièreté et sa plasticité anatomiques (l’agilité de Spiderman est celle de ses membres d’araignée) plutôt que le visage en tant que tel ou l’expressivité qui en émane.

7 Dans un important commentaire, tiré de son livre Jump Book (1959), Ph. Halsman choisit de mettre l’accent sur la capacité de révélation du self — l’expressivité spirituelle — du portrait sautant : In a jump, the subject, in a sudden burst of energy, overcomes gravity. He cannot simultaneously control his expressions, his facial and limb muscles. The mask falls. The real self becomes visible.1

8 Ce propos nous renvoie très explicitement à la grande tradition — notamment reynoldsienne — du portrait comme expression de la spiritualité (ou, mieux encore, de l’idéalité) et, à travers le portrait, du visage comme miroir ou fenêtre sur l’âme. La photographie américaine, où le portrait a de tout temps été le genre majeur aussi bien quantitativement que qualitativement (et cette remarque peut être étendue au cinéma), a plus que toute autre « école » fait sienne cette ambition du portrait comme

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révélateur de la vérité intime des personnes. Dans bien des cas, de Hawthorne et Frederick Douglass à Cindy Sherman et Nan Goldin, la révélation photographique a été associée à des propos satiriques ou militants de dénonciation, démasquement, exposition des vices et turpitudes cachés, destruction des « fausses apparences » dictées par les normes et les conventions ; et Halsman, dans le propos cité, y fait explicitement allusion (« the mask falls »). Mais le démasquement fonctionne aussi, et bien plus communément, de manière positive, optimiste ou perfectionniste : le portrait réussi est celui qui, écartant un voile de laideur ou de médiocrité qui n’est en réalité que le reflet du regard social, ou de l’indifférence, élève son sujet dans la lumière ; c’est le sens précis de la notion de photogénie au XXe siècle. Dans la photographie du XIXe siècle, ce sont les portraits de métiers et les portraits d’Etat qui illustrent le plus évidemment cette élévation, même si l’art des photographes — ou la capillarité intericonique propre à la démocratie visuelle — consiste en fait à proposer ce type d’« agrandissement » à tout un chacun. (Le burlesque, dans ce champ-là, n’est jamais loin.) Au XXe siècle, ce sont bien sûr les portraits de stars — ou les mythologiques gros plans du cinéma — qui forment le modèle de l’élévation. Une version exacerbée de cette élévation est l’extase, dont la saisie réussie ferait du portrait photographique une authentique transfiguration.

9 Si l’on revient maintenant à Ph. Halsman, il est utile de comparer à la lumière des remarques qui précèdent les portraits sautants de célébrités à d’autres portraits, plus sérieux ou ordinaires, des mêmes personnalités, et en particulier aux autres portraits réalisés par Halsman lui-même. Ces comparaisons peuvent être faites par exemple pour David Sarnoff, les Windsor, ou encore Grace Kelly. Il est incontestable que dans la plupart des cas les portraits sautants décapent ou « déposent » des images plus conventionnelles. Peut-on dire pour autant que les sauteurs sortent du cadre, « tombent le masque », et révèlent leur véritable self ? Ce n’est pas évident : car ces portraits sautants, tout autant que les portraits non sautants, sont des images d’apparat, des images médiatiques et publiques, qui complètent et confortent l’identité visuelle officielle des personnalités plutôt qu’elles ne la démentent ou la démarquent.

10 Ce que les portraits sautants « déposent » est le corps des sauteurs, plutôt que leur visage. (Et encore, un certain nombre de ces portraits doivent leur attrait humoristique au fait que les postures des corps en élévation sont elles-mêmes très dignes, sobres, lévitantes plutôt que sautantes.) La plupart des visages des sauteurs sont imprégnés d’une grande impassibilité ou — à l’image de celui de François Mauriac — d’une heureuse sérénité, qui peut faire sourire mais rarement susciter l’expérience d’une découverte du deep self. Certains visages proposent des expressions décalées, comiques, voire grotesques ; mais ces cas sont en réalité très rares en dehors de la catégorie des comiques professionnels (Dean Martin et Jerry Lewis [Fig. 4], Ray Bolger, Bob Hope, Fernandel et Dali surtout), dont les visages sautants apparaissent alors comme des versions superlatives de leurs visages accoutumés. Le cas de Richard Nixon est assez édifiant, si j’ose dire. Photographié sautant — mais parfaitement digne — par Halsman en 1959 lorsqu’il était Vice-président, et manifestement satisfait du résultat et de sa diffusion, Nixon, raconta le photographe, le sollicita en 1969 pour son portrait de président ; de sorte que ce portrait officiel incorpore jusqu’à un certain point, intericoniquement, l’image sautante qui l’a précédé. A tout le moins peut-on dire, dans le cas de Richard Nixon, que les deux images sont congruentes : elles composent conjointement l’image publique d’un Président qui dut une part de sa popularité à son

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style « proche des gens », à sa capacité supposée à « sortir du cadre » (et du code beaucoup plus aristocratique associé à la famille Kennedy).

11 J’aurais donc tendance à conclure que les portraits sautants de Halsman ne sont ni des portraits « conventionnels » (expression de toute façon malvenue dans la sphère du portrait d’art américain, qui est rarement « conventionnel » si l’on y regarde d’un peu près) ni des portraits « déconditionnés ». Ce sont des images publiques, des portraits d’apparat, pleinement compatibles avec l’esthétique de l’élévation photogénique du sujet et avec la logique sociale et commerciale du grand photographe d’agence. Ce qui ne les empêche pas d’apparaître, au regard de cette esthétique et de cette logique, comme de formidables réussites.

12 Ces photographies sont ici reproduites avec l’aimable autorisation du Musée du Jeu de Paume.

Fig. 1

Marilyn Monroe 1959 Philippe Halsman Musée de l'Elysée © 2015 Philippe Halsman Archive / Magnum Photos

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Fig. 2

Dalí Atomicus 1948 Philippe Halsman Musée de l'Elysée © 2015 Philippe Halsman Archive / Magnum Photos. Droits exclusifs pour les images de Salvador Dalí: Fundació Gala-Salvador Dalí, Figueres, 2015

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Fig. 3

Le Duc et la duchesse de Windsor 1956 Philippe Halsman Archives Philippe Halsman © 2015 Philippe Halsman Archive / Magnum Photos

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Fig. 4

Dean Martin et Jerry Lewis 1951 Philippe Halsman Archives Philippe Halsman © 2015 Philippe Halsman Archive / Magnum Photos

NOTES

1. Philippe Halsman, Jump Book, Simon and Schuster (New York, 1959); Harry N. Abrams (New York, 1986) Magnum: http://www.magnumphotos.com/C.aspx?VP3=SearchResult&ALID=2TYRYD1KJ7Z2 Halsman: http://philippehalsman.com/?image=jumps

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AUTEUR

FRANÇOIS BRUNET Université Paris-Diderot

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"Paul Strand: Photography and Film for the 20th Century" Victoria and Albert Museum (Londres), 19 mars-3 juillet 2016

Didier Aubert

1 La rétrospective Paul Strand organisée par le Philadelphia Museum of Art en octobre 2014, avant de passer par la Suisse (Fotomuseum Winterthur) et Madrid (Fondation Mapfre), vient de se conclure à Londres, au Victoria and Albert Museum. On regrettera de ne pas l’avoir vue en France, où l’on sait que le photographe, chassé par le maccarthysme, termina sa carrière. Pour l’institution londonienne, le choix d’accueillir cette exposition se justifiait dans une large mesure par l’existence dans ses collections d’une série d’images tirées du travail de Strand aux Nouvelles-Hébrides, prises en 1954 et publiées en 1962 sous le titre Tir a’Mhurain. L’institution ayant acquis récemment une sélection de ces tirages, on comprend aisément sa volonté de mettre en valeur le seul projet mené par Strand en Grande-Bretagne, et qui n’est pas, loin s’en faut, le mieux connu. L’un des intérêts évidents de cette belle rétrospective était en effet de déplacer quelque peu les repères conventionnels généralement associés à la carrière de Strand, en faisant la part belle à son travail dans les années 50-60, loin des Amériques.

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FIG. 1.

Première salle de l’exposition : « A Modernist Vision » © Victoria and Albert Museum, London

2 Les deux premières salles, relativement modestes (la première intitulée « A Modern Vision » et la seconde consacrée à la projection d’un extrait de Manhatta), accueillaient le visiteur en terrain connu, avec des images aussi classiques que Wall Street (1915) ou Blind Beggar (1916) : d’un côté, l’héritier de Stieglitz (The City of Ambition, 1910), magnifiant la modernité de New York sur des tirages de platine ou dans les pages de Camera Work, de l’autre des portraits annonçant les clichés dérobés par Walker Evans dans le métro new yorkais (Subway Portraits, 1941). Quelques salles plus loin, l’indispensable section sur le Strand « mexicain » des années 1932-34 n’offrait rien de révolutionnaire par rapport à l’exposition présentée à la Fondation Henri-Cartier Bresson, il y a cinq ans. Entre ces deux étapes, en revanche, une petite salle intitulée « Intimate Portraits » jouait un rôle de pivot esthétique et biographique, proposant une clef à la fois inattendue et osée à l’œuvre de Strand : des clichés modernistes explorant les mécanismes d’une caméra Akeley (celle du photographe se trouvait exposée dans la même salle) y côtoyaient trois portraits d’inspiration « stieglizienne » de sa première épouse, Rebecca Salsbury. Commentant ceux-ci, l’exposition indiquait laconiquement que cette série fut la dernière que Strand consacra à ses relations intimes. Constatation clinique, et pourtant éclairante : sur le mur d’en face, le visage du mentor servait à évoquer l’éloignement personnel et professionnel des deux hommes. C’est un Strand moderniste, plus fasciné par les machines que par les hommes, qui se dessinait en creux avant de se lancer dans les salles les plus vastes et les plus copieuses, menant le visiteur du Canada à Orgeval en passant par le Mexique et l’Afrique. L’intime évacué, sans doute à juste titre, le travail du photographe redessinait la carte du monde atlantique du milieu du XXe siècle : un panorama aussi passionnant que problématique.

3 Deux-tiers de l’exposition, environ, mettaient donc l’accent sur les voyages et les images ayant donné naissance à Time in New England (1950), La France de profil (1952), Tir’a’Mhurain (1954, publié en 1968), Un Paese (1955), Ghana : An African Portrait (1963-1964, publié en 1976), et Living Egypt (1969). Dans le dossier de presse (http://

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www.vam.ac.uk/__data/assets/pdf_file/0009/260289/Paul-Strand-Press-Release- FINAL.pdf), Martin Barnes, commissaire de l’exposition pour le V&A Museum, soulignait ce déplacement chronologique et géographique délibéré: the exhibition will not only explore the life and career of Strand, but also challenge the popular perception of Strand as primarily a photographer of American places and people of the early 20th century.

4 Le contexte géopolitique des années 50-60 formait dès lors un arrière-plan explicite et pourtant mal assumé par l’exposition1. Certes, sur certaines notices explicatives, et notamment en vis-à-vis des photographies mexicaines ou de la projection d’un extrait de Native Land, les sympathies marxistes de Strand étaient évoquées en quelques mots. Rien, pourtant, ne rappelait les démêlés bien connus de la Photo League et de son président d’alors, Paul Strand, avec l’Attorney General Tom C. Clark. Aucune citation du Photo Notes de janvier 1948, où il se déclarait atterré de voir le nom du groupe associé à celui du Parti communiste et du Ku Klux Klan dans la catégorie des organisations « totalitaires, fascistes, communistes ou subversives » (http://newdeal.feri.org/pn/ pn148.htm). Aucune mention non plus, si l’on voulait s’en tenir à « l’œuvre » plus qu’au contexte, des lettres de Sacco et Vanzetti sélectionnées par le photographe et Beaumont Newhall pour fabriquer le tissu narratif et visuel de Time in New England : en examinant ces tirages magnifiques, on note pourtant qu’aussi bien le Town Hall, New Hampshire (1946) que l’église de Church, Vermont (1944) sont légèrement bancals. C’était l’Amérique qui tremblait alors sur ses bases, ce que l’exposition évacuait un peu rapidement en décrivant un photographe « de plus en plus inquiet » (« increasingly concerned ») devant la montée du maccarthysme, et choisissant de quitter les États-Unis en 1950.

FIG. 2.

Avant dernière salle de l’exposition (dans la section « Portraits of Place ») : photographies du Ghana et sélection d’ouvrages publiés par Strand entre les années 50 et les années 70 © Victoria and Albert Museum, London

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* **

5 Les pérégrinations de l’exilé ne donnaient guère plus de place aux enjeux de la Guerre Froide, au risque de faire passer ses voyages en Ecosse ou au Ghana comme le prétexte à la publication de très beaux coffee-table books. L’arrière-plan politique n’était pas entièrement passé sous silence, mais il n’était mentionné – rapidement – que sous l’angle des échecs apparemment prévisibles rencontrés par les expériences socialistes dans les pays concernés. En Roumanie, Strand aurait été découragé par les tentatives du pouvoir communiste de lui imposer ses sujets. Au Ghana, il arrive au moment où un référendum est organisé pour légitimer le régime dictatorial de Kwame Nkumah : on découvrait pourtant, à travers la sélection des images présentées, l’intérêt marqué de Strand pour le processus politique. Ici un portrait du président ghanéen, là des photos de rassemblements politiques ou des clichés redoublant la dimension visuelle de la culture politique ghanéenne (affiches, emblèmes, pancartes…). Le format des images, plus petit que pour la plupart des autres séries, suggérait même la tentation du reportage. Cette piste n’était pas vraiment explorée, et l’on sait que Strand ne s’imaginait guère journaliste. En revanche, une carte annotée de la côte ghanéenne et un carnet de croquis ouvraient brièvement une fenêtre passionnante sur le travail de Strand, avec des dessins reprenant presque trait pour trait les images photographiques réalisées.

6 La sélection des clichés pris en Ecosse en 1954 constituait à la fois un apport assez remarquable de cette rétrospective et un exemple de plus du voile trop pudique jeté sur des enjeux politiques pourtant déterminants. L’accrochage prenait le parti d’associer plutôt les photographies à des enregistrements sonores (un court entretien avec l’une des personnes photographiées par Strand, et la voix d’une autre, interprétant des chansons populaires d’Uist du Sud). Pourtant, le travail de recherche sur le sujet existe, et il est probant. Dans un article intitulé « Paul Strand and the Atlanticist Cold War », par exemple, Fraser McDonald détaille l’ensemble des facteurs qui font de ces vues « folkloristes », inspirées d’une émission de la BBC et du travail d’Alan Lomax sur les chants populaires de la région, un travail profondément politique.

7 Rappelons quelques éléments parmi les plus saillants : d’abord et avant tout, McDonald rappelle l’intérêt marqué des intellectuels de gauche de l’après-guerre, des deux côtés de l’Atlantique, pour le folklore, avec pour l’Ecosse la création du People’s Festival (1951-1954) : « Strand’s arrival in Scotland in 1954 […] coincided with a Folk Revival that was, in no small part, a political as well as a cultural movement, and one nurtured within the orbit of the Communist Party. » (McDonald, 367) En outre, le journaliste et écrivain Basil Davidson, co-auteur de Tir’a’Mhurain, était une figure marquée à gauche, soupçonnée de sympathies communistes à l’issue de la guerre, et un temps interdit d’entrée aux États- Unis autant que dans les colonies britanniques en Afrique (McDonald, 362-3). Enfin, les efforts de la School of Scottish Studies fondée dans les années 50 doivent se comprendre aussi dans le contexte pressant de l’installation, aux Nouvelles-Hébrides, d’un site de lancement de missiles nucléaires destinés à la protection de la Grande-Bretagne et de l’Europe de l’Ouest dans le cadre de l’OTAN. Au moment de la visite de Strand, en 1954, le projet était déjà en cours de discussion : il est mentionné dans le texte de Davidson (« that grim and dubious project ») et dans les échanges épistolaires entre les deux auteurs cités par McDonald (McDonald, 370).

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8 On se permet ici de rappeler l’article de McDonald à titre d’exemple, non pour circonscrire le travail de Strand à ses réseaux et à ses résonnances idéologiques, mais seulement pour s’étonner que le thème ait été si peu traité dans une telle rétrospective. C’est bien dans le contexte d’une politique atlantiste qu’il juge agressive que Strand s’attarde sur les paysages des Nouvelles-Hébrides et les visages creusés de ses habitants – gens du bout du monde soudain rattrapés par les enjeux géostratégiques planétaires. Que restera-t-il bientôt de ce peuple et de cette culture ? Quelle voix dans le concert futur des nations ? Le folklore ici n’a rien de folklorique. De même, l’abstraction du politique auréolant les extraits de film (Redes, 1936, et Native Land, 1942) les plongeait, dans la présentation du V&A, dans un flou idéologique difficile à appréhender pour un spectateur moins averti.

9 Pour citer de nouveau le commissaire Martin Barnes : we have taken a chronological and geographical rather than thematic approach, so that visitors can see the development of Strand’s photography over time. In his photographs, political statements are inferred through subtle nuances, rather than illustrated explicitly2. On retrouve ici des échos de la différence établie par Alan Trachtenberg, à propos de Strand, entre « politics of affiliation » et « politics of aesthetics » (Trachtenberg, 4)3 : d’un côté, l’impasse d’une approche qui tenterait d’expliquer l’œuvre par l’engagement militant ; de l’autre, une posture et un discours politique propres à l’esthétique moderniste, et seul objet légitime de la réflexion. Tout en affirmant qu’il tenait à ce que les opinions politiques de Strand soient mises en évidence par l’exposition originale (celle de Philadelphie), le commissaire américain Peter Barberie insistait que son art ne l’était pas : Strand was very politically engaged from the 1930s onward. It was clear to him that his political views were distinct from his art. That goes back to what I said earlier: he realized he wasn’t really cut out to be a political artist in the way that John Heartfield was or someone like that. He didn’t want his photographs to be seen as illustrations of his political ideas. A lot of people have a hard time with that, even in reviews of this exhibition […] Strand may or may not have been a clear political thinker. When he’s making his art, he’s making it as a reader of literature and poetry4. L’argument est parfaitement recevable, mais l’exposition telle qu’elle était reprise au V&A semblait plutôt guidée par les « subtiles nuances » évoquées par Martin Barnes que par une mise en perspective de l’articulation problématique entre modernisme et politique. En outre, comme le démontre l’analyse proposée par Fraser McDonald, il aurait été possible de rendre mieux compte des enjeux historiques sans pour autant ramener chaque image au déterminisme réducteur d’un engagement idéologique ou partisan.

10 À Londres, ce travail de contextualisation restait trop discret, alors même que l’équilibre thématique et chronologique de l’exposition, par son originalité, y invitait sans cesse. En conséquence, on a retrouvé dans la presse, des deux côtés de l’Atlantique, les considérations attendues et un peu vaines sur l’« humanisme » du travail de Strand. Un article du New York Times, publié à l’occasion de l’exposition de Philadelphie, résume parfaitement ce paradoxe, en même temps qu’il illustre les hésitations des commentateurs, relevées plus haut par Barberie : The catalog […] reveal(s) that Strand wanted to do a book somewhere in the Soviet Union, and that he advocated a realism that "takes sides.'' In the show, however, his idea of the modern photograph is decidedly nonpartisan. For him, it could be

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abstract or representational, still or moving, staged or spontaneous, urban or provincial, as long as it was human. (Rosenberg, C29) Une fois encore, il n’est pas question de nier à Strand ce regard « humaniste », ou de résumer son travail à une œuvre de propagande, ce qui serait à l’évidence absurde. Le risque, dans le cas présent, est tout de même de banaliser le parcours d’un artiste exilé volontaire, tournant le dos aux États-Unis et arpentant systématiquement les quatre coins du monde atlantique postcolonial, au moment-même où cet espace se teinte d’un atlantisme controversé. On espère aussi que ce parti-pris – qui affaiblissait tout de même, à certains égards, un événement remarquable par l’ampleur de la sélection présentée et par une réévaluation bienvenue du Strand « post-Mexique » – ne préfigure pas complètement les choix qui seront effectués dans les années qui viennent par le Victoria & Albert Museum, par exemple lorsqu’il s’agira de présenter à l’avenir les collections de la Royal Photographic Society. On sait que le transfert de ces images en provenance du National Media Museum de Bradford est depuis plusieurs mois l’objet de controverses animées et qui mettent en jeu la manière dont le « patrimoine » photographique doit être approché, étudié, et présenté au public (https:// www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2016/feb/02/bradford-photography-collection-move- vanda-reviled-vandalism) : non seulement comme un art et une technique, aussi remarquable soit l’artiste, mais aussi comme vecteur et acteur d’une économie visuelle complexe, marquée par de multiples phénomènes de circulation, et soumise à chaque étape aux enjeux matériels et politiques de son temps.

11 En outre, alors que l’exposition fermait ses portes la veille du « Brexit » et de la réémergence possible de nouvelles revendications nationalistes écossaises ou nord- irlandaises, on ne put s’empêcher de s’interroger, avec une certaine mauvaise foi sans doute, sur la vision encore teintée d’impérialisme du V&A dans sa fonction de « musée universel » (O’Neill, 197). Telle qu’elle était présentée ici, la mise en valeur bienvenue du projet de Strand aux Nouvelles-Hébrides (ou au Ghana) ressemblait encore un peu à une tentation d’estomper le poids de la politique et de l’histoire, dans une exposition où l’esthétique et la mise en valeur d’une « collection »5 replaçaient la matérialité de la pratique photographique et de la diffusion des images. Cette collection devient ici un simple moment de l’histoire de l’art et, par ricochet, du musée lui-même (Adams, 65).

BIBLIOGRAPHIE

ADAMS, Ruth, « The V&A: Empire to Multiculturalism ? », Museum and Society Vol. 8, No 2 (2010), 65.

MACDONALD, Fraser, “Paul Strand and the Atlanticist Cold War”, History of Photography Vol. 28, No. 4 (2004), 356-373.

O’NEILL, Mark, “Enlightenment Museums: Universal or Merely Global?”, Museums and Society, Vol. 2, No. 3 (Nov. 2004), 190-202.

ROSENBERG, Karen, “Expatriate Humanist, Lens Up His Sleeve”, The New York Times, 24 octobre 2014, C29.

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TRACHTENBERG, Alan, “Introduction”, in Stange, Maren (ed.), Paul Strand, New York : Aperture, 1990.

NOTES

1. Le catalogue de l’exposition, pourtant, revient largement sur cette thématique point.Voir Peter Barberie et Amanda Bock (ed.), Paul Strand : Master of Modern Photography, New Haven, Yale University Press, 2014.N’ayant pas vu l’accrochage du Philadelphia Museum of Art, on ne pourra se prononcer avec précision sur une possible dilution de ces problématiques lors de la traversée de l’Atlantique, même si on la soupçonne à la lecture de certains comptes rendus concernant l’exposition américaine. 2. “Interview with Martin Barnes”, Aesthetica, en ligne depuis le 16 mars 2016,http:// www.aestheticamagazine.com/452900-2/(page consultée le 8 juillet 2016). 3. On se situera plutôt du côté de Michael Denning pour s’interroger sur le risque du formalisme, que fait courir cette distinction (voir The Cultural Front : The Laboring of American Culture in the Twentieth Century, New York, Verso, 1998, 473). 4. “Q&A: Peter Barberie on Paul Strand”, the aperture blog, en ligne depuis le 27 février 2015,http://aperture.org/blog/peter-barberie-paul-strand/(page consultée le 14 juillet 2016). 5. Depuis un accord avec la fondation Aperture datant de 2010, le Musée de Philadelphie abrite l’archive Paul Strand, tandis que le V&A Museum possède le plus grand fonds en Europe.

AUTEUR

DIDIER AUBERT Université Paris 3 – Sorbonne Nouvelle

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Reconnaissances

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Rencontre avec Richard Powers et Bruno Latour

Nathalie Cochoy et Jean-Yves Pellegrin

1 Ces entretiens autour de l’œuvre de Richard Powers ont eu lieu dans le cadre du festival La Novela 2013, à Toulouse, et des activités de Poéthiques (Laboratoire Cultures Anglo- Saxonnes, Université Toulouse Jean-Jaurès).

Entretien avec Richard Powers :

Ce média ne peut être affiché ici. Veuillez vous reporter à l'édition en ligne http:// 2 journals.openedition.org/transatlantica/7958

Entretien avec Bruno Latour :

Ce média ne peut être affiché ici. Veuillez vous reporter à l'édition en ligne http:// 3 journals.openedition.org/transatlantica/7958

INDEX

Thèmes : Reconnaissances

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