Aesopic Voices Aesopic Voices Re-framing Truth through Concealed Ways of Presentation in the 20th and 21st Centuries Edited by Gert Reifarth & Philip Morrissey Aesopic Voices: Re-framing Truth through Concealed Ways of Presentation in the 20th and 21st Centuries, Edited by Gert Reifarth and Philip Morrisey This book first published 2011 Cambridge Scholars Publishing 12 Back Chapman Street, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE6 2XX, UK British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Copyright © 2011 by Gert Reifarth and Philip Morrisey and contributors All rights for this book reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner. ISBN (10): 1-4438-3443-2, ISBN (13): 978-1-4438-3443-8 We dedicate this book to the memory of Prof. Greg Dening (1931–2008), who believed that history is not something we learn but something that we perform, and who taught history by asking his students first to describe their present so that they could better hear the silences of the past. Contents List of Images and Texts x Acknowledgements xi INTRODUCTION 1 Gert Reifarth and Philip Morrissey Aesopic Voices: A Foreword 1 PART I AESOP IN TIME 2 Gert Reifarth Old Aesop and ‘Aesopics’: Facts and Fiction, Film and Fables 14 3 Justin Clemens The Slave, the Fable: A Political Hermeneutics of the Aesopic 45 PART II AESOP IN LITEraTURE 4 Erwin Rotermund ‘Concealed Writing’ (Verdeckte Schreibweise) in the ‘Third Reich’: Forms and Problems of Reception 76 5 Evgenia A. Kravchenkova ‘Once GPU Came to Aesop…’: Political Fables in Russian Literature of the Twentieth and Twenty-First Centuries 101 6 Gert Reifarth Aesop vs Censor in the GDR: On the Subversive Power of Political Fairy Tales 128 vii viii Contents 7 Odile Cazenave Dis-Enchanted, Dis-Entangled Tales: Francophone African Literature Today. The Examples of Boubacar Boris Diop and Véronique Tadjo 157 8 Laura Petersen ‘We are Story Animals’: Aesopics in Holocaust Literature by Art Spiegelman and Yann Martel 174 PART III AESOP IN Film AND THEATRE 9 Catherine Collins and Patricia Varas Thrilling the Audience, (Dis)tracting the Censors: Suspense as Diversion in Adolfo Aristarain’s Film Tiempo de revancha 210 10 Xan Colman and Tamara Searle Once Upon a Time, Tonight: Aesopic Dramaturgy in Community Development and Intercultural Art in Thailand 235 11 George Katsadoros The Disfiguration of Aesop and Karaghiozes: Embodiment of Indirect Expostulation and Resistance in Greek Shadow Theatre 257 PART IV AESOP IN SCIENCE AND REligiON 12 Stephan Packard Aesopic Transformation in Scientific Discourse: Observations on Galileo and a Perspective on Dawkins 292 13 Julia Vassilieva Back to Orthodoxy? Religious Discourse in Post-communist Russia as an Empty Signifier 320 Contents ix PART V AESOP IN AUSTralia AND THE SOUTH PACifiC 14 Greg Dening Wayfinding: Dances on the Beaches of the Mind 338 15 Philip Morrissey ‘Old Cobraboor’: Colonial Violence and Aboriginal Modesty 358 16 Marcus Waters Contemporary Urban Indigenous ‘Dreamings’: Connection, Ceremony and Practice 369 PART VI AESOP RE-INVENTED IN THE TWENTY-FirST CENTURY 17 Kevin Murray Changing the World is Child’s Play: The Challenge of Aspirationalism in the South 406 18 Catherine Fargher The Man with no Ear: Bioethical Issues as a Base for Fables 415 Contributors 443 Index 451 List of Images and Texts Cover Front: Former prison in Berlin-Hohenschönhausen, photo © Christian Herrnbeck 2010, and Diego Velázquez: Æsopus (1638), reproduced courtesy of Museo del Prado, Madrid. Back: Former prison in Berlin-Hohenschönhausen, photo © Christian Herrnbeck 2010. Images used with permission. Chapter 2 2.1 Anonymus: Esopus woodcut (printed, for example, in Heinrich Steinhöwel’s German edition of Aesop’s fables, 1476/77, and in a 1489 Spanish edition); 2.2 Diego Velázquez: Æsopus (1638), reproduced courtesy of Museo del Prado, Madrid (original colour). Chapter 10 All photos © Xan Colman and Tamara Searle 2007. Chapter 11 All images from the book Greek Shadow Theatre: From Light and History, ed. Alexandra Charitatou (Athens: The Hellenic Literary and Historical Archive, 2004), used with permission. Images 11.1 and 11.2 first appeared in ‘Εικονογραφημένο ημερολόγιο Pirelli’ (Illustrated Pirelli Calendar), 1970. Image 11.3 is from The Hellenic Literary and Historical Archive Collection, image 11.4 from the K. Makres Collection, image 11.5 from the M. Hatzakes Collection. All originals are colour images. Appendix text 1 used with permission of the University Press of Kentucky. Permission to use Appendix text 2 has been requested from Gnosis Publishers, Athens. Chapter 14 14.1. A Most Remarkable Voyage, created by Emily Brissenden from a concept of Greg Dening (original colour); 14.2. Cook’s Copy of Tupaia’s Chart. British Library ADD MS 21593c; 14.3 Australian Aborigines Paddling Bark Canoes. By ‘Artist of the Chief Mourner’ (now identified as Tupaia). British Library ADD MS 15508, f.10; 14.4 Drawing by Georg Heinrich von Langsdorff from hisTravels and Voyages in Various Parts of the World, vol. 1, London: Colburn, 1813, plate VI, p.117. Images 14.1, 14.2 and 14.3 used with permission of the copyright holders. Chapter 16 Computer paintings by Maiala Waters (16.1 and 16.2) and Marcus Waters (16.3). © The artists. Chapter 18 Images used with permission of the copyright holders (18.1 Jonathon Oxlade, 18.2 Sean Williams, 18.3 Sydney Opera House from the Kids in the House program 2007). All originals are colour images. ‘The Woman Who Knitted Herself a Child’ © Catherine Fargher 2004. x Acknowledgements The editors wish to thank all contributors, the publisher, the Museo del Prado (Madrid) for permission to reproduce the image of Velázquez’ painting, the other copyright holders for their permission to use their images and texts, our text editor Bruce Sims, our book designer Adrian Saunders, photographer Christian Herrnbeck for the cover images, Donna Denning for help with her late husband’s chapter, Laura Petersen and John Morrissey for help with individual chapters, and last but not least Johanna Simmons for her kind assistance throughout the whole duration of our Aesopic project, to Meg Tudor for her help in its first stages and to Kate Rendell for assistance in its last stage. xi 1 Gert Reifarth and Philip Morrissey Aesopic Voices: A Foreword 1. The Realm of the Aesopic How does one respond, as a humane and critical thinker, when political, social or religious circumstances are hostile to truth and open discussion? Responses differ remarkably: thinkers can succumb to the pressures of a régime and even openly serve its purposes, they can try and ignore the situation and retreat into inner or actual exile, or they can resist the régime and try to incite change. Such resistance can in itself assume various forms, and it is one of these forms that our book Aesopic Voices. Re-framing Truth through Concealed Ways of Presentation in the Twentieth and Twenty-First Centuries is devoted to, namely the seeking of artistic and intellectual refuge in the clandestine realm of the Aesopic. Aesop is said to have written fables in the sixth century BC to veil his opinions about the ruling authorities. While the name ‘Aesopic fable’ later, especially in the Victorian era, tended to describe morally educating pieces often associated with children’s literature, the genre’s political potential also continued to flicker (for example Gotthold Ephraim Lessing’s fables in 1 2 Gert Reifarth and Philip Morrissey the times of the German Enlightenment and Mikhail Saltykov-Shchedrin’s fables in Tsarist Russia). In contemporary times, the political potential of the Aesopic finds continued use and development, and the term ‘Aesopic’ has evolved to also mean the description of a critical intellectual attitude and its artistic and academic expression. The modern Aesopic realm serves both as a safeguard and a battlefield: from a relatively safe and protective aesthetic cave, the Aesopic mind combats conditions that are hostile to artistic and academic practice and often to humane living in general. The contributions to our book devote themselves to a broad range of Aesopic voices, presenting examples from both a narrow and a wide understanding of Aesopic creation. In a narrow sense, the Aesopic method involves the creation of fables and fairy tales in camouflaged modes, often employing myths and elements of folklore (for example in novels, short stories and poems, or films, paintings and sculptures). Artists can relate to such elements in a number of ways. They can create new fairy tales and fables, or recreate old ones; they can reactivate old folktales or traditional stories and relate them to their present situation; elements of old tales can be merged with modern counterparts in narrative and visual art forms; and traditional symbols or figures can feature in otherwise contemporary writing, storytelling, film, painting and other artistic practices. A wider understanding of the term ‘Aesopic’ is, in contrast, not restricted to fables, fairy tales and myths but instead refers in general to the great arsenal of artistic camouflage and allegory. A further extension of the term would relate it to methods of camouflage in works that are outside of artistic creation, namely in academic and scientific writing; academics and scientists also have at their disposal different techniques of camouflage that could either refer back to established methods or rely on modified or new discursive codes. 2. Conditions for Aesopic Creation At the end of the 1960s, both Michel Foucault and Roland Barthes provided strong analytical criticism of the well-established and overbearing concept of the ‘author’, which both writers urge literary studies to transcend.