RECIPROCITIES: Essays in Honour of Professor Tadeusz Rachwał NR 3234 RECIPROCITIES: Essays in Honour of Professor Tadeusz Rachwał

Edited by Agnieszka Pantuchowicz Sławomir Masłoń

Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Śląskiego ● Katowice 2014 Redaktor serii: Historia Literatur Obcych: Magdalena Wandzioch

Recenzent: Zofia Kolbuszewska Photo by Bartosz Szymañski

…a grateful mind By owing owes not, but still pays, at once Indebted and discharg’d;… John Milton, Paradise Lost, Book IV, ll. 55–7

Contents

inTRoduction 9

Anna­‑Zajdler­‑Janiszewska Artysta w przestrzeniach przyrodoznawstwa. O wybranych praktykach Marka Diona 15

Piotr Fast O tytule eseju Watermark Josifa Brodskiego 28

Anna Węgrzyniak Więzy i więzi. Ości w Ościach Ignacego Karpowicza 38

Anna Czarnowus “Ich mot wende in mi way”: The Construction of Masculinity through Travelling in Le Pèlérinage de Charlemagne and the Stanzaic Guy of Warwick 60

Andrzej Wicher The Place of William Shakespeare’s (Lost) Cardenio in the Context of the Late Romances 74

Przemysław Uściński Borderlines/Ornaments in Eighteenth Century Classical Discourse 87

Jeremy Tambling “Living On”: On Smart, Cowper, and Blake 106 8 Contents

Jacek Mydla Joanna Baillie’s Theatre of Sympathy and Imagination 129

Małgorzata Nitka Wordsworth, the Railway and “the riot of the town” 151

Katarzyna Więckowska On Uselessness 166

Mary Conde Reading “Mrs Bathurst” 177

Jacek Wiśniewski Travelling in Search of Spring: Edward Thomas’s In Pursuit of Spring as Travel Literature 184

David Malcolm Traffic with the Enemy: The Traitor in Elizabeth Bowen’s The Heat of the Day, Rebecca West’s The Meaning of Treason, and Francis Stuart’s Black List, Section H. 204

Tymon Adamczewski The Spectral Difference: On Hauntology in Sarah Waters’ The Little Stranger 216

Edyta Lorek­‑Jezińska On Haunting as Metaphysical Stalking: The Middle Story and a Piece of Charred Ectoplasm 228

Sławomir Konkol “Skedaddle, Ellie”: Feminine Mobility, Tourism and Capital in Graham Swift’s Wish You Were Here 241

Krzysztof Knauer Spoilt for Choice? Self­‑fashioning and Institutionalised Identities versus “Being Oneself” in Contemporary London Literature 266

Sławomir Masłoń Audio­‑graphy: Meaning and Irrationality in Music 291 inTRoduction

Professor Tadeusz Rachwał teaches at Szkoła Wyższa Psychologii Społecznej (the University of Social Sciences and Humanities) in War‑ saw. He is in perpetual motion across northern Poland, using any means at hand (he has neither a car nor a driving license). It has not always been that way. TR (he will excuse this) was born on the 12th of April, 1954 in Gliwice, southern Poland, to an itinerant family of mixed cultural roots. There, in the Upper Silesian region where Polish, German, and Bohemian cultu‑ ral influences intermingle, he grew up and paid his dues, on the street and at school. What his intentions were when, in 1973, he enrolled in the Academy of Economics in Katowice is in retrospect difficult to say – but after a semester he changed his mind and the following year became a student at the Institute of English Philology at the University of Sile‑ sia, Katowice. TR’s interest in research goes back to his fourth year as a student, when for the first time he took part ina conference organized by the Maria Curie­‑Skłodowska University in Lublin where he delivered a paper on phonetics and phonology in generative grammar, which may have been quite impressive because he was awarded a prize for it. His scholarly work continued to such good effect that his M.A. thesis, devoted to the topic of idiomatics in transformational‑generative­ model of grammar, was appraised as outstanding, in recognition of which an abridged ver‑ sion of it was published in Neophilologica, an annual linguistic journal published by the University of Silesia. 10 inTRoduction

After receiving his M.A. degree in linguistics, TR taught English for a year at a secondary school in Gliwice – Wittgenstein‑like,­ one can say, though, TR being the mildest of men, there certainly was no ear­‑ or hair­‑pulling involved. After testing his mettle in basic lan‑ guage teaching, in September 1980 he became employed as an assistant professor in the Institute of English Philology at the University of Silesia (a kind of misnomer in this case because the Modern Langua‑ ges Department is located in Sosnowiec, which lies across the Brynica River and therefore technically not in Silesia but Zagłębie). At first his interest in theoretical linguistics continued, but gradually his research into the problems of semiotics led him to expand into literary semio‑ tics and then into literary theory and philosophy, especially Jacques Derrida’s deconstruction, which was scarcely known in Poland at the time. One of the results (or causes – one can never be sure and this is not necessarily a Derridean insight) of his interest in deconstruction was the beginning of a long friendship and scholarly collaboration between TR and Tadeusz Sławek, his older colleague at the English Institute. Soon they became a well­‑known academic duo, publishing a series of articles and finally three book­‑length studies (one with a third collabo‑ rator) devoted to English literature and culture of the 17th and 18th cen‑ turies. At the beginning of the 1980s Tadeusz Rachwał and Tadeusz Sławek were among the four founding members of the “Er(r)go Seminar” rese‑ arch group (the other two being Wojciech Kalaga and the late Emanuel Prower) which made the Silesian “school” a recognized theoretical cen‑ tre of English literary and cultural studies in Poland with an internatio‑ nal reputation. By 1992 the group had published six volumes of studies devoted to the problems of interpretation theory. During this period TR quickly became one of the major Polish authorities on Jacques Derrida’s thought, which found its culmination in the first Polish book devoted to Derrida, which he co­‑wrote with Taduesz Sławek: Maszyna do pisania. O dekonstruktywistycznej teorii Jacquesa Derridy, published in 1992. TR’s continual and intensive engagement with 18th century literary and cultu‑ ral issues found printed form in the Foucauldian analyses of Word and Confinement: Subjectivity and Classical Discourse (1992) and the aforemen‑ tioned books written together with Tadeusz Sławek: Lines, Planes and inTRoduction 11

Solids: Studies in Seventeenth‑Century Writings (1992) and Sfera szarości. Studia nad literaturą i myślą osiemnastego wieku (1993). The crooked ways of Enlightenment literary theory and practice have never ceased to engage TR, which is also confirmed by the large number of articles he has devoted to it thus far, and by yet another book, Appro‑ aches of Infinity: The Sublime and the Social (1993) dealing with the 18th century ramifications (and domestications) of the discourse of the sub‑ lime. It is this monograph in particular which perhaps best explains TR’s constant fascination with the 18th century because, in its refashioning of the category of the sublime, the epoch seems uncannily to prefigure the problematics of the poststructuralist discourse in which sublimity itself becomes one of the most central concepts or even (in Jean­‑François Lyotard’s thought) the foundation of postmodernity as such. A separate but related sphere of TR’s intellectual interests has been the work of Bruno Schulz, a Polish­‑Jewish modernist writer, whose sometimes surprisingly deconstructive intuitions have been very con‑ genial to TR, witness the number of papers he devoted to this aspect of Schulz’s work. Moreover, the issues encountered while struggling with the tightly­‑woven texture of this writer’s ambiguous meanings turned out to lead further into translatological problems (explored in further papers), therefore bringing TR back into the core aspects of deconstru‑ ction for which translation and linguistic multiplicity are very important theoretical issues. Perhaps it can be ascribed to a deconstructive bent in TR’s mind that he kept finding his thought roaming far and wide and finding new chances of international collaboration. Apart from the aforementioned long­‑standing joint research with Tadeusz Sławek, TR co‑originated­ and co‑published­ a number of papers together with his English friends and intellectual interlocutors (also sometime residents in Poland), Claire Hobbs and the late lamented David Jarrett, the latter a co­‑author with Sławek and TR of a fascinating analysis of the discourse of 17th and 18th century gardening Geometry, Winding Paths and the Mansions of Spirit. A restless deconstructive mind, thriving on impurities, alloys, and cross‑fertilisation,­ and fascinated by unseemly mixtures and monstros‑ ities, is at home in Upper Silesia, a region of borderlands and cross­ ‍‑cultural interchange, which has been damaged by heavy industry, an 12 inTRoduction area full of waste matter and unexpected concoctions. TR’s place under the smoke­‑veiled sun and the home of a certain theoretical attitude it seemed to be. But nothing lasts forever and as after twenty odd years the Er(r)go group – the foundation on which the Silesian “school” rested and which finally resulted in the founding of the Institute of English and American Literature and Culture1 (of which TR was vice­‑director between 1999 and 2002) – finally crumbled, TR, a full professor by that time, renewed his peregrinations. TR founded the School of English Language Cultures and Literatu‑ res at the University of Bielsko‑Biała­ in 2002. He also moved from Sile‑ sia to the mountain region of Podbeskidzie where he divided his time between administrative duties, scholarly activities, and walking in the woods. For a couple of years he enjoyed living in a flat directly facing the mountains, but this idyll was regularly interrupted by visits to the holy city of Częstochowa where he also taught. Quite a bit of his educa‑ tional and scholarly oeuvre of that time was devoted to representation of minority discourses in the academia. In 2005 he finally decided to test the charms of the capital of Poland and accepted the offer to become the chair of the School of Anglophone Cultures and Literatures at the Uni‑ versity of Social Sciences and Humanities where he has since been tea‑ ching students at postgraduate levels. The decision was followed by he and his family moving to the medieval city of Toruń where they live in an old apartment full of volu‑ minous furniture wherein books vanish constantly. Intellectual reflec‑ tion on the crooked matters of contingency and precarity, and their the‑ oretical implications for living and reading in the world, are happily interrupted by a little gardening and biking, for which Toruń is well suited. In Toruń TR also engages in the work of the academic commu‑ nity, particularly supporting the development of British Studies at the Nicolaus Copernicus University (established several years earlier by his late friend David Jarrett) and serving as head of the Anglophone Cul‑ ture Section in the Department of English (2007–2011), where he gave lectures and seminars, took part in the organization of conferences and co‑edited­ collections of essays.

1 Now the Institute of English Cultures and Literatures. inTRoduction 13

Presently TR divides his time between meditations on metaphysics as a supplement of finitude (whose seemingly transgressive operations contribute a great deal to the phantasmagoric nature of metaphysical considerations) and poetics (as well as every­‑day practices) of care and its power to overcome the deadly logic of ownership, appropriation and domination. In his current research he also continues to explore the the‑ mes of precarity in culture, nature, wilderness, and the wild. Essays included in this volume2 are written by TR’s friends, collea‑ gues and former students and bear witness to many intellectual affini‑ ties which can be shared, exchanged and enjoyed in mutual encoun‑ ters. Every one of these texts also testifies to the possibility of reciprocity being materialized.

A.P., S.M.

2 It has a companion collection entitled Affinities published concurrently by Peter Lang Verlag.

Anna Zeidler­‑Janiszewska Szkoła Wyższa Psychologii Społecznej, Warszawa

Artysta w przestrzeniach przyrodoznawstwa O wybranych praktykach Marka Diona

Każdy niemal podróżny, który zawitał do Kassel czy to w celach tury‑ stycznych, czy na Documenta, wie, że jedną z atrakcji tego miasta jest Muzeum Przyrodnicze (Naturkundemuseum). Jego zbiory mieszczą się w powstałym w roku 1606, pierwszym na ziemiach niemieckich (i jed‑ nym z pierwszych w Europie) budynku przeznaczonym na stałą sie‑ dzibę teatru. Ufundował go heski landgraf Moritz (nazywany „uczo‑ nym”) i nazwał, na cześć syna, Ottoneum. Później w budynku mieściły się m.in. kaplica dla żołnierzy, odlewnia armat, obserwatorium i teatr anatomiczny. W 1779 roku Kassel wzbogaciło się o zaprojektowany w stylu klasycystycznym przez wykształconego w Sztokholmie archi‑ tekta francuskiego pochodzenia Simona Louisa du Ry budynek muze‑ alny, nazwany Fridericianum na cześć jego fundatora, landgrafa Fry‑ deryka II. Znalazła się w nim zawartość powstałego w XVI wieku (jednego z najstarszych na kontynencie) gabinetu landgrafów heskich wraz z bogatą biblioteką, z którą później związali swą działalność bra‑ cia Grimm, uhonorowani w Kassel pomnikiem i osobnym muzeum. W roku 1888 eksponowane we Fridericianum naturalia trafiły do prze‑ budowanego w międzyczasie Ottoneum – stałej odtąd siedziby Muzeum Przyrodniczego. Wśród jego najcenniejszych, zachowanych do dnia dzi‑ siejszego zbiorów znajduje się ofiarowany w 1592 roku ojcu landgrafa Moritza trzytomowy zielnik Caspara Ratzenbergera (lekarza i bota‑ nika), zawierający około 700 wysuszonych i sprasowanych okazów roślin z terenów niemieckich, francuskich, włoskich i azjatyckich (Indie, 16 Anna Zeidler-Janiszewska

Turcja), oraz równie unikatowa Xylotheka Carla Schildbacha, która pod‑ czas Documenta 13 stała się przedmiotem artystycznej interwencji Marka Diona. Do atrakcji, jakie oferuje swoim mieszkańcom i turystom Kassel, należą także planetarium i gabinet astronomiczno‑fizyczny­ w budynku oranżerii, będącym pierwotnie nie tylko zimową przechowalnią ciepło‑ lubnych roślin, ale również letnią siedzibą władców Hesji. Muzea historii naturalnej (otwierane często wraz z ogrodami bota‑ nicznymi i zoologicznymi) są, obok muzeów sztuki, instytucjami sym‑ bolicznymi dla nowoczesnego projektu edukacyjnego, artykułowanego za pomocą terminów refinement czy Bildung. Pierwsze takie muzeum powstało w Paryżu w 1793 roku. Zatrudniono w nim najwybitniejszych ówczesnych uczonych (nie tylko francuskich). Londyńskie muzeum założono w 1881 roku, a berlińskie i wiedeńskie – w 1889 roku. Miesz‑ kańcy Kassel mogli więc być dumni, że ich miasto nie ustępowało w tym zakresie nie tylko większym miastom niemieckim, ale nawet europejskim stolicom. Obydwa muzea powstały dzięki zainteresowa‑ niom poznawczym i estetycznym oraz ambicjom politycznym kolej‑ nych landgrafów (kolekcje podnosiły ich pozycję wśród władców euro‑ pejskich), ale także – o czym przypomniał Krzysztof Wodiczko w swojej projekcji na pomniku Fryderyka II podczas Documenta 8 (1987) – pie‑ niądzom, jakie tenże landgraf uzyskał, sprzedając do armii brytyjskiej 1 tys. heskich chłopów (większość z nich straciła życie w wojnie prze‑ ciwko amerykańskiej niepodległości)1. Popularne w przedoświeceniowej Europie gabinety kolekcjonerów wpisywały się bardziej w kunstvolle Wissenschaft (artful Science) niż w „czystą” Wissenschaft (w znaczeniu, jakie zaczęło się krystalizować wraz z profesjonalizacją i względną autonomizacją poszczególnych dyscyplin nauki). Średniowieczna kolekcja księcia de Berry zawierała nie tylko około 700 obrazów, ale również – jak przypomniał Umberto Eco – wiele innych przedmiotów, m.in. „róg jednorożca, pierścień zarę‑ czynowy św. Józefa, orzechy kokosowe, zęby wieloryba, muszle z Sied‑ miu Mórz […] zabalsamowanego słonia, hydrę, bazyliszka, jajko zna‑

1 Przypomnienie to kierowało uwagę odbiorców na „nieczyste” źródła kapitału koncernów sponsorujących Documenta i inne przedsięwzięcia w obszarze sztuki (por. Wodiczko oraz katalog Documenta 8). Artysta w przestrzeniach przyrodoznawstawa… 17 lezione przez pewnego opata w innym jajku”, itp. W obliczu owej rozmaitości eksponatów Eco, podążając tropem Huizingi z Jesieni Śred‑ niowiecza, wskazuje na „nieczystość” smaku epoki, smaku niezdolnego „do odróżnienia rzeczy pięknych i osobliwych, sztuki i teratologii” (Eco, 26). Wiele znanych późniejszych kolekcji także miało charakter „nieczysty”, synkretyczny – obejmowało obiekty naturalne, wytwo‑ rzone przez człowieka, również naukowe. Te, które kwalifikowano jako „osobliwe”, wzbudzały zarówno zainteresowania poznawcze, jak i doznania estetyczne (nieograniczające się wszak do piękna). Dbano także o estetyczny wymiar przestrzeni, w których eksponowano kolek‑ cje. Największa świetność kunstvolle Wissenschaft przypadła, oczywi‑ ście, na okres manieryzmu i baroku, inspirowana rozwiniętą na sze‑ roką skalę światopoglądowo­‑poznawczą działalnością zakonu jezuitów. W Rzymie integrował tę działalność m.in. Athanasius Kircher, niemiecki zakonnik znany z licznych i obszernych tomów z pogranicza teologii, filozofii i – jakbyśmy dziś powiedzieli – protonauki, człowiek określany często jako „ostatni prawdziwie uniwersalny uczony”2. Opiekował się on założonym w Collegium Romanum gabinetem – swego rodzaju tea‑ trem osobliwości połączonym z biblioteką, nazwanym później Museo Kircherianum (1651). Przez lata muzeum to funkcjonowało jako wzorzec atrakcyjnej, wyzwalającej wyobraźnię i poznawczą pasję kolekcji. „Dla wielu podróżników z całego świata przybywających w celach studyj‑ nych stało się ono najbardziej atrakcyjnym miejscem w Rzymie dru‑ giej połowy XVII wieku. W przestrzeni zainscenizowanej jako komnata osobliwości Kircher wystawiał tam wszystko, co z rzeczy zadziwiają‑ cych przywożono mu lub przysyłano z dalekich krajów i to, co sam potrafił stworzyć: skamieliny, książki i mapy, instrumenty matema‑ tyczne i mechaniczne, zegary mechaniczne i hydrauliczne, wypchane aligatory, szkielety, czaszki, naczynie do destylacji, a obok wielu innych przedmiotów reprodukcje egipskich obelisków, których hieroglify roz‑ szyfrował, jak dawał do zrozumienia w Oedipus aegyptiacus (1652–1654)” (Zielinski, 165). Zwiedzających zaskakiwały liczne efekty akustyczne

2 W dziejach europejskiej kultury różnych myślicieli określano mianem „ostatnich uniwersalnych uczonych”; obdarzono tym mianem Leibniza, a w XX wieku – Ernsta Cassirera. 18 Anna Zeidler-Janiszewska i optyczne – „gadające głowy”, liczne lustrzane odbicia czy poruszające się dzięki pomysłowym mechanizmom figury. Muzeum przetrwało do 1915 roku (od 1870 roku – jako instytucja świecka). W 2001 roku jego roz‑ proszone w różnych miejscach zbiory połączono ponownie w ramach wystawy zatytułowanej „Muzeum Świata” (Il museo del mondo) w rzym‑ skim Palazzo Venezia. Nie była to jedyna próba rekonstrukcji kształtu słynnego muzeum, określanego jako „teatr nauki i sztuki”, poprzedziły ją bowiem dwie uniwersyteckie wystawy amerykańskie. Zgromadzone przez Kirchnera eksponaty stanowiły także część otwartej w 2005 roku w Bonn dużej ekspozycji „Barok w Watykanie 1572–1676. Sztuka i kul‑ tura w papieskim Rzymie”. Wystawy te wpisały się w kontekst rosną‑ cego w ostatnich dekadach ubiegłego wieku zainteresowania artystów, kuratorów i badaczy „mieszaną” zawartością dawnych kolekcji i form‑ ami jej ekspozycji3. Horst Bredekamp zainteresowanie to wiąże ze zwro‑ tem wizualnym w kulturze współczesnej i ponownym otwarciem granic między nauką, techniką i sztuką (101–102)4. W kontekście dzisiejszych zwrotów w kulturze i jej badaniach nie sposób nie wspomnieć o per‑ spektywie postkolonialnej angażowanej przez artystów podejmujących krytykę nowoczesnych muzeów. Powróćmy jeszcze na moment do przeszłości. Oprócz królów, papieży, wyższego kleru, książąt i szlachty kolekcje zakładali także urzędnicy, prawnicy, lekarze, kupcy, a nawet rzemieślnicy. Były one na ogół wyrazem szlachetnych pasji badawczych czy estetycznych, a zara‑ zem stanowiły stosunkowo pewną lokatę kapitału. Dzięki nim zyski‑ wano też uznanie, niekiedy awans społeczny i sławę (nazwiska właś‑ cicieli wraz z adresami podawane były w ówczesnych przewodnikach turystycznych). Omawiając zawartość przeciętnych paryskich kolekcji eksponowanych w gabinetach (na podstawie wydanego w 1685 roku przewodnika po mieście), Krzysztof Pomian podkreśla, że nadal domi‑ nowało w nich przemieszanie naturaliów z „dziełami ludzkiej ręki”, nastawienie na gromadzenie tego, co „rzadkie, osobliwe, ciekawe”, choć kryterium to „ulegnie w następnym stuleciu ważnym i znamien-

3 Z kulturoznawczego punktu widzenia na szczególną uwagę zasługuje książka Angeli Mayer­‑Deutsch Das Museum Kircherianum. 4 Zob. też teksty w katalogu towarzyszącego wystawie „Die Erfindung der Natur” w Sprengel Museum. Artysta w przestrzeniach przyrodoznawstawa… 19 nym przeobrażeniom” (117). Przeobrażenia te zostały opisane m.in. przez Barbarę Marię Stafford, ujęte w terminach przejścia od zróżnicowanych wizualno­‑performatywnych praktyk demonstrowania i popularyza‑ cji wiedzy do jej dyskursywizacji w epoce Oświecenia. Amerykańska badaczka zajęła się m.in. problemami związanymi z przekształceniem barokowych gabinetów osobliwości w otwarte dla szerokiej publiczno‑ ści muzea, których ekspozycje miały już być podporządkowane stan‑ dardom ówczesnej wiedzy naukowej, np. systematyce wypracowanej przez Karola Linneusza, gdzie każda z wyodrębnionych grup świata roślinnego i zwierzęcego otrzymała swoją nazwę5. Niezwykłość, obfi‑ tość i zróżnicowanie kolekcji gabinetowych, ciesząca zarówno zbie‑ raczy amatorów, jak i tych, którzy je oglądali, stała się kłopotliwa dla ówczesnych organizatorów muzeów, zobowiązanych do ekspozycji demonstrujących poznawczą wartość zgromadzonych zbiorów zgod‑ nie z naukowymi klasyfikacjami. Stafford przywołuje w tym kontekście przypadek szczególny, opisany przez współpracującego z hrabią Buf‑ fonem (autorem niezwykle wówczas popularnej wielotomowej Histo‑ rii naturalnej) Louisa Jeana Daubentona, którego tekst przedstawiający problemy z ekspozycją heterogenicznego zbioru naturaliów, udostęp‑ nianego zróżnicowanej publiczności, trafił do Encyklopedii. Dauben‑ ton „czuł się, podobnie jak dzisiejsi kuratorzy muzealni, zobowiązany do znalezienia dróg udostępnienia większej publiczności ulubionych przedmiotów będących w prywatnym posiadaniu. […] Jako kuratora interesowało go pytanie, jakie zasady instalacji będą najbardziej odpo‑ wiednie dla stymulowania uwagi i aktywnego włączenia się odbiorcy. Miał nadzieję, że rozluźni nie tylko utrwalone przyzwyczajenia wzro‑ kowe, ale i opór obiektów. Wykonanie powinno być równocześnie roz‑

5 Analizując związki między historią naturalną i gramatyką ogólną w XVIII wieku, Michel Foucault tak opisał procedurę ówczesnej systematyki świata roślinnego i zwie‑ rzęcego: „Zakłada się, że istnieją powszechnie przyjęte wielkie rodziny, których pierw‑ sze deskrypcje wyznaczają, trochę na ślepo, zasadnicze rysy. Owe wspólne rysy zakłada się teraz w sposób pozytywny; potem za każdym razem, gdy napotyka się gatunek czy rodzaj, który jawnie do tej rodzimy należy, dosyć będzie wskazać, jakie różnice dzielą go od innych gatunków czy rodzajów, służących mu za naturalne otoczenie. Poznanie każdego gatunku stanie się łatwo osiągalne dzięki owej ogólnej charaktery‑ styce” (191–192). 20 Anna Zeidler-Janiszewska rywkowe i pouczające, a obiekty w przyjemny sposób miały modyfiko‑ wać oczekiwania i skojarzenia odbiorców” (Stafford 1998, 279). Francuski przyrodnik (profesor Collège de France, Szkoły Weterynaryjnej i pierw‑ szy dyrektor paryskiego Muzeum Historii Naturalnej) zastanawiał się nad tym, jak pogodzić estetyczne oddziaływanie dawniejszych pry‑ watnych gabinetów osobliwości z optymalnymi zasadami konserwa‑ cji obiektów i z wymogami stawianymi przed naukowo‑edukacyjną­ instytucją publiczną. Rozważał też sposób ekspozycji obiektów wyjąt‑ kowych, niepoddających się systemowym klasyfikacjom, stanowiących „oczko w głowie” wcześniejszych kolekcjonerów, wzbudzających cieka‑ wość zarówno dawnych, jak i – czego spodziewał się – przyszłych zwie‑ dzających. Podobne dylematy towarzyszyły zapewne wszystkim kusto‑ szom, którzy przekształcali zbiory gabinetów osobliwości w placówki muzealne dostępne dla znacznie bardziej niż uprzednio zróżnicowanej publiczności. Pragmatyczne rozwiązanie, jakie udało się wypracować Daubentonowi, zakwestionował już jednak ówczesny scjentystyczny rygorysta Joseph­‑Adrien Le Large de Lignac. Zarzucił mu mianowicie, że biorąc pod uwagę kryteria estetyczne, raczej bawi publiczność, niż ją faktycznie kształci. „Przejście od zmysłowego wyrazu do racjonalizu‑ jącej klasyfikacji oznacza jednocześnie zwrot od niezwykłości do zwy‑ czajności” – komentuje Barbara Stafford (289), przypominając, iż Lignac zalecał też „poważnym, wykształconym badaczom” rezygnację z usług kolekcjonerów amatorów i samodzielne poszukiwanie potrzebnych im okazów, stanowiących zarazem przedmiot ich badań i edukacyjny eks‑ ponat muzealny. O tym, że zbiory muzealne mogą dostarczać zmysło‑ wej przyjemności, nie było już mowy. Ten przejściowy w dziejach przyrodoznawstwa okres podsumował Wolf Lepenies: „Amatorskie stadium rozwoju nauk należy do przeszło‑ ści, kontury wyraźnie wyznaczonych, usamodzielniających się obsza‑ rów badawczych są coraz widoczniejsze, nawet jeśli nie można jeszcze mówić o profesjonalizacji i specjalizacji. Badacz naukowy już dawno przestał być virtuoso, który w swoich poczynaniach upatruje również przyjemną rozrywkę, ale panuje jeszcze przekonanie, że nauka jest bardziej powołaniem niż zawodem, bardziej wyznaniem niż profe‑ sją. Wielu traktuje jeszcze proces poszukiwania wiedzy jako akt czy‑ sto indywidualny, ba, samotniczy: otoczenie społeczne z reguły zakłóca Artysta w przestrzeniach przyrodoznawstawa… 21 proces poznawczy jednostki” (18). Osiemnastowieczne pisarstwo naukowe zachowało początkowo walory literackie. Historia naturalna Buffona miała wiele wydań – była szeroko czytana i chwalona za jakość pisarskiego stylu. „Kiedy w roku 1753 – wskutek ciągłych nacisków Ludwika XV – Buffon został wybrany do Académie Française, wygłosił przemówienie na temat stylu. Było rzeczą oczywistą, że także przyrodo‑ znawca uważał się za pisarza: za kogoś, komu zależy nie tylko na tym, co mówi, ale również na tym, w jaki sposób to czyni, za kogoś, kto pragnie swoją publiczność nie tylko uczyć, ale ucząc bawić” (Lepenies, 19). Gdy jednak pod koniec wieku historię naturalną zaczęły zastępo‑ wać autonomizujące się dyscypliny przyrodoznawstwa, korzystne dla Buffona wartościowania zmieniły się: dla badaczy natury jego przed‑ sięwzięcie było zbyt literackie6, a jego powieści – nadto scjentystyczne dla zwiększającego się szybko grona czytelniczek i czytelników. Rów‑ nolegle do procesu oddzielania kryteriów estetycznych od naukowych w tekstach przyrodników i w ekspozycjach zbiorów muzealnych postę‑ powało wyzwalanie się poszczególnych nauk o życiu z ram metafizycz‑ nego obrazu świata. Trasę tej, z konieczności krótkiej i niesystematycznej, wycieczki w przeszłość rozpoczęłam od Kassel, gdyż właśnie w tamtejszym Natur‑ kundemuseum bohater mojego szkicu, Mark Dion, umieścił jedną ze swo‑ ich prac. Choć przygotował ją na Documenta 13 (2012), stała się już skład‑ nikiem stałej ekspozycji muzealnej. Jednym z rarytasów tej ekspozycji jest powstała w latach 1771–1779 Xylotheka Carla Schildbacha – zbiór 530 „tomów”, czyli trzech rozmiarów kasetek, z których każda – wyko‑ nana z drewna pochodzącego z konkretnego gatunku drzew lub krze‑ wów rosnących w Hesji – zawierała zarówno nasiona, zasuszone liście, kwiaty, owoce danego drzewa (lub ich mniejsze modele z pomalowa‑ nego wosku, gdy rozmiar naturalnych owoców był za duży), jak i pod‑ stawowe o nim informacje (po łacinie i po niemiecku). Zapisane zło‑ tymi literami na grzbietach kasetek tytuły pozwalały umieszczać je na półkach analogicznie do książek w bibliotece. Mark Dion zaprojektował

6 Przejściem od dawnych gabinetów osobliwości (prowokujących do swobodnych asocjacji) do zbiorów ilustrujących zasady klasyfikacji naukowej w kontekście Historii naturalnej Buffona i w kontekście urządzania lipskiego Richterianum zajmował się Horst Bredekamp w książce Antikensehnsucht und Maschinenglauben. 22 Anna Zeidler-Janiszewska nowy kształt ekspozycji zawartości Xylotheki – ustawił mianowicie osz‑ klone regały w sześciokątnym pomieszczeniu, nawiązując tym samym do architektury dawnych gabinetów osobliwości. Z uwagi na fakt, że ów wydzielony z przestrzeni muzeum gabinet wykonany został w cało‑ ści z drewna dębowego, można go kojarzyć ze słynną akcją obsadzenia Kassel dębami, zainicjowaną przez Josepha Beuysa podczas Documenta 7. Dodatkowo amerykański artysta uzupełnił zasób Xylotheki o sześć nowych „książek”, wykonanych własnoręcznie z gatunków drzew ros‑ nących na innych niż Europa kontynentach. Pracę tę można potrakto‑ wać jako swoisty hołd złożony Carlowi Schildbachowi – na co dzień skromnemu pracownikowi zatrudnionemu w niegdysiejszych dobrach landgrafów heskich. Fakt, iż Dion wybrał Naturkundemuseum jako miejsce instalacji przy‑ gotowanej na ostatnie Documenta (zakupionej przez władze Kassel), nie zdziwi nikogo, kto choć trochę orientuje się w jego dotychczasowych działaniach artystycznych (równie licznych w Europie, jak w USA). W syntetyzujących ujęciach porządkujących zróżnicowane praktyki sztuki współczesnej jego nazwisko pojawia się wespół z nazwiskami artystów skupionych na krytyce instytucji sztuki, jednak od swoich bar‑ dziej zaangażowanych politycznie koleżanek (jak np. Angela Fraser) i kolegów (jak np. Hans Haacke) Dion różni się tym, że interesują go przede wszystkim przestrzenie reprezentacji szeroko pojętej natury jako dokumenty historycznych transformacji naszych wyobrażeń o życiu i porządku wszechświata. W rozmowie z Miwon Kwon Dion dekla‑ ruje się nawet jako ultrakonserwatysta w kwestii zachowania dawnych ekspozycji muzealnych w niezmienionej postaci (Graziose Corrin 1997, 17). Również w pracach przygotowanych na wystawy w instytucjach sztuki (muzea, galerie) lub w przestrzeniach otwartych (miejskie parki, obszary poprzemysłowe) artysta wprowadza eksponaty gromadzone przez muzea przyrodnicze (z okresu dominacji historii naturalnej) lub buduje wiwaria (obrazujące dzisiejszy splot natury / kultury). Za emble‑ matyczne dla tych praktyk uznać można dwie instalacje. Jedną z nich – zatytułowaną Wielki łańcuch bytu – artysta zaprezentował na zbiorowej wystawie „instytucjonalistów” w nowojorskim Muzeum Sztuki Nowo‑ czesnej (MoMA) w 1999 roku (zorganizowanej pod hasłem Museum as Muse. Artists Reflect). Druga instalacja – Neukom Vivarium – ekspo‑ Artysta w przestrzeniach przyrodoznawstawa… 23 nowana była w parku rzeźby w Seattle w latach 2004–2006. Pierwszy z projektów dopełnia wcześniejsza doń „przymiarka” (Scala Naturae), drugi – mniejsze wiwarium powstałe w 2002 roku w Düsseldorfie. O ile tytuł pierwszej instalacji nawiązuje do szczególnie popularnego w XVIII wieku obrazu świata opisanego w znanej książce Arthura O. Love‑ joya, o tyle drugi – do czego jeszcze w kontekście ostatnich Documenta powrócę – łączony bywa przez interpretatorów z dzisiejszą perspek‑ tywą nieantropocentryczną, konstytuowaną m.in. przez Bruno Latoura i Donnę Haraway. O popularności platońsko­‑arystotelesowskiej koncepcji „wielkiego łańcucha bytu” (w wersji najpierw statycznej, później – uczasowio- nej) w XVIII wieku nie zadecydował, jak przekonuje Lovejoy, jakiś gre‑ mialny powrót ówczesnych intelektualistów do greckich źródeł, lecz zmodernizowana wykładnia tej koncepcji, zaproponowana we wcześ‑ niejszym stuleciu przez Leibniza. Amerykański historyk idei przy- tacza mało znany (choć doceniony m.in. przez Cassirera) list niemie‑ ckiego filozofa, dotyczący powiązań ludzi ze zwierzętami, zwierząt z roślinami, roślin ze skamielinami, jak i z ciałami uznawanymi przez nas za nieożywione. W dziele wypełnienia tej koncepcji doniosłą rolę wyznaczył Leibniz dążeniom przyrodników do odkrywania form gra‑ nicznych (zoofitów u Arystotelesa czy, później, roślino­‑zwierząt). Wie‑ rzył, że dzięki zastosowaniu precyzyjnej aparatury naukowej uda się w przyszłości wypełnić nie tylko lukę między roślinami i zwierzę‑ tami, ale również – na najniższym poziomie – lukę między minera‑ łami a roślinami. Przekonanie, że każde istnienie ma swoje stałe miej‑ sce w łańcuchu bytu, wyznaczało ramy zarówno ówczesnych praktyk badawczych, jak i stowarzyszonych z nimi praktyk kolekcjonerskich; sprawiało też, że uważnie przyglądano się osobliwościom („dziwom natury”) jako potencjalnym świadectwom ugruntowującym połącze‑ nie zasady różnorodności z zasadą ciągłości we wszechświecie. Love‑ joy (220–221) przypomina, że „przynajmniej od połowy XVIII wieku do czasów Darwina owo polowanie na brakujące ogniwa wciąż anga‑ żowało nie tylko uwagę specjalistów przyrodoznawstwa, ale również ciekawość szerokiej publiczności”, i dodaje, iż gdyby Arystotelesowi „dane było wrócić na podksiężycową scenę lat czterdziestych XIX wieku, nie mógłby się doczekać wizyty w Muzeum Barnuma”, będą‑ 24 Anna Zeidler-Janiszewska cym wczesnym odpowiednikiem dzisiejszych parków rozrywki, w któ‑ rym – wedle zapowiedzi reklamowych – można było zobaczyć takie okazy gatunków pośrednich, jak zakonserwowana syrena czy rybo‑ ptaki, ale również „osobliwości” gatunku ludzkiego. Już tytuł nowojorskiej instalacji Diona nawiązywał do koncepcji, któ‑ rej losy tak precyzyjnie zrekonstruował Lovejoy. Na czterech półkach obszernej szafy, z których każda podzielona była na trzy części, artysta zgromadził eksponaty reprezentujące zbiory natury zawarte w różnych działach muzeów historii naturalnej (kamienie, korale, muszle, grzyby, zasuszone rośliny, wypatroszone i zakonserwowane zwierzęta). Częś‑ ciową niespodziankę stanowił tu porządek eksponowanej kolekcji; częś‑ ciową, bo zgodnie z przewidywaniem na najniższej półce znalazły się minerały, na wyższej – grzyby i zasuszone rośliny, na kolejnej – gąbki, mięczaki i owady, a jeszcze wyżej – ryby, ptaki i ssaki. Zgodnie z tra‑ dycją człowiek mieścił się w tak skonstruowanym łańcuchu bytów na szczycie. W szafie Diona przedmioty wytworzone przez człowieka: koło, świeca, klepsydra znalazły się w narożnej, prawej części najniższej półki szafy, z kolei po lewej stronie, w przegrodzie sąsiadującej ze ssa‑ kami, umieszczono książki, a przed nimi popiersie Arystotelesa. Popier‑ sie Arystotelesa ustawiono też z lewej strony najwyższego stopnia białych schodów stanowiących przestrzenną ramę wcześniejszej, poka‑ zanej po raz pierwszy w 1994 roku w Wiedniu, instalacji Diona, poświę‑ conej dawnej wizji wszechświata. Określony przez nią porządek jest w obydwu instalacjach identyczny, różnią się natomiast niektóre ekspo‑ naty (np. zamiast klepsydry na samym dole schodów znalazł się zwy‑ czajny budzik). Patronat Arystotelesa świadczy o tym, że Diona intere‑ suje przede wszystkim naukowy – czy raczej: protonaukowy – wymiar koncepcji wielkiego łańcucha bytu, a nie jej zaplecze metafizyczno­ ‍‑teologiczne. Wiedeńskiej wystawie Diona patronowała także dwójka innych, bliższych nam czasowo postaci: Rachel Carson – amerykań‑ ska biolożka, jedna z pionierek ekologii, i Alfred Russel Wallace – bry‑ tyjski botanik i zoolog, niezależny od Darwina ewolucjonisty, który około połowy XIX wieku podróżował po Ameryce Południowej i Azji Południowo­‑Wschodniej, badając florę i faunę tych kontynentów. Zary‑ sowane zostały tym samym dwa inne, równie ważne konteksty aktua‑ lizowane w licznych pracach Diona – naukowe ekspedycje i ekologia. Artysta w przestrzeniach przyrodoznawstawa… 25

Pierwszym z nich zająć się wypadnie przy innej okazji, drugi natomiast łączyć może uwolnioną z obciążeń metafizyczno­‑teologicznych koncep‑ cję wielkiego łańcucha bytu z nastawioną na równoprawność różnorod‑ nych form życia perspektywą posthumanistyczną, urzeczywistnioną przez Diona w wiwarium w Seattle7. Drugie z wiwariów, mniejsze, przypominające przeszkloną witrynę muzealną dużych rozmiarów, pozwala odwiedzającym pałacowy park w Düsseldorfie z zewnątrz jedynie obserwować pień drzewa porośnięty mchem, grzybami, papro‑ ciami. W Seattle odbiorcy mogli wejść do środka oszklonego budynku w typie szklarni czy oranżerii, uczestniczyli więc z bliska w splocie pro‑ cesów międzygatunkowej wymiany, które musiały być stale – z wyko‑ rzystaniem nowoczesnej technologii – pielęgnowane i podtrzymywane. Wokół ulegającego rozkładowi pnia leżącego na podstawie obudowa‑ nej biało­‑niebieskimi kaflami z motywami lokalnej flory i fauny wytwo‑ rzyła się hybrydyczna przestrzeń, angażująca całą sieć ludzkich i nie­ ‍‑ludzkich aktorów (artysta, wykonawcy poszczególnych elementów instalacji, odbiorcy, mikroorganizmy roślinne i zwierzęce, insekty, urzą‑ dzenia techniczne do regulacji wilgotności i temperatury, szafa gabine‑ towa, w której znalazły się szkła powiększające, mikroskop oraz rysunki i szkice). Nietrudno opisać to, co działo się w Neukom Vivarium w języku etnografii laboratorium (tym bardziej że Mark Dion sam pewną jej wer‑ sję uprawia w innych swoich instalacjach muzealnych i ekspozycjach dokumentujących antropologiczne podróże). Szkicowe z konieczności zestawienie przywołanych instalacji amery‑ kańskiego artysty zachęca do postawienia pytania: Czy między obra‑ zem miejsca człowieka w wielkim łańcuchu bytów a obrazem wielo‑ poziomowych sieci zawiązywanych przez nas z innymi, nie­‑ludzkimi w szczególności, aktorami, nie rysuje się jakaś forma ciągłości? Jeśli tak, to raczej w płaszczyźnie etyczno­‑ekologicznych implikacji obydwu koncepcji. W jednej z nich wzywa się (jak np. Rousseau w Emilu) do poskromienia apetytów w zakresie panowania nad naturą i jej eksploa‑ tacji, w drugiej – mówi się jednym ciągiem o naturze / kulturze i etyce międzygatunkowej współpracy.

7 W tej właśnie perspektywie ujmuje Neukom Vivarium Ilka Becker w artykule „Dead Or Alive?” (2012). 26 Anna Zeidler-Janiszewska

Odpowiedzialna za kształt ideowo‑artystyczny­ Documenta 13 Carolyn Christov­‑Bakargiev (2012, 2) deklarowała, iż przyjęta przez organizato‑ rów wizja „podziela i respektuje formy i praktyki wiedzy wszystkich ożywionych i nieożywionych producentów świata, włącznie z ludźmi”. Sformułowanie to od razu przywołuje na myśl koncepcje związane z perspektywą nieantropocentryczną: teorię aktora­‑sieci (ANT) Bruno Latoura, prace Donny Haraway czy Rosi Braidotti. Ani Latoura, ani Bra‑ idotti w Kassel nie było, Haraway należała natomiast do grona Dorad‑ czego Komitetu Honorowego i czynnie uczestniczyła w jednej z trady‑ cyjnie towarzyszących ekspozycjom platform dyskusyjnych. Stała się też patronką The Wordly House – archiwalnej instalacji przygotowanej przez duńsko­‑niemieckiego artystę Tue Greenforta w dawnej szopie dla pta‑ ków na terenie parku Karlsaue. W prowizorycznym archiwum znalazły się nie tylko teksty Haraway, ale również dokumentacja prac artystów zainteresowanych tematyką międzygatunkowego współżycia (od akcji Josepha Beuysa z kojotem w Nowym Jorku i performansów Mariny Abramowić ze zwierzętami po dzisiejsze formy sztuki biologicznej). Fotograficzna, filmowa i rysunkowa dokumentacja licznych prac Marka Diona może takie i podobne przedsięwzięcia w sposób znaczący zasilać.

Bibliografia

Becker, Ilka. “Dead Or Alive? Agency des Lebendigen und kristisches Vermögen in Mark Dions ‘Neukom Vivarium’ ”. Zeitschrift für Ästhetik und Allgemeine Kunstwissenschaft, 57 (1), 2012: 103–25. Bredekamp, Horst. Antikensehnsucht und Maschinenglauben. Die Geschichte der Kunstkammer und die Zukunft der Kunstgeschichte. Berlin: Verlag Klaus Wagen‑ bach, 1993. Christov­‑Bakargiev, Carolyn. “Einführung / Introduction”. Documenta (13). Das Begleitbuch / The Guidebook. Kassel: Hatje Cantz Verlag, 2012. 6–9. Die Erfindung der Natur. Max Ernst, Paul Klee, Wols und das surreale Universum. Hannover: Sprengel Museum, 1994. Dion, Mark. “Füllung des Naturhistorischen Museums”. Texte zur Kunst, No. 20, November 1995: 75–86. Documenta 8, Kassel 1987, 12. Juni – 20. September. Kassel: Weber & Weidemeyer, 1987. Artysta w przestrzeniach przyrodoznawstawa… 27

Eco, Umberto. Sztuka i piękno w średniowieczu. Przeł. Magdalena Kimula i Miko‑ łaj Olszewski. Kraków: Wydawnictwo Znak, 2006. Foucault, Michel. Słowa i rzeczy. Archeologia nauk humanistycznych. Przeł. Tadeusz Komendant. Gdańsk: Słowo / obraz terytoria, 2000. Graziose Corrin, Lisa, Miwon Kwon, Norman Bryson. Mark Dion. London: Phaidon Press, 1997. Lepenies, Wolf. Trzy kultury. Socjologia między literaturą a nauką. Przeł. Krystyna Krzemieniowa. Poznań: Wydawnictwo Poznańskie, 1997. Lovejoy, Arthur O. Wielki łańcuch bytu. Studium historii pewnej idei. Przeł. Artur Przybysławski. Gdańsk: Słowo / obraz terytoria, 2009. Mayer­‑Deutsch, Angela. Das Museum Kircherianum. Kontemplative Momente, histo‑ rische Rekonstruktion, Bildrethorik. Zürich: Diaphanes Verlag, 2012. Pomian, Krzysztof. Drogi kultury europejskiej. Trzy studia. Warszawa: Wydawni‑ ctwo IFiS PAN, 1996. Stafford, Barbara M. Kunstvolle Wissenschaft. Aufklärung, Unterhaltung und der Niedergang der visuellen Bildung, aus dem Amerikanischen von Anne Vonderstein. Amsterdam, Dresden: Verlag der Kunst, 1998. Wodiczko, Krzysztof. Sztuka publiczna. Warszawa: Wydawnictwo CSW, 1995. Zielinski, Siegfried. Archeologia mediów. O głębokim czasie technicznie zapośredni‑ czonego słuchania i widzenia. Przeł. Krystyna Krzemieniowa. Warszawa: Ofi‑ cyna Naukowa, 2010. Piotr Fast Uniwersytet Śląski w Katowicach

O tytule eseju Watermark Josifa Brodskiego

Obrazy pamięci zacierają się, skoro tylko zastygną w słowa … Może boję się, że stracę od razu całą Wene‑ cję, jeśli będę o niej mówił. A może, mówiąc o innych miastach, już ją stopniowo utraciłem. Calvino 1975, 67

Zgodnie z informacją zamieszczoną w komentarzu do siódmego tomu dzieł zebranych Josifa Brodskiego Watermark to esej napisany po angiel‑ sku na zamówienie Consorzio Venezia Nuova w listopadzie 1989 roku (Бродский 2001, 336)1. Po raz pierwszy (jeszcze przed drukiem angiel‑ skiego oryginału czy tłumaczenia rosyjskiego) został opublikowany po włosku w przekładzie Gilberto Fortiego już w grudniu tego roku (Brod‑ skij 1989). Tłumacz i wydawcy włoskiego przekładu zdecydowali się na zasadnicze przekształcenie w tłumaczeniu tytułu utworu Brodskiego, wykorzystując w tej funkcji nazwę jednego z weneckich nabrzeży – Fon‑ damenta degli Incurabili. Uznali najwidoczniej, że skoro sam Brodski wspomina w eseju o tym fragmencie topografii miasta, to traktuje go jako element znaczący. Zamieszania z tym tytułem są dość charaktery‑

1 Wszystkie cytaty z rosyjskiego przekładu utworu podaję według tego wydania, wskazując strony w tekście. Jak pisze Ewa Górniak w eseju Płaska ziemia, opublikowa‑ nym w internetowym wydaniu „Tygodnika Powszechnego” w roku 2000, „sam fakt rea‑ lizacji przez Brodskiego zamówienia na tę książkę, złożonego przez Consorzio Venezia Nuova, zajmującego się szeroko rozumianą ochroną Laguny Weneckiej – jej ekosystemu i dzieł sztuki, był istotnym głosem w obronie ukochanego miasta, podobnie jak wszyst‑ kie publikacje i spotkania związane z jej promocją”. O tytule eseju Watermark Josifa Brodzkiego 29 styczne dla recepcji Znaku wodnego w różnych wariantach językowych. Tak się bowiem stało, że rozbieżności w tym zakresie można uznać za symptomatyczne dla interpretacyjnej wykładni dzieła rosyjskiego nobli‑ sty. Włoski tłumacz korzystał przecież z angielskiego oryginału, który – gdy autor opublikował jego pierwsze fragmenty – nosił tytuł In the Light of Venice (1992a), wydrukowany zaś w całości pojawił się pod nagłów‑ kiem Water‑mark­ (1992b)2. Można by uznać (dlaczego piszę o tym w try‑ bie warunkowym, wyjaśnię za chwilę), że ów angielski tytuł – podobnie jak polskie tłumaczenie dokonane przez Stanisława Barańczaka i opub‑ likowane niespełna rok po druku anglojęzycznego oryginału – nie powinien pozostawiać żadnych semantycznych wątpliwości ani rodzić w przekładzie na język włoski żadnych trudności. Istnieje bowiem we włoskim leksykonie słowo „la filigrana” posiadające dokładnie takie samo znaczenie jak angielskie „watermark” i polskie „znak wodny”. Decyzję włoskiego tłumacza traktować więc należy – a przynajmniej można – jako znaczącą, stanowiącą element jego deklaracji dotyczącej interpretacji dzieła. Tłumacz uznał najwyraźniej, że takie „zwyczajne” słowo nie przenosi wystarczająco skutecznie semantyki utworu Brod‑ skiego, nie naznacza go odpowiednim bagażem konotacyjnym, który prowadziłby czytelnika ku pełnemu odbiorowi najgłębszych sensów tekstu, a jego, tłumacza, wybór mógłby stanowić rodzaj wyraźniejszej interpretacyjnej dyrektywy, ukierunkowującej sposób czytania eseju3. Włoski tłumacz, nadając utworowi Brodskiego tytuł Fondamenta degli Incurabili, wydobywa – jak postaram się pokazać – pewne tropy

2 Korzystam z pierwszej edycji paperbackowej, opublikowanej w Nowym Jorku przez Farrar, Straus & Giroux w roku 1993. 3 Jak wiadomo z licznych prac poświęconych poetyce oraz funkcji tytułów dzieł lite‑ rackich utworu, te różnią się w swojej funkcji od innych elementów struktury dzieła. Przekraczają bowiem kompetencje jakiegokolwiek podmiotu mówiącego w utworze i stanowią wyznacznik abstrakcyjnego podmiotu całego utworu. Przysługuje im więc (podobnie jak przypisom, spisom treści) pewien rodzaj funkcji metatekstowej. Stanowią, jak z tego wynika, rodzaj semantycznego ekwiwalentu całego utworu i stają się (poza samym tekstem) najważniejszym sygnałem całościowego sensu dzieła albo przynajmniej pierwszą wskazówką interpretacyjną, jakiej dzieło udziela czytelnikowi. Jako że przyna‑ leżą do najwyższej instancji nadawczej utworu, w sposób nieuchronny ukierunkowują pierwsze decyzje interpretacyjne czytelnika. Zob. na ten temat m.in. Okopień­‑Sławińska 1971; Danek 1980. 30 Piotr Fast interpretacyjne odmienne niż przywoływane przez oryginalny anglo‑ języczny nagłówek. Angielskie Water­‑mark – szczególnie pisane właś‑ nie z łącznikiem, z czego Brodski w późniejszych edycjach rezygnuje, uznając pewnie tę wczesną decyzję za nadmiernie wieloznaczną czy raczej bardzo „mgławicową” semantykę tytułu – niesie dwa równo‑ ległe znaczenia. Pierwsze, „zwyczajne”, odsyłające do słownikowego zakresu semantycznego tego słowa, przywołuje cechy wprost kojarzące się z wiedzą o desygnacie tytułu – o nazywanym słowem „watermark” charakterystycznym ukształtowaniu papieru: pewnej ulotności, wyż‑ szej niż standardowa wartości, trudnościach związanych z dostrzeże‑ niem samego znaku itp. Drugie znaczenie, wydobyte przez zastoso‑ wanie łącznika, wyraźniej podkreśla związek z wodą i jej semantyką oraz z samą znakowością, nakazującą poszukiwanie „znaczenia” owej „wody”. Oddzielając „water” od „mark”, Brodski kieruje ku rozsepa‑ rowanej i równocześnie wspólnej semantyce, a może wręcz symbolice wody i znakowości. Trudno uznać tę decyzję za przypadkową i nie sposób podjąć lektury tekstu Brodskiego bez świadomości owej wszech‑ ogarniającej go aury „wodności” i „znakowości”. Zastosowany przez Brodskiego łącznik sugeruje też takie przesunięcie akcentu semantycz‑ nego w angielskim oryginale, które można by oddać w polszczyźnie inwersją jego elementów – to raczej „wodny znak” czy „znak wody” niż „znak wodny”. Konsekwencją takiej decyzji jest przecież wyraźny sygnał niecodzienności semantycznej: koncentracja na odrębnych zna‑ czeniach rozdzielonych elementów, które odcinają się niejako od pier‑ wotnego znaczenia słowa i kierują uwagę czytelnika ku odrębnym dla każdego elementu kręgom skojarzeniowym, obciążając ów pozor‑ nie skontaminowany twór leksykalny znaczeniem nadbudowanym nad „zwyczajną” semantyką słownikową, odsyłający do niezależnych pierwotnych znaczeń składających się nań elementów leksykalnych. Taki „pseudoneologizm”, odsyłając do „znaku wodnego” w jego zna‑ czeniu słownikowym, wydobywa równocześnie na pierwszy plan odrębną semantykę wody ze wszelkimi możliwościami konotacyjno­ ‍‑symbolicznymi i znaku / znakowości, co uwydatnia owe symboliczne odesłania wpisane w tekst Brodskiego. A przecież woda i jej symbolika są bezwzględnie nieodłączne od faktograficznych i kulturowych umo‑ cowań obiektu opisu i refleksji poety w tym eseju. Wenecja to nie tylko O tytule eseju Watermark Josifa Brodzkiego 31 po prostu „miasto na wodzie”, ale – jak pisze Marek Bieńczyk (2012, 93–94) – także:

Najbardziej melancholijne w dziejach kultury miasto […], ta skutecznie odraczana z sezonu na sezon nicość, obrosło litanią na tak wiele głosów, obudowało się tyloma obrazami, malarskimi i filmowymi, tyloma wspa‑ niałymi westchnieniami poetów i eseistów, że zdaje się szczelnie utkane z cytatów, ze smutków i zadumy innych. Znamy je z wypisów, z teks‑ tów, które zdążyły wytworzyć ponad­‑Wenecję, nadmiasto – melancholijny destylat, likier zmierzchu.

Podobną refleksję formułuje Ewa Bieńkowska (156) w eseju o sztuce tego miasta, którego specyficzna symbolika – jak sugeruje autorka – ukształtowana została na początku XIX wieku dzięki George’owi Byro‑ nowi: „Wenecja staje się miastem melancholii, gdzie się przyjeżdża oglą‑ dać smutne piękno umierania”. Włoski tłumacz, rozważając tę wyraźną sugestię semantyczną („sym‑ boliczną”) zawartą w oryginalnym tytule, odsyłającym przecież wyraź‑ nie do owego hiperromantycznego toposu, stanął przed poważnym dylematem: czy oddać znaczenie denotacyjne tytułowego słowa, czy też szukać takich rozstrzygnięć, które będą w stanie wyraźnie wydo‑ być sensy przezeń konotowane. Decyzję utrudniał mu przy tym w spo‑ sób oczywisty rodzimy system językowy, w którym bezpośrednim odpowiednikiem angielskiego „watermark” jest przywoływane już tu słowo „la filigrana” – brzmiące wdzięcznie, ale przecież nieprzenoszące w żadnej mierze semantyki kojarzonej w impresji Brodskiego z wodą i jej najróżniejszymi – symbolicznymi, metafizycznymi, kreującymi szczególny „wenecki” klimat – konotacjami, do których odsyła tekst. Ze świadomością pewnego intelektualnego nadużycia można by uznać, że rdzeń tego słowa kojarzy się, przynajmniej w polszczyźnie, z czymś drobnym, delikatnym, ulotnym – „filigranowym” właśnie, ale chociaż te kręgi semantyczne przystają poniekąd do bezpośrednich skojarzeń ze znakiem wodnym w jego znaczeniu słownikowym, to jednak przecież daleko im do potencji symbolicznej zawartej w konotacjach wody i zna‑ kowości przywoływanych czy wręcz detalicznie artykułowanych przez Brodskiego. 32 Piotr Fast

Włoski tłumacz, otwierając serię translatorską, najpewniej zupełnie nieświadomie kreuje na dodatek pewien nurt w tradycji translatorskiej, podejmowanej później przez innych tłumaczy. Grigorij Daszewski, który jest autorem rosyjskiego wariantu eseju, opublikowanego niemal natychmiast po wydrukowaniu angielskiego tekstu, uzupełnionego i nieco poszerzonego w porównaniu z wersją stanowiącą podstawę tłumaczenia włoskiego, staje przed dość zasadni‑ czym problemem. W języku rosyjskim nie ma bowiem słowa, które sta‑ nowiłoby jednoznaczny ekwiwalent angielskiego „watermark” czy pol‑ skiego „znaku wodnego”. Tłumacz sięga więc do szczególnego rodzaju podpowiedzi udzielonej przez Gilberto Fortiego i tytułuje rosyjski prze‑ kład Набережная неисцелимых. Czyni to jednak — odmiennie niż jego włoski poprzednik – powodowany koniecznością poradzenia sobie z dość częstym problemem translatorskim związanym z tłumaczeniem tytułów, nazw własnych i innych elementów kulturowych, na którą w tym przypadku nakłada się jeszcze jednoznaczna niemożność czysto językowa. Krzysztof Hejwowski (71–121) nazywa te zjawiska nieprzekła‑ dalnością kulturową i językową4. Decyzja rosyjskiego tłumacza jest po prostu rezultatem kulturowej i systemowej nieprzystawalności języków oryginału i przekładu, podczas gdy tłumaczenie Włocha stanowi jed‑ noznaczny akt interpretacyjny. Inna to już sprawa – wykraczająca poza międzyjęzykowe nieuchronności – że rosyjski przekład automatycznie odsyła do tych samych, co w tekście włoskim, konotacji semantycz‑ nych i kieruje rozumienie tekstu ku uniwersalizującemu uogólnieniu, takiemu jednak, które ujednoznaczni sens dzieła Brodskiego. Przyjrzyjmy się temu fragmentowi Znaku wodnego, w którym poja‑ wia się owa charakterystyczna nazwa. Brodski dość obszernie opisuje

4 W literaturze przekładoznawczej pojawia się wiele przykładów niefortunnych tłu‑ maczeń tytułów – dotyczy to szczególnie filmów czy popularnych utworów literackich kierowanych do szerokiej dystrybucji, w których tytuł pełni raczej funkcje marketin‑ gowe niż semantyczne. Kłopoty z tym związane narastają w przypadku produkcji serii utworów (sequeli), które miałyby zdyskontować sukces osiągnięty przez pierwszą rea‑ lizację. Do groteskowej sytuacji doszło na przykład w przypadku filmu Die Hard Johna McTiernana, którego tytuł przełożono na język polski jako Szklana pułapka. Po ukazaniu się kolejnych sequeli, tytułowanych po angielsku Die Hard 2 itd., polskim dystrybutorom nie pozostało już nic innego, jak tylko trwać przy Szklanej pułapce, mimo że semantycz‑ nie tytuł ten w żadnym sensie nie odpowiadał już realiom przedstawionym w filmie. O tytule eseju Watermark Josifa Brodzkiego 33 wizytę, jaką złożył wraz z Susan Sontag (z jej inicjatywy) długoletniej partnerce i matce córki Ezry Pounda – Oldze Rudge5. Podczas tego spotkania owa wiekowa już dama (w roku 1989 miała 94 lata, a w ogóle dożyła 101 lat) z uporem zacinającej się płyty przekonywała ich o tym,

[t]hat Ezra wasn’t a Fascist; that they were afraid the Americans (which sounded pretty strange coming from an American) would put himin the chair; that he knew nothing about what was going on; that there were no Germans in Rapallo; that he’d travel from Rapallo to Rome only twice a month for the broadcast; that the Americans, again, were wrong to think that Ezra meant it to… (72).

Kończąc opis tej wizyty i najwyraźniej okazjonalnie komentując to zdarzenie, Brodski uogólnia zaobserwowane zachowanie dzięki odesła‑ niu go do skojarzenia z nazwą nabrzeża, którym wracał z Susan Sontag po tej męczącej wizycie:

I think I’d never met a Fascist – young or old; however, I’d dealt with a considerable­ number of old CP members, and that’s why tea at Olga Rudge’s place, with that bust of Ezra sitting on the floor, rang, soto speak, a bell. We turned to the left of the house and two minutes later found ourselves on the Fondamenta degli Incurabili (74).

Z przytoczonego tu we fragmentach kontekstu widać jednoznacznie, że Brodski czyni aluzję do trwałości i natręctwa przekonań, nieuleczal‑ ności postaw – zarówno faszystowskich, jak i komunistycznych, nie zmierzając bynajmniej do sięgających głębiej sensów metafizycznych czy emocjonalnych. To jedynie dająca szansę na uogólnienie topograficzna zbieżność na mapie miasta (informacja ta wygłoszona jest zupełnie en passant, tonem obojętnym; Brodski nie łączy przecież tego elementu spa‑ ceru bezpośrednio z tematem swoich refleksji): zapętlona w swojej fał‑ szywej wizji rzeczywistości stara kobieta mieszka tuż obok miejsca, kry‑ jącego w swej nazwie zarówno fundamentalizm, jak i nieuleczalność. Dość jednoznaczne i bardzo okazjonalnie umotywowane przytoczenie

5 W polskim tłumaczeniu fragment ten został rozdzielony na dwie odrębne całostki – odmiennie niż w oryginale i przekładzie rosyjskim. 34 Piotr Fast nazwy nabrzeża włoski tłumacz ekstrapoluje na całościowy sens tekstu Brodskiego. W jego ślady idzie autor przekładu rosyjskiego, chwytając się – w sytuacji dla niego niemal przymusowej – „koła ratunkowego” rzuconego mu przez włoskiego poprzednika. Rozpisuję się o tym wszystkim może nadto obszernie, wydaje mi się jednak, że konsekwencje interpretacyjne tych zabiegów mogą być, co się zowie, fundamentalne dla sposobu rozumienia nie tylko tego utworu Brodskiego, ale wręcz znacznej części lub nawet całej jego twórczości. Angielski tytuł, podobnie jak polski, niesie dość oczywiste znacze‑ nia pozwalające na odniesienie go do zawartości semantycznej tekstu. „Watermark”, znak wodny, czasami nazywany z łaciny filigranem, to nic innego jak rodzaj obrazu dostrzegalnego pod światło na karcie papieru, ukształtowanego dzięki różnemu stopniowi przezroczystości materiału, będącej rezultatem różnic jego grubości lub gęstości. W znaczeniu prze‑ nośnym, skojarzony z rangą opatrywanych nim dokumentów, może przywoływać szczególną wartość, niedostrzegalność, tajemniczość, ulot‑ ność itp. Brodski wykorzystuje jego wieloznaczeniowość, kreując dość prostą metaforę, skonstruowaną dzięki odniesieniu do semantyki wody – zagubionemu albo lepiej: odsuniętemu na drugi plan w procesie lek‑ sykalizacji owego „filigranu”. Słowo to bowiem – jeśli myśleć o nim w kontekście eseju Brodskiego – odsyła do żywiołu wody bezpośrednio, co wiemy zarówno dzięki temu, że mowa jest wszak o Wenecji, jak i dzięki jednoznacznym ste‑ matyzowanym passusom kreującym specyficzną wizję symbiozy wody i czasu w reprezentowanym przez poetę systemie metafizycznym, sta‑ nowiącym fundament jego refleksji nad światem i kondycją człowieka. Słowo „watermark”, rozbite (tak jak w pierwszym angielskim wydaniu – z intencji autora, i jak w polskim tłumaczeniu – z racji przymusów systemu językowego) na dwie całostki: „water­‑mark”, podkreśla, z jed‑ nej strony, semantykę wody, z drugiej zaś – owej wody „znakowość”. Ktokolwiek wie, jaką rolę przydawał temu żywiołowi rosyjski poeta, musi owej metafizycznej semantyce ulec niemal nieuchronnie –wów‑ czas określa ona całą lekturę tekstu, każąc doszukiwać się we wszyst‑ kich jego elementach sygnałów metafizycznego rozumienia świata i człowieka. Obiektem owej metafizycznej refleksji rosyjskiego noblisty jest, jak się przyjęło sądzić w większości poświęconych mu opracowań, O tytule eseju Watermark Josifa Brodzkiego 35 przede wszystkim czas – w dwóch podstawowych wymiarach: obiek‑ tywnym (wieczność) i egzystencjalnym (los człowieka), oraz emocjonal‑ ność jako podstawowa zasada kondycji ludzkiej. Zupełnie inaczej musi zostać zorientowana percepcja utworu noszą‑ cego tytuł Fondamenta degli Incurabili czy Набережная неисцелимых6. Tytuł ten będzie odsyłał czytelnika do jakości emocjonalnych, do „nie‑ uleczalnych” cech psychiki kojarzonych z postawą melancholijną7. Jak postaram się pokazać w obszerniejszej pracy o omawianym eseju, cha‑ rakterystyczne dla Brodskiego myślenie melancholiczne polega głów‑ nie na przyjęciu tezy, że melancholik to człowiek, który wie. Owa osta‑ teczna wiedza staje się tu nie tyle zestawem informacji o świecie, ile pełnym wewnętrznej pewności rozpoznaniem znikomości każdego „ja” wobec wszystkiego, co „poza” – sugestywnie tę kondycję melan‑ cholicznej świadomości wyraził Lars von Trier w przejmującym filmie Melancholia z 2011 roku. Mam poczucie, że przyjęcie tezy o specyficz‑ nym melanżu metafizyczności myślenia Brodskiego i melancholiczności podmiotu jego utworów pozwoli głębiej zrozumieć sens jego twórczości czy wręcz specyfikę jego mentalności i emocjonalności – Umberto Eco nazwałby to pewnie struttura asente. Oba te wątki przedstawieniowo­‑myślowe: (1) analiza metafizycznych refleksji zawartych eksplicytnie i implicytnie w eseju Brodskiego oraz (2) liczne i niezwykle różnorodne sygnały odsyłające się do żywiołu melancholii, pojawiające się w sposób stematyzowany w tekście eseju oraz w konstrukcyjnych decyzjach autora, obecne są, jak próbowałem pokazać, w głębokiej konotacyjnej semantyce tytułu tego dzieła. Wyzna‑ cza on, jak się wydaje, cały zespół sugestii interpretacyjnych, które winny stanowić przedmiot szczegółowej analizy niezwykłego utworu

6 W tłumaczeniu tego fragmentu tekstu, w którym pojawia się nazwa tego nabrzeża, Grigorij Daszewski stosuje dość charakterystyczny chwyt. Przytacza mianowicie w tek‑ ście głównym włoski toponim, opatrując go przypisem stanowiącym jego rosyjskie tłu‑ maczenie – równe przecież tytułowi całego utworu (zob. tekst rosyjski, s. 34). Na doda‑ tek, niezgodnie z rosyjską normą ortograficzną, drugie słowo tej nazwy zapisuje tu – jak po włosku – z dużej litery. Trzeba to pewnie potraktować jako wynikający z licencji poe‑ tyckiej sygnał interpretacyjnej rangi tego elementu świata przedstawionego. 7 Wystarczy tu przywołać charakterystyczne określenie melancholików jako „tych, co nigdy nie odnajdą straty”, zawarte w podtytule ważnej książki Marka Bieńczyka (2000). 36 Piotr Fast rosyjskiego noblisty – analizy odwzorowującej wielokształtny model wyobraźni zaprojektowany w partyturze lektury spajającej w jedno tak pozornie wzajemnie sprzeczne żywioły, jak myślenie metafizyczne i antymetafizyczną wrażliwość melancholijną8. Teza, którą tu wstępnie stawiam, może być znacząca dla rozumienia sposobu myślenia i kon‑ strukcji wielu utworów Brodskiego, a może wręcz całej jego twórczości, gdyż mimo powszechnego przekonania o metafizyczności jego dzieła (wiązanej zazwyczaj z podjęciem przez rosyjskiego poetę tradycji kla‑ sycystycznych), równie często odnotowuje się ironiczność i – głównie – autoironiczność wielu jego utworów, a także egzystencjalny i emo‑ cjonalny wymiar wierszy i prozy Rosjanina. Pisząc ongiś o rozumieniu czasu w jego poezji, dochodziłem do konkluzji sprowadzającej podej‑ mowaną przez niego refleksję egzystencjalną do wymiaru metafizycz‑ nego. Dzisiaj, bogatszy o kilkadziesiąt lat lektury, uznałbym raczej, że Brodski prowadzi z nami i z samym sobą wyrafinowaną literacką grę, w której tak pozornie sprzeczne żywioły jak metafizyczność i skłonność do melancholii pojawiają się w harmonijnej jedności, wbrew wszelkim oczekiwaniom nie kreując bynajmniej żadnego dysonansu poznaw‑ czego. Tę cechę konstrukcji i semantyki jego utworów, które postrzegam jako manifestację sposobu myślenia i odczuwania świata przez poetę, byłbym dziś skłonny uznać za przejaw myślenia ponowoczesnego.

Bibliografia

Bieńczyk, Marek. Melancholia. O tych, co nigdy nie odnajdą straty. Warszawa: Wydawnictwo Sic!, 2000. ---. Książka twarzy. Warszawa: Świat Książki, 2012. Bieńkowska, Ewa. Co mówią kamienie Wenecji. Gdańsk: Słowo / obraz terytoria, 2000.

8 Żywioł metafizyczny przeciwstawia melancholii Marek Bieńczyk, odwołując się do analiz Erwina Panofskiego, Raymonda Klibanskiego i Fritza Saxla. Bieńczyk pisze: „W znanej analizie melancholii renesansowej Panofsky, Klibansky i Saxl przeciwsta- wiają wyobraźni metafizycznej wyobraźnię matematyczną, charakterystyczną dla melan‑ cholii i oporną na spekulacje czysto metafizyczne, rozważające naturę i istnienie Boga” (2000, 81). O tytule eseju Watermark Josifa Brodzkiego 37

Brodskij, Iosif: Fondamenta degli Incurabili. Przeł. G. Forti. Venezia: Consorzio Venezia Nuova, 1989. Brodsky, Joseph. “In the Light of Venice”. The New York Review of Books, vol. 49, No. 11, June 11, 1992a: 90–92. Brodsky, Joseph. Water­‑mark. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1992b. Бродский, Иосиф. Сочинения Иосифа Бродского. Т. 7. Общая редакция Яков Гордин. Составители Виктор Голышев, Елена Касчаткина, Виктортор Куллэ. Санкт­‑Петербург: Пушкинский фонд, 2001. Calvino, Italo. Niewidzialne miasta. Przeł. A. Kreisberg. Warszawa: Czytelnik, 1975. Danek, Danuta. Dzieło literackie jako książka. O tytułach i spisach rzeczy w powie‑ ści. Warszawa: PWN, 1980. Górniak, Ewa. „Płaska ziemia”. Tygodnik Powszechny 2000. http://www.tygodnik. com.pl/kontrapunkt/15­‑16/gorniak.html [data dostępu: 17.10.2013]. Hejwowski, Krzysztof. Kognitywno­‑komunikacyjna teoria przekładu. Warszawa: PWN, 2004. Klibansky, Raymond, Panofsky, Erwin and Saxl, Fritz. Saturn and Melancholy: Studies in the History of National Philosophy, Religion and Art. New York: Basic Books, 1964. Okopień­‑Sławińska, Aleksandra. „Relacje osobowe w literackiej komunikacji”. W Problemy socjologii literatury. Red. Janusz Sławiński. Wrocław: Ossolineum, 1971. Anna Węgrzyniak Akademia Techniczno‑Humanistyczna­ w Bielsku­‑Białej

Więzy i więzi Ości w Ościach Ignacego Karpowicza

Ostatnia powieść Ignacego Karpowicza oferuje odbiorcy postmoderni‑ styczną „grę w ości”, oczywiście pod warunkiem, że ma on liberalny światopogląd i poczucie humoru. Intrygującym, wieloznacznym tytu‑ łem Ości przebijają wcześniejsze: Niehalo, Cud, Gesty oraz Balladyny i romanse. Wszystkie wymienione tytuły można potraktować jako słowa klucze tej twórczości, która konsekwentnie podważa „kościec”/ „ościec” narodowego kanonu. Teraz pisarz częstuje nas „ośćmi” – czymś, co kłuje i dławi, by wspomnieć karaska z Iwony, Księżniczki Burgunda Witolda Gombrowicza. Czytelnikom prozy Karpowicza, który z upo‑ dobaniem bawi się pustymi symbolami, ości pozostające w bliskim związku z rybą (symbolem Chrystusa) powinny kojarzyć się z chrześ‑ cijaństwem, wszak pisarzowi od początku doskwiera polska obycza‑ jowość, zależna od religijnych rytuałów. Tytułowe „ości” zapowiadają zmierzch kultury chrześcijańskiej, zwycięstwo „cywilizacji śmierci” nad „cywilizacją życia” (Karpowicz 2013, 342; cytując tę pozycję, dalej podaję tylko paginę). Dla „prawdziwych Polaków”, uczulonych na szarganie świętości, Karpowicz będzie uczniem Szatana i prowokatorem, dla po- nowoczesnych – rzecznikiem nowej etyki, wolnej od katechezy i hipo‑ kryzji, czyli tego, co w jego powieściowym świecie zazwyczaj idzie w parze. Wybieram więc dwa fragmenty (są to głosy powieściowych postaci: Mai i Ninel) – ustalające mój projekt lektury – z wyraźnym motywem „ości”: Więzy i więzi… 39

etyka i moralność nabierają ciężaru i sensu wyłącznie po oskrobaniu reli‑ gii do ości. Etyka religijna przypomina … panią nauczycielkę, pilnującą, żeby dzieci w czasie dużej przerwy nie kopały się po kostkach. Etyka oskrobana z religii do ości przypomina natomiast grupkę dzieci, usiłu‑ jących nie rozkwasić sobie wzajem nosa, gdy próby restytucji powalonej zawałem pani nauczycielki nie przyniosły były pozytywnego rezultatu (346). Okazała mu zakurzone, choć nadal lśniące wartości – szacunek i lojal‑ ność. Może jakieś inne jeszcze – ości, ogryzione do połysku przez nie‑ rozsądek, strach i zawiść (459).

Ości – jak inne powieści Ignacego Karpowicza – są prozą wyjąt‑ kowo „ościstą”, kłującą „tradycyjne wartości” Polaka, na które pisarz od początku reaguje alergicznie. Mając na uwadze jego skłonność do lingwistycznych gier, można zapytać o „inne jeszcze” wartości, które warto zachować. Mimo żywiołu nieskrępowanej zabawy i spodzie‑ wanego ataku na tradycyjny model kultury, odbieram tę powieść jako zaproszenie do rozmowy o wartościach. Choć niejednemu „stanie ona ością w gardle”, czyta się ją znakomicie, bo Karpowicz umie uwodzić. Jak powieściowy bohater Krzyś, lubi „niuanse i gry kontekstów, … sądy zanurzone w palecie szarości, detale mieniące się znaczeniem” (62). W Balladynach i romansach pisarz, dzięki sztuce uwodzenia dowcipną narracją i fabularnym konceptem, awansował na pierwszego postmo‑ dernistę swojego pokolenia, natomiast w Ościach uwodzenie staje się środkiem do rozmowy o wartościach. Narrator ironista, zachowując dystans wobec wypowiedzi bohaterów, z jednej strony akceptuje ich „program” etyczny, strzegący moralnej autonomii jednostki, a z drugiej – pokazuje konsekwencje tej wolności. W społeczeństwach poddanych presji / opresji zakazów i nakazów religijnych moralność często zostaje zawężona do obszaru seksualności. Ponieważ kontrola ciała wiąże się z kontrolą umysłu, burzenie opresyjnego ładu społecznego zaczyna się od uwolnienia ciała. Zgodnie z tym przekonaniem Karpowicz już w poprzednich powieściach profanował świętości: „Jezus Chrystus, ksywka Ichtys” żyje i pomaga „na koszt Nike” (2010, 285, 570). Poka‑ zywał, że świat napędzają: kłamstwo, magia i wiara w cuda, „wiara w to, że można wymknąć się stałym fizycznym organizującym funk‑ 40 Anna Węgrzyniak cjonowanie świata” (2013a, 211). Od początku atakował opresyjność pol‑ skiej kultury, która uzależnia jednostkę od trzech Matek: Ojczyzny, Koś‑ cioła i Rodziny, ograniczając jej swobodę ruchów i dojrzewanie zgodne z „autentyczną” (cokolwiek to znaczy) potrzebą. Karpowicz obserwuje, diagnozuje i projektuje. Ponieważ jest „niehalo”, bo nasza rodzinna wspólnota opiera się na schematach i hipokryzji, z upodobaniem ośmie‑ sza konserwatywne postawy i reakcje, przeciwstawiając im zachowania swobodne, nieobyczajne, zaskakujące, niezgodne ze społeczną normą kulturową. W Polsce o seksie rozmawia się półgębkiem, eufemistycznie, natomiast pisarz od początku łamie tabu, a momentami nawet ociera się o pornografię. Tytułowe „ości” mimochodem kojarzą się z Gombrowiczem (wart­ ‍‑ością jest niedojrzał-ość) i Białoszewskim (bohaterem Ości jest język), aczkolwiek Karpowicz, który „okrasił” powieść cytatami z prze‑ różnych tekstów literackich1, do tych „patronów” ani razu nie odsyła. Prowokator Gombrowicz – dla niektórych krytyków pierwszy post‑ modernista – ojczyźnie przeciwstawia „synczyznę”, Białoszewski (87) w wierszu namuzowywanie prosi muzę, by „natreściła” mu „ości”: „natreść / mi / ości / i / uzo”. W programowym wierszu (ma on wiele interpretacji) poeta lingwista drwi z natchnienia i zwraca się do muzy (języka) z prośbą o ościec ryby, o mi(ł)ość, o „ości”. W odmiennych kontekstach interpretacyjnych „ości” będą nośnikiem różnych znaczeń. Szkielet ryby (bielejące ości / wartości) może być znakiem śmierci, śmie‑ ciowym odpadem kultury chrześcijańskiej, ale również znakiem trwało‑ ści, fundamentem, kośćcem, który rozkłada się wolniej. Karpowicz idzie drogą przetartą. Gombrowicz i Białoszewski – każdy inaczej – moco- wali się z etosem wspartym na trójkącie: Bóg – Honor – Ojczyzna, i wyraźnie demonstrowali, że piszący nie wie, dokąd zaprowadzi go język, bo słowo pociąga za sobą inne słowa, dopisując nowe historie. Ich twórczość literacka była nieufnością, ich krytyka języka – krytyką kultury. W swoich „grach z językiem” obaj demonstrowali sztucz‑ ność. Białoszewski z powodzeniem uprawiał lingwistyczne ekspery‑ menty, Gombrowicz (101) pisał: „im bardziej jest się sztucznym, tym

1 Używam określenia „okrasił”, bo – podobnie jak w Balladynach i romansach – autor uprawia „sztukę cytatu” w guście postmoderny. Więzy i więzi… 41 bardziej można być szczerym, sztuczność pozwala artyście na zbliże‑ nie się do prawd wstydliwych”. Mocno podkreślam fakt, że w Ościach najważniejsza jest narracja, sam sposób opowiadania, eksponujący, jak mówią / myślą powieściowi bohaterowie, zależni od uprzedzeń, sche‑ matów postrzegania i wartościowania. W pierwszej lekturze trudno połapać się we wzajemnych relacjach (kto z kim), na szczęście odbiór powieści ułatwia kompozycja. Pisząc Ości, Karpowicz swobodnie korzysta z różnych konwencji dawnych i współczesnych. Fabuła rozwija się w układzie dramaturgicznym bądź poematowym (4 części z epilogiem) – tyleż konwencjonalnie (splątane losy bohaterów złożą się w całość powieściową), co niekonwencjonalnie (prezentacja postaci, wprowadzanie ich na scenę zdarzeń przypomina‑ jące rozbudowane didaskalia). Tytuły kolejnych części wyraźnie „pod‑ powiadają” autorski zamysł pokazania świata w ruchu – od rozpadu związków opartych na przymusie i grach, przez otwarcie na uczucia innego, do empatycznych zbliżeń i lepszej komunikacji. W rozbudowa‑ nej części pierwszej Osobne wzory autor przedstawia pierwsze postacie, w części drugiej Gry i sądy wszyscy bohaterowie grają przyjęte role – Ninel gra „w dobrą córkę”, Norbert gra przyjaciela domu, Kuan gra przykładnego męża, ale też piękną Kim Lee, Maria gra rolę szczęśliwej żony Maksa. W części trzeciej Wiem, co czujesz zawiązują się romanse (Mai z Frankiem, Ninel z Norbertem) i przyjaźnie (Mai z Andrzejem, Ninel z Norbertem). W części czwartej Słyszę, co do mnie mówisz posta‑ cie, które na początku były osobno, zbliżają się do siebie, tworzą nowe związki (partnerskie i siostrzane, np. Maja z Faustyną). Kompozycja powieści wyraźnie eksponuje galerię postaci, z któ‑ rych każda będąc inną, „osobną”, zarazem reprezentuje określony typ (w sensie społecznym czy psychologicznym). W części pierwszej wszy‑ scy są osobno: emocjonalna Maja i racjonalny Szymon trwają w bezna‑ dziejnym związku małżeńskim (łączy ich tylko syn); Andrzej pedant i Krzyś bałaganiarz od pięciu lat są razem, ale mieszkają osobno; Ninel, po dwu rozwodach, dzieli życie z kotem i niezbyt dobrze czuje się w roli córki czy matki. W myśl zasady: „im bliżej, tym dalej”, wszyst‑ kie związki z bliskimi osobami są trudne, skomplikowane. Skupieni na sobie i pracy, w natłoku rozlicznych zajęć, ludzie nie widzą / nie słyszą tych, z którymi dzielą życie. Trudno nazwać to egoizmem, w codzien‑ 42 Anna Węgrzyniak nym zabieganiu nie mają czasu na wsłuchiwanie się w potrzeby najbliż‑ szych. Dla każdej postaci można wskazać „matrycę” (psychologiczną, socjologiczną czy literacką), ale są one pod każdym względem „osobne”, poszczególne. Mając na uwadze antypedagogiczny charakter prozy Kar‑ powicza, zauważalny dystans wobec „osoby”/ persony jako podmiotu stałego, a także osobność (wyjątkowość, niepowtarzalność) życiowego wzoru powieściowych bohaterów, „osobne wzory” mimochodem koja‑ rzę ze zwrotem „wzory osobowe”. Do wzorów osobowych odsyła etyka chrześcijańska i tradycyjne wychowanie pokoleń Polaków – przez dom i kościół. Takimi wzo‑ rami są np. Matka Boska i siostra Faustyna Kowalska, mistyczka, apo‑ stołka Bożego Miłosierdzia. Marii, matki Jezusa przedstawiać nie trzeba, natomiast historię św. Faustyny, zakonnicy z klasztoru w Krakowie­ ‍‑Łagiewnikach, dobrze znają tylko katolicy. Na początku XXI wieku, po jej kanonizacji, gdy Jan Paweł II ustanowił święto Miłosierdzia Bożego, upowszechnił się w Polsce kult miłosiernego Boga, kochającego każdego grzesznika. Nieprzypadkowo zatem matka Mai ma na imię Maria, a jej siostra – Faustyna. Gdy skacowana Maja zarzuca mężowi, że „cuchnie matką”, jej „świętoszkowatym, trupim odorem” (34), Szymon zauważa, że ich matki są do siebie podobne:

Obie wierzyły w kościół, w dewocjonalia, czasem też w Jezusa. Fakt, że religijność Szymonowej matki pogłębiała się z wiekiem, kilka lat temu sięgając dna ortodoksji, łamanej jeśli nie przez świętość, to z pewnością przez beatyfikację, fakt ten w ogóle nie usuwał faktu innego: bardzo matkę kochał (34).

Racjonalny Szymon kocha matkę i czuje, że jest kochany, więc jej reli‑ gijność wcale mu nie przeszkadza. Antyklerykalnymi reakcjami Mai ste‑ rują urazy z dzieciństwa i ugruntowane uprzedzenia. Na nich buduje niechęć do matki zwanej Panią Cecylią i siostry Faustyny obarczonej czwórką dzieci. A właśnie z Mają narrator solidaryzuje się bardziej niż z innymi postaciami tej romansowej układanki. Nie lepiej od Pani Cecylii traktuje zaradną Marię, typową „matkę gastronomiczną” (Wal‑ czewska, 167), biegnącą z rosołkiem do chorego kochanka męża. Aby zachować domową harmonię, Maria długo unika konfrontacji z rzeczy‑ Więzy i więzi… 43 wistością. Woli nie znać tajemnic męża, a gdy je pozna, też umie sobie wytłumaczyć „dziwne” potrzeby Kuanka. Perfekcyjnie gra rolę szczęśli‑ wej żony, w przekonaniu, że właśnie tak trzeba, zgodnie z dekalogiem, nie odróżniając „miłości od powinności” (198). Bohaterowie Ości bardzo różnie pojmują miłość (ale to inny wątek). Narrator opowiada historię kilku rodzin w rozpadzie, których człon‑ kowie, uwalniając się od przymusu więzi (zniewolenia), tworzą nowe związki, nowe kombinacje „rodzinne”. Jak długo w nich wytrwają, czy faktycznie są usatysfakcjonowani i jaki to ma wpływ na synów, tego się nie dowiemy. Według różnych koncepcji pedagogicznych, dla dzieci najważniejszym wzorem są rodzice. Dlaczego więc Franek, syn Ninel, z rozbitej rodziny wychodzi nadzwyczajnie „zdrowy”, uporządkowany, niepokojąco „normalny”? Czy dlatego, że matka feministka nie apli‑ kowała mu wzorów myślowych właściwych kulturze represyjnej, ale nauczyła go altruizmu i prawdomówności, wychowała go bez obłudy? Nienormatywną, wstrząsową strategię wychowawczą przyjmuje też Maja, oferując nastoletniemu synowi rodzinę powiększoną o partne‑ rów biologicznych rodziców. Można powątpiewać w zgodne współży‑ cie rodzinnego „kwadratu” i zastanawiać się nad skutkami tego eks‑ perymentu. Choć fikcyjne historie mogą mieć ciąg dalszy poza ramą powieści, odbiorca ma prawo spekulować. Takie historie zdarzają się naprawdę, więc może warto o nich pomyśleć. Wszyscy bohaterowie Ości należą do klasy średniej i mieszkają w dzi‑ siejszej Warszawie (czas i miejsce są ważne, w stolicy szybciej zachodzą przemiany kulturowe charakterystyczne dla współczesnego świata). Poznajemy ich w konkretnych, codziennych sytuacjach, spotykają się przypadkiem – w autobusie, w klubie, na spotkaniu towarzyskim czy na festiwalu; zawiązując nowe znajomości, niejako przypadkiem wcho‑ dzą w nowe związki. Stopniowo odsłania się ich przeszłość, z tego, co mówią, myślą, co wie o nich narrator. Nie jest bez znaczenia, z jakich środowisk się wywodzą, jakie są ich relacje z rodzicami, z kim i jak byli lub są związani. Z ich historii – będących przecież narracją / interpreta‑ cją – wynika, że są okaleczeni przez toksyczne domy, nieudane związki rodziców, „chore” więzi rodzinne. Obnażając stereotypy, Karpowicz, ze swoją niechęcią do Kościoła, sam wpada w stereotyp. Najgorsi, bo zawsze zakłamani, są chrześcijanie. Swobodę myślenia najbardziej ogra‑ 44 Anna Węgrzyniak nicza światopogląd chrześcijański (w Cudzie – prawosławie, w Niehalo i Ościach – katolicyzm), a raczej nawykowe przywiązanie do gestów i rytuałów dla zachowania rodzinnego ładu (Maria, Pani Cecylia). Obse‑ syjny antyklerykalizm Karpowicza ma zapewne różne motywacje (oso‑ biste i pokoleniowe). Kreowane postacie „dziedziczą” te urazy w róż‑ nym stopniu. Maja uważa, że „katolicyzm to mieszanka hipokryzji i hierarchii [służąca] jedynie ogłupianiu i okaleczaniu ludzi” (341). Nato‑ miast jej syn, młody pankowiec, lubi jeździć z babcią na pielgrzymki i choć uważa się za anarchistę, do Kościoła ma stosunek obojętny („nie‑ groźne dziwactwo”). Maja katolicyzmu nie znosi głównie dlatego, że

odebrał jej dzieciństwo, albo też tak postanowiła zapamiętać wczesne lata i głównego przeciwnika. Zawsze czuła się gorsza od Matki Boskiej w wariantach Jasnogórskiej, Ostrobramskiej i tysiącu innych (247).

Niedorastanie do wzoru osobowego Madonny jako główna przy‑ czyna manifestowanej wrogości do Kościoła nie przekonuje nawet nar‑ ratora. Uwzględniając rozchwianie, wyobraźnię i emocjonalność Mai – „córeczki tatusia”, można przyjąć, że wyimaginowaną opresyjność wzoru Madonny domalowała jej pamięć, zawsze będąca użyteczną korektorką na usługach emocji. Poddając analizie biografie głównych postaci – choć będzie to uprosz‑ czenie, sprowadzające wielość do wzoru (taki trop sugeruje tytułowa formuła „Osobne wzory”) – dochodzę do wniosku, że źródłem kom‑ pleksów i porażek zawsze jest rodzina (trudne relacje pomiędzy rodzi‑ cami, konfliktogenne spory światopoglądowe, sprzeczne projekty świata). W XXI wieku kategoria „rodziny” wymaga uściślenia. Według sondaży dla Polaków najważniejsza jest rodzina – tradycyjna, stabilna, uświęcona sakramentem małżeństwa, gwarantująca właściwy przekaz wartości. Kto myśli inaczej, jest buntownikiem, zagraża polskiej trady‑ cji, nad którą czuwa duszpasterstwo rodzin. Choć Kościół nie akceptuje „nowych modeli rodziny” (takich jak rodzina niepełna, wtórna, kon‑ kubinat czy małżeństwo homoseksualne), to we współczesnym świecie kryzys tradycyjnej rodziny jest faktem, a z rzeczywistością nie wypada dyskutować. Czytając Ości jako rzecz o rodzinie, trudno nie zauważyć wielości przedstawionych wariantów. Każda postać jest „produktem” Więzy i więzi… 45 nieco innej rodziny. Związki trwałe, oparte na hipokryzji (rodzina Marii i Faustyny), wcale nie są lepsze od związków niesakramentalnych, przygodnych, bez sankcji prawnej. W prozie po roku 1989 zaroiło się od rodzin patologicznych i opre‑ syjnych, nierzadko skrojonych (czy interpretowanych) według współ‑ czesnej wiedzy psychospołecznej, modnych wersji freudyzmu, post‑ freudyzmu bądź rozlicznych teorii feministycznych. Wspominam o tym dlatego, że autor Ości często wykorzystuje dyskurs feministyczny. Noś‑ nikiem feministycznego programu naprawy świata jest feministka Ninel Czeczot. Prawie wszyscy bohaterowie mają „jakiś nierozwiązany prob‑ lem z matką” (20). Dla jednych będzie to tylko „dowcip z brodą, z Freu‑ dem w tle” (20), dla innych – teoria wyjaśniająca słabości i niepowo‑ dzenia. Po której stronie jest Karpowicz, nie wiadomo, gdyż do każdej „uczonej” wersji wyjaśnienia świata narrator pochodzi z dystansem, wszystkie bierze w nawias, prezentuje mnogość odmiennych, nierzadko sprzecznych poglądów sterujących zachowaniami „osobnych” postaci, np. Szymon czuje się dzieckiem Freuda, Lacana i Junga, „jeśli ktoś uwrażliwił się na mandale” (444). Niejako „sceniczna” strategia pre‑ zentacji zdarzeń – przy zachowaniu eseistycznej swobody żartobliwego komentarza – skłania odbiorcę do zajmowania stanowiska. Komentując losy bohaterów, narrator porusza modne kwestie socjologiczne, egzy‑ stencjalne czy psychologiczne, trzeba jednak zachować ostrożność, wziąć pod uwagę to, w czyim imieniu i w jakiej sytuacji swoje uwagi wypowiada. W świecie bez Ojca życie powieściowych bohaterów jest ucieczką – od natury, od siebie nieakceptowanego, od wzorów kultury ograniczającej potrzeby jednostki. Wszyscy czują się oszukani, rozczarowani i nieprzy‑ stosowani, ale tylko Krzyś wycofuje się z życia (kasuje profil na Facebo‑ oku, popełnia samobójstwo). Pozostali żyją „do przodu”, zakochują się, łapią małe chwile szczęścia (zgodnie z tym, jak sobie to wyobrażają), nie oglądając się wstecz, bez rozpamiętywania tego co minione, utra‑ cone (żadnej melancholii!). Otwarci na nowe związki, przede wszystkim szukają bliskości (blisk­‑ości). Odrzucając krępujący gorset tradycji, nie potrafią jednak uwolnić się od tego, co zostało wdrukowane w dziecięcą pamięć. Prawdomówna Maja, miotająca się między dwoma matkami: Naturą, która nie kłamie, i Kulturą, która „tka miraże” (122), zawsze 46 Anna Węgrzyniak mówi to, co chce powiedzieć, bo pamięta nos Pinokia (13). Znamienne, że w powieściowym świecie Ości (ość też jest rodzaju żeńskiego) nie ma ojców (są w tle, jakby ich nie było), czego nie można zarzucić mat‑ kom. O ile synowie kochają rodzicielki (czy dlatego, że więź z matką jest „zwierzęca”?; 19), o tyle relacje córek z matkami są bardzo skom‑ plikowane. Wydaje się, że autor kreuje postacie zgodnie z ich / naszą „pofreudowską” edukacją psychologiczną. Zważywszy na stale obecny w tej prozie wątek tożsamościowy, niechęć do religii wynika z niezgody Karpowicza na kulturowy reżim, definiujący rodzinę jako związek kobiety z mężczyzną, a płeć w kategoriach binarnych. Tożsamość sek‑ sualna kilku powieściowych postaci (Kuan / Maks / Kim Lee, Norbert, Kuba / Ninel) nie jest stała i oczywista, lecz „odgrywana”, zależna od kulturowego kontekstu i sytuacji – można by zatem przyjąć, że Karpo‑ wicz opowiada się za modelem konstrukcjonistycznym. Natomiast inne postacie pozwalają łączyć autora z esencjalizmem. (Na temat różnych modeli zob.: Basiuk, Ferens, Sikora, red. 2002; Banot, Barabasz, Majka, red. 2012) Taki balans jest charakterystyczny dla kampu, który nie opo‑ wiada się jednoznacznie za żadnym z modeli. „Zamiast rozstrzygać pojedynek między dwiema antropologiami na korzyść którejś z nich, kamp wciąga obie do inscenizacji i rozgrywa – w pokazach, dziełach, działaniach – różnicę między nimi” (Czapliński, Mizerka, 13). Tę „que‑ erową” prozę, utrzymaną w estetyce kampu, stającą w obronie wyklu‑ czonych, wyraźnie zaangażowaną w przemodelowanie świata, odbie‑ ram jako protest przeciw opresji kulturowych norm. W postmodernistycznej zabawie na śmietniku symboli, w grze, którą poprzedzają rozpoznanie nowej sytuacji oraz niezgoda na hipokry‑ zję w imię tradycji, ciągłości i świętego spokoju, jednak o coś chodzi. Chodzi mianowicie o bliskość, o miłość (jakkolwiek ją definiować), o prawo do bycia sobą, zgodnie z pożądaniem i autentycznym pragnie‑ niem podmiotu, które w „płynnej nowoczesności” jest zmienne, niestałe, zależne od zmieniających się potrzeb. Karpowicz nie jest szydercą. Pisze „lekko” i zabawnie. Bawi odbiorcę błyskotliwymi dialogami (w czym króluje Maja) i kabaretowym komentarzem. Opowiadając historie swo‑ ich bohaterów, kpinę dozuje z umiarem, bywa wyrozumiały dla śmiesz‑ nostek i ograniczeń, które tłumaczy uprzedzeniami, ciążeniem stereo‑ typów. Więzy i więzi… 47

Recenzując Ości, Czapliński (2013c, 12) wskazał „pudelkowy” cha‑ rakter powieściowego materiału. Może to i plotka, rozpoznawalna dla tzw. środowiska, znającego osoby będące prototypem postaci, ale ma to jakieś znaczenie wyłącznie dla wtajemniczonych. Każdy pisarz „żeruje” na otoczeniu, by wspomnieć wielkich realistów (Balzak, Prus, Orzesz‑ kowa), co ma jednak znikomy wpływ na odbiór. Doceniam badaczy ustalających prototypy bohaterów Lalki czy Nad Niemnem, ale czy taka wiedza wnosi coś istotnego do interpretacji? Asekuracyjnie dodam, że wiązanie Karpowicza z konwencją realizmu (jako jedną z wielu innych, wykorzystanych w tej powieści) uzasadnia respektowanie zasady życio‑ wego prawdopodobieństwa. Kreując swoich bohaterów, pisarz pozoruje zachowanie motywacji socjologicznej i psychologicznej (z wykorzy‑ staniem najnowszej wiedzy w zakresie socjologii i psychologii), toteż odbiorca niewidzący odautorskiej gry z tym, co mówią postacie, co i jak przejmują z modnych dyskursów, mógłby przeczytać Ości jako współ‑ czesną powieść realistyczną. Powinien jednak zauważyć, że bohatero‑ wie nie działają racjonalnie i nie dokonują wyborów według wartości, ale – jak głosi współczesna wiedza o człowieku – szukają racjonalnych uzasadnień dla swoich uprzedzeń i nawyków. To, co mówią, nie sprzyja krytycznej refleksji, raczej pomaga im utwierdzać się w przekonaniu, że tak jest dobrze. Szczególnym przypadkiem tożsamości rozchwianej, paradoksal‑ nie godzącej sprzeczności jest Norbert – trochę rasista, trochę liberał. Podwójnie „napiętnowany” (w sensie dosłownym, bo bezwłosy, i Goff‑ manowskim, bo gej) ucieka z lubelskiej prowincji do Warszawy, gdzie czasem może „pozwolić sobie na luksus bycia sobą […] wbrew popraw‑ nościowym narracjom” (175). Nowego życia uczył się w gejowskich klubach. Ma kochanka Wietnamczyka i kochankę intelektualistkę, ale „k/ościec” ma prawomyślny:

Przede wszystkim wierzył we wszystko, co się w niego wyuczyło za młodu. Wierzył w rzeczywistość hierarchiczną, wierzył w wyższość katolicyzmu nad innymi poganami, wierzył w wyższość Polaków nad innymi barbarzyńcami, wierzył w rodzinę jako wartość nad wartoś- ciami, w małżeństwo jako sakrament łączący mężczyznę i kobietę … (175–176). 48 Anna Węgrzyniak

Zgodnie z przyjętą „narracją poprawnościową”, Norbert, kocha‑ nek Maksa, uważa gejów za zboczeńców. Związek z Wietnamczykiem go upokarza, bo Azjatami gardzi, ale coś (co?) ciągnie go do rodziny kochanka. Szanuje Marię, „Polkę z dobrego rzymskokatolickiego domu” (182), lgnie do ich syna, a odwożąc matkę Marii, myśli o niej „teściowa”. Zapewne tak realizuje potrzebę niespełnionego ojcostwa i brak rodziny. Wieloletni związek z Maksem tłumaczy sobie poczuciem odpowie‑ dzialności za rodzinę: „ani jego żona, ani ich syn, ani dalsza rodzina by sobie beze mnie nie poradzili” (178). Ta paradoksalna racjonalizacja gejowskiego związku eliminuje wątpliwości i nie narusza wpojonego w dzieciństwie przekonania, że najważniejsza jest rodzina – „rodzina to podstawa” (182). Z jednej strony Norbert trzyma się swoich przeko‑ nań, kocha Maksa, zwłaszcza wtedy, kiedy Maks wchodzi w rolę Kim Lee, a z drugiej – kocha Ninel, która mu imponuje inteligencją i „gadką dydaktyczną”. Pod jej autorytarnym wpływem zaczyna myśleć. Socjo‑ lożka intelektualistka wychowuje go w duchu nowej, liberalnej popraw‑ ności politycznej, np. ruguje z jego słownika słowo „dziki”, tłumacząc, że to niestosowne określenie europocentryczne – „dziki seks” brzmi nieprawomyślnie (311). Urok tej prozy polega na tym, że poważne „treści programowe” (np. postkolonializm), pod którymi autor zapewne mógłby się podpi‑ sać, podawane są błazeńsko, prawie zawsze w sytuacjach niepoważ‑ nych, najczęściej w kontekście zmieniającym sens słowa czy zwrotu frazeologicznego. Odpryski różnych teorii, pojawiających się aluzyjnie w komentarzach czy dialogach bohaterów, narrator traktuje z przymru‑ żeniem oka. W moim odbiorze (podkreślam prywatność lektury) głównymi posta‑ ciami są kobiety: Maja, Ninel i Maria. Każda ma problemy rodzinne, każda musi sobie radzić z trudną, nietypową sytuacją. Maria, żona Wietnamczyka, „nie znosi skojarzeń” (192), stara się widzieć i wiedzieć tylko to, co nie zakłóci domowej sielanki. Kiedy „życzliwy” uświada‑ mia ją, że mąż jest gejem, „chroni się pod dachem schematu o nazwie: różnice kulturowe” (194), dla uspokojenia czyta album poświęcony Ojcu Świętemu lub wiersze „księdza biedronki” (ks. Jana Twardow‑ skiego). Maria, Pani Cecylia, Faustyna są Matkami Polkami, domo‑ wymi „pobożnisiami”, strzegącymi domu i dekalogu. Na przeciwnym Więzy i więzi… 49 biegunie sytuują się Maja i Ninel – kobiety wolne, niezależne, szukające własnej drogi. W pobieżnej, powierzchniowej lekturze sympatia nar‑ ratora jest po stronie tych drugich. Maja i Ninel to „gwiazdy” towa‑ rzystwa – dowcipne, błyskotliwe, dominujące, bezpośrednie w kon‑ taktach, lojalne wobec bliskich, brzydzące się hipokryzją. Choć należą do różnych pokoleń, są do siebie tak podobne, że Franek, syn Ninel, w Mai rozpoznaje to, co kocha, czyli „osobny wzór” swojej matki. Kobiety są indywidualistkami na różnych etapach życia, egotycznymi, oczekującymi od bliskich zrozumienia. Ninel Czeczot – jeśli wierzyć jej opowieściom – jest ofiarą: historii, bo doszło do pomyłki przy zapi‑ sie jej imienia (Ninel jest anagramem Lenina; 762); babci, która na cześć zamordowanego syna przerobiła Ninel na Kubę (już w dzieciństwie była zatem równocześnie i dziewczynką, i chłopcem); matki, która opo‑ wiada różne wersje jednego zdarzenia. Ninel odwiedza matkę z poczu‑ cia obowiązku, ale nie umie z nią rozmawiać, wręcz dusi się w jej towarzystwie. Ma za sobą antyreżimową, solidarnościową przeszłość, nieudane małżeństwo z opozycjonistą, dwa rozwody i bolesne roz‑ stanie z kotem, jedyną istotą, do której może się przytulić. Ninel Cze‑ czot nie lubi Łodzi i roli poprawnej córki, dla matki wciąż pozostającej Kubą. Relacji z matką nie da się już naprawić, więc traktuje powroty do Łodzi jako rodzaj przykrego obowiązku. Opowiadając o jej losach, narrator znakomicie wykorzystuje elementy dyskursu feministycz‑ nego, który zabawnie wybrzmiewa w różnych sytuacjach codziennych, np. obdarowana przez Wietnamczyka figurką ptaka Ninel interpretuje go jako prezent „wietnamskiego Freuda”, a zarazem słyszy „przebija‑ jący się przez tkanki rozmaitych nie­‑, pod­‑, nadświadomości, w które została wyposażona przez kulturę, głos: figurka ptaka to figurka pta- ka” (315). W zdarzenia powieściowe wchodzimy z Mają, o pokolenie młodszą „siostrą” Ninel:

2 To imię Karpowicz „wywiódł” zapewne z antykomunistycznej działalności Ninel. Gra „Leninem” pełni tu różne funkcje: koresponduje z historią repatriantów, uzasadnia transpłciowość Ninel, sugeruje lewicowe korzenie współczesnego feminizmu. Z kolei nazwisko Czeczot (aluzja do filomaty, Jana Czeczota znad Niemna) kieruje uwagę odbiorcy na szlachecko­‑litewski rodowód, ideowe wychowanie. 50 Anna Węgrzyniak

wiek 36 lat, waga 52 kg; wzrost 160 cm; oczy piwne, orientacja seksualna: hetero ze skłonnościami do dramatu i eksperymentu; orientacja świato‑ poglądowa: depresja; narodowość: w zaniku; stosunek do ofiar Holokau‑ stu: empatyczny (7).

Wykorzystując poetykę kwestionariusza, Karpowicz nie tylko przed‑ stawia postać, ale – co równie ważne – zapowiada narracyjną optykę. Pół żartem, pół serio charakteryzuje postać, która wprowadzi nas w śro‑ dowisko „nienormalsów”, rozpęta serię spotkań i związków. Maja, biolożka w średnim wieku, wegetarianka, depresyjna, histeryczna, zaprzyjaźniona z gejami, empatyczna, zawsze staje po stronie słabszych bądź wykluczonych, jest uczciwa – nie gra i nie kłamie, bez względu na konsekwencje, mówi dokładnie to, co myśli (208). Fabuła powieści wiele zawdzięcza jej pomysłom (działalność w blogosferze, prywatka, romans z Frankiem, projekt życia w rodzinnym czworokącie). W tym miejscu warto dodać, że wśród powieściowych bohaterów przeważają osoby w wieku średnim, około czterdziestki (wyjątkiem jest sześćdzie‑ sięcioletnia Ninel), różniące się upodobaniami i orientacją seksualną, przy czym – co warto powtórzyć – płeć nie jest tu oczywista. Maja i Maria są kobietami, Krzyś i Andrzej – gejami, ale Ninel, Norbert i Wietnamczyk – postaciami o „płynnej”, nieustalonej tożsamości sek‑ sualnej. Szczególnie ciekawym przypadkiem jest Wietnamczyk, bezkoli‑ zyjnie godzący trzy różne role. Na co dzień Kuan – zaradny biznesmem, „dobry mąż i ojciec, przykładny, zintegrowany ze społeczeństwem oby‑ watel” (179) – dba o rodzinę, w niektóre weekendy, jako Maks, spędza czas z kochankiem Norbertem, ale naprawdę szczęśliwy czuje się wów‑ czas, gdy wchodząc w rolę drag queen, staje się piękną Kim Lee. Norbert zauważa, że

w szczelinie pomiędzy Maksem a Kim Lee, gdy jeden człowiek przecho‑ dził w drugiego w sposób niepojęty … on był nareszcie prawdziwy. On, czyli nie Maks i nie Kim Lee … ta postać bez imienia, to krótkotrwałe zaklinowanie w prawdzie. [Norbert] zazdrościł tej postaci, że na kwa‑ drans uwalnia się od Maksa, Kuana i od Kim Lee, ale się ich nie wypiera, że jest uderzająco i boleśnie prawdziwa, i może nawet nie zdaje sobie z tego sprawy (180–181). Więzy i więzi… 51

Wyraźnie zazdrości Maksowi tajemniczej „szczeliny”, tego, co jest poza / ponad płcią. Dobrym komentarzem do tego wyznania wydaje się teza: „Tylko nie‑kobieta­ udająca kobietę może wzbudzić czystą fascyna‑ cję” (Baudrillard 2005, okładka). Zdaniem Norberta (a może i Karpowi‑ cza?), właśnie „w szczelinie” artysta / artystka wymyka się wszystkim rolom, gubi płeć i rasę, przekracza siebie, transcenduje. W innym miej‑ scu, przy innej okazji, czytamy w Ościach, że o wyjątkowej wartości tego doznania decyduje brak innych transgresji (dawniej transgresję umożli‑ wiało przeżycie religijne). W tej powieści kwestia tożsamości dotyczy preferencji seksual‑ nych, a nie narodowych. W przywołanym wcześniej cytacie charakte‑ ryzującym Maję pojawiło się określenie „narodowość w zaniku”. Nie tylko odnosi się ono do bohaterów tej prozy, ale jest też – typowym dla współczesnych tendencji w wielonarodowościowej, integrującej się Europie – unieważnieniem tożsamości narodowej. W powieści wielo‑ krotnie powraca kwestia stosunku do Czeczenów, ofiar Holokaustu czy Srebrenicy, najczęściej jako sygnał empatycznej postawy Mai, która klei swoją tożsamość z dawnych urazów i nowej wrażliwości, budowa‑ nej na fundamencie ponowoczesnej etyki (np. Rorty, Bauman) i mod‑ nych narracji równościowych. Z kolei „depresja” – ironicznie nazwana „orientacją światopoglądową” – odsyła do psychologicznych i socjo‑ logicznych teorii na temat cywilizacyjnej choroby XXI wieku, której przyczyn upatruje się w rozpadzie fundamentów światopoglądowych (brak kośćca / ośćca), zaniku więzi z bliskimi, wypaleniu zawodowym, w narastającym poczuciu nudy, rutyny, pustki. Maja, będąca typową ofiarą świata w rozpadzie, leczy depresję blogiem. Już wstępna charak‑ terystyka zapowiada depresyjno‑liberalny­ „światopogląd” bohaterki, a przy okazji również narratora, który niejako w punktach informuje, jak patrzy na ludzi, także – według jakiego wzoru portretuje swoich bohaterów. Przedstawia ich wyraźnie i „detalicznie”, zawsze w określo‑ nej sytuacji, nieprzypadkowej, istotnej dla dalszego ciągu zdarzeń. Kim jest narrator, nie wiadomo. Często przyjmuje on punkt widzenia postaci, niejako mówi w ich imieniu, a zarazem – jak rasowy postmo‑ dernista – godząc sprzeczne dyskursy, pokazuje, że w bliskich, erotycz‑ nych kontaktach znikają „światopoglądy”, człowiek „wyzwala się od wpływu idei” (Czapliński 2013c, 12). Karpowicz eksponuje gry językowe, 52 Anna Węgrzyniak bawi się metaliteracko – już w pierwszej sekwencji, gdy Maja jedzie uli‑ cami Warszawy, narrator ujawnia swoją „maszynę do pisania”: „Auto‑ bus wolno stał w korku i niepoprawnym związku frazeologicznym” – to zdanie (kontaminacja zwrotów „wolno jechał” i „stał w korku”) od razu uczula odbiorcę na „poetycki” charakter narracji. Tak mógłby opo‑ wiadać Miron Białoszewski, prekursor współczesnych lingwistów, np. bliskiej Karpowiczowi Krystyny Miłobędzkiej (lubi ją Andrzej, czyta ją Maja, „wypisem” z jej poetyckiej prozy zaczyna się fragment, w którym poznajemy Ninel). Skutkiem przekształcenia zwrotu frazeologicznego, nad dosłownością (autobus niby jedzie, posuwa się tak wolno, że właś‑ ciwie stoi) nadbudowuje się sens metaforyczny. Czemu służy lingwi‑ styczna igraszka, okaże się niebawem. Wracając do fabuły, wracam do autobusu. Czerwcowy upał, popsuta klimatyzacja, kleiste ciała, kichający mężczyzna, wyglądający na Cze‑ czena („orientacja seksualna: zajebać Rosjan”), i biedna Maja. Biedna, bo utraciła pracę, nie stać ją na taksówkę, i biedna, bo rozsypuje się jej życie. Taki początek wyraźnie zapowiada powieść osadzoną w realiach XXI­‑wiecznej stolicy. Maję, ofiarę bloga – na którym z nudy i despera‑ cji, w konwencji real­‑fantasy opowiadała o zdarzeniach w Mordorze bis (gdzie zajmowano się rozmnażaniem i mordowaniem bakterii) – zwol‑ niono z pracy za karykaturalne przedstawienie współpracowników instytutu. „Zakorkowana” w domu, w pracy i w sobie, realizowała się w blogosferze, dającej poczucie wolności. Bezrobotna Maja wraca zatem do domu z czarnym workiem na śmieci3, który funkcjonuje tu jako rekwizyt, a zarazem metafora mortualno‑śmieciowej­ kondycji bohaterki. Trudno też pominąć chwyty kompozycyjne. Z jednej strony Karpowicz tak sobie plotkuje, a z drugiej – stosuje poetyckie reguły kompozycji. Motyw utknięcia (z pierwszego zdania) powraca raz jeszcze: „Wsiadła do autobusu i utknęła. Po pierwsze w korku. Po drugie, w upale. Po trzecie, w sobie” (13). Pierwsze zdanie powieści: „Autobus wolno stał w korku [wyróż. – A.W.]” zapowiada niby­‑życie Mai (jak też innych bohaterów powie‑

3 Motyw worka powróci w finale rozdziału: idąc do domu, Maja – „niby zewnętrzną ciążę” (14) – dźwiga worek, do którego zgarnęła instytutowy dobytek, rękawiczki, fartuchy, kapcie, pipetę, maski… Wiele tutaj argumentów na realizm i „detalizm” tej powieści. Więzy i więzi… 53

ści). W kontekście sekwencji finałowej słowo „wolno” uwalnia nowe znaczenia: po pierwsze znaczy „powoli”, po drugie kojarzy się z „wol‑ nością”. Zdanie inicjalne w formie wariantywnej „Autobus utknął w korku” (252) powraca w połowie powieści, gdy zdesperowana Maja w drodze do ojca wspomina wspólne życie w domu rodzinnym, gdzie nie było ani miłości, ani wzajemności. Rodziców podzieliły światopo‑ glądy (Betlejem i Darwin), ojciec – ironista i samotnik – bywał potwo‑ rem, a matka „zawekowana w dusznym środowisku katolickim” (246) przeniosła tę tradycję do własnego domu. Udało się jej ze starszą córką Faustyną, ale Maja jako „córeczka tatusia” poszła w stronę przeciwną. Oddaleniu od matki sprzyja forma „Pani Cecylia”, której używa, zwra‑ cając się do niej, cała rodzina. Pewnie zdarza się, że ktoś o matce mówi „Pani”, rzadko jednak tej formy używają dzieci. Koncept Karpowicza zasługuje na szczególną uwagę, tym bardziej że wspiera go żartobliwy dopisek­‑przerywnik, udający wypis z fachowego źródła, np. słownika czy wikipedii: Pani to „rzeczownik odnoszący się do każdej kobiety, której nie znamy (por. matka) lub z którą łączą nas oficjalne stosunki (por. P. Jasnogórska)” (246). Maja kocha matkę, lecz jej nie zna i nie próbuje poznać, bo jest uprze‑ dzona4. Nie przepada też za siostrą obarczoną czwórką małych dzieci i „rozmodloną” atmosferą jej domu. Gdy czuje się bardzo rozbita, jedzie do ojca dziwaka, z góry wiedząc, co ją spotka. „Wizyta u ojca od prawie dwudziestu lat przypominała wizytę na obcej planecie” (259), bo zgodnie z obyczajem, ich rozmowa sprowadzała się do koszmarnej wymiany zło‑ śliwości. Zapytana o powód wizyty, Maja odpowiada, że chciała zobaczyć „kogoś bardziej niż [ona] sama”, a ojciec dopowiada: „samotnego i żałos‑ nego”. Już ta scena wystarczy, by empatycznie wczuć się w depresyjno­

4 Kwestia uprzedzeń, których w Ościach szczególnie wiele, zajmuje Karpowicza szcze‑ gólnie. Powołując się na dzieło Mahzarina R. Banajia i Anthony’ego G. Greenwalda Blin‑ dspot: Hidden Biases of Good Poeple (Plamka ślepa. Ukryte uprzedzenia dobrych ludzi), pisze o tym, jak bardzo jesteśmy zależni od automatyzmów. „Testy IAT w USA pozwo‑ liły stwierdzić, że aż 75 proc. badanych wykazuje silną automatyczną preferencję rasy białej. Sporą niespodzianką było też odkrycie, że także osoby wykształcone … zdecydo‑ wanie opowiadające się za egalitaryzmem rasowym test oblały” (Karpowicz 2013b, 10). W tej grupie znaleźli się też Mahazrin i Greenwald, którzy od dawna zajmują się prob‑ lemem dyskryminacji w USA. 54 Anna Węgrzyniak

‍‑histeryczną konstrukcję psychiczną („doły”, dragi, dziwne zachowania). Maja boi się kolejnego ataku depresji, ma poczucie nie­‑życia. „Zakorko‑ wana” w sobie stoi w miejscu, nie żyje (czego znakiem jest czarny worek, niesiony jak ciąża), zapada się w emocjonalną dziurę. Jednak mając na uwadze kierunek rozwoju powieściowych zdarzeń, trzeba zauważyć, że sytuacja nie jest beznadziejna, bo Maja jest wolna. Syn dorasta, mąż za granicą, za nudnym towarzystwem z instytutu nie tęskni, więc może wydarzyć się coś nowego. Od „wolno” do „wolności” zaledwie jeden krok, wystarczy zrzucić krępujące więzy i poczuć się wolną. Trzymam się pierwszego zdania, bo w mojej lekturze Ości to również rzecz o woln­‑ości, o ludziach, którzy pewnego dnia zrzucają bagaż przywiązań (życie wstecz) i spragnieni bliskości, wchodzą w nowe związki. Ale czy można uwolnić się od toksycznych związków z bli‑ skimi, od „wdrukowanych” w psychikę uprzedzeń i atomatyzmów? Z psychicznego zastoju wyprowadzi Maję przypadkowo spotkany (właśnie w autobusie) Franek. Od momentu spotkania zaczyna się coś dziać. W ostatnich partiach powieści, pod wpływem nowych okoliczno‑ ści, bohaterom udaje się zweryfikować uprzedzenia, podjąć próbę poko‑ nania dzielących ich „mostów”, ułożenia sobie życia na nowo, jeśli nie lepiej, to przynajmniej w zgodzie ze sobą5. Nowym związkom sprzyja mobilność. Pomysłowy autor zastosował roszadę: kochanek Franek właśnie wrócił z Berlina, a Szymon, mąż Mai, językoznawca afrykanista, wyjechał do Niemiec realizować grant. Ana‑ lizując kłopoty komunikacyjne z żoną i problemy zawodowo­‑życiowe (trudność zrozumienia „konstrukcji nieczasownikowych, wyrażających znaczenia egzystencjalne” oraz miłość rozjaśniającą park i ludzi), Szy‑ mon sam dla siebie jest przedmiotem autoanalizy. „Szymon szybuje” – świadom­‑ość (samoświadom­‑ość) odrywa się od podmiotu. Szy‑ mon kocha,

5 Maja, która gardziła siostrą, zarazem jej zazdroszcząc (409–410), stopniowo zbliża się do Faustyny i jej dzieci, pobożna Faustyna w złości nazywa siostrę „egoistyczną, kawiorowo­‑lewicową pizdą” (406), którą gardzi, ale jej zazdrości (457). Gdy mąż Fau‑ styny odchodzi z sąsiadem­‑kochankiem jest zrozpaczona, ale gdy mija szok, uświada‑ mia sobie, co zyskała (nie lubiła go, teraz nie musi udawać, jest wolna). „Dał jej dzieci, teraz da rozwód i alimenty” (468). Również pani Czeczot, matka Ninel, po śmierci męża zrzuca małżeński gorset, śpiewa, je to, co lubi, jest wolna. Więzy i więzi… 55

ponieważ staje się trzecioosobowy. Unosi się w trzeciej osobie, we wraż‑ liwej, współczującej i socjologizującej narracji nad samym sobą w pierw‑ szej osobie … najdoskonalsza forma bytu to trzecia osoba liczby poje‑ dynczej. (105)

Uwzględniając znakomitą parodię stylu uczonego językoznawcy, który po odkryciu, że „prawdziwa […] inteligencja umie naśladować bełkot” (109), nabrał szacunku dla wypowiedzi niejasnych, sądzę, że „szybowanie Szymona” ma wiele wspólnego z szybowaniem autora (nie dlatego, że Karpowicz jest afrykanistą). Zauważmy, że narrator konsekwentnie unika pierwszej osoby. Pisząc w trzeciej, niejako wciela‑ jąc się w swoich bohaterów, może zaistnieć w „najdoskonalszej formie bytu”, z którą korespondują: „transempatia” (empatia z drugiej / tam‑ tej strony?), „przedwspółczucie” (współczucie poprzedzające współ‑ czucie?), „obokprotoplasta” (ktoś obok założyciela rodu) i „zapłeć” (coś poza płcią). Może na chwilę uciec od „tego ja nieokreślonego, pozba‑ wionego cech dystynktywnych, monadycznego” (105). Każdy z wymie‑ nionych neologizmów powstał przez dodanie morfemu słowotwórczego wnoszącego komponent przestrzenności („trans”, „przed”, „obok” i „za”) do słów, których znaczenia lokują się w polu semantycznym boga. W świecie bez Boga rolę oka – obserwującego, współodczuwają‑ cego i współczującego – przejmuje narrator. Jego „boskie” oko patrzy, ale nie ocenia. Będący „protoplastą” grających w ości postaci, wyposaża je w swoje problemy, swoją inteligencję, wiedzę, uczuciowość. Autor Ości nie powie „Szymon to ja”. Zasadniczą różnicę pomiędzy Ignacym Karpowiczem a Gustawem Flaubertem („Pani Bovary to ja”) wyznacza dystans wobec stosowanych konwencji (np. realizmu). Argumentem potwierdzającym szczególną bliskość autora z Szymonem może być zabawne zdanie metaliterackie, zawierające tytułowe formuły części drugiej („Gry i sądy”) oraz pierwszej („Osobne wzory”), pełniące tutaj funkcję czytelnych autoaluzji: „Szymon płacze wielopłaszczyznowo, także na metapoziomach, nie stroniąc od metasensów … Nad grami i sądami; snami i jawami, osobnymi wzorami… [wyróż. – A.W.]” (110). Bohater płacze z bezsilności, natomiast autor świetnie się bawi, zamy‑ kając tę scenę kabaretowym akcentem. Na tym właśnie polega zwycię‑ 56 Anna Węgrzyniak stwo piszącego nad bohaterem – ucieczka od „ja”, zabawa w samo‑ świadomość, gra sensów, migotanie znaczeń. „Szybując nad światem powieściowym” Karpowicz też myśli o sobie, o swoich uprzedzeniach (np. wobec katolików), o kłopotach z komunikacją, o relacjach z rodziną. Plotkując o Warszawie, opowiada o sobie. Jest stale obecny w komenta‑ rzach, wycinkach lektur, w zabawnej opowieści, w skrzących się dow‑ cipem dialogach. Nie ukrywa porządku metaliterackiego. Brak zaufania do figury losu sprzyja układaniu historii mało prawdopodobnej, wymy‑ ślonej, potrzebnej jako ościec / kościec, niezbędny do pokazania zjawisk polskiej rzeczywistości na początku XXI wieku (np. swoboda obycza‑ jowa, sytuacja instytutów naukowych, akcje feministyczne, sieć skle‑ pów z azjatyckim „badziewiem”, kluby gejowskie, zakorkowane ulice stolicy, konferencja unijna), które można dowcipnie skomentować. Prze‑ niesienie spojrzeń i opinii, często doraźnych, wynikających z kontekstu sytuacyjnego bądź skojarzenia z innym tekstem, zapewnia zachowanie ironicznego dystansu. Wartością Ości jest właśnie gra, niekonkluzyw‑ ność, względność, kpina, autoironia. Oceny i spekulacje autor zostawia odbiorcom, którzy w zależności od własnych gustów i projektów świata mogą dopowiadać, dywagować, domniemywać, zgodnie z ich prywatną potrzebą, np. zadając pytania „hodowane” na konwencji serialowej (Jak długo przetrwają nowe związki? Dlaczego Krzyś popełnił samo‑ bójstwo?), pytania natury socjologicznej (o kierunek przemian kultury i hipotetyczny efekt destabilizacji), genderowe pytania psychologiczne bądź filozoficzne (o płeć, podmiot, tożsamość, wartości…). W Ościach każda z postaci ma swoją historię rodzinną, która tłuma‑ czy nawyki i uprzedzenia. Przed banałem chronią Karpowicza przy‑ jęta strategia narracyjna (nie wiemy, z którymi sądami bohaterów nar‑ rator się zgadza, a które odrzuca) i estetyka kampu. Kreując postacie, autor niejako empatycznie przyjmuje ich język i punkt widzenia. Iro‑ niczny komentarz ma tutaj wartość refleksji autoironicznej. Narrator – gracz tożsamy z autorem – jest Mają, Andrzejem, Krzysiem, Szymo‑ nem, Ninel. W ich usta wkłada istotne, krytyczne komentarze do rze‑ czywistości, zgodne z niepisanym „programem” autorskiego zaanga‑ żowania w przebudowę mentalności. Przed pojawieniem się postaci na powieściowej scenie odbiorca otrzymuje wyraziste wstępne charaktery‑ styki. Zanim losy bohaterów się zaplączą i poplączą, autor – mimo post‑ Więzy i więzi… 57 modernistycznej żonglerki cytatami i kryptocytatami, dbający jednak o porozumienie z odbiorcą – relacjonuje ich obecną sytuację życiową, upodobania, lektury, stosunek do świata. Przedstawia ich z dystansem, zabawnie, ironicznie, a zarazem empatycznie – w taki sposób, że trudno tych postaci nie polubić. Co je łączy? Miejsce zamieszkania, sytuacja kryzysowa (a może to stan trwały?), rozpadające się związki, zachowa‑ nia nietypowe (neurotyczne), swoboda obyczajowa. Odbieram Ości jako powieść obyczajową z życia Warszawy w okresie kulturowej transfor‑ macji. Dawne wzory już nie obowiązują, a nowe z trudem przebijają się przez „skorupę” tradycyjnego polskiego społeczeństwa. W świecie przygodnym rodziny rozpadają się bez dramatów, a nowych konfigu‑ racji wolnych związków nie wieńczy happy end. W ostatniej scenie – jak w Proustowskim salonie – całe towarzystwo czy może jedna wielka rodzina (?): Maja, Szymon, Juli, Franek, Norbert, Maks i Andrzej spoty‑ kają się na kolacji u Ninel. Nie przyszła tylko Maria i brakuje Krzysia6. Rozmowa toczy się w kilku językach. Śmieją się, żartują, „czasem coś poważniejszego, czasem jakiś spór, jakaś etyczna blizna, moralna krosta [wyróż. – A.W.]” (462). Rolę odautorskiego komentarza pełni znakomicie dobrany fragment z esejów Olgi Tokarczuk (2013, 462):

Heterotopianie zupełnie inaczej rozumieją też słowo „rodzina”. U nich rodzinę może tworzyć na przykład jedna starsza kobieta i jej dwana‑ ście kotów. Albo trzy przyjaciółki plus partner jednej z nich, bo wszyscy pasjonują się makrobiotyką. Albo dwie homoseksualne pary mieszkające w secesyjnej willi, o którą trzeba dbać.

Czy Karpowicz sugeruje, że tradycyjna rodzina jest utopią? Raczej diagnozuje, pokazuje złe i dobre skutki rozpadu małżeńskiej więzi oraz plusy i minusy nowych związków. A może w ogóle nie ma „normal‑ nych” rodzin? Wolność jest wartością, ale czy ułatwia życie?

6 Krzyś, partner Andrzeja, jest autorem książki Szafa. Homobiografie polskiej litera‑ tury (300). Zdaniem Andrzeja zgubiła go uczciwość, bo naiwnie wierzył w „prawo do szczęścia każdej istoty ludzkiej, niezależnie od koloru skóry czy innych ingrediencji” (301), zapominając o tym, że „uczciwość i szczerość często oznaczają śmierć, cywilną lub fizyczną …” (301). Książkę Krzysia poleca Ninel, która ceni jego odwagę, empatię i gest odkłamywania. 58 Anna Węgrzyniak

[Ninel] Kochała i nienawidziła jednocześnie tę cywilizację osła, w której żyła, owies i siano […], nienawidziła tej szlachetnej cywilizacji zawie‑ szenia, wolności wyboru, wolnej woli. Zazdrościła wszystkim debilom tej Ziemi (457).

Maja eksperymentuje, Ninel się miota i tylko rodzinie Marii nie grozi żadna katastrofa. Gdzie biegnie więc granica między kompromisem i hipokryzją? Tą powieścią Karpowicz włącza się do społecznej dysku‑ sji na temat nowej etyki i nowych modeli rodziny, które już zaakcep‑ towali Obama i Cameron, a polski parlament konsekwentnie odrzuca. W tym kontekście nie można lekceważyć aktualnego wymiaru powieści pokazującej ludzi połamanych przez idee i religie. Nie twierdzę, że Ości to powieść z tezą, lecz dyskretnie sugeruję gejowski rodowód antyka‑ tolickiej batalii Karpowicza, który – śladem przetartym (pierwszy był Gombrowicz) – uderza w Ojca i konstruuje świat „płynny”, w którym ani płeć, ani światopogląd (czego przykładem jest Norbert) nie są stałe. Dekonstrukcja tradycyjnych związków (czy więzi) ma zapewne różne przyczyny; tu na plan pierwszy wysuwa się potrzeba miłości. W poszu‑ kiwaniu bliskości bohaterowie Ości tworzą nowe związki i małe pry‑ watne wspólnoty, niezależne od idei. W Niehalo pisarz pokazuje frustracje zagubionych i spadek po PRL, w Ościach – z określonej pozycji – uważnie śledzi przemiany kulturowe i formowanie się nowej etyki (liberalnej? ponowoczesnej? feministycz‑ nej?). Zawsze więcej widzi „wykluczony” (Żyd czy gej), ten, kogo boli, kto nie przystaje do schematów. Po rybie zostały nam ości – mówi Ignacy Karpowicz, posiadacz „rybiego” nazwiska (karp to wigilijna potrawa Polaków). Podejrzewam, że znakomity, wieloznaczny tytuł powieści jest efektem lingwistycznej gry z fikcyjnym „otczestwem” (Karpo‑ wicz – syn Karpia). Pamiętając o prośbie Mirona („natreść / mi / ości”), dostrzegam w „ościach” znak ambiwalentny; po zmierzchu „ryby” jed‑ nak zostaje ościec / kościec / szkielet. Życie trwa dalej, a żeby żyć, trzeba opowiadać. Więzy i więzi… 59

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“Ich mot wende in mi way”: The Construction of Masculinity through Travelling in Le Pèlérinage de Charlemagne and the Stanzaic Guy of Warwick

The citation appearing in the title of this study comes from the stanzaic Guy of Warwick, written c. 1300 and preserved in the so‑called­ Auchin‑ leck manuscript (the National Library of Scotland Advocates’ Manus‑ cript 19.2.1), but originating from the Anglo­‑Norman Gui de Warewic, a romance written in England c. 1220 (Wiggins 2013). Guy’s agenda, “I must continue my journey” (GW 2664),1 is equally applicable to the plans of setting off to the East that are made by Charlemagne in Le Pèlérinage de Charlemagne.2 The idea of voyage and its sub‑category,­ a pil‑ grimage, in relation to masculinities seems to deserve a closer inspection in the two texts, one of which is related to the chansons de geste tradition and the other rather to romance. In Women Pilgrims in Medieval England Susan Signe Morrison notices a gap in the criticism of medieval pilgri‑ mage and its sites of worship consisting in inadequate scope being devo‑ ted to female pilgrims. On the one hand it was “a normal social activity for numerous women,” but on the other it determined the female travel-

1 The quotations from Guy of Warwick will come from Wiggins’ edition (2004) and will be followed by the abbreviation GW along with line numbers. 2 According to Anne Lizabeth Coby the poem is not earlier than 1150 (2), even though its dating has usually ranged from the late eleventh to the late thirteenth century (1). “Ich mot wende in mi way”: The Construction of Masculinity… 61 ers’ gender identity to a great extent (Morrison, 44). As Morrison cla‑ ims, the association between pilgrimage and Virgin Mary’s maternity and the femininity of virginal female saints shaped medieval images of what it meant to be a woman (44). Here I intend to fill in yet another critical gap, this time the one concerning the relationship between pil‑ grimage and medieval masculinities in the two texts, one French and one English.3 Voyage or pilgrimage has traditionally been imagined as a deeply transformative activity. In order to prove that point, Morrison quotes Alphonse Dupront, who adopts a spatial perspective on the experience. Morrison writes the following about Dupront’s theory of pilgrimage: “the pilgrim is a man who walks on foot through space, becoming ‘other,’ transmuting both man and the space he passes through. The purpose of pilgrimage is to meet the other, and this alterity transmu‑ tes the pilgrim … The act of pilgrimage liberates the pilgrim from quo‑ tidian life and makes a rupture with the everyday” (Dupront 373, 412, qtd. in Morrison, 85). We shall analyze here the psychological space of the central characters in the narratives under scrutiny and broach the question of physical space that surrounds them in our search for trans‑ formation and gender formation. In terms of the relationship between a wandering male narrative and the domain of history the two poems represent two opposing situations. The author of Le Pèlérinage relied on his audience’s knowledge of the tradition of pilgrimages to the East and on the historical facts associated with the person of Charlemagne, while the author of Guy contributed to the formation of a new legend for Eng‑ land out of utterly non‑historical­ facts. Furthermore, in the French nar‑ rative Charlemagne’s masculinity is ultimately ridiculed as if to coun‑ terbalance his historical role in the political and military world, whereas

3 Le Pèlérinage was more likely written in France than in England, despite its Anglo­ ‍‑Norman features and its being seen for the last time in 1879, when the manuscript Royal 16 E VIII of the British Library went missing, but Guy of Warwick is undoubtedly an English narrative, as English as the legend of Robin Hood and similar to it in its wide popularity, folk imagery, and relationship to specific historical and geographic sites; the places most often associated with the legend of Guy of Warwick are Warwick, an impor‑ tant Norman kingdom, Winchester, King Athelstan’s capital, and Wallingford, from which Guy’s father originates in the Anglo­‑Norman version (Richmond, 14). 62 Anna Czarnowus the idea of male prowess of the fictitious Guy needs to be constructed from scratch in the course of the plot development, since there is no one historical model for that figure, not to mention a widely­‑known one.4 Le Pèlérinage has consequently been termed a satire on politics of the times, a light‑hearted­ comedy, a parody with or without satire, and in generic terms a chanson de geste, a folktale, and a pious story (Coby, 2–3), whe‑ reas Guy was written with a serious, legend­‑making intent and the out‑ come is equally non­‑parodic. Guy has been diagnosed as a work inspi‑ red by “chansons de geste, romances of Chrétien de Troyes, hagiography, chronicles, recent history, and social customs,” as Velma Bourgeois Richmond summarizes it, but it is an elevated text rather than a satiri‑ cal one (4). The two poems share a courtly style, according to Coby sho‑ wing that the French poem must have been influenced by the culture of romance (2), while Guy is indubitably a fully developed romance, albeit a popular one. Le Pèlérinage is based on the historical facts of Charlemagne main‑ taining good relations with the Patriarch of Jerusalem and with Harun­ ‍‑al­‑Rashid, the Caliph of Baghdad. Those diplomatic contacts found their reflection in the legend of his travelling to the East and his acqui‑ ring relics on the way, which was first recorded in the late tenth cen‑ tury by Benedictus de Sancto Andrea, a monk of Monte Socrate in Italy (Coby, 12). The French narrative was not the first account creating this fiction on the grounds of facts, but the idea of pilgrimage was so impor‑ tant for the text’s editors that the manuscript was titled The Travels of Charlemagne to Jerusalem and Constantinople or Le Pèlérinage de Charle‑ magne already in its very first editions in the first half of the ninetee‑ nth century (Coby, 14). I would argue that pilgrimage is central to this narrative because it is a transformative experience in the sense of sha‑ ping gender identity and constructing a specific type of masculinity. The historical Charlemagne chastized the so­‑called “false pilgrims,” who put the voyages to their own commercial benefit and mingled with real pilgrims only to be exempt from toll, as Morrison reminds

4 Richmond names William Marshall from L’Histoire de Guillauime le Marechal writ‑ ten in French as a possible model (16–20), along with St. Alexis and William of Orange (20–30); Judith Weiss mentions other, less obvious, antecedents of that figure, such as William Marshal and Harold Hardrada (Weiss, 8). “Ich mot wende in mi way”: The Construction of Masculinity… 63 us when quoting Charlemagne’s 796 letter to King Offa of Mercia (7). In Le Pèlérinage he is made a false pilgrim himself, obviously not in the sense of avoiding paying toll and distributing merchandise on his way to Jerusalem and Constantinople, but through his materialistic and power­‑crazed plans that he manages to fulfill in the course of his jour‑ ney undertaken under the cover of religious travelling. Making money and increasing one’s social position could be two intentions of false pil‑ grims. Aleksandra Witkowska reminds us of yet another goal, that of undertaking a successful journey within what she calls “pilgrimage tourism,” a tendency that partly replaced the originally noble idea of pilgrimage as a special way of ascetic life (9). It needs to be investiga‑ ted whether Charlemagne’s pilgrimage signals the existence of such pil‑ grimage industry at the time of the poem’s composition; the industry did not share much with the original design of a religious nature. Yet another version of a pilgrimage venture was a crusade, initially not cal‑ led a crusade at all, but a peregrination, so perhaps Charlemagne’s ven‑ ture should more aptly be called a crusade.5 From the 1920s traditionalist scholars have been defining the cru‑ sade as a journey to the Holy Land. This criterion alone would make the voyage of Charlemagne and the exploits of Guy crusading ventures. A different stance on the issue was expressed by‑called theso­ plura‑ lists, who thought that organization and procedures defined a crusade (Lock, 289). The latter attitude extended the usage of this term tothe expeditions against Eastern European pagans, the Albigensians and the Husites (Coby, 11). It seems, however, that the two medieval texts in que‑ stion include elements of the crusading ideology, the primary element being the emphasis laid on developing a specific type of masculinity: a military­‑oriented one, centered on gaining fame and reputation, and conquering all that is to conquer. Importantly, the movement eastwards that was made by the Franks meant more or less the same for Muslims there regardless of the Westerners’ intentions: Muslims did not distin‑ guish between pilgrims, crusaders, and settlers and they called all of

5 Peter Lock evokes the words iter and peregrinatio as the ones used during the first three crusades to the Holy Land. From the Fourth Crusade the words Cruce signati, Pas‑ sagium generale, Negotium Jhesu Christ, and Expeditio crucis started to be used (Lock, 291). The term “crusade” appeared in Western Europe as late as 1638 (Lock, 289). 64 Anna Czarnowus them “Al Franj” (Lock, 289). All of those travellers could be equally aggressive and destructive according to the Easterners. Apart from the crusades, which with time started to be called croiserie and croisement, there were also pilgrimages related to the “pilgrimage industry,” whose association with the distribution of relics was very close.6 The French text belongs to a rich tradition which made the Franks on the First Crusade believe that they were following in the footsteps of Charlemagne (Lock, 305). The literary Charlemagne is like those cru‑ saders, because similarly to them he wishes to visit the holy places. He declares: “La croiz e le sepulcre voil aler aurer” [I wish to worship the cross and the sepulchre] (PC 70).7 Nevertheless, at that point of the narrative the anonymous author ridicules Charlemagne’s masculinity, since the ruler is simply taunted by his wife which is the reason why he undertook the journey in search of fame and riches. She does it with the words: “Del rei Hugon le Fort ai mult oi parole./ Emperere est de Grece e de Constuntinoble./ Il tent tute Perse tresque en Capadoce,/ N’at tant bel chevaler de ci en Antioche./ Ne fut tel barnez cum le sun, senz le vostre” [I have often heard of King Hugo the Strong, Emperor of Greece and Constantinople. He holds all Persia as far as Capadocia and there is no finer knight from here to Antioch. Apart from yours, there has never been such a fine company of men as his] (PC 45–50). Charlemagne com‑ prehends the hidden allusion that he is not as powerful as Hugo, since he replies to his wife: “Ne dusés ja penser, dame, de ma vertuz” [My lady, you ought not to have doubted my power] (PC 56). Here Charle‑ magne is inspired to go on a strange journey eastwards, whose intended result is not really specified. Not all other narratives about pilgrimages to the Holy Land have to, like Le Pèlérinage, provide their readers with similarly ridiculous ima‑ ges of dominated husbands. In the stanzaic Guy of Warwick we have the story about a kind­‑hearted man inspired by his beloved to take great effort in the course of his adventures, since he is the son of a provincial

6 Villehardouin and Joinville’s accounts also include such nouns as croize / croisse (cru‑ sader), firent croise (make crusaders) and se croizer (take the cross) (Lock 2006, 291). 7 The quotations from Le Pèlérinage will come from Burgess’ edition and will be follo‑ wed by the abbreviation PC and line numbers; the translation will also come from this edition. “Ich mot wende in mi way”: The Construction of Masculinity… 65 steward and she is an aristocrat. He declares to Felice’s father that he is motivated by his affection for her rather than by the want of riches:

And Y schuld spouse a wive Ich hadde lever hir bodi alon Than winnen al this warldes won With ani woman o live. (GW 147–150)

The day of their wedding confirms that Guy still reacts to his young and beautiful wife with enthusiasm. Another possible reason for this emotio‑ nal reaction could be the confirmation of his social status through mar‑ riage, since at the wedding he is surrounded by aristocracy: “That frely folk in fere/ With erl, baroun, and mani a knight/ And mani a levedy fair and bright” (GW 183–185). There is a potential here for exposing Guy’s vanity and desire for splendour, but it is quickly concealed by the decision he makes soon after being successfully wedded to Felice. He ponders on “Jhesu omnipotent/ That alle his honour hadde him lent” (GW 244–245). His very low mood results from the reflection that “Mani man he hadde slayn with wrong” (GW 251) and he needs to repent for it. He declares to Felice that, despite his deep devotion to her, he needs to go on a pilgrimage alone: “To bote min sinnes ichil wende/ Barfot to mi lives ende/ To bid mi mete with care” (GW 262–264). As Lee C. Ramsey insists, his need for self­‑aggrandizement is concealed here (59) under the pretense of a deep spiritual transformation that requires him to abandon his young wife. The pilgrimages that Guy undertakes firstly are not enough for him, since on his return he decides to make yet other trips to the East, where this time he will not fight for the right to marry the woman he loves, but for the good of Christianity. In the French poem the satirized Charlemagne travels to Jerusalem, where he is warmly welcomed by the Patriarch. The Frankish ruler firstly sits on the chair on which Jesus once sat in the company of his apostles: “Cum il vit la chaere, icele part s’aprocet/ Li emperere s’asists, un petit de reposet” [Seeing the chair, he approached it and sat down to rest a while] (PC 119–120). The comparison of Charlemagne and his twelve peers to Jesus and the apostles must have seemed ridiculous to the text’s medieval audience, but the Patriarch in the text reacts to it in a different manner: “Sis as en la chaere us sits mames Deus” [You 66 Anna Czarnowus

… have sat in the chair in which God himself sat] (PC 157). The act of sitting on a piece of furniture validates Charlemagne’s power and the Patriarch is the first one to ever call the ruler “Charles Maines” (PC 158). The Patriarch is then no wiser than the ruler, or perhaps he understands the law of the stronger in the world dominated by lust for possessions and power. During pilgrimages stress was laid on the issues of sin, peni‑ tence, and absolution, which meant that relics became most important (Lock, 305). Hence it is not surprising then that both Le Pèlérinage and diverse versions of Guy’s legend include the topic of relics. The heroes are offered relics by the powerful people in the East, who acknowledge their greatness.8 In Le Pèlérinage the transfer of relics follows the ini‑ tial acknowledgment of the Frankish ruler’s power: the Patriarch gives Charlemagne Jesus’ “sudarie” [shroud] (PC 170), “un des clous averez que il out en sun ped” [one of the nails from his feet] (PC 175), “la sainte corone que Deus out en sun chef” [the holy crown from his head] (PC 176), and “le calice que il benesquid” [the chalice which he blessed] (PC 177). Minor relics are also handed over only to be followed by “del leyt sainte Marie dunt ele aleytat Jhesus” [some of the Virgin Mary’s milk with which she fed Jesus] (PC 187). This special relic had a gender­ ‍‑specific background. Morrison devotes this gender­‑specificity a lot of critical attention in her considerations of female pilgrimages, since she discusses the belief that Saint Thomas à Beckett had the ability to turn water into milk (18) and the importance of a vial of Mary’s milk that the second most popular English shrine of Walsingham boasted of (23). Special ampullae filled with holy water and a drop of this milk were sold there in order to bring the female pilgrims aid in their potential problems with fertility, childbirth, and lactation (24). Morrison defines this relic as more “gender­‑specific,” as she calls it, than others (16). In the French narrative Charlemagne, whose children are not mentioned in the text, is given this relic perhaps in order to question his masculi‑ nity a little, or at least to add a new aspect to the literary figure custo‑ marily associated with belligerence and other chivalric virtues. The tex‑ tual image undermines what we know of Charlemagne from chansons

8 The version of the Guy legend where particular importance is attached to relics is William of Malmesbury Gesta Regum Anglorum (Richmond 12). “Ich mot wende in mi way”: The Construction of Masculinity… 67 de geste and hints at the possibility of his having to form his masculinity in the course of the voyage, since before his pilgrimage he is boyish rather than manly and no father to his (hypothetical) children, but rat‑ her a more effeminate figure. Here femininity becomes symbolic rather than literal and gender can be attributed to literary characters on the grounds of how they behave. Charlemagne’s possible lack of agency, while agency was a quality conventionally attributed to men in medieval culture, becomes even more realistic in the scene of his arrival at Constantinople, where he enters Hugo the Strong’s palace. The palace turns out to be situated in the realm of the marvellous, since it is an architectural construction swi‑ veling at the slightest gust of wind:

… L’estache del miliu neelee d’argent blanc. Cent coluns i ad tut de marbre en estant, Cascune est a fin or neelee devant. de quivre e de metal tregeté douz enfanz: Cascun tient en sa buche un corn d’ivorie blanc. Si galerne ist de mer, bose ne altre vent, Ki ferent al paleis devers occident, In le funt truner e menut e suvent, Cumme roe de char qui a tere decent. Cil corn sunent e buglent e tunent ensement Cumme taburs u toneires u grant cloches qui pent. Li uns esgardet le altre ensement cum en riant, Que co vus fust viarie que tut fussent vivant. [The pillar in the centre was inlaid with white silver and a hundred columns of marble stood there, each inlaid with pure gold at the front. There was a sculpture in copper and metal of two children who carried in their mouths horns of white ivory. If any wind, blowing from the sea, struck the palace on the west side, it would make the palace revolve repeatedly, like a chariot’s wheel as it rolls earthwards. Their horns blared and bellowed and thundered, just like a drum or a clap of thunder or the tolling of a huge suspended bell. They looked gaily at each other and you would have sworn they were alive.] (PC 349–357) 68 Anna Czarnowus

In her study “The Palace of Hugo de Constantinople” Margaret Schlauch mentions the theory that historic Byzantine architectural stru‑ ctures inspired the description of this palace and she even suggests that the author either made a similar voyage to Constantinople or at least read accounts of the existence of numerous buildings of the kind, in our times put together by Jean Ebersolt (501). Schlauch focuses parti‑ cularly on one architectural detail of the edifice, which is the myste‑ rious statue that represents two boys, “two smiling youths, each hol‑ ding an ivory horn, who acted as weathervanes” (500). The statue is an integral part of the palace, as before the storm the air flows through the ivory horns that the boys hold and makes the whole constru‑ ction vibrate. She identifies it as the‑called so­ “vocal statue,” that is a statue meant not only to please the eye, but also to produce sound (502). The sight experienced by Charlemagne would thus be a lite‑ rary equivalent of the Eastern man­‑made marvels, as Scott Light‑ sey calls the artifacts produced for European and Oriental, including Byzantine, rulers, in order to please them and the people gathered at their courts (55–87). Georgius Codinus’ De Antiquitatibus Constantino‑ politanis, a description of Byzantine edifices, records a statue similar to that in Le Pèlérinage. The figure depicted in the statue blew its horn whenever the one who asked it the question was a cuckold: “if the suspicion were true, the statue groaned; if not, it remained silent upon being questioned” (Schlauch, 502). Is the fact that Charlemagne walks under the statue of the two boys and perhaps awaits them to blow their horns indicative of his possible problems with the wife? It cannot be proved that the poem’s medieval audience did not have such associations, if they knew such legends associated with the real vocal statues. The weakness of Charlemagne’s masculinity is then exposed upon his coming to Constantinople even though he “wins” the confrontation with King Hugo. This is not at all a situation of Lévi­‑Strauss’ transfer of women between men as summarized by Jef‑ frey Jerome Cohen in the following citation: “woman is definitio‑ nally a ‘mystery’ in the exchange system; her voice and agency are wholly excluded” (Cohen viii). The situation in the French poem is the opposite: Charlemagne’s agency seems to be superficial since he sets off on a pilgrimage exclusively because of his wife’s words. The narra‑ “Ich mot wende in mi way”: The Construction of Masculinity… 69 tive on becoming male is subversive, since it presents the Frankish ruler as if he was an object sent abroad by his wife. The “becoming male” never happens, since Charlemagne’s masculinity is thoroughly under‑ mined in the course of the pilgrimage and not created or solidified. Still, Charlemagne clings to his self‑image­ that he disseminated through the boasts he uttered at Hugo’s court, so he does not realize the frail nature of his own masculinity. The plot of Guy reveals how the formation of masculinity was ima‑ gined in medieval culture, but it does not adopt a satirical take on it. Guy undertakes his pilgrimages despite the initial erotic attraction of Felice, who was consistently presented as beautiful in all the versions of the legend. He adopts the way of humiliation in order to repent for his sins and does not commit further ones during the pilgrimage. The plot of the stanzaic poem commences when the Middle English Guy in couplets, also from the Auchinleck manuscript, ended: it takes its read- ers from the marriage between Guy and Felice to Guy’s death as a her‑ mit once he has finished all his journeys. If the twisted geography of Le Pèlérinage was only a pretext for presenting the supposed maturation of Charlemagne, the space in the stanzaic Guy constitutes a genuine oppor‑ tunity for exploration and the changing of oneself. This is how Rebecca Wilcox writes about the series of Middle English legends about Guy from the Auchinleck manuscript: “the collection suggests that the per‑ son or family who commissioned the book was interested in the East as a place of exploration, adventure, conquest, and Christian faith” (219). In the stanzaic poem Guy sets off, as A.S.G. Edwards called it, on a “one­ ‍‑man crusade” (94), which here mingles the masculine belligerent and militaristic effort with the process of becoming like a monk and, ultima‑ tely, a hermit. Being a knight is not enough: one needs to become a miles Christi fighting against demons in his hermitage in the end. Felice her‑ self calls Guy’s first venture a pilgrimage (“Mi lord is went fro me his way/ In pilgrimage to fond” (GW 426)), but this does not exhaust the list of activities that he undertakes on the way, which includes fighting aga‑ inst infidels, cultural confrontations with Eastern Christians and slaying Amoraunt, a Saracen giant. Paradoxically, the point at which he deci‑ des to become a hermit appears to be a natural consequence of his cru‑ sading, since the Orient was where he encountered his role model for 70 Anna Czarnowus the pious life, Earl Jonas. The confused geography of the land he visits becomes a background for real transformation from a masculine knight to a reclusive religious man. The actual geographical location does not matter, as the anonymous author implies, once the crusading male con‑ structs his new mature self in the course of it. Becoming a deeply reli‑ gious man seems to be the highest stage of perfection in this imaginary rather than real world. Guy’s story is no parody of “becoming a man,” but a genuinely religion­‑oriented narrative, in contrast with the French poem. Further‑ more, in Le Pèlérinage there was no close identification between Char‑ lemagne and his wife. The voyage was not presented in the context of courtly love, but rather against the background of two types of violence: the violence of henpecking and the one the ruler threatened to use aga‑ inst his wife. In Guy courtly love between the characters develops only to be replaced by higher virtues: the military exploits in the name of Christ, that is becoming a miles Christi, and the humble life of a hermit. Felice agrees to all those and does not demonstrate any agency at all, since, to quote Ramsey, “after her marriage to the hero, she becomes closely identified with him, as is implied by the fact that she always dies when he does or immediately afterwards” (46). The ideology of the poem seems to be claiming that he develops his masculinity to the full by becoming a recluse. A perfect medieval man, such as Guy, should overcome the limitations of flesh and become an epitome of piety. The hero already issues lengthy supplications to God before he starts his life of a penitent; he prays before he has to confront Colbrond, a champion of the Danes who attack England:

“Lord,” seyd Gii, “that rered Lazeroun And for man tholed passioun And on the Rode gan blede, That saved Sussan fram the feloun And halp Daniel fram the lyoun, Today wisse me and rede. Astow art mighti heven­‑king Today graunt me thi blisseing And help me at this nede; And Levedi Mari ful of might “Ich mot wende in mi way”: The Construction of Masculinity… 71

Today save Inglondes right And leve me wele to spede.” (GW 3013–3024)

The piety manifested in such prayers was the element which greatly contributed to the text’s popularity, as Marianne Ailes insists (26), hence it may be assumed that the attitude of Guy presented the stan‑ dards of how a man should evolve as he matures. The later versions of the legend of Guy even evolved in the direction of a saint’s life, as John Lydgate’s fifteenth‑century­ Guy of Warwick demonstrates (Edwards, 88). In Le Pèlérinage the physical space of the pilgrim alters considerably, following its own logic, but the psychic one does not, even though Charlemagne returns home cherishing the illusion that it did. In Guy the highest achievement appears to be: “In the forest hermite bicome/ Mine sinnes forto bete” (GW 3446–3447), that is a radical psychological transformation. Characteristically, neither of the two heroes changes his heart upon contact with the religious and ethnic others, since their mee‑ tings with alterity only solidify their feeling that they represent the one true religion and that their ventures that mingle pilgrimage with cru‑ sading are a righteous cause. Charlemagne becomes thirsty for power over other kingdoms, whereas Guy is not interested in them, as Ramsey comments on it: “The kingdom is not such an important matter, and Guy … never actually wins one, although he is offered several” (46). Male pilgrimages in the two narratives are not a normal social activity, but the opportunity for self­‑aggrandizement and for constructing one’s masculinity. Traversing physical space is only a pretext for focusing on one’s mental one, which results in Charlemagne solidifying his idea of being a perfect masculine figure and Guy taking on certain qualities of his pious medieval masculinity to the full, as it occurs when he becomes a hermit. 72 Anna Czarnowus

Works Cited

Ailes, Marianne. “Gui de Warewic in its Manuscript Context.” Guy of Warwick: Icon and Ancestor, edited by Alison Wiggins and Rosalind Field. Cambridge: D.S. Brewer. 2007. 12–26. Burgess, Glyn. “The Pilgrimage of Charlemagne.” The Pilgrimage of Charlemagne. Aucassin and Nicolette, edited and translated by Glyn Burgess. New York and London: Garland Publishing, 1988. 29–89. Coby, Anne Elizabeth. “Introduction” to The Pilgrimage of Charlemagne. Aucassin and Nicolette, edited and translated by Glyn Burgess. New York and London: Garland Publishing, 1988. Cohen, Jeffrey Jerome and Bonnie Wheeler. “Becoming and Unbecoming.” Beco‑ ming Male in the Middle Ages, edited by Jeffrey Jerome Cohen and Bonnie Wheeler. New York: Garland Publishing, 2000. vii–xx. Dupront, Alphonse. Du Sacré: Croisades et pélérinages: Images et langages. Paris: Gallimard, 1987. Ebersolt, Jean. Le Grand Palais de Constantinople. Paris: Ernest Leroux, 1910. Edwards, A.S.G. “Speculum Guy de Warwick and Lydgate’s Guy of Warwick.” Guy of Warwick: Icon and Ancestor, edited by Alison Wiggins and Rosalind Field. Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2007. 81–93. Lightsey, Scott. Manmade Marvels in Medieval Culture and Literature. New York and Houndmills, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007. Lock, Peter. The Routledge Companion to the Crusades. London and New York: Routledge, 2006. Morrison, Susan Signe. Women Pilgrims in Late Medieval England. London and New York: Routledge, 2000. Ramsey, Lee C. Chivalric Romances: Popular Literature in Medieval England. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984. Richmond, Velma Bourgeois. The Legend of Guy of Warwick. New York and Lon‑ don: Garland Publishing, 1996. Schlauch, Margaret. “The Palace of Hugo de Constantinople.” Speculum 7 (1932): 500–514. Weiss, Judith. “Gui de Warewic at Home and Abroad: A Hero for Europe.” Guy of Warwick: Icon and Ancestor, edited by Alison Wiggins and Rosalind Field. Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2007. 1–11. Wiggins, Alison, ed. Stanzaic Guy of Warwick. Kalamazoo, Michigan: Medieval Institute Publications, 2004. Accessed May 20, 2013. http://www.lib.rochester.edu/camelot/teams/guywfrm.htm>. ­‑­‑­‑. “Stanzaic Guy of Warwick: Introduction.” Stanzaic Guy of Warwick, edited by Alison Wiggins. Kalamazoo, Michigan: Medieval Institute Publications, “Ich mot wende in mi way”: The Construction of Masculinity… 73

2004. Accessed May 20, 2013. . Wilcox, Rebecca. “Greeks and Saracens in Guy of Warwick.” Pulp Fictions of Medieval England: Essays in Popular Romance, edited by Nicola McDonald. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2004. 217–240. Witkowska, Aleksandra. “Peregrinatio religiosa w średniowiecznej Europie.” Peregrinationes. Pielgrzymki w kulturze dawnej Europy, edited by Hanna Manikowska and Hanna Zaremska. Warszawa: Instytut Historii PAN, 1996. 9–16. Andrzej Wicher University of Łódź

The Place of William Shakespeare’s (Lost) Cardenio in the Context of the Late Romances

To deal, or rather to try to deal, with the text of Shakespeare’s Cardenio, one must in practice focus on the play associated with the name of Lewis Theobald, and entitled Double Falsehood, or the Distressed Lovers. This play, published in 1728, was claimed by Theobald himself to have been an adaptation of The History of Cardenio written by William Shakespeare in collaboration with John Fletcher, and performed originally in 1613. The manuscript of The History of Cardenio has been lost, but Theobald, otherwise a rather obscure figure, claimed that he had access to it, or at least to manuscripts based on it. This is nowadays strongly distrusted, as there was apparently nobody else who saw those manuscripts, and there are critics who believe that Double Falsehood is Theobald’s play, rather than Shakespeare’s, or “that Theobald was a fraudster trying to pass off a play by Massinger as Shakespeare’s work, injecting additional Shake‑ speare into the text to render his forgery more plausible” (Hammond, 5). On the other hand, we may read that there is, among Shakespearean scholars, “a growing conviction that Theobald’s adaptation is indeed what remains to us of an otherwise lost Shakespeare­‑Fletcher collabo‑ ration once called Cardenio or The History of Cardenio” (Hammond, 5). I do not pretend to be able to contribute anything to this controversy, therefore let me put the vexed question of Double Falsehood’s authenticity and authorship into brackets, and let me treat this so called Theobald’s play as if it were the lost Shakespeare’s Cardenio, or at least as something sufficiently similar to it. This measure is also additionally motivated The Place of William Shakespeare’s (Lost)… 75 by the fact that I am interested, first of all, in the plot of the play in que‑ stion, rather than in its style or its language which, while containing many Shakespearean echoes and allusions, do not, admittedly, show the artistic quality that characterizes Shakespeare’s Last Plays, let alone his best comedies or problem plays. Double Falsehood is not, however, a bad play. As Brean Hammond recognizes: “The play has much to offer its audience” (25), and it‑ cer tainly offers a lot of variety, containing indoor and outdoor scenes with quite a lot of dramatic action. The events shown in the play con‑ stantly border on a tragic resolution, but, eventually, a happy ending is achieved, and it is happy for everybody, including the villains, or rather one villain, which of course may already remind the reader, or viewer, of such Shakespearean romances as The Tempest, or The Winter’s Tale, but also such plays as Measure for Measure, or The Two Gentlemen of Verona. The latter play, even though it is hardly one of Shakespeare’s last plays (indeed it is one of the first, if not actually the first) is particu‑ larly often quoted as analogous to Double Falsehood; little wonder if we consider that the title Double Falsehood could just as well be applied to The Two Gentlemen of Verona. The villains of the two plays, Henriquez from Double Falsehood, and Proteus from The Two Gentlemen of Verona, not only betray their best friends, but also the women, Violante and Julia respectively, who are loyal towards them. The main difference is that Proteus’ friend, Valentine, is a morally dubious figure who offers to sur‑ render his innocent and devoted ladylove, Silvia, to his false friend Pro‑ teus, in order, apparently, to secure their renewed friendship. In Double Falsehood, the equivalent of Valentine is Julio (who is also the original Cardenio in Cervantes’ Don Quijote) who does not show such aberrant behaviour towards his equally innocent and devoted ladylove, named Leonora. In both plays then we have two men (Julio and Henriquez, Valentine and Proteus) and two women (Leonora and Violante, Silvia and Julia), who get involved in constantly changing relations. This may easily remind us of the situation in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, with its confu‑ sing amorous permutations among two men (Demetrius and Lysander) and two women (Helena and Hermia). The difference, however, is that 76 Andrzej Wicher in The Two Gentlemen of Verona, and in Double Falsehood, there is no cha‑ racter comparable to Puck, who could be blamed for the lovers’ insta‑ bility, even though in all three plays it is only the men who are fickle and disloyal, never the women, but this seems to be generally true of Shakespeare’s plays as such. In Measure for Measure, there are even four such couples: Claudio and Julietta, Angelo and Mariana, Isabella and Vincentio, the Duke, and finally Lucio and Kate Keepdown. The problem, at least from my point of view, is that such narrative structure is not typical of the Late Plays. They are characterised by what I call triangular patterns composed of three characters, of central importance for the action of the play. They are either one man, and two women, or, contrariwise, two men, and one woman. The former pattern is visible in Pericles and The Winter’s Tale, where we have the protago‑ nist Pericles, his wife Thaisa, and his daughter Marina, in the first play; and Leontes, his wife Hermione, and his daughter Perdita, in the second one. The latter pattern can be found in Cymbeline, where we have the eponymous Cymbeline, his daughter Imogen, and her husband Posthu‑ mus, and in The Tempest due to the characters of Prospero, his daughter Miranda, and her husband Ferdinand. The dramatic tension, in the for‑ mer pattern, consists in the fact of the protagonist’s estrangement and separation from both his wife and his daughter until the final reunion and reconciliation, while, in the latter one, it consists in the protagonist’s, that is, the father’s, efforts to make it difficult for the young manand young woman, the protagonist’s daughter, to become united in mar‑ riage, even though eventually he reconciles himself to this solution. Cymbeline is naturally hardly the true protagonist of the play that bears his name. He can be called a mere plaything in the hands of his ruthless wife, but it is exactly his determination to yield to his wife in everything that leads to the dramatic entanglement of the play. Besides, the wicked queen, who, in collusion with Cymbeline, places obstacles in the path of the loving couple, Posthumus and Imogen, fulfills the fun‑ ction of Prospero in The Tempest, who similarly creates obstacles for Fer‑ dinand and Miranda. It should of course be conceded that, unlike the queen in Cymbeline, Prospero does not want to marry his daughter off to a monstrous simpleton, whose role in Cymbeline is fulfilled by Cloten, and in The Tempest by Caliban. The Place of William Shakespeare’s (Lost)… 77

It seems characteristic that even in Two Noble Kinsmen, a play that is regarded, not quite justifiably, as one of the Last Plays, the symmetrical, even sets of numbers are rejected and we are left with a hard to resolve triangle of the two friends, Palamon and Arcite, falling out with each other as they fall in love with the same woman, Emilia. The intrigu‑ ing possibility of one of the friends being persuaded to accept the love of a lower class character, the so called Jailer’s Daughter, is ruled out exactly because of that girl’s humble origins, symbolized by her name‑ lessness. As I argue elsewhere (Wicher, 147–149), the former pattern, that is the Pericles pattern, is akin to the so called tales about supernatural hus‑ bands, that is a variety of folktales in which the heroine has a relations‑ hip with a man who, in one way or another, represents another world, and who later leaves her, for a variety of reasons, typically because she has broken some kind of prohibition, or taboo. Later a reunion between the estranged spouses takes place, but, before it can ensue, the hero‑ ine, in pursuit of her husband, usually has to go through a number of trials and tribulations during which she often narrowly escapes death. Eventually, she finds her lost husband, but she still has to get ridof a rival, another woman who seems to have taken priority over her in her husband’s heart. Usually this is achieved by means of the so called bed trick, as a result of which the heroine sleeps with her husband, who imagines that he sleeps with the heroine’s rival. Of course, from this point of view, it is Thaisa that should be the protagonist of Pericles, and Hermione that of The Winter’s Tale. In Pericles and The Winter’s Tale, however, we seem to have to do with a curious variety of that pattern, a variety I have not yet managed to identify among fairy tales, or tales of magic. In that variety, the charac‑ ter of the rival woman has been apparently replaced with the heroine’s own daughter.1 The task of the heroine cannot then, naturally, consist

1 In fact, a much more orthodox version of the tales about supernatural husbands can be discerned in the plot of All’s Well That Ends Well, where, however, the heroine, Helena, acts in collusion with her potential rival, Diana, and they both prepare a typi‑ cal bed trick, similar to the one in Measure for Measure, so that Helena can win back her husband, Bertram, while in Measure for Measure the bed trick is used to enable Mariana to win back Angelo. 78 Andrzej Wicher in getting rid of the daughter, but rather in preventing an incestuous union between her husband and the daughter, whom he may not at first recognize as his own daughter, from taking place. The motif of incest is absent from The Winter’s Tale, but it appears in Shakespeare’s source for The Winter’s Tale, in Robert Greene’s Pandosto, or the Triumph of Time, where Pandosto, the equivalent of Shakespeare’s Leontes, has incestu‑ ous designs on his daughter Fawnia, the equivalent of Perdita, though it has to be admitted that he, at that time, does not know her to be his daughter. In Pericles, there is only a faint suggestion of the possibility of incest between Pericles and Marina (“my dearest wife was like this maid” 5.1.110), but we find there a fully developed incestuous relation‑ ship between Antiochus, King of Antioch and his unnamed daughter, who are both killed by a divinely sent fire, even though the story of Antiochus seems to be merely a subplot that hardly matters much from the point of view of the main course of action. The story that represents this pattern probably in the most‑ per fect way is the legend of the patient Griselda employed by Boccaccio and Petrarch, and best known to the students of English literature as Chaucer’s The Clerk’s Tale from The Canterbury Tales. There the protago‑ nist, the rather diabolic marquis Walter, indeed seems intent on mar‑ rying his daughter, having rejected most cruelly his innocent wife, but this turns out to be only a hoax perpetrated by Walter to try his wife’s patience and devotion.2 The Cymbeline pattern is related to the same group of tales of magic, but it is definitely closer to the so called Maiden Without Hands tales, which are not so much related to the tales about supernatural hus‑ bands, but rather to those about supernatural wives. In Maiden Wit‑ hout Hands, the motif of the father­‑daughter incest is of foremost impor‑ tance because the protagonist has to escape from her father, who is hell bent on making her a lover of his, and she usually wanders alone, often having been cruelly mutilated (in the Grimms’ version her hands are cut off by her father on the requirement of a devil to whom the father

2 There is an article the authors of which argue that the origin of the tale of Griselda may have been Oriental, which could perhaps explain the motif of the wife’s absolute subjugation to her husband, see: Bettridge and Utley, 153–208. The Place of William Shakespeare’s (Lost)… 79 has sold her3), until she is saved by a young man, who eventually beco‑ mes her husband, but she usually has first to foil the fiendish plots of her prospective mother­‑in­‑law (though sometimes it may be a devil), who manages for a time, by means of calumnies, to sour the relations between her son and the heroine. This pattern is certainly better visible in Cymbeline, where Imogen, the calumniated wife of Posthumus, is cle‑ arly the protagonist, than in The Tempest, where Miranda is overshado‑ wed by her father. In Cymbeline we have also a good embodiment of the wicked mother­‑in­‑law, the unnamed queen, who in fact is Imogen’s stepmother, even though the function of the calumniator, or slanderer, is taken over by Iachimo, Posthumus’s false friend.4 It is true that neither in The Tempest, nor in Cymbeline the motif of incest is explicit. But it is suggested strongly enough in The Tempest by the fact of the father and daughter’s long­‑standing isolation on a desert island, and by Prospero’s extreme unwillingness to give up his daugh- ter to Ferdinand. In Cymbeline, the situation is, admittedly, even more complicated, Cymbeline himself seems a mere cipher, and there does not seem to be any deep relationship between him and his brave and intelligent daughter. And yet the general situation in Imogen’s family is definitely very unhealthy, the queen, Imogen’s stepmother, dominates her husband and she is determined either to force Imogen into the mar‑ riage with her idiot son, Cloten, or kill her if this cannot be achieved.5 Thus, Imogen lives in a family circle where she is being browbeaten to accept an unnatural marriage, and her father Cymbeline, at the instiga‑ tion of his wicked wife, banishes Posthumus whom Imogen had mar‑ ried secretly against her father’s wishes. No more, I think, is needed to

3 The Grimms’ version of Maiden Without Hands does not contain the motif of incest, but it does appear in many other versions of it, as can also be seen in the Middle English romance Emaré. 4 Similarly, in Much Ado about Nothing, the role of the slanderer who tries to ruin an innocent girl’s reputation is fulfilled by a man, Don John. 5 Later Imogen, owing to a curious coincidence, wakes up, in a middle of a wilder‑ ness, with the headless body of Cloten dressed as her husband Posthumus. This is clearly an ironic version of the bed trick which the male protagonist of the tales about superna‑ tural wives plays to win back his supernatural ladylove. Imogen should have spent that night with her living husband, not with his dead rival, though of course his being dead is exactly what the protagonist wishes for. See also: Thompson, 98. 80 Andrzej Wicher create an equivalent of the incest motif. Cloten resurfaces in The Tempest as Caliban, who, just like Cloten, intends to rape the heroine, and who is the dark aspect of Prospero himself, as can be gathered from the famous line spoken by Prospero at the end of the play with reference to Caliban: “This thing of darkness I acknowledge mine” (5.1.278). Let me now return to Double Falsehood. From a folkloristic point of view, the play contains three main stories, and three protagonists, Julio, Violante, and Leonora. In particular, I mean the story of Violante looking for her beloved Henriquez, the story of Julio who tries to recover, rather ineffectually, his lost ladylove Leonora, and the story of Leonora who wants to escape from her father who tries to make her marry the man she does not love. That Violante should be in love with Henriquez is somewhat strange, he raped her, and treats her badly, but superna‑ tural husbands are often enough shown as rapists. This is, for exam‑ ple, the situation in the Middle English romance Sir Degare, where the protagonist’s mother was raped by a fairy knight. In Basile’s Pentame‑ rone (1638), there is a version of The Sleeping Beauty where the heroine is raped, rather than merely kissed, by the knight who thus tries, brutally and yet unsuccessfully, to awaken her from a magical sleep (Wikipedia, e­‑text). The fact that Violante is spurned by Henriquez without having done anything wrong is a typical feature of the man‑woman­ relations‑ hips shown by Shakespeare. Henriquez, who, in Violante’s story, is a supernatural lover, of which his superior social status is another sign, in Julio’s story, becomes the protagonist’s rival for the love of a supernatural woman, and as such he has to be eliminated. But it is surely Leonora’s story that makes Double Falsehood different from The Two Gentlemen of Verona, and, at the same time, similar to the Late Romances. Leonora’s story is analogous to that of Imogen from Cymbeline, and Miranda from The Tempest. She has to escape from the tyranny of her father, who wants to give her to a devi‑ lish character, with whom he is strongly connected, which in itself is an equivalent of the motif of incest, as in the Grimms’ version of Maiden Without Hands. This devilish character is Cloten in Cymbeline, Caliban in The Tempest, and Henriquez in Double Falsehood, even though Henriquez, unlike Cloten or Cymbeline, is no simpleton, but rather a clever and ruthless manipulator. Leonora insists on being faithful to her lover, The Place of William Shakespeare’s (Lost)… 81

Julio, even at the cost of provoking her father’s, Don Bernard’s, anger, just as Imogen was faithful to Posthumus, and Miranda to Ferdinand. Leonora, fortunately for her, does not have to deal with the problem of her lover’s turning, for all kinds of wrong reasons, against her, just like Posthumus turns against Imogen, Leontes against Hermione (in The Winter’s Tale), Claudio against Hero (in Much Ado About Nothing), Ber‑ tram against Helena (in All’s Well That Ends Well), Othello against Des‑ demona, Hamlet against Ophelia, Henriquez against Violante in Double Falsehood and so on. And yet Leonora is certain that such a development is very likely:

Now I perceive the birth of these delays, Why Leonora was not worth your suit. Repair to court? Ay, there you shall perhaps, Rather past doubt, behold some choicer beauty Rich in her charms, train’d to the arts of soothing, Shall prompt you to a spirit of hardiness, (1.2.131–136)

Leonora’s task consists in getting rid of the false suitor, but she cannot achieve this, so she decides to get rid of herself, by committing suicide, just like Juliet, from Romeo and Juliet, facing the prospect of her marriage to Paris, or Lucrece, from The Rape of Lucrece, reacting to Tarquin’s act of rape:

Then woe the day! I’m circled round with fire; No way for my escape but trough the flames. (2.3.133–134)

Also remarkable are her father’s, Don Bernard’s, expressions of rage at her obstinacy, which include calling on Henriquez to follow Leonora so that her opposition can be overcome:

Go thy ways, contradiction. – Follow her, my lord, follow her, in the very heat. This obstinacy must be combated by importunity as obsti‑ nate. (2.3.143–145)

This strikes a sinister note, if we realize that Henriquez is already known to be a rapist – he raped Violante, driving her almost to suicide (2.2.38–40). 82 Andrzej Wicher

Clearly, Don Bernard is capable of great brutality towards his own dau‑ ghter, which again suggests a latent motif of incest, indeed more clearly present than either in Cymbeline, or The Tempest. Leonora’s father comple‑ tely and suddenly changes his orientation, and realizes the unnaturalness of his behaviour when his daughter disappears. He then, a little like King Lear, repents his mistake, accepts his daughter’s choice of the husband, and becomes prepared for a happy reunion. In the end, Leonora does not commit suicide either; she escapes and finds refuge in a nunnery, which she eventually leaves to become Julio’s wife, owing to the beneficial inter‑ vention of Roderick, Henriquez’s virtuous elder brother. Henriquez is shown to be a rather interesting type of a villain, who likes to meditate on his villainy. At times he seems to be experiencing pangs of conscience:

How can it be that with my honour safe I should pursue Leonora for my wife? That were accumulating injuries, To Violante first, and now to Julio; … But Pleasure is too strong for Reason’s curb, And Conscience sinks o’er­‑power’d with Beauty’s sweets. (2.3.10–19)

This soliloquy suggests that Henriquez is not quite a satanic villain, such as Richard in Richard III, Iago in Othello, or Edmund in King Lear. His wickedness seems to be a matter of insufficient will power, rather than a determination to do evil. And yet there is something monstrous in the easiness with which he finds and accepts excuses, feeble as they are, for his devious behaviour. This is indeed a persistent habit of his. In Scene 1 of Act 2, we can see him grappling with an uneasy conscience following his rape of Violante. And we see him also suggesting to himself that the fact that, even though his victim struggled while being raped, she strug‑ gled in silence, is a sufficient excuse for his odious deed: “True, she did not consent: as true, she did resist; but still in silence all” (2.1.37–38). We are offered then rather unique glimpses of the process of moral degra‑ dation, even though ultimately Henriquez returns to his former love, Violante, who has been steadfastly looking for him in a boy’s disguise, like Viola, in Twelfth Night, or Rosalind for As You Like It, or Imogen from Cymbeline. The Place of William Shakespeare’s (Lost)… 83

Another matter that should be dealt with in connection with Double Falsehood is surely the question of the value of the story of Cardenio (or Julio), from Cervantes’ point of view, and from Shakespeare’s point of view. Cardenio is, in Don Quijote, an alter ego of the protagonist him‑ self, he goes mad for the love of a woman, while Don Quijote goes mad for his misplaced love of low quality books, but they are not so different from each other since Don Quijote’s books are romances, that is love stories, as much as adventure stories. Like Don Quijote, Julio (or ‑ Car denio) takes to distracted wandering in the wilds, having misguidedly put his trust in his false friend Henriquez, and is unable to stop thin‑ king about his Leonora, with whom he probably would have never been reunited if it were not for Henriquez’s brother Roderick. It is probable that, from Shakespeare’s point of view, Don Quijote, and to some extent also Cardenio, were comparable to the character of King Lear, who also goes mad on having put his trust in those who do not love him, like Julio (Cardenio) who trusted Henriquez, and having spurned those who loved him, like Don Quijote who turned his back on his family. In both writers’ works, madness in the wilderness is a typical behavior of a hus‑ band who goes insane being unable to defend his family against the encroachments of an evil character, or characters, often with superna‑ tural features,6 even though, in the case of Don Quijote and King Lear, the dangerous villain is either imaginary, or it is, as in the case of Lear, the protagonist himself. Don Quijote in his madness, when wandering across Spain, likes to think that he cannot enjoy the imagined love of his Dulcinea until he defeats the equally imaginary giant Caraculiambro, “lord of the island of Malindrania” (Cervantes, 12). In a remotely similar way, Lear wanders on the heath having lost his wits the first symptom of which was that he imagined his only loving daughter, Cordelia, to be his enemy, and his evil daughters to be his loyal children. This devilish character is normally the hero’s rival for the favours of a supernatural wife, his appearance is then natural in the story of Julio, where this role is assumed by Henriquez, or in that of Hamlet (assu‑ ming that Hamlet, in keeping with Polonius’s theory, went mad because

6 Probably, the best example of such a story is provided in the Middle English romance of Sir Orfeo. 84 Andrzej Wicher of Ophelia), where this role is assumed by a group of characters, con‑ sisting of Polonius, Claudius, and Laertes, all of whom try, though not for erotic reasons, to weaken Ophelia’s loyalty to Hamlet. A similar cha‑ racter cannot be expected in the story of King Lear, who, like Prospero or Cymbeline, is a ruler that should be resisted mainly because of his incestuous designs on his daughter, or daughters. The case of Prospero is interesting in this context because, like Don Quijote, he loses his home and secure conditions as a result of an excessive love of books, and starts a precarious existence on the margins of the civilised world. Indeed Don Quijote, somewhat like Prospero, is interested in conquering an exotic island, the governance of which he promises to his servant Sancho, as a reward for his loyal services. But the analogy between Don Quijote and The Tempest seems to deserve a separate study. Harold Bloom summarizes Shakespeare’s Last Plays (i.e. Cymbeline, Winter’s Tale, The Tempest) in the following way:

I suspect also that the plot complexities (of Cymbeline), luxuriantly cro‑ wded … are themselves a parody, since after Cymbeline Shakespeare will seem weary of plot as of characterization. The Winter’s Tale has a much simpler design, and The Tempest is virtually plotless. (Bloom, 626)

There is no doubt some truth in this verdict, even though I think that The Tempest has a plot, however poorly developed. And as for the plot of The Winter’s Tale, it is only relatively simple, but can easily be accu‑ sed of implausibility.7 Bloom is, I think, essentially right in suggesting that the plots of the Last Plays are problematic and tend to strain the rules of strict logic and rationality. From this point of view, Double Fal‑ sehood can be interpreted as a return to the mainstream Shakespearean plot construction, especially that of the Bard’s earlier comedies. Hence, as discussed above, one can clearly detect here the echoes of the plots of such plays as Two Gentlemen of Verona, or Midsummer Night’s Dream. Additionally, one finds here the character of Roderick, who, unlike his

7 Raphael Lyne, for example, says the following with regards to the ending of The Winter’s Tale: “Shakespeare repeatedly features this conflict between a wonderful vision at the consummation of a romance, and the sense of intellectual anxiety caused by improbability and machination” (42). The Place of William Shakespeare’s (Lost)… 85 counterparts, Fortinbras in Hamlet, or Albany in King Lear, intervenes in time, not only to save some kind of rudimentary moral and politi‑ cal order, but also to save the lives of the main characters, and the play from an unhappy ending. This should not be understood as meaning that Double Falsehood is entirely free from improbabilities, the most obvious of which is pro‑ bably the, rather sudden, transformation of Don Bernard, Leonora’s father, from a bully to an amiable gentleman. And yet it is exactly the story of Don Bernard and Leonora, that is the story of the estrangement between a father and a daughter, and of their subsequent reconcilia‑ tion and reunion that constitutes the common denominator of the Late Plays. It is the story of Pericles and Marina, of Cymbeline and Imogen, of Leontes and Perdita, of Prospero and Miranda,8 of Don Bernard and Leonora, but above all it is naturally the story of Lear and Cordelia. King Lear, one of the great tragedies, but written shortly before the earliest of the Late Plays, seems to constitute the master text of the Late Plays. The similarities that can be seen between the story of Cardenio, the story of Don Quijote, of which of course Cardenio isa part, on the one hand; and the story of Lear and also that of Prospero, on the other, also seem to point in this direction.

Works Cited

Bettridge, W.E., and F.L. Utley. “New Light on the Origin of the Griselda Story.” Texas Studies in Literature and Language, vol. 12, no. 2 (Summer 1971): 153–208. Bloom, Harold. Shakespeare. The Invention of the Human. New York: Riverhead Books, 1998. Cervantes Saavedra, Miguel de. Don Quixote. Translated by P.A. Motteux. Ware, Hertfordshire: Wordsworth Classics, 1993. The Brothers Grimm. The Complete Fairy Tales. Ware, Hertfordshire: Wordsworth Editions, 1998.

8 It is true that in The Tempest the conflict between Prospero and Miranda is played down as much as possible, but her determination to help her beloved Ferdinand (3.1.25– 26), even though her father expressly forbade her to do so (1.2.505), shows that this only partially developed motif is of some importance in the play. 86 Andrzej Wicher

Hammond, Brean, ed. Double Falsehood or The Distressed Lovers. London: Arden Shakespeare, 2010. Lyne, Raphael. Shakespeare’s Late Work. Oxford, New York: Oxford University Press, 2007. Thompson, Stith. The Folktale. Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press, 1977. Wicher, Andrzej. Shakespeare’s Parting Wondertales. A Study of the Elements of the Tale of Magic in William Shakespeare’s Late Plays. Łódź: Wydawnictwo Uniwer‑ sytetu Łódzkiego, 2003. Wikipedia, accessed September 2, 2013. . Przemysław Uściński University of Warsaw

Borderlines/Ornaments in Eighteenth Century Classical Discourse

The figure of the monarch ceases to be the media‑ tor between God and people, and the communication between the two spheres becomes a matter of reading from the book of the law inscribed within our minds and reason. Tadeusz Rachwał, Word and Confinement. Subjectivity in the “Clas‑ sical” Discourse

Writing is not inhuman but a matter of flesh and blood. Terry Eagleton, Trouble with Strangers. A Study of Ethics

1. The Frailty of the Female Body

Alexander Pope’s mock epic poem The Rape of the Lock ends with a con‑ solation directed to the offended aristocratic Belle, Belinda, which simul‑ taneously provides the rationale for the poem in an evident parody of epic poetry, the aim of which was, as tradition has it, to preserve the memory of the deeds of ancient heroes:

Then cease, bright Nymph! to mourn thy ravish’d Hair Which adds new Glory to the shining Sphere! Not all the Tresses that fair Head can boast Shall draw such Envy as the Lock you lost. For, after all the Murders of your Eye, When, after Millions slain, your self shall die; 88 Przemysław Uściński

When those fair Suns shall sett, as sett they must, And all those Tresses shall be laid in Dust; This Lock, the Muse shall consecrate to Fame, And mid’st the Stars inscribe Belinda’s Name! Canto V, 141–150 (Pope, 241–2)

Belinda’s vanity is courted by the poet’s vanity expressed in the assurance that his written word will immortalize her lock. Belinda will be preserved in print but not in the glory of the epic heroic warriors. She will be immortalized as a vain coquette who can murder the gal‑ lant Beaux with her freezing glance, in a travesty of male heroes, their mock version, or rather inversion into a passive victim of “the rape” of the lock. Verse, versus, version, variation, versatile, reverse, perverse, inversion, travesty; the string of words containing the letter “v” brou‑ ght to Derrida’s text(s) also the suggestion of the word “vagina” as the opening, incision, the voidness and the gap (Derrida, 281–2). The female as a travesty, a perverse version or reversal of the male, almost a trans‑ vestite, constitutes a recurring theme, or even a chain of themes, in the eighteenth century satires on women. The heroines of these satires, be them Belinda, or Celia, or Corinna, or Shamela, must therefore become undressed. In Fielding’s Shamela, a travesty of Richardson’s Pamela, the readers are presented, for instance, with the naked truth of the exagge‑ rated female sensitivity:

Nothing can be more prudent in Wife than a sullen Backwardness to Reconciliation; it makes a Husband fearful of offending by the Length of his Punishment. (359)

Women’s sulkiness and surliness appears to be almost sublime, defini‑ tely imbalanced and out of proportion; a mystery from the rational male perspective, but in satires written from male perspective the feminine temper is often constructed as underwritten by very rational (perhaps the rational) thinking: the economic calculation and balancing of profit:

O! Bless me! I shall be Mrs. Booby, and be Mistress of a great Estate, and have a dozen Coaches and Six, and a fine House at London, and another at Bath, and Servants, and Jewels, and Plate, and go to Plays, and Opera’s, and Court. (347) Borderlines/Ornaments in Eighteenth Century Classical Discourse 89

The luxurious commodities that Shamela wants to purchase with her sulkiness and stubborn (pretended) chastity all follow after her new name. It is only Mrs. Booby that can possess them, never Mrs. Andrews. The female name is thus only a mask, a misnomer or a sham (Shamela under the mask of Pamela). The masquerade of female sensibility that Fielding gloriously deconstructs is, in fact, a cold, profit­‑oriented tactic of seduction – a manipulation. As conduct books change into satires, a woman pretends to be a woman rather than becomes one in the eig‑ hteenth century. The theory of female sensibility according to which “women’s nerves [were] interpreted as more delicate and more suscep‑ tible than men’s” and “women’s ability to operate their nerves by act of will (part of Newton’s account) was seriously questioned” (Barker­ ‍‑Benfield xvii) is merrily manipulated by Shamela for her egotistic ends (“I pretended to be shy” she admits in her letter). This interpretation mocks Richardson’s campy sentimentality: Pamela’s innocence must be inauthentic because it is expressed through a material body. The idealized woman is always false for Fielding and Swift exactly because no woman can be so absurdly feminine; there must be some masculine rationality behind the veil of coquettish sulkiness. The eig‑ hteenth century satire wants therefore to “materialize” women, to lite‑ rally dissect their bodies, unveil them not in an erotic but in an anatomi‑ cal way, because “a woman’s body is not a unity but an amalgamation of detachable objects” and “Swift’s Corinna dismantling her body before going to bed” is the obvious example of this tendency (Rachwał 1992, 106). The architecture of the female figure needs to be supported with stays, buttons, whalebones, jumps, corsets, bolsters and hoops in order not to collapse. These fetishistic supporting garments actually construct the impression of the excessive weakness of the female body. The female dress as a refined Rococo construction that no fancy can surround is presented in John Gay’s The Fan, yet another poem on the female mas‑ querade:

What force of thought, what numbers can express, The inconstant equipage of female dress? How the strait stays the slender waist constrain, How to adjust the manteau’s sweeping train? 90 Przemysław Uściński

What fancy can the petticoat surround, With the capacious hoop of whalebone bound? But stay, presumptuous muse, nor boldly dare The Toilette’s sacred mysteries declare; Let a just distance be to beauty paid; None here must enter but the trusty maid. Book I, 229–238 (15)

Female beauty is beautiful only from a distance, away from the gro‑ tesque materiality of the female body that shall always be veiled by the “inconstant equipage of the female dress,” which is both its decoration and a “constraint,” a self­‑disciplining “adjustment” of the body, its supporting and self­‑censoring frame. Rachwał reads eighteenth­‑century satire on women as one of the attempts at distan‑ cing from (and thus regulating) the subversive irregularity, non­ ‍‑identity and instability that the female embodied in the “Classical” discourse:

Man produces himself by inscribing subjection into his less discipli- ned parts and thus establishes the masculine domination over the feminine as what she desires or wants in the manner in which Pope’s garden “wanted” correction. … in positing the possibility of there being a female subject as a positive category, “Classical” discourse actu‑ ally created the pattern for the construction of identity in general, the pattern for the construction of the self‑disciplined­ individual. (Rachwał 1992, 109)

The projection of female subjectivity as a positive entity is attempted, yet this projection at a certain point dissipates. Fielding’s Shamela is a dissection of the body of Richardson’s Pamela into a self­‑disciplined homo oeconomicus, who, lacking money, purchases things through her husband’s purse, opened by the mysterious powers of her coquettish moodiness, her counterfeited swoons and blushing. Because she can change her name and fortune, woman as a free­‑floating signifier might be seen as the embodiment of the structure of social mobility of the indi‑ vidualized bourgeoisie. Defoe plays with the idea in his Moll Flanders, where the heroine becomes wife five times. As she observes, however, fortune­‑hunting is by no means confined to women: Borderlines/Ornaments in Eighteenth Century Classical Discourse 91

I observ’d that the Men made no scruple to set themselves out, and to go a Fortune Hunting, as they call it, when they had really no Fortune themsleves to Demand it, or Merit to deserve it; and That they carry’d it so high, that a Woman was scarce allow’d to enquire after the Character of Estate of the Person that pretended to her. (53)

Moll Flanders is, in fact, the cross­‑dressed male satirist, whose shrewd penetrating eye sees behind the masquerade of politeness and cour‑ tesy; the ever­‑present sham, fraud, counterfeited identity, manipulation and calculation. Moll Flanders is thus not so much the narrator in the novel as the object of its counterfeited, parodistic first­‑person narration, the object of its unmasking satiric laughter, which unmasks women by turning them into rationally calculating entrepreneurs cross­‑dressed as coquettish women.1 The story of awkwardly innocent Pamela must be parodied, since for the satiric eye of Fielding corruption must always lurk behind the mask of innocence. Indeed, despite her apparent weak- ness and naïveté, Pamela’s perseverance, her regulated, regular, self­ ‍‑disciplined subjectivity finally overcomes the old regime of debauched maleness orchestrating in effect a complete Puritan reformation and submission of Mr. Rochester. The weakness of Pamela represents from Fielding’s point of view an anomaly which is explained as a form of sublimated, masqueraded power. This happy interpretation is, however, impossible for Richardson’s second novel. Femininity as presented in Richardson is a peculiar combination of perseverance and self‑disciplining­ regulation on the one hand and the physical weakness on the other. The risk that his heroines face seems to be, on the surface, not so much the risk of being oppressed by powerful male writing etc., but the more immediate risk of rape. This risk haunts

1 As Watt observes, “the transition to an individualist social and economic order brou‑ ght with it a crisis in marriage which bore particularly hard upon the feminine part of the population” (167). Unmarried women “were no longer positive economic assets to the household because there was less need for their labour in spinning, weaving, and other economic tasks” so that they could either work “for very low wages,” or become “largely superfluous dependants” (163). Their future “depended much more completely than before on their being able to marry” (167). What Watt calls the “middle­‑class con‑ cept of marriage” develops in the 18th century and becomes central for most novelists, from Richardson to Austen. 92 Przemysław Uściński

Pamela, but it becomes reality for Clarissa once she is raped by Love‑ lace. The only form of protest her weak, defenseless body is capable of after this traumatic event is dying, which Eagleton sees as her final refu‑ sal “to figure as an item of exchange in the symbolic currency ofcul‑ ture” (Eagleton 2011, 206). Since the threat of rape is brutally actualized, Eagleton suggests, it points to the irreducible materiality of the body as the final borderline of discourse. Yet, this borderline established by the physicality of the body seems dubious. Though the raped, mutilated or tortured body should never be traded off as a symbol, there is more at stake in physical or sexual vio‑ lence than the Real outside the Symbolic. Eagleton himself acknowledges that Clarissa’s resolution to die and her planning of own burial and funeral become an “aggressively morbid” sacrificial ritual for redemp‑ tion (2011, 206). Her “mesmerizing fragility,” to use Charlotte Sussman’s expression (129), marks the irreducible, monstrous weakness inherent in any living body (somehow obliterated when suffering is changed into martyrdom), yet Clarissa also happens to be female. The female body in satiric and sentimental texts illustrates perhaps Žižek’s claim that the Real of sexual difference escapes symbolization because every attempt at symbolizing the female/ male into binary oppositions fails (326). Though weakness may not be “in reality” either female or male, good or bad, etc., the Symbolic order/ law of the sexual difference tends to har‑ ness every concept into a play of binary oppositions, in which “female weakness,” for instance, will inevitably construct/delimit a counter­‑term in the form of (protective yet domineering) “masculine strength.” The symbolic economy, like most economies, it seems, is thus not exactly “just” or “proper” in its operations based on substitution. Weakness is always exaggerated or played down, condemned or enforced, projected onto bodies or banned from them through what Butler calls the “per‑ formative” aspect of the body, which is its (cultural/ symbolic) forma‑ tion and performance. The issue at stake in Butler’s work seems to be the troubling incoherence between the (Real) body and the (normative posing as “natural”) cultural/ symbolic body projected onto it. To some‑ how interrogate the symbolic formulations of the body, Butler calls for cultural practices of a parodistic kind, which she also calls “subversive repetitions” that would emphasize, by their disorienting incongruity or Borderlines/Ornaments in Eighteenth Century Classical Discourse 93 exaggerated exactness, for instance that gendered systems or behaviors are always already parodic imitations of other imitations, with no “ori‑ ginal” body at the beginning (194–204). Clarissa’s absurdly theatrical gesture of dying suggests that her death is the result of symbolic condemnation of her body as much as its real violation through rape: “this vile body ought not so much to engage my cares. It is a weakness – but let it be called a natural weakness, and I shall be excused” (Letter, 465, qtd. in Sussman, 128). Clarissa calls the com‑ passion she feels for her weak body a “natural” weakness, which may be opposed to the masochistic “cultural” separation of body and mind that she tries to achieve, finally, by dying. Condemned by her parents for elopement, dying in isolation, she refuses to live due to the chronic lack of compassion for the body in its discursively inappropriate, explo‑ itative formulations, in particular the simultaneous symbolic/ economic enforcement and condemnation of weakness in/as the female (or femi‑ nine) body. The task left, perhaps, is the laborious contestation of the coherence of these hegemonic formulations of the body, which hope‑ fully will replace martyrdom with compassion in its “critical reflection on gender ontology as parodic (de)construction” (Butler, 64).

2. The Panoptical (Self) Surveillance

A wealthy, rakish squire manipulated by a prudish coquette is lau‑ ghable, but the weakness that is truly defenseless, like Pamela’s or Clarissa’s, will always contradict modern individualism and liberalism, for which the docility of the body must be mastered into disciplined self‑reliance.­ In other words, coquettes like Belinda or, in a less elegant way, Shamela, are still only cross­‑dressed entrepreneurs of sorts, but Clarissa seems to dangerously lack the signs of male rationality under the veil of her delicate skin. In a peculiar reversal, it is the naïve senti‑ mentality of Richardson that becomes subversive in its more compassio‑ nate grasping of the precarious female condition, while the unmasking laughter of satire assigns the stable stigma of a manipulative wench. As Bauman notes, carnival in modernity is over, it is no longer con‑ tained by and contrasted with power, because 94 Przemysław Uściński

modern power has found a way to harness laughter, its ancient enemy, to its chariot – to enlist it in its service. No longer is fear deployed to stifle and silence laughter. It is as if power has picked laughter sothat it will have more room to hide in and so that resistance to fear­‑wielding power could be paralysed before it started, and if it did explode, it would leave the fearsome intact. Like the phoenix from the ashes, or the ageing witch from the bathtub full of virgin blood, power arises from laughter reborn and rejuvenated. (62)

The presence of the elements of carnival during the public executions so vividly presented by Foucault illustrates Bauman’s diagnosis. Power learns from laughter and not only becomes immune to it also but accom‑ modates it for itself. Bauman sees the death of carnival in modernity’s privatization of both fear and laughter, which no longer can recog‑ nize themselves in their social and political dimension (63). Comedies, pamphlets, satires and parodies are performances of textual mockery that dethrone the seriousness of their targets, but when humour fails to question the vital points of societal existence it only replicates its stru‑ ctures.2 Rachwał reads many eighteenth­‑century satires somewhat against their efforts to posit the cogito of a rational (male) spectator as a mo- nitoring vantage point guarding the healthy tissue of the social body against grotesque mutations:

Crime and madness go hand in hand with bodily distortion (see Hogarth, for instance) while reason and harmony dwell in a regular, regulated

2 Bakhtin’s reading of pre­‑modern folk carnival identifies it with the anti­‑dogmatic “ambivalent laughter” that always presupposed incongruity between different points of view, excluding a one­‑sided monologue. All carnivalesque motifs (the mask, mad‑ ness, folly, grotesque body and gesture, degradation, parody) suggest unceasing play and ambiguity of mismatched perspectives, a contradictory unity of all and everything. In Renaissance, such carnivalesque laughter reverses but also completes the cosmic har‑ mony and its Chain of Being. In what Foucault calls the Classical Age, laughter is gradu‑ ally reduced to triviality or private mockery, since the totalizing view of the world also disintegrates (Bakhtin, 1–58). Tellingly, both Foucault and Bakhtin see Cervantes’ Don Quixote as a transitory text that displays the increasing tension in the Renaissance clas‑ sicism between bourgeois individualism and feudal/classical vision of harmony, a crisis which Eagleton, in turn, traces in Shakespeare’s plays. Borderlines/Ornaments in Eighteenth Century Classical Discourse 95

body. Madness and crime are but mutations of harmony and these spheres of transgression are explored by the Classical gaze disinte‑ restedly, that is to say, as the spheres which ideally should not exist, which should be only detected and cut off from the healthy body of society. (82)

The grotesque, sick body and mind of a criminal, a poor Grub­‑Street poet, a debauched woman, a sodomite or a dissenter as mad religious “enthusiast” are identified with excess of individuality that distorts the fabric of the balanced individuation sanctioned and distributed within the (classical) confines of society. Not only the abjectly poor or morally deprived, but also the extravagant, excessively opulent, or too fervent in their religious beliefs (see Butler’s Hudibras), may easily become, as Rachwał notes, too individualistic, dangerously transgressing and con‑ sequently exposing modern individualism exactly by adhering too much to its logic. Like Milton’s Satan, who, memorably, preferred to rule in Hell than serve in Heaven, the too­‑individual individual beco‑ mes a proud dunce or a wild Yahoo, is either too bookish or too bru‑ tish, either way not easily domesticated within the “decent talk” of the polite, homosocial gatherings of the coffee­‑houses (Rachwał 1992, 102). For Baudelaire, almost two centuries later, the transgressive Satan beco‑ mes the patron of all the abject and extravagant individuals exiled from the “coffee­‑house” angelic level of society:

O Angel, the most brilliant and most wise, A God betrayed by fate, deprived of praise, Satan, take pity on my misery! (269)

Pity subverts here the regulating and scorning gaze of the satiric Panop‑ ticon. Only the wisest and most beautiful of angels can take pity on drunkards, criminals, opium addicts and prostitutes of the streets of Paris or London, the orphans of the self­‑reliant, disciplined society. Baudelaire’s Satan is perhaps the Satan notably absent from the more rigidly monotheistic Old Testament, where all misfortunes are attributed only to God’s will. The absent Satan whom the poet calls in his impious litany is the force of compassion that no “official” God can embody because such compassion goes beyond any justice or law: “Who gives 96 Przemysław Uściński the prisoner his calm disdain,/ Who damns the crowds around the guil‑ lotine/ Satan, take pity on my misery! (Baudelaire, 271). The sovereign who is the earthly embodiment of God is also the gua‑ rantor of the law, the physical presence behind the letter of the law, which must be engraved on the minds of his subjects. The public execu‑ tions and tortures, in Foucault’s account, were functioning not only as a deterrent but also the cultural inscription, reproduction and represen‑ tation of crime:

In so far as it must bring the crime before everyone’s eyes, in all its seve‑ rity, the punishment must take responsibility for this atrocity: it must bring it to light by confessions, statements, inscriptions that make it pub‑ lic; it must reproduce it in ceremonies that apply it to the body of the guilty person in the form of humiliation and pain. Atrocity is that part of the crime that the punishment turns back as torture in order to display it in the full light of day: it … produces the visible truth of the crime at the very heart of the punishment itself. (51)

The severity of the punishment was therefore the tautological justifi‑ cation for the severity of the punishment, because it created the “visible truth” of the severity of the crime. In the first Act of Gay’sBeggar’s Opera, Peachum is considering which of his fellow criminals to denounce and which to save from gallows or transportation by bribery (488–9). Jonathan Wild became popular among Londoners not only for deno‑ uncing his comrade highwaymen but also for tracking, capturing and then triumphantly presenting them before the court in expectation for the reward. In 1720, the Privy Council consulted him even about the “ways and means of checking the increase in highway robberies” and he advised, not surprisingly, “an increase in rewards paid for apprehending highwaymen” (Nokes, 8). The punishing machine of modern state must enter into a symbiotic and cynical relationship with the criminal underworld, with its experts, because the sovereignty of the law is now replaced with the sovereignty of the crime, which gives shape to the idea of the technical efficiency of the law. Foucault sees in Bentham’s Panopticon not only an architectonic but also a cultural model of surveillance, the unsurpassed effectiveness of which stems from the fact that the supervisor remains always hidden, so that the Borderlines/Ornaments in Eighteenth Century Classical Discourse 97 supervised begin to continually supervise themselves being uncertain whether or not they are observed in a given moment. Gay and Fiel‑ ding mock the law as managed by the gangs of criminals and corrupted politicians, but Wild is perhaps the protoplast of Panopticon, an insi‑ der in the underworld of crime that forces the highwaymen into con‑ stant vigilance, since they may always be denounced by comrades for the rewards. Their self­‑examination will thus ensure the “automatic fun‑ ctioning of power” (Foucault’s phrase), which will reinforce the power without the observing gaze of God or the sovereign, and thus create the power the gaze of which is internalized. Confessions, memoirs, autobiographies and journals, so crucial in eighteenth century literature, are perhaps all exercises of the panopti‑ cal (self) surveillance that attempt to consign subjectivity to its proper place, to establish its borderlines, rate and narrate the self as a ratio‑ nal whole. The classical man, Rachwał reflects, is “an impression of the self which as such cannot be expressed, and in actually attempting to express himself he makes the representation a ‘faint image’ of that impression, a fiction of the self” (1992, 92). Autobiographies or confes‑ sions as self­‑reflexive narrations want to imprint the expression of the self­‑presence of the subject, demanding full and complete testimony as the impossible reflection (and hence construction) of “the completeness of the confessing subject” (77). The search for this lost completeness is characteristic of modernity in Žižek’s view:

modern subjectivity is announced not in the Renaissance humanist cele‑ bration of man as the “crown of creation” … but, rather, in Luther’s famous statement that man is the excrement that fell out of God’s anus … modern subjectivity emerges when the subject perceives himself as “out of joint,” as excluded from the “order of things,” from the positive order of entities. (183)3

3 Žižek agrees with Foucault that the illusion of completeness and autonomy of sub‑ jectivity is the ideological construct of the regulatory powers: the subject perceiving himself/ herself as fully autonomous while performing the consigned role and duty signals the final victory of the oppressive system. Still, however, Žižek also sees the emancipatory potential in the possibility of a liberating excess of this subjectivity, in the subject “excessively” resisting and actually exploding “from within” the oppressive for‑ ces that constructed him/ her in the first place (296–306). 98 Przemysław Uściński

3. The Ornament

Crime and abject poverty are seen as transgressions of bourgeois ratio‑ nality as much as spendthrift luxury because both inevitably point to the corruption and waste of what Milton called “the gift of reason,” God’s gift that should be shared in ideal coherence by all the reasonable mem‑ bers of civil society (Rachwał 1992, 57–58). The eighteenth­‑century Rococo aesthetic seems to express and promote a rather self­‑disciplined luxury (regulated by the emerging categories of taste, beauty, the sublime and the picturesque) by the use of timid, restrained, almost bland, colours. Burke recommended “light greens; soft blues; weak whites; pink reds; and violets” as “most appropriated to beauty” (Baur, 44). The paintings by Watteau, Fragonard, Reynolds, and sometimes even Hogarth, abandon the lurid opulence of the Baroque, they prefer intimacy, detail, lightness. The trend is visible also in the horticultural treatises of the time:

garden is the “embellishment,” and, as such it cannot but belong to the exorcised sphere of culture based on excessive consumption and waste…. The garden is a perfect machine to maintain the social and economic sta‑ tus quo: the rich remain rich and gain the moral and aesthetic alibi for their capital and its expenditure, the poor manage to survive precisely due to the expenditures of the rich. (Jarrett, Rachwał, Sławek, 66)

Excessive expenditure (so crucial in capitalist economy) and the excessive individual desire to possess luxurious embellishments may be either sub‑ limated into purely aesthetic pursuits or rationalized as beneficial. The delicate, porcelain sophistication of rococo may signify the rediscovery of the world in its non­‑metaphysical, secular, fragmentary dimension: the fascination with the exotic, with botany, even with insects signifies in the 18th century the aesthetization of nature as nature, not as a religious alle‑ gory but increasingly as a reflection and confirmation of the secularized cultural refinement. This requires, however, some pruning in the garden of nature, an element of censorship advocated by Samuel Johnson:

It is justly considered as the greatest excellence of art, to imitate nature; but it is necessary to distinguish those parts of nature, which are most proper for imitation…. If the world be promiscuously described, I cannot see of what use it can be to read the account. (151) Borderlines/Ornaments in Eighteenth Century Classical Discourse 99

This transparent, disciplined language is thus the prime censor of the promiscuity of nature. Gardens are also such screens that appear to pre‑ sent nature while veiling and censoring it, as in the garden “the cal‑ ligraphy of man’s hand is superimposed upon the chaotic scribble of nature” (Jarrett, Rachwał, Sławek, 16). In Humphrey Repton’s theory of gardening, which attempted to abandon earlier geometrical formality, intricacy is one of the “sources of pleasures in landscape gardening” (alongside Congruity, Unity, Order, Variety, Contrast, etc.) and intricacy is defined as “that disposition of objects, which by partial ‑and uncer tain concealment, excites and nourishes curiosity” (Repton and Loudon, 112). Nature needs to be partly covered, like a woman perhaps, to excite curiosity, so that the presentation of nature in gardening is nothing but its partial concealment. “Variety,” in turn, which is “infinite in nature,” gives the raw material that the gardener needs to fashion according to the rules of congruity (“the proper adaptation of several parts to the whole”) and symmetry to secure the presentation of this endless variety that will “lead the eye by an easy gradation, without flutter, confusion or perplexity” (Repton and Loudon, 112–3). The variety of detail and small ornament seem to preoccupy the epoch. In discourse, the variations of minor details, such as anecdotes, numerous digressions, annotations or footnotes become the “dangerous supplement” in the sense that they spill over and threaten to undo the neat symmetry of Classical discourse, a tendency exemplified by Tri‑ stram Shandy and The Dunciad (see Rachwał 1992, 62–3). Pope’s The Dun‑ ciad scorns the triviality of “the study of Butterflies, Shells, Birds­‑nests, Moss, &c.” (796), and the poet attaches few hundred pedantic footnotes to his poem in ridicule of the neoclassical scholars and editors. Empiri‑ cal science should always work towards the “extensive views of Nature, or its Author” according to Pope (796) and it should never surrender under the fetishism of a trifle detail, yet butterflies, bugs, toads and moss appear to come in infinite variety in nature, proving difficult to be neatly catalogued and classified.4

4 Eighteenth­‑century poets often see calligraphy in the chaotic scribble of nature. Thomson devoted fifty lines to the description of bird­‑nests in the “Spring” part of his poem, The Seasons, and, as Marshal Brown observed (29), the expressions such as “kind Concealment,” “kind Duty” or “kindly Care” abound. The nests are seen as “soft and 100 Przemysław Uściński

Analogically, the minimal ornament is the necessary companion to the signifier of polished, well­‑mannered discourse, which avoids rhetorical excess but needs to accentuate its politeness. Such style also may become a dangerous supplement, since the obsessive concern with minimal yet finely accentuated ornamentation (which should have protected from rhetorical excess) creates, in Susan Sontag’s view, the eighteenth­‑century Camp. “Campy” art can be defined as being so preoccupied with the dis‑ ciplined finery of its stylization that its style accidentally obliterates all the content. The foregrounding of detail, ornament, or individual (especially in portraits and the sentimental novels) signals, in Eagleton’s phrase, the shift from property to propriety; in Shaftesbury’s theory of “moral sense” the ethics become part of the “aesthetic” vision of society, which is above all a vision of the individual, of his or her well­‑managed, self­‑perfected taste and sensibility. The post­‑feudal society of burgeoning capitalism, as Terry Eagleton observes, after being shattered by religious radicalism despera‑ tely needs the ornament of unifying harmony and stability to oil its rusty social wheels: „manners for the eighteenth century signify that meticulous disciplining of the body which converts morality to style, deconstructing the opposition between the proper and the pleasurable” (1996, 41). The decorum of polite manners puts the coarse empiricism, rationalism and bourgeois individualism into a more ornate and subtle frame of sociabi‑ lity: “delicacy and sensibility manifested an alternative hierarchy of values to those of inheritance and birth, one based on morality” (Barker­‑Benfield, 289). Politeness and sensibility are the opposites of militancy and radi‑ calism, they promote agreeable variety of minor differences expressed in courteous conversation, ensuing in the pleasing social landscape of concor‑ dia discors, avoiding thus the “perplexity” feared by Repton. In this idyll of elegant society even labour becomes a site of aestheti‑ zation. In place of the rejected Hobbesian view that economic relations are based on primitive, egotistic interests, they are suggested to be based on mutual sympathy and wish for improvement, so that labour becomes the source of pleasure by the very constraint it implies: warm,/ Clean, and compleat,” as “artful Fabrick” and “Habitation.” Wilderness is thus read as surprisingly polite, proper, artful and caring, since “kind” suggests both the pro‑ per and tender, accurate and mild. Borderlines/Ornaments in Eighteenth Century Classical Discourse 101

Providence has so arranged matters that a state of rest becomes soon obnoxious, breeding melancholy and despair; we are thus naturally dri‑ ven to work, reaping enjoyment from its surmounting difficulties (Eagle‑ ton 1996, 57). In the nineteenth century the link between tourism and leisure is not only guidance through space to beautiful places but also a moral guidance through one’s free time, through the time which what Foucault calls “disciplinary society” offers to people, simultaneously fea‑ ring the potentially subversive force of leisure (Rachwał 2000, 82).

If leisure can be morally instructive and labour aesthetically pleasing, the opposition between the two is deconstructed, as well as the opposi‑ tion between coercion and consent. In the individualized, liberal yet dis‑ ciplinary, societies, labour must become aesthetic and leisure moral, as if turning topsy­‑turvy the relation between the two. Labour (at least some priviledged kinds of it) becomes aesthetic exactly because it contains an element of coercion, which is also the element of freedom, of lear‑ ning to become an independent individual, of acquiring self‑sufficiency­ by overcoming one’s own limitations (Eagleton 1996, 57). When labour becomes pleasure and a privilege, leisure becomes a duty. “Free time” provides valuable time for the necessary cultivation of sensibility and instruction of politeness, it should thus never be wasted. The seemingly idle activity of leisure may always turn out to be productive in the end, because “culture’s invisible hand translates leisure into a productive kind of activity leading to both physical and spiritual gain” (Rachwał 2000, 83). The eighteenth­‑century emblem of such instructive leisure and the protoplast of modern tourism, the Grand Tour on the Continent, could still, in Pope’s Dunciad, turn into a gloriously idle (and thus immo‑ ral) adventure:

Intrepid then, o’er seas and lands he flew; Europe he saw, and Europe saw him too. … Where, eas’d of fleets, the Adriatic main Wafts the smooth eunuch and enamour’d swain. Led by my hand, he saunter’d Europe round, And gather’d ev’ry vice on Christian ground; Saw every Court, heard every King declare 102 Przemysław Uściński

His royal sense of Op’ras or the Fair; The Stews and Palace equally explored, Intrigued with glory, and with spirit whored; Tried all hors­‑d’œuvres, all liqueurs defined, Judicious drank, and greatly daring dined; Dropp’d the dull lumber of the Latin store, Spoil’d his own language, and acquired no more; All classic learning lost on classic ground; And last­‑turn’d Air, the Echo of a Sound! Book IV, ll. 293–322 (782–783)

This carnivalesque presentation of eating, drinking and whoring inclu‑ des the allusion to the Italian eunuch: a spoiled fop, a sodomite and an opera singer in one person. The danger that Pope’s satire wishes to expa‑ triate from England to Italy is the perverse mixture of refinement and immorality, the possibility of immoral art, which for Pope is contradic‑ tion in terms, conceivable perhaps only as the “eunuch art,” an empty ornament of the “spoil’d language” that impotently fails to instruct and imprint its precepts on the mind. In the vicinity of the Continental Tour passage, however, Pope casti‑ gates the excessive disciplinary practices at Westminster School and Eton, where corporeal punishment by rod represents the brutal oppo‑ site of the polite instruction by means of refined art:

When lo! a spectre rose, whose index hand Held forth the virtue of the dreadful wand; His beaver’d brow a birchen garland wears, Dropping with infants’ blood and mothers’ tears. O’er ev’ry vein a shudd’ring horror runs, Eton and Winton shake thro’ all their sons. All flesh is humbled, Westminster’s bold race Shrink, and confess the Genius of the place: The pale boy­‑senator yet tingling stands, And holds his breeches close with both his hands. Book IV, ll. 139–48 (773–774)

The overt disciplining of the body into refinement implies here an infan‑ tilization of culture, resembling closely what Polish modernist novelist, Borderlines/Ornaments in Eighteenth Century Classical Discourse 103

Witold Gombrowicz, called in Ferdydurke the process of upupienie, from pupa meaning buttocks. It is the child’s buttocks (even more thanthe adult “ass”) that seem to be the focal point of the regulatory procedures of culture. The buttocks of Westminster boys are “humbled” so that they are forced to “confess the Genius of the place” and this forced admi‑ ration for the educational institution equals the forced participation in the infantilized concordia discors of the narrow, unified culture of poli‑ teness. Pope, himself excluded from the standard schooling, “insinua‑ tes that rule by the rod produces adults dangerously cowed by autho- rity” (Rumbold and McGeary, 608). The dunces are wits “made into the buttocks” (upupieni) according to the grotesque logic, known also from Nietzsche’s Zarathustra, where one part of the body outgrows and begins to govern the remaining parts. The dunces are “all buttocks” as they epitomize human creativity humbled and constrained by the peda‑ gogy of a schooling ruler, which is used both for spanking and measu‑ ring everything according to its antiquated scale. Pope parodies in The Dunciad the reduction of classical harmony into the disciplining “dread‑ ful wand” of rigid neoclassical rules promoted by the modern, pedantic philology. The classical canon of beauty, which required for the com‑ plete and harmonious body a complete and harmonious mind, becomes, in modernity, its own dwarfed inversion. The notion of the “sublime” discussed extensively by Rachwał may, perhaps, stand to some extent for the opposite of the concordia discors of classical reason and its universality that also constitutes its necessary ideological supplement, a negative centre mobilising its construction and sustaining its identification. In his deconstructive reading of Burke, Rachwał traces the violence of simultaneous exclusion and appropria‑ tion (colonization) of the sublime by “the beautiful” of the Enlightened reason (68–76). The sublime that Burke chastises (also as the “naked power” of the French Revolution) is perhaps similar to “the grotes‑ que” located in the promiscuous nature or unconstrained femininity to be controlled or corrected by the self­‑presence of rational subjectivity.5

5 To simplify the matters, it can be said that the hegemony of the Renaissance classi‑ cal beautiful is inherently connected to the hierarchical society which had no middle (its middle was divided into higher and lower), expressing what Foucault called the “ascen‑ ding” individuality and the cosmic chain of Being, whereas the modern (neo)classical 104 Przemysław Uściński

Subjectivity as completeness or presence requires also the production of “objectivity” within which the borderlines of subjectivity can be identi‑ fied and constructed. Such normative construction of subjectivity in sati‑ ric, sentimental or aesthetic discourses often depends on the exclusion or neat covering of the somewhat less beautiful ideological tenets that underwrite its apparent coherence. The distorting delay of writing, the dissemination (and the surplus) of meaning­‑full writing, may, however, inscribe something more, or less, than the written discourse, literally or logically speaking, presents.

Works Cited

Bakhtin, Mikhail. Rabelais and his World. Translated by Helene Iswolsky. Bloomin‑ gton: Indiana University Press, 1984. Barker­‑Benfield, G.J. The Culture of Sensibility. Sex and Society in Eighteen­‑Century Britain. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1996. Bauman, Zygmunt. In Search of Politics. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999. Baur, Eva­‑Gasine. Rococo. Hong Kong, London and Los Angeles: Taschen, 2007. Baudelaire, Charles. Flowers of Evil. Translated by James McGowan. London: Oxford University Press, 2008. Brown, Marshall. Preromanticism. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1991. Butler, Judith. Gender Trouble. New York and London: Routledge, 2006. Defoe, Daniel. Moll Flanders. London: Wordsworth Classics, 2001. Derrida, Jacques. Dissemination. Translated by Barbara Johnson. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1981. Eagleton, Terry. William Shakespeare. Oxford and New York: Blackwell, 1986. ­‑­‑­‑. The Ideology of the Aesthetic. Cambridge and Oxford: Blackwell, 1996. ­‑­‑­‑. Trouble with Strangers. A Study of Ethics. Oxford: John Willey & Sons, 2011. Fielding, Henry. Joseph Andrews and Shamela. London: Dent, 1996. Foucault, Michael. Discipline and Punish. Translated by Alan Sheridan. New York: Random House, 2012. beautiful expresses better the bourgeois individuality which, as Rachwał notes, can only envision itself as the middle, distancing from the royal or religious “heights” of the sub‑ lime as much as from the “low” carnival of the bodily grotesque (1992, 120; see Bakhtin, 22–23, Foucault, 192–194). Borderlines/Ornaments in Eighteenth Century Classical Discourse 105

Gay, John. The Poetical Works of John Gay, edited by G.C. Faber. London: Oxford University Press, 1926. Gombrowicz, Witold. Ferdydurke. Warsaw: Wydawnictwo Literackie, 2012. Jarrett, David, Tadeusz Rachwał and Tadeusz Sławek. Geometry, Winding Paths and the Mansions of Spirit. Aesthetics of Gardening in the 17th and 18th Centuries. Katowice: University of Silesia, 1997. Johnson, Samuel. Selected Writings, edited by Patrick Cruttwell. London: Pen‑ guin Books, 1968. Nokes, David. Introduction to Jonathan Wild by Henry Fielding. London: Pen‑ guin Books, 1982. Pope, Alexander. The Poems of Alexander Pope, edited by John Butt. London: Methuen, 1968. Rachwał, Tadeusz. Word and Confinement. Subjectivity in the “Classical” Discourse. Katowice: Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Śląskiego, 1992. ­‑­‑­‑. Approaches of Infinity. The Sublime and the Social. Studies in Eighteenth­‑Century Writings. Katowice: Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Śląskiego, 1993. ­‑­‑­‑. “Free as a Bird. Wordsworth’s Railways.” (Aesth)ethics of Interpretation, edited by Wojciech Kalaga and Tadeusz Rachwał. Katowice: Wydawnictwo Uniwer‑ sytetu Śląskiego, 2000. 80–93 Repton, Humphrey and John Claudius Loudon. The Landscape Gardening and Landscape Architecture of the Late Humphrey Repton, Esq. London: Longman, 1840. Rumbold, Valerie and Thomas McGeary. “Folly, Session Poems, and the Prepa‑ rations for Pope’s Dunciads.” The Review of English Studies, Vol. 56, No. 226 (2005): 557–610. Sussman, Charlotte. Eighteenth­‑Century English Literature. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2012. Watt, Ian. The Rise of the Novel. London and New York: Penguin Books, 1977. Žižek, Slavoj. The Ticklish Subject. The Absent Centre of Political Ontology. London and New York: Verso, 2008. Jeremy Tambling University of Manchester

“Living On”: On Smart, Cowper, and Blake

This paper goes back to Christopher Smart (1722–1771), who must be pai‑ red with William Blake (1757–1827), though Blake, it seems, did not know Smart’s work. Both Smart and Blake have been figures of immense sig‑ nificance to Teddy, and to his interest in deconstruction; I would not have started reading Smart without his enthusiasm. This paper will take a longer look at the eighteenth‑century,­ in order to get at these two, but it will also have a more developed discussion of a more nega‑ tive because more melancholic poet, William Cowper (1731–1800), in his own turn a figure haunting Blake. My “longer look” will start with The Oxford Book of English Verse, which, edited in 1927 by Sir Arthur Quiller­ ‍‑Couch, prints side by side for comparison Addison’s Ode, “The Spa‑ cious Firmament on High,” which first appeared in The Spectator 465 (1712), and Isaac Watts’ “The Day of Judgment” from Horae Lyricae (1706), which runs:

When the fierce North­‑wind with his airy forces Rears up the Baltic to a foaming fury; And the red lightning with a storm of hail comes Rushing amain down; How the poor sailors stand amazed and tremble, While the hoarse thunder, like a bloody trumpet, Roars a loud onset to the gaping waters Quick to devour them. “Living On”: On Smart, Cowper, and Blake 107

Such shall the noise be, and the wild disorder (If things eternal may be like these earthly), Such the dire terror when the great Archangel Shakes the creation; Tears the strong pillars of the vault of Heaven, Breaks up old marble, the repose of princes, Sees the graves open, and the bones arising, Flames all around them. Hark, the shrill outcries of the guilty wretches! Lively bright horror and amazing anguish Stare through their eyelids, while the living worm lies Gnawing within them. Thoughts, like old vultures, prey upon their heart­‑strings, And the smart twinges, when the eye beholds the Lofty Judge frowning, and a flood of vengeance Rolling afore him. Hopeless immortals! how they scream and shiver, While devils push them to the pit wide­‑yawning Hideous and gloomy, to receive them headlong Down to the centre! Stop here, my fancy: (all away, ye horrid Doleful ideas! come, arise to Jesus, How he sits God­‑like! and the saints around him Throned yet adoring! O may I sit there when he comes triumphant, Dooming the nations! then ascend to glory While our Hosannas all along the passage Shout the Redeemer. (496–8) 1

Addison (1672–1719) suggests the Augustan gentleman, who, as Steele says, “has seen the world enough to undervalue it with good Breeding,” who writes “without unseasonable passions,” and who “writes much

1 Watts is quoted from Horae Lyricae: Poems, Chiefly of the Lyric Kind, in Three Books, Sacred I: To Devotion and Piety, II: to Virtue, Honour and Friendship, III: To the Memory of the Dead. 10th edition. London: D. Midwinter, 1758. 74–76. 108 Jeremy Tambling like a Gentleman, and goes to Heaven with a very good Mien” (Ross, 76).2 F.R. Leavis quotes Addison’s definition: “a Philosopher, which is what I mean by a gentleman” (Leavis 1964, 96),3 being anticipated by Dr Johnson’s Lives of the Poets: “Whoever wishes to attain an English style, familiar but not coarse, and elegant but not extravagant, must give his days and nights to the volumes of Addison” (Wilson, 881). Watts (1674–1748), in contrast, is violent, and affective, controlling that by classical rationalism, in its form, which is that of Horace, Odes 1.22, and the word “disorder” and “stop here, my fancy,” which makes it a poem of instruction, on the side that judges, not that is judged. It anticipates “graveyard” sentiments (Blair, The Grave (1743); Young, Night Thoughts (1742–5); the Wesleyan James Hervey’s Meditation Among the Tombs (1745); Gray’s “Elegy” (1751)), and so is baroque, and it inspires eighteenth­ ‍‑century hymnody, as with John Wesley’s A Collection of Psalms and Hymns (Charleston 1737), which used many of Watts’ hymns; Wesley’s last version of his hymnbook was A Collection of Hymns for the Use of the People Cal‑ led Methodists (1780), a year after the Olney hymns of Newton and Cow‑ per which I discuss below.4 Though Watt’s Ode is not a hymn, its use of paradox reappears in Charles Wesley’s hymns: Donald Davie, arguing for Charles Wesley’s “classicism” calls Charles Wesley’s favourite figure of speech oxymoron (69). Yet this formalist argument is what E.P. Thom‑ pson, thinking of Freudian “ambivalence,” where contraries appear together in human behaviour, implicitly rejects, when he writes of the “sexual sublimation streaked through with masochism” of Wesley’s hymns (44).5 The classical neatness points to a repression at work.

2 Tatler no 5 (21 April 1709). 3 Tatler no 69 (17 September 1709). See also Leavis, 116–7. 4 See Hempton, 68–74. On the Wesleys, and their hymnbooks, and for the significance, see essays by Charles I. Wallace jr, “Wesley as Revivalist/ Renewal Leader” and Karen B. Westerfield Tucker, “Wesley’s Emphases on Worship and the Means of Grace,” in The Cambridge Companion to John Wesley, ed. Randy B. Maddox and Jason E. Vickers (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 81–97, 225–244. 5 See also 407–411. Thompson is responded to in Phyllis Mack, Heart Religion in the British Enlightenment (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 41–54. See also: Donald Davie, The Eighteenth­‑Century Hymn in England (Cambridge: Cambridge Uni‑ versity Press, 1993), and A Gathered Church: The Literature of the English Dissenting Interest 1700–1930 (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1978). On hymnody, see Martha Winburn “Living On”: On Smart, Cowper, and Blake 109

The Royal Society’s language reform had influenced Thomas Rowe’s Dissenting Academy where Watts had studied: it solicited “a close, naked, natural way of speaking … preferring the language of artisans, countrymen and merchants before that of wits and scholars” (qtd. in Escott, 6–7). This makes verse require “common sense” and Newtonian empirical science, mistrusting metaphor; hence the formal “like” intro‑ ducing similes in Watt’s Ode; and the rationalist “If things eternal may be like these earthly,” which assumes that comparisons may be proper, not catachretic. Horae Lyricae preceded Watts’ Hymns and Spiritual Songs (1707), which contains a subjective drive: “when we sing, especially unto God, our chief design is, or should be, to speak our own hearts and our words to God.”6 This appears in Watts’ paraphrase of the Psalms of David Imitated in the Language of the New Testament, where his imita‑ tions “rewrote them as David would have written them had he been a loyal eighteenth century Briton and a devoted Christian” (Rogal 1968).7 Watts’ 1709 Preface to Horae Lyricae says that he has often “fettered his thoughts” and “cramped the sense, or made it obscure and feeble, by the too speedy and regular returns of rhyme” by adopting the “nar‑ row metre of our Psalm Translators” (xxii). The Odes, because they con‑ tained “some expressions that were not suited to the plainest capacity, and had metaphors too weak to please the weaker Christian” (xxiii), he said he had excluded from his volumes of hymns. The hymns and the Divine Songs for Children (1715) are insistent upon teaching, and the nar‑ rowing of the emblem tradition which Bunyan had used in A Book for

England and John Sparrow, Hymns Unbidden: Donne, Herbert, Blake, Emily Dickinson and the Hymnographers (New York: New York Public Library, 1966); M. Pauline Parker, “The Hymn as a Literary Form,” Eighteenth Century Studies 8 (1975): 392–419; D.D. and Robert Stevenson, English Hymnology in the Eighteenth Century (L.A: William Andrews Memorial Library, 1980); J.R. Watson, The English Hymn: A Critical and Historical Study (Oxford: Cla‑ rendon Press, 1997) and his “Eighteenth Century Hymn Writers” in The Blackwell Compa‑ nion to the Bible in English Literature, ed. Emma Mason, Jonathan Roberts and Christopher Rowland (Oxford: Blackwell, 2009). 6 Quoted from “A Short Essay towards the Improvement of Psalmody,” suffixed to the Hymns and Spiritual Songs, in Williamson at al. II, 9. 7 See also, for Watts and the Psalms, J.R. Watson, “The Hymns of Isaac Watts” in Isa‑ bel Rivers and David L. Wykes, Dissenting Praise: Religious Dissent and the Hymn in Eng‑ land and Wales (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 33–67. 110 Jeremy Tambling

Boys and Girls (1686), from open towards determinate meaning is inhe‑ rent in Watts; their condescension, and their class structures are paro‑ died by Blake.8 And Blake’s emblem­‑books, For Children: The Gates of Paradise (1793), revised as For the Sexes: The Gates of Paradise (1806–1818) critique absolutely any sense of a determinate meaning to be found in the “things” that make up emblems. Anna Barbauld (1743–1825) shows herself similar to the rationalizing drift within Watts even though she critiques the idea of his children’s hymns in her Preface to Hymns in Prose for Children (17):

It may well be doubted, whether poetry ought to be lowered to the capa‑ cities of children, or whether they should not rather be kept from reading verse, until they are able to relish good verse, for the very essence of poetry is an elevation in thought and style, above the common standard, and if it wants this character, it wants all that renders it valuable. (qtd. in Sola Pinto, 84)

We can contrast Barbauld’s insistence on prose with Blake’s on his poe‑ try: “I am happy to find a Great Majority of Fellow Mortals who can Elucidate My Visions & Particularly they have been Elucidated by Chil‑ dren who have taken a greater delight in contemplating my Pictures than I even hoped” (Letter to Rev. Dr Trusler, 23 August 1799; Erdman, 703). Anna Barbauld, however, is in a tradition which Dr Johnson, no model for Blake, had raised about hymns as poetry. Johnson excludes the possibility, in writing on Waller:

The essence of poetry is invention; such invention as, by producing something unexpected, surprises and delights. The topics of devotion are few, and being few are universally known; but few as they are, they

8 See my “Bunyan and Things: A Book for Boys and Girls,” Bunyan Studies 16 (2012): 7–31, and my Blake’s Night Thoughts (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), 124–48 for Blake and madness. The charge against Watts goes through to Dickens, in the nineteenth­‑century: see The Old Curiosity Shop, ed. Angus Easson (Harmondsworth: Pen‑ guin, 1972), chapter 32, on the differences between “In books, or work, or healthful play” for “genteel children,” and “In work, work, work. In work always” for “poor people’s children” (309). “Living On”: On Smart, Cowper, and Blake 111

can be made no more; they receive no grace from novelty of sentiment, and very little from novelty of expression. (Wilson, 848) and second on Watts:

[Watt’s] ear was well‑tuned,­ and his diction was elegant and copious. But his devotional poetry was, like that of others, unsatisfactory. The paucity of its topics enforces perpetual repetition, and the sanctity of the matter rejects the ornaments of figurative diction. It is sufficient for Watts to have done better than others what no man has done well. (Wilson, 932)

But before we reach Blake, there is Cowper’s dissent from Johnson, which nonetheless turns into a compromise equal to that which Watts had made, in that Cowper finally accepts the language of good sense as the only possible model to follow:

report informs me that [Johnson] has been severe enough in his animad‑ versions upon Doctor Watts, who was nevertheless, if I am in any degree a judge of Verse, a man of true poetical ability. Careless indeed for the most part, and inattentive too often to those niceties which constitute Elegance of expression, but frequently sublime in his conceptions and masterly in his Execution. (King and Ryskamp, 520–1)9

Johnson and Cowper both bring poetry close to prose, and the ratio‑ nality of grammar, and hymns cannot admit the decoration considered inherent to poetry. Yet the argument might be changed, in a way which relates to Smart and Blake: that hymns inherently question orthodoxy and polite culture in that they deal with a significance which cannot be framed in ratio‑ nal terms, that its language can only be that of catachresis, because it must exceed the rational, even infringing on madness. In neither Smart nor Blake are “the topics of devotion … few, and being few are univer‑

9 Cowper notes that Pope included Watts in his satire in the Dunciad; King and Ryskamp note both the references in the 1728 edition: I, 126, III, 188, and that Watts’ name was removed either through his own “serious, though gentle remonstrance,” or through the influence of Jonathan Richardson. 112 Jeremy Tambling sally known.”10 Johnson and Cowper overinvest in rationality, since the topic of hymns cannot be rational; and Cowper particularly falls vic‑ tim to a tendency which T.S. Eliot, thinking of eighteenth­‑century wri‑ ting, notes: “Sensibility alters from generation to generation in every‑ body, whether we will or no; but expression is only altered by a man of genius. A great many second­‑rate poets, in fact, are second‑rate­ just for this reason, that they have not the sensitiveness and consciousness to perceive that they feel differently from the previous generation, and therefore must use words differently” (Eliot, 271–2). Eliot continues, considering Augustanism specifically:

So positive was the culture of that age, that for many years the ablest writers were still naturally in sympathy with it; and it crushed a num‑ ber of smaller men who felt differently but did not dare to face the fact. (273–274)

Perhaps Eliot overstates the singleness of the culture, ignoring the contradictions already at work in its dominant discourse. Watts did feel differently, at least in part, as the “Ode” suggests, but he seems to have become inseparable from the culture of the age, and one of its spokes‑ men; Dr Johnson, however much within the culture, defended Smart and his madness (“he insisted on people praying with him; and I’d as lief pray with Kit Smart as anyone else” (qtd. in Williamson et al. I, xix). Perhaps few could feel comfortably in sympathy with “the cul‑ ture of that age,” but certainly, one of its most significant casualties was Smart, who did “alter expression” in what he wrote, though not in a way that could be followed by anyone coming after him; similarly Cowper, who maintained an eighteenth­‑century mode while feeling dif‑ ferently, suffered, as did Blake, who was ignored. In all three, their mad‑ ness could be defined as “feeling differently.” These three, Smart, Cow‑ per, and Blake, are the substance of the rest of this essay. The first two by becoming part of the “great confinement” that Foucault discussed in Histoire de la folie; Blake, too, was considered mad, but was left as

10 See the discussion of “the proper” and of metaphor in Jacques Derrida, “White Mythology: Metaphor in the Text of Philosophy,” Margins of Philosophy, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), especially 246–258. “Living On”: On Smart, Cowper, and Blake 113 a marginal figure. All of them used forms deriving from hymns; while Smart and Blake were more resistant to the generalising tones these provided, Smart in particular becoming wholly original in his mode of “adoration,” Cowper partially succumbed to a hymn­‑writing which was generalising but which shows evidence of a subjectivity aware that it “felt differently.” In Smart and Blake, the positiveness of the culture of the age meant its Newtonian and Deist optimism. Like Blake, Smart’s poetry rejects New‑ tonianism: “Newton is more of error than of the truth, but I am of the WORD of GOD” (B.195).11 And it is language – the word – that he works upon; altering expression, drawing attention to the materiality of the word. In virtually his last extant letter (April 26, 1770), he writes:

after being a fortnight at a spunging house, one week at the Marshalsea in the want of all things, I am this day safely arrived at the King’s Bench – Seven years in Madhouses, eight times arrested in six years. (Rizzo and Mahony, 132)12

The madhouse (St Luke’s hospital, Moorgate in 1757, followed by Mr Potter’s madhouse in Bethnal Green until 1763) and the prison, where Smart died, comment alike on the exclusion of the poet whose work is unacceptable socially and in terms of the meanings that the cul‑ ture lives by. Smart’s religious poetry, initiated by Hymn to the Supreme Being on Recovery from a Dangerous Fit of Illness (1756) includes A Song to David (1763), A Translation of the Psalms of David Attempted in the Spi‑ rit of Christianity and Adapted to the Divine Service which included the 35 Hymns and Spiritual Songs for the Fasts and Festivals of the Church of Eng‑ land (1765), The Parables of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ (1768) and Hymns for the Amusement of Children (1771) and the unpublished Jubilate Agno, written in the madhouse, perhaps between 1758 and 1763.

11 Jubilate Agno, fragment B, line 195 [editors’ note]. See Karina Williamson, “Smart’s Principia Quarterly: Science and Anti­‑Science in Jubilate Agno,” RES 30 (1979): 409–22. 12 For Smart’s madness, see 56–58, 65–68, 142–145; Tom Keymer, “Johnson, Madness, and Smart,” in Christopher Smart and the Enlightenment ed. Clement Hawes (New York: St Martin’s Press, 1999), 177–194; Chris Mounsey, Christopher Smart: Clown of God (Lewis‑ burg: Bucknell University Press, 2001), 145–201, 202–238. 114 Jeremy Tambling

Williamson and Walsh say that Smart’s hymns were unique since he was “the only Anglican hymn­‑writer of this period who was neith- er a Methodist nor an Evangelical” (II, 11). Nonetheless, he was still unacceptable, and nearer to both those groups in what may be called a “manic” mode.13 His intention appears in Jubilate Agno, where philo‑ sophy cannot be deist: its affirmativeness links with Derrida on the gift, and with Heidegger on thinking as thanking:

For I pray the Lord Jesus to translate my MAGNIFICAT into verse and represent it (B.430) For the method of philosophizing is in a posture of Adoration. (B.268) For by the grace of God I am the Reviver of ADORATION amongst ENGLISH­‑MEN (B.332)

“Adoration” “adds”: it is the subject of the Song to David.14 It is a form of praise whose public aspects – “For I blessed God in St James’ Park till I routed the whole company” (B.89, compare B.224), and “For I proph- esy that the praise of God will be in every man’s mouth in the Public streets” (C.62) – involved throwing off all shame (B.384, C.113). That and its unorthodoxy, and its excess, which makes the Biblical “Magnificat” (Luke 1.46–55), with its Utopian levelling themes, a “magnifi­‑cat,” inclu‑ sory of his cat Jeoffry, meant his exclusion.15 And of course, Jeoffry, who is magnified throughout, alongside his acts, only brings out an inclusi‑ veness which relates to all animals, and which compares with Blake’s “Auguries of Innocence.” Despite the rejoicing, Smart writes that “I have a greater compass both of mirth and melancholy than another” (B.132). Cowper had an equivalent melancholia; being confined, in Dr Nathaniel Cotton’s mad‑

13 For the “manic” mode, see Clement Hawes, Mania and Literary Style (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996). 14 See Patricia Meyer Spacks, Reading Eighteenth­‑Century Poetry (Chichester: Wiley­ ‍‑Blackwell, 2009), 177–179. 15 See Geoffrey Hartman, “Christopher Smart’s Magnificat: Toward a Theory of Representation,” ELH 41 (1974): 429–54; and the readings of Jubilate Agno in Harriet Guest, A Form of Sound Words: The Religious Poetry of Christopher Smart (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989), 123–240. “Living On”: On Smart, Cowper, and Blake 115 house at St Albans, from the end of 1763 to June 1765, during which time he underwent an Evangelical conversion, at the hands of the Revd Mar‑ tin Madan, whom, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography says, “he had hitherto looked down upon as a Methodistical enthusiast.”16 His poe‑ try is Augustan, but also personal, so not fitting the generalising power required the Olney Hymnbook, to which he contributed some 66 along‑ side the 281 of John Newton (1725–1807).17 Newton, brought up as a Dis‑ senter, and associated with Methodism, was curate of the impoverished lace­‑making town Olney, in Buckinghamshire from 1764 to 1779, when he moved to St Mary Woolnoth.18 Newton thought the Olney hymns “should be hymns, not odes, if designed for public worship and for the use of plain people. Perspicuity, simplicity and ease should be chiefly attended to; and the imagery and colouring of poetry, if admitted at all, should be indulged in very sparingly, and with great judgment.”19 He said that it cost Watts “some labour to restrain his fire, and to accom‑ modate himself to the capacities of common readers” (viii). The Olney hymnbook wants singing to create a single communal subject, the voice of a town, as in Book 2 no. 49: “The Famine of the Word”:

The gospel and a praying few Our bulwarks long have proved,

16 James King, William Cowper: A Biography (Durham: Duke University Press 1986), 50–57; for Cowper’s breakdowns in 1753, see 26–27, in 1763, 45–48, see also 57–58, where King attributes the melancholia to the loss of his mother when he was six; 86–89 for the sickness of 1773–4, 177–8, 212–3 for depression of 1787, and, for 1793 onwards, see 263–5, 271–5, 281. 17 On the controversies on the extent to which Methodism and religion were respon‑ sible for Cowper’s madness, see Lodowick Hartley, “Cowper and the Evangelicals: Notes on Some Early Biographical Interpretations,” PMLA 65 (1950): 719–31. 18 See Bruce Hindmarsh, John Newton and the English Evangelical Tradition: Between the Conversions of Wesley and Wilberforce (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996). 19 Olney Hymns in Three Books 1779 edition, Preface, vii. Also quoted, Lodowick Har‑ tley, “The Worm and the Thorn: A Study of Cowper’s ‘Olney Hymns,’” The Journal of Reli‑ gion 29 (1949): 220–229, p. 222. See also Vincent Newey, Cowper’s Poetry: A Critical Study and Reassessment (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1982), 271–313; Bill Hutchings, The Poetry of William Cowper (London: Croom Helm, 1983), 18–47. For Cowper in relation to Watts, see Willam Cowper, The Task and Selected Other Poems, ed. James Sambrook (London: Longman 1994) for comments. 116 Jeremy Tambling

But Olney sure the day will rue When these shall be removed. Then sin, in this once‑favoured­ town Will triumph unrestrained …

Another (2 no. 69), “On the Fire at Olney. September 22, 1777,” declares how prayer saved the town, and then puns on Lot and “lot/ few”:

O may that night be ne’er forgot Lord, still increase thy praying few, Were Olney left without a Lot, Ruin, like Sodom’s would ensue.

Newton’s hymns differ from Cowper’s, re­‑working emblems, such as “The Gourd,” taken from Jonah 4.7 (1 no. 75):

As once for Jonah, so the Lord To sooth and cheer my mournful hours Prepared for me a pleasing gourd Cool was its shade and sweet its flow’rs.

But the “I” confesses that he has so valued the gift, that its Giver has been hidden, and it had to be destroyed by a worm. He prays for it to be spared, which it is, and the hymn closes affirmatively, positively:

Now Lord, my gourd is mine no more ‘Tis thine, who only couldst it raise, The idol of my heart before Henceforth shall flourish to thy praise.

An emblem is made out of the blasted fig tree (Mark 11.20, 1 no. 97), or appears in the hymn describing Spring:

Yet here as emblem I perceive Of what the Lord can do, Dear Saviour, help me to believe That I may flourish too (2 no. 32) “Living On”: On Smart, Cowper, and Blake 117

Spring is “an emblem of the spring of grace” (2 no. 33). “Haytime” is “the emblem of our mortal state” (2 no. 35). A thaw, “the work of God alone” is “an emblem of his power” (2 no. 89). The calm and faithless sea is “Lively emblem, world, of thee” – “The World,” (2 no. 99).20 Newton opposes Addison, as in the hymn 2.81, “The Book of Crea‑ tion”: here, the creation’s meaning is immanent, but not reason, yet sub‑ jective experience discerns it:

Philosophers have por’d in vain, And guessed, from age to age, For reason’s eye could ne’er attain To understand a page. Though to each star they give a name, Its size and motion teach, The truths which all the stars proclaim, Their wisdom cannot reach.

The hymn critiques naming stars, so conferring a language upon them; that is part of its repression of “imagery” – that is, of the metaphorical. Everything here is immanent truth, not that which has to be worked out, or worked for. Biblical texts expanded as verse concentrate on incidents, and reviews of past experience, so that the first eleven of the hundred hymns comprising Book 2, “On Occasional Subjects” of the Olney Hymns are appropriate for either ending the year, or starting the new one, as are nos. 17, 18, 20–29, and nos. 41, 42, 48. Unlike Smart, there are no hymns for the Church year: it is not that kind of public verse. In the first Book, “On Select Texts of Scripture,” none of Christ’s doctrinal statements in John’s gospel are glossed, with the exception of “I am the resurrection and the life” (John 11.25, 1 no. 116), while only ten hymns gloss Paul’s Epistles. This will to avoid mystery is shared by Cowper; his “There is a fountain filled with blood” (1 no. 79) begins non­‑classically, but the baroque image is hardly maintained beyond the first verse, becoming, in the second verse, a definite image for Christ. When the hymn becomes personal:

20 For the relevance of Olney to the Olney Hymns, see Madeleine Forell Marshall and Janet Todd, Congregational Hymns in the Eighteenth Century (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky 1982), 89–118. 118 Jeremy Tambling

E’er since, by faith, I saw the stream Thy flowing wounds supply, Redeeming love has been my theme, And shall be till I die it becomes general, non­‑specific, non­‑autobiographical; the fountain­ ‍‑image receives no meaning beyond the doctrinal. In the third Book, “Of the Rise, Progress, Changes and Comforts of the Spiritual Life,” where the majority of Cowper’s hymns are found, Cowper writes deistically, mentioning neither himself nor Christ, “God moves in a mysterious way,” (3 no. 15); that, as a commonplace, effectively erases the mystery. “God is his own interpreter/ And he will make it plain” the last lines read, but Cowper precedes God in plainness. Newton’s form of introspection is generalisable from, Cowper’s less so. Newton sets Job 29.2, “O that I were as in months past” (1 no. 43), which begins with past contentment, until the end of the fifth verse: “But now my heart is almost broke/ For all my joys are gone”:

Now when the evening shade prevails My soul in darkness mourns, And when the morn the light reveals No light to me returns. My prayers are now a chattering noise, For Jesus hides his face, I read, the promise meets my eyes, But will not reach my case. Now Satan threatens to prevail, And makes my soul his prey Yet Lord, thy mercies cannot fail, O come without delay.

This, with an Enlightenment sense of light, confident in its ability to name the opposing forces of Jesus and Satan, contrasts with Cowper, where there is not a necessary resolution of the introspection constru‑ cted. Isaiah 57.15, where God says “I dwell in the high and holy place, with him also that is of a contrite and humble spirit, to revive the spirit “Living On”: On Smart, Cowper, and Blake 119 of the humble and to revive the heart of the contrite ones” is glossed by Cowper’s 1.54, which also evokes Psalm 51.17: “The sacrifices of God are a broken spirit: a broken and a contrite heart, O God, thou wilt not despise”:

The Lord will happiness divine On contrite hearts bestow: Then tell me, gracious God, is mine A contrite heart, or no?

I hear, but seem to hear in vain, Insensible as steel: If ought is felt, ‘tis only pain, To find I cannot feel.

I sometimes think myself inclin’d To love thee, if I could; But often feel another mind, Averse to all that’s good. My best desires are faint and few, I fain would strive for more; But when I cry, “My strength renew,” Seem weaker than before.

Thy saints are comforted, I know, And love thy house of pray’r, I therefore go where others go, But find no comfort there.

Oh, make this heart rejoice, or ache; Decide this doubt for me; And if it be not broken, break, And heal it, if it be.

Here, the speaking subject neither feels nor knows, and the lack of reso‑ lution shows in how no conclusion which could be decisive is anticipa‑ ted. The earlier­‑written “Oh! for a closer walk with God” (1 no. 3) looks forward, in its last verse, to a walk which is “close” and which wants to be able to sing “calm and serene my frame” (as opposed to the first 120 Jeremy Tambling verse’s “a calm and heav’nly frame”).21 The frame is the body, and per‑ haps the form for the poem, or hymn. But in “The Lord will happiness divine,” which begins with a proposition: there is divine happiness for the contrite heart (but the biblical text did not specify happiness), the hymn requires to know if the heart is contrite or not, not knowing of itself: the problem is melancholic indifference which it gives him pain to recognise in himself. The only “feeling” possible is another “mind,” “averse to all that’s good.” The poem becomes a complaint, as the fourth verse indicates, which, moving from “faint” to “fain,” calls the result of prayer further weakness, no “comfort,” so that experience fails to back up conviction. This is accentuated by, in the penultimate verse, looking at others in the Olney congregation: the verse, with its play on “com‑ fort,” could hardly be sung by a congregation, and suggests how the premises of the hymnbook exclude him. The last verse’s prayer demands that the heart should rejoice or ache, which means it does neither. In “Oh! for a closer walk,” memory of his “peaceful hours” has left “an aching void”: and an ache might be Keats’s “my heart aches” (“Ode to a Nightingale”) or “aching pleasure” (“Ode on Melancholy”) (525, 540). Or it might be pain suffered masochistically. But here, there is no ache. “Rejoice or ache” may be a choice of oppo‑ sites, or they may be the same; the question which is part of the doubt to be decided. The last two lines resolve the question through opting for aching: the heart must be broken if it is not already, or healed if it is broken: but there is no feeling, no affect, which could resolve which of these is true. Cowper’s “special talent” in the hymns, for Patricia Meyer Spacks, “is the ability to turn the perceptive faculty inwards, to define and render directly certain sorts of psychic activity and psychic sta‑ tus without significant recourse to visual metaphor” (202). While the hymn is the expression of not being able to feel, not being able to sing, what is mourned is – in the hymn’s one comparison – the state of being

21 Cowper included the hymn in a letter of 10 December 1767 (King and Ryskamp, I,187­‑8), adding “I began to compose … Yesterday Morning before Daybreak, but fell asleep at the end of the first two Lines, when I awaked again the third and fourth were whisper’d to my Heart in a way which I have often experienced.” James Sambrook’s annotation of “the dearest idol I have known” speculates that this is Mrs Unwin, who was ill at that time to the point of death. “Living On”: On Smart, Cowper, and Blake 121

“insensible as steel,” which may be thought of as a modern condition, Spacks indicates that the hymn is a crafted version of this state: its for‑ mality and politeness gives structure to indifference, and such formality strengthens, and contests the complaint within the verse. In contrast to Cowper, Newton, in 1 no. 70 asks:

Lord, doest thou such backslidings heal, And pardon all that’s past? Sure if I am not made of steel, Thou hast prevailed at last.

Or, in “The Waiting Soul” (3 no. 33), the fourth verse reads:

Cold as I feel this heart of mine, Yet since I feel it so – It yields some hope of life divine Within, however low.

There is always optimism (“so positive was the culture of that age”):

But if indeed I would, Though I can nothing do, Yet the desire is something good, For which my praise is due. (1 no. 126)

Cowper’s “The Lord will happiness divine” defers the possibility of sin‑ ging, because there is nothing to sing about; the first verse does not know if the heart is contrite, the last verse does not know if the heart is broken. This makes it less than a hymn: a hymn would express some relation to God; this, however, must record a state anterior to that, one passionless. Newton’s – “O come without delay” assumes the absolute immanence of God, even though it opens up a fear that there may be a deferral of divine presence, and so an absence, language being, in Derrida, a struc‑ ture of deferral and difference.22 Smart dates a fragment of Jubilate Agno, as if insisting on immediacy – which can be magnified – and on pre‑

22 See Jacques Derrida, “Différance,” in Margins of Philosophy, trans. Alan Bass (Chi‑ cago: University of Chicago Press 1982), 3–27. 122 Jeremy Tambling sence when he writes: “The Lord magnify the idea of Smart singing hymns on this day in the eyes of the whole university of Cambridge. Novr 5 1862” (D.148). With Cowper, all is “delay.” Baird and Ryskamp note his melancholia in 1772, during the writing of the hymns, and of his dream of 24 January 1773, when a voice told him “Actum est de te, periisti” – it is all up with you, you have perished – a sentence which ended Cowper’s religous activities for ever. They date the poem written in sapphics, a virtual response to Watts’ “Ode,” to 1774 (it was first pub‑ lished in 1815):

Hatred and vengeance, my eternal portion, Scarce can endure delay of execution: – Wait, with impatient readiness, to seize my Soul in a moment. Damned below Judas, more abhorr’d than he was, Who for a few pence, sold his holy master. Twice betray’d, Jesus, me, the last delinquent, Deems the profanest. Man disavows, and Deity disowns me. Hell might afford my miseries a shelter; Therefore hell keeps her everhungry mouths all Bolted against me. Hard lot! Encompass’d with a thousand dangers, Weary, faint, trembling, with a thousand terrors, Fall’n, and if vanquish’d, to receive a sentence Worse than Abiram’s: Him, the vindictive rod of angry justice Sent, quick and howling, to the centre, headlong; I, fed with judgments, in a fleshly tomb, am Buried above ground. (Baird and Ryskamp, 209–10)23

Watts’s vision of sinners going “headlong/ Down to the centre” is cor‑ rected by “Stop here, my fancy,” but Cowper has nothing to make the imagination pause. Rather, the poem contrasts the “delay of execu‑

23 See also xiv­‑xx, xxix­‑xxx, 478–90. “Living On”: On Smart, Cowper, and Blake 123 tion” that must be experienced before hatred and vengeance have their portion, with the “quick” sentence which was passed on Abiram; its mood is “impatience.” Hatred and vengeance are impatient, but so is the poem, which would aspire towards hell since it “might afford my miseries a shelter.” The resultant state is the “sentence” of being dead while being alive, or “quick,” the word coming from Watts: “the gaping waters/ Quick to devour them” (as “devour” provides Cowper’s “ever‑ hungry”). The poem exists beyond congregational use, and its extremity of sentiment, despite its formal structure, indicates it was written by one who “felt differently” from the generalising feelings of the hymn, if that is to be taken as the expression of the “culture of that age.” So, too, was “The Castaway,” written in 1799, and which Willam Hayley (1745–1820), who had known Cowper since 1792, published posthumously in 1803: it showed someone feeling differently. The title shows that resolution has occurred: the Olney hymn “Welcome Cross” (3 no. 16) had welco‑ med “trials” (a word four times repeated) otherwise: “Might I not with reason fear/ I should prove a cast­‑away?” Now, beyond question: he is a cast­‑away. This poem suggests in metre a hymn­‑tune, though adding an octosyl‑ labic couplet to each verse, which modifies that impression. Its subject is “such a destin’d wretch as I,” who in vain “his destiny repell’d.” The man is “washed headlong” from the ship – “headlong” coming from Watts and from “Hatred and Vengeance.” The context of a storm at sea recalls Watts, where “poor sailors” are ready to be devoured by the “gaping waters”: Cowper’s “deeper gulphs.” Being lost in the water suggests the “aching void,” security as resting on absence, on nothing; the man in the water, in the void, must be “self­‑upheld.” The poem justifies the men on board ship, who can do no other than leave him to drown: “They left their outcast mate behind,/ And scudded still before the wind.” Incre‑ asing distance means that “his comrades, who before,/ Had heard his voice in every blast/ Could catch the sound no more.” It uses the terms in which he wrote to Newton, on 29 July 1798. Newton’s letter to him, he said, contained kind expressions “which would have encouraged, per‑ haps, and consoled any other than myself, but I was, even then, out of the reach of all such favourable impressions” (my emphasis) (King and 124 Jeremy Tambling

Ryskamp IV, 462).24 The poem turns both increasing distance and delay – attenuating space and time – making it impossible to hear a distinctive voice above other sounds, as if articulating the problem with the Augu‑ stan tradition. What appals in the poem is, as in “Hatred and Venge‑ ance,” the delay between the death‑sentence­ (which is pronounced, as it were, when the man has gone overboard) and the time when the man drowns; the delay answers to what Cowper feels about himself in con‑ trast to Abiram. Watts feared the “gaping waters,” Cowper, the “aching void,” and finally, “deeper gulphs.” Such delay continued. Hayley, after Cowper’s death in 1800, wrote his life and compiled his letters, in a near­‑obsessive enterprise involving Blake, to whom he gave patronage by bringing him from London to Felpham in Sussex.25 Blake was enthusiastic. In a letter to Thomas Butts of 11 September 1801, Blake writes about John Johnson, Cowper’s cousin who had looked after him since 1790, as “the most innocent forgetter of his own Interests,” and saying that Hayley’s Life will be valuable “as it will contain Letters of Cowper to his friends … Certainly the very best letters that ever were published” (Erdman, 716).26 But his growing anger with Hayley, which meant quitting Felpham, originated from his sense of Hayley’s patronage of Cowper whom Blake had not known perso‑ nally; patronising Cowper’s state, which Hayley must have known, when Cowper wrote such a letter to him as this:

24 See Cowper to Newton, 11 April 1799, on the “sad retrospect to those days when I thought myself secure of an eternity to be spent with the Spirits of such men as [the Rev. William Grimshaw, whose Memoirs, by Newton, had been sent to Cowper]. But I was little aware of what I had to expect, and that a storm was at hand which in one terrible moment would darken, and in another still more terrible, blot out that prospect for ever” (466). 25 For Hayley, see Morchard Bishop, Blake’s Hayley: The Life, Works, and Friendshps of William Hayley (London: Victor Gollancz, 1951); for Hayley’s association of Blake with Cowper, see his letter to Lady Hesketh, Cowper’s Tory cousin, who wanted to suppress his madness, July 15 1802: “he resembles our beloved Bard in the Tenderness of his Heart, and in the perilous powers of an Imagination utterly unfit to take due care of Himself. With admirable Faculties, his sensibility is … dangerously acute” (278). Hayley represents Blake only as an artist, not a poet. 26 On Blake and Cowper, see Morton D. Paley, “Cowper as Blake’s Spectre,” Eighteenth­ ‍‑Century Studies 1.3 (1968): 236–52. “Living On”: On Smart, Cowper, and Blake 125

Ignorant of every thing but my own instant and impending Misery, I know neither what I do when I write nor can do otherwise than write because I am bidden to do so. Perfect Despair the most perfect that has ever possessed any mind has had possession of mine you know how long. (19 June 1797, King and Ryskamp IV, 460).

Blake writes, anti­‑Hayley:

For this is being a Friend just in the nick Not when hes well but waiting till hes sick He calls you to his help be you not movd Untill by being Sick his wants are provd. You see him spend his Soul in Prophecy Do you believe it a Confounded lie Till some Bookseller & the Public Fame Proves there is truth in his extravagant claim For tis atrocious in a Friend you love To tell you any thing that he cant prove And tis most wicked in a Christian Nation For any Man to pretend to Inspiration (Erdman, 507)

Blake makes Cowper a prophet, and inspired, Methodist­‑like, separating him from the normative Christianity of the eighteenth century as embo‑ dying a “Christian nation.” Hayley, writing a biography for Cowper’s imperious cousin, Lady Hesketh – who would not sanction his madness being mentioned – can only recuperate Cowper by including him with- in the values that Blake identifies as having driven both him mad and Cowper before him. Blake in Felpham writes that “my Abstract folly hurries me often away while I am at work, carrying me over Mountains and Valleys which are not Real in a Land of Abstraction where Spectres of the Dead wander” (11 September 1801, Erdman, 716), and says that he has been “very Unhappy” (22 November 1802, Erdman, 719). He tells Hayley that he has been possessed by a “spectrous Fiend”: “Nebuchad‑ nezzar had seven times passed over him; I have had twenty … I was a slave bound in a mill among beasts and devils” (23 October 1804, Erdman, 756). We can compare the entry in Blake’s Notebook, “Tue‑ 126 Jeremy Tambling sday Jan.ry 20 1807 between Two & Seven in the Evening – Despair” (Erdman, 694).27 The sense that madness is a condition of delay, and therefore of repe‑ tition, repetition because of delay, and repetition instead of a decisive event happening (“O come without delay”) appears in the vision which Blake’s annotations to Spurzheim’s Observations on Insanity (1817) record. He glosses Spurzheim’s statement that Methodism, and religion in gene‑ ral “is another fertile cause of insanity”:

Methodism etc. p. 154. Cowper came to me & said. O that I were insane always I will never rest. Can you not make me truly insane. I will never rest till I am so. O that in the bosom of God I was hid. You retain health & yet are as mad as any of us all – over us all – mad as a refuge from unbelief – from Bacon [Isaac] Newton & Locke. (Erdman, 663)

The ghostly Cowper in his despair nineteen years after his death is “living on,” as Derrida would put it, in Blake; remaining still the vic‑ tim of delay, and incompleteness, including incomplete madness, while Methodism is seen by Blake to be an incomplete way of going mad. Here, madness seems to be a necessary way of evading that world of unbelief, which is summed up by Hayley, and which may be equated with empiricist rationality. In that world, it is impermissible that anyone should be allowed “to tell you anything that he can’t prove.” Blake shows no distance from Methodism, from God’s “two Servants, Whitefield and Wesley,” called “Prophets” though spoken of by others as “Idiots or Madmen” (Milton 22.61–2, Erdman 118). Against the Dei‑ sts, he praises Whitefield, “for Whitefield pretended not to be holier than others: but confessed his Sins before all the World” (Jerusalem 52, Erdman, 201; see also Jerusalem 72.51, Erdman, 227). Blake implicitly separates himself from such figures as the Augustan Fielding, who atta‑ cked Whitefield through Parson Adams in Joseph Andrews (1742), saying that Whitefield called “nonsense and enthusiasm to his aid and [setting]

27 See Andrew M. Cooper, “Blake and Madness: The World Turned Inside Out,” ELH, 57 (1990): 586–642, and W.J. T. Mitchell, “Dangerous Blake,” Studies in Romanticism 21 (1982): 410–416. “Living On”: On Smart, Cowper, and Blake 127 up the detestable doctrine of faith against good works,” a doctrine Adams says, with enthusiasm, “was coined in hell” (93). A difference between Cowper and Blake is in the intensity of belief: Cowper’s work is not insane enough; his Evangelicalism and his hym‑ nody associate with despair, because they know only separation between the poet as hymnist, and God. Cowper’s melancholia associa‑ tes in the Olney hymns with an ethos of good sense which bound him, but “Hatred and Vengeance,” and “The Castaway” break out, at a price virtually too great. Blake, with his extraordinary achievement, seems to break free of that imprisonment, and lets Cowper live on in him, in his dream­‑life and in his poetry.

Works Cited

Baird, John D. and Charles Ryskamp, eds. The Poems of William Cowper; Vol. 1, 1748–1782. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980. Davie, Donald. Purity of Diction in English Verse and Articulate Energy. Manche‑ ster: Carcanet Press, 2006. Eliot, T.S. “Poetry in the Eighteenth Century.” From Dryden to Johnson: The Pelican Guide to English Literature, vol. 4, edited by Boris Ford. Har‑ mondsworth: Penguin, 1965. 271–278. Erdman, David V., ed. The Complete Poetry and Prose of William Blake. New York: Anchor Books, 1988. Escott, Harry. Isaac Watts, Hymnographer: A Study of the Beginnings, Development and Philosophy of the English Hymn. London: Independent Press, 1962. Fielding, Henry. Joseph Andrews, edited by R.F. Brissenden. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1977. Hempton, David. Methodism: Empire of the Spirit. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005. Keats, John, Keats: The Complete Poems, edited by Miriam Allott. London: Lon‑ gman, 1970. King, James and Charles Ryskamp, eds. The Letters and Prose Writings of William Cowper. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1979–86. 5 vols. Leavis, F.R. Revaluation: Tradition and Development in English Poetry. Har‑ mondsworth: Penguin, 1964. Meyer Spacks, Patricia. The Poetry of Vision: Five Eighteenth Century Poets. Camb‑ ridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1967. 128 Jeremy Tambling

Quiller­‑Couch, Arthur, ed. The Oxford Book of English Verse 1250–1900. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1927. Rizzo, Betty and Robert Mahony, eds. The Annotated Letters of Christopher Smart. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1991. Rogal, Samuel J. Introduction to Reliquiae Juveniles: Miscellaneous Thoughts in Prose and Verse On Natural, Moral and Divine Subjects, Written Chiefly in Youn‑ ger Years (1734) by Isaac Watts. Gainesville: Scholars’ Facsimiles and Reprints, 1968. Ross Angus, ed. Selections from The Tatler and The Spectator. Harmondsworth: Penguin 1982. Sola Pinto, Vivian de. “William Blake, Isaac Watts and Mrs Barbauld.” The Divine Vision: Studies in the Poetry and Art of William Blake, edited by Vivian de Sola Pinto. London: Victor Gollancz, 1957. 67–87. Thompson, E.P. The Making of the English Working Class. Harmondsworth: Pen‑ guin, 1968. Watts, Isaac. Horae Lyricae: Poems, Chiefly of the Lyric Kind, in Three Books, Sacred I: To Devotion and Piety, II: to Virtue, Honour and Friendship, III: To the Memory of the Dead. 10th edition. London: D. Midwinter, 1758. Williamson, Karina, Marcus Walsh, and Ann Becher eds. The Poetical Works of Christopher Smart. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980–1996. 6 vols. Wilson Mona, ed. Dr Johnson: Prose and Poetry. London: Rupert Hart­‑Davis, 1957. Jacek Mydla University of Silesia, Katowice

Joanna Baillie’s Theatre of Sympathy and Imagination

Introduction

Joanna Baillie (1762–1851) and her works have long lain outside the cen‑ tre of literary studies. However, if we were to judge by her presence in anthologies of literature, she has recently (“been”) moved closer to the centre; we can now find her poems in The Norton Anthology of English Literature, and the Broadview Anthology of Romantic Drama contains her 1812 “Gothic” play Orra. Broadview has, besides, published a criti‑ cal edition of the first collection, published originally in an anonymous volume in 1798, of Plays on the Passions (see references for details), a wri‑ ting project that extended over a number of years. Apart from numerous theses devoted to particular aspects of Baillie’s work, there is – among other books – a new critical biography (Judith Bailey Slagle’s Joanna Bail‑ lie, a Literary Life) and a copious two­‑volume edition of her letters. There is a larger context to this reclaiming and restitution: “Over the past two decades,” – writes Jonathan Mulrooney – “scholars of British theatre in the long eighteenth century have produced some of the most imaginative and exciting work in contemporary cultural studies” (249). What we have been witnessing for some time now can be described as the “de­‑peripherisation” of romantic drama, and of female roman‑ tic drama in particular. Thanks to this process, Baillie now – once more – occupies centre stage. In other words, she has largely reclaimed the position she held two hundred years ago. 130 Jacek Mydla

This article is another attempt at de­‑peripherisation, but also at making central an issue that cultural­‑studies­‑oriented scholars have cho‑ sen to ignore. I examine here three ways in which the drama of Baillie is related to the imagination; this means that I pick up a problem that may seem peripheral in drama and theatre studies, but one which, as we shall see, is central to the theoretical concerns with which Baillie occu‑ pied herself in her dramaturgy. In what follows I address two major concerns: philosophical (epi‑ stemological and moral) and (meta) theatrical. The larger philosophi‑ cal context involves the philosophy of the mind (chiefly Scottish) as an influence on Baillie’s drama. This epistemological aspect of the relation between the passions and the imagination is tightly intertwined with some moral ramifications: the troubled – and even potentially cata‑ strophic – relation between the imagination and the passions supplied sources for the conflicts that Baillie represented (“staged”), or, aswe might put it, “studied” in her plays. If a philosophy of the mind, with an inseparable moral dimension, informs Baillie’s dramaturgy, this philosophy has necessarily undergone a transmutation due to the way in which Baillie, as her project of “plays on the passions” compelled her to, needed to work out a manner of sho‑ wing the workings of the imagination on the stage. Especially interest‑ ing in this context are cases of pathological tensions between the private and the public spheres, tensions that arise from the process whereby philosophical introversion has to be transmuted into theatrical inter‑ personality and sociability.1 The relationship between the broader phi‑ losophical framework of Baillie’s work and the way in which it is put to use in drama, and thus given a largely novel theatrical facet, cannot be an easy one to unravel. As we shall see, there is indeed some variance between the conceptual and theatrical contexts of her engagement with the passions and the imagination.

1 This is to be taken in a double sense, because we have to distinguish between (1) the social world portrayed in drama from (2) the performance as a social event. Bail‑ lie consistently devised her plays as “acting plays,” i.e., ones intended for performance, no matter how critical she was with the actual conditions of staging in the London royal theatres. Joanna Baillie’s Theatre of Sympathy and Imagination 131

Baillie and the Passions

Long forgotten but recently rediscovered, Joanna Baillie’s plays –and the project they represented – earned her once the reputation of a play‑ wright who revived the tradition of serious or legitimate drama. An anecdote frequently quoted by those few scholars who have published on Baillie features Lord Byron, with whom Baillie was a great favourite (“there are fine things in all the Plays on the Passions,” qtd. in Brewer, 167): in response to Voltaire’s supposition that “the composition of a tra‑ gedy requires testicles,” Byron wrote: “If this be true Lord knows what Joanna Baillie does – I suppose she borrows them.”2 As we shall see, Baillie encroached also upon another supposedly male terrain, that of philosophy. Even though she was not unanimously extolled by her con‑ temporaries, praise was often heard. For instance, in 1802 (Baillie having turned forty, with decades of active life awaiting her) a critic wrote that “even if her pen were now to be inactive … [she] would be always cele‑ brated among the brightest luminaries of the present period” (qtd., after a reviewer in the British Critic, in Slagle, 95). In the words of her friend, Sir Walter Scott, Baillie was “the best dramatic writer whom Britain has produced since the days of Shakespeare and Massinger” (qtd. in Brewer, 166).3 Baillie made her debut as a playwright in 1798 with an anonymous publication of three plays (the full title of the book reads A Series of Plays: In Which It Is Attempted to Delineate the Stronger Passions of the Mind. Each Passion Being the Subject of a Tragedy and a Comedy).4 The pro‑ ject, as it was originally devised, involved the composition of two plays, a comedy and a tragedy, on each of the major passions (love, hate, ambi‑ tion, fear, hope, remorse, jealousy, pride, envy, revenge, anger, joy, grief) (Duthie, 24).5 The 1798 publication contained two tragedies, one on love

2 Byron’s letter to John Murray (Venice, April 2nd 1817): Byron 1976, 203. Italics and punctuation according to the source publication. 3 Like Byron, Scott showed some eagerness in getting Baillie’s plays staged. 4 Earlier, in 1790, Baillie published, also anonymously, some poetry. 5 As Duthie points out, by 1812 Baillie had changed her original plan, explaining that joy, grief, and anger were “too transient,” pride “dull,” and envy “too disgusting in Tra‑ gedy,” and to be endured only in “Comedy or Farce.” Being thus left with remorse, jealousy, 132 Jacek Mydla and the other on hatred, and a comedy on love. Significantly, it was pre‑ faced by an essay entitled “Introductory Discourse,” in which Baillie presented her theory of drama based on the notion of “sympathetick [sic] curiosity.” Engagements with the philosophy of the human mind can be found in all thirteen of her plays on the passions. As we shall see on the example of the plays discussed below, these engagements necessitated a preoccu‑ pation with the imagination. Like the philosophy of her times that inspi‑ red her, Baillie’s interest in the strong passions obliged her to explore the links between those and the imagination. This is perhaps most con‑ spicuous in her two plays on the passion of fear, Orra and The Dream (both published in 1812). In Orra, the title heroine’s irrational, indeed pathological, fear of the supernatural, described as “the secret weakness of her mind” (90),6 is cause of her madness in bizarre if not somewhat ridiculous circumstan‑ ces; she loses her mind in the moment when she is about to be rescued from imprisonment in a gloomy castle. Her hyperactive imagination is the immediate cause of her death: “Her mind within itself holds a dark world/Of dismal phantasies and horrid forms!” (152). The hero of The Dream, “imperial general” Osterloo dies of fear a minute before an order is delivered to prevent his execution. Osterloo’s mind has been agita‑ ted into frenzy, not so much by a presentiment of imminent death, as by thoughts on the abyss of an Unknown Beyond that death opens. As he describes it: when the mind tries to apprehend death, it finds itself suspended over a yawning gulf of “the unknown, the unbounded, the unfathomable” (188). In both these instances, Baillie gives an excrucia‑ ting examination of what in the playtext of The Dream is described as the and revenge, she subsequently deleted revenge from her plan as a passion which is “fre‑ quently exposed.” She realised her project, in this curtailed form, over a period of almost 30 years (1798–1836), and the three volumes which belong to the “series” include: Count Basil (a tragedy on love), The Tryal (a comedy on love), De Monfort (a tragedy on hate), The Election (a comedy on hatred), Ethwald (a tragedy on ambition; in two parts), The Second Marriage (a comedy on ambition), Orra (a tragedy on fear, of the supernatural), The Dream (a tragedy on fear, of death), The Siege (a comedy on fear), The Beacon (a musical drama on hope), Romiero (a tragedy on jealousy), The Alienated Manor (a comedy on jealousy), and Henriquez (a tragedy on remorse). See the “Chronology” section in Duthie’s edition. 6 All citations, by page number, to these two plays are to Baillie 2007. Joanna Baillie’s Theatre of Sympathy and Imagination 133

“inward agonies of imagination” (187). As we have already suggested, we may speak here of attempts at bringing forth, at putting on display what naturally remains hidden from view. To put it differently, Baillie’s goal is to address anew and redefine the customary relation between within and without in drama; while traditionally the outside (mime, actions, etc.: a play’s mimetic, stagey content) are for the audience the indices of mental goings­‑on, Baillie’s goal is to, as it were, stage the mind. The audience’s interest is to be directed to the inner workings of the human mind as the source and cause of events represented on the stage. Taking into account the larger context, which we shall examine subse‑ quently, Baillie’s project of “plays on the passions” consists in combining dramaturgy and the philosophy of the mind. And so, before we examine in more detail the two earliest tragedies on the passions (De Monfort and Count Basil), we discuss briefly that philosophical context.

The Epistemology of Sympathy

That modern philosophy in Britain was occupied with passions beco‑ mes obvious not only when we look into John Locke’s Essay Concerning Human Understanding; significant for the history of this problematic is also Francis Hutcheson’s critique of Thomas Hobbes’s and Bernard Mandeville’s views on man’s supposed natural selfishness. Hutcheson contributed in this way to the development of what we may call the moral branch of English empiricism, which worked out a theory of sym‑ pathy. In her introduction of the first series ofPlays on the Passions, Joanna Baillie makes use of the term “sympathetic curiosity,” which reveals her debt, not only to the philosophy of the human mind in general but also and chiefly to this philosophy’s contribution to ethics, namely the way it assisted in the fashioning of a system of morals. In what follows in this section, we look chiefly at the philosophers who represent what came to be called the Scottish Enlightenment.7

7 The term was coined in 1900 by William Robert Scott (in reference to Hutcheson) “to designate the great eighteenth­‑century flowering of moral philosophy and the human sciences in the university towns of Lowland Scotland.” (Manning et al., 71). See also Introduction to Broadie 2007. 134 Jacek Mydla

Besides Hutcheson (1694–1746), the main representatives were David Hume (1711–1776), Adam Smith (1723–1790), Thomas Reid (1710–1796) and Dugald Stewart (1753–1828). To Stewart and his Elements of the Philosophy of the Human Mind (1792), Baillie explicitly refers in the preface to The Martyr (a play originally published in 1826). Stewart, however, was one of the many literati; among them we we find also Edmund Burke, who partook in a debate over Smith’s (Hutcheson’s disciple’s) treatise The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759).8 Of importance, not merely biographi‑ cal, is the fact that Baillie’s father, Reverend James Baillie, was profes‑ sor of divinity at Glasgow at a time when the passions‑­ and sympathy­ ‍‑centred philosophy was at the height of its popularity.9 Given the fact that Joanna left Scotland for London at the age of twenty­‑two, following the death of her father, we may safely assume that by that time she had absorbed some of the intellectual atmosphere of “her Scotts envi‑ ronment” (Armstrong, 56, note 8).10 Besides the larger context of the cultural environment, imbued with philosophy, in which Baillie grew up as a thinker and a poet, we have internal evidence of Baillie’s absorption of the intellectual atmosphere of – to use James Buchan’s phrase – “the Scottish moment of the mind.” We have already mentioned Baillie’s use of the term “sympathy.” Let us at this point examine what she does with it in the “Introductory Disco‑ urse,” her manifesto, as we might call it, prefixed to the 1798 Plays on the Passions. Here Baillie lays out a broad conceptual context, indeed a foundation, for her passions‑centred­ drama. As the extended title of this volume, which – as we have noted – contains the first three plays, informs us, the project of “a series of plays” is about renewed attempts “to delineate the stronger passions of the mind.” In the “Discourse” Baillie explains that the notion of “sympathetick curiosity towards others of our kind” (2001, 69) supplies a foundation for this project.

8 The publication that helps us follow the debate is to be found among the works cited (see Reeder). 9 Adam Smith was Professor of Moral Philosophy at Glasgow from 1752 to 1763. 10 As a daughter of a Presbyterian minister, Armstrong argues, Baillie was “saturated in the culture and intellectual disputes of the Scottish Enlightenment” (Armstrong 2003, 56, note 8). This sounds convincing, which is not to say that this example of “cultural saturation” would not merit further investigation. Joanna Baillie’s Theatre of Sympathy and Imagination 135

She defines “sympathetick curiosity” as man’s natural “propensity” (the word frequently recurs), an innate inclination, in other words, that makes us take interest in others, and specifically in what our fellow cre‑ atures think and feel. The epistemological meaning of “this universal desire in the human mind to behold man in every situation” (70) ought not escape us: sympathetic curiosity is not only a natural but also an indispensable cognitive impulse, one which brings us into contact with other people. The philosophy of sympathy, besides the epistemological and moral, also has other aspects, among them social and political. In the realm of dramatic art, sympathy carries a unique significance, which, howe‑ ver, is to a large extent a reflection of the way sympathy – in the real world – is the foundation for interpersonal relationships of different orders (familial, communal, national). Unsurprisingly, in her theoreti‑ cal considerations, Baillie foregrounds the metadramatic significance of sympathetic curiosity; she calls upon it to explain the universal appeal of dramatic art and, as a consequence, to justify her occupation as a playwright. The playwright’s task is to trace “the varieties and pro‑ gress of a perturbed soul” (2001, 73) thereby to satisfy this desire, as Baillie self­‑consciously does in her plays. This task turns the playwright into a practical philosopher, the plays being so many studies in human nature (81).11 Baillie is thus intentionally indebted to the idea, expressed among other thinkers by Edmund Burke, according to which “our Creator has designed we should be united by the bond of sympathy” (42).12 But it is in Adam Smith and his theory of moral sentiments that we find (as Baillie did) the term “sympathetic” used systematically as a techni‑ cal term and in the sense in which it is used by Baillie. According to Smith, “men are naturally sympathetic” (101). As scho‑ lars have repeatedly explained, the Smithan notion of sympathy is

11 To be consistent, Baillie actually goes a step further and argues for the su- premacy of drama over philosophy; drama fleshes out the abstract and dry notions of philosophy. 12 This section of Burke’s tract is entitled “The effects of SYMPATHY in the distres‑ ses of others.” It has been reprinted in Appendix A of Duthie’s edition of Baillie’s Plays. 136 Jacek Mydla a technical term: “In the technical sense, to sympathise with someone is to have a feeling which one knows or suspects another person to have, and to acquire the feeling by imagining oneself in the very same cir‑ cumstances that we know the other person to be in” (Broadie 1997, 155; editor’s note).13 What is more, Smith’s conception of the spectator (as in, for instance, this passage: “the sympathetic indignation of the specta‑ tor” (Smith, 98)) prepares the ground for Baillie’s metadramatic employ‑ ment of the notion of sympathy. Indeed, as Alexander Broadie puts it: “For Smith, sympathy cannot be detached from spectatorship, for it is spectators who sympathise” (Broadie 2006, 158). That Baillie’s debt to Smith and other Scottish philosophers is not to be regarded as an unthinking appropriation becomes obvious if we take into consideration her conscious transference of the ideas to the theatri‑ cal medium, with special emphasis placed on dialogue and other than verbal types of interaction between characters on the stage. Some scho‑ lars have gone so far as to suggest that Baillie’s project of plays on the passions “throws out a challenge to contemporary accounts of the emo‑ tions and particularly to a discourse of sympathy pursued by Adam Smith” (Armstrong, 23). We shall return to this assumption in due course. Smith certainly institutes sympathy as a transpersonal faculty.14 This role of sympathy follows logically from the epistemological pre‑ mise with which Smith opens his treatise: “As we have no immediate experience of what other men feel, we can form no idea of the manner in which they are affected, but by conceiving what we ourselves should feel in the like situation” (11). It is thanks to sympathy that we know what others feel; it is the sympathetic bond between persons that allows for what may be called emotional communication. What is important for us to note is what role conception grants to the imagination. The role played by the imagination in interpersonal (“sym‑ pathetic”) communication is crucial. Not only is the imagination clo‑

13 Broadie suggests that we should “think of sympathy as an adverbial modification of a given feeling”: the spectator has another’s feeling sympathetically (Broadie 2006, 164; see also 168–9). 14 As Adela Pinch put it: “feelings are transsubjective entities that pass between per‑ sons” (19). Interesting as the reformulation may sound, neither Smith nor Hume speak of feelings actually passing from one person to another. Joanna Baillie’s Theatre of Sympathy and Imagination 137 sely connected with the passions,15 but it also allows us to perform the transsubjective leap into the minds of other people. Smith treats at some length of the latter function of the imagination. In his view, thanks to the imagination we can intuit the mental state of another person. This trans‑ subjective intuition is a function of our minds that makes imagination indispensable: “By the imagination we place ourselves in his [another man’s] situation, we conceive ourselves enduring all the same torments, we enter as it were into his body, and become in some measure the same person with him …” (12). We can be mentally transported as it were bey‑ ond the confines of our particular selves; we can almost become a per‑ son other than ourselves. In relation to the passions, imagination functions on two different levels and in three different ways. On a personal level, the passions both influence the imagination and are influenced by it. The philosop‑ hers customarily occupied themselves with either or both of these types of influence. For instance, Smith devotes an entire chapter to “passions which take their origin from a particular turn or habit of the imagina‑ tion” (the title of I.ii.2). On the interpersonal level, the imagination, in the way we have just described, affects a sympathetic link between the person under the influence of a particular passion (Smith speaks of the “person principally concerned” (25)) and the spectator. All these aspe‑ cts have a moral dimension attached to them. Typically and to return to the problem of influence, Dugald Stewart in his Elements of the Phi‑ losophy of the Human Mind sets apart a section of his treatise to discuss “the influence of imagination on human character and happiness.” The main concern here is the potentially harmful influence that a disorde‑ red imagination can exert on the mind; cautions Stewart, “at length the most extravagant dreams of imagination acquire as powerful influence in exciting its [the mind’s] passions, as if they were realities” (452).

15 In the words of David Hume, “‘Tis remarkable, that the imagination and affections have a close union together, and that nothing, which affects the former, can be entirely indifferent to the latter” (1981, 424). 138 Jacek Mydla

Passions and Morals

Baillie’s drama is ostensibly occupied with the operation of the pas‑ sions in the mind of an individual person, as well as with their trans‑ mission amongst a community. According to Janice Patten, the real action in Baillie’s plays on the passions is “predominantly psycholo‑ gical” (174). Isobel Armstrong, alluding to the medical occupation of Baillie’s brother, Dr Matthew Baillie, calls her plays the “anatomy of the emotions” (55, note 8). By engaging the then current philosophy of the human mind, Baillie inevitably engaged a number of problems this phi‑ losophy addressed, including besides the epistemological dimension of sympathy the moral concerns just mentioned. When speaking of the passions, Smith, as we have seen, singles out those which are “derived from the imagination,” and which “take their origin from a particular turn or habit of the imagination.” Both love and hatred provide appropriate examples. In her plays on the passions, Baillie devotes each of these two aseparate tragedy: Count Basil (set in Mantua in the sixteenth century, with a military conflict in the backgro‑ und) is a tragedy on love and De Monfort (set in a town in Germany) a tragedy on hatred. As regards the underlying moral philosophy, both tragedies illustrate and verify Smith’s disapproval of these passions, an attitude that is at the same time, a recognition of their strength. Smith calls them “disagreeable” and repeatedly stresses the fact that they put considerable strain on the sympathetic propensities of the obser‑ ver. As Smith sees it, love, though natural and “pardoned” at a certain age, makes it difficult for the impartial spectator to “enter into it,” or to fellow­‑feel (38).16 In other words, when we see others moved by these strong passions, we also have a sense of the limitations of our capacity to fellow­‑feel; there is always some disproportion between, for exam‑ ple, the intensity of love and its actual object (i.e. the loved person); that object’s value, assessed impartially, does not justify the strength of the affection and so the spectator finds it “disproportioned.” Two functions

16 Love “is always laughed at, because we cannot enter into it”; and the reason for this limited ability to sympathise is that it is “extravagantly disproportioned to the value of [its] objects” (Smith, 40). Joanna Baillie’s Theatre of Sympathy and Imagination 139 of the imagination are in conflict here: the object­‑passion disproportion in the mind of the person principally concerned prevents fellow­‑feeling in the observer, whose mind cannot enter into the mind of the enamou‑ red or “doting” person. For reasons that do not seem to require further elucidation, Baillie was primarily interested in examining strong as opposed to petty or tran‑ sient passions, especially in her tragedies. As she tells us in the “Disco‑ urse,” strong ones are those that take time to grow and have a capacity to take possession of and even devastate the soul. Whether, as some critics would have it, this determination in the playwright posed a chal‑ lenge to Smith and other philosophers is debatable. However, Baillie must have been aware, if dimly, of the difficulties which this task posed for a dramatic artist. First of all, the project involved showing (or “deli- neating,” as she puts it) the growth of a passion, not just its final or patho- logical stage. (She censures previous dramatists for their manner of limiting their representations of the passions to their most violent out‑ bursts.) Secondly, given the possibility of a successful representation of the process whereby a passion gradually takes possession of the soul of the protagonist, it will still, because of its vehemence, prevent sympathy, and these both in the other figures of the play (on‑stage­ spectators) and the audience (external spectators). These are serious difficulties, perhaps even obstacles, but Baillie does not address them in the “Discourse.” Moreover, there is the problem of the tragic genre. According to Smith, the inordinate strength of some passions obstructs their cre‑ dibility, i.e. makes them implausible: “such passions [derived from the imagination], though they may be allowed to be almost unavoidable in some part of life, are always, in some measure, ridiculous” (38). Can then a tragedian successfully delineate a passion that the spectator (even if understood in the Smithan sense of the term) must find ridiculous? At this point, we can come up with the assumption that, conscious of the difficulty, Baillie simply decided to put a theory of the passions to the test of dramaturgy and of theatrical practice. As with any such test, however, the results are largely a matter of speculation, because only a few of the plays were staged and in the case of those that were (e.g. De Monfort) we have little direct access to the actual response of Baillie’s audiences. What we must chiefly rely on is the text of the plays themselves. 140 Jacek Mydla

As we shall see, the conclusions we have arrived at are also ridden with a degree of ambiguity, also of a moral nature. To make this sound clea‑ rer, we need to take a closer look at the literary material at hand. In both early tragedies, there is much in the conceptual fabric that confirms that Baillie shared Smith’s ambivalent attitude to strong pas‑ sions; love and hate, though natural, are potentially destructive, both on the personal and the interpersonal levels.17 In Count Basil, great empha‑ sis is put on the disparity between the way in which the lover, Basil, feels about the object of his passion, and how other characters feel about him and his love:

Basil. [about Victoria, the woman he dotes on] Long has she been the inmate of my breast!/ The smiling angel of my nightly dreams. … Yet, like a beauteous vision from the blest,/ Her form has oft upon my mind return’d; … (139).18

Here we are made aware of the role played by the imagination in giving rise to Basil’s strong affection. At the same time, while strengthe‑ ning his passion, the imaginary component, as we might call it, foreclo‑ ses fellow­‑feeling. To represent this perceptual disparity, Baillie uses an onstage spectator; Basil’s friend, Rosinberg, cannot enter into the mind of the thus love­‑bewitched companion: “What mean you now? Your mind is raving, Basil” (139). A more detached observer allows Baillie to describe Basil’s infatuation by means of a telling metaphor: “Earth­ ‍‑kindled fire, which from a little spark/ On hidden fuel feeds its growing strength …” (141); Victoria’s father, the Duke of Mantua, who will use Basil’s weakness to serve his political ends, is perhaps the most brusque in his judgement: “fantastic fancies bind him thus …” (142). Elsewhere, we hear a suggestion that Basil has become slave to “ideal tyranny” (147). The word “ideal” occurs here in the then common sense of “ima‑ ginary,” and, according to Duthie, Baillie may be indebted to Mary Wollstonecraft’s reflections concerning the fantastic (“ideal”) powers of woman over man. This idea is latter echoed by Rosinberg, who finds

17 Compare Victoria’s lines in Count Basil: “Were human passions plac’d within the breast/ But to be curb’d, subdu’d, pluck’d by the roots?” (147). 18 Unless indicated otherwise, emphasis in the quotations has been added. Joanna Baillie’s Theatre of Sympathy and Imagination 141

Basil “enthralled by a woman,” and suspended over “a yawning gulph/ To which blind passion guides [his] heedless steps” (186–7). In return for the deficient fellow­‑feeling in a friend, Basil “disowns” him (188). When disaster struck (Basil jeopardised the success of the military campaign and thus disgraced himself as a soldier), he comes to a full realisation of his weakness. In an anguished soliloquy that opens Act V, he himself employs the image of an abyss of fancy. He conjures up a vision of his unburied corpse as the source of a wanderer’s terror, fleeing “the horrid place,/ With dark imaginations frightful made,/ The haunt of damned spirits” (201). In the terms of the Smithan theory of moral sentiments, Basil has rejected the (beneficial) intervention of the impartial spectators, which alone could help him mitigate his passion. Instead, he has allowed his inflamed fancy to take absolute hold of him, which has drawn him into a state of mental desolation. In this state of mind, no compassionate fellow­‑feeling can be expected but the imagi‑ nation remains active (as his speeches show), though now as a source of torment. His suicide is imminent. In De Monfort, the tragedy on hate, we unsurprisingly also find lines (perhaps even more sinister in tone) that point towards similar emotio‑ nal and moral predicaments. The title hero­‑villain’s speech hints at the difficulty in intuiting someone’s passions because of their entanglement with mental “content” that is impenetrable to a bystander (spectator):

De Mon. That man was never born whose secret soul/ With all its motley treasure of dark thoughts,/ Foul fantasies, vain musings, and wild dreams,/ Was open’d to another’s scan. (314)

“Dark thoughts,” “foul fantasies,” “vain musings,” and “wild dreams” lie on the periphery of the real world and as such forestall the opera‑ tion of sympathy. Baillie, however, programmatically seeks to bring this murky peripheral stuff into the open space of the stage. The impres‑ sion is that, in comparison with Count Basil, in De Monfort she proceeds more self­‑consciously. Here the main role in the explorations of the powers and limitations of sympathy is performed by Jane De Monfort, the hero’s sister, the main and model sympathetic spectator in the play. In reply (albeit not a direct one) to her brother’s scepticism expressed in 142 Jacek Mydla the lines just quoted, she offers what we may call an emotional therapy (described as “driving forth” wild and potentially criminal “fantasies”):

I’ll stay by thee, I’ll cheer thee, comfort thee:/ Peruse with thee the study of some art,/ Or nobler science, that compels the mind/ To steady thought progressive, driving forth/ All floating, wild, unhappy fantasies;/ Till thou, with brow unclouded, smil’st again,/ Like one who from dark visions of the night,/ When th’ active soul within its lifeless cell/ Holds its own world, with dreadful fancy press’d/ Of some dire, terrible, or murd’rous deed,/ Wakes to some dawning morn, and blesses heaven. (330)

What hints at the self­‑conscious quality of De Monfort is Baillie’s use of the term “sympathy” in contexts that point up its technical meaning and its possible therapeutic function, both of which have their equivalent, and possibly a direct source, in Smith’s treatise. We shall return to this presently. At the same time, as we have suggested, Baillie goes beyond philosophical perspicacity and sets herself the daring task of handling a passion that is “darker” than love, more directly ruinous (to the per‑ son principally concerned, the hater), and antisocial; De Monfort’s hate poses a real threat to its object, a man called Rezenvelt. Among the functions that Smith has devised for the impartial spe‑ ctator is that of bringing down the violence of one’s passions, which I believe justifies our use of the word “therapeutic,” even though we won’t find it in his treatise. Of the unsocial passions, such as hatred, Smith has this to say: “before we can enter into them, or regard them as graceful or becoming, they must always be brought down to a pitch much lower than that to which undisciplined nature would raise them” (41). This bringing down is a condition for a successful opera‑ tion of sympathy; if the person principally concerned (De Monfort) is to expect the impartial spectator (his sister Jane) to fellow­‑feel his hatred, he needs to bring it down to a lower pitch to make it possible for that other person to enter into it. Baillie clearly constructed the cha‑ racter of Jane De Monfort in such as way as to make her an ideal or model spectator.19 Jane is described as an angel in human form: “Jane

19 The term “ideal spectator” appears in Part III of Smith’s treatise. The impartiality of the Smithan spectator must not be misconceived as indifference. Jane’s sisterly love of Joanna Baillie’s Theatre of Sympathy and Imagination 143

De Monfort is not mortal woman” (337). She offers her brother unboun‑ ded and unconditional love and, as we have seen, proposes to help him curb his distempered imagination, which fuels his hatred. The question is: will she succeed in helping her brother to tone down the pitch of his hatred? Baillie’s dramatic employment and critical exploration of the then cur‑ rent philosophy is conspicuous in the way she weaves “sympathy” into the stage dialogue. Already in the first scene of the play, De Monfort’s servant comments on the bizarre ways of his master saying that the “gloomy sternness in his eye … sullenly repels all sympathy” (305). This remark, it will be noted, hints at the key problem of the play, not only conceptual but also theatrical: a protagonist who “repels all sympathy” may not be a proper vehicle for the cathartic purgation of emotions that the genre of tragedy demands.20 Another significant occurrence of “sym‑ pathy” is found in the scene, already discussed, in which Jane offers her brother emotional therapy. In reply, De Monfort sums up the major crux of the tragedy: “thou wilt despise me./ For in my breast a raging passion burns,/ To which thy soul no sympathy will own./ A passion which hath made my nightly couch/ A place of torment; …” (331). The difficulty is, first of all, of a moral nature; as we have seen, a model spectator, such as Jane, will not share a passion that is both unjustified and inordinately vehement. De Monfort seems to know this, and the realisation adds to his torment and possibly makes his figure tragic in the pedestrian sense of the word; the odd mental alliance between his passions and his ima‑ gination turns him into a victim (as much as the man he kills). We have here an either­‑or situation: either De Monfort brings down the pitch of his hatred to allow the impartial spectator sympathetically to enter into her brother does not stand in opposition to her fulfilling the role of the impartial specta‑ tor in the Smithan understanding of the term. 20 Here, without being able to dwell on the subject, we need to note that the relation of sympathy to the tragic catharsis was raised by Hume in his correspondence with Smith following the publication of The Theory of Moral Sentiments (see Reeder, already mentio‑ ned in a footnote above). The opening of Hume’s essay “Of Tragedy” is worth recalling: “It seems an unaccountable pleasure which the spectators of a well­‑written tragedy rece‑ ive from sorrow, terror, anxiety, and other passions that are in themselves disagreeable and uneasy” (2008, 126). 144 Jacek Mydla it, or Jane will somehow engender in her mind the same violent hatred for the object of De Monfort’s. Both are impossibilities; the first would mean cancelling the catastrophic violence of De Monfort’s hatred, the second compromising Jane’s righteousness. We can see clearly that the theoretical problems that the plays raise have a theatrical equivalent, to which we turn in order to examine the implications that the philosophy of sympathy had for Baillie’s dramas as acting plays.

A Theatre of Tragic Passions

Verbal, and specifically conceptual, content is naturally only a part of any drama; its role depends on the overall conception of drama to which a playwright subscribes. Baillie’s plays give the impression of spoken plays, which is in part what the idea of legitimate drama is all about. Yet, as we have pointed out, Baillie herself insisted on the importance of stage action. Unlike some romantics, Baillie wrote “acting plays” and her plays on the passions were written for the stage,21 and indeed, in her project, the non­‑verbal component of dramatic action, the stage business, as we might call it, acquires special significance.22 We shall now enquire into the modes of representation she thought to be fit vehicles for the issues she addressed in her plays on the passions. Not all of Baillie’s plays were staged, and the stagings of those that were, such as De Monfort (performed first in 1800 and then revived several times) were not received with enthusiasm (she herself used the word “feeble” to describe the reception). To some extent, the way Bail‑ lie formulates her project and even the few lines from her plays quoted so far allow us to see a part of the problem she had to confront. Her theatre was to be a theatre of dark passions, depicting and studying

21 Writes Judith Slagle: “for she states consistently in her letters that these were to be ‘acting plays’” (82). Baillie complained of the staging conditions in the London theatres of her time as unfavourable to the non­‑verbal content of her plays (the mime, etc.), chiefly due to the great distance between the actor and the audience. 22 I have discussed this aspect of Baillie’s drama in a recently published essay: Mydla 2009. Joanna Baillie’s Theatre of Sympathy and Imagination 145 half‑realised,­ half­‑concealed desires expressing themselves in gloomy imaginings. The tragedies show protagonists whose emotional sta‑ tes (“strong passions”) repel fellow‑feeling­ and banish them from the society of men. What were the means which she wished to use for her purposes? There is no indication that Baillie attached special significance to stage design as a means to throw light into the hidden recesses of the souls of her protagonists; she must have regarded their behaviour as capable of performing this revelatory function. A dramatic character’s behaviour is either verbal (dialogue, soliloquy) or nonverbal, both the behaviour that is explicitly described in the playtext (by means of stage directions) and the behaviour that is described and suggested in what is said on the stage. In her “Introductory Discourse,” Baillie stresses the significance of the soliloquy, which confirms what we have said about the revelatory function she attached to language, or the verbal behaviour of the charac‑ ters. She calls soliloquies “those overflowings of the perturbed soul, in which it unburthens itself of those thoughts, which it cannot communicate to others …” (105). Clearly, however, Baillie overlooks here the larger context and the problem that has to do with emotional interaction. That her Basils and De Monforts cannot share their passions with the other characters is evident; we have examined the reasons as we find them stipulated in Smith’s theory of sympathy. The passions have grown to a point at which they have isolated the protagonists even from their clo‑ sest and most sympathetic fellow creatures. The question that we need to ask is: have these protagonists been isolated also from the audience? Apparently, Baillie is confident that spectators can keep them company even in their darkest moments. Baillie certainly goes a long way to help the audience comprehend the state of mind of her perturbed protagonists. The simplest means is to use descriptive language. In De Monfort, from the outset, i.e. before De Monfort’s appearance on the stage, we are told what to expect. We are informed of how his behaviour has changed lately: he has been an “alter’d man,” “difficult, capricious, and distrustful”; “sullen, haughty, ungracious” (304). We hear that “something disturbs his mind” (305). At the same time, as we have seen, we are warned that his sullen manner “repels all sympathy” (305). Indeed, the effectiveness of Baillie’s 146 Jacek Mydla treatment of hatred consists in the way in which this passion makes the hero into an outcast. When we first see him, the stage directions des‑ cribe him as “thoughtful” and given to outbursts that we put down to bad temper. The situation becomes strenuous when De Monfort discovers that the man whom he regards as his mortal enemy, Rezenvelt, has come to the same town. This is a moment when Baillie lays stronger empha‑ sis on non­‑verbal behaviour. When De Monfort first hears the news, his nonverbal behaviour makes conspicuous what his language would be powerless to conceal: he “starts from his seat, and lets the cup fall from his hand” (312). Indeed, unhampered expression comes only when he is alone, i.e. observed only by the spectators. In this moment, his vio‑ lent manner corresponds to the violent language he uses in the accom‑ panying soliloquy: “gives loose to all the fury of gesture, and walks up and down in great agitation” (313, stage directions). The problem, as we have suggested (and the playtext also hints at), is that the audience are to a large extent prevented from exercising their sympathetic pro‑ pensity; we do not see what De Monfort’s strong hatred can possibly be based on (“Hell hath no greater torment for th’ accurs’d/ Than this man’s presence gives –”); we have not yet even seen the object of this passion. And when we have, we do not find much in the man that would justify the way De Monfort feels about him.23 When finally confronted with Rezenvelt (De Monfort seems to have developed some extra sense which allows him to hear his approach even before others do! – Byron’s favourite moment in the play), De Monfort cannot overcome his physical revulsion. Rezenvelt runs to him “with open arms” and an offer of reconciliation, but De Monfort “shrinks back from him” (345). Scenes like this create a palpable difference between how De Monfort feels about the object of his hatred and how we, i.e. the spectators, do; we have no grounds to hate Rezenvelt, nor is it possible for us to fellow­‑feel with De Monfort. This emotive disharmony between the psyche of the main protagonist (now slave to a strong passion) and the spectators, who – like De Monfort’s sister – have limited access to

23 For this reason, i.e. to supply De Monfort with more justification for the way he feels about his “enemy,” the play was reworked extensively before it was performed. Joanna Baillie’s Theatre of Sympathy and Imagination 147 the workings and contents of his imagination and who are not emo‑ tionally capable of keeping him company is not something that Bail‑ lie envisaged in her project. Indeed, a study of the tragedies, such as that attempted in this article, shows that, rather than explorations of the growth of strong passions, the plays are in fact explorations of the limi‑ tations of our sympathetic propensities. To rephrase this in the terms of Aristotelian poetics, while in classical tragedy we are expected and given a chance to experience cathartic purgation (due to our unham- pered emotional involvement in the plight of the protagonist), in Baillie we remain tightly fixed in our position of judges, i.e. the impartial spec‑ tators of Smith’s theory of moral sentiments. The worry for the verbal texture of the plays is that the language, and especially the speeches of the protagonist, cease to be the vehicles for emotional or imaginative response. In this sense, the poetry hovers over a mental void. When, further in the play, De Monfort dreams of being an outcast “upon some desert coast” (353), this dream can hardly elicit our pity, if that was Baillie’s goal. At the same time, he may terrify us with his murderous fantasising. Here he is thinking of a fitting place in which to carry out his bloody design: “That ’midst the murky darkness I might strike;/ As in the wild confusion of a dream,/ Things horrid, bloody, terrible, do pass,/ As tho’ they pass’d not; …” (361). Lines like these may be read as an Baillie’s attempt to create a proper setting for an action that is at once real (Rezenvelt will soon get killed, albeit off- stage) and mental (De Monfort wades in his horrid imaginings). Howe‑ ver, because Baillie does not put the source or cause of the passion she “delineates” in the external circumstances, the “action” takes place in the mind of the main protagonist. There may be more to her decision to remove the actual killing to an offstage space than a wish to observe decorum. The mind of her hero is also largely an offstage world, now virtually inaccessible to the audience. As we have seen, simultaneously with the object of De Monfort’s hate, Baillie introduces De Monfort’s sister, Jane, whose function – if we might speculate about Baillie’s authorial intention – would consist in mediating between the stage and the audience. But, if this was indeed Baillie’s motive in devising this particular character, then as we have argued, Jane could fulfil this mediating function only to a very limited 148 Jacek Mydla extent. To be more precise, she can and does act as a sympathetic spec‑ tator in the common sense of “sympathy,” but she cannot fellow­‑feel in the technical, Smithan sense. Similarly and for the same reasons, there are limitations on the degree to which Baillie’s plays on the passions satisfy the “sympathetic curiosity” in the audience. As we have argued, there is an antagonism between the conceptual and theatrical aspects of Baillie’s preoccupation with the passions, a tension that arises out of her debt to the philosophy of the mind. On the one hand, it is the ima‑ gination (as the tool of our sympathetic curiosity) that helps us to enter into and know the minds of the protagonists, that is, chiefly their pas‑ sions as the basic motivational and actuating force. On the other hand, the working of the imagination in her protagonists is doomed to remain a mystery to the audience. The tragedies lead us where we cannot and perhaps even should not follow. For even though Baillie makes an effort to “delineate” the progress of a strong passion, such as love or hatred, we are still left with a keen sense of the incomprehensible or, to use a better word, impenetrable (“the unknown, the unbounded, the unfath- omable”). Smith’s philosophy explains why this is so. It is then difficult to say what type of response Baillie had inmind when she spoke of the theatre as a school of morals (“Drama improves us by the knowledge we acquire of our own minds” (2001, 90)). Smith explains why the impartial spectator cannot enter into a mind that is actuated by passions which are unreasonably strong and which for this reason may be destructive or – as in the case of De Monfort – criminal. The alternatives that have presented themselves are two, but neither, I am afraid, would have made the playwright feel comfortable about her project: either Baillie wants us to fellow­‑feel with her protagonists (which would mean that we should share, for instance, De Monfort’s homicidal hatred) or expects us to feel, as it were, against them. If we were to remain impartial and pass judgement on the protagonists (and actually fellow­‑feel with those they alienate and harm), we would need to rein in our sympathetic propensity and perhaps rely on apathy rather than sympathy. There is no one satisfying solution to the problems that Baillie’s project raises when confronted with the content of the plays. There are concep‑ tual inconsistencies and there is what we might describe as emotional Joanna Baillie’s Theatre of Sympathy and Imagination 149 turmoil. She may have been too philosophic about playwriting and the theatre; after all, a good play will never be another philosophic treatise. She may have been too “romantic” and thus not philosophic enough in her wholehearted poetic dedication to the passions and the imagi‑ nation. There is little doubt, no matter which of these two suppositions is closer to the truth, that in approaching Baillie’s plays and the theo‑ retical discourse that accompanies them we encounter an imagination that has the capacity to spellbind and an intellect that has the power to intrigue.

Works Cited

Armstrong, Isobel. Joanna Baillie, Byron and Satanic Drama. Nottingham: School of English Studies, University of Nottingham, 2003. Baillie, Joanna. “Introductory Discourse.” Plays on the Passions, edited by Peter Duthie. Letchworth: Broadview Literary Texts, 2001. 67–113. ---. Baillie, Joanna. Six Gothic Dramas, selected and introduced by Christine A. Colón. Chicago: Valancourt Books, 2007. Brewer, William D. “Joanna Baillie and Lord Byron.” Keats­‑Shelley Journal 44 (1995): 165­‑181. Broadie, Alexander, ed. The Scottish Enlightenment. An Anthology. Edinburgh: Canongate Classics, 1997. ---. Broadie, Alexander. “Sympathy and the Impartial Spectator.” The Cambridge Companion to Adam Smith, edited by Knud Haakonssen. Cambridge: Camb‑ ridge University Press, 2006. 158–188. ---. ed. Broadie, Alexander, ed. The Cambridge Companion to the Scottish Enlig‑ htenment. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007. Buchan, James. Crowded with Genius. The Scottish Enlightenment: Edinburgh’s Moment of the Mind. New York: Perennial, 2004. Burke, Edmund. A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful. Oxford & New York: Oxford University Press, 1998. Byron, George Gordon. Byron’s Letters and Journals, edited by Leslie A. Mar‑ chand, vol. 5. London: John Murray, 1976. Duthie, Peter. Introduction to Joanna Baillie’s Plays on the Passions, edited by Peter Duthie. Letchworth: Broadview Literary Texts, 2001. Hume, David. A Treatise of Human Nature. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1981. 150 Jacek Mydla

Hume, David. Selected Essays. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2008. Manning, Susan et al., eds. The Edinburgh History of Scottish Literature, Vol. 2: Enlightenment, Britain and Empire (1707–1918). Edinburgh: Edinburgh Univers‑ ity Press, 2007. Mulrooney, Jonathan. “Reading Theatre, 1730–1830.” The Cambridge Companion to British Theatre 1730–1830, edited by Jane Moody and Daniel O’Quinn. Camb‑ ridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007. 249–260. Mydla, Jacek. “Mowa ciała – ciało mowy. Język sceniczny w koncepcji Joanny Baillie.” Znaki, tropy, mgławice. Księga pamiątkowa w sześćdziesiątą rocznicę uro‑ dzin Profesora Wojciecha Kalagi, edited by Leszek Drong and Jacek Mydla. Katowice: Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Śląskiego, 2009. 112–123. Patten, Janice. “Joanna Baillie, A Series of Plays.” A Companion to Romanticism, edited by Duncan Wu. Oxford: Blackwell, 1999. 169–178. Pinch, Adela. Strange Fits of Passion: Epistemologies of Emotion, Hume to Austen. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996. Reeder, John, ed., On Moral Sentiments. Contemporary Responses to Adam Smith. Bristol: Thoemmes Press, 1997. Slagle, Judith Bailey. Joanna Baillie, a Literary Life. London: Associated Univer- sity Presses, 2002. Smith, Adam. The Theory of Moral Sentiments, edited by Knud Haakonssen. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007. Stewart, Dugald. Elements of the Philosophy of the Human Mind. Brattleborough: Wiliam Fessenden, 1813. Małgorzata Nitka University of Silesia, Katowice

Wordsworth, the Railway and “the riot of the town”

The majority of texts written as a part of the anti­‑railway campaign in the 19th century tendered graphic images of the destruction of the landscape, either accomplished or anticipated, wrecked in the name of technological advancement. Sundry opponents of the railway would therefore bring to focus the trail of marked change and irreparable damage left by the rail‑ way in its relentless progress, and in so doing depict the technological triumph as a procession of spoils. Such is the tenor of a Mr Bell’s vision:

The whole country from coast to coast was to be traversed and dissected by iron roads. Wherever there was a hamlet or a cattle track, a market or a manufactory, there was to be a railroad; physical objects and private rights were straws under the chariot wheels of the Fire King. Mountains were to be cut through; valleys were to be lifted; the skies were to be scaled; the earth was to be tunnelled; parks, gardens, and ornamental grounds were to be broken into … (Francis, 147)

Typically, Bell brings into play all the stock elements and tactics of the anti­‑railway offensive as he reconstructs the principal anxieties engen‑ dered by the imminent introduction of technology into the countryside. The focus is on violence: a disruption of the organic fabric required to sculpt the requisite topography. Through exploits of engineering as vio‑ lent as they are awesome nature is to be shaped anew to yield to the demands of the machine. 152 Małgorzata Nitka

The laying down of the iron track across the countryside, whereby the face of the land acquired new indelible lines, was inevitably com‑ pared to a radical surgical operation: the land was “dissected,” as Bell put it, or “cut up” as Lady Dunstane phrases it in Diana of the Cross- ways: “this mania for cutting up the land does really cause me to pity those who are to follow us. They will not see the England we have seen. It will be patched and scored, disfigured … a sort of barbarous Maori visage – England in a New Zealand mask” (Meredith, 51). Here the diatribe against the railway includes, inevitably, a lament for the loss of the beautiful face of the countryside, not long before impro‑ ved by landscape artists, the spectacular effects of whose long­‑term work could be appreciated at the beginning of the nineteenth century. Now alien industrial features, together with the new demarcation lines redrafting the boundaries of private property, mutilate the beauty and integrity of the land, but worse still give it a foul aspect of regression. It is the pre­‑industrial, though not entirely natural, landscape that beto‑ kens the civilised England. Once branded by the railway, the territory surrenders its Englishness to lapse into a savage condition. Proof aga‑ inst external forces, England becomes ravaged from within in an insi‑ dious act of vandalism and self‑mutilation.­ It is a colonisation from within as well as a colonisation à rebours in that England, “our dear England” (Meredith, 51), criss­‑crossed by the tracks, adopts a barba‑ rous appearance of the people it elsewhere subjugated. Progress bears a savage face. Still, the destruction of the countryside turns out to be perfor‑ med less for the sake of the railway, which is just a means, and more for the sake of the remote town. Bell’s vision incorporates also such scenes:

the shrieking engine was to carry the riot of the town into the sylvan retreats of pastoral life; sweltering trains were to penetrate solitudes hit‑ herto sacred to the ruins of antiquity; hissing locomotives were to rush over the tops of houses. (147)

Thus to yield to the train really means to yield to the town, and, obviously, the distance annihilated with the help of new technology is Wordsworth, the Railway and “the riot of the town” 153 that between the country and the town. The railway heralds the exten‑ sion of urban ways, the expansion of oppressiveness, noise, disorder, and ugliness. As more and more of the land is reticulated with tracks, permanent connections between the country and the town are forged, and so contract the rural ground and rustic integrity. The town conquers the countryside; the machine breaks into the garden.1 The theme of the incursion of technology into nature can be seen as a development of the commonplace literary practice of contrast‑ ing the town and the country. Yet, with the appearance of the railway, all comparisons of the two locations and the modes of living pert- inent to them have to acknowledge the dissolution of the spatial distance which hitherto kept the two worlds apart. Before the machine age the distance helped stave off urban culture, together with all its complexities and complications. It was a reassuring border since not not hermetic enough to preclude, yet not too easily or commonly crossed and thus sufficiently secure to make these realities distinctly separate. The railway opens this border by closing the distance. Though the physical distance does not shrink to nothingness (it has a solid represen‑ tation in the form of the track and the regular appearance of the train), it no longer remains in the service of the difference: rather than separate, it connects; rather than isolate, it integrates, which some find an agreeable and others a precarious phenomenon. Still, as the distance between the country and the town is travelled, the journey initiated by technology seems to remain very much a one­‑way journey. It is the town that tra‑ vels in the direction of the country, and once it arrives it does so to imprint the marks of its order on rural space. Technology serves urban forces but, as Leo Marx says, “technological power … does not remain confined to the traditional boundaries of the city” (Marx, 32). The train, an unmistakable envoy of urban order, comes and goes, but however rapid the actual passage of the train through the countryside might be, it can hardly be considered in terms of transience. Rather, the train sig‑ nifies an implacable mobility: it disappears from sight only to threaten

1 The Machine in the Garden is the title and the subject of the classical study of Leo Marx. 154 Małgorzata Nitka a regular return. After all, the conquered territory is permanently mar‑ ked, the inroads which technology made into the country are too deep, the changes too far­‑reaching: mountains were cut through, valleys lifted, the earth tunnelled; the operations undertaken were too extravagant to make the presence of the machine in the rural surroundings an inconse‑ quential episode. In the anti­‑railway writings, obviously, sympathy goes out to the country enclosed within the sentimental paradigm of serenity and sec‑ lusion. Lady Dunstane joins her rant against the railway with the lament for “quiet, rural England,” “beauty [and] … simplicity” (Meredith, 51). The train which carries, in Bell’s words, “the riot of the town into the sylvan retreats of pastoral life” upsets this Arcadian harmony with its ugly intrusion into the tranquil landscape. What the railway imports into the appropriated land is the intimidating physicality of technology as new discordant sights and sounds penetrate the place: “the shrie‑ king engine,” “sweltering trains,” “hissing locomotives.” Meredith, too, makes Lady Dunstane rehearse all the hackneyed fears: “the whistle in the night beneath one’s windows, and the smoke of trains defacing the landscape; hideous accidents” but above all “noise and hubbub,” “his‑ ses, shrieks, puffings and screeches” (Meredith, 51). It is the shriek of the machine that best illustrates the idea of “the interrupted idyll” (27), to refer to Leo Marx again, a triumphant as much as ominous call of technology which breaks the tranquillity of the countryside and annexes it to the urban domain. Thus the shock experienced at hearing the shrill noise is, in fact, a shock at the alarming proximity of the town. The “shr‑ ieking engine,” “sweltering trains,” “hissing locomotives” are abhorrent in themselves, but the real revulsion relates to the invasion of urban manners and morals as “the refuse of the town [keeps] flooding the land” (Meredith, 51). What Bell, similarly, calls “the riot of the town” means a noise not merely louder or more lasting but also far more dele‑ terious than that of the machine. It is exactly the fear of “the riot of the town” that motivated William Wordsworth’s well­‑known protests against the projected branch line in his beloved Lake District. In a letter to William Gladstone, published in the Morning Post, he wrote: Wordsworth, the Railway and “the riot of the town” 155

We are in this neighbourhood all in consternation, that is every man of taste and feeling, at the stir which is made for carrying a branch Rail‑ way from Kendal to the head of Windermere. When the subject comes before you officially, … pray give it more attention than its apparent importance may call for. In fact, the project if carried into effect will destroy the staple of the Country which is its beauty, and on the Lord’s day particularly, will prove subversive of its quiet, and be highly inju‑ rious to its morals. (Legg, 59)

At the heart of his concern is then the disruption of the peace of the place by the uncouth crowd whose members are not men “of taste and feeling.” Of not refined sentiments and aesthetically uneducated, com‑ mon – that is to say working­‑class – visitors could scarcely appreciate the beauty of the spot. Wordsworth positions himself as a spokesman for the local community, but, more accurately, he writes on behalf of persons of the aristocratic turn of mind, in defence of the place as well as in defence of his own exquisite sensibility, so as to mark his and his likes’, separateness from the insensitive and unimaginative crowds. To admit coarse spectators into the Lake District makes little sense since the charm of the landscape cannot but be lost on them. But, of course, that charm will have already been impaired and unfit for con‑ templation through the very presence of both railway constructions and crowds pouring out of the train to view the scenery, to whose loveliness contributes, amongst other things, its sequestered character. Beauty is conditioned by seclusion. Not only does Wordsworth assume that urban crowds lack aesthetic expertise to do justice to the surroundings, but he even harbours a suspicion that the rabble may have little, if if not none, admiration for the scenery and treat it indifferently or, worse still, make it a backdrop to vulgar forms of leisure. The idea behind going out of town, William Hazlitt once argued, is “to forget the town and all that is in it” and not to “carry the metropolis” (141) and the noise of others with one; but what may be possible for an individual (for Hazlitt a journey into the countryside was a pleasant experience, provided one went by oneself), is unworkable in the case of a mass excursion. By definition a noisy and rough body, the populace can have no ear for silence. As Tadeusz Rachwał writes, since “artisan minds are … dispo‑ sed to unrest rather than to peace … they should spend their leisure 156 Małgorzata Nitka in equally ‘unrestful’ places” (91). Without a doubt, the city is one such unrestful place, replete with loud and rowdy amusements, so vividly represented in Book VII of The Prelude, and it is to them that Wordsworth angrily orders the common travellers out of the Lake District:

Go to a pantomime, a farce, or a puppet­‑show, if you want noisy plea‑ sure – the crowd of spectators who partake your enjoyment will, by their presence and acclamations, enhance it; but may those who have given proof that they prefer other gratifications continue to be safe from the molestation of cheap trains pouring out their hundreds at a time along the margin of Winderemere. (154)

Wordsworth reinforces his argument by alluding to the then popu‑ lar sabbatarian campaign and, even though he does not amplify this particular issue, he sets in motion a convoy of moral reservations that Sabbath travelling provoked. On the one hand, the excursion train was doing good since it took the urban throng to “the green fields, the smo‑ keless heavens, and the fresh free beauties of Nature” (Pimlott, 91), but, on the other, in so doing it took this very crowd away from religious service. Arguments for excursion traffic would highlight the salutary value of Sunday escapades allowing the labouring classes to recoup their energy in the wholesome environment, and so work more efficien‑ tly. And while nature betokens here restorative freshness and health, unavailable in busy towns, it has another economic merit: its medicinal and aesthetic attractions are free. Nature thus, and therefore the Sunday train – the latter, admittedly, not free – entailed a thrifty and hygienic use of leisure. Deprived of a cheap opportunity to break away from the urban confinement, the working classes, it was argued, could yield, as many of them had done before, to gross and debilitating pleasures such as beer or gin drinking, prize fights or betting (Pimlott, 85). Compared to these, a train excursion to the countryside was a civilised and civili‑ sing activity. Yet while proper observance of Sunday required it should be a day of respectable rest, it – more importantly – meant that the day should be honoured by going to church. Thus if the railway was a means of Wordsworth, the Railway and “the riot of the town” 157 saving the populace from sin by leading it away from ignoble tempta‑ tions, it itself was a means to distraction removing city­‑dwellers from their religious duties. That Sunday trains decimated congregations was not an infrequent complaint expressed by clergymen, although much exaggerated and unfair: church­‑attendance did not plummet down on the introduction of Sunday railway service, not just because most rail‑ way companies made a concession to the Sabbath by providing either the so called “church interval” – the discontinuation of service from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. – or a less frequent operation of trains. While Wordsworth hints at the Sunday issue, his concern about irre‑ verence involving the urban masses does not inhere in their railway­ ‍‑induced failure to go to church, but in the far more reprehensible desecration of nature’s peace. It would also be a desecration of his pri‑ vacy and solitude that condition his own spiritual communion with the surroundings. Brought to the serene area by excursion trains, “large bodies” of “uneducated persons” (Wordsworth, 152) could not but disturb it with ugly clamour, a natural corollary of their uneducated‑ ness and largeness. The assault on nature of which Wordsworth wri‑ tes is not attributed only to the machine: he makes little of technolo‑ gical noises; the evil of the railway’s intrusion in the district would be “its scarifications, its intersections, its noisy machinery, its smoke, and swarms of pleasure­‑hunters, most of them thinking that they do not fly fast enough through the country which they have come to see” (152). This anxiety echoes that interwoven in Bell’s vision of “the shrieking engine [that] was to carry the riot of the town into the sylvan retreats of pastoral life” or anticipates Meredith’s Lady Dunstane’s apprehension that the quiet, beauty and simplicity of rural England “will be destroyed by the refuse of the town flooding the land” (Meredith, 51). What links the three visions of the railway’s invasion of the countryside is the way in which they all identify the train with the town, and the noise of the engine with that of the mob. Thus the disruption proper would come from the noisy common crowd deposited by the train in the once quiet locality. Such an inva‑ sion of nature would be no different from profaning a house of worship by loud and disorderly behaviour; Wordsworth’s belief is that one must observe the stillness of nature with a reverence due to a divinity. Nature 158 Małgorzata Nitka is a place and object of worship: “Sacred as a relic of the devotion of our ancestors deserves to be kept, there are temples of Nature, temples built by the Almighty, which have still higher claim to be left un­‑violated” (162). Parties of uncouth Sunday visitors blighting the place would per‑ petrate an act of desecration all the more heinous because happening on the Lord’s Day. It would be a more sacrilegious act also since, as Wor‑ dsworth insists, temples of nature, unlike, say, urban churches, are more evidently the work of God, whereby the protection of their inviolability should be everyone’s moral duty. Although Wordsworth professes to speak, as it were, on nature’s beh‑ alf, protecting ‘temples of nature’ for nature’s sake, the cause he so fer‑ vently champions is not entirely altruistic. Defending the cause, he has to take care to simultaneously defend himself against the accusation “of having written from any selfish interests, or from fear of disturbance which a railway might cause to [himself]” (165). For one thing he claims his age – 74 at the time – to be an argument against his selfish motiva‑ tion, yet it is for his own seclusion, as much as that of the Lake District, that he fears. One consequence of the construction of the railway line between Kendal and Windermere would be that

Schemes of retirement sown In youth, and ‘mid the busy world kept pure As when their earliest flowers of hope were blown, Must perish; – how can they this blight endure? (146)

The expected frustration of the “schemes of retirement” which comfor‑ ted one when still besieged by “the busy world” puts one in mind of Oliver Goldsmith’s Deserted Village, which, similarly, touches on the once entertained hopes of a happy withdrawal into the countryside. For both poets it means a retreat into a desired reality and such values as it embo‑ dies as well as, if not more, a retreat from “civilisation’s growing power and complexity” (Marx, 9). However for Goldsmith the longed‑for­ reti‑ rement away from the hectic or care­‑laden world was to be a retirement not so much into stillness and seclusion as into a perhaps less busy yet certainly communal life. If this scheme comes to grief, it does so for reasons different from those which threaten Wordsworth’s retreat: Wordsworth, the Railway and “the riot of the town” 159 enclosures destroy Goldsmith’s expectations because they result in waste and the depopulation of the village, producing thus seclusion that is too absolute and too contaminated by loss and decay to take pleasure in. In Goldsmith’s view the pleasure of the countryside rests on a social experience, the withdrawal means joining in the village life, enjoying a gentle, low­‑key busyness of toil and leisure. As he constructs in the recollection of the pre­‑enclosure village the romance of the place, one of its most essential elements is its cheerful liveliness communicated by a variety of sounds. Of course, the noises with which the village rever‑ berates are the sounds that Wordsworth could not think objectionable, let alone threatening, since they are all indigenous, ordinary, and natu‑ ral: they belong to and are expressive of the location. In an analogous manner then stillness intimates the character of the Lake District in which nature patronises silence and solitude: “The wide­‑spread waters of these regions are in their nature peaceful; so are the steep mountains and the rocky glens; nor can they be profitably enjoyed but by a mind disposed to peace” (Wordsworth, 154). It is also silence and solitude which give the area an essentially romantic qua‑ lity; enjoining nature to “protest against the wrong” Wordsworth apo‑ strophises the scenery in the Sonnet accompanying his letters as “thou beautiful romance of Nature” (146). But it takes a fine imagination to introduce the romance into the natural scenery and a cultured sensi- tivity to savour its tranquillity. Crowds are by definition antipathetic to the reflective or imaginative experience of the landscape, but ignora‑ mus crowds even more so. This is what Joseph Heely, whose thoughts on visiting Leasowes Peter de Bolla quotes, discovered when trying to lose himself in the contemplation of a particular spot: “I believe every spectator who visits this inimitable cascade, quits it with the utmost regret: – for my own part, had I not been disturbed by one of those noisy, ridiculous parties, who come to view they know not what, I can‑ not tell when I should have been disposed to leave it” (106). Heely’s irritation stems out of the disruption of his solitude by a noisy unin‑ formed party too close behind whereby he loses his place as well as silence and solitude. To maintain or re­‑claim them he must move on and so experiences a minor displacement, by no means as serious as the eviction which Wordsworth feels he will have to face once the Ken‑ 160 Małgorzata Nitka dal and Windermere railway opens. Diverse circumstances and threats apart, both Heely and Wordsworth see or imagine themselves driven out not so much by numbers as by ignorance. For all his lament for the loss of solitude Heely would not mind, one may assume, a company of more sensitive or culturally aware spectators, such who, like him, quit the “inimitable cascade … with the utmost regret.” A polite company, however numerous, would never be a noisy crowd but rather a frater‑ nity of silent spectators whose good taste prompts them all into the self­ ‍‑absorption of delight. Not only does the enjoyment of nature require a superior taste, but this superior taste makes the appreciation of beautiful scenery a pro‑ fitable experience. The contemplation of the exquisite landscape eleva‑ tes the mind, but as Wordsworth never tires of pointing out, it is only select minds that can be exalted in the process. Thus, while contact with nature improves man, it properly improves those who are already improved – and live in the neighbourhood – and who already belong to the privileged, and already closed, category of a “man of taste and fee‑ ling.” Those without this class are, in most instances, deemed beyond improvement, and so best suited to demotic pleasures, whereas the few who are acknowledged as improvable should seek the material for their improvement elsewhere, away from beautiful scenery. Aesthetic deve‑ lopment cannot but be approved of, “more susceptible taste is undo‑ ubtedly a great acquisition,” but “the question is, what means are most likely to be beneficial in extending this operation? Surely, that good is not to be obtained transferring at once uneducated persons in large bodies to particular spots” (Wordsworth, 152). What invites disapproval then is the strategy proposed for educating taste, based on the fallacy that it boils down to a simple transport ope‑ ration. As a result, aesthetic sensitivity becomes devalued in that the argumentation appended to the Kendal and Windermere Railway pro‑ ject implies that it can be acquired for a train fare and in very little time too. Yet such a belief bears the stamp of arrogant imposture. Nature, although apparently an egalitarian pleasure, calls, in fact, for the highest degree of connoisseurship. As Wordsworth argues, “the perception of what has acquired the name of picturesque and romantic scenery is so far from being intuitive, that it can be produced only by a slow and Wordsworth, the Railway and “the riot of the town” 161 gradual process of culture” (157). One cannot come to nature simply by train. The intuitive sense of beauty, which he would deny the populace anyway, does not suffice to experience it profoundly, and if not contemplated profoundly, nature should best be left alone. One cannot come to nature quickly either. The railway, whose constru‑ ction, as its projectors argued, would help “to place the beauties of the Lake District within easier reach of these who cannot afford to pay for ordinary conveyances” (Wordsworth, 148), offers a presumptuous shortcut to nature to which one should arrive after a long and arduous progress that is through culture. Wordsworth seems to spare no effort to complicate the way to nature and thus save it from becoming a popu‑ lar, simple and easy to both get to and perceive destination. If one mode of estranging and distancing nature is by keeping it off the railway track, another one is by placing the condition of prior aesthetic educa‑ tion as essential to its appropriate contemplation. Whichever approach, the objective remains to secure the seclusion and, what follows, exclusi- veness of the scenery whose beauty and tranquillity deserve to be experienced by those alone who belong to the aesthetic, emotional and intellectual elite. Those whose minds are of a more common cast can feed their eyes on a more ordinary nature. For Wordsworth insists on discriminating between two kinds of nature, each of which he reserves for the delecta‑ tion of a different class of persons, thus projecting upon the appreciation of natural scenery a division similar to that practised also on the trains. “It is benignly ordained that green fields, clear blue skies, running stre‑ ams of pure water, rich groves and woods, orchards, and all the ordi‑ nary varieties of rural nature, should find an easy way to the affections of all men” (151). Common nature commonly pleases. It is a universal approval that it enjoys, and though the intensity of this recognition may vary, still such a site of purity and plenty hardly arouses controversies as to its charm. For most people therefore “a rich meadow, with fat cat‑ tle grazing upon it, or the sight of … a heavy crop of corn” (151) would make an aesthetically gratifying scene. But the sublimity afforded by the mountains draws no such common regard and for most eyes it would lose in comparison with a more domestic or ordinary landscape. Even among the accomplished travellers, Wordsworth observes, the enthu‑ 162 Małgorzata Nitka siasm for the Alps, Pyrenees or Lake District developed only recently and so in a less susceptible observer the generation of a taste for the sublime will not happen without a lengthy and slow process of training. The train bringing them all too easily to more staggering, and so aesthe‑ tically more complex, landscapes would be of service to some absurd acceleration. And while the railway may be invaluable in shortening all other times and distances and advancing the interests of trade, indu‑ stry or agriculture, it cannot shorten the journey to the cultivated taste. Since “rocks and mountains, torrents and wide‑spread­ waters …. can‑ not, in their finer relations to the human mind, be comprehended, or even very imperfectly conceived, without processes of culture or oppor‑ tunities of observation in some degree habitual” (151), one may assume that the common persons first have to turn to other landscapes in order to exercise their powers of observation before they can attempt an ini‑ tiation into superior scenes. Such a natural testing ground to which Wordsworth would rather dispatch them extends more closely to their homes and, by the same token, further from his home:

Instead of tempting artisans and labourers … to ramble to a distance, let us rather look with lively sympathy upon persons in that condition, when upon a holiday, or on the Sunday, after having attended divine worship, they make little excursions with their wives and children among neighbouring fields, whither the whole of each family might stroll, or be conveyed at much less cost than would be required to take a single individual of the number to the shores of Windermere by the cheapest conveyance. It is in some such way as this only, that [they]… can be train- ed to a profitable intercourse with nature where she is the most distin‑ guished by the majesty and sublimity of her forms. (152)

Once again in Wordsworth’s argument the practical attitude mixes with the religious concern for, as he claims, the more immediate scenery can be enjoyed not only more cheaply and comfortably but also without deviating from the church routine. Perceived as instrumental to temp‑ tation, the train becomes here embroiled in devious, not to say devilish, practices from which only mischief can follow. While the advertised profit to be gained from the existence of train service to sites of beauty would belong to the uneducated classes brought to hitherto inaccessible Wordsworth, the Railway and “the riot of the town” 163 places, the actual and only profit such enterprises could bring would go into the pockets of the railway proprietors and shareholders. The osten‑ sible educational and recreational objective of mass excursions into the regions of beauty which new railway lines would facilitate thinly dis‑ guises, Wordsworth indicates a less noble hope for large returns. It is from all directions that he gathers, almost helter­‑skelter, reasons against the railway’s presence in his corner of the Lake District. The fact that the projectors drew the “humbler ranks of society” (157) into their argumentation and so advertised themselves as the partisans of the poor and uneducated could not but have a disabling effect in that all oppo‑ sition to the railway would be readily equated with the indifference, or even aversion, to the common crowd. While Wordsworth picks to pieces the project itself, he also finds fault with the conception of cha‑ rity to which the plan of the Kendal and Windermere Railway gives a stimulus. For not only would the railway open up new, hitherto sec‑ luded, landscapes to the humble masses at an affordable charge, but it would launch further gestures of benevolence. One such patently chari‑ table scheme concocted by manufacturers from nearby counties presu‑ pposed that they would send at their own expense their operatives on excursions to the Lake District. These mass railway expeditions repre‑ sent just a perverted act of generosity in that they make the masters even more masterful by increasing their possession of workmen’s time. Against its professed intentions, it ultimately demeans rather than bene‑ fits the poor: “packing off men after this fashion, for holiday entertain‑ ment, is … treating them like children,” Wordsworth remarks, adding “they go at the will of their master, and must return at the same, or they will be dealt with as transgressors” (159). The railway which facilitates such wholesale operations functions then as a means of coercion, enclo‑ sing within a rigid time­‑table the already prescribed and scripted leisure experience. What originates as a benign idea results in tightening the net of constraint. Although these organised expeditions to distant spots would have for their objective the development of the common mind, they would impose the conditions and direction in which this develop‑ ment should happen. It would be an operation not so different from the process of mass production in which, this time, similar “more compre‑ hensive” tastes and sensibilities could be churned out. 164 Małgorzata Nitka

As Wordsworth argues, excursion trains run counter to what he calls the “sense of personal independence” (159), which he grants – more generously than he would do sensibility – to Englishmen of all social classes. Counter to it runs however principally the doctrine of utilita‑ rianism of which, he observes, railways are, unsurprisingly, “favou‑ rite instruments” (162) as this form of transport which deals in grea‑ test numbers. In that vein, Walter Benjamin will later remark on “the historical significance of the railroad” as of “the first means oftrans‑ port – and until, the big ocean liners, no doubt also the last – to form masses” (602). It is thus when in the service of utilitarian ideas, against which he mounts a brief but vituperative attack, that the railway beco‑ mes misdirected and has therefore to be contended against. One has to justly discriminate between the “abuse” (Wordsworth, 164) of railways and “their legitimate application” (165), yet the latter does not exonerate them from the compromising link with utilitarianism. More dangerous perhaps than the connection with utilitarianism turns out the connec‑ tion with pleasure and aesthetic experience by which the railway tries to expand its network.

Works Cited

Benjamin, Walter. The Arcades Project. Translated by Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin. Cambridge, Mass.: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2002. De Bolla, Peter. “The charm’d eye.” Body and Text in the Eighteenth Century, edited by Veronica Kelly and Dorothea E. von Mücke. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1994. 89–111. Francis, John. A History of the English Railway. Its Social Relations and Revelations 1820–1845. London: Longman, Brown, Green and Longmans, 1851. Vol. II. Hazlitt, William. “On Going a Journey.” Selected Essays. Cambridge: CUP Archive, 1924. 141–150. Legg, Stuart, ed. The Railway Book. London: Fourth Estate, 1988. Marx, Leo. The Machine in the Garden. Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in America Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1964. Meredith, George. Diana of the Crossways. Chicago and New York: Rand, McNally & Company, 1900. Wordsworth, the Railway and “the riot of the town” 165

Pimlott, J.A.R. The Englishman’s Holiday. A Social History. Hassocks: The Har‑ vester Press, 1976. Rachwał, Tadeusz. “‘Free as a Bird’: Wordsworth’s Railways.” (Aesth)etics of Interpretation. Essays in Cultural Practice, edited by Wojciech Kalaga & Tadeusz Rachwał. Katowice: Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Śląskiego, 2000. 80–93. Wordsworth, William. “Kendal and Windermere Railways, Two Letters Re­‑Printed from the Morning Post Revised, with Additions.” Guide to the Lakes edited by Ernest de Selincourt. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977. 146–166. Katarzyna Więckowska Nicolaus Copernicus University, Toruń

On Uselessness

I am greatly obliged to you for your letter. . . . Yet you must not suppose that I have wilfully neglected to write. It is two months since I set resolutely to work, determi‑ ned to send you a very handsome letter without loss of time. And I had assuredly done so, had I not clearly per‑ ceived that it was not in my power to send you anything that could at all have interested you. Since that time I have been continually loading myself with unavailing reproaches; and I have begun to write at last, solely, lest by my silence I should offend you without remedy. You are therefore to expect nothing but a very useless letter from me; and dull as may be. Thomas Carlyle to Robert Mitchell, 15th July 1816

It is difficult to find Thomas Carlyle doing nothing, or doing something useless, though he himself often catches others succumbing to some kind of “excellent Passivity” (Carlyle 1831, e­‑text) of which no good may come either to them or to other men. “Labour is life,” Carlyle declared in 1843, and it is so also in the quotidian sense of fighting against time that “devours all his Children,” the devouring can be delayed “only by incessant Running, by incessant Working” (1843, 246; 1831, e­‑text). In Carlyle’s world, “[m]an has been created to work, to act, to use his force which is the living part of god within him” (Rachwał, 49); his “Whole Destiny” is “to move, to work – in the right direction” (Carlyle 1831, e­‑text). The choice of direction is cru‑ cial since only the right one can make labour heroic and, though to On Uselessness 167

Carlyle a “man that can succeed in working is … always a man” (1843, 199), some men’s work is nevertheless better than others’. Effeminate aristocrats, the lazy bourgeoisie, or the angry Chartists have all lost their sense of direction in the modern world where “there is no religion; there is no God; man has lost his soul, and vainly seeks antiseptic salt” (1843, 172). In the dark times of growing effeminacy and indolence, Carlyle sets the labour of re­‑birthing the world through “the grandest of human interests” to the leaders of industry who are “virtually the Captains of the world” (339, 335). Toiling in the “Infinite Battle against Infinite Labour,” and helped by some lesser middle­‑class captains, the leaders will set the world right, while at the same time also bettering themselves and proving that, though they are “not Flun‑ kies,” they dutifully obey the “Laws of God,” which are “transcen‑ dent, everlasting, imperatively demanding obedience from all men” (192, 284). It is perhaps not surprising that for Carlyle the work that “lies silent under [his] feet in this world, and escorts and attends [him], and sup‑ ports and keeps [him] alive” (1843, 165) is men’s job that is done among men, for men, and against the many feminised threats that attack the captains from within and without. Celibate men, preferably monks, make the best workers, but even they may fall prey to the emascula‑ ting dangers of laziness, indolence, disobedience, hedonistic consump‑ tion, or stupidity – the “Darkness of Mind” that is “the one enemy we have in this Universe” (1850, 15). Linked with primitivism and femininity, these dangerous qualities are to be conquered by heroic labour that “tames the dark forces of wildness,” and that is not, in fact, “a productive kind of activity, but an activity of constant preservation of the old against the threat of consumption” (Rachwał, 52, 60). Carlyle is not interested in production as such – which anyway always “goes on elsewhere”– but in the work of preserving the present by looking back to the history that constitutes heroic identity and whose carry‑ ing “seems to be the only labour done by heroes” (Rachwał, 60). The present itself is of interest only insofar as it is ravaged by effeminate consumption, by the “consumerism both within and without England” (Rachwał, 60), and only with regard to its potential to become a heroic past constitutive of a certain future­‑present without the lazy pumpkin 168 Katarzyna Więckowska or biscuit eaters, but full of captain­‑heroes bravely fighting the murky waters of feminine indolence.1 Thomas Carlyle’s presentation of the link between femininity and consumption as a major threat to social order illustrated, as well as hel‑ ped to bring about the larger shift in conceptualising modernity as dri‑ ven not by progressive development towards a more rational society, but by the irrational and inchoate desire to consume. From the mid­ ‍‑19th century onwards, “the idea of the modern becomes aligned with a pessimistic vision of an unpredictable yet curiously passive femi‑ ninity seduced by the glittering phantasmagoria of an emerging con‑ sumer culture” (Felski, 62) which, very much like Carlyle’s feminised waters, threatens to flood the ship captains by the insatiable desire to do nothing but consume useless things. The association of consumption with women, undoubtedly connected to the development of the depart‑ ment store and the newly acquired women’s “liberty” to go shopping, placed femininity at the centre of the modern, thereby not only femini‑ zing, but also demonizing the latter (Felski, 61–62). By the late 19th cen‑ tury, consumerism had been given a feminine face and “the consumer was frequently represented as a woman” (Felski, 61), which represen‑ tations significantly helped to demonize both categories and made the tasks of the captains ever more difficult, if not outright impossible. The highly popular and influential She (1887) by H. Rider Haggard offers a unique representation of the fears inscribed in the link between femi‑ ninity and consumerism, and of the anxieties of male powerlessness in the encounter with the joint forces of economy and sexuality. Haggard’s novel tells the story of the quest undertaken by Ludwig Horace Holly and his adopted son, Leo Vincey, in order to find the mysterious woman who centuries back killed one of Leo’s ancestors, Kallikrates. Holly and Leo find the immortal She, or Ayesha, in the ruins of the ancient city of Kôr deep in Africa, but, instead of avenging his ancestor, Leo falls in love with the woman. The young man is immediately exonerated for his neglect of familial duties since he has been seduced by the image

1 In Labours of the Mind, Tadeusz Rachwał titles the chapter dedicated to Thomas Carlyle “Ploughing the sea (Carlyle’s marine service),” and describes the labour of heroic captains as conducted against the white “biscuit eaters in England and pumpkin eaters elsewhere” (60), in the British colonies. On Uselessness 169 of a perfect beauty to which everyone yields, including the hideous Cambridge scholar Horace. Ayesha promises Leo immortality, as well as power over the whole world, but before she manages to fulfil her promise she is destroyed by the flames which centuries ago granted her eternal life. In a spectacular drama of racial degeneration, Ayesha shri‑ vels, darkens, turns into a creature “no larger than a big monkey, and hideous – ah, too hideous for words” (Haggard 1888, e­‑text), and finally dies. Terrified by what they have witnessed, Holly and Leo leave the caves and return to their regularly rational world, each carrying a lock of the dark hair that fell off Ayesha’s head before she was consumed by fire. The woman is severely punished, perhaps even too severely for one who, quite like a heroine of a 21st century sweets commercial, merely wanted to get just one more bite of the delicious chocolate of immorta‑ lity, and took that bite not even for herself, but for her lover.2 The novel makes it clear that Ayesha does not desire eternal life for herself since she already has it – though surely one could always do with a little bit more of eternity – but that she wants it for Leo, and that her plans to conquer the world are to satisfy not her desire, but what she takes to be his. In this convoluted logic of desiring to be what or who one thinks the other really desires, the woman is an object of consumption that orche‑ strates her own devouring, a pumpkin that grows itself to be eaten, or, to put it differently, a commodity endowed with agency and will inde‑ pendent of the consuming subject. Hidden in the catacombs of the great extinct race,3 “locked up in her living tomb,” Ayesha sits by the beauti‑ fully preserved corpse of Kallikrates, “waiting from age to age for the coming of her lover”. The woman is “the glittering phantasmagoria of consumer culture,” whose use value is hidden under the veil that she always wears, though she takes it off for some men, like Horace or Leo. Hers is “the beauty of celestial beings” that makes the men “blinded and amazed”, and also strangely passive and unable to resist her will, even when they know that it can lead them to self­‑destruction. Horace’s first impression that She is a corpse is hardly a mistake, for her almost

2 Ayesha enters the fire in order to convince Leo that he has nothing to fear. 3 Like in other novels by Haggard, the great ancient race in Africa is white. 170 Katarzyna Więckowska perfect passivity makes her a living dead, a condition well­‑captured by another of her names, She­‑who­‑is­‑everlasting. Ayesha waits, in the mean‑ time despotically ruling her African subjects as She­‑who­‑commands and She­‑who­‑must­‑be­‑obeyed in order to kill time – and not infrequen‑ tly also people – and awakens to act when her white love arrives. Yet unfortunately, she is never allowed to finish her act because every time her lover comes – and he comes twice – one of them dramatically leaves the stage. Although She ends with Ayesha’s death, her return is to be expected since she is She­‑who­‑is­‑everlasting. Seconds before her death, Ayesha promises Leo: “I shall come again”; accordingly, in 1905 Rider Haggard published Ayesha: The Return of She,4 which he asked his readers not to regard as a sequel, but as “the conclusion of an imaginative tragedy … whereof one half has been already published,” and which “it was always his desire to write” (Haggard 1905, e‑text).­ In the novel, Ayesha summons Leo in dreams to search for her in some Asian mountains, seducing him from a distance; indeed, “distance is the very element of her power” (Derrida, 49) since when Leo finds her and uncovers the many veils that hide her body, he discovers not a beautiful woman, but a hideous mummy. In a fairy­‑tale manner, Leo’s kiss returns to Ayesha her beauty, and she promptly sets to work to subdue the world again, to the men’s horror including in her plans the conquest of Great Britain. Ayesha will lack nothing and her power will be infinite once she makes Leo immortal, though not before that since “man and spirit may not Mate”. Unfortunately, however, her lover proves to be an impatient con‑ sumer used to instant satisfaction, and talks her into kissing him before he is made a spirit himself. Leo dies; so does Horace when he finis‑ hes recording his tale, and Ayesha retreats – most probably into another mountain, and quite possibly located somewhere in America – to wait for her love to come again. Although Haggard’s novels deal with what the late­‑20th­‑century consu‑ mer Jean Baudrillard called simulacra, they do so in order not to “mark the end of human productivity,” but to show that “this end itself is illu‑ sory, a simulacrum of the end from which there is no way back to the

4 I would like to thank Tadeusz Rachwał for drawing my attention to this book. On Uselessness 171 original, to nature as material for human labours” (Rachwał, 150). In She and Ayesha, no end is possible, and certainly no end to consumption, since Ayesha is the very Spirit of Nature, the Eternal Feminine, every woman or simply the Woman (Haggard 1905, e­‑text) who always returns, forcing also her lover to search for her infinitely. Quite predictably, Hag‑ gard makes Ayesha wear an ornamental belt shaped like the Uroboros serpent eating its own tail, but he also makes her a resistant consumer who “never touched anything except cakes of flour, fruit and water” (1888, e­‑text), and who could restrain her desire to consummate her love. Ayesha is the object of consumption, though mostly visual, but so is Leo, whose god­‑like beauty makes his Cambridge colleagues call him Apollo, the Greek god, or the Beauty (1888, e­‑text). Ayesha lasts forever, eter‑ nally consumed and kept alive by her desire, but Leo lets his consume him; he is a worker who does not labour well, though he has been intro‑ duced into the business of muscular Christianity as Horace’s apprenti‑ ce.5 Leo not only allows himself to be seduced by the commodity’s glit‑ ter – frankly, he has no choice since he had been programmed to desire Ayesha centuries before he was born – but he turns himself into a com‑ modity, and does so quite willingly. In the novels, one is always both the object and subject of consumption, and in both cases merely a commo‑ dity, a recyclable body that can be easily exchanged in another incarna‑ tion. Haggard’s protagonists live out the consumerist dream where every time feels like the first time: Ayesha’s many returns make her forget some parts of her life, and Leo does not even know that he is Kallikrates until she tells him that. Consumption itself is not an external force, but a con‑ veniently hidden disease that is already a part of one’s self, and it spoils one from the inside, as She is always ready to show. A commodity living a life of its own, Ayesha is the fetish whose providential presence sustains for the men the illusion that consumption is not their business, or work, but rather the curiously unproductive non­‑activity of the Woman. She protects her exclusively male progeny, screening them from that part of their selves that does not want to work – in Ayesha, she is represented in

5 In She, Horace refers several times to the various sports games and physical exer‑ cises in which he and Leo excelled when Horace was a university lecturer in Camb‑ ridge, and whose aim was, one might suppose, to lessen the feminising influence of Leo’s beauty. 172 Katarzyna Więckowska a statue of “Humanity saved by the Divine” as a mother sheltering only one, male child. But she is also, unfortunately for her sons, “Truth stan‑ ding on the World, and calling to its children to unveil her face” (1888, e­‑text), whose unveiling makes them lose themselves, consumed by “that Motherhood which bore us,” and which, quite like Carlyle’s time, “unforgetting, faithful, will receive us at the end” (1905, ­‑text).e If the world of She is one of conspicuous consumption, of “consu‑ merism without and within,” to which Leo, Horace, and even Hag‑ gard6 spectacularly succumb, it is not inescapable, and Haggard’s fic‑ tion does suggest some ways out. True to Marx’s dialectic of history, or perhaps implementing a kind of ancient dumping procedure, the men of the matriarchal country of She worship women as the source of life, obey them and toil for them “till at last [the women] get unbearable,” which happens “about every second generation,” and then the men “rise, and kill the old [women] as an example to the young ones, and to show them that we are the strongest” (1888, e‑text).­ Effective as it is, the practice may prove slightly too savage for the civilized Britain, but it can always be exchanged for the more cultured alternative outlined in She and Allan (1921), whose well­‑trained hero does not succumb to Ayesha’s consumerist charm, but merely gets angry with her for making him the victim of what he thinks is a particularly cunning and fanta‑ stic deceit. Allan Quatermain is an imperial adventurer and hunter, as well as an English gentleman. Those qualities, when combined, enable him to emerge victoriously from the encounter with Ayesha. “The state and dignity of English gentleman,” Haggard announces in Allan Qua‑ termain, is “the highest rank whereto we can attain” (1887, e­‑text). This precious state is tested in imperial adventure, and is to be acquired through reading appropriate books, such as his own, which he often dedicated to boys, of any age, so as to supply them with instructions on their way to become gentlemen for the first time or yet again.7

6 As demonstrated by his She series, or the series featuring Allan Quatermain, or, finally, by She and Allan which tops the list by combining in one book Haggard’s two commercially successful protagonists. 7 For example, King Solomon’s Mines (1885) was dedicated to “all the big and little boys who read it,” and Allan Quatermain to Haggard’s son “and many other boys” who strug‑ gled to become gentlemen. On Uselessness 173

With Thomas Carlyle at the rudder, the 19th­‑century captains toil in the world that has forgotten its aim so as to set it to work again and to re­‑create a “whole world of Heroes” (Carlyle 1843, 43). From Char‑ les Dickens’s tales of hard times,8 Charles Kingsley’s chronicles of glo‑ rious fights, Thomas Hughes’s school books to Joseph Conrad’s early sea adventures, there goes the endless work of educating brave and active Englishmen, little Toms Browns who will know which direction is right. In the project of building a bright future, women are rarely present, and if they are, they certainly do not make good workers, though they are sometimes given a chance to try: in Charles Kingsley’s novels, for exam‑ ple, they almost make it to the labouring stage, but then, unfortunately, they die. “You may chisel a boy into shape,”9 John Ruskin proclaimed in his 1864 lecture, but “you cannot hammer a girl into anything. She grows as a flower does” (Ruskin 1871, 9). One has to be careful with the girl before she is grown into an angel of the house, and give her kno‑ wledge “not as knowledge, – not as if it were, or could be, for her an object to know” (156) in case one may stimulate the growth of some unwanted darkness. “Keep the modern magazine and novel out of your girl’s way” (163), and give her a Walter Scott or a Shakespeare, or any of the classics instead; by all means, bar her from novels by women, from “the Literature of Desperation” which brings “enormous temporary mischief and even a radical perversion, falsity and delirium” (Carlyle Ltd. in Cumming, 409).10 Thus, men need to labour through the “spoken Word, the written Poem” which, though not as good as “the done Work” (Carlyle 1843, 198), may come in handy when in the global “sanitation of madness” (Rachwał, 56) one must deal with the girl’s occasional bouts of inexplicable hysteria. The men’s labour lets blossom the roses of the English garden, the “enduringly, incorruptibly good” women, who are “instinctively, infallibly wise – wise, not for self­‑development, but for self‑renunciation”­ (Ruskin 1871, 152). Mass‑produced­ statues of “Huma‑

8 Charles Dickens’s Hard Times (1854) was dedicated to Thomas Carlyle. 9 The exception to the general rule is the gentleman, which Ruskin claimed to be a hereditary condition. Ruskin writes that the primal meaning of the word gentleman is “a man of pure race, well bred,” and that the gentlemen are produced in a way similar to well­‑bred horses (1860, 266). 10 In the fragment, Carlyle criticizes “Sandism” and George Sand’s novels. 174 Katarzyna Więckowska nity saved by the Divine” (Haggard 1905, e­‑text), with a guarantee of “modesty of service” (Ruskin 1871, 153), they are well­‑designed to shel‑ ter their fathers and sons from all kinds of immoral consumption in “the place of Peace” that is their middle­‑class home (Ruskin 1871, 152). And if the women’s “excellent passivity” occasionally resembles Ayesha’s eter‑ nal wake, or if the deadly calm of the city of Kôr reverberates in the pea‑ cefulness of their homes, then this is certainly not the labourers’ fault, though perhaps a sign of a minor logistics problem. Labour one must, and in the right direction since “[y]ou cannot have your work well done, if the work be not of a right kind” (Carlyle 1850, 13). That the right kind is the male kind is rather too obvious, but why to write a useless letter is perhaps less so. Carlyle’s letter turns his “una‑ vailing reproaches” into useful work, filling time and space with notes on trigonometry, Crabbe’s poems, Wood’s Optics and various other “gar‑ bage” that he has “allowed [himself], at different intervals, to devour” (Carlyle 1886, 33, 35). Production, as always, “goes on elsewhere,” on the side of the letter that mentions the proposal of a job in Kirkcaldy where Carlyle would teach mathematics for the next two years, and where he would meet Margaret Gordon, his first love, and Edward Irving, the man who would introduce him to Jane Welsh, the future Mrs Carlyle. More important than production is the devouring of the “garbage” on Carlyle’s reading list that, as he writes in another letter, may “deliver . . . [him] from Darkness into any measure of Light” (Norton, 7),11 and that would produce him as a member of the privileged group which Thorstein Veblen called in 1899 the “leisure class”. Distinguished by conspicuous consumption, this class does nothing but engage in the special kind of leisure that “does not connote indolence,” but “non­ ‍‑productive consumption of time,” and that, based on “a sense of the unworthiness of productive work,” is “an evidence of pecuniary ability to afford a life of idleness” (Veblen, 43). With idleness that is not indo‑ lence, but a source of indefatigable labour, and with manual work dele‑ gated to lower­‑class men and to women of any class, “[c]onspicuous

11 The fragment comes from a letter to Goethe from 1827, in which Carlyle describes the influence of the latter’s work on his own, and which he intends to be one of “a Disci‑ ple to his Master, nay of a Son to his spiritual Father” (7). On Uselessness 175 consumption of valuable goods is a means of reputability to the gentle‑ man of leisure” (Veblen, 75). Through such “unproductive” consump‑ tion that is, nevertheless, “a mark of prowess and a perquisite of human dignity” (Veblen, 72), Carlyle writes himself as a gentleman, and in this way he also fights discontent, “the most vulgar of all feelings” which is “utterly useless, moreover, more than useless” (Carlyle 1886, 76). “Let us cultivate our minds,” Carlyle continues, “and await the issue calmly, whatever it may be” (76), even if it may be a rather dull text, and one to be consumed, as I truly hope, in a very useless manner.

Works Cited

Carlyle, Thomas. Past and Present. London: Chapman and Hall, 1843. ­‑­‑­‑. Sartor Resartus: The Life and Opinions of Herr Teufelsdrockh. London: Chapman and Hall, 1831. Accessed October 20, 2012. . ­‑­‑­‑. Latter­‑day Pamphlets. Volume: 3, edited by Sir David Ramsay and Lord Rea. Boston: Phillips, Sampson, and Company, 1850. ­‑­‑­‑. Early Letters of Thomas Carlyle, edited by Charles Eliot Norton. London: Macmillan & Co., 1886. Cumming, Mark, ed. The Carlyle Encyclopaedia. Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickin‑ son University Press, 2004. Derrida, Jacques. Spurs: Nietzsche’s Styles. Translated by Barbara Harlow. Chi‑ cago: University of Chicago Press, 1979. Felski, Rita. The Gender of Modernity. Cambridge, Mass. and London, Harvard University Press, 1995. Haggard, H. Rider. Allan Quatermain. 1887. Accessed August 16, 2013. . ­‑­‑­‑. She. London: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1888. Accessed August 13, 2013. . ­‑­‑­‑. Ayesha: The Return of She. Further History of She­‑Who­‑Must­‑Be­‑Obeyed. 1905. Accessed September 15, 2013. . ­‑­‑­‑. She and Allan. 1921. Accessed September 16, 2013. . Norton, Charles Eliot, ed. Correspondence between Goethe and Carlyle. London: Macmillan and Co., 1887. 176 Katarzyna Więckowska

Rachwał, Tadeusz. Labours of the Mind: Labour in the Culture of Production. Frank‑ furt am Main: Peter Lang, 2001. Ruskin, John. Modern Painters. Volume V. London: Smith, Elder and Co., 1860. ­‑­‑­‑. Sesame and Lilies. New York: H. M. Caldwell, 1871. Veblen, Thorstein. The Theory of the Leisure Class: An Economic Study of Institu‑ tions. New York: Macmillan, 1915. Mary Conde Queen Mary, University of London

Reading “Mrs Bathurst”

Rudyard Kipling’s short story “Mrs Bathurst” from his 1904 collection Traffics and Discoveries is notoriously enigmatic. Angus Wilson, the seve‑ rest of its critics, writes of it irritably that its so­‑called “difficulty” is of little interest because “in the last resort, the story is empty” (Wilson, 221), but the more usual reaction, for well over a hundred years, has been to admire its brilliance while remaining perplexed by it. One of the many aspects of the story to which Wilson objects is the use of Pyecroft “the petty officer whose voice ruins so many of Kipling’s naval stories” (222) as its main narrator; Marghanita Laski, however, although she thinks Pyecroft’s are usually “dreary farcical stories,” sele‑ cts “Mrs Bathurst” as the one exception, where he was used “serio‑ usly and well” (148). Pyecroft appears in two other stories in Traffics and Discoveries, “Their Lawful Occasions” and “Steam Tactics”; there are three other stories set in South Africa, “The Captive,” “The Compre‑ hension of Private Copper” and “A Sahibs’ War”; in addition, just as “Mrs Bathurst” is based on a cinematic image, so “They” in the same collection is based on the motor­‑car, and “Wireless” on wireless – all recent innovations in 1904. This was also the first of Kipling’s adult col‑ lections in which stories were interspersed with poems or (as in the case of “Mrs Bathurst”) dramatic excerpts. All this would suggest that the story was conceived as part of a unified whole. Yet it stands alone in its ability to puzzle the reader: J.M.S. Tompkins calls it one of the “most extreme” of Kipling’s experiments in suppressed narrative (89), and Charles Carrington feels it “suffers from too much compression, 178 Mary Conde so that in parts it is unintelligible” (435). Less charitably, Kingsley Amis concludes that “authorial self­‑indulgence can leave out too much as well as put too much in” (128). It is indeed tempting to think that Kipling simply overdid what he called the “Higher Editing” (1937, 207), his method of ruthlessly paring a story down at paced intervals. Yet his description of his inspiration for the story suggests one central idea. He writes in his autobiography that

All I carried away from the magic town of Auckland was the face and voice of a woman who sold me beer at a little hotel there. They stayed at the back of my head till ten years later when, in a local train of the Cape Town suburbs, I heard a petty officer from Simons Town telling a companion about a woman in New Zealand who “never scrupled to help a lame duck or put her foot on a scorpion.” Then – precisely as the removal of the key­‑log in a timber­‑jam starts the whole pile – those words gave me the key to the face and voice at Auckland, and a tale cal‑ led “Mrs Bathurst” slid into my mind, smoothly and orderly as floating timber on a bank­‑high river. (101)

Kipling retained the setting of a little hotel near Auckland for the first narrated appearance of Mrs Bathurst, the remembered phrase to describe her, a petty officer, Pyecroft, as main narrator, anda spot near Simons Town as the scene of the narration. His memory of the face and voice permeates the whole story, which is not only about Mrs Bathurst and her mysterious allure, but about memory itself. The characters constantly exchange, and check on each others’ memories. Pyecroft, who has him‑ self “an unforgettable eye” (Kipling 1904, 357), defines Mrs Bathurst in terms of how she stays in a man’s memory (352), and her repeated reap‑ pearance on the cinema screen, which the haunted Vickery has to pursue night after night, is memory incarnate. Andrew Lycett, indeed, sees the story in terms of Kipling responding to a specific technological challenge to writers who like himself “acted as licensed memory joggers” (489) and might be threatened by this new form of memory. The events of the story are these: the outer narrator, who could be taken for Kipling himself, meets his friend, a railway inspector called Hooper, and shortly afterwards his friend Pyecroft with his old ship‑ Reading “Mrs Bathurst” 179 mate Pritchard. Together Pyecroft and Pritchard tell the story of being led astray by Boy Niven, on the empty promise of a farm in British Columbia, and then Pyecroft tells the story of “Click” Vickery (so­‑called because of his badly fitting false teeth) who obsessively followed the image of Mrs Bathurst, a hotel­‑keeper known to them both, as she appears briefly at Paddington Station in London in a newsreel film cal‑ led “Home and Friends.” In order to keep following this image night after night, Vickery has a private interview with his captain, and is allo‑ wed to leave his ship to go up‑country­ by himself. Hooper then takes up the story, telling of finding two tramps in a teak forest beyond Bulawayo who have been struck dead by lightning. One of the tramps is clearly identified as Vickery by his tattoos, and by his false teeth, which Hooper obviously has in his pocket, although he does not ever produce them. Vickery has obviously wronged Mrs Bathurst in some way, probably by marrying her bigamously, since he refers at one point to his lawful wife as if he also had an unlawful one (362), but it is hard to believe that this is the clue which unlocks the whole story. Craig Raine argues that

Vickery has committed a crime, bigamy, and that presumably is why the captain connives at his absence without leave – desertion being less of a disgrace than legal proceedings from the Navy’s point of view. (17)

Vickery, however, does not take absence without leave, and he would not need over an hour (360) to explain mere bigamy to the captain, who is obviously appalled by what he hears. The image of Mrs Bathurst who, Vickery clearly believes, has cros‑ sed the world to find him, both terrifies and enthrals him, and one may read his obsessive need to see it every night in multiple ways: he needs to be there for her because he originally failed to be there; he needs to give her a sporting chance to look out of the screen with her “blindish look” (356) and see him; he needs to make sure she is still safely on the screen and not out in the world pursuing him, as she effectively is. This pursuit by a very recent innovation, a figure on a cinema screen, ends in the most ancient, classical way, with a bolt of lightning. Pyecroft and his companions, too, who jumped ship in response to Boy Niven’s treacherous promises, were punished with metaphorical heavy thunder 180 Mary Conde with continuous lightning for two hours (344). This subsidiary story acts as a parody of the presumed treacherous promises of Vickery to Mrs Bathurst: Pyecroft remarks that as far as Boy Niven was concerned, they were loving and trustful to a degree (343) and that, as he puts it, even a sailor­‑man has a heart to break (344). What it also establishes is both that it may be the deceived rather than the deceiver who is punished, and that Pyecroft and Pritchard, who jointly narrate it, before going on to express their absolute faith in Mrs Bathurst, are extremely gullible. The fact that she is referred to only as Mrs Bathurst, without any first name, may actually alert us to the possibility that she is not a widow, as the men think, but the unmarried mother of her “niece” Ada, who is mentioned again in the closing lines of the story (365). Kipling may have included the detail that Pyecroft is shown the photograph of Vickery’s own daughter (348) to assure us that it is not Ada – although both daughters may effectively have been denied by their parents, ifMrs Bathurst really has fooled people into thinking she is a widow, which would only be one of the many errors in the story. The outer narra‑ tor chooses to visit a ship on the very day it leaves (339); in False Bay, Pyecroft and Pritchard, who have been mistaken in Boy Niven, are mistaken by Hooper for little Malay boys (340); Pritchard, who claims to have recently been mistaken for someone called Maclean (342), him‑ self mistakes Hooper for a lawman (347); and the cox Lamson is wrong about the captain’s “court­‑martial” face (360). In only one of these cases is there an indisputable conscious trickster – Boy Niven, who has now graduated to the name “Mr L.L. Niven,” is a consummate storyteller and, master of the telling detail (343). Pritchard thinks he tricked the men to get himself talked about (344), in which he succeeded, since this escapade “used to be a legend of the Fleet” (343). Does this not suggest that the once notorious Boy Niven can be confla‑ ted with Kipling himself, the boy wonder, who is now a more serious and respectable writer, and that the real subject of the story is storytel‑ ling itself? The story has an astonishing range of geographical referen‑ ces, and this may be linked with Kipling’s own range of readership, one of the biggest and most distantly linked that the world had ever seen. His father, Lockwood Kipling, had commented on this as early as 1890, saying that, because of the recent developments in publishing, Reading “Mrs Bathurst” 181

it will be literally true that in one year this youngster will have had more said about his work, over a wider extent of the world’s surface than some of the greatest of England’s writers in their whole lives. (Ricketts, 165)

If Boy Niven is a version of Kipling, and it was the tricked and not the trickster who got the blame, in what sense is the reader to be found guilty? Guilt is felt most keenly within the story, of course, by Vickery, who even denies that he has been guilty of murder (362), although no one seems to have suggested that he has, and guilty of failing to under‑ stand his own story, telling Pyecroft that he is not sure he could explain anything much (359). Mrs Bathurst, who like Boy Niven is so lovingly trusted, may also function as a version of Kipling. In his art he certainly, in the key phrase of the story, helped lame ducks and trod on scorpions. He shared her “blindish” look (mentioned three times, 351, 356, 358) without his glas‑ ses, and like Mrs Bathurst cannot see his audience. As a writer he has the ability to make his reader feel that there is a special and privileged link between them, and we know from Pritchard’s brief account of her (350­‑51) that it is part of Mrs Bathurst’s fatal fascination to make a man feel singled out. Vickery may, after all, be wrong in supposing that Mrs Bathurst is looking for him. He tells Pyecroft enigmatically that he is it (362), but Mrs Bathurst’s indescribable allure has already been named ‘It’ (352): the reader of a masterly story has the sensation of sharing in the process with the writer. The central image of Mrs Bathurst depends on its hypnotic effect on its audience, inside and outside the story, who are all attempting to read it unsuccessfully, like Pyecroft saying of the captain, “His face didn’t read off at all” (360). Our attention is specifically drawn to the plight of the audience of the victims near the end of the story, when Pyecroft, told there were two tramps in the teak, says that he does not envy the other man (363), clearly meaning that he pities the other man if he too had been forced to witness Vickery’s terrible suffering. Pyecroft here assu‑ mes that the other tramp was male, whereas Pritchard seems to think it was Mrs Bathurst herself, which indeed seems supported by the song of the picnic­‑party in the background about the maiden and her lover (365). But by using the word “mate” Kipling goes out of his way to make the 182 Mary Conde gender ambiguous, and any explanation of the story has to rely to a cer‑ tain extent on the supernatural (for example, to explain what so appal‑ led the captain), which is the ultimate ambiguity in any narrative. Yet the story owes much of its power to its realism. Not only is the South African setting used with extreme precision, as Daniel Karlin’s notes to a critical edition of Kipling make clear (610–17), but banal physical deta‑ ils like the buzzing of the film dynamo coinciding with the clicking of Vickery’s false teeth (Kipling 1904, 355) anchor us to reality. Kipling is taking an artistic chance here in choosing such an unlikely candidate for the presumed romantic hero, and someone who seems degraded to the status of a machine. But the whole story, I think, is taking an artistic chance in operating as a self­‑referential confidence trick. There are various references in the story to wrong directions: Boy Niven makes his victims walk round in circles (344), the sloop is con‑ stantly going aground (345), a gyroscope has been “sugared up” (354), and trains are derailed even on a perfectly straight line (363). The remo‑ val of the key­‑log in the timber­‑jam was Kipling’s pointing of his rea‑ der in the wrong direction. The story actually is in a sense empty, as Angus Wilson claimed, and as Kipling confirms when Hooper brings his hand away from his waistcoat­‑pocket, empty (364). The pocket must have held the teeth which confirm the corpse’s identity, but the corpse has already been identified, and the corpse is not the point. The point is Kipling’s exultation in his power over his audience – the very power he had become conscious of in the “magic” town of Auckland. As a final touch of humour, Kipling ends his story with Pyecroft’s expression of relief that his trials as audience are over:

“Well, I don’t know how you feel about it,” said Pyecroft, “but ‘avin’ seen ‘is face for five consecutive nights on end, I’m inclined to finish what’s left of the beer an’ thank Gawd he’s dead!” (365)

Works Cited

Amis, Kingsley. Rudyard Kipling and His World. London: Thames and Hudson, 1975. Reading “Mrs Bathurst” 183

Carrington, Charles. Rudyard Kipling: His Life and Work. London: Macmillan, 1955. Karlin, Daniel, ed. Rudyard Kipling: A Critical Edition of the Major Works. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999. Kipling, Rudyard. “Mrs Bathurst.” Traffics and Discoveries. London: Macmillan, 1904. 339–65. ­‑­‑­‑. Something of Myself for My Friends Known and Unknown. London: Macmil‑ lan, 1937. Laski, Marghanita. From Palm to Pine: Rudyard Kipling Abroad and At Home. Lon‑ don: Sidgwick and Jackson, 1987. Lycett, Andrew. Rudyard Kipling. London: Phoenix, 2000. Raine, Craig. Introduction to A Choice of Kipling’s Prose. London: Faber and Faber, 1987. Ricketts, Harry. The Unforgiving Minute: A Life of Rudyard Kipling. London: Chatto & Windus, 1999. Tompkins, J.M.S. The Art of Rudyard Kipling. London: Methuen, 1959. Wilson, Angus. The Strange Ride of Rudyard Kipling: His Life and Works. London: Secker & Warburg, 1977. Jacek Wiśniewski University of Social Sciences and Humanities, Warsaw

Travelling in Search of Spring: Edward Thomas’s In Pursuit of Spring as Travel Literature

Daniel Defoe’s A Tour through the Whole Island of Great Britain, Henry Fielding’s Journal of a Voyage to Lisbon, Tobias Smollett’s Travels in France and Italy, James Boswell’s Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides, William Cobbett’s Rural Rides, Charles Darwin’s Voyage of the Beagle, George Borrow’s Wild Wales, C.M. Doughty’s Travels in Arabia Deserta, Richard Jefferies’s The Life of the Fields, W.H. Davies’s The Autobiography of a Super­‑Tramp all belong to an indeterminate category of writing which, for lack of a bet‑ ter term, we call travel literature or travel books. Edward Thomas, bet‑ ter known today as an important poet and “a mirror of England” – the phrase was coined by Walter de la Mare – knew and admired them all. When he came to publish his own great travel book, In Pursuit of Spring in 1914 (to be exact, the text of the book was written in the early months of 1913, but appeared in print in April of 1914), he created a modern clas‑ sic of the genre. Thomas’s book, like several of those earlier examples, combines travel writing with nature writing; for the sake of convenience, critics usually call such travel books “rural literature” or “topographical writing,” or simply “country books.” It is a uniquely English, and rather untidy, sub­‑category of non‑fiction­ writing, a demanding form of lite‑ rature with a long history behind it, going back at least to the 17th cen‑ tury and the English Restoration, when learned societies, with the Royal Society in the lead, started publishing journals on natural sciences, phi‑ losophy, botany, biology, medicine and geography. Travelling in Search of Spring… 185

A good travel book like Edward Thomas’s is usually a curious and intriguing combination of several sub‑genres:­ without the benefit of a sustained plot and its dramatic possibilities, a non­‑fiction book about travel, nature and the countryside must rely much more heavily on the quality of the narrator’s voice. Such books usually offer a digres‑ sive travelogue, because travel, with its spatial and temporal dimen‑ sions, orders and arranges the narrative; they are also accurate tourist guides with topographical detail; In Pursuit of Spring presents a com‑ plete journal of a tour, and each chapter is preceded by a detailed map (for instance, Good Friday took the pursuer from Clapham in London to Guilford); it is also a knowledgeable nature study; a lively polemic; a series of entertaining short stories and comic anecdotes; several stimu‑ lating literary essays; and last but not least, a large number of passages of beautiful descriptive prose which show how close Thomas came by this time to declaring himself in verse. Thomas was working on the text of In Pursuit of Spring in January and February of 1913, six months before he was introduced to Robert Frost. At the same time, he was engaged in two other projects of great importance. By December 5th, 1913, he finished writing his fine little book on Keats, not a biography of the poet, but an in­‑depth study of Keats’s achievement which bears the marks of having been written by a fellow poet. Soon after he sent Keats to the printers, he started experimenting with the possibility of writing autobiographically, when, in the early months of 1914, he struggled with the opening chapters of The Child‑ hood of Edward Thomas: the writer’s mind was struggling in the months before he met Frost with poetic prose, with a close analysis of the poe‑ try he loved in his essay on John Keats, and with the kind of Künstlerro‑ man which reads very much like a portrait of the artist as a young man. The similarities with Joyce’s book are intriguing and wholly accidental, since the first fragments of Joyce’s autobiography were serialized in The Egoist only later in 1914, certainly after Thomas started and abandoned his project. If, therefore, the poetry was already in Thomas’s book, as Frost recog‑ nized and pointed out by reading aloud parts of the book back to Thomas and a group of Georgian poets assembled in Lascelles Abercrombie’s cottage, Frost’s “friendly jog of encouragement” (the 186 Jacek Wiśniewski phrase is F.R. Leavis’s) was clearly one of friendly support rather than that of example or model. In Pursuit of Spring persuaded Robert Frost that its author was in reality a poet who simply did not have the self­ ‍‑confidence (which Frost never lacked) to proclaim himself as a poet by using the formal structure of verse, and meeting its demands presented by the use of rhythm and rhyme, line and stanza, its concentration and brevity of utterance. The book begins – quite typically for Thomas – with the description of things he was not very fond of: the bleak end of winter, a month before Easter, in a large modern city like London. The resurrection of life in the spring is celebrated by Thomas in his emphasis on the theme of fertility, with the motif of rain, streams, rivers, fountains and water sources, but there is no undertone of conventional Christian belief in his account of the spring solstice. “Ideas of pagan nature worship were topical in 1913 when Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring was a recent sensation” (Ingram, 12). The city is a horrible place, called “the inhuman masses of humanity” (Ingram, 24), but it is saved by the sudden appearance of brilliant sun‑ light, a strong northwestern wind and people’s sudden feeling of joy. But In Pursuit of Spring is not just descriptive of nature, the elements or seasonal change; the author often takes a longer look at a person, or suddenly notices a characteristic situation, almost a miniature story which is worth narrating, and he endlessly digresses in his narrative of a journey. Some portraits are depressing but vivid and complete in their attention to colour, movement and gesture:

Straight through the women, in the middle of the broad pavement, and very slowly, went an old man. He was short, and his patched overcoat fell in a parallelogram from his shoulders almost to the pavement. From underneath his little cap massive gray curls sprouted and spread over his upturned collar. Just below the fringe of his coat his bare heels glowed red. His hands rested deep in his pockets. His face was almost conce‑ aled by curls and collar: all that showed itself was the glazed cold red of his cheeks and large, straight nose, and the glitter of gray eyes that looked neither to left nor to right, but ahead and somewhat down. Not a sound did he make, save the flap of rotten leather against feet which he scarcely raised lest the shoes should fall off. (26) Travelling in Search of Spring… 187

Thomas’s particular attention to figures of tramps, beggars, poor old men (especially old farmers), gamekeepers or poachers, and Gypsies, persuade a critic like Stan Smith of his powerful sense of social fair‑ ness, or even radical class consciousness. Here the old man’s isolation, the way he fixed his eyes before his feet, his small figure “clad in com‑ plete hue of poverty,” in a crowd of passers­‑by who are richer, more warmly and more colourfully dressed, give a sense of the observer’s empathy; such feelings are clearly seen in “The Owl,” “A Private” or “Man and Dog,” the poems which Thomas wrote early in 1915. Thomas seems to be hounded by the memory of such impersonal city crowds. Living all his adult life away from London, he still refers to himself as “born and bred a Clapham Junction man” (170). Even when he is away from London, travelling along the River Avon, he compares the colourful holiday crowd in Trowbridge (it is Easter Monday) with the faceless London crowd that he remembers:

It is a disintegrated crowd, rather suspicious and shy perhaps, where few know, or could guess much about, the others. When I find myself among them, I am more confused and uneasy than in any other crowd…. Here at Clapham Junction, each one asks a separate question. In a quarter of an hour I am bewildered and dejected. (171)

In other places he notices and records situations that may be taken as minute anecdotes or short narratives, but are capable of being deve‑ loped into short lyrics. In the following fragment he notices the little boy’s joy on meeting his father, and the girl’s envy. In the context of the colourless modern city and its “oceanic multitude” the moment of ten‑ derness is noticed and commented upon, presumably by the writer him‑ self, even if he manages to keep the narrative quite impersonal:

A boy had just met his father at a railway station, and was glad; he held the man’s hand, and was trotting gently, trying to get him to run – he fail- ed; then in delight put his arm to his father’s waist and was carried along thus, half lifted from the ground, for several yards, smiling and chattering like a bird on a waving branch. The two obstructed others, who took a step to left or right in disdain or impatience. Only a child at an alley entrance saw and laughed, wishing she were his sister, and had his father. (25) 188 Jacek Wiśniewski

The author’s “I” is cleverly concealed in the text by ascribing his impres‑ sions to that little girl, but the comparison of the boy to a bird, “smiling and chattering … on a waving branch” is the author’s, and not the little girl’s. Thomas presents himself as an experienced walker, though this trip could also become a rural ride, because he is considering, though with- out much enthusiasm, going on a bicycle: he is looking at his maps and choosing his itinerary carefully, and his hesitation over the choices persuades the reader that this traveller already knows the area around Salisbury Plain very well indeed:

Whatever I did, Salisbury Plain was to be crossed, not of necessity but of choice; it was, however, hard to decide whether to go reasona‑ bly diagonally in accordance with my western purpose, or to mean‑ der up the Avon, now on one side now on the other, by one of the parallel riverside roads, as far as Amesbury.… Or again, I might follow up the Wylye westward from Salisbury, and have always below me the river and its hamlets and churches, the wall of the Plain always above me on the right. Thus I should come to Warminster and to the grand west wall of the Plain which overhangs the town.… I could not decide. If I went on foot, I could do as I liked on the Plain. There are green roads leading from everywhere to everywhere. But, on the other hand, it might be necessary at that time of year to keep walking all day. (27)

Frost’s joke at Thomas’s expense in the poem “The Road Not Taken” clearly has its origin in passages like the one quoted above. Frost often said, when asked about the origins of this very popular poem (it opens his third collection, Mountain Interval, the first to be published in Ame‑ rica after his return from England), that it was intended as a gentle joke at Thomas’s expense.

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood, And sorry I could not travel both And be one traveller, long I stood And looked down one as far as I could To where it bent in the undergrowth (105) Travelling in Search of Spring… 189

Frost’s own explanation of what he meant by the poem stresses the context of walking and choosing paths, and regretting the choice as it obviously means the loss of the alternative experience. He would like us to believe (but not very seriously) that the poem is not more than a friendly reprimand, saying merely that Thomas was hesitant, and “sorry [he] could not travel both” roads. Frost’s biographer says:

Repeatedly Thomas would choose a route which might enable him to show his American friend a rare plant or a special vista; but it often hap‑ pened that before the end of such a walk Thomas would regret the choice he had made and would sigh over what he might have shown Frost if they had taken a “better” direction. More than once, on such occasions, the New Englander had teased his Welsh‑English­ friend for those wasted regrets… Frost found something quaintly romantic in sighing over what might have been. Such a course of action was a road never taken by Frost, a road he had been taught to avoid. (Thompson, 421)

Frost’s poem is obviously more general in its message: it is about choices, where crossroads are metaphoric, not literal; in Thomas’s own early poem “The Signpost,” written well before “The Road Not Taken,” the moment of choosing an itinerary “At the hilltop by the finger­‑post” is described thus:

I read the sign. Which way shall I go? A voice says: You would not have doubted so At twenty. Another voice gentle with scorn Says: At twenty you wished you had never been born. (2004, 3)

In Pursuit of Spring, the book which persuaded Frost of his friend’s poetic gift, is a key text in any critic’s search for the moment Thomas’s poetry started to flow. It is an attractive possibility to read the book as Thomas’s “road to poetry.” On the one hand, the process of writing the book was bringing Thomas closer to poetry, and on the other, since his goals were to be the Quantock Hills and Nether Stowey, he was travel‑ ling towards the land so closely associated with Romantic poetry. It is perhaps also significant that from Will’s Neck, the highest point on the Quantocks, it is possible on a fine day to see Wales, Thomas’s native land, as far as the Gower Peninsula. He wishes that 190 Jacek Wiśniewski

since my journey was to be in “a month before the month of May,” Spring would come fast, not slowly, up that way. Yes, I would see Nether Sto‑ wey, the native soil of “Kubla Khan,” “Christabel,” and “The Ancient Mariner,” where Coleridge fed on honey‑dew­ and drank the milk of Paradise. (37)

It is tempting to look, reading In Pursuit of Spring, for passages which made Frost proclaim that Thomas was a poet already. Samuel Hynes, in his essay entitled “Frost as an English Poet,” not only isolates such a passage because it has what Frost called “the sound of sense,” but also proceeds to transcribe it as verse: “one can easily lift from it lines of colloquial­‑sounding blank verse that is very like Frost’s narrative poems. It is not surprising that Frost, reading it, should have found in it a poem trying to get out” (unpa‑ ginated). Passages which scan as blank verse are more numerous in In Pur‑ suit, though not always using the cadence of verse. There are striking, vivid similes that one would expect to find in poe‑ try rather than prose: “The elms standing about like conspirators in the mist of the rain, preparing something” (34); there are metaphors which are picked almost at random from the pages of the second chapter, “The Start: London to Guildford”: “The north wind made an invasion with horizontal arrows of pricking hail” (35), or: “…each current of smoke from locomotive or cottage lay in solid vertebrae above the mist” (36). A memorable simile is likely to appear in the middle of any paragraph, giving it vividness and strength. Thomas enriches the narrative of his trek in In Pursuit by quoting songs he heard on the way, on the roads or in the roadside inns, sim‑ ple country ditties sung by workmen; or by listing the names of towns and villages he passes on his way, streams and rivers, hills and woods, or even names of inns, because such cataloguing of local names allows him to capture the spirit and flavour of each place, and possibly also to taste its ancient local history:

Thither I planned to go, under the North Downs to Guilford, along the Hog’s Back to Farnham, down the Itchen towards Winchester, over the high lands of the Test to Salisbury; across the Plain to Bradford, over the Mendips to Wells and Glastonbury, along the ridge of the Polden Hills to Bridgewater, and so to the Quantocks and down to the sea. (37–38) Travelling in Search of Spring… 191

He also transcribes inscriptions from country tombs and fountains, even listing names of the deceased, because local history is recorded in them; or quoting fragments of poetry which the names of places (little towns close to London, or names of churches, rivers, or even pubs) reminded him of, like the fragments of John Skelton’s poem remembered in Chap‑ ter II because of its association with a place called Leatherhead. The pre‑ sence of “the other man,” a travelling artist and collector of curiosities, also enriches the narrative: he makes sketches of interesting things he notices on the way, like weathervanes, signs over pubs, wells and cros‑ ses. Even though the two are not travelling together, and for long stre- tches “the other” is absent or silent, they still tend to meet in front of interesting items to exchange a remark or two, and move on. “‘Wret‑ ched weather,’ said the man, speaking through the pencil in his mouth, as he straddled on to his bicycle. At Ewell I lost him by going round behind the new church to look at the old tower” (51). The impression on the reader is that Thomas needs the alternative point of view; al- though Thomas was usually a solitary traveller when he went out to collect impressions and notes for his travel books, he gives this narra‑ tive a bit of dynamic force by having some dialogue or comment which would otherwise sound artificial or professorial. Leaving town on a spring afternoon, leaving it behind asa kind of prison, a gray land of London suburbs, he describes it in ways which echo similar passages from his earlier books:

These streets are the strangest thing in the world. They have never been discovered. They cannot be classified. There is no tradition about them. Poets have not shown how we are to regard them. They are to us as mountains were in the Middle Ages, sublime, difficult, immense; and yet so new that we have inherited no certain attitude towards them, of liking or dislike.… An artist who wished to depict the Fall, and some sympathy with it in the face of a ruined Eden, might have had little to do but copy an acre of the surviving fields. (1982, 5–6)

Not only the location, season, time of day, and weather seem exactly the same, but Thomas also uses here, in In Pursuit of Spring, a book writ‑ ten eight years later, the same narrative device of introducing the elu‑ sive “other man,” an artist and painter of landscapes, sometimes coming 192 Jacek Wiśniewski forward with comments and conversation, sometimes disappearing for long stretches of the journey, to appear again in convenient moments. On his second appearance (first he was noticed buying and releasing a chaffinch from a bird­‑shop), the “other man” is walking out of the London suburbs together with the “I” of the narrative:

The liberator of the chaffinch and I no longer had the road to ourselves as we struggled on in the mud between old houses, villas, dingy tea­ ‍‑shops, hoardings, and fields that seemed to produce crops of old iron and broken crockery. If the distant view at one moment was all elm trees, at the next it was a grand new instalment of London, ten fields away. But all of us must have looked mainly at the road ahead, making for some conjectural “world far from ours.” The important thing was to get out of this particular evil, not to enquire whether worse came after. (49–50)

As they go further away from the city, they see more hedges, copses, meadows and flowers, places of tranquillity and beauty. Leaving Epsom (“almost free from advertisements,” 53), they come to a copse of oak, whose description may not bring Thomas any closer to the cadences of his later poems, but shows him carefully working towards that surpri‑ sing last line, suggesting that he was using the technique – later much in evidence in his poems, like for instance “The Mountain Chapel,” “Swedes,” “But these things also,” “The Glory,” “Cock‑Crow,”­ “There’s nothing like the sun,” or “The long small room” – of the fragment (of prose or verse) developing backwards from the last statement or line:

The gorse came to an end, and here was a copse of oak. At intervals of thirty yards or so were oaks as old as Epsom, of a broad kind, forking close to the ground, iron­‑coloured and stained with faint green. Oaks not more than forty or fifty years old, tall instead of spreading, their lower branches broken off, grew between…. And the thin grasses around the thickets were strewn with dead twigs and leaves, and some paper and broken bottles left there in better weather. A robin sang in one of the broad oaks, whether anyone listened or not. (54)

It is not very difficult to spot fragments which did become poems (I will give an example below). It is also possible to find fragments which are Travelling in Search of Spring… 193 virtual poems even if Thomas never chose to use them, fragments in which a situation is made memorable and vivid because of the observer’s deliberate but often unsuccessful search for particular meaning, the use of metaphoric language and symbolic structure of represented action. In the fragment about the copse of oak, the old and the young trees are like generations of people, even if the span of their generation is much longer. The younger taller trees are towering above ancient broad oaks which are forking close to the ground. The robin’s spring song brings in yet another time scale of the brief lifespan of the birds. This juxtaposition of different life spans of trees and birds, with man placed somewhere in between the two, is successfully used in one of Thomas’s poems of war, “Fifty Faggots,” allowing him to meditate on the past, the present moment, and the speaker’s uncertain future in one brief poem. There is obviously a passage or two in the fragment quoted above which would probably be dropped or changed in the final version – if it ever became a poem – like the sentence about the rubbish left among the trees in bet‑ ter weather. Thomas’s practice in rewriting prose to verse usually meant a very radical selection of phrases to be excised: so that a fragment of prose several pages long might very well produce a poem not much longer than a sonnet. But in the final sentence there is an attempt at a coda: the robin’s song is suggesting something we often encounter in Thomas’s poems: nature has its own laws and pays no attention to man. The bird needs no human audience and no human interpretation of his song. If the ancient oaks, “as old as Epsom,” about four hundred years old, and the younger trees, “not more than forty or fifty years old,” are described as the audience of the robin’s song, they can be supposed to remember the endless succession of bird generations and their songs . Man’s relation to nature, like in the poetry of William Butler Yeats whose work Thomas knew, reviewed and admired, has a characteristic sadness or pessimism about it that looks back to the poetry of Thomas Hardy (in poems like “The Darkling Thrush”), and forward to the poetry of Philip Larkin (in poems like “Trees”). Critics and editors who produced full critical editions of Thomas’s poems, Edna Longley and R. George Thomas, often trace particu‑ lar poems back to passages in his earlier prose about the countryside, and In Pursuit of Spring is often mentioned and quoted in sections like 194 Jacek Wiśniewski

“Notes” and “Prose Versions and Early Drafts of Poems.” The opening chapters of the book are full of brilliant descriptions of the weather, sea‑ sonal movement, and the motif of regeneration.

The next day was the missel­‑thrush’s and the north­‑west wind’s. The missel­‑thrush sat well up in a beech at the wood edge and hailed the rain with his rolling, brief song: so rapidly and oft was it repeated that it was almost one long, continuous song. But as the wind snatched away the notes again and again, or the bird changed his perch, or another ans‑ wered him or took his place, the music was roving like a hunter’s…. The robin could be heard as often as the missel­‑thrush. [Days were full of] cloudy brightness, brightened cloudiness, rounded off between half­‑past five and half­‑past six by blackbirds singing. The nights were strange chil‑ dren for such days, nights of frantic wind and rain, threatening to undo all the sweet work in a swift, howling revolution. Trees were thrown down, branches broken, but the buds remained. (35)

The poem “March,” one of the earliest, written in early December 1914 (a hectic time in which Thomas managed to write five poems in five days), is an attempt to concentrate the spirit of In Pursuit of Spring into little more than the length of two sonnets. From the point of viewof theme and mood there is a striking similarity between particular pas‑ sages in the book and early seasonal poems (for example “November Sky,” “March,” “After Rain” or “Interval”), therefore a comparison is useful here. “March,” a blank verse poem which looks back to those Spring days described in the nature book, contains in its lines echoes of Coleridge’s “The Nightingale.” It also confirms F.R. Leavis’s claim that Thomas in his deceptively simple nature poems was “trying to catch some shy intuition on the edge of consciousness that would disappear if looked at directly. Hence, too, the quietness of the movement, the absence of any strong accent or gesture” (55). The first movement des‑ cribes the erratic March weather, and the second tries to interpret the singing of the birds:

What did the thrushes know? Rain, snow, sleet, hail, Had kept them quiet as the primroses. They had but an hour to sing. On boughs they sang, Travelling in Search of Spring… 195

On gates, on ground; they sang while they changed perches And while they fought, if they remembered to fight: So earnest were they to pack into that hour Their unwilling hoard of song before the moon Grew brighter than the clouds. (2004, 8)

What took Thomas over two hundred pages in the book, to find “Winter’s grave,” is expressed in poems like “March,” “The Source,” “But these things also” or “Thaw,” which are among his shortest. Edna Longley is certainly right when she says: “‘March’ concentrates, not only several March days into a quintessential one, but also the whole spirit of In Pursuit of Spring and of many passages in Thomas’s prose.” The critic concludes: “The season of ‘thaw,’ release, regeneration naturally attracted a depressive temperament, the victim of long frustrations. As man and poet he eventually experienced a ‘hoar Spring’ (‘It was upon’). In celebrating Spring’s moral victory here, he celebrates his own. And Thomas, like the birds, was ‘to pack into that hour/ [His] unwilling hoard of song’” (149–150). Thomas’s travel books are not just about nature, but about man’s place in nature, about man’s attentiveness to nature which allows him to understand and measure his humanity. Many of the topographical descriptions are written in a fluid and relaxed style, enlivened by a poe‑ tic touch, as in the last sentence here:

Mickleham is, apart from its gentlemen’s residences, an old‑fashioned­ place, accommodating itself in a picturesque manner to the hillside aga‑ inst which it has to cling, in order to avoid rolling into the Mole. The root­‑suckers and the trunk shoots of the elm trees were in tiny leaf beside the road, the horse­‑chestnuts were in large but still rumpled leaf. The celandines on the steep banks found something like sunbeams to shine in. On the smooth slopes the grass was perfect, alternating with pale young corn, and with arable squares where the dung was waiting for a fine day before being spread. The small flints of the ploughland were as fresh and as bright as flowers. (58)

The town’s clinging to the hillside makes it look almost like a live thing, a bird colony or an insect nest. There are also clear echoes of this frag‑ 196 Jacek Wiśniewski ment in one of the most beautiful poems, “But these things also,” espe‑ cially in the deceptive likeness of chips of flint to earliest spring flowers like violets. From time to time Thomas allows himself the freedom to insert into his narrative quite substantial digressions, almost literary essays – for instance when he starts discussing Meredith’s poetry, suggested to him by rainy and sunny March weather. He quotes the poet freely, compares his poetry to Wordsworth’s and Shelley’s, and finds in Meredith’s poetry the same kind of love of earth that one can find in Thomas’s own poems of nature; the deep love of earth which meant to Meredith “more than is commonly meant by Love of Nature. Men gained substance and sta‑ bility in it; they became strong –

Because their love of earth is deep, And they are warriors in accord With life to serve.” (61)

The discussion of Meredith, with further quotes and critical comment, continues for several pages; which is justified by the closeness of Box Hill, the poet’s writing chalet, but the impression the reader gets is that digressions like this are a conscious strategy to keep the narrative free of monotonous guide‑book­ enumeration and descriptions of scenic rou‑ tes, though one can (as the editor of the book, Patrick Ingram, proves in his Foreword which is a detailed account of a trip taken by him in the author’s footsteps) follow Thomas’s directions and travel all the way from Clapham to the Quantocks and see for oneself what kind of pur‑ suit it might be. Another type of digression which Thomas attempts in this section of the book comes in the form of a short story, a sad tale about two coun‑ try girls, two sisters Martha and Mary. It is a well­‑written short story, showing perhaps how Thomas was looking round for possibilities other than nature books, essay writing or reviewing at the time when demand for them was rapidly shrinking (there are in his output only two collec‑ tions of short stories and sketches, Rest and Unrest, 1910, and Light and Twilight, 1911). Fiction writing, including the heavily autobiographical novel The Happy­‑Go­‑Lucky Morgans, 1913, was more satisfying than com‑ Travelling in Search of Spring… 197 missioned books. This short story shows Thomas’s rather modest skill as a fiction­‑writer: he uses an old­‑fashioned form of a letter ostensibly written and sent to him by an old friend; the narrator’s confident voice, which is that of presentation and commentary, is comparable to Somer‑ set Maugham’s sophisticated narrative manner: there is a wise raconteur who tells the story in a well­‑balanced account written some time later, with the benefit of hindsight. Thomas’s story isa Hardyesque tragic tale of love and death which, in its predictability, sounds almost like a ballad. There are other types of digression in the book: portraits of his tra‑ velling companions, comments about land use (which sound faintly familiar, like in William Cobbett’s Rural Rides); anecdotes; portraits of vagrants, old peasants or Gypsies who can always be relied on to tell the pursuer of spring an interesting story (like echoes of Borrow); ety‑ mological speculation, especially on the origin and hidden meaning of the local names of villages, streams, copses, woods and roads; opinions about poetry and poets. Some passages in which he describes the tired traveller’s rest in inns, where he can have his tea and “only hear the rain falling from the sky and dripping from roofs” (70), become an interest‑ ing background to poems like “The Owl.” In the next section of the book, “Guilford to Dunbridge,” he offers useful advice on prices in inns and bed­‑and­‑breakfast places (and warns against overly expensive ones) – if anyone wanted to follow in his footsteps. There is lively humour in his comments and grievances about weatherproof clothing, a personal touch which everyone fond of footpath walking, especially in England, can appreciate. The “vanity of waterproofs” is described this way:

Sellers of waterproofs are among the worst of liars…. The one certain fact is that nobody makes a garment or suit which will keep a man both dry and comfortable if he is walking in heavy and beating rain. Suits of armour have, of course, been devised to resist rain, but at best they admit it at the neck…. Whoever wore a coat that kept his knees dry in a beating rain? I am not speaking of waterproof tubes reaching to the feet. They may be sold, they may even be bought. They may be useful, but not for walking in…. At first thought, it is humilia‑ ting to realize that we have spent many centuries in this climate and 198 Jacek Wiśniewski

never produced anything to keep us dry and comfortable in rain. (232–3)

Features like this make his narrative a guidebook as well, with detailed maps, descriptions of routes, and words of practical advice. He notices and describes the activities of the farmers ploughing, harrowing and erecting hop­‑poles; when walking downhill and with the sun rising, he likes to recite a ballad (providing the whole story) or sing a march- ing song (providing not only the words, but also suggesting its tune – using his considerable experience as a collector and editor of Songs for the Open Road); whenever he approaches a place of interest, like Wil‑ liam Cobbett’s birthplace in Farnham, he inserts a digression – Thomas obviously knows and admires Cobbett, and thinks Rural Rides is a more durable monument to the man than any statue:

I looked in vain for a statue of Cobbett in Farnham. Long may it be before there is one, for it will probably be bad and certainly unnecessary… so long as Rural Rides is read. (78)

The thought of Cobbett reminds him of another writer associated with the area, George Sturt (Bourne), author of The Bettesworth Book, 1901, and several others on rural crafts and affairs. There follows quite a detailed and lively literary essay on Bourne’s books. Since Thomas is mentioning here a writer who belongs, like himself, to this unique sub­‑genre which mixes travel writing with nature study and autobiography, it is worth noticing what it is exactly that he finds attractive in Bourne: the way he faithfully recorded, in numerous long conversations with the hero of his books, a “Surrey labourer, a neighbour and workman of the author” (78), and possibly a forerunner of his own incarnation of rural virtues, Lob, the figure appearing in one of the longest and most intriguing of his poems. Sturt’s Bettesworth presents a truthful and subtle picture of rural England, touched with a hint of nostalgia. The book is

a picture of rural England during the latter half of the nineteenth cen‑ tury, by one born in the earlier half and really belonging to it…. The por‑ trait of an unlettered English peasant is fascinating. He lived in a parish where people of urban habits were continually taking the place of the Travelling in Search of Spring… 199

older sort who dropped out, but he had himself been labourer, soldier, “all sorts of things; but … first and last by taste a peasant, with ideas and interests proper to another England than that in which we are living now.” (Thomas 2007, 80)

Thomas calls Bourne’s book “a volume which ought to go on to the most select shelf of country books, even beside those of White, Cobbett, Jeffe‑ ries, Hudson, and Burroughs” (78). Such digressions about nature writers and poets make In Pursuit of Spring a medley book. The string of days is enriched with interesting comments about places and people associated with them. At Alresford, Thomas remembers and quotes from George Wither’s poem about Alre‑ sford pond, and this launches him on yet another interesting digres‑ sion in which he discusses something that always fascinated him: the sense of place as inspiration for poetry. Wither is discussed as a local poet, “one of the poets whom we can connect with a district of England and often cannot sunder from it without harm” (90). He is then contra‑ sted with Wordsworth, who “possessed a creative power which made it unnecessary that the reader should see the places, whatever the railway companies may say. Wordsworth at his best is rarely a local poet, and his earth is an ‘insubstantial fairy place’” (90). The pleasure of the text is not only the vivid and unselfconsciously poetic way in which Thomas is depicting his travels. There is also striking (and to some readers perhaps perverse) pleasure in being alone, at night, cold and drenched to the bone, in the English countryside of early spring (as in the opening lines of his poem “The Owl”). Late in the evening, tired, hungry and unable to find an inn with a bed in it, Thomas is as attentive to the beauty of nature as ever, and able to suggest to the reader the sublime flavour of the moment by hardly noticeable modulations in the cadence of his phrases and sentences which begin to sound like lines in a poem, with subtle inver‑ sions, repetitions, alliteration, internal rhymes and half­‑rhymes, and startling similes:

The earth was quiet, dark, and beautiful. The owl was beginning to hunt over the fields, while the blackbird finished his song. Pleasant werethe 200 Jacek Wiśniewski

yellow road, the roadside bramble and brier hoops, the gravel pits and gorse at corners. But the sky was wild, threatening the earth both with dark clouds impending and with momentary wan gleams between them, angrier than the clouds. Up in the pale spaces overhead Venus glared like a madman’s eye. (102)

A large part of the book presents Thomas’s trek through Salisbury Plain which is not described just for itself, for the beauty of its empty spaces, its five rivers, its ‑hiddenwell­ military camps, its ancient earthworks, and its birds and beasts: it is described chiefly for its beauty as nature’s work of art, its colours, shapes, and, as the pursuer of spring is moving through it, the impression of fluid movement of its colours.

As you travel across the Plain you come rarely to a spot where the chief thing for the eye is not an immense expanse of the colour of the ploughed chalkland, or of corn, or of turf, varying according to season and weat‑ her, and always diversified by parallelograms of mustard yellow. Some‑ times this expanse rolls but little before it touches the horizon; far more often, it heaves or billows up boldly into several long curving ridges that intersect or flow into one another. The highest of these may be crowned by dark beeches or carved by the ditch and rampart of an ancient camp. Hedges are few, even by the roads. The roads are among the noblest, visiting the rivers and their orchards and thatched villages, but keeping for the main part of their length high and dry and in long curves. (126)

The area is described as it appears in the eye of the sensitive behol‑ der who is a connoisseur of art, someone who is responsive to nature’s design, the last remaining area in the south of England, unaltered by man and technology, despite the appearance of the railways and occa‑ sional (but perhaps no longer sufficiently occasional) motor cars. Thomas’s attention is also attracted by the role Salisbury Plain had in the creation of Sir Philip Sidney’s Arcadia. His claim, supported by several long quotations from the romance, is that the Plain not only con‑ tained elements of Arcadia (thus becoming the most influential symbo‑ lic ground for the whole of English pastoral tradition), but it also pro‑ vided Sidney with “a solitude in which they [the elements of Arcadia] could be mingled at liberty” (130). Travelling in Search of Spring… 201

“There were hills which garnished their proud heights with stately trees; humble valleys whose base estate seemed comforted with the refreshing of silver rivers; meadows enamelled with all sorts of eye‑pleasing­ flowers; thickets which, being lined with most pleasant shade, were witnessed so too by the cheerful disposition of many well‑tuned­ birds; each pasture stored with sheep feeding with sober security, while the pretty lambs with bleating oratory craved the dams’ comfort; here a shepherd’s boy piping, as though he never should be old; there a young shepherdess knitting, and withal singing, and it seemed that her voice comforted her hands to work, and her hands kept time to her voice­‑music.” (128)

Sidney’s most famous passage in which he writes of the beauty of Arca‑ dia, is placed right after Thomas’s own. Interestingly, both passages are as full of technical painterly terms referring to colour, shape, line and movement. This arrangement is meant to persuade the reader about the connection between Arcadia and Salisbury Plain, one more argument to support Thomas’s belief in the importance of place in literary inspi‑ ration. In the closing chapters of the book, Thomas travels further west in search of spring. Apart from the usual vivid descriptions of villages, their churches and churchyards, character sketches and little anecdotes, the chapter “Shepton Mallet to Bridgewater” contains a large essay on the nature books by Thomas’s friend and model, a famous ornitholo‑ gist and traveller, W.H. Hudson. Thomas praises him for being not only a leading scientist but also an excellent writer; he enviously calls this combination a “miracle of a naturalist and an imaginative artist in one and in harmony” (198), and adds:

Were men to disappear they might be reconstructed from the Bible and the Russian novelists and, to put it briefly, Mr. Hudson so writes of birds that if ever, in spite of his practical work, his warnings and indignant scorn, they should cease to exist, and should leave us to ourselves on a benighted planet, we should have to learn from him what birds were. (198)

Seeing Glastonbury Tor and Glastonbury Abbey makes a lesser impres‑ sion on this pursuer of Spring than the first blossoms on an old hawthorn: 202 Jacek Wiśniewski

I had found the Spring in that bush of green, white and crimson. So warm and bright was the sun and so blue the sky, and so white the clouds, that not for a moment did the possibility of Winter returning cross my mind. (204)

The penultimate chapter, “Bridgewater to the Sea,” brings Thomas to Nether Stowey, and quite predictably, to a lively and perceptive essay on Coleridge’s poetry, in which “The Ancient Mariner,” “Christabel,” “Frost at Midnight” and other shorter poems are quoted and discus‑ sed by the future poet who admired “Fears in Solitude” so much that he bravely (or recklessly) placed his own first two poems to appear in print, “Haymaking” and “The Manor Farm,” right after Coleridge’s in the patriotic anthology This England, published by Oxford University Press in the first months of the Great War. In the last chapter, “The Grave of Winter,” the further west he goes the more signs of Spring he sees: daffodils, periwinkle, laurustinus and primroses are in full bloom; finally, on the last day of his pursuit, March 28th (and on the last page of his book), he sees the distant blue hills of South Wales under a rainbow, and spots the first bluebells and cowslips1:

Here, in the sun, they were as if they had been fragments fallen out of that rainbow over against Wales. I had found Winter’s grave; I had found Spring, and I was confident that I could ride home again and find Spring all along the road. Perhaps I should hear the cuckoo by the time I was again at the Avon, and see cowslips tall on ditchsides and short on chalk slopes, bluebells in all hazel copses, orchises everywhere in the lengthening grass, and flowers of rosemary and crow­‑imperial in cot‑ tage gardens, and in the streets of London cowslips, bluebells, and the unflower­‑like yellow­‑green spurge… Thus I leapt over April and into May, as I sat in the sun on the north side of Cothelstone Hill on that 28th day of March, the last day of my journey westward to find the Spring. (238–9)

1 This essay is a modified version of a chapter in my book Edward Thomas: A Mirror of England published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing in 2009. Travelling in Search of Spring… 203

Works Cited

Frost, Robert. “The Road Not Taken.” The Poetry of Robert Frost, edited by Edward Connery Lathem. New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1975. Hynes, Samuel. “Frost as an English Poet.” Horizons USA (1974): unpaginated. Ingram, Patrick. Introduction to In Pursuit of Spring by Edward Thomas. Trowbridge, Wiltshire: Laurel Books, 2007. Leavis, F.R. New Bearings in English Poetry: A Study of the Contemporary Situation. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1979. Longley, Edna, ed. Edward Thomas: Poems and Last Poems. Estover: Macdonald and Evans, 1973. Thomas, Edward. In Pursuit of Spring. Trowbridge, Wiltshire: Laurel Books, 2007. ­‑­‑­‑. The Collected Poems, edited by R. George Thomas. London: Faber and Faber, 2004. ­‑­‑­‑. The Heart of England. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982. Thompson, Lawrence. Robert Frost: The Years of Triumph. New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1970. David Malcolm University of Gdańsk

Traffic with the Enemy: The Traitor in Elizabeth Bowen’s The Heat of the Day, Rebecca West’s The Meaning of Treason, and Francis Stuart’s Black List, Section H.1

Scholarly discussions of treason, the traitor and treachery in British lite‑ rature are rare. For example, Patrick Deer’s recent, excellent study of British war literature, Culture in Camouflage, devotes only a few pages to the motif of treason in the literature of the 1939–45 conflict. This is sur‑ prising, for British history offers some splendid examples of treachery, betrayal and treason. Drawing examples only from the last two hundred years, one could point to a wide range of major historical figures whom British governments have, at one time or another, classed as traitors. The club includes the ideologists and leaders of the American Revolu‑ tion in the late eighteenth century: Thomas Paine, George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin, and others. It embraces, too, Bri‑ tish working­‑class and middle­‑class dissidents and political reformers, much persecuted by the British authorities, during the French Revolu‑ tionary and Napoleonic Wars. Ireland and Britain’s engagement with Ireland have produced a rich crop of traitors: Wolfe Tone of the 1798

1 A slightly different version of this essay was published in Polish in Wojna i postpa‑ mięć (War and Post­‑memory). Ed. Zbigniew Majchrowski and Wojciech Owczarski. Gdańsk: Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Gdańskiego, 2011. 235–246. Traffic with the Enemy: The Traitor in Elizabeth Bowen’s… 205

Uprising, and the Fenian Brotherhood of the 1860s. The early twentieth­ ‍‑century movement for Irish independence is full of figures who were from the British point of view little but common traitors: the leaders of the 1916 Easter Uprising – Pádraig Pearse and James Connolly, for example – the fascinating and complex Sir Roger Casement (whom the British not only executed, but whose name they blackened by revealing his homosexuality), and the charismatic guerrilla leader of the Anglo­ ‍‑Irish War, Michael Collins. Another part of the Empire, India also offers examples of great traitors to the British Crown, disrupters of the stability of the King­‑Emperor’s realm. Any account of the intricate maneuverings between Indian nationalists and the British colonial police during the First World War (an internal and late act in the “Great Game” of main- taining empire on the Indian sub‑continent)­ reads like a lurid tale of espionage. The great leaders of the Indian and Pakistani independence movements – Mohandas Ghandi, Jawaharlal Nehru and Muhammad Ali Jinnah – were all at various times treated as traitors by the Govern‑ ment of India. Later British history, too, is rich in treachery. The Second World War threw up William Joyce (“Lord Haw­‑Haw,” of whom more later). The Cold War begat a bevy of renegades: Donald Maclean, Guy Burgess, Anthony Blunt and Kim Philby.2 Those British Muslims respon‑ sible for the 7 July 2005 terrorist bombings in London could similarly be described as traitors. British literature and film have not avoided the subject of treachery (although the Hindu­‑German conspiracy against the British Empire awaits its bard). Somerset Maugham’s Ashenden stories (1928) contain three texts – “Giulia Lazzari,” “The Traitor” and (perhaps) “Miss King” – that touch on the topic in a complex fashion. Ashenden’s attitude to the bold Chandra Lal is far from disapproving, and he has certain sym‑ pathy even with the unlovely Caypor, while Miss King’s bitter rejection of England is understood and accepted by him. The great thrillers of the early twentieth century – Erskine Childers’s The Riddle of the Sands (1903) and John Buchan’s The Thirty­‑Nine Steps (1915) – present threats

2 Because the Cold War generated so many espionage novels and because many of the best of these involve treachery, this is the one area of British literature in which the figure of the traitor has met with an adequate critical discussion. 206 David Malcolm to England, but the villains are not traitors. They are German agents. The same is true of Graham Greene’s Second‑World­ ­‑War spy novel, The Ministry of Fear (1943). However, the traitor turns up in a sinister glory in Ealing Studios’ innovative and compelling war film Went the Day Well? (1942). The local squire, the apex of village society, is revealed as a cynical German fifth‑columnist,­ working for Berlin behind chintz curtains. But it is the Cold War espionage novel that offers the richest crop of traitors. The major practitioners of the genre, Graham Greene, John le Carré and Len Deighton, all deal with treachery: Greene in The Human Factor (1978), le Carré in Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy (1974), as well as in the definitive novel of ‑WarCold­ treachery, A Perfect Spy (1986), and Deighton in Berlin Game (1983). It must be emphasized that the tra‑ itors in these texts are very complex characters, and the novels consti‑ tute a serious examination of betrayal at many levels. The traitor, too, enters the work of writers not associated with the espionage genre: Ian McEwan’s The Innnocent (1990) involves an encounter with the British traitor George Blake; John Banville’s The Untouchable (1997) deals with Victor Maskell, art historian and Soviet spy, who is a lightly disguised version of Anthony Blunt, one of the Cambridge spy­‑ring. The end of the Cold War, while it has killed the classic Berlin espionage story, has not entirely removed traitors from the British literary landscape. Hanif Kureishi’s “My Son the Fanatic” (1994) broaches the topic of British Isla‑ mic terrorism. Robert Harris returns to the Second World War for his traitor in Enigma (1995). Here, I wish to address briefly the motif of treachery within Polish literature. The configuration of this motif provides an illuminating coun‑ ter example to its British equivalent. Treachery in Polish literature and culture may be said to be under the patronage of Konrad Wallenrod. Mickiewicz’s 1828 narrative poem takes as its central figure the Slavic Wallenrod, who, brought up by his people’s mortal enemies, the Ger‑ man Teutonic Knights, rises to become Grand Master of the Order, only to take his revenge upon them by leading the Knights to military disa‑ ster. The figure of Wallenrod has long been prominent in Polish culture, and has been written about extensively, especially recently and autho‑ ritatively by Maria Janion in Życie pośmiertne Konrada Wallenroda (1990) and Stefan Chwin in Literatura i zdrada: Od “Konrada Wallenroda” do Traffic with the Enemy: The Traitor in Elizabeth Bowen’s… 207

“Małej apokalipsy” (1993). Janion describes Wallenrod as embodying such imaginiatively powerful topoi (“schematy”) as “‘tajemniczy mściciel’; ‘porwany za młodu’; człowiek, który stanął wobec ‘jednego wyjścia’; samotny ofiarnik, który wyrzekł się wszystkiego dla ojczyzny; ‘zdrajca­ ‍‑patriota’; wojownik o ‘dwóch sumieniach’” (the “secret avenger”; “one abducted in youth”; a man for whom “there is but one way out”; the solitary self­‑sacrificing spirit who renounces all for his country; the “patriot­‑traitor”; a warrior with a “double conscience”) (8). Janion goes on to write of Wallenrod:

Niezmierna różnorodność kołujących wokół Konrada Wallenroda postaci autentycznych oraz literackich dowodzi sekretnej, niebywałej wprost siły utworu Mickiewicza, mocy, którą nieraz nazywano “magnetyczną.” Świadczą też one o charakterze kultury tak dramatycznie walczącej o swe wartości – właśnie w zderzeniu z fascynującym, tajemniczo zamasko‑ wanym, dwuznacznym rycerzem‑mścicielem­ – oraz stale podejmującej problem zachowania się we wrogim otoczeniu, utrzymania tożsamości narodowej i moralnej, ustalenia granic “prawdziwego” i “fałszywego” patriotyzmu. Mickiewicz … wyrzekł się swego utworu i swego boha‑ tera, ale większość czytelników nie chciała o tym wiedzieć. Wallenrod oderwał się od jego twórcy, wyzwolił spod jakiekolwiek jego władzy i zaczął pędzić życie, które – z rozmaitych powodów – należałoby nazwać pośmiertnym. (8–9)3

Chwin indicates some of the cultural power, and the moral, political and psychological complexity, of the figure of Wallenrod in the follo‑ wing:

3 The extraordinary variety of real and literary figures that whirl around Konrad Wallenrod indicates the mysterious, quite unusual power of Mickiewicz’s work, a power which has more than once been called “magnetic.” These figures also bear witness to the nature of a culture struggling under such dramatic circumstances to maintain its own values – in particular, in collision with the fascinating, mysteriously masked knight­ ‍‑avenger – and constantly addressing the problem of how to behave in a hostile envi‑ ronment, how to maintain national and moral identity, how to set the limits of a “genu‑ ine” and a “false” patriotism. Mickiewicz … renounced his work and its hero, but the majority of readers has paid no attention to this. Wallenrod broke from his creator, freed himself from his power and began to lead a life that – for a variety of reasons – we must describe as posthumous. (Translation: D.M.) 208 David Malcolm

Wallenrod to rycerz chrześcijański zmuszony do wyboru metod walki niezgodnych z etosem rycerskim. Przeżywany przezeń konflikt norm moralnych ma charakter doświadczenia tragicznego i współtworzy bar‑ dziej złożoną sytuację duchową bohatera, w której tragizm przejawia się także i na innych płaszczyznach. Decyzja o przedsięwzięciu tajnej misji pociąga za sobą doświadcze‑ nie tragiczności w sferze życia prywatnego. Aby ocalić ojczyznę, Wal‑ lenrod musi zniszczyć własne szczęście, musi też zniszczyć szczęś‑ cie kobiety, którą kocha. … Istota doświadczenia tragicznego zawiera się przede wszystkim w tym, że aby ocalić ojczyznę, musi Wallenrod popełnić czyny w jego odczuciu niemoralne. Dążąc do urzeczywistnie- nia celu obdarzonego najwyższą sankcją moralną, musi wybrać spo‑ sób walki, który splami jego honor rycerski; musi dopuścić się kłam‑ stwa i zbrodni. Wybiera sposób działania nie mieszczący się w granicach chrześcijańskiego etosu rycerza – niczym zamaskowany skrytobójca zdaje wrogowi “cios w plecy.” Mówi o sobie, że musi zdradzać i mordować. (25–26)4

But, above all and banally, one must emphasize that the archetype of treachery in Polish culture is not a traitor to Poland at all. He is a German­‑nurtured Slav who turns – quite rightly – on the oppressors of his people. It is otherwise in British literature and culture. In what follows, I discuss the motif of treachery in three texts about the Second World War: The Heat of the Day (1948) by Elizabeth Bowen;

4 Wallenrod is a Christian knight compelled to choose methods of combat that are incompatible with a knightly ethos. The conflict of moral standards that he encounters is a tragic experience, and it helps to create the protagonist’s extremely complex spiritual situation, in which tragedy is apparent also on other levels. The decision to undertake his secret mission also leads to tragic experience in the sphere of private life. In order to save his country, Wallenrod must destroy his own hap‑ piness, and must also destroy the happiness of the woman he loves. … The essence of his tragic experience lies above all in the fact that in order to save his country, Wallenrod must commit acts that he feels to be immoral. In attempting to realize an end sanctioned by the highest morality, he has to choose a means of struggle that stains his knightly honour: he must lie and commit crimes. He chooses a way of acting that does not fit within a Christian knightly ethos – as a masked treacherous assassin he “stabs his enemy in the back.” He says of himself that he must betray and murder. (Translation: D.M.) Traffic with the Enemy: The Traitor in Elizabeth Bowen’s… 209

The Meaning of Treason (1949) by Rebecca West; and Black List, Section H (1971) by Francis Stuart. Immediately, it must be stressed that to describe these texts as British is a simplification. All have substantial Irish elements in their make­‑up. Elizabeth Bowen is usually, or often (she is that kind of writer, in that kind of world), classed as an Anglo‑Irish­ writer, with strong links both with mainland Britain and southern Ireland. Impor‑ tant sections of The Heat of the Day take place in what is at the time of the novel’s setting the Irish Free State. In The Meaning of Treason, the principal figure discussed is Irish in origin, and that origin and background are crucial in the text. Francis Stuart, the author of Black List, Section H, is an Irish writer, although much of his work was published first in Britain, and the text in question here was published in London before it was published in the Irish Republic. The shift- ing identities of two of these texts, and the focus of all three on Irish subjects, are appropriate to the twilight worlds of treason that they open up. The texts themselves, one might say, enact a kind of divided loyalty. The Heat of the Day is a complex novel set in London during the Second World War. Although the treachery of one of the major characters forms a central part of the novel’s story material, it is only one part. However, it is central to my concern here. Stella Rodney, the protagonist, disco‑ vers in the course of the novel that her lover, Robert, has been working for the Germans since his return to Britain after the disgrace of Dunkirk. In fact, Stella does not herself discover Robert’s treason, but rather she is informed of it by Harrison, a British counter­‑intelligence officer. The circumstances of his revelation are important. He offers to leave Robert alone if Stella becomes his mistress. Thus, the British state, which Robert is betraying, is itself seen as morally opaque, certainly as embodied in its representative, Harrison. When Robert comes to talk openly to Stella about his treachery (in Chapter 15), his reasons are both clear and unclear. Humiliated and outraged by the disaster of Dunkirk, he considers Britain (or England?) to be a shabby lie, a cause not worth fighting for, an empty word. His contempt for democracy and for humans’ potential for freedom is also manifest. He is under no illusions as to the superiority of the other side; 210 David Malcolm it is simply that if the Germans win, there will be an end, he believes, to an old, corrupt order. There will be less nonsense, he suggests.

I don’t see what you mean – what do you mean? Country? – there are no more countries left; nothing but names. What country have you and I outside this room? Exhausted shadows, dragging themselves out again to fight – and how long are they going to drag the fight out? Wehave come out the far side of that. (267) Freedom. Freedom to be what? – the muddled, mediocre, damned. Good enough to die for, freedom for the good reason that it’s the very thing which has made it impossible to live, so there’s no alternative. Look at your free people – mice let loose in the middle of the Sahara. It’s unsup- portable – what is but a vacuum? (268) It was enough … to have been in action on the wrong side. Step after step to Dunkirk: the extremity – I could forget it if I had not known what it meant. That was the end of that war – army of freedom queuing up to be taken off by pleasure boats. … The extremity – can theynot conceive that’s a thing you never do come back from? How many of us do they imagine ever have come back? We’re to be avoided – Dunkirk wounded men. (272) They [the enemy] have something. This war’s just so much bloody quib- bling about some thing that’s predecided itself. Either side’s winning would stop the war; only their side’s winning would stop the quibbling. I want the cackle cut. … (282)

There is much that is vague in Robert’s words (what has been “prede‑ cided” and what does that mean?), but his disgust with the moral and political status quo is evident and eloquently put. In The Meaning of Treason Rebecca West takes as her subject a range of real, historical traitors, both from the Second World War, and from an early stage of the Cold War. The first and longest part of the text, entitled “The Revolutionary,” is a detailed analysis and interpretation of the life and career of Willam Joyce, Lord Haw­‑Haw, notorious as a fascist activist in the 1930s and broadcaster of German propaganda to Britain during the Second World War, and hanged by the British in 1946 for treason. As befits its subject, West’s text is itself a treacherous Traffic with the Enemy: The Traitor in Elizabeth Bowen’s… 211 document. It purports to be a piece of reportage, and is, indeed, such. However, it is also very speculative, employing many of the techniques of the novel to try to make Joyce comprehensible. Further, the language of the text is often not transparent, as one might expect it to be in sober, fact­‑oriented accounting, but takes on attributes of the poetic (density of metaphor, phonological orchestration). For example:

Joyce’s destiny drew him to South London; he crossed the Thames only to meet disaster. This is to say that his destiny led him away from London: from the London where England can be conquered. For South London is not London. It even calls itself by a vague and elided locution that leaves out the name of the capital. “Where do you live?” “South of the river.” The people on the other bank never speak of their landscape as “north of the river.” They may go down east, or go up west, but they move within London, where the Houses of Parliament are, and the Abbey, and Buckingham Palace, and Trafalgar Square, and the Law Courts, and St Paul’s, and the Mansion House, and the Bank and the Mint, and the Tower and the Docks. The house where William Joyce first took up his dwelling on the other side of the Thames stood in one of those streets which cover the hills round Clapham Junction like a shabby striped grey counterpane. (60–61)

West’s interpretation of Joyce and his treachery is that he is a little man, in many senses of the word, unable to succeed in England, and con‑ demned to unsuccess, as it were, from the beginning (there is nothing he could have done to achieve honourable prominence), driven to iden‑ tify himself with his nation’s enemies, both for reasons of self­‑interest, and also out of conviction, a certain and unequivocal fascist and pro­ ‍‑German to the end of his days. He is a man who, paradoxically, loves the country that gives him no place of honour or respect, and which, indeed, has betrayed him and his family, for the Joyces are prosperous pro­‑British southern Irish pieds­‑noirs abandoned by their country in 1922. He is a man whose love for the country that has betrayed him, paradoxi‑ cally, leads him to betray it.

William Joyce himself could not restore the family fortunes – in spite of his intellectual equipment, which was sufficient to give him a degree at the University of London, with first‑class­ honours in English language 212 David Malcolm

and literature – because of his personal limitations, the clownish extrava‑ gance which left him, even after he had played a uniquely sinister part in history, with the comic nickname of Lord Haw­‑Haw, the odd vulga‑ rity which made it almost impossible to believe, looking at him or liste‑ ning to him, that he was a University graduate or the child of people with a position in a community. After finishing his studies he at once gained a position, and not an unremunerative one, in a tutorial college, but it would have been inconceivable that he could have arrived at any position of distinction in the academic world. He had in early youth joined the Conservative Party and spoken for it, but it would have been inconceivable that any local committee could have nominated him as parliamentary candidate. If he had remained innocent as snow he would still have looked a gangster, and, what was worse for him, a comic gangster. Therefore the fascist movement was a godsend to him. (19)

West reprints Joyce’s statement to a British intelligence officer in May 1945, after his arrest in northern Germany.

I take this opportunity of making a preliminary statement concerning the motives which led me to come to Germany and to broadcast to Britain over the German radio service. I was actuated not by the desire for personal gain, material or otherwise, but solely by political convic‑ tion. I was brought up as an extreme Conservative with strong Impe‑ rialistic ideas, but very early in my career, namely, in 1923, became attracted to fascism and subsequently to National Socialism. Between the years 1923 and 1939 I pursued vigorous political activities in England, at times as a Conservative but mainly as a Fascist or Natio‑ nal Socialist. In the period immediately before this war began I was profoundly discontented with the policies pursued by British govern‑ ments, first, because I felt they would lead to the eventual disruption of the British Empire, and secondly, because I thought the existing economic system entirely inadequate to the needs of the times. I was very greatly impressed by constructive work which Hitler had done for Germany and was of the opinion that throughout Europe as also in Britain there must come a reform on the lines of National Socia‑ list doctrine, although I did not suppose that every aspect of National Socialism as advocated in Germany would be accepted by the British people. (167) Traffic with the Enemy: The Traitor in Elizabeth Bowen’s… 213

As West points out, Joyce goes unrepentant and, in a sense, triumphant to the gallows. Like The Meaning of Treason, Black List, Section H is a protean, unfixed text. Partly and explicitly autobiographical, it is, nonetheless, a work of fiction. In its unstable identification, it is like its protagonist, H. H (whose surname, sparingly used, is Ruark) is an Irish writer, who – like the text’s author – travels to Berlin in 1940 to take up a job lectu‑ ring at the University of Berlin. He is able to do so without enormous difficulties, as he is a citizen of the Irish Free State, which maintained strict official neutrality during the 1939–45 conflict.5 H does so in order to seek extreme forms of experience. He does this throughout his life, furthermore through these experiences seeking to make himself a com‑ plete outsider, as, he believes, the genuine poet/writer/artist should be. Indeed, one of his few moments of doubt concerning his actions in the 1940s comes when he wonders whether the Germans might win the War (354). The text leaves H happy in a French prison, covered in sores, awaiting interrogation and prosecution for collaborating with the Nazis. The following quotations are representative of H’s thinking on the matter of betrayal.

Long ago … he’d told Iseult that what the poet needed to keep him unspotted from the world was dishonour. It hadn’t beena phrase he’d thought up. It had come out instinctively without premeditation. Now it was time to catch up and to come to a conscious grasp of his attitude. … There had to be an extreme flexibility of spirit and avoidance of all morality in order to associate with the losers at any given moment, who, for the poet, were the only suitable companions. (44) Considering the incident seriously, he supposed he had meant to suggest that the only side to take was always the one considered most unpardo‑ nable by the circle in which he found himself, in this case that of most

5 Is H a traitor? In one sense, clearly not. He is a citizen of a sovereign state, not at war with Germany. However, H is deliberately putting himself beyond norms of behaviour within the societies, Irish and British, in which he lives. If he were not doing something offensive and widely thought of as wrong, what he does would have no point at all, least of all to himself. He is certainly aware of how vile many of his contemporaries must see his behavior (Stuart, 382). 214 David Malcolm

intellectuals with a sprinkling of enlightened politicians. There was the further suggestion, hidden, he was ready to concede, from anyone but himself, that the collapse of all those commendable attitudes and faiths, including the cherished ones of those present, was a precondition of imagining, let alone starting to construct, the altogether different kind of society, nearer his largely subconscious dream. (238) The cell, on his return, appeared dim and shabby to the point of being uninhabitable, and it was hard to see how he’d ever looked on it, or his own corner of the floor, as a tolerable shelter. But soon he was recon‑ ciled to it again. Although he was still far from coming to understand the necessity for what had happened to them, he did begin to see the silence that he had entered as the deep divide between the past and what was still to come. Whatever it was that was at the other end there was no way of telling. It might be a howl of final despair or the profound silence might be broken by certain words that he didn’t yet know how to listen for. (405)

Collaboration, the betrayal of consensual values, has brought him to the position of the ultimate outcast and to the brink of revelation. Above, I have pointed out that the Polish arch­‑traitor, Konrad Wallen‑ rod, is a complex figure, driven to treachery which he abhors by impera‑ tives which he cannot deny. He is a noble character, compelled to adopt ignoble means. The British literary traitors from the Second World War which have been discussed above are of a different cast. In essence, they are unproblematic (whereas Wallenrod is anguishedly so). They are traitors by conviction, certain that they are right. Further, although in all cases, ultimately (even with regard to Stuart’s novel), the reader is meant to be most critical of their actions, these are understandable. The British state is compromised in The Heat of the Day; West allows us to comprehend Joyce’s rush to treason against a world that rejects him a priori; H may be juvenile at times, but he does have a case of sorts. One might say, that these traitors are not in themselves complex, although this is not to suggest that their portraits are superficial or that as cha‑ racters they lack depth. One can certainly, however, say that the circum‑ stances in which they exist – a post­‑Dunkirk Britain, an exclusive but fagged­‑out England, an early twentieth­‑century Europe in which each old order is collapsing – are complex. Traffic with the Enemy: The Traitor in Elizabeth Bowen’s… 215

The above is only a preliminary approach to what might turn out to be a fruitful and interesting area of comparative literary studies: the diverse treatments of treachery in various literatures and cultures. This most contentious of topics, of which there are certainly vast silences in all cultures, might open up many fascinating cultural sites. In addition, if pursued aright, it offers an opportunity to link the thematic with the technical. In what ways can the topic of treachery be linked to questions of genre (as in the case of West and Stuart), intertextuality, and even language (it is notable, for example, that both Bowen and Stuart employ rather peculiar syntactic structures throughout their texts)? The traitor awaits the serious attention of the scholar.

Works Cited

Bowen, Elizabeth. The Heat of the Day. London: Vintage, 1998. Chwin, Stefan. Literatura i zdrada: Od “Konrada Wallenroda” do “Małej apokalipsy.” Kraków: Oficyna Literacka, 1993. Deer, Patrick. Culture in Camouflage: War, Empire and Modern British Literature. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009. Janion, Maria. Życie pośmiertne Konrada Wallenroda. Warsaw: PIW, 1990. Stuart, Francis. Black List, Section H. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1996. West, Rebecca. The Meaning of Treason. 2nd and rev. ed. London: The Reprint Society, 1952. Tymon Adamczewski

The Spectral Difference: On Hauntology in Sarah Waters’ The Little Stranger

Introduction

Related to spectres and ghosts, haunting does not merely refer to spine­ ‍‑chilling, Gothic stories, but – as theorised by Jacques Derrida in his later works – may be understood from the perspective of undecidability. Opening his much debated Spectres of Marx, the philosopher writes his meditations into the rich context of otherness, alterity and difference: “If I am getting ready to speak at length about ghosts, inheritance, and generations, generations of ghosts, which is to say about certain others who are not present, not presently reading, either to us, in us, or out‑ side us, it is in the name of justice” (xviii). His problematisation of the spectre fits neatly into the deconstructive endeavour which unhinges the established philosophical and cultural certainties and entails ethical and political dimensions. These meditations, especially after the publi‑ cation of his encounter with Marxism, have spawned several theoreti‑ cal and critical works devoted to the themes of the supernatural haun‑ tings and the Gothic, proving, among other things, the need for such meditations. Put differently, they also attest to what Slavoj Žižek descri‑ bed as the “fundamental fantasy of contemporary mass culture” (qtd. in Castricano, 5). Operating on the instability offered by the figure of the spectre – a simultaneous absent­‑presence questioning the notions of The Spectral Difference: On Hauntology… 217 time and space, hauntology may, in consequence, be also used in lite‑ rary interpretation. The present contribution aims to offer a brief analysis of the possi‑ bility of employing aspects of Derridean hauntology in the reading of The Little Stranger, Sarah Waters’ last book to date. This work of fiction lends itself to such a reading because it reworks the paradoxical sta‑ tus of a haunting spectral (non­‑)presence to deliver a ghost story with- out the explicit portrayal of the actual ghost itself and, in addition, con‑ nects it with the context of identity, politics and class. In this way the representation of the topic receives links to otherness, difference and the instabilities of undecidability. Hence, what is argued throughout the article is that such an approach to the novel questions the strictly psy‑ choanalytical interpretation proposed in the text itself and allows for the uncovering of different, latent meanings in the work.

The Spectralised Difference

The figure of a spectre permeating Derrida’s Spectres of Marx – in a close reading of Shakespeare’s Hamlet and Marx’s Communist Manifesto – is for the philosopher an epitome of undecidability which continues the philosopher’s conceptualisation of difference. That is why Nicholas Royle, for example, aptly claims that the différance is ghostly, as the notion is “the difference of the present from itself. It is what makes the present possible and at the same time impossible” (74). Spectrality and haun‑ ting thus constitute another possibility (after différance, dissemination, supplement, etc.) to look into the mutual entanglement of seemingly opposing ideas which structure thinking about politics, culture, litera‑ ture, or philosophy. Specifically speaking, while discussing the Marxist legacy and the propositions of the end of communism, history and ideo‑ logy, Derrida asserts a common ground between capitalism’s spectral nature, linking it to that of ghosts and apparitions. The figure of a spec‑ tre ties in here with a somewhat deconstructive spirit which aims at dismantling the seemingly fixed certainties and opening them to a plu‑ rality of difference. In this way, the spectre is “a possibility” (Derrida 2006, 13) which confounds notions of time and space (existence, pre‑ 218 Tymon Adamczewski sence/ absence, life and death) which also challenges aspects of traditio‑ nal scholarly interest because it refers to what lies beyond the limits of traditional knowledge. Elements of such a tradition can be easily exemplified by the generic distinctions in criticism itself, which Derrida’s spectral analyses para‑ doxically and deliberately challenge. Spectres of Marx, for instance does not provide its readers with a trickled­‑down method of analysing texts. Nevertheless, the propositions spurred much interest and commotion in criticism, producing what Colin Davis terms as a mixture of theme analysis (haunting, ghosts, the supernatural), close reading and “daring speculation” (11). Notable works within such a speculative strain are certainly those of Julian Wolfreys and Jodey Castricano. Being fully aware that “spec‑ trality resists conceptualization” (x) and that Derrida does not propose a coherent theory in the traditional, formulaic sense of the word, Wol‑ freys connects spectres with textuality and treats haunting as a power‑ ful force of displacement, “as that disfiguring of the present, trace of non­‑identity within identity, and through signs of alterity, otherness, abjection or revenance” (1). According to the critic, this approach traces “how do ideas of haunting and spectres change our understanding of particular texts and notion of text in general?” (ix). As a result, the haun‑ ting is not necessarily solely about the ghosts, spectres and poltergeists as specific, constitutive elements of a given story, but more about the act of interpretation as such: “To speak of the spectral, the ghostly, of haun‑ ting in general is to come face to face with that which plays on the very question of interpretation and identification, which appears at the very limit to which interpretation can go” (x–xi). In turn, Jodey Castricano proposes a reading of the writings of Derrida himself in relation to the crypt as a structural metaphor, an underlying principle of the philosopher’s texts. Her approach centres on cryptomimesis, a term which describes “a writing practice that, like certain Gothic conventions, generates its uncanny effects… [it] draws attention to a writing predicated upon encryption: the play of revela‑ tion and concealment lodged within parts of individual words” (6; my emphasis). Correspondingly, such analyses are located in a fissure opened exactly by the figure of the spectre which Derrida themati‑ The Spectral Difference: On Hauntology… 219 ses within the framework of hauntology, a coinage drawing on the similarity in the French pronunciation of both ontology and haun‑ ting (hantise), which “has the common sense of obsession, a constant fear, a fixed idea, or a nagging memory” (Kamuf in Derrida 2006, 224). Additionally, Castricano digs further in the etymologies and empha‑ sises the context of debt triggered by the English revenant and the French revenance: “[t]hese words bring to mind the theme of the retur‑ ned from the dead and all that this implies as well as to how that theme is bound to a certain economy: they have affinities with reve‑ nue and with revenir – from the French to come back or to amount to and thus to the notion (financial) return(s) (9). The crypt, she writes, thus also performs an (economic) function – it keeps, saves, or keeps safe “that which would return from it to act, often in our place” (9). Spectrality thus encompasses the close bonds between “revenance and desire” and that of “ghostly inheritance,” regardless of “what is recei‑ ved by descent or succession or what returns in the form of a phantom to tax the living” (9). Since “a spectre is always a revenant” (Derrida 2006, 11), or something which comes back, it also stands for an opening in the seemingly conso‑ lidated unified concepts of time and place. As Derrida demonstrates, in the case of the spectral nature of communism, where a haunting spectre already assumed a certain future, it does not only contain a link to that what is past, but contains a link to the future. What is more, the retur‑ ning presence should not solely be taken literally as a ghost, but also as someone/­‑thing which comes back in a sense different than a living entity (Davis, 69). That is why Derrida (2006, 4) emphasises the equivo- cal status of ghosts: a spirit “assumes a body, it incarnates itself, as spirit, in the spectre”; however “the spectre is a paradoxical incorpo‑ ration, the becoming­‑body, a certain phenomenal and carnal form of the spirit” (5). Moreover, the difference between the spirit and the spectre acquires importance in his formulations because it is also linked with the question of knowledge. Insisting on the ambiguity produced by these figures Derrida writes:

One does not know: not out of ignorance, but because this non­‑object, this non­‑present present, this being­‑there of an absent or departed one 220 Tymon Adamczewski

no longer belongs to knowledge. At least no longer to that which one thinks one knows by the name of knowledge. One does not know if it is living or if it is dead. (5)

In other words, the ghost for Derrida is a figure of ambiguity which should not be reduced to an object of traditional knowledge, but which represents otherness. Wolfreys parallels these issues by poin‑ ting out that “(t)he idea of the spectre (spectrality) itself, escapes even as its apparitional instance arrives from some other place, as a figure of otherness which traverses and blurs any neat analytical distinction” (xi). Approaching the ghost as a non­‑object and inviting it to speak is also the subject of Derrida’s reading of Hamlet. In particular, the scene where Marcellus encourages Horatio to speak to the ghost is the one in which the philosopher singles out the latter character as a traditio‑ nal scholar. Such identification is an equivalent of saying that “a tra‑ ditional scholar does not believe in ghosts – nor all that could be called a virtual space of spectrality”: he or she operates by means of binaries (“the sharp distinction between the real and the unreal, the actual and the inactual, the living and the non­‑living, being and non­‑being” (12)). Horatio­‑the­‑scholar – as read by Derrida – “wants to inspect, stabilize, arrest the spectre in its speech.” (13). This, among other things, echoes the poststructural incredulity towards language and fixed (linguistic) meanings. Contrastively, the possibility of difference advocated by the spectral approach assumes going beyond these traditional oppositions by way of utilizing the opening provided by the figure of a spectre, by following the opening which belongs outside the order of traditional knowledge (not‑knowing­ which is not a lacuna) and stands for “hetero‑ geneity” (45). Consequently, the spectre also becomes the figure of alte‑ rity and otherness, “a figure of the other, of the strange and the stran‑ ger of that which in me is other than myself and that which outside me is more than I can know” (Davis, 76). As the critic puts it, it is the spectre which “holds open the possibility of an unconditional encounter with otherness, of an undetermined, unanticipated event without which there would be no escape from the endless repetition of the same and no promise of emancipation and justice” (76). Thus, characteristically for The Spectral Difference: On Hauntology… 221 his later, more ethically­‑leaning works, it is not only the plurality and diversity of meanings that is important for Derrida. The apparent confusion which the spectral figure brings to traditional intellectual oppositions and distinctions is deeply deconstructive, as it goes against the grain of ontology, psychoanalysis and philosophy. Con‑ trasting Freudian approaches – where ghosts constitute a “re­‑awakening of something familiar and long­‑established which has been repressed” and which accept “ghosts in order to demystify our belief in them” – the approach of Derrida “wants to put into question the intellectual tra‑ dition to which Freud, like Marx (ambiguously) belongs and to allow for the possibility that the spectral other might speak” (Davis, 16–17). The ambiguous status of the spectre, or “the spectral logic[,] is de facto a deconstructive logic” (Derrida and Stiegler, 117). Instead of arresting the meaning it welcomes the fluidity and un‑fixed­ nature of the spectral figure – of its borderline and marginal existence between being and not­ ‍‑being, life and death, or present and the past. As the philosopher sta‑ tes: “It is in the element of haunting that deconstruction finds the place most hospitable to it, at the heart of the living present, in the quickest heartbeat of the philosophical” (Derrida and Stiegler, 117). However, it is not limited to the philosophical mode, but as the following section will demonstrate, can be identified in fiction as well.

The Undecidability of Haunting

The Little Stranger, Sarah Waters’ last novel to date (2009), tells the story of the Ayres family – landed gentry who for more than two centuries have been living in an impressive Georgian mansion, Hundreds Hall, in Warwickshire. In decline after the Second World War, the physical state of the house – gradually falling into ruin – is not only constitutive of the family’s identity but also bears symbolical similarity to their receding way of life and the upper classes’ necessary confrontation with the novel social conditions of late 1940s Britain (e.g. the new Labour Party govern‑ ment, National Health Service, etc.). The events are narrated by Dr Fara‑ day, a first­‑person narrator participant who, typically for his profession, represents a more rational outlook on things, although the reliability 222 Tymon Adamczewski of his account is doubtful. Much in the vein of such Gothic classics as E.A. Poe’s The Fall of the House of Usher, the novel constitutes an explora‑ tion of ghosts and hauntings, as well as the notion of class, especially in its exposition of the shortcomings of the gentry’s seemingly fixed iden‑ tity and their financial insecurity when faced with the changing social situation. However, there are several aspects to The Little Stranger which link it to the theme of undecidability and spectres. In fact, it operates in the novel on several levels and results in important instabilities. Apart from the departure from the lesbian themes usually elaborated by the author, a further, generic instability refers to the book’s lack of a determinate status about the ghost and an unambiguous resolution. Firstly, the book’s status within Waters’ oeuvre testifies to the ambi‑ guity connected with the themes elaborated within the text itself. One of the foremost contemporary British writers, Sarah Waters is often catego‑ rised as a lesbian writer working in the neo­‑Victorian tradition. Indeed, mostly set in Victorian times, her novels generally offer an almost ex- clusive portrayal of women and their sexual and social relations. Simi‑ larly, her academic work is also related to her main preoccupations as a fiction writer – i.e. the focus on offering a fictional, yet historical representation of women.1 In this context, The Little Stranger constitu‑ tes a departure from her usual preoccupations, mainly in its male nar‑ rative voice and a lack of lesbian characters. Of her fiction, The Night Watch is Waters’ only other novel which does not take place in Victorian England (but has a gay character), whereas Affinity while containing a strong ghost theme eventually resolves its presence in a rational manner. From this perspective The Little Stranger deviates from the established expectations, both, in its lack of apparent gay/ lesbian themes and the ambiguous presence of the ghost in the story. Toy‑ ing with readers’ and audience’s expectations, the novel also marks a departure from and a reworking of the “usual” Sarah­‑Waters­‑motifs.

1 The academic work of Sarah Waters includes Wolfskins and Togas: Lesbian and Gay Historical Fictions, 1870 to the Present (Ph.D. thesis), Queen Mary, University of London, 1995; “‘A Girton Girl on a Throne’: Queen Christina and Versions of Lesbianism, 1906– 1933.” Feminist Review (46), 1994: 41–60; “‘The Most Famous Fairy in History’: Antinous and Homosexual Fantasy.” Journal of the History of Sexuality 6 (2), 1995: 194–230. The Spectral Difference: On Hauntology… 223

Although social/class relations and a strong female character (Carolin Ayres) do appear in the book, they rather seem to be reworked in a form which works “against” them. The sole intimate moment between the narrator and Caroline, for example, is a failed and awkward sex scene which seems so tense and stifled that it almost has a deconstructive ring to it – while bearing the traces of such typical scenes (ones often flam‑ boyantly portrayed by Waters in her previous novels), it simultaneously emphasises its forced and artificial nature. In this way, the author both subverts the expected critical approaches – on the surface level omit‑ ting them, but on a closer look actually employing them in a somewhat à rebours, spectralised manner. In a similar vein, the generic instability of the tale presented in the book contributes to the links between The Little Stranger and difference, alterity or otherness. In fact, Waters’ text, despite what the author her‑ self identifies as “a clear presence haunting Hundreds Hall” (Lovell, e­‑text), cannot be taken as a fully­‑fledged ghost nor as a haunting story because it encourages disparate interpretations depending on the cha‑ racters and the stage of the tale. The mysterious events in Hundreds Hall are narrated by an ageing country doctor, Faraday, who gradually befriends the Ayres family as a result of a house call to a teenage maid, Betty, one of the few mem‑ bers of the staff actually running the vast mansion, who reports the feelings of a mysterious presence in the house. As the story progresses, Dr Faraday bonds with the owners and becomes the witness of how each family member meets his or her demise: the son, Roderick, falls into madness after seeing objects in his room spontaneously shift places and a fire starting in his chambers; Mrs Ayres kills herself, convinced of the malice administered by her baby daughter’s ghost; and finally, Caroline, the daughter of the family, dies in enigmatic circumstances after declining the doctor’s marriage proposal. Each of the stories (family members’ and the narrator’s) may be seen as delivering disparate points of view on the presence haunting the mansion, which contribute to its unequivocal status. In these stories the haunting powers change from a poltergeist (Roderick), through the spectre of a dead child (Mrs Ayres), to an unidentified (destructive) force (Caroline). The most obvious interpretation dominating the text itself is 224 Tymon Adamczewski the psychoanalytical one. From this standpoint, the ghostly hauntings in the family can be read as resulting from subjective and repres‑ sed traumatic energies of particular characters – with Roderick’s war­ ‍‑time traumas, Mrs Ayres’ loss of a baby, and Caroline’s anxiety against the traditional sexual role forced on her by a marriage with Faraday – yet, they can equally stand for the family’s collective apprehensions about the new social hierarchies. As Smith puts it, “the spectre is an absent presence, a liminal being that inhabits and gives shape to many of the figurations that characterise the Gothic. The spectre is also a strangely historical entity that is haunted by the culture which produced it” (147). Within the text itself, the psychoanalytical interpretation is upheld at several points – most notably by Dr Faraday, who as a figure of the abovementioned Derridean “traditional scholar” refuses to em- brace the supernatural dealings in Hundreds Hall and opts for a ratio‑ nal explanation. Faraday’s colleague, Dr Seeley, also offers a Freudian explanation by claiming that the mysterious events in the mansion result from “the subliminal mind [which] has many dark, unhappy corners”; the eponymous “little stranger” which is “a sort of shadow­‑self … a Caliban, a Mr Hyde” (380). Moreover, in a genre­‑biased gender­ ‍‑biased manner, Seeley also argues that it is “generally women … at the root of this sort of thing” – the “menopausal mother,” Mrs Ayres, who is in “a queer time, psychically,” and the teenage house maid, Betty (380). Interestingly, the Polish translation of the title (Ktoś we mnie, Eng.lit. Somebody/a stranger within me) also seems to be in accordance with the psychoanalytical reading promoted in the book. A further point contributing to this interpretation of the hauntings is the character of Faraday, who, surprisingly, may also stand for the eponymous “little stranger.” In fact, the narrator participating in the action which unfolds in the story also links at least a few aspects con‑ nected with subconscious desires. However, like the spectre his status is also unstable and undecided – as an educated man he feels ill at ease with his working class origins and also longs for inclusion in the upper classes represented by the Ayres family. From this perspective, the novel can be read as a story of the desire for inclusion in the higher ranks of society, with Faraday being the “little stranger” producing The Spectral Difference: On Hauntology… 225 the destructive psychic energies and penetrating the house in search of revenge for Caroline’s refusal to accept his proposal. The construction of the novel certainly allows for such a reading, with Caroline’s enigma‑ tic last words (“You?”) which may refer to Faraday; or with the narra‑ tor himself finally remaining the sole character visiting Hundreds Hall striving to unravel the mystery of the family’s death. Significantly, what he sees reflected in “a cracked window‑pane”­ is his own face (499). From the hauntological point of view, however, particularly impor‑ tant are the undecidable and unstable features of the text. The book opens with Faraday’s recollection of the Empire Day fête of 1919, when the young narrator is taken by his mother, a nursery maid in Hundreds Hall, inside the house where, in an act expressing his desire “to possess a piece” (3) of the house, he chips a part of a decorative plaster border from the walls. This initial act and his subsequent returns to the house makes Faraday into something of a “revenant,” repeatedly coming back to the place of his desires, a place where he can conduct the desired crossing of class borders – a movement which ultimately leads to the family’s downfall. Additionally, the family’s identity itself is in the book linked to notions of inheritance and property, epitomised by the house which turns out to be unstable and difficult to keep. In the text, the mansion is frequently personified and rendered as yet another, active character in the story, equally constitutive of the identity of its owners. In this way, the vast property that the Ayres initially possess seems to fix their identity, which can be described as “the quality of being the same, of being absolutely one, [it] hides the ambiguity of property, of having unchangeable properties as one’s absolute property, and of thus being proper” (Kalaga and Rachwał, 7). Such “economy of property” renders “any disturbance of identity as improper, as a lack of properties which translates itself into a deficiency, a disturbance of normality, a neither­ ‍‑this­‑nor­‑that” (Kalaga and Rachwał, 7). Indeed, this undecidable qua‑ lity of the Ayres’ property occasionally shines through. For example, when Caroline says “[t]he truth is, you see, we know how lucky we are to have lived here at all. We have to sort of keep the place in order, keep our side of the bargain” (48; my emphasis), she points to the awa‑ reness of the constructed, conventional nature of the family’s social 226 Tymon Adamczewski position. This is further emphasised by additional comments about the labour of the people working, or who used to work, in the property to keep it operational thus laying bare the political dimension of the nar‑ rative. With the new social situation at hand, and the family identity in peril, the bargain crumbles and the identity based on property and subjugation of the working­‑class becomes spectralised and insecure. From this perspective, the presence of otherness haunting the house may represent the threats to the seemingly fixed nature of the family’s, and the upper classes’ identity. It may equally attest to the fact that this otherness constitutes an inseparable part of identity for both the masters and the servants, and only when threats to this identity are made – e.g. when an individual (Faraday) wants to transcend traditio‑ nal divisions – does this notion start revealing its artificial character and the mutual interdependence of the oppositions.

Conclusion

Derrida’s hauntology, which deliberately confounds ontology, allows one to look at spectral dealings from the point of view of undecida‑ bility. The notion of the spectre, which in the philosopher’s formula‑ tions embodies undecidability, otherness and difference, allows one to trace instabilities in the notions of identity and opens the possibi‑ lity for a reading of a haunting presence within the field of literary fic‑ tion which, in a way, goes beyond the psychoanalytical interpretation. As seen in a Sarah Waters’ book, the seemingly fixed nature of identity, owing to the disturbances of the spectral presence’s otherness, is reveal- ed as a construct which falls apart when one of its constitutive elements shifts sides.

Works Cited

Castricano, Jodey. Cryptomimesis: The Gothic and Jacques Derrida’s Ghost Writing. Quebec: McGill­‑Queen’s University Press, 2001. Davis, Colin. Haunted Subjects. Deconstruction, Psychoanalysis and the Return of the Dead. Chippenham and Eastbourne: Palgrave, 2007. The Spectral Difference: On Hauntology… 227

Derrida, Jacques. Spectres of Marx. The State of Debt, the Work of Mourning and the New International. Translated by Peggy Kamuf. New York and London: Routledge, 2006. Derrida, Jacques and Bernard Stiegler. Echographies of Television. Filmed Inter‑ views. Translated by Jennifer Bajorek. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2002. Kalaga, Wojciech and Tadeusz Rachwał, eds. Introduction to (Trans)­‑Formations I, Identity and Property. Essays in Cultural Practices. Katowice: Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Śląskiego, 2002. Lovell, R. ‘‘Sarah Waters on The Little Stranger.’’ The Guardian 22 May 2009. Accessed July 15, 2013. . Royle, Nicholas. Jacques Derrida. London: Routledge, 2003. Smith, Andrew. ‘‘Haunting.’’ Routledge Companion to Gothic, edited by Catherine Spooner and Emma McEvoy. London and New York: Routledge, 2007. 147– 154. Waters, Sarah. The Little Stranger. London: Virago, 2010. Wolfreys, Julian. Victorian Hauntings. Spectrality, Gothic, the Uncanny and Litera‑ ture. New York: Palgrave, 2002. Edyta Lorek‑Jezińska­ Nicolaus Copernicus University, Toruń

On Haunting as Metaphysical Stalking: The Middle Story and a Piece of Charred Ectoplasm

Smoke, written by Bryony Lavery and first produced in 2006, is a play about, as the playwright humorously writes in her note, “stalking, haunting and having an excuse for smoking” (2006, note). Its main plot‑ line concentrates on the contemporary relationship between a young woman, Donna, and her rejected admirer, Rod, presented in a sequence of increasingly oppressive manifestations of attention followed by acts of revenge. The plot’s ending is ambivalent: the play ends happily for the woman as she manages to free herself by accidentally killing the stalker but from the man’s perspective the final murder raises questions about how far one can go in self­‑defence as well as shows the man as doubly harmed – first by being rejected and then murdered by his lover. The main plotline, rather uncomplicated and straightforward as it seems, from the very beginning is haunted by another story, which for the large part of the play remains only hinted at and is suppressed by repetitive acts of mocking the Gothic convention. The middle story, which disrupts the main plotline, is delivered by Tom, the character des‑ cribed in the list of dramatis personae as “a piece of charred ectoplasm” just before the scene of Rod’s death. The ghost’s intrusion has the poten‑ tial to reshuffle the power and urgency of the stories presented in the play and to question the validity of the main plot’s perspective. It does so by presenting a prototype against which the women’s perspective temporarily loses its cultural significance to the centuries long rejected On Haunting as Metaphysical Stalking… 229 lover tradition. What I propose in this essay is to look at this cultural repositioning of stories and plots made by Bryony Lavery in her play as a deliberate subversion of gender allocation in the concepts of the contradictory middle and haunting. The “contradictory middle” has been referred to in feminist criticism as the alternative story temporarily suspending the main narrative. In her discussion of the myth of Philomela, Patricia Klindienst comments on the significance of the voice of the shuttle, of the tale delivered by the silent woman, testifying to the suffering and injustice she has en- countered. The moment of the loom is the moment when the story that should not have been presented according to the circumstances briefly surfaces to reveal the truth which could1 change the course of events. The concept of the contradictory middle signifies the potential for a new tale, a novel perspective, a moment at which something new might be created. Although as the text develops, it returns to the initial story‑ line and suppresses the potential disruption, the story of the middle re- mains a “point of departure for the woman’s story,” demanding the cultural incorporation of “something monstrous” (Klindienst, 621). Philomela’s silent story sealed in her tapestry on the primary level serves to “redress a private wrong,” but in broader cultural terms, as Klindienst argues, “it threatens to retrieve from obscurity all that her culture defines as outside the bounds of allowable discourse, whether sexual, spiritual, or literary” (620). A patriarchal text thus contains a nar‑ rative which demands its incorporation into the dominant structure which it potentially disrupts. If the story in the middle is narrated by a ghost as it is in Lavery’s Smoke, several additional consequences arise. In a broader perspective suggested, among others by Julian Wolfreys, all stories are ghost sto‑ ries: “to tell a story is always to invoke ghosts, to open a space through which something other returns” (3). He goes on to suggest that “[g] hosts return via narratives, and come back, again and again, across cen‑ turies, every time a tale is unfolded” (3). The other that enters through

1 Although Philomela’s story does alter the course of events, according to Klindienst, the change which leads to Tereus’ punishment in fact returns to the violence originally performed on Philomela. Revenge wastes the potential created by Philomela’s story of transforming violence into a peaceful resolution (resistance) (Klindienst, 623). 230 Edyta Lorek-Jezińska the story is on one level the other text, a previous narrative or its fragment and more literally the figure of a ghost, a stranger, who demands a reconsideration of the main narrative. The ghost as a story‑ teller, thus, is granted radicality and urgency similar to the middle story both in its disruptive potential and the necessity to face something that has been suppressed and erased from rational reality. The ghost’s tale also contains a secret, the revelation of which threatens the stability of the other characters and the main plot as such. Likewise, telling the secret often serves the same purpose as the story in the middle – of redressing a private or somebody else’s wrong.2 The ghost returns in order to claim the truth, to tell a story or to gain attention, putting the witness under an obligation to watch, listen and react. In a more abstract deconstructive approach proposed by Jacques Derrida, the ghost or the spectre is the opening of a text to something other, something which we cannot com‑ prehend but which questions the text’s self­‑sufficiency. It is something that is there but cannot be named or identified because it is paradoxical and indefinite:

[O]ne does not know: not out of ignorance, but because this non­‑object, this non­‑present presence, this being‑there­ of an absent or departed one no longer belongs to knowledge. One does not know if it is living or if it is dead. Here is – or rather there is, over there, an unnameable, or almost unnameable thing… (6).

The ghost signifies in Derrida’s sense, as Colin Davis suggests, “a pro‑ ductive opening of meaning” (377), which refutes definition and comple‑ tion, yet it possesses a potentially ethical dimension as the voice of the other which is incomprehensible but as such, it should not be ignored

2 A significant aspect of the ghost’s return is mentioned, among others, by Jac‑ ques Lacan in his discussion of the ghost figure in Hamlet. In the folk tradition the ghost appears to demand a proper burial: “This explains the belief we find in folklore in the very close association of the lack, skipping, or refusal of something in the sati‑ sfaction of the dead, with the appearance of ghosts and spectres in the gap left by the omission of the significant rite” (39). Lavery’s ghost, however, although murdered and improperly buried, focuses his attention on being listened to, on being able to deliver his story. On Haunting as Metaphysical Stalking… 231 or forgotten.3 In Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok’s studies of haun‑ ting, the tale told by the phantom becomes significant not for the secret it reveals but for the lies it tells. Such a secret is often transferred from one generation to the other, and what seems to be related to somebody else’s past continues to exert its influence on other people’s psyche. The revelation of the secret is in this case a necessary condition of getting rid of the stranger within one’s mental topography; according to Nicho‑ las Rand’s interpretation of Abraham’s and Torok’s texts, “[w]e should engage in this unveiling of and understanding of the former existence of the dead not because we may want to appease them or prevent them from perpetrating their nocturnal pranks, but because, unsuspected, the dead continue to lead a devastating psychic half­‑life in us” (167). The story narrated by the ghost contains the silence or omission in which the secret might be embedded: “the words used by the phantom to carry out its return … point to a gap, they refer to the unspeakable” (Abraham 1994a, 174). The task of the listener is to bring the silence or secret into an acceptable form of expression, because of the taboos and traumas related to the secret preventing the straightforward statement of the truth (Abraham 1994b, 189). Thus, taking into consideration these three aspects of the ghost and its story in a text, we may assume that firstly, the ghost opens a text to something other (possibly another text), secondly, it signifies the return of an entity that is as yet unnameable and incomprehensible, but which one should try to preserve, and third- ly, the ghost’s tale contains a secret or gap which one needs to decode in order to free themselves from its destructive influence. As already mentioned, Bryony Lavery’s play Smoke contains a story which appears in the middle of the predominantly realistic plot and is narrated by a ghost. It causes a rupture in the thriller­‑like flow of events, appearing in the climactic moment, postponing the resolution of the plot. It suddenly transposes the play onto a different metanar‑ rative level, which requires from the reader/viewer a reconsideration of the events that have taken place so far. In one of the performance reviews, a critic complains about the second half of the performance,

3 See Davis’ discussion of hauntology as part of the larger “ethical turn” in decon‑ struction (373). 232 Edyta Lorek-Jezińska which is the part following the moment the ghost appears and is allo‑ wed to speak:

The first half builds to a thrilling climax, with a ghost that haunts Theresa’s flat scaring Donna out of her wits. However, Smoke then beco‑ mes rather silly. We finally see the spook called Tom … – and from then on the play’s a letdown. … All the earlier comedy, the clever plotting and committed acting are undone by Tom’s annoying antics and a script that becomes ridiculous (Orme, e‑text).­

Such a comment is not totally unjustified, as the ghost can hardly keep up with the pace of events thus far, carefully wording every phrase, hesitating and restarting, after the centuries of silence, which Lavery chooses to describe in stage directions humorously as: “Tom, after all these centuries, has found an audience. He seizes the spotlight with ectoplasmic gusto” (80). The ghost wastes his own and the listener’s energy by repeating the same phrases and he tries to make a greater impression by overusing exclamation marks, like in the following extracts:

I run hither thither (He shows us.) Thither hither (He shows us.) Up this chain (He shows us.) Down this chain. (82) Then her faaaaather appeaaaaaaarrrrs! With his two best tallow­‑dippers!!! ‘I tooooold you to leave my lass be!!! Cease following my lass!!!’4 He lifts his oak cudgel! He brings it down Whhhhhaaaaaaack!!! (81)

4 Uneven spacing in the original; in the author’s note preceding the play Lavery humorously explains her rationale for the text’s unusual layout, which is sup‑ posed to reflect “the frenetic nature of these characters in their situation” (3). The note itself uses this type of layout and is printed in the shape that resembles a ghost. On Haunting as Metaphysical Stalking… 233

The fact that the ghost in a sense ruins the play by telling his tale con‑ veys a significant message about the possibility of sustaining one version of the events. The story of stalking can never exist on its own because it is a consequence of gender relationships and cultural traditions which seem to legitimize certain forms of enforcement or violence on the part of men and criticize the women’s active resistance to unsolicited fa- vours. It is only by placing the stalking plot in the perspective offered by the story in the middle that the contemporary plot gains or negotiates its significance. When set against the feminist concept of the contradictory middle, Lavery’s Smoke reverses the processes of suppression and domination by placing the dominant story in the middle and even more important- ly, changing the gender allocation to the middle and main narratives. The main plot is constructed from the women’s perspective while the middle story is delivered by a male ghost who was killed by the fa- ther of the lady whom he adored and followed everywhere. Tom, being invisible to the owner of the flat, Theresa, can be felt by her as a dark, cold and smelly spot in a corner – the unheimlich spot which she tries to subdue by an excessive use of air fresheners sprayed straight into the ghost’s eyes. Throughout the play the ghost desperately tries to make himself heard, but what comes out of his mouth usually is redu‑ ced to incomprehensible verbal reactions, such as “Uuuuuuuurgh!!!” or “Haaaaghhhhhhhhhhh!!!!” It is only after Theresa’s friend’s, Donna’s, visit to the house and only because of her strange ability to see and hear the ghost that he can tell his tale and as a result of this be saved and freed from his chain and curse. Telling his story becomes a moment of liberation, after which he is unchained and can move beyond the “dark and smelly” spot in the room. In order to express his gratitude, he beco‑ mes a faithful servant to Donna, following her everywhere in the same way as he had followed his lady in the Middle Ages and almost ex- actly in the manner Donna has been followed by Rod, the contempo‑ rary stalker. The ghost’s tale imposes on her another level of oppression, drawing a correspondence between the medieval courtly love adoration and contemporary stalking. Donna briefly comments on the similarity between the two in a casual manner: 234 Edyta Lorek-Jezińska

Even when men’ve … (died) Even when they’ve become … (putrid ectoplasm) … Even … (hideously disfigured) … they still think you’re there just to listen to them… (83)

Therefore, in Smoke the middle story is appropriated by the oppres‑ sor figure as if to defend the stalker. The ghost’s simple and naive story explains the motivation and significance of the strange actions ‑perfor med by Rod, such as oppressive knocking on doors and windows, repe‑ titive messaging or breaking into Donna’s house in order to leave the living room covered with burning aromatic novelty candles in various shapes and sizes (Rod being a candles manufacturer). In his comic imi‑ tation of medieval English, Tom’s stalking takes an almost acceptable poetic form of adoration and devotion:

I was her … ever­‑present serf her knight every night! her constant disciple. She says, “Oh Tom, you follow me everywhere follow me here sit here I’ll buy us both some roast chestnuts I’ll be back presently.” She’s never retuuuuuurned! (80–81)

The sudden turn towards hatred expressed in offensive sexual metaphors (“that orange basket” or “that fishhead seller”) seems to be justified by the fact that he was mutilated and burnt alive by his sweetheart’s fa- ther, who ironically explained to him “Now you’re Alight with Love, Lad!!” (81). When telling his story, the ghost cannot understand why he had died and goes on believing that he was wrongly punished for love and devotion with which he now wishes to reward his saviour, Donna. When Rod breaks into the house, Tom tries to defend his lady in a knightly fashion, but as Rod cannot see him, he is limited only to ver‑ bal reactions heard by Donna. Seeing the murder performed by Donna on Rod, in what she believes to be self­‑defence, Tom gradually becomes On Haunting as Metaphysical Stalking… 235 speechless as he comes to understand the implications of his own death in the past. He sees how his own story is being re­‑enacted from an exte‑ rior perspective, yet he still regards men as victims of women, not being able to view the situation from his lady’s standpoint. Though feeling compassion towards the ghost, Donna is unable to change her view in order to understand how the ghost’s tale represents her stalker’s per‑ spective, by which she could learn why Rod has been behaving in such an awkward and oppressive manner. She misinterprets Rod’s breaking into the house and Theresa’s delay, while Rod’s self‑narrating­ monolo‑ gue delivered in a heroic fashion – “No door was too thick for him/No bolt was too strong for him/ no lock was too complex of design/it was as if he had super­‑powers…” (89) – makes it more difficult to comprehend what is happening. It is only after murdering Rod that Donna learns Theresa’s version, in which Rod is positioned and subdued as a saviour and not an oppressor, although he performs the role with a similar exaggeration. In a critical situation, Theresa manages to control Rod by playing the role of a damsel in distress, one who happens to need all the attributes that Rod had tried to shed onto Donna. When he breaks into the house it is because Theresa had no keys and he tried to be as efficient as possible. The critic’s complaint about the play’s second half is justified to the extent to which the story in the middle makes it impossible to read Smoke only as a play about being stalked – about the legal impossibi‑ lity to prevent it and personal inability to survive it. By presenting the stalker’s perspective, the play shows stalking in a different light, which temporarily weakens the female victim’s version. The ghost, as a victim of murder, steals the compassion and attention of the listeners, the more so for the sentimental romanticism of his commitment and his moving, naïve faithfulness. The final lesson given by Theresa in how to safely handle a stalker might even suggest that Donna could have avoided the violence by carefully redirecting the stalker’s undesirable attentions for his and her own benefit by acting a helpless woman. Thus the story of the middle – the one suppressed in the play for centuries – seems to reinforce the helplessness of the main victim, Donna, who can only escape stalking by killing her oppressor. By stealing attention and acti‑ vating the convention of chivalric adoration, the ghost re­‑represents 236 Edyta Lorek-Jezińska the patriarchal interpretation of stalking. The ghost returns to reinforce the raison d’être for the overprotective and over­‑attentive male lover, in which perspective a woman who feels oppressed by such attention is seen as neurotic and overreacting. In her concept of arachnologies, Nancy Miller argues for the consi- deration of the text as well as the process by which it came into being – the web and the spider. It entails a redefinition of the text itself by getting rid of the established patterns of reading, which involves both under­‑ and over­‑reading. The first practice refers to reading a text “as if it had never been read, as if for the first time” (274), while the second involves, among other practices, an emphasis on the representation of the process of writing or artistic creation. Lavery’s play in this context seems to reverse the focus on the final product by taking us behind the text to see what a particular narrative means for the female character involved in it. It simultaneously presents the text, the narrative and the circumstances in which the narrative came into being. Thus we start reading a story that we believe to be reading for the first time, only to (re­‑) discover that we are actually looking at the cultural paradigm from a different perspective, at its reverse. The story of stalking narra‑ ted from the woman’s perspective is the reverse side of the rejected lover tale delivered by the ghost and in fragments narrated by the character of Rod. Granting the dominant story a ghostly status undoubtedly contribu‑ tes to its exposure because of the curiosity and attention with which we listen to the mystery that it might contain. The ghost’s story in Lavery’s play foregrounds the suffering of the rejected lover and the sense of injustice experienced because of his devotion, which for no apparent reason to him is not reciprocated. The voice regained by the ghost after centuries of silence, faint and hesitant as it is, calls for atten‑ tion and acquires validity, his torment being touchingly and paradoxi‑ cally embodied in the disfigurement of his face and the damage made to his burnt body. His position of a victim is underlined by the way in which his figure is being overlooked and disregarded in the play, mainly by Theresa. A series of anti­‑climactic situations in which the ghost manages to create the unheimlich atmosphere of potential hor‑ ror and mystery is played down into grotesque occasions on which the On Haunting as Metaphysical Stalking… 237 ghost’s threatening presence is annulled by Theresa’s materialistic acti‑ vities. On one such occasion the ghost and the audience/readers almost believe that the ghost has finally become visible to Theresa, when she shudders at what she sees in the mirror. At that time a mask represen‑ ting the ghost’s disfigured face is faintly reflected in it. But Theresa’s frightened exclamation is caused by the reflection of her own face onto which she has applied a face pack. Many similar occasions on which the ghost materializes in one form or another are likewise comically ignored, so that when the ghost finally manages to make himself heard and seen his threatening power is drastically reduced. He starts his tale as a marginalized and disregarded victim punished for his sense of what he believes to be true romantic love. The story is thus told from the position of the one unjustly mistreated and violated by others and as such seems to represent the traditional function attributed to ghosts – of returning to relate the tale of their unjust death. The only retribution that he needs but refrains from demanding is to find a lady who will be more suitable for adoration than his former lover, and he seems to believe that he has achieved his goal by worshipping Donna. Up to the moment in which the ghost story is told, the main plot is focused on the sexual and emotional harassment suffered by the main character, Donna. The intrusion of Tom’s tale stops this uniform per‑ spective; as the ghost story is slowly revealed in short episodes the viewer/reader gradually becomes aware of its relationship to the main plot – of the parallels and mirroring between the ghost story delivered by the medieval tormented lover and the contemporary stalker, Rod. The reader/viewer is encouraged to read both narrative structures at once, gradually realizing how they converge in particular points and how a woman’s figure is implicated in both of them. The correspon‑ dence between the stories narrated from different gender perspectives culminates in the moment of murder, followed by Rod’s dead body’s transformation into another ghost. In reference to Abraham and Torok’s concepts of haunting two signi‑ ficant aspects arise – the one of generational transmission of the secret and trauma and the one of lying. The former is manifested mainly in the repetition of events leading up to the stalkers’ deaths separated by seve‑ ral centuries. The identical story is re­‑enacted in the same spot by simi‑ 238 Edyta Lorek-Jezińska larly related characters, suggesting the continuation of the conflict over the centuries. The latter is mainly concerned not so much with a con‑ scious or deliberate lie – as Tom appears to be innocent and naïvely sin‑ cere in his story telling – but with his narrow perspective which seems to totally disregard the lady’s reaction to him. This omission embodied in the silence of the woman figure in the tale is indispensable for him in order that he can build an image of himself as an innocent, rejected and tormented lover. Presenting the lady’s suffering would endanger the status of his narrative as the story of the middle and his position as a ghost. The revelation of his torment conceals the suffering on the part of his lady. However, making a stalking victim his only listener in the play exposes the analogies between the female character in the ghost story and Donna. This juxtaposition brings to light the other side of the events – the woman’s perspective. When approached from the ethical perspective, which is one aspect of Derrida’s hauntology, the ghost’s story requires attention because its meaning cannot be fully comprehended in a particular moment – because it might come to signify something different in the future. Igno‑ ring the ghost’s voice simply because of its gender bias might thwart the future possibility of reading the story in a different light. In fact, when the two female characters in the final scene, while waiting for the police to arrive, promise to themselves that they “will never ever accept anything less than the love [they] deserve” (104), the two male ghosts staying with them quietly join in. In its simplicity, the ending seems to admit everybody’s right to seek the love that they need and deserve, but how far can they go in the realization of that promise? The two female characters limit themselves to the story they invent just before the police arrives: that the two policemen who will come to see to the trouble will be good, handsome and not married, and they will fall in love with them. They project themselves as celebrities, who will gain their fame – one by “self­‑defence slaughter” and the other by letting a flat to a friend and coming “back to a Bloodbath” (103). The play stops, as they do in their projection, at this moment, pointing at the diffe‑ rence between wishful thinking and realizing one’s wishes by force and exposing the female characters’ naïve trust in the rightfulness of their perspective. On Haunting as Metaphysical Stalking… 239

In a play so obsessed with storytelling as Lavery’s Smoke is – stories narrated over the phone, recorded on ansaphone, told in person and reported to others, or stories by which the characters narrate activities which they actually perform on stage – granting one tale to the ghost certainly privileges both the speaker and his theme. The voice of the ghost steals the reader’s/viewer’s curiosity and emphasizes the urgency of his story. The degree to which it becomes suppressed by the rationa‑ lity of some characters paradoxically increases the ghost’s appeal in the listeners’ ears. The more the story is threatened by unfavourable circum‑ stances, the more desired it becomes. However, when narrating his tale, the ghost performs violence on the victim of stalking who has become tired of having to endure and listen to stories told by the stalker. Lis- tening to the ghost’s narrative is another oppressive activity which she is forced to perform in order to satisfy the teller. The ghost’s tale imposes itself on the narrative that has endeavoured to show the female victim’s version. The play thus presents a confrontation between a woman’s ver‑ sion of the story, private and individual, with a male perspective sanctio‑ ned by the literary and cultural tradition of a chivalric lover, in which male physical strength, self­‑assurance and disregard for the others’ opinion can be justified by the cultural legitimacy of certain attributes of masculinity and women’s passivity. In a sense, the play compromises the cultural and literary convention by making explicit the violence that it involves but conceals, suggesting, as Bryony Lavery does in her note, that haunting is in fact a kind of “supernatural [and perhaps also inter‑ textual] stalking” (my addition).

Works Cited

Abraham, Nicolas. “Notes on the Phantom: A Complement to Freud’s Meta‑ psychology.” The Shell and the Kernel: Renewals of Psychoanalysis by Nico‑ las Abraham and Maria Torok, edited and translated by Nicholas T. Rand. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994a. 171–176. ­‑­‑­‑. “The Phantom of Hamlet or The Sixth Act preceded by The Intermission of ‘Truth.’” The Shell and the Kernel: Renewals of Psychoanalysis, by Nicolas Abra‑ ham and Maria Torok, edited and translated by Nicholas T. Rand. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994b. 187–205. 240 Edyta Lorek-Jezińska

Davis, Colin. “État Présent: Hauntology, Spectres and Phantoms.” French Stu‑ dies. Vol. LIX. No. 3 (2005): 373–379. Derrida, Jacques. Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning and the New International. Translated by Peggy Kamuf. New York, London: Routledge, 2006. Klindienst, Patricia. “The Voice of the Shuttle Is Ours.” Literary Theory: An Anthology, edited by Julie Rivkin and Michael Ryan. Malden, Oxford: Blackwell, 1998. 612–629. Lacan, Jacques. “Desire and Interpretation of Desire in Hamlet.” Translated by James Hulbert. Yale French Studies No 55/56 (1977): 11–52. Lavery, Bryony. “Note.” In Smoke. London: Faber and Faber, 2006. Unpaginated. ­‑­‑­‑. Smoke. London: Faber and Faber, 2006. Miller, Nancy K. “Arachnologies: The Woman, the Text, and the Critic.” The Poetics of Gender, edited by Nancy K. Miller. New York: Columbia University Press, 1986. 270–295. Orme, Steve. Rev. of Smoke by Bryony Lavery, New Vic Theatre, Newcastle Under Lyme. British Theatre Guide, 2006. Accessed September 10, 2013 . Rand, Nicholas T. “Editor’s Note.” The Shell and the Kernel: Renewals of Psycho- analysis by Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok, edited and translated by Nicholas T. Rand. Chicago, London: University of Chicago Press, 1994. Wolfreys, Julian. Victorian Hauntings: Spectrality, Gothic, the Uncanny and Litera‑ ture. Basingstoke, N.Y.: Palgrave, 2002. Sławomir Konkol University of Silesia, Katowice/ University of Bielsko­‑Biała

“Skedaddle, Ellie”: Feminine Mobility, Tourism and Capital in Graham Swift’s Wish You Were Here

Willy Chapman, the protagonist of Graham Swift’s début, Sweet Shop Owner (1980), commits suicide by going for a walk. This is perhaps the most drastic illustration of the immobility symptomatic for most charac‑ ters in the author’s writing. Defined and confined by their geographical (as well as, to a large extent, economic) situations, they appear to be anything but affected by the “postmodern refusal of permanent dwel‑ ling” (Rachwał, 33): in fact, they are in most cases rooted in the extreme and in some actually trapped. In Swift’s second novel, Shuttlecock (1981), the narrator dreams several times of escaping and reports feeling “this urge to take off my tie, my socks and shoes – to go no further – and simply to walk away; as if Clapham Common were some endless, enveloping savannah. But, of course, I don’t” (93). In turn, Waterland (1983) announces the fundamental significance of its self­‑contradictory, all­‑enveloping, inescapable setting right from its title, establishing it as a model for the protagonist’s perception of reality, history, or subject- hood. The mobility of the small community portrayed in Last Orders (1996) is limited virtually exclusively to work and war. Clearly, one could hardly say that in Swift’s works society has lost “the spatial‑territorial­ sense of belonging and rootedness” (Rachwał, 33). Considering how much they are indeed “concerned with the permanence of address, with the regularity and ordering of the state territory,” Swift appears to be describing people living in the modern state, who might indeed be 242 Sławomir Konkol shocked by the postmodern possibility of “wandering freely across national borders.” (Rachwał, 33) The main character of Wish You Were Here (2011), exceptional in actually having some foreign travel under his belt, is nonetheless inescapably determined by a memory of a time when “the notion of being anywhere other than England would have seemed totally crazy … and quite beyond any circumstance that might include him.” In fact, the experience “still seems to him, even now that he’s done it several times, like something impossible, a trick, even somehow wrong: that you could get into an aeroplane, then get out again a few hours later and there’d be – this completely different world” (55–6). In most cases, Swift’s characters are not even affected by the variety of enforced mobility which Tadeusz Rachwał attributes to the flow of capi‑ tal and accompanying changes in the availability of labour (34). The vast majority of Swift’s prose figures are bound toa rather restricted geographical space, entangled in a complex web of family relations and permanently defined by their occupations, possibly creating an impres‑ sion of their author as a writer out of tune with his time. This apparent anachronism is perhaps not particularly surprising in a writer as ostensibly indebted to the past as Swift, one who boasts a doctorate in nineteenth­‑century novel (Blodgett, 298) and who “iden‑ tifies himself closely with a Victorian (and nonexperimental twentieth­ ‍‑century) tradition of storytelling” (Malcolm, 23). David Malcolm further describes Swift as placing “the dull, the prosaic, the unadven‑ turous at the center of the text, with echoes of those masters of the drab quotidian – Thomas Gray, George Eliot, and Philip Larkin” (42), noting that the parallels are by no means limited to the subject mat‑ ter or stylistic devices employed. At the same time, Swift is presented as undeniably taking a critical stance towards the tradition he inscri‑ bes into, subjecting its methods to incisive metatextual consideration. In the words of Pamela Cooper, “Swift is well aware of the ‘great tra‑ dition’ … of English literature within which he writes, and his fictions explore the strengths and limitations of that tradition partly through a deliberate process of imitation” (18).1 Also, as Adrian Poole observes,

1 For an insightful discussion of intertextuality in Swift’s prose, using the example of Waterland, see also Bernard Richards, “Graham Swift and the Fens: A Study in Intertex‑ tuality.” Etudes Britanniques Contemporaines. N° 0 (1992): 1–9. “Skedaddle, Ellie”: Feminine Mobility, Tourism and Capital… 243 this awareness has inevitable implications on the ideological dimension of Swift’s works. In fact, the intertextual references serve to bring out the fundamental differences between the two periods at least as distinctly as they point to analogies between them: “Swift’s novels could be said to mourn some of their own literary antecedents … Where they could still mourn the passing of certain religious, mythical and metaphysical justi‑ fications for ‘terrible accidents,’ Swift’s fiction is left to mourn theim- possibility of such mourning.” (164–165). Wendy Wheeler takes this line of thought to its logical conclusion and, noting the melancholic mood pervading the 19th century with its progress and consequent loss, ascribes to Swift the postmodern task of moving beyond this melan- cholia into a healthy mourning (65). In terms of the interrelation of Swift’s style and ideology, this means that he

amalgamates postmodern and classical realist techniques in an attempt to reflect the ambiguities, contradictions and nuances of contemporaneity. What this means is that Swift is utilising realist conventions to imitate society’s use of constructed models of “truth” and reality such as photo‑ graphic images, literature and textbook history. Simultaneously, however, he challenges their status as absolutes by deconstructing and undermi‑ ning their foundations, revealing their illusory nature. (Woollons, 6)

Despite his own protestations,2 the postmodern standpoint of Graham Swift is apparently strong enough in his writing to invitea teleologi‑ cal perspective which is rather popular among critics despite its threat of an oversimplified perception of the novelist’s work. This approach implies a change, a progress, a liberalisation of the author’s presumed policy. Indeed, as Wendy Wheeler proposes, Swift’s interests lie preci‑ sely in exploring the juncture of the modern and the postmodern, the moment in which old paradigms lose their validity and new forms of order appear out of the confusing transition.3 She further postulates that

2 For example, Woollons quotes the author’s declaration of being “almost ignorant of the revolutions and counter­‑revolutions in critical theory … and I do not regret this igno‑ rance. I am not very interested in critical theory” (10). 3 One might consider also Gary Davenport’s “Novel of Despair” where Last Orders is ascribed an “oppressive sense of transience without transcendence” (440) or Lewis 244 Sławomir Konkol

the outcome of postmodernity, seen as the attempt to live with loss and uncertainty as a permanent condition, might be the discovery or inven‑ tion of ways of being in the world which move beyond the harsh indi‑ vidualism of utilitarian modernity, and towards a different way of acco‑ unting for and valuing human needs. (65)

Wheeler’s text sets out to demonstrate that this discovery is also pro‑ gressively more and more completely realised in Swift’s prose, from Sweet Shop Owner to what she sees as the crowning achievement of Last Orders. Since the author’s writing (in)famously focuses on male perspectives, male protagonists, male narrators, it might perhaps be revealing to observe these changes with reference to his female charac‑ ters. In this, I will follow some suggestions of Harriet Blodgett’s infor‑ mative analysis, which draws attention to the somewhat neglected rela‑ tions of Swift’s struggling fathers with their daughters and displays precisely the kind of teleological, developmental approach in stating, for example, that “given the quiet but firm emphasis Swift has mai‑ ntained on father­‑daughter relations, he may just as well, without allegorizing, be increasingly showing up the flaws in patriarchy” (299). Indeed, the exploration of the dominant modes of constructing gender roles in Swift may be argued not only to bring their costs and limits into ever sharper focus but also to open increasingly more vivid alternatives before his characters. This is to be observed also – although by no means exclusively – in the situations of the Swift’s dau‑ ghters who, as Blodgett herself points out, are entirely determined by their circumstances, alienated from their families or indeed overlooked in his early works, and in his later novels become more active, more free and successful in forming more satisfying relationships with their parents.

MacLeod’s “In the (Public) House of the Lord,” arguing that “Jack’s friends have not really lost the sense of a spiritual world (or the desire to feel its ‘presence’), they have just lost the conventional rules and procedures used to approach that world; they expe‑ rience religious longing under the conditions of post­‑modernity, searching for spiritual integration in a historical moment after the ‘manifest loss of plausibility of the so­‑called modern master narratives,’ after the authority of conventional religious life has been compromised” (148). “Skedaddle, Ellie”: Feminine Mobility, Tourism and Capital… 245

Swift’s female characters in general display a greater tendency for mobility in most of his novels than their male counterparts. One of the very few males who does try to leave the past behind is Matthew Pearce, a Victorian ancestor of the protagonist of Ever After (1992). After deciding that he cannot reconcile his life as a family­‑ and clergyman with his loss of faith, he prepares to leave for the New World but his boat promptly sinks right after leaving port. Swift’s female characters are frequently trapped in unsatisfying relationships, or in other ways oppressed by their circumstances, but once they determine to change that, they do not experience this kind of difficulty. In a sense, the fate of Anna, the mother of one protagonist in Out of This World (1988) and the wife of the other, constitutes the polar opposite to that of Matthew’s: she dies in a plane crash at the point where she is determined to end an affair and return to her marital commitment.4 Her death also opens up intriguing implications for the future of her daughter, Sophie, who delivers roughly half of the narrative. When telling the story, Sophie is herself on the verge of ending a ten year period of estrangement from her father, following her escape from the stifling family environ‑ ment in England to America.5 At the end of the novel, she is boarding a plane which is to take her back to be reconciled with the same man to whom Anna was returning on her fatal flight. If the conclusion of Out of This World is to be seen, as David Malcolm suggests, as “partly optimi‑ stic” (111), the emphasis should thus probably fall on the adverb, since the denouement raises doubts about the desirability of the characters’ embracing traditional modes of existence (voiced several times by the narrators themselves, commenting on the suspiciously conventional resolutions of their struggles). However, as suspended as the happy ending of Out of This World may be, most of the other daughters in Swift’s output do not exhibit nearly as much goodwill as Sophiein their tense relationships with their parents. In Sweet Shop Owner, Willy’s suicide is in fact directly motivated by being cut off by his daughter,

4 This convenient analogy is admittedly complicated by the fact that at the moment of the crash, Anna is pregnant with her lover’s baby and has made up her mind to have an abortion. 5 In this, she reverses the pattern set by her mother, who once travelled to Greece to discover her roots. 246 Sławomir Konkol who has left her parents well before the beginning of the narrative wit‑ hout ever looking back. If Dorothy has a model to follow in this respect, it is her mother Irene, who once escaped her own parents into the mar‑ riage with Willy. In Last Orders, three daughters abandon their London homes (one goes as far as Australia) and the one who is fundamentally unable to absent herself is never truly present either: indeed, her father’s rejection of his obligations towards the mentally handicapped June con‑ stitutes one of the principal conflicts of the text. Things do begin to look somewhat differently in Swift’s later novels, where the female characters not only are increasingly mobile, but, in their mobility, undermine the stability of the male protagonists – or, perhaps, get them out of their rut. In Light of Day (2003), the appea‑ rance of a Croatian refugee marks the beginning of the dissolution of a marriage, culminating in the murder of the unfaithful husband by his wife (even though the lover has moved on by this time). On the other hand, the daughter of the protagonist, George Webb – as rebellious as her mother once was, having come out to her father as a lesbian – eventually returns to form a mature relationship with the estranged man in a way unprecedented in Swift’s body of work. Helen’s return aids George’s reforming of his life after a dishonourable dismissal from his work as a police officer and his wife’s condemnation of this failure, ending in a divorce. His unprecedented achievement reinforces the impression that the novel does offer an alternative to the (self­‑) destructive model of masculinity generally explored in Swift’s oeuvre. In this article, I would like to focus my attention on Swift’s most recent novel to date, Wish You Were Here (2011), in which the mobile – and mobilising – qualities of the female subjects are felt profoundly, motivating some of the central conflicts of the text. The evolution of the motif of travel between Swift’s Last Orders and Wish You Were Here illustrates in an interesting way the transition from pilgrimage to tourism, postulated by Zygmunt Bauman as characteri‑ sing the postmodern understanding of identity (19–31). In the former novel, the journey is a communal effort; a desperate attempt at (re)acti‑ vating an identity­‑confirming ritual, while in the latter mobility is pre‑ dominantly a reflection of the characters’ increasing individualism and shedding of fixity. The characters of Last Orders struggle to reaffirm and “Skedaddle, Ellie”: Feminine Mobility, Tourism and Capital… 247 support their identities like Bauman’s pilgrims. The group of men spend a single day travelling from London to Margate with the urn containing the remains of their friend, Jack Dodds, who, despite his absence, rema‑ ins a unifying point of reference in the group and clearly directs the reassessments to which all the others subject their experiences and iden‑ tities. As Lewis MacLeod puts it: “In performing such a duty, Jack’s friends (inadvertently, it seems) participate in a long tradition by which some physical journey is used both to signify the spiritual dislocation death initiates and to hint at the possibility of some kind of rebirth or reintegration” (147). MacLeod’s analysis focuses on the “idiosyncratic but ordered procedures of a particular community of believers, a com‑ munity composed of the four men … carrying the ashes, with Jack him‑ self acting as their central figure of contemplation” (147). Last Orders may therefore be categorised as a tale of modernity, if we consider its central preoccupation with “nothingness waiting to become something, if only for a while; … meaninglessness waiting to be given meaning, if only a passing one” (Bauman, 21). The four mourners join the long suc‑ cession of characters in Swift’s prose, embarking on an attempt to put back together the pieces of their shattered lives. In turn, the primary concern of the characters of Wish You Were Here is rather, in Zygmunt Bauman’s terms, to “beware long‑term­ commit‑ ments. To refuse to be ‘fixed’ one way or another. Not to get tied to the place. Not to wed one’s life to one vocation only. Not to swear consi‑ stency to anyone and anybody” (24). In Last Orders, Jack’s widow, Amy, does not come on the peculiar pilgrimage, having chosen an alterna‑ tive form of mobility inspired by Jack Dodds’ stubborn renouncement of their mentally handicapped daughter. Amy has been commuting for years to visit her now grown up child in her institution and because she was never joined by her husband, she in turn refuses in turn to join his friends, who fulfil his final wish to have his ashes scattered in a holiday destination of great significance to both of the spouses. Her gesture is repeated – and significantly modified – in Wish You Were Here. Jack Lux‑ ton finds himself travelling to his home village to attend the funeral of his brother Tom unaccompanied by his wife Ellie, whose decision is not overtly motivated by any grudge she might bear against her brother­ ‍‑in­‑law. If anything, it expresses her wish to be free from obligations 248 Sławomir Konkol towards her own and her husband’s past, mirroring the behaviour of Jack rather than Amy Dodds. Issues relating to the abandoning of one’s inheritance also play a central role in both novels: Jack’s adoptive son, Vince, thwarts his father’s dream of establishing a family tradition of Dodds butchers when he chooses a different career and the plot of Wish You Were Here revolves around the struggle of the young generation of Devon farmers to get rid of the burden of their heirloom. In its explo‑ ration of this motif, Wish You Were Here puts unprecedented focus not only on mobility in general but in particular on its specifically postmo‑ dern manifestation: tourism. Admittedly, the alteration is rather more profound than the temporary displacement of a holiday, since the prota‑ gonists change their profession and permanent location, but doing this in fact involves abandoning the rootedness of an ages­‑long tradition of milk farming in favour of running a caravan park. In a sense, Ellie and Jack’s situation reflects Rosi Braidotti’s injunction to view postmoder‑ nism as a historically specific time of profound changes to the system of economic production affecting social and cultural structures as well. For the Western world, this means “the shift away from manufacturing toward a service and information‑based­ structure [which] entails a glo‑ bal redistribution of labor” (2) and a reconfiguration of the traditional patriarchal shape of our culture. In a move typifying these tendencies, Jack and Ellie choose to “become the proprietor of the very opposite thing to that deep­‑rooted farmhouse. Holiday homes, on wheels” (Swift 2011, 29), rather than follow in their parents’ footsteps and devote their lives to “hard work for the softest, mildest thing in the world” (41) on the dairy farms whose tradition extends as far back as the early 17th cen‑ tury. A shift away from patriarchal patterns is also quite clearly implied: the driving force behind the change and the organiser of the new life is Ellie, having chosen freely – as if in spite of herself – to live with the big, (potentially) threatening Jack.6

6 “Michael Luxton, it was true, could sometimes scare her. He wasn’t scary in any obvious way, but he could sometimes frighten her. If there should be a choice of fathers with whom you’d have to live alone for the foreseeable and barely thinkable future, then she’d choose her own father, small and nimble, not towering and looming … Her father owned her, but he didn’t scare her. She’d choose him of the two. But then she’d chosen Jack, who could sometimes look the image of his father” (109). “Skedaddle, Ellie”: Feminine Mobility, Tourism and Capital… 249

The willed dispossession of the spouses is paralleled by the fate of Jack’s younger brother, a soldier eventually killed during a mission in Iraq. Tom escaped the family farm on his eighteenth birthday to join the army and since then led anything but a rooted life. Excluded by the furious father from his will, he has effectively broken off all involve‑ ment with his remaining family, only once replying to Jack’s letter and not attending their father’s funeral. In fact, Tom is as headstrong about remaining on the move as Willy Chapman is about remaining motion‑ less: just as Chapman only decides to move when he chooses to die, Tom only returns to his native village in a hearse. More significantly, the analogy also applies to both characters’ relation to the restricting models of masculinity available to them: whereas Willy Chapman takes his life upon realising the failure of the only shape he can imagine for his relationship with his daughter, Tom in fact escapes in order not to contaminate Jack with the disease “already eating away” at his dad – and himself. “He’d got it from his dad. Jack was made of tougher stuff, maybe, better stuff than he was. A good brother, a better brother. And a better father, sometimes, than his father” (199–200). The disease is a clear metaphor for the destructiveness of specific structures of masculinity, revealed most fully in the character’s realisation “that he, Tom Luxton, had the killer instinct in him. And he’d have to put a lid on it” (209). This discovery comes in the aftermath of the traumatic shooting of Tom’s sick dog by Michael who asks his younger son to pull the trigger. Tom refuses and, witnessing the execution, has to listen to his father’s disturbing remark: “And I hope one day, when it’s needed, someone will have the decency to do the same for me” (143). In motivating his departure from the family farm, the narrator considers Tom’s fear that he might one day fulfil this wish. For this reason, he treats the army not only as a means of escape but also as a “strangely unresented punishment” (200–1) for his guilt as well as a disciplining institution, “a perfect opportunity for firing off lots of cool, disciplined single rounds of anger” (206). Rachwał points out another aspect of increased mobility characteristic of contemporary culture: “[t]hough mobility, like labour, has become a necessity to most people, it has also become a token of economic success. Tourism mobilises us to mobility at what is called leisure, 250 Sławomir Konkol as opposed to the mobility at work” (35). Appropriately, tourism plays a central role in the expression of Jack and Ellie’s new iden‑ tity not only as their new profession but also their pastime, even tho‑ ugh their attitude to their increased mobility is not unanimous. The enthusiasm of Ellie, who is the spiritus movens behind all of these enterprises, is countered by the reluctance of Jack, who feels guilty about abandoning their old way of life. In fact, the tropical winter holidays during the low season on the Isle of Wight become so much of a routine – not to say “obligation” – that the dramatic discord bet- ween the couple of protagonists that constitutes the frame of the nar- rative is the result precisely of a clash between the duty of burying Tom’s remains and that of going on holidays. This situation is worlds apart from that of Ellie and Jack’s parents, although there is a telling analogy here as well, since the only two holiday outings the young Lux‑ tons have ever made were the effect of the relentless insistence of their mother:

She must have said to Michael, with perhaps more than her usual firm- ness with him, that she was going to give those two boys a holiday, a seaside holiday that when they’d grown up they’d always have to remember. They weren’t going to go without that. And Michael must have relented – for two years running – though Jack would have coun‑ ted then, even at thirteen and fourteen, as full­‑time summer labour on the farm. (65)

At the same time, Jack’s first holiday is also the occasion to write his first postcard. Already at the age of thirteen, in sharing his excitement with Ellie, he exhibits a sense of limiting attachment and guilt about leaving. Writing, with his mother’s prompting, the “most uninventive” message on the card, he feels “a mixture of honesty and guilt. Yes, he really did wish she was there. But if he really wished that, how could he be so happy in the first place? Wishing she was there was like admitting he was happy without her. It was like saying he waswri‑ ting this postcard because he’d betrayed her” (66). In fact, since it is his sense of obligation that undeniably provides the motivation for most of his actions, Jack’s desire to liberate himself from the constra‑ ints imposed by his situation approaches that of Ellie only in the most “Skedaddle, Ellie”: Feminine Mobility, Tourism and Capital… 251 extreme of circumstances. If, as Bauman has it, identity is an inven‑ tion of modernity which from its very origin “was a problem and the‑ refore ready to be born” (146), Jack’s longing for the state before the complication of a fixed identity during his sombre solitary journey to his brother’s funeral situates him in a curiously pre­‑modern position. He observes the “foreignness” of the very words “city” and “citizen” and remembers that it was only when acquiring a passport that he real- ised he is himself a citizen: “Not so long before, the very idea of pos‑ sessing a passport would have seemed ridiculous. A farm was its own land, even its own law, unto itself. As for being a ‘citizen’ – citizens hardly lived on farms” (146).7 Ultimately, haunted by the feeling of guilt also during this trip, Jack is neither willing to establish a fixed identity for himself nor to escape the fixity into an ever­‑changing array of masks to put on and take off at will.8 Instead, he is pestered by a wish to be free of the task of identity altogether: “He felt like a man on the run. He felt a great desire not to know who he was” (223). Jack’s wish is at once more radical and less achievable than the very practical form of freedom sought by Ellie. This divergence resonates with the tendency ascribed by Braidotti to contemporary feminism to see the postmodern “crisis” as signifying “the opening up of new possibilities,” stressing the significance of not romanticising the condition but above all ofaban‑ doning any “nostalgia for [an] allegedly more wholesome past” (2). In this light, Luxton’s wish to shed his identity may be seen to repre‑ sent the utopianism of the longing for a pre­‑modern Eden. Speaking about the ethnic dimension of subjectivity, Braidotti makes observa‑ tions which correspond closely to Jack’s experience of “the disenchan‑ ting experience of dis­‑identifying [himself] with sovereignty altogether” (10). Braidotti supports her postulate of the necessity to subvert univer-

7 The bizarre, de­‑subjectifying experience further confirms Luxton’s pre­‑modern situ‑ ation: “But it had still seemed strange to Jack to discover that he was a citizen and that in order to pass through Gatwick Airport he had to prove it. Gatwick Airport itself had seemed like some weird, forbidding city, though he hadn’t felt like a citizen, shuffling through and showing his clean new passport. He’d felt more like a cow at milking time” (146). 8 Only at one point does he begin “to invent for himself – in case he should come to be questioned – an alias as a salesman” (258). 252 Sławomir Konkol salising notions of subjectivity by referring to Foucault’s work on the topic:

He argues that the constitution of the fragile, split subject of the postme‑ taphysical era is in fact a process of culturally coding certain functions and acts as signifying, acceptable, normal, desirable. In other words, one becomes a subject through a set of interdictions and permissions, which inscribe one’s subjectivity in a bedrock of power. The subject thus is a heap of fragmented parts held together by the symbolic glue that is the attachment to, or identification with, the phallogocentric sym‑ bolic. (12)

In more than one way, for Ellie and Jack, tourism becomes a way of questioning their positions as subjects and loosening the grip their former identities had on them. In fact, however, the re­‑shaping of the couple, whose “tastes and requirements had been raised conside‑ rably in recent years” (Swift 2011, 221), fits all too well the doubts that Rachwał brings up concerning the actual nature of the mobility of the female subject when considered as representative of the contemporary condition. On the one hand, Ruth Bankey’s observation is here invoked that women are pathologised in Western culture as “unstable, deceit‑ ful, naturally inferior and irrational” (qtd. in Rachwał, 37). To an extent which is undesirable from society’s point of view, women increase the mobility of the subject, by nature fulfilling – potentially at least – Rosi Braidotti’s call for “nomadic subjects,” transcending fixed borders, destabilised and antihegemonic, leading to what Rachwał terms “the feminine de­‑identifying hyper­‑mobility” (38). On the other hand, howe‑ ver, Bauman’s sobering remarks are referred to, positing the deceptive promise of the contemporary freedom of increased mobility, which actu‑ ally “is very well channelled and in fact distributed” (37). Jack’s expe‑ rience during his journey to the funeral provides a convenient metaphor of the state. It includes the sense of disorientation and uncertainty in the traveller’s feeling of relief at the “tunnelled anonymity” of the moto‑ rway which he perceives as dominating over the landscape: “The road was everything and, despite the names that loomed at junctions, might have been anywhere. Chippenham? Malmesbury? Where the hell were they?” At the same time, confirming Rachwał’s contention that the post‑ “Skedaddle, Ellie”: Feminine Mobility, Tourism and Capital… 253 modern world remains a profoundly mappable space, Jack “saw him- self as a mere moving speck on a map” (214–15). Beyond the coin- cidence of phrase, the situation of the privatised, mobilised postmodern subject in Wish You Were Here actually reflects the complications of the presumably liberating progress of the contemporary world. Rachwał states:

What is opposed to the nomadically incontrollable feminine mobility is not so much a petrified world of some absolute stability and fixity, but a world which continually moves towards an improvement of things in which well balanced human activities are ideally both productive and advantageous, granting some more or less measurable gains and profits. (38)9

This is exactly what the rebranding of the Luxtons is in fact aimed at – freedom from the slavish labour of the farm, no longer being “tethered, all year round, to a herd of Friesians” (Swift 2011, 27). In the end, they aim at social advancement, higher social and financial status, tempted by the promise of an easier life, softer work as well as of disburdening themselves of the modes of being imposed by their family traditions: “Their Isle of Wight life. The beauty of it: a whole separate land, with only a short sea to cross, but happily cut off from the land of their past … it was a fact, and it had become their purpose, that they were in the business of pleasure” (210–11). Arguably, the change which Jack and Ellie achieve could to some degree suggest that their displacement is precisely “de‑identifying.”­ In the eyes of their guests, the proprietors of the Lookout Caravan Park are after all described as creating the impression that there is “something a bit misfit and oddball about the two of them. There didn’t seem to be any little Luxtons, you couldn’t even be sure if they were really married. Something just a bit hillbilly” (73). Their blurred new identity, howe‑ ver, proves a surprisingly non­‑threatening and socially acceptable one after all, neutralised as part of the service being offered: “But that was

9 Perhaps equally significantly, the mechanism of tourism controls people’s sense of reality by pointing them towards “finding the real in what has been designed as such in an advertisement or in a guide as worth its price” (Rachwał, 35). 254 Sławomir Konkol okay, that was fine. There was something just a bit wacky and hillbilly about taking a holiday in a caravan anyway. And when you were on holiday you wanted colour, you didn’t want dull and ordinary” (73). Jack makes a similar discovery about himself. Much as the contact with “this shifting temporary population – migrants, vagrants, escapers in their own country” (30) made him see his position in a new way, “brou‑ ght something out in him,” there is also the observation of undeniable similarities between his old and new professions – and identities. The campers in their units are, after all, “certainly a form of livestock,” and looking after them means that “[y]ou had to be their smiling hostin a joke of a shirt, but there were times when you had to show them who was in charge. Jack had found he was surprisingly good at this. At both things: the smiling and the policing” (72–3). The constant change which in fact changes nothing has its equivalent in the situation in which the feminine subject is placed. Following Freud, Rachwał demonstrates the mobility of the feminine subject to be fundamentally immobilising, gro‑ unded in the fact that “women are not fully corrigible, that they freeze in their development to social mobility and exchange, the development towards culture” (38). In this sense, the condition of the feminine sub‑ ject corresponds to the supposed freedom offered by contemporary rea‑ lity in which “various social, cultural, economic and political mobili‑ ties make the world seem changing and innovative, fully making use of the human invention which guarantees its progress” (38). This apparent progress of postmodern mobility therefore proves to be, like the immo‑ bilising mobility of the feminine subject, oriented and teleological, con‑ trolled and controlling. The examples set to their children by the two women who shaped Jack and Ellie have interesting implications on how the relation between femininity and freedom is portrayed in Wish You Were Here. One might indeed ask whether the figures of women ‑actu ally correspond to freedom after all or, to be more precise, whether it is specifically women who do. The most significant female influences on Ellie and Jack – their mothers – arguably work in diametrically opposing directions, in a sense replay‑ ing the two facets of the feminine subject: a destabilising, nomadically postmodern one and one that serves to increase the fixity of the subject’s position. When Ellie was a teenager, Alice Merrick left her family for “Skedaddle, Ellie”: Feminine Mobility, Tourism and Capital… 255 a lover who himself was soon replaced. Her lesson to Ellie, shaping her daughter’s behaviour years after Alice’s death, is straightforward and unremitting:

And as for that advice, that example, did she really need to stoop, cocking an ear, by her mother’s grave? It was stored up, anyway, in her memory, like an emergency formula for some future – rainy – day. She could hear her mother’s forgotten voice. Skedaddle, Ellie. Just skedaddle, like I did. Cut lose. While you’ve got the car and while you can. With just the clothes you’re in and what’s in your handbag. Now or never. Cut loose. (35)

Ellie’s first attempt at following this exhortation fails because of the sense of obligation she feels towards her father. She finds herself unable to become the other significant woman in his life to abandon him. This is why “[s]he drives back into Westcott Farm, to her mother’s absence, to her sleeping father” (40). Later on, if Jack’s sentiments are to be be- lieved, Ellie is actually merely waiting for Jimmy Merrick to die and allow her to take charge of her (and Jack’s) life. Once the news of an unexpected inheritance from her late mother’s partner gives her the freedom to do this, Jack

understood … that he was now in Ellie’s thrall. (But hadn’t he always been?) He felt the letter taking away from him any last argument, any last crumb of Luxton pride and delusion. Mastery? He was in Ellie’s hands now. “They” not “he.” He knew that keeping the farm, for all its summer glory, was only a picture. Ellie had stuck her finger through it. Now she was pointing to their future. (283)

Finding herself in the position of Bauman’s postmodern subject, Ellie throws away any pretence at the stability of identity offered by root- edness. She becomes an eager player of the game in which rules – and roles – change constantly:

The sensible strategy is therefore to keep each game short – so that a sen‑ sibly played game of life calls for splitting one big all­‑embracing game with huge stakes into a series of brief and narrow games with small 256 Sławomir Konkol

ones. “Determination to live one day at a time,” “depicting daily life as a succession of minor emergencies” become the guiding principles of all rational conduct. (Bauman, 24)

The novel opens with images of piles of burning cattle and it is the disaster of mad cow disease that introduces Ellie and Jack to expe‑ rience the world where “[j]obs are no longer protected, and most certainly no better than the stability of places where they are practi‑ sed” (Bauman, 24). Indeed, both farms – like many others in England at the time – are affected by this instability to a sufficient extent to be turned into “a ghost farm” with “[n]o milk flow, no cash flow, and precious little in the bank” (Swift 2011, 42). As was already noted, Ellie embraces the rules of the postmodern game of life much more readily than Jack and is determined to increase the chance of achieving the short­‑lived gratifications it has to offer. She sees the crisis very much as an opportunity. Her unsentimental insistence not to be bound by the past finds expression, among others, in her constant injunction to Jack to “forget Tom,” indicative of her willingness to endorse – and in fact initiate – constant change. “She even said (and it was an oddly appea‑ ling idea), ‘Pretend you don’t know me. Pretend I’ve never been here before’” (277). Big, burly, bovine Jack is not, however, all that easy to move. Alice Merrick has been gone for so long – and has left in such a way – that for Ellie “to think of her at all is like seeing distant glimmers through a blur” (32). Vera Luxton, on the other hand, remains an essential ele‑ ment of her family long after she has died of ovarian cancer. Vera is an anchor, the heart of the farm, “more of a Luxton … than the Luxtons themselves” (23), the one who passes on family traditions, and, espe‑ cially in Jack’s life, an undeniable presence, setting a constant standard for his self­‑evaluation. In fact, Ellie’s original failure to follow her own mother’s example has a lot to do with the influence of Jack’s mother: wondering whether she might actually be capable of running away, Ellie imagines herself driving to Jebb Farm to take Jack with her and “sees the family turning out to confront her amazing arrival. Michael. Vera. There’s a difficulty there, she knows it – to tear Jack from his mum” (39). This can hardly be an easy task, considering how well installed in his “Skedaddle, Ellie”: Feminine Mobility, Tourism and Capital… 257 identity Jack is – by his mother: it is, after all, through “grown­‑up con‑ versations” with Vera that he has come into

his future and his responsibilities. Or, to put it another way, his name. Since it meant something if you were born, as he was, on a farm: the name. The generations going back and forwards, like the hills, whichever way you looked, around them. And what else had his mother borne him for than to give him and show him his birthright? Something his father, for whatever reason – and though it was his name – could never do. (22)

In his disinclination to change, Jack is juxtaposed not only to Ellie but also, perhaps even more tellingly, to Tom. In the younger Luxton, the line of maternal transfer is twisted in a way which subverts sim‑ ple analogies between parents and their children, which is not the first time in Swift that the straightforward transition of socially prescribed gender roles is ever so subtly problematised.10 Regardless of what Vera tried to teach her sons about their place in the world, the question of mobility is certainly one point where the brothers, otherwise apparently very close, differ diametrically: “Generally speaking, Jack was a sticker, a settler. He didn’t have the moving‑on­ instinct, or he never really tho‑ ught he could move on. Whereas Tom, clearly was a mover­‑on, in more ways than one. By the time he was eighteen, very clearly. A mover­‑on and a leaver­‑behind” (102). This is why Ellie, despite her problematic attitude to him, appears to feel a certain affinity with Tom, which allows her to understand his decision, to see that joining the army “was a sim‑ ple, all­‑in solution for a man of Tom’s age … The main thing was he’d got out. He’d shown it could be done. Tom was not unlike her mother” (111). The cross­‑gender analogies go deeper: Tom is described not only as being “good with a gun” but “even better, after Vera died, at taking

10 Emma Parker, in her “No Man’s Land: Masculinity and Englishness in Graham Swift’s Last Orders,” demonstrates persuasively that the two of the protagonists who are most successful in embracing the crisis in masculinity models as an opportunity to disrupt the limiting binary oppositions of gender roles are the ones who can be con‑ sidered most optimistic, hopeful and successful in the ethical sense. Parker also makes a well illustrated observation that “[i]nitially, the novel associates women with move‑ ment and men with stasis” (96). 258 Sławomir Konkol her place, at being, for them all, a bit of a mum himself” (205). While the former qualification is presumed to predestine Tom for a military career, the usefulness of the latter is offered more asa hypothesis: “Was that something the army required of a man too?” (205). Significantly, howe‑ ver, in the later portrayal of Tom’s life as a soldier on a mission, this pre‑ sumption is confirmed in a rather matter­‑of­‑fact manner: “By the time they were out here, most of them had that hard and soft stuff sorted out. They knew they didn’t have their mums around any more. They’d better be their own mums to themselves, and that wasn’t a joke” (205). Perhaps because of the absence of this sort of mobilising experience, Jack pro‑ ves profoundly restrained in making any comparable discoveries. He is prevented by his father’s profound influence from replacing Vera, even if he “should have been the one, by rights, to step into her space” (43). Jack is too fixed in his unrelenting masculine identity of “a big, outdoor man with mud on his boots. If he’d tried to take his mum’s place, Dad would have mocked him” (43). In a sense, both Vera Luxton and Alice Merrick are typical Swift’s mothers precisely because they are significantly absent from their children’s life: Irene Chapman in Sweet Shop Owner abandons her dau‑ ghter emotionally, ceding all responsibility – including any affective engagement – to her husband; the protagonist of Shuttlecock is so preoc‑ cupied by his father figures as to make no more than a few strained remarks about the sudden death of his mother as “a day, to be honest, I don’t like to remember in detail” (41); the final conversation with the dying Helen Crick is a watershed experience for the narrator of Water‑ land. Thus, if Jack Luxton feels abandoned by Tom as much as by Ellie, it seems appropriate that also in this his younger brother should be asso‑ ciated not only with feminine mobility but with Vera Luxton specifi‑ cally. Regardless of her embeddedness in the family lineage, the boys’ mother realises the fundamental and inescapable impermanence of human beings and – again in analogy with Waterland – it is Vera who sets out to prepare Jack for her absence: “And it was only later, when she was gone, that it occurred to him that another gist, and perhaps the real gist, of those conversations was precisely that. That she was telling him that she wouldn’t always be there” (23). Seen from this perspec‑ tive, it seems appropriate that Tom’s final departure should again con‑ “Skedaddle, Ellie”: Feminine Mobility, Tourism and Capital… 259 nect him with Vera in Jack’s mind: “But Tom’s with her right now, Jack thinks, he could scarcely be closer. He was walking right back to her, that night, without knowing it” (28–9). Jack’s resistance to the agents of mobilising feminine subjectivity is accompanied by his perception of both of them as alien and potentially dangerous. At the height of the profoundly disturbing experience of organising his brother’s funeral, Jack asks himself if he knows Ellie at all almost at the same moment that he notices how strangely unfamiliar Tom looks in a recent photo:

Jack had looked at the photograph and recognised, of course, the man he was looking at. Yet at the same time it had seemed appropriate for him to ask, deep inside: Do I know this man? Can this man really be my brother? … But then he’d felt just the same about Ellie, he realised, when she’d demanded to be counted out. Do I know this woman? This unwavering woman. There’d been an odd touch about Ellie, in fact, of the man in the photograph. You wouldn’t want to mess with that man. He might even shoot you, no questions asked. Similarly, if Ellie could be so unbudging about a thing like this, then there was no saying what else she might do. (127)

The presumed ruthlessness of both representatives of the mobilising feminine subjectivity is particularly striking: whether or not actually associated with a figure of a woman, it is seen as threatening from the point of view of the stability of the patriarchal structures of identity. Braidotti draws an analogy between femininity and monstrosity, which she ascribes to the “phallogocentric perversion” of the conceptualisa‑ tions of difference dominant in Western culture. The results are closely related to the pathological mobility of the feminine subject:

Woman/mother is monstrous by excess; she transcends established norms and transgresses boundaries. She is monstrous by lack: woman/mother does not possess the substantive unity of the masculine subject. Most important, through her identification with the feminine she is monstrous by displacement: as sign of the in between areas, of the indefinite, the ambiguous, the mixed. (83) 260 Sławomir Konkol

The monstrosity of in‑betweenness­ appears to affect the remodelled condition of the Luxtons. Changes have, after all, taken place in Jack, however reluctantly: Ellie insists that during the life­‑altering ten years of their marriage, Jack had in fact been coming out of mourning for the farm, “and not so slowly, and actually started to look happy” (211). Jack himself recognises the influence of the new lifestyle and in particu‑ lar the change of locality, emphasising the effect of its inherent mobility: “It was only ever an encampment down there, that was the feel of it, like the halt of some expeditionary, ragtag army. It might all be gone in the morning – any morning – leaving nothing but the tyre marks in the grass. That was the tug. Not cattle, not even caravans, but people” (30). Also, when travelling to Tom’s funeral, Jack, “a landsman, by experi- ence and disposition [who] liked his feet anchored to solid ground,” at the same time feels himself to have become an islander, now affected by “a queasy distrust of the looming mainland – that yet contained his roots and his past” (135). This “remarkable rebirth” is in fact part of his deal with Ellie, who is prepared in return to accept remaining childless. It is for her sake that Jack is trying “to demonstrate … that he had indeed become a new, lighter, gladder, luckier man, and it was thanks not jut to luck but to Ellie’s really rather amazing sticking by him” (57). He is characteristically passive about the transformation, as illustrated by an incident during their holiday in the Caribbean, when, flying on a parachute, he is neither excited nor triumphant: despite Ellie’s calling him a hero, his impression is that “he’d just hung there, Jack Luxton, like some big baby being dandled, or rather – with that thing above – like some big baby being delivered by a stork” (58). What is more, his metamorphosis proves to be always insufficient: years after Jack suppo‑ sedly came out of his shell, Tom remains an irremovable impediment, “still in the picture though out of it” (115). His death raises Ellie’s hopes of resolving the issue permanently, but she soon realises that actually it is precisely through his death that Tom really comes back, “to bloody haunt them” (117). Ellie is also forced to acknowledge the catastrophic consequences of her refusal to become involved in the mourning ritu‑ als. Seeing that Jack comes back from the funeral shattered, she admits to herself that she should have gone with her husband “back into the wretched past” (211): she considered the possibility of his not returning “Skedaddle, Ellie”: Feminine Mobility, Tourism and Capital… 261 but did not expect him to return so gravely changed. The conflict between the spouses, concerning their obligations towards the dead and towards each other, reaches a dramatic climax after the return and appa‑ rently produces in Jack a level of self­‑doubt worthy of Conrad’s protago‑ nists. Hoping to reverse the damaging effects of mutual accusations con‑ cerning their fathers’ deaths, Ellie attempts to summon up the old Jack and asserts that she knows him well enough to dismiss his provocative claim of being directly responsible for Michael’s death. “But she was looking at him as though she was no longer certain on that last point. And whatever Ellie knew, she didn’t know and couldn’t know what had only ever been in his head. Even Jack himself couldn’t be sure of how it really was” (302–3). Typically for Swift, the issues of symbolic debt, insufficient mourning, the costs of freeing oneself from entanglements with the past, are all presented not only on a strictly personal plane, but are given a more distinctly public, political, global dimension. Questions of the private and the public figure heavily in the context of the younger Luxton’s funeral: the ritual is described as a “communal effort” of the village to depoliticize Tom’s death,11 to which Jack himself contributes in his strain “to get away with as little as possible: time, involvement, talk,” by demanding a non­‑military funeral with an insistence which leaves him “surprised at his own firmness” (261). More interestingly from the point of view of this text, the issues of mobility – and the mobilising influence – of capital are overtly discussed. Jack is admittedly initially shocked at the very thought of someone buying a place with genera‑ tions of history “in the same way that they might buy a picture to hang on their wall” (326), but the farm is eventually sold. What is more, to increase its attractiveness Ellie and Jack actually detach their property from its history and put it up for sale not as a farm but as a country

11 “It seemed now that the coffin before him was the same coffin that he’d watched yesterday being carried off a plane and that had been flown all the way from Iraq … There was no sign of the connection (he hadn’t noticed – in his not­‑looking – any Union Jacks) and no one so far had made any mention of it, so that it seemed there might be some silent communal effort around him to make it not exist. As if Tom had died, at a tragically early age, just a little distance away. A tractor accident, perhaps” (271). 262 Sławomir Konkol house and land to go with it. The oak under which Michael Luxton shot himself, presumed to be twice as old as the farm itself, becomes a com‑ modity, merely making the view more attractive and thus gaining a bet‑ ter price. The new owners, appropriately called Robinson, in their turn effectively colonise the place, transforming both the farm and the house, mixing with locals no more than necessary, and experiencing the privi‑ lege described by Bauman as characteristic for investors, endowed with power without obligations, “freedom from the duty to contribute to daily life and the perpetuation of the community” (qtd. in Rachwał, 34). The wealthy Londoners, whose “Jebb life” is limited almost exclusively to summers, strive for the local security of a controllable environment in a world increasingly affected by the “unlocal malaise of insecurity” (Swift 2011, 313). Their specific understanding of the term is also expli‑ citly stated: what the Robinsons are really after is “the kind of security that might prevent the possession and enjoyment of their new property from ever being impaired or violated” (314). At the same time, the impossibility of such an idyllic retreat is empha‑ sised by Jack Luxton’s surprising discoveries on the matter made during his involvement with “the business of pleasure”: “Jack might have said that it was a funny thing, but the caravanners, on their holidays, often wanted to talk about the general state of the world, how it wasn’t getting any safer … And Jack might have put forward the idea that there was no such place really as ‛away from it all,’ was there?” (316). This remark echoes closely the words Sophie Birch in Out Of This World, where they signal in a much more definitive way a break with the illusory havens of denial. In Wish You Were Here, it is Claire Robinson who arrives at an analogous conclusion, despite being rather well­‑versed in renouncing uncomfortable truths (she has a “pact with herself” to repress the awa‑ reness of her husband’s long­‑lived affair (320)). Her uncanny unease, a sensation of inexplicable terror which she experiences under the oak where Luxton senior died, is repeated when she reads a newspaper note about Tom’s death. The country house purchased by Toby Robinson as “a sort of pay‑off”­ to her and the children is a place built on significant silences: Claire’s silence about her husband’s lover and about her own “moment” of terror as well as the Luxtons’ silence about the suicide staining the attractiveness of the property. Thus, the precarious founda‑ “Skedaddle, Ellie”: Feminine Mobility, Tourism and Capital… 263 tion of the Robinsons’ hideaway is the consistent decision not to men‑ tion the troubling aspects of their existence, since “it might be a fatal thing to do. It might cause a catastrophe” (327). In discussing the conclusions of several case studies, R.W. Connell observes the costs of remodelling individual practices of masculinity through involvement with powerful female figures, seeing in such a solution an attempt at “backtracking on steps by which Oedipal masculinity was formed.” The experience of “a passive­‑dependent rela‑ tionship with an admired woman” is described as entailing the threat of self­‑annihilation, or a sense of losing one’s centre (136). Even if these formulations are not to be taken as clinical terms, they nevertheless give a strong indication of the emotional difficulties of challenging the structures of conventional gendered identity. Regardless of his critical attitude towards patriarchal culture, in Wish You Were Here, Swift also proves to be as watchful as ever of the dangers involved in trying to restore the imaginary pre­‑Oedipal unity, his stress falling on the impo‑ ssibility of detaching oneself from the past, or, indeed, of returning to its idyllic form. The costs of denial have, after all, been at the centre of his interest throughout the writer’s career. In a sense, Willy Chap‑ man and Jack Luxton form a sort of frame to Swift’s handling of these issues in his entire oeuvre. In a distant echo of Chapman’s final walk, excessive mobility also brings Luxton to the brink of suicide. The signi‑ ficant difference is that unlike Willy, killed by his attempt to blackmail his daughter into a role prescribed for her, Jack is in fact saved by the ghost of his brother, who literally stops him in his self­‑destructiveness and by Ellie, whose sudden burst of grief for the younger Luxton exor‑ cises the ghost in what might be the riskiest denouement in any Swift novel. When Jack decides that the only way out of the tangle is to shoot Ellie and then himself, he sees “Tom standing with his back pressed against the inside of the front door through which Ellie must enter, in a barring posture that’s vaguely familiar” (346).12 On the other side of the door, Ellie feels “a tangible sense of his living presence,” which

12 The recently buried soldier also addresses Jack (“though it’s hardly necessary”), delivering a signature Swift bad pun: “Shoot me first, Jack, shoot me first. Don’t be a fucking fool. Over my dead fucking body” (346). 264 Sławomir Konkol disappears immediately after, “to her own surprise … her eyes and throat thicken and she splutters out as if she might even have been the poor dead man’s wife, lover, mother, sister: ‛O Tom! O poor, poor Tom!’” (349). Despite the increased individualism and mobility of the characters of Wish You Were Here, the need for communal mourning ulti‑ mately proves as indispensable as it was in Last Orders if the spectres of the past, whether horrifying or benevolent, are to find peace. The inevitable consequences of large­‑scale socio­‑political processes, admittedly responsible for the personal turmoil of Swift’s characters, also inspire positive change, which is, however, always strenuous and evolutionary. In a heavily symbolic gesture, Jack Luxton finally deter‑ mines “that he would simply get rid of all this weaponry, he’d get rid at last of the gun and that when he did so, Tom would finally be laid to rest” (352). Consequently, while the task at hand for Swift’s prota‑ gonists are indeed much more challenging than a simple “skedaddle” from obsolete forms of subjectivity, Wish You Were Here offers some of the most compelling evidence in his prose in favour of the mobility of the feminine subject.

Works Cited

Bauman, Zygmunt. “From Pilgrim to Tourist – or a Short History of Identity.” Questions of Cultural Identity, edited by Stuart Hall and Paul du Gay. London: Sage Publications, 1996. 18–36. Blodgett, Harriet. “Iphigeneia Revalued: Graham Swift’s Fathers and Daugh- ters.” Midwest Quarterly Vol. 49, no. 3 Spring (2008): 298–313. Braidotti, Rosi. Nomadic Subjects: Embodiment and Sexual Difference in Contempo‑ rary Feminist Theory. New York: Columbia University Press, 1994. Connell, R.W. Masculinities. Cambridge: Polity Press, 1995. Cooper, Pamela. Graham Swift’s Last Orders: A Reader’s Guide. New York: Con‑ tinuum, 2002. Davenport, Gary. “Novel of Despair.” Sewanee Review 105, no. 3 (1997): 440– 46. MacLeod, Lewis. “In the (Public) House of the Lord: Pub Rituals and Sacramen‑ tal Presence in Last Orders.” Mosaic: A Journal for the Interdisciplinary Study of Literature 39.1 (2006): 147–64. “Skedaddle, Ellie”: Feminine Mobility, Tourism and Capital… 265

Malcolm, David. Understanding Graham Swift. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2003. Parker, Emma. “No Man’s Land: Masculinity and Englishness in Graham Swift’s Last Orders.” Posting the Male: Masculinities in Post­‑War and Contemporary Bri‑ tish Literature, edited by Daniel Lea and Berthold Schoene­‑Harwood. Amster‑ dam, New York: Rodopi, 2003. 89–104. Poole, Adrian. “Graham Swift and the Mourning After.” In An Introduction to Contemporary Fiction: International Writing in English since 1970, edited by Rod Mengham. Cambridge: Polity Press, 1999. 150–67. Rachwał, Tadeusz. “Capital, Tourism and the Feminine Mobility.” On the Move: Mobility and Identity, edited by Krzysztof Knauer and Tadeusz Rachwał. Bielsko­‑Biała: Wydawnictwo Akademii Techniczno‑Humanistycznej,­ 2005. 33–39. Swift, Graham. Shuttlecock. 1980. London: Picador, 1997. ­‑­‑­‑. Wish You Were Here. London: Picador, 2011. Wheeler, Wendy. “Melancholic Modernity and Contemporary Grief.” Literature and the Contemporary: Fictions and Theories of the Present, edited by Roger Luckhurst and Peter Marks. Harlow: Longman, 1999. 63–79. Woollons, Jennifer. “Authentic Synthetics: Three Novels by Graham Swift.” University of Canterbury Research Repository. Accessed July 2, 2013. . Kris Knauer Morley College, London

Spoilt for Choice? Self­‑fashioning and Institutionalised Identities versus “Being Oneself” in Contemporary London Literature

In his Social Identity, Richard Jenkins asks: “how can we reconcile our sense of ourselves… with the knowledge that we can be different things to different people and in different circumstances?” Given institutional demands of family, marriage, ethnicity, workplace, schools or friendship and the like, Jenkins asks whether it is possible to “just be myself” (3). This discussion, which was originally written as part of a larger study, will explore some of the complexities of multiple identifications that contemporary protagonists in London fiction are confronted with and how they deal with those both on a daily basis and in times of crisis or during life­‑changing decision making. While the subject itself is far from new, what makes it appealing is the context of multiethnic cohabitation in the British capital, which complicates individual choices much more than one could suppose to begin with. First of all, it is worth starting this discussion from an observation that all collective identities are institutionalised since they are govern- ed by norms and conventions – by “the way things are done,” as Jen‑ kins writes – gender roles are locally and culturally specific; professions and occupations dictate conduct as do religions and so on. However, all institutional identifications, in equal measures, depend on the indivi‑ dual who occupies them and on their interaction with their significant Spoilt for Choice? Self-fashioning and Institutionalised… 267 others as much as on institutional orders themselves (Jenkins, 139–40). In other words, how individuals perform their roles as husbands, wives, lecturers or Christians will depend on what others expect of them, on the institution of marriage/university/religion itself and last but not least on their own choices. Correspondingly, regardless of the relative freedom of forging per‑ sonal identities that the protagonists of contemporary London fiction enjoy, they are simultaneously portrayed as struggling with their insti‑ tutionalised identifications and with the demands of their significant others. Sami Traifi in The Road From Damascus, for example, having been preoccupied with his own quests to feel comfortable in London in his own “pop version” of secular Arabic identity and to reconcile it with his academic work in Arabic literature, realises, in the second half of the novel, that “he had betrayed everybody, in various ways. … Not just now, but for a decade”:

He’d let down Mustafa [his father] by failing as an academic, even as an atheist. For Marwan [his father­‑in­‑law] the betrayal was not being a Muslim, or a father. For his mother, he was not a son. For his wife, not a man (Yassin­‑Kassab, 201).

Sami had severed ties with his mum after Mustafa’s death, believing that Nur did not care enough and because she betrayed his father’s secularism by wearing a hijab – as we later find out – in protest aga‑ inst his father, who had denounced her brother to the Syrian police, as a result of which Faris spent twenty­‑two years in prison, but at the time Sami was unaware of his mum’s reasons. This complicated family history is in itself a good example of the combination of personal and political demands made by one’s significant others but Sami makes mat‑ ters worse by not being able to write his doctoral thesis (he gives up after a decade of trying), by cheating on his wife in a drink and drug frenzy that followed his final academic defeat, and by not being able to earn his living or become a father, for which his father­‑in­‑law despised him. During his crisis, we see Sami at a cross‑section­ of contradictory institutional demands that are made of him by his significant others but also that he makes of himself. In his early thirties, Yassin‑Kassab’s­ pro‑ 268 Kris Knauer tagonist realises he has not fulfilled any of the demands of his identities and has to reassess his place in the world away from his marital home as Muntaha asks him to leave. Consequently, in the second half of the novel we see Sami without direction and “sick of himself”; the narrator informs the reader that Sami “could take no pride in himself” (252–3), which is followed by his somewhat desperate attempts to become “something” again. Sami even accepts the help of his much younger brother­‑in­‑law Ammar, for whom he had once been a role model, and does not flinch at his: “You’re a Muslim, you’re worth something” (259). Similarly, Nat in Blake Morrison’s South of the River questions himself and who he had become in circumstances not too dissimilar to Sami’s. Having left his wife Libby and their kids for his younger lover Anthea, with whom he moved into a small basement bedsit, he was suddenly abandoned by Anthea as well. Nat, who lost his job at an adult educa‑ tion college due to government cuts, was also unable to finish any of his book projects and the writer’s block seemed to subside only momentarily when he had been seeing his lover in secret, describing the “real thing” in a play. Later, during a bout of labyrinthitis (a virus of the inner ear), Nat wondered whether he was going through a midlife crisis or a men‑ tal breakdown because “there was no more at­‑oneness­‑with­‑the­‑world. He’d become un­‑, non­‑, Not­‑Nat, a shadow of himself” (359). Having failed as a lecturer, a writer, a father, a husband and as a lover, Nat envisaged his life as a “punishing regime” and was gripped with shame on a plumber’s call when he looked at the state of his flat through the stranger’s eyes. It seems that during such a crisis of failing on all fronts there is nothing left to reconcile oneself with, as the sense of self slips away no matter how long it had been in construction because the self is no longer required to perform. Jenkins’s question could perhaps be then re­‑written into a negative that it is not quite possible to “be oneself” without any institutional demands either, because regardless of how difficult it is to reconcile our sense of ourselves with institutional orders and the demands of others, when nothing is expected of one, the person might start to lose the sense of self altogether, staring at the void left by the absence of all institutional demands. This must be one of the reasons why characters in contemporary fic‑ tion grapple with a plurality of their identifications, juggling not infre‑ Spoilt for Choice? Self-fashioning and Institutionalised… 269 quently incongruous institutional demands of family, marriage, work‑ place, friends, ethnicity or religion and the like. They all feed their sense of self through institutional demands and it appears that London pro‑ tagonists are repeatedly caught not only struggling with their institu‑ tional identifications of whose limitations or demands they try to free themselves from but they are also captured by the writers in their efforts to become “something” – and therefore to identify with “something.” After years of sacrifice, Nat’s wife, for example, resumed her professio‑ nal career and despite Nat’s smirks that she worked in advertising while he was preoccupied with “high culture,” Libby established an excellent reputation and decided to start her own agency:

She had made a name for herself. And now she was the name of an agency, twice over. Raven McCready. Her married name and her maiden, joined together. Or as Carly put in press handouts, “Raven McCready: a New Agency for a New Age.” (122)

Making a name for oneself, especially professionally, indeed seems to be the key to present­‑day notions of success which, on a larger scale, rely on the name being instantly recognised like those of brands or celebri‑ ties. Names signify success, failure or oblivion, which are, like an image or a logo, instantly visible. “Name” as an instantly recognisable identity is also apparent among the politicians and aristocrats in Allan Hollinghurst’s The Line of Beauty, where the reader is introduced to a host of ministers, titled individuals and successful entrepreneurs along with their children who are known as “the son of” or “the daughter of” – the “who is who” of the upper classes and their peers, among whom Nick was so desperately try‑ ing to feel at ease. Professions and even job titles can have an equally overwhelming impact on some individuals whether they do or do not identify with them like Anthea in Blake Morrison’s novel, who found her role in the world as a Tree Officer in the local council hard to swallow:

“Don’t laugh,” Anthea said to people when they asked what she did, “I’m a Tree Officer.” Usually they did laugh, or at any rate smirk, atwhich point she would change the subject. (74) 270 Kris Knauer

Presenting herself to the world as a Tree Officer did not match Anthea’s aspirations so eventually, tired of it, she started writing short sto‑ ries about foxes, which brought her and her former creative writing lecturer (Nat) together and she became his lover and enjoyed her brief moment as a writer too. However, in the need of becoming something “worthwhile” and “different” she ditched both Nat and writing for the sake of training to do something “useful” for a Christian charity GoHelp in Seattle, following which she joined an NGO mission in the Middle East. In much of today’s literature, jobs do seem to constitute one of the most primary ways of identification, to be happy with which some pro‑ tagonists are ready to sacrifice a lot. These professional identifications compete with or sometimes complete other identifications that a per‑ son takes on. After all, professional career can lift one up the social ladder just as the lack of it can break lives (or sometimes marriages) and, last but not least, unconventional approaches to professional suc‑ cess can also lay the foundations to many alternative identities. Accor‑ dingly, Harry in South of the River chooses his work as a journalist not to be affected by his ethnicity even though “there were people who found Harry’s attitude annoying … and thought he was betraying his race,” but he decided: “Blackness in pores, yes. Blackness in prose, no” (81). Furthermore, to become “something” – a writer in her case – Mira in Looking for Maya exposes herself to some emotionally draining expe‑ riences, as does Nicola in All the Blood Is Red when her heart is set on becoming an actress. In Brick Lane, the lack of career prospects for Chanu, after over a decade of trying, resulted in low self­‑esteem and finally in his decision to return to Bangladesh, where he could become “somebody” still, even if it meant leaving his family behind. While, Oliver in Julian Barnes’s Love, etc, a bit like Sami Traifi in The Road From Damascus, or Nat Raven in South of the River, creates an alternative space for his intellectual aspirations, shunning paid work and letting his wife Gillian become the breadwinner as he is thoroughly opposed to middle class values – a situation which is later exploited by Gillian’s first hus‑ band Stuart, who, in contrast to Oliver, learns to look at life optimisti‑ cally after a range of successful enterprises including restaurants and organic food distribution outlets. Using his accomplishments, however, Spoilt for Choice? Self-fashioning and Institutionalised… 271 and helping Oliver and Gillian, Stuart envisions an ultimate reversal of their lives. Furthermore, the identity of Zadie Smith’s characters are also usually at least partly engendered by their status according to their positions at work – both Archie and Samad not being able to reach their middle­‑class ideals. On the other hand, nonetheless, whether they are scientists like Marcus Chalfen, teachers like Poppy Burt­‑Jones (White Teeth), academics like Howard Belsey or Monty Kipps (On Beauty), auto‑ graph men like Alex­‑Li (The Autograph Man) or waiters like Samad and “losers” like Archie, in one way or another, in their thus defined roles, they all become parodies of themselves, as the author became known for her oppositional reading of the world. Additionally, there are of course countless alternative identities constructed as if “against the grain” of the capitalist success like Z’s boyfriend in Guo’s A Concise Chinese­ ‍‑English Dictionary for Lovers, who considers himself to be an anarchist and does only occasional work (189–90); GR (standing for Global Resi‑ ster) in The Road From Damascus, who also opted out of the rat race for the sake of her ideals; or Josh Chalfen’s circle of militant environmenta‑ lists in White Teeth to name just a few. What remains true for all of these conventional as well as less con‑ ventional identifications is that all of them, being institutional, dictate “the way things are done” and rely on being easily recognised. In the contemporary image­‑dominated culture, identification with both suc‑ cess and its alternatives has to be instantly visible. And given the den- sity of the metropolitan population, there is always someone to witness the other’s life, however dispassionately, and since verbal communi‑ cation between strangers is rare, what speaks volumes is looks. Looks can project success but also failure; looks appeal and repel; looks signify – and in the era of the instantly visible they often do it at first sight. Physical appearance as a rudimentary factor informing our percep‑ tion of others deeply affects one’s life often in unmediated ways. After all, looks win elections, raise profiles to a celebrity status but they can also ruin lives. Looks help to secure jobs and not merely these obvious ones like models, actors or TV presenters but Lev, an Eastern European migrant from an unspecified part of the former USSR, in Rose Tremain’s The Road Home, for one, was lucky enough to be able to get a job in a Greek restaurant because he could pass for one (273). (“Authenticity” 272 Kris Knauer in catering seems to be the key). Negotiating the roles ascribed to them by their jobs, family and traditions, literary characters in contemporary London wrestle with the social concepts of who they are or of who they “should” be as well as of what they look like to others – of whether they can “play the part.” The multi­‑ethnic urban environment complicates these identifica‑ tions further because not all images are clear to us and therefore physi‑ cal appearance is often enhanced to be decoded in an immediate way. Decoding or identifying physical appearance seems to be one of the most essential skills in such diverse environments and consequently we could say that looks are also institutionalised inasmuch as all commu‑ nities as well as the society at large attach meaning to physical appear- ance, which together with clothes and demeanour are seen as reflec‑ tive of social status and backgrounds. Besides, physical characteristics like blond hair, brown skin as well as other body parts or body size can be routinely fetishised; long legs and shapely bums are insurable and therefore have reached the status of prized commodities; cosme‑ tic surgeries including dental work, but also dying, bleaching and fake tan are all not only permissible but often seen as advisable; and that these gym­‑toned urban bodies need to be clothed in designer labels is de rigueur. Bodies and what we do with them and how we clothe them have always been institutionalised in all cultures at all times but “body­ ‍‑consciousness” of the present‑day­ urbanites might seem to border on obsession to a third dispassionate eye because physicality can be a state- ment: personal, social and political alike. For instance, prior to his temporary downfall, Sami Traifi in The Road from Damascus expressed his personal and political statements through the conscious self‑fashioning­ of his cultural genetic inheritance, carefully choosing clothes, books and music to accentuate his political stance. A similar role is played by the “mix and match fashions” of the young British Punjabi crowd in Meera Syal’s second novel Life Isn’t All Ha Ha Hee Hee (44–5) and in Diana Evans’s (mixed race) protagonists’ personal choices of how to present themselves to the world according to their political outlooks in 26a, especially for the oldest one, Bel, whose natural hair treatment is often considered reflective of “ethnic pride” in some sections of black communities as are dreadlocks, which the youngest Spoilt for Choice? Self-fashioning and Institutionalised… 273 one (Kemy) starts to wear in her teens. While youth cultures and young people traditionally excel in finding innovative ways of putting them‑ selves together, making use of current fashions in clothes, hairstyles and the like, taking more pride in their physicality than older generations, physical appearance is also perceived as institutionalised by older cha‑ racters in contemporary multicultural fiction from London. Dressed, in her special red and gold silk sari while recuperating from an illness, Nazneen in Monica Ali’s Brick Lane, for example, catches a glimpse of her own reflection in her dressing‑table­ mirror and ponders the relation between dress code and lifestyle:

Suddenly, she was gripped by the idea that if she changed her clothes her entire life would change as well. If she wore a skirt and a jacket and a pair of high heels then what else would she do but walk around the glass palaces on Bishopsgate, and talk into a slim phone and eat lunch out of a bag? If she wore trousers and underwear, like the girl with the big camera on Brick Lane, then she would roam the streets fearless and proud. And if she had a tiny tiny skirt with knickers to match and a tight top, then she would – how could she not? – skate through life with a sparkling smile and a handsome man who took her hand and made her spin, spin, spin. (229)

Nazneen’s early fascination with the figure of a female ice­‑skater she saw on a billboard initially allowed her to peep at the world that was astonishing but forbidden to her. Her original amazement, however, gave her the necessary springboard to profoundly question her life. Slowly, she began to see cracks in “the story of how she was left to her fate” (Ali 2003, 10) when as a newborn baby she was believed to be dying but her mother (“who was a saint” (11)) refused to consult doctors and prayed. But Nazneen herself did not follow her Amma’s practices already when her firstborn son was in a critical condition and took Raqib to the hospital. Because he did not recover and passed away, Nazneen was gripped with guilt for disobeying her mother’s ways, her personal secret negotiations with religion and tradition increasing in intensity with every year she spent in London. With time, howe‑ ver, as her married life disintegrated and she was forced to defend her London­‑born eldest daughter Shahana from Chanu’s rage, Nazneen 274 Kris Knauer begins to realize her new commitment that she was not quite aware of. Her daughters “belonged” “here” and she embraced it wholehear‑ tedly, it seems. Finally, the realisation that one could so easily trans‑ form themselves by simply changing wardrobe and project themsel‑ ves in utterly different ways gave her the courage to take her fate into her own hands. Once Chanu had left for Bangladesh, Nazneen became free to fashion her life herself other than as a Bangladeshi mother and wife. Another radical transformation of a female protagonist, which could be read as a statement, is presented by Leila Aboulela in Minaret, a novel described on the back cover as “the first halal novel written in English.” Najwa, a political refugee in London from Sudan after a coup as a result of which her father was executed, was raised in a wester‑ nised upper class family in Khartoum and as she admits at the begin‑ ning of the novel that she did not pray often, even during Ramadan (29). In exile, she has rapidly “come down in the world” as the ope‑ ning sentence announces (1); her mother dies; family savings run out and her brother goes to jail and Najwa is forced to take up employment as domestic help. Initially, she admires her employer whom she des‑ cribes as “a certain type of Arab woman – rich student, late twenties, making the most of the West…” and notes how Lamya let her silk scarf roll from her head and neck, exposing her hair (2), but with time her relations with Lamya deteriorate. What’s more, Najwa’s acute sense of alienation and doom is also enhanced by her failed attempt at a rela‑ tionship with a young Sudanese communist activist Anwar, who sup‑ ported the changes in Sudan and kept putting her down because of her privileged background. Having lost all hope, she turns to religion and during regular women’s meetings at the mosque she quickly finds not only new friends but also motivation to carry on. Soon, Najwa decides to never leave her flat without wearing her hijab, despite the fact that her family and former friends used to see it as backward. However, as her faith helps her get through constantly arising difficulties, her choice of Muslim attire creates other problems. First, she is assaulted on a bus by some young thugs who throw things at her, pour a can of lemonade over her head and call her “Muslim scum” (81). Later Najwa also realises that her employer Lamya will “never treat her Spoilt for Choice? Self-fashioning and Institutionalised… 275 as her equal,” will never even “chat to her like [Lamya’s] mother did.” “She will always see my hijab, my dependence on the salary she gives me, my skin colour, which is a shade darker than hers” (116), she con‑ fesses. Finally, her ardent faith brings her closer to Lamya’s younger brother, Tamer, who was also a student but, in contrast to his elder sister, is very religious; their fondness for each other, however, will eventually cost Najwa her job. In Abdoulela’s novel, therefore, Najwa is portrayed as struggling with the complexity of her institutio‑ nal identities as a “fallen aristocrat,” an exile, domestic help, a lover, a sister, a Muslim and finally a religious woman who impresses Tamer to the degree that he wants to “embrace all of her being” and make her his wife. Unfortunately for her, her age (much older than Tamer) coupled with her lowly status in the British capital prevents her from marrying him, as his family threatens to disown him, and Najwa with- draws from as many engagements as she can, planning to go on the Hajj – her religious identity being the only one she feels secure with, in the end. These religious transformations which made women wearing hijabs a common sight in the capital are in fact a much more frequent subject of local literature nowadays as the public strives to understand a certain religious revival in many Muslim communities. Just as Sami Taifi in The Road from Damascus does, because brought up in secularism he finds it hard to accept the deepening faith of his Bagdad­‑born spouse Muntaha. The first point here is that wearing religious attire in London is usually portrayed as a choice and that any religious paraphernalia have always been meant to be seen as a statement of belonging, symbolising a cer‑ tain worldview and a way of life, despite the popularisation of crosses as a fashion accessory at the same time. Najwa’s story also amplifies the fact that we rely on some differences being easily perceived as we dress or conduct ourselves accordingly. In this light, I will have to men‑ tion Libby from Morrison’s South of the River again, in that she makes a few references to the fact that her “Irishness” or her “outsiderism” was often overlooked and not seen, although it was heard in her accent and some automatically assumed that she was a nurse (Morrison, 86, 276). The other point is that, on one hand, in a multiethnic environ‑ ment, the cultural genetic inheritance can be found “like an extra shoe 276 Kris Knauer

– whoa!” (Smith 2003, 31), which makes many characters “use” it, one would like to say “creatively” (like Sami Traifi before his crisis); howe‑ ver, the physicality of skin colour and facial features and the physicality of attire, language, accent or custom can at the same time be the object of racism and discrimination, or “not being treated as English.” Con‑ sequently, Najwa’s experiences depict not only her self­‑fashioning but also both white and Arab racisms, the former relating to the Western anti­‑Muslim backlash in the twenty­‑first century and the latter to clas‑ sism and racism in the Arab world. Not just “skin colour” but its shade proves once again crucial in the internal­‑external dialectic of identi- fication because Najwa is a few shades darker than her employer’s/ boyfriend’s family. Equally, the physical aspect of self­‑fashioning and institutional iden‑ tity can be demonstrated through the emphasis on hair (straighte‑ ning, bleaching or keeping it natural) or body size (especially in cul‑ tures dominated by Western ideals of beauty), both of which become Irie’s teenage nightmares in White Teeth. Unlike Bel or Kemy in 26a, Irie Jones tries relaxing “the bird’s nest of her hair” (Smith 2003, 273) in an attempt to entice Millat, whom she was secretly in love with and whose girlfriends always had long blonde hair. “Intent upon transformation, intent upon fighting her genes,” Irie shows up at the hairdresser’s envi‑ saging “straight straight long black sleek flickable tossable shakeable touchable finger­‑through­‑able wind­‑blowable hair” (273). The result was disastrous, however, as the “ammonia gloop” proved too strong for Irie’s recently washed head and her hair fell out, which left her with no option but to make a purchase in a local hair shop and having it sub‑ sequently weaved on. Irie was also very much affected by the image of her own round figure, comparing herself to thinner white English girls and spent much time sucking in her stomach and imagining her‑ self slim as if in one of these “before and after” advertisements (266–8). In The Body and Social Theory, Chris Shilling writes that: “social construc- tionist views differ according to how much of a social product the body is, and whether it is even possible to speak of the body as a biologi‑ cal phenomenon” (70). The physicality of the body then has become an important aspect of self‑fashioning­ as Western popular culture “has produced a very strict and uncompromisingly fixed sense of the Spoilt for Choice? Self-fashioning and Institutionalised… 277 aesthetic Ideal which is popularised by media and advertising,” as Marzena Kubisz observed in her essay, in which she analyses Fay Weldon’s 1983 satirical novel The Life and Loves of a She Devil, where the main protagonist Ruth Patchett is set to “improve on His original idea” and undergoes a number of cosmetic surgeries (Kubisz, 239). After Jean Baudrillard, Kubisz then writes that: “one manages one’s body; one han‑ dles it as one might handle an inheritance; one manipulates it as one of many signifiers of social status” because Ruth goes under the knife to “feel at home with her body,” to “change her social status,” to “change her life” (238). Correspondingly, Nicola Baines in Leone Ross’s All the Blood Is Red embarks on a much complicated self‑fashioning­ journey which is to take her to stardom (Nicola is an actress) and to self­‑empowerment. A very tall daughter of light­‑skinned Jamaicans, Nicola spent her child‑ hood on the island, not having much faith in herself but her teenage years in London brought more “personal pain” as “she had known that she was ugly, bean poley, red­‑skinned” (33). To counterbalance her low self‑esteem­ she “began to rewrite herself” as Mona, who “would turn heads,” “didn’t care about tangly hair” and “went dread”; in contrast to Nicola, Mona “was beautiful” and “bursting with it” (32–3). The trans‑ formation indeed became so well enacted that it brought her popularity with friends, with men and finally with the press. She used everything she hated about herself to her advantage. And although by the end of the novel Nicola has a few bones to pick with Mona, as she is prompted by one of her friends to understand that she “could be an actress wit‑ hout acting every day of [her] life” (196), the person she had become was getting her roles and one could argue that both stages of creating and deconstructing Mona were necessary phases of not only self­‑fashioning but also psychological and emotional growth. One of the “side effects,” perhaps, of Nicola’s transformations was also her relationship with a white English theatre director Julius, who served Mona as a spring‑ board to celebrity status as she craved romance and adoration while, as the writer explains, black men in England “were too busy fighting the good fight, being black men, angstful, complaining…” (95). So Nicola got engaged to Julius, kept her skills of performing in front of his parents, in whose house “she was a hit” (194) but she began to realise that it was 278 Kris Knauer

Mona all along and not herself indeed. The deconstruction of Mona was therefore followed by the breaking off of the engagement to Julius, as if adding the physicality and ethnicity of one’s partner into the spectrum of one’s self­‑fashioning. Accounts of such internal­‑external dialectic of identification are plen‑ tiful in the texts written in a city as diverse as London, where multi‑ cultures engender multiracisms. As mentioned before, the quest to free oneself from and to counteract the negative stereotyping functioning in the society at large has to be seen as a key component of any identity quest. Meera Syal, as one of many, describes quite a few such combats in Life Isn’t All Ha Ha Hee Hee. When Sunita accompanies her pregnant friend Chila to the hospital they are told it was the hospital’s policy not to divulge the information about the sex of the baby to pregnant women. Sunita, who was a lawyer herself, reacts to the statement, having real- ized that what they were up against was institutional racism:

“What do you mean, policy?” I asked her, and told her about Sally [who “had come in for a scan in this same hospital and had been told she was having a boy”], using as many pseudo­‑legal terms and long words as possible. She had that Gosh, you speak good English look on her face that I can spot from fifteen paces after years behind that stained desk [in the Citizens Advice Bureau where she worked]…. I could tell she was a mite confused, poor love, as Chila and I both happened to be wearing shalwar kameez that day and therefore messed up her rules, that brown ladies wearing curtains are the ones you can patronize and baffle with policy. (230)

With her usual irony and sense of humour, Syal relates the typical confusion of some white inhabitants of the British Isles who are unac- customed to “brown ladies wearing curtains” being able to articulate their views better than themselves. This hostile disbelief of countless clerks, officers and “ordinary citizens” at the “Englishness” of the second generation Britons is indeed a recurring theme in black and Asian British literatures with airport scenes being perhaps the most cited. Numerous authors recount interrogations at Immigration each time they return to the United Kingdom. Coming back from America, Gary Younge is sur‑ prised not to be questioned for a change: “No ‘Is this your only pas‑ Spoilt for Choice? Self-fashioning and Institutionalised… 279 sport, sir?’ or ‘Could you tell me your place of birth, sir?’” What’s more, Younge suggests that his amazement was so great that he was tempted to put on a West African accent to make life “that little bit more inte‑ resting” (275). Therefore, Sunita’s experience at the hospital implies that the most symbolic episodes at British airports are of course not the only sites of “not being treated as English” because as we can see this can happen anywhere: equally likely at a hospital as on the street or in the countryside as Jackie Kay observed in her poem “In My Country,” pub‑ lished in 1993. Walking by the river, this Scottish­‑based poetess is subje‑ cted to a following experience:

a woman passed round me in a slow watchful circle, as if I were a superstition; or the worst dregs of her imagination, so when she finally spoke her words spliced into bars of an old wheel. A segment of air. Where do you come from? “Here,” I said, “Here. These parts.” (1993, 16)

Hostility on the part of bureaucrats or passers‑by,­ disbelief at their “Englishness” or at least the feeling of being unwelcome crop up in most second generation writing from Britain at one point or another; the vast majority of the protagonists, as their authors, must have expe‑ rienced these to a greater or lesser degree because the trauma of insti‑ tutional racism continues to be relieved in the process of artistic cre‑ ation. Furthermore, the persistent recurrence of such incidents makes them predictable, which Millat in White Teeth plays on in his first ever exchange with Joyce Chalfen:

“Well, … you look very exotic. Where are you from, if you don’t mind me asking?” “Willesden,” said Irie and Millat simultaneously. “Yes, yes, of course, but where originally?” “Oh,” said Millat, putting on what he called a bud­‑bud­‑ding­‑ding accent. “You are meaning where from I am originally.” 280 Kris Knauer

Joyce looked confused. “Yes, originally.” “Whitechapel,” said Millat, pulling out a fag. “Via the Royal London Hospital and the 207 bus.” (Smith 2001, 319)

For some uncanny and definitely non­‑linguistic reason many use the question “Where do you come from originally?” to ask the name of the faraway land to which one supposedly belongs no matter whether the questioned have ever been there and/or regardless of how many gene- rations they are removed from it. This seemingly innocent national linguistic lapse is symptomatic of a much larger problem that the British society faces even today (despite great progress having been made in this regard and in spite of the fact that Britain has arguably one of the best equality and diversity laws in the world) and that is the unre‑ lenting idea that the second or even third generations are not quite English – that they do not quite belong to “these parts.” Although the outward hostility and the overt racism of the 1940–1980s described by Sam Selvon, George Lamming, Linton Kwesi Johnson or Caryl Phillips and Andrea Levy have largely subsided, this insistence of the assertion that the offspring of non­‑white immigrants cannot possibly identify with the land of their birth suggests that institutional racism is still very much at work, despite the nation embracing more and more “celebri‑ ties” like Oxford­‑educated Zadie Smith or the “face of the 2012 Olym‑ pics” and the “golden girl” Jessica Ennis­‑Hill, who are both mixed­‑race, by the way. We have to remember that in no way is Joyce Chalfen “racist” in the “traditional” sense – Zadie Smith portrays her as a very liberal author of books on gardening, who is delighted and exultant to be able to cre‑ ate a second home for Irie and Millat. Her eagerness to host her “brown strangers” is nevertheless underpinned not only by curiosity and good‑ will but also by the identical sense of superiority which informed latter­ ‍‑day philanthropists. She patronised the youngsters and their families much in the same manner as the hospital representative patronised Chila and Sunita, since it was claimed that the policy of not divulging the information about the sex of the unborn baby was to protect Asian women from familial pressures to abort girls. The policy was introduced “for their own good.” Spoilt for Choice? Self-fashioning and Institutionalised… 281

Institutional racism is possibly the most serious form of racism today because it affects the quality of life through its intricate‑22 catch­ ­‑like manifestations in the public domain – in politics, at schools, at work and elsewhere. Paul Gilroy describes it in the following way:

Opinion formers have always found it easier to discover the problems of extreme racial nationalism in the fascinating shaven‑headed­ forms of the neo­‑nazi young and fit, than in the anonymous‑striped pin­ indiffer- ence of those who might not profess their commitment to race hier- archy in public after dark but whose disinterested actions institutionalise it nonetheless. (Gilroy 2002, xxiv–xxv)

For decades institutional racism went unchallenged as it is much more convenient to see only the most violent acts of prejudice while discrimi‑ natory cultural practices went unreported. The Macpherson Report1 has changed that a tad and the phrase “institutional racism” is now widely recognised and associated with “the way things are done,” whether at the police station or in the classroom. Examining identity politics in contemporary London literature, the bottom line is that no matter how Najwa, Libby, Irie, Millat, Nicola, Chila or Sunita perceive their own choices of cultural belonging, no matter how they put themselves together juggling worldviews and traditions, they will have encountered discriminatory practices in one form or another. Facing other people’s judgements of who and what they should be (opinions not infrequent- ly based solely on physical characteristics, gender or indeed taste in clothes), the question is how they will cope with the situation – what politics or (defence) mechanisms they will deploy to counteract both negative stereotypes as well as other discriminatory practices. Sunita, well educated and self‑assured,­ presents herself as a hardened­ ‍‑in­‑battle individual, for she had been one of the “Rebels” and an acti‑ vist of Uni Women’s Group, and she will not let anyone intimidate her. Chila, on the other hand, not having the assertiveness or the “pseudo­

1 The Macpherson Report famously identified police practices in Britain as institutio‑ nally racist in 1999 and it was commissioned in the aftermath of the botched police inve‑ stigation into the murder of Stephen Lawrence in a racist attack in South East London in 1993. 282 Kris Knauer

‍‑legal” terms to defend herself with, is much more vulnerable and easier to bully. Whether in marriage, at school or in the hospital, she is much more likely to yield under the pressures of institutional demands. Which brings us round to the recognition that the less fortunate ones will not necessarily agree with the thesis that all Londoners are “spoilt for choice” in terms of choosing identifications and lifestyles at will. The ghetto stories from South London written by Alex Wheatly, like East of Acre Lane, and Courttia Newland’s characters from poorer West London estates attest to that. In Newland’s The Scholar, Cory’s father dies having been wrongfully arrested and then killed by the metropolitan police. As a teenager, Cory, unlike his cousin Sean (“the scholar”), does not see much choice for himself when he gets entangled in crime and gang wars but both end up involved in murder and armed robbery respecti‑ vely, trying to protect each other. These characters are also of the opi‑ nion that one does not get the same freedom of choice when it comes to self‑fashioning­ when one is black. These stories, which we normally expect to come out of the inner­‑city areas of America, increasingly ins‑ cribe themselves in the British capital’s cityscapes as well. The less for‑ tunate ones than the better­‑off characters of Kureishi’s or Syal’s novels believe they have much less choice. The choice they do see, however, is how political or how militant they will become like the Keepers of the Eternal and Victorious Islamic Nation in White Teeth or Bengal Tigers of Monica Ali’s Brick Lane or Riaz’s militant Muslim group in Kureishi’s The Black Album. Additionally, as current media coverage suggest the aliena‑ ted urban youths also see a choice in joining a gang. Once again one’s physical characteristics prove at least as vital in the process of self­‑fashioning as cultural heritage, taste in clothes, political conviction or religious beliefs inasmuch as a person’s social interaction will largely depend on these. The idea of success or being able to suc‑ ceed is repeatedly married to one’s looks, of which ethnicity and race are also a critical part. Andrea Levy’s Olive and Vivien Charles in Never Far From Nowhere illustrate this most poignantly. Their choices of how to present themselves to the world are heavily informed by both the preva‑ lence of racism in England at the time of their growing up as well as the colonial British caste and class system in Jamaica, in which their parents were raised, whereby different hues and shades of black, brown, yellow, Spoilt for Choice? Self-fashioning and Institutionalised… 283 white or tanned each formed a separate caste. In her insistence that her daughters were not black, light­‑skinned Rose Charles tried to ensure that their development would not be hindered by identifying or being identified with the caste which found it most difficult to succeed. For this reason, Vivien, who uses the fact that she could pass off for a Mau‑ ritian or a Southern European to accomplish her goals she otherwise saw as inaccessible, fills Rose with pride (although the latter does not know the extent of Vivien’s denial); while, Olive, whose self­‑image suf‑ fered many blows because she was identified as black and taunted as a result, is a source of continual disappointment for her mum. The novel ends with a scene of Vivien, an art student now, coming to visit her mum in their council flat; Rose decorating her china tea set with doi‑ lies; and Olive, an unemployed single mother, having a bitter row with her sister about the chances they have had in life. What’s more, during their conversation over tea and cakes Rose waves aside Olive’s dream to “go back” to Jamaica to be accepted, first of all, stressing that she cannot “go back” somewhere she does not even know and, secondly, pointing out that life in the former colony is hard. “You children have had it easy… You children don’t know. And I thank God you don’t,” she says (280–2). What Andrea Levy’s story makes the reader realise is not only how relative the notions of “success” and of a “hard” or “easy” life are but also how ethnic identification can influence our expectations of upward social mobility. The whole panorama of Levy’s characters’ identity poli‑ tics (both in Jamaica and in London) she portrays in her novels is inter‑ related with the spectrum of their ability to succeed or, in fact, in their belief in being able to do so. By showing how deeply the internalisation of social expectations affects an individual, Levy illustrates the power of institutionalised racism in both colonial and postcolonial British socie‑ ties. The colour lines that her numerous characters face in her novels reflect essentialist and absolutist approaches to racial difference which characterised colonial politics for centuries and from whose shackles many contemporaries are still not capable to free themselves. That these have an effect on the multiplex identity negotiations is one of the con‑ tentions of London literature at the last turn of centuries; yet, what is being amplified in the texts discussed here equally tenaciously is that 284 Kris Knauer even not denying one’s religion, race or ethnicity, one still has choices, personal and political, of how to “wear it.” Although families and our significant others as well as society in general impose limitations and demands, which are capable of breaking one’s career or one’s life, they are nonetheless not impossible to contest. For example, following the tea and cake conversation with her sister and mum, which Rose so tried to keep “polite,” Vivien reassesses her personal politics of belonging and in an accidental fellow­‑passenger chat with an elderly English woman on the train back to her college she finally admits: “My family are from Jamaica. … But I am English” (Levy 1996, 282). Does it however bring us any closer to an answer to Richard Jenkins’ question of whether it is possible to “just be oneself”? On one hand, I believe, many a reader will laugh a definite No! Considering all the roles we have to enact, the search for a “real/ true self” brings to mind peeling off an onion, but the phrase “just be yourself” is being used around the globe countless times daily – are we all so wrong using this phrase then? Is “being oneself” merely one of the most widespread myths of our times? Shahid in The Black Album seems to abandon the question of a “true self” altogether for the sake of experiencing his life with his lover Deedee directly and immediately as if to prove that the point is not in finding answers but in asking questions. ‑Conver sely, Kevin Robins relates after Bogdanovic that the urban experience “provides [us] with the chance to give responsible answers to eternal human questions like, who am I? What am I? Where am I? And why am I where I am?” (489). Consequently, should we understand, for instance, Vivien’s realisation at the end of Andrea Levy’s novel as an example of such a “responsible answer” to the question of who she was or did she merely accept the labels of who she was (from the cultural and ethnic points of view) that she had been in denial of for so long? Or was her admission only symbolic of the change that happened in her, allowing her to finally “just be herself”? In The Black Album Hanif Kureishi has Shahid think that: “These days everyone was insisting on their identity, coming out as a man, woman, gay, black, Jew – brandishing whichever features they could claim, as if without a tag they wouldn’t be human” (92). This preoccupation with institutional identities in Kureishi’s reading is, as might be expected, Spoilt for Choice? Self-fashioning and Institutionalised… 285 a double­‑edged sword. While it mobilised the previously mis‑­ and under­‑represented sectors of society into the fight for civil rights and helped advance the studies of difference, it also promoted the congea‑ ling of identity into one‑dimensional­ seemingly self­‑explanatory labels which are to define much more of one’s existence than they are actually capable of. Likewise, Tania in Meera Syal’s Life Isn’t All Ha Ha Hee Hee is also por‑ trayed up against her institutional identifications, which she struggles with to preserve her own sense of self:

The sense of dislocation that dogged her [Tania] like a shadow momen‑ tarily faded. She was used to not belonging anywhere totally. In fact, it was quite a relief to peel off the labels randomly stuck on her forehead somewhere around 1979, which read “Culture Clash Victim – Handle with Care” or “Oppressed Third World Woman – Give her a Grant.” She’d met enough people like her whose isolation was their calling card; being different, having an objective third eye, that’s what her business wanted. (56)

In contrast to Olive (Never Far From Nowhere) and Afria (Fruit of the Lemon), who seek to belong to a larger “we” having been deprived, by their mothers, of a collective (black) identification they craved, Tania resists her public image of belonging to a group. Denied part of her indi‑ viduality at home and classed as an “Oppressed Third World Woman” at work, she develops a personal, albeit alienated space of resistance in which she can both utilise her public image even if it is only for a grant at first. This dislocation of not belonging anywhere totally, the difference between her self‑image­ and public image makes her miserable until she learns to use it in a creative way. “Peeling off the labels,” she empowers her self­‑definition (as the dislocated one) by never really becoming her public self, but at the same time she internalises others’ perceptions of herself as the “different” one and incorporates both into her work. “All artists are lonely wolves,” she recalls a director tell her, which works for her for a while. However, when Tania gets pressured to continue to do documenta‑ ries about Asian communities (only), while her intention was to stop “grubbing in the ghetto,” she hears from her producer that “the ghetto 286 Kris Knauer got you where you are today, Tania. It’s what makes you different. And a good story is a mainstream story” (259). In defence of her artistic free‑ dom, Tania protests that Scorsese is not pushed into filming only Italian stories and that nobody thinks of Woody Allen as a Jewish filmmaker. The choice of topics in Tania’s work is of course reflective of a much wider issue of institutional racism of cultural establishments, white­ ‍‑collar workers or in education. This situation brings to mind Jackie Kay’s autobiographical poems where she wrote of a music teacher tel‑ ling her that she should be good at dancing because she should have it in her blood (1991, 38). While Glen Jordan and Chris Weedon in their Cultural Politics, relate that contemporary Artists of Colour are given the status of “ethnic artist”; Indian artists are always said to produce “Indian art”; black Caribbean painters like Aubrey Williams were ana‑ lysed to paint with instinct, power and passion, “the instinctive sense of rhythm of the Negro fused with the mytho­‑poetic imagination of the Indian­‑Voodoo,” while European influences in his work “refined” and “tamed” him as if modernity was designated as a space and time for the West, or for whiteness only, to be precise (433–47). Similarly, Tania fears being labelled and marginalized, or ghettoised and clothed in an “ethnic costume” like when she was photographed for the glossy maga‑ zines “against the backdrop of saris and spices,” Indian restaurants and Indian films. Therefore, in her interviews she would say she is “a direc‑ tor first and Asian second” (250) – a stance that is not uncommon in the contemporary ferment of urban life, in which “ethnicity is only one of a lists of priorities,” to paraphrase Mike Phillips (204), and where the ability to succeed defines people just as much as we have seen discus‑ sing identifications taken on by Libby and Nat, Nicola/Mona, Olive and Vivien, Sami Traifi or Nick’s upper­‑class Notting Hill hosts in The Line of Beauty. On the other hand, we cannot be sure of the intentions of Tanya’s agent because he might have acted in “good faith” that Asian com‑ munities should get more exposure in British media and that no one would do it better than Tanya; besides, there is a lot of truth in the sta‑ tement that a “good story is a mainstream story,” but whether this is how it really works in the media and in popular culture remains a que‑ stion. However, an apparently opposite argument is put forward by Spoilt for Choice? Self-fashioning and Institutionalised… 287

Gary Younge in No Place Like Home. Comparing approaches to ethnicity and race in America and Britain, Younge shows the other side of the coin, making a point about enforced colour­‑blindness. While “race in America is everywhere,” he writes “in Britain race ranks alongside sex, politics and religion as a subject best not discussed in polite company.” If you “mention racial slights you have encountered” you might be accused of being “chippy”; bringing up a topic with a racial dimension “you will be rubbing their noses in it”; write articles about race and “they will warn you about being ghettoized.” “At times, being black in Britain feels like my worst‑kept­ secret,” Younge writes. Consequently, whereas issues of race define you in America, in Britain race is not sup‑ posed to matter – at least in the official discourse (39–40). At first sight many might think that talking or not talking about ethnicity or race is a no win situation – Younge denounces the pressure to exclude race from his creative work, whilst Syal presents an apparently opposite situ‑ ation of Tania being bullied into shooting documentaries about Asian ghettos. The contradiction is however only apparent because what both predicaments have in common is the pressure to conform to institutio‑ nal demands of others whether they magnify or deny difference. In both situations “being oneself” is politicised by others who demand that one “be oneself” in a different, more palatable or a more exotic way respec‑ tively. The apparent contradiction between Tanya’s and Younge’s expe‑ riences turns out, therefore, to be merely reverse sides of the same coin, whereby self­‑fashioning has to be fashioned according to current insti‑ tutional demands. In other words, quite regardless of the fact that the rebel side of many contemporary Londoners in contemporary fiction seems to help them preserve apparent integrity even if not a full control over their lives, it is undeniable that “being oneself” is a site of contra‑ dictions and complex, often political negotiations in which institutional orders and demands of significant others play an equal part. In his landmark “Who Needs ‘Identity’?” Stuart Hall theorises the recent trends in understanding identity as strategic and positional in contrast to the traditional “notion of an integral, originary and unified identity.” Scholarship of the last few decades in philosophy, cultural criticism, psychoanalysis and feminism helped to see identity in non­ ‍‑essentialist terms and to see “the endlessly performative self” instead 288 Kris Knauer of the “transparent notion of the subject or identity as the centred aut‑ hor of social practice … – which leads to a transcendental conscious‑ ness” (Hall, 1–3). To put it differently, the Cartesian concept of a self­ ‍‑sustaining subjectivity no longer seems to correspond to the current understanding of the complexities of subjectivity and identification, because on one hand we see identification as solidarity or allegiance and on the other as a process inasmuch as it can be sustained or abando‑ ned but primarily because there does never appear to be “a proper fit, a totality” (1–3). Identification is therefore always ambivalent because the demands of the super­‑ego are conflicting and disorderly in themsel‑ ves but they are also competing with all other institutional demands as well as the demands of our significant others. Furthermore, these demands on who we should be and how we sho‑ uld present ourselves to the world affect us as much at home as on the street and at work and they influence our conduct and even the most intimate details of our lives. We have looked at literary illustrations of families trying to impose identity on its members but characters like Syal’s Tania experienced ethnic stereotyping from her (“white middle class”) boyfriend as well, who was “bemoaning her lack of native cul‑ ture.” Martin had been to India while she had not; he “brought home the latest fusion CDs,” fireworks for Diwali and tickets for a Dussehra festival. Tania calls him a “ghetto groupie” and a fashion victim because Asian culture was in vogue. “He was planning a romantic tour with me,” Tania says, “around the one­‑hut, dung­‑filled villages he visited as a student, and instead he gets someone who can drink him under the table and belch the alphabet as a party piece” (146, 109). Tania did not share Martin’s fascination and seemed to distance herself from her Asian identity the more other people found it fascinating, the more they demanded that she be Asian for them. To cut a long story short, Zygmunt Bauman relates that Max Frisch describes “being yourself” as resisting external pressures to assume identities as defined by others (Bauman, 81), and this would probably be the best explanation of Tanya’s stand because she refused to accept “wearing mini­‑skirts and liking Italian food means that she was in ethnic denial.” Justifying herself, she also mentions successful Asian women who having taken off their Armani clothes perform a very diffe‑ Spoilt for Choice? Self-fashioning and Institutionalised… 289 rent role at home, doing all the house chores, which she calls the most frightening and speedy transformation since Jekyll and Hyde (Syal, 146–7). Tanya, therefore, would not be coerced into roles defined by others – neither for her family nor for Martin; her “integrity” (or her “super­‑ego”) came first, taking precedence over her work just as her passion prevailed over her loyalty to friends. Fighting off instruction and trying not to yield to other people’s expectations of her throughout her life, she was very much aware that the demands of our significant others have an underestimated impact not only on our personal iden‑ tifications but also on the most private choices we can make. At some point in the novel, she says: “Jonathan was right, remarkably, when he said that choosing whom you love is the most political decision you can make” (148), which is however a subject for another discussion. On the other hand, it has to be noted that “resisting external pressures to assume identities as defined by others” can take quite opposite forms because we cannot forget about the need in many of us to conform. Conform to become something, anything, as long as it is “recognizable,” as long as it will make us “belong.” Alternatively, it can be conforming to become somebody, which is often a cosy synonym for “success.” And it seems that this perennial wrestling or the constant dialectic, to use different jargons, between resisting and conforming can be dramatically enhanced in such a multiethnic environment as London because the scope of cho‑ ices and perspectives is significantly wider or multiplied, to which the stories of contemporary London protagonists quoted here attest. And whether, in their struggles, the individuals in question are “being them‑ selves” is left to the reader to decide.

Works Cited

Aboulela, Leila. Minaret. London: Bloomsbury, 2005. Ali, Monica. Brick Lane. London: Doubleday, 2003. Barnes, Julian. Love, etc. London: Picador, 2001. Bauman, Zygmunt. The Art of Life. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2008. Evans, Diana. 26a. London: Chatto & Windus, 2005. Gilroy, Paul. Introduction to There Ain’t No Black in the Union Jack. London: Routledge, 2002. xi–xiv. 290 Kris Knauer

Guo, Xiaolu. A Concise Chinese­‑English Dictionary For Lovers. London: Vintage Books, 2007. Hall, Stuart. “Who Needs ‘Identity’?” Questions of Cultural Identity, edited by Stuart Hall and Paul Du Gay. London: Sage Publications, 1996. 1–17. Hollinghurst, Allan. The Line of Beauty. London: Picador, 2004. Jenkins, Richard. Social Identity. London and New York: Routledge, 2004. Jordan, Glen and Chris Weedon. Cultural Politics: Class, Gender, Race, and the Postmodern World, Oxford, UK and Cambridge, USA: Blackwell, 1995. Kay, Jackie. Other Lovers. Newcastle: Bloodaxe Books, 1993. ­‑­‑­‑. “Black Bottom.” Adoption Papers. Newcastle: Bloodaxe, 1991. 24–27. Kubisz, Marzena. “Female Body/Whose Body? Contemporary Culture and Social Constructionism of Femininity.” Britishness and Cultural Studies: Con‑ tinuity and Change in Narrating the Nation, edited by Krzysztof Knauer and Simon Murray. Katowice: Śląsk, 2000. 226–39. Kureishi, Hanif. The Black Album. London: Faber and Faber, 1995. Levy, Andrea. Never Far From Nowhere. London: Review, 1996. ­‑­‑­‑. Fruit of the Lemon. London: Review, 1999. Morrison, Blake. South of the River. London: Chatto & Windus, 2007. Newland, Courtia. The Scholar. London: Abacus, 1997. Phillips, Mike. London Crossings: A Biography of Black Britain. London: Conti‑ nuum, 2001. Robins, Kevin. “Endnote. To London: The City beyond the Nation.” British Cultural Studies, edited by David Morley and Kevin Robins. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001. 473–495. Ross, Leone. All the Blood Is Red. London: Angela Royal Publishing, 1996. Shilling, Chris. The Body and Social Theory. London: Sage Publications, 1997. Smith, Zadie. White Teeth. London: Penguin Books, 2001. ­‑­‑­‑. The Autograph Man. London: Penguin Books, 2003. ­‑­‑­‑. On Beauty. London: Hamish Hamilton, 2005. Srivastava, Atima. Looking for Maya. London: Quarter Books, 1999. Syal, Meera. Life Isn’t All Ha Ha Hee Hee. London: Black Swan, 2000. Wheatle, Alex. East of Acre Lane. London: Harper Perennial. 2006. Tremain, Rose. The Road Home. London: Chatto & Windus, 2007. Yassin­‑Kassab, Robin. The Road from Damascus. London: Hamish Hamilton, 2008. Younge, Gary. No Place Like Home. London: Picador, 2000. Sławomir Masłoń University of Silesia, Katowice

Audio­‑graphy: Meaning and Irrationality in Music

Until the second half of the 18th century meaning in music did not exist as a separate problem because music was simply treated as a practice illustrating the meanings of texts. Although at the turn of the 15th cen‑ tury purely instrumental works began to appear – that is, musical mate‑ rial gained a kind of autonomy – it was a limited autonomy, because they were still considered to be dependent on language.1 In other words, they were seen as expressive of conventional (linguistic) meanings – music was taken to be a rhetorical discourse, which was confirmed by a large number of published handbooks of such rhetorics that taught how to produce an intended effect of meaning by using particular technical devices. Therefore, music was considered to be an art of representation whether it be social (music serving power by means of representing its idealised image) or emotional (music illustrating feelings, as Jean­‑Jacques Rousseau wrote about it). The problem of separate non­‑literary musical meaning appears only at the end of the 18th century with the so­‑called “absolute music”. Altho‑ ugh illustrating the whole problem by referring to only one figure is to simplify, one can say that with Ludwig van Beethoven the basic que‑ stion is no longer how to objectivise familiar feelings and emotions in

1 Only “practical” music is being considered here. Ancient and medieval purely the‑ oretical treatises, which take musica practica as a lower kind of practice belonging to a separate sphere pose a different set of problems. 292 Sławomir Masłoń music, but how to use sounds in order to create unknown emotional states that only music can produce (Chanan, 38). However, with this understanding of the task of instrumental music as entirely autono‑ mous, its status becomes radically altered – it turns into something which Umberto Eco describes as “a semiotic system apparently wit‑ hout a semantic plane” (qtd. in Chanan, 28), that is, a system of signs which works but does not result in meaning. In other words, a riddle is posed: music moves us, it moves even those who know nothing about its “technical” (structural) content, but what does it move in us, if it has no “semantic plane”? When a new question appears, new the‑ ories which try to answer it spring up, yet one should perhaps remind oneself that most of the 19th and 20th century philosophers, including the greatest ones, have not had much to say about music, although they speculated profusely on other arts. This deafness of the thinkers is quite puzzling. Two famous exceptions to this peculiar indifference are Arthur Scho‑ penhauer and Friedrich Nietzsche. The former (who is said to have been a good flutist), in his opus magnum The World as Will and Representa‑ tion (1818, expanded edition 1844), claims that music is the highest art because it is the immediate expression of will unmediated by repre‑ sentation. A variation on the same subject by early Nietzsche, who still considers Schopenhauer as an educator and who is enthralled by Wag‑ ner, is The Birth of Tragedy out of the Spirit of Music (1872) in which Apollo and Dionysus represent two opposing principles roughly correspon‑ ding to representation and will. A rather vulgarized continuation of this dualism, in the form of various pop‑cultural­ versions of psychology and psychoanalysis, is still with us: musical material speaks or expres‑ ses our “primeval instincts,” which at the same time it “disarms” by means of enforcing form on them, which allows them to become subli‑ mated rather than repressed. However, in spite of the popularity of this take on music, an obvious problem appears here: even the most “primi‑ tive” music is always already a form of socialization and therefore its effect is always the establishment of at least a rudimentary social space, that is, it is in no way just an expression of “nature.” Therefore the idea that the meaning of music lies in its giving cultural expression to pre­ ‍‑cultural living “substance” without the mediation of the alienating idea Audio-graphy: Meaning and Irrationality in Music 293

(as in writing) or image (as in visual arts) does not seem to be very con‑ vincing.2 In the concept of music as sublimation, form as such (and with it order as an effect of rationalisation) is valorised positively, so the next step in theorising on musical meaning is the one taken by Eduard Hanslick who announces that there is no extra­‑musical content in music: its meaning is perceptible solely as the development of its stru‑ cture, that is, it is strictly formal and has no extra‑musical­ references. Although people often ascribe to music some extra­‑musical content, this is simply a popular weakness in which the sacred purity of music is polluted and abused by the dilettantes. However, in spite of the conti‑ nuous popularity of Hanslick’s position and certain advantages it un- doubtedly possesses (for instance, it rids us of the rather obscurantist idea of a “natural” foundation of music), one can have serious reserva‑ tions about it. For instance: if a composer like Claude Debussy is taken into consideration, one can say that in his works extra­‑musical content (images, atmosphere) is turned into the constructive elements of a com‑ position:

Richard Wagner’s harmony had promoted the change in the logic and constructive power of harmony. One of its consequences was the so‑called­ impressionistic use of harmonies, especially practiced by Debussy. His har‑ monies without constructive meaning, often served the coloristic purpose of expressing moods and pictures. Moods and pictures, though extra­ ‍‑musical, thus became constructive elements, incorporated in musical functions; they produced a sort of emotional comprehensibility. (Scho‑ enberg, 104)

Hanslick would probably have answered to this reservation that Debussy’s music was French and degenerate and that his theory applied to the great musical forms created by Germanic classicism. However,

2 A more sophisticated version of this theory, proposed by some psychoanalysts, may claim that music is a symbolic language of the unconscious whose symbolism we are unable to fathom. But it is absurd to speak of the existence of a symbolic language about which we cannot say anything. One can just as well claim that sparrows are very intel‑ ligent birds, because they have created a sophisticated symbolic logic, but unfortunately it is inaccessible to the human mind for unknown reasons. 294 Sławomir Masłoń when one has a closer structural look at a classical symphony or sonata, one will find that they are narrative forms, and that they are narrative in a specific way: their narration is of a type which we also encounter in realist novels. While the 18th century novel is most often simply a mixture of various genres in which the narration concerning adventures of the main prota‑ gonist is not necessarily the most important (the most extreme example of this, and a kind of parody at the same time, is Lawrence Sterne’s The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman), the basic pattern of the realist novel, reigning supreme in the nineteenth century, focuses on the education in life of the protagonist (or a small group of them) who beginning from the original state of harmony passes through conflict and chaos in order to recreate the harmonious state but on the higher level of consciousness. In the process, the strength of his character is tested while he learns about himself and the world.3 Therefore, in order to concentrate attention on the presentation of the modern odyssey of the newly autonomous bourgeois individual, all discourses inessential to the central psychodrama, which earlier added to the colour of the novel, have to be discarded. The same kind of narrative structure can be found in the great classical forms of western music. Moreover, if one takes into consideration the fact that these musical forms are addres‑ sed to the ideal listener, that is, the ideal cultured bourgeois who is well­‑read in literature, philosophy, politics and music, one can be sure that he will “insert” the odyssey of the new self working out its spi‑ ritual (and economic) autonomy into the music (Chanan, 45). In other words, the subject identifies here with what is happening in the music by means of importing into the music an extra­‑musical meaning, yet this meaning does not appear in the guise of some external superad‑ ded content (e.g. music as expressing certain emotions) – it is the very form of a musical work which produces the identification. Meaning is not located here in the structure as such (the formal juxtaposition of notes is meaningless), but in what the structure itself is the expression

3 Franco Moretti in The Way of the World argues quite convincingly that the rise of realist novel, which focuses on this particular kind of social education, can be seen as a reaction to the great trauma of the French Revolution. Audio-graphy: Meaning and Irrationality in Music 295 of: the ideal image of the dynamics of the autonomous subject as the “upward­‑moving” spirit in the process of self­‑overcoming, which is at the same time the process of self­‑realisation. In the final analysis, the appearance of the new 19th century subject in music can briefly be de- scribed thusly: the form, which without any “programmatic” content is already ideological in itself, brings into existence a certain kind of subject and its particularly structured desire – the desire to rise up to one’s heroic image, which appears to the subject as its most profound content. Should one, therefore, treat music (and art in general) as (among other things) one of the disciplinary practices analysed by Foucault? In other words, can one rationalise music the way it is done by this kind of ideology critique? Even if such a critique may be inevitable and necessary (as in fact it is), it should be rather obvious that it constitutes only a preliminary stage in the understanding of the nature of musical meaning for the very obvious reason that the aforementioned descrip‑ tion of the coming to existence of the imaginary subject in music is the description of a fully successful ideological operation of identifying with the ideal image incarnated in a musical structure. However, one has to note that such an identification (together with the rationalisation which explains it) can never fully succeed, which results in all kinds of contra‑ dictions in the ideological form which is being described here. One can say, for instance, that although the epoch prefers (in music, though not necessarily in literature) tragic themes, the form which it uses (har‑ mony→ conflict→ higher harmony) is essentially comic (in the sense of being the inversion of tragedy). Therefore we return to the postulate that apart from form and content (whether we consider them as ideo‑ logical or not) there is something else in music, some mysterious sur- plus, something which cannot be described in rational categories. One of the aspects of composition which clearly points to this issue can be the fact that even on the strictly technical plane nobody has been able to rationalise music whether we take into consideration traditional har‑ monic systems or even such a hyper­‑rationalised way of composition as serialism. Even Pierre Boulez speaks about an irrational component in music: 296 Sławomir Masłoń

Let me refer to Diderot who once wrote very strikingly about how to approach the work of art. First, it is unknown to you, and you are in the dark – you just have a certain feeling for it. Second, you analyze it and therefore become familiar with its structure. But if you go further than that, you again find yourself in darkness because you did not really find an explanation for the irrational aspect of the work. Many people have analysed Mozart’s music, for instance his melodies, but nobody will tell you exactly why one of his melodic lines is better than that of any other composer of his time. You can give reasons but these rea‑ sons are always profoundly inadequate. For instance, you can judge that Debussy’s rhythms are terribly flexible and very interesting because of their flexibility; you can analyze the successions of time divisions. At the time, everybody was making approximately the same time divisions – but Debussy’s were very new and different. So you approach the work in the dark, you become familiar with it, and then you lose it again. You know, and finally, you do not know. That is encouraging, because if ana‑ lysis could lead to complete knowledge I think both of you [you and the composer] would soon be in despair. (Boulez, 111)

But where does the irrational come from? Are we doomed to explain it (but what kind of explanation is this?) by once again having recourse to the unconscious as the site of primeval instincts? When one speaks about the unconscious, the automatic association is psychoanalysis. But is this really the case that psychoanalysis defines the unconscious as the site of unbridled biological forces? Certainly not the psychoanalysis of Jacques Lacan. Hence, we can perhaps use some Lacanian concepts in order to theoretically approach what is be- yond meaning in music. Actually, we have already loosely used his early theory of the mirror stage in our attempt to describe the constitution of the bourgeois subject in music as the narcissistic relation with the ideal image of oneself. The theory analyses the way in which a stable image of the ego is created: “falling in love” with the ideal image offered to it, the imperfect subject tries to rise up to the level of this image and therefore identifies with the values of a given society (my ideal image is an image which I consider lovable, but I know it is lovable because I have inter‑ nalized what is considered to be lovable by the society in which I live). In other words, we are dealing here with a narcissistic stage which is Audio-graphy: Meaning and Irrationality in Music 297 necessary on the way to socialization because it teaches us what we should desire.4 However, we know that Narcissus’ story does not have a happy ending. That is: such identification is never completely success‑ ful – the ideal image always turns out to be a failure, it always lacks something impalpable, this something which actually makes me who I really am. And so, paradoxically, the ideal image becomes a source of aggression directed at everything which confirms that something is lacking. In his 11th seminar Lacan revises his earlier mirror stage theory in order to emphasise the mechanism which makes identification impo‑ ssible. To do this, he introduces probably his most famous theoretical concept “object a” (Lacan 1979, 67–121). Although Lacan’s explanation is mainly devoted to object a as the gaze (regard) in relation to the field of the visible, I think that this discussion also allows one to draw cer‑ tain conclusions concerning the field of the hearable/listenable, espe‑ cially because object a is a generic name given to what psychoanalysis also calls “partial object,” and which can take various forms, not only of the gaze but also of the voice. Without going into the theoretical intrica‑ cies connected with the central place of this object in Lacanian theory, we can just say that it is, among other things, precisely the paradoxical object which is lacking in our ideal image, the lack the subject ultimately identifies with: I really am this something inexplicable which cannot be seen in any image and which makes me desirable.5 Therefore object a is a paradoxical object which does not exist but whose effects (the effects of its lack, which is taken to be the presence of something inaccessible) can be perceived.6 Theorising about the visible, Lacan speaks about objects which are traps for the eye or the gaze (Lacan 1979, 89). In a similar sense, we can

4 In fact, the process of the formation of the ego and its desire is rather more compli‑ cated in Lacanian theory because it involves both the Imaginary (image) and the Sym‑ bolic (language). For our purposes here, however, we do not have to go into all the com‑ plications. 5 The soul has always been one of the figures of this something in me which is more than me. 6 Lacan calls it the object­‑cause of desire: it is rather a cause than an object because substantially it does not exist. 298 Sławomir Masłoń speak about musical works as traps for the ear. Because, in the final analysis, the most important question we should be able to answer here is: why do we listen to something? As our quotation from Boulez al- ready intimated, no structural analysis will ever answer why we want to listen to a given work rather than to another. It is well known that there are plenty of pieces constructed according to the best technical rules whose listening is simply boring.7 Therefore, what makes the work into an object awakening desire? One can suggest that it is precisely object a as semblance (Lacan 1979, 107). In other words, representation (purely musical structure) has to be constructed in such a way that it becomes a screen which seems to veil something behind itself, something which is not there and which cannot be there as Hanslick argued rightly. What he did not realise, however, was that in the split between the hearable and intelligible structure and the suggestion of something that lies beyond it desire appeared and with it the musical subject came into existence. Therefore, the listening subject (and not simply the subject hearing some acoustic phenomena) is the effect of this impossibility of hearing the meaning of what one is listening to. What we encounter here is a phenomenon (musical structure) and its generative principle which one cannot find “in the notes,” but whose effect the musical structure is. The origin, the source of musical form is therefore informe: the unformed (what does not have meaning in music) and the inquiry (the question addressed to the representation about what it is the representation of) (Copjec, 35). In other words, the effect cannot appear without its generative principle, yet the generative prin‑ ciple does not have an autonomous existence which can but does not have to produce its effect (like, for instance, the state of “inspiration”) – the generative principle is simply the empty place in the structure which the effect indicates (Copjec, 9). It is not only that meaning has belonged to the “essence” of music for most of its history, but that, para‑ doxically, it presents itself even in its own absence in absolute music. The absence which appears here takes the form of a lack. The point is not that something is not there – if something we do not know is not

7 Moreover, if we accept music as entirely autonomous, that is, limited to its structure, we make it into something resembling chess. Audio-graphy: Meaning and Irrationality in Music 299 there, we do not know that it is not there; absence appears to us only as something lacking. For a man used to sound film, sound in a silent film is not simply absent, but even more present (its lack is the source of discomfort) by its very absence. We know, however, what is lacking in a silent film, while object a remains elusive. Yet, its elusiveness is not one of the impossible ideal which is determinate but unreachable (for instance, because as transcendent and spiritual it cannot be realised in the fallen material and materialist existence) but of the impossible (non­‑existent) Real which by producing desire disfigures the stable and familiar reality in which we live. The consequences of the aforementioned characteristics are far­ ‍‑reaching: one can say that absorbing music (as any successful work of art) is inhuman. Music seems to turn its back on us in order to face its meaning which is for us inaccessible. In other words, it seems to enjoy itself in the way which is completely independent of us. We approach it and feel guilty because we do not understand. In our encounter with autonomous art it turns out that its function is to make us aware that we lack something and that in order to understand we have to overcome our miserable and limited self, that is, we have to become someone else. If we have to look for heroism in art, this is the place to find it. There is one more consequence deserving mention: it is semiotics and not acoustics which sheds a proper kind of light on the problem of music. Because only the signifier can give things meaning, it is the signifier which makes listening possible (Copjec, 34).8 Therefore, there is no listening independent of language and meaning – music is audio­ ‍‑graphy. But it is “audiographic” primarily in the formal sense discus‑ sed above and not because people tend to impose all kinds of extra­ ‍‑musical scenarios on it. One has to add, however, that such scenarios are probably inevitable and they are precisely the outcome of music’s “audiographism.” Because music becomes the veil behind which object a is hidden, all kinds of private and social fantasies, which attempt to assimilate the inhuman in music and force it to become the expression of ourselves, are projected on such a screen. The screen then turns into Narcissus’ mirror.

8 Copjec argues a parallel point relating the signifier to the field of the visible. 300 Sławomir Masłoń

Works Cited

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